Ison of the Isles (38 page)

Later that day, when Nathaway was out booking passage on a ship to Fluminos, she returned to the balcony, a terrible ache of homesickness already in her heart. No Lashnura was meant to leave the islands for the lands outside, where the earth was inert and unfeeling. She thought of the words she had spoken, about sacrifice, and felt that it wasn’t over for her.

She had no illusion that the Innings would be kind to her, no more than they would be to the Isles. She thought,
We are their past they have lost. They need us, and therefore hate us. They want to destroy us because we are their salvation
.

The rooftops by her balcony came together in a complex mesh of angles, slate and clay and cedar shingle all mossy with age. In one of the rooftops was a gable window standing open, where a black housecat with yellow eyes was watching her. Tensing, she leaned over the railing toward it. “Ridwit?” she whispered.

The cat blinked slowly, but said nothing.

How the panther would ridicule her for what she had become—just another dhotamar enslaved to her bandhota. And yet it was only through dhota that she had achieved any justice. Only by giving up control had she found control.

“Ridwit, am I doing the right thing?” she said.

The cat didn’t answer.

Carolyn Ives Gilman writes both fiction and nonfiction about frontiers. Growing up close to the U.S.-Canada boundary, she became a historian of borders between nations, races, and cultures, and a writer of fiction about even more exotic worlds than ours.

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s most recent novel,
Isles of the Forsaken
, starts the story concluded in
Ison of the Isles
; it has been compared to the works of Mary Doria Russell and Ursula K. LeGuin. Her first novel,
Halfway Human
, was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF” by
Locus
magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in
Fantasy and Science Fiction
,
The Year’s Best Science Fiction
,
Bending the Landscape
,
Interzone
,
Universe
,
Full Spectrum
,
Realms of Fantasy
, and others, and she has a collection of short fiction,
Aliens of the Heart
, from Aqueduct Press. Her work has been translated and reprinted in Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, and Germany. She has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award.

In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in 18th- and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her latest nonfiction book,
Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide
, was featured by the History Book Club and Book of the Month Club. Her history books have won the Missouri Governor’s Humanities Award, the Missouri Conference on History Best Book Award, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award from
Choice
magazine. She has been interviewed on
All Things Considered
,
Talk of the Nation
,
History Detectives
, and the
History Channel
. She is currently working on a history of the American Revolution on the frontier.

Carolyn Ives Gilman is a native of Minnesota who now lives in St. Louis and works for the Missouri History Museum.