The Shadow Isle (16 page)

In the far-off land of Alban, a howl of wind woke Dougie in the middle of the night. He sat up in bed just as the wind slammed into the side of the house and made it shudder. A flash of lightning lit the room with a blue glow. Thunder roared directly overhead. With a yelp his brothers woke and sat up next to him. Dougie heard his mother scream, and his father’s voice, loudly soothing, right through the wall.

“What in God’s name?” Gavin said.

“Just a storm,” Dougie said, “but a strong one.”

For some while the wind howled around the steading. Now and again lightning split the sky and cast an eerie pattern of light through the shutters, banging hard at the loft window, on the opposite wall. Thunder followed, louder at first, then softer as the peak of the storm moved off to the north. Both Gavin and Ian fell asleep once the thunder slacked, but Dougie lay awake, worrying about Berwynna, out on an island with the wind kicking up big waves all around her.

With dawn the rain slacked, and the sky began to clear. When the family gathered around the table to eat breakfast and discuss the storm, Dougie gobbled down a bowl of porridge. He did his chores, then left the steading. Rather than argue about his destination, he told no one that he was going out to Haen Marn.

At the lake, the silver chain hung from its boulder on the shore, but from the chain dangled—nothing. One bent loop of metal marked where the silver horn usually hung. He swore aloud, then squatted down to examine the ground. Not there, either. He straightened up and glanced around, but no glint of silver lay among the scrubby bushes and new grass. Had someone stolen the thing? A cold ripple of fear ran down his back. What if he couldn’t reach the island? What if he never saw Berwynna again?

Dougie cupped his hands around his mouth and called out a long halloo. Only the lapping of waves answered him. He tried again, louder. When he finally saw the boat heading out from the pier, his eyes filled with tears of relief. He shook his head hard and wiped them away with the edge of his plaid.

When the boat arrived, Lon greeted him with a bare wave of one hand. Dark pouches under his eyes and a bleary smile marked him as exhausted.

“Up all night, were you?” Dougie said.

Lon merely nodded and handed him the mallet for the gong. Dougie hit it as hard and as fast as he could. He’d never seen so many beasts in the lake; the water roiled and splashed as they rose to the surface, swung their heads this way and that, then dove again to disappear.
Somewhat’s frightened them,
Dougie thought.
They’re acting like netted fish.

Berwynna was pacing back and forth at the end of the wooden pier. She looked pale, and her uncombed hair fell untidily around her shoulders. When he caught her hand and kissed it, she smiled, but her eyes showed traces of weeping.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “Something peculiar’s happening. ”

“That storm was peculiar enough for me!”

“Beyond that. I can feel some baleful thing in the air. It’s all around us.”

“Oh, is it now?” Dougie glanced over his shoulder but saw nothing but the lake. “Did you know that someone’s stolen the silver horn?”

“I didn’t.” Her eyes grew wide. “Come up to the manse. We’d best tell Mam that.”

Angmar met them at the door of the manse and raised a gentle hand to keep them from entering. “Keep your voices down,” she said. “Marnmara’s studying the patterns on the walls and can’t be disturbed.”

Dougie glanced through the open door of the manse. At the far wall Marnmara was standing with Tirn, both of them facing the wall and waving their hands as they pointed to this mark or that. On a table behind them, Evandar’s book lay open.

“Dougie,” Angmar continued, “you’d best leave us straightaway. I’ll tell the boatmen.”

“What?” Berwynna clutched his arm with both hands. “Mam, why?”

Angmar gave her daughter a black look. “There’s no time to argue,” she said, “if Dougie wants to see his mother and clan ever again. The boat—”

“Wait,” Dougie broke in. “I shan’t stay if you’d rather not have me here, but let me tell you one quick thing. Your silver horn’s been stolen. It’s not chained to the rock anymore.”

Angmar muttered something in a language he didn’t understand. “Then it’s too late,” she said at last. “My heart aches for you, Dougie, truly it does.”

“Mam!” Berwynna snapped. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re going home,” Angmar said, “and Dougie’s going with us, whether he wants to go or not.”

The light around them suddenly dimmed. Dougie shook his arm free of Berwynna’s grasp and spun around to look at the lake. The sunny spring day had vanished. Like a silver bowl, fog arched over loch and island both, a strange swirling fog, touched with pale purples and blues. He saw the boatmen hauling the dragon boat up onto the shore and heard them yelling back and forth in near panic.

“I should go help them,” Dougie said.

“It’s too dangerous,” Angmar said. “You don’t truly belong to the island, and it can’t protect you. Let’s go to Avain’s tower. We’ll be safer there.”

The square stone tower rose gray and menacing over the apple trees. Angmar hurried them inside to an oddly cold room, empty except for the rickety wooden stairs. Marnmara’s cats, their ears laid back, their tails bushed, bounded up ahead of them.

Avain met them at the landing by her little chamber. She was abnormally tall, perhaps an inch taller than Dougie, and pudgy, with a big puffy face and a round head crowned with a tangled mass of blonde hair. She kept rising up on her toes and then falling back on her heels while she grinned and clapped her hands. She was repeating a single word over and over, not that Dougie understood it, “Lin, lin, lin.”

“What may that mean?” Dougie asked Berwynna.

“Home, home, home,” Berwynna said, then began to tremble.

Angmar ushered them into the chamber, where a wooden table stood by the single window. They sat down in the straw on the floor. With a cautious glance at Angmar, Dougie put his arm around Berwynna’s shoulders and drew her close, but Angmar never noticed. She was staring at the window. When Dougie followed her glance, all he could see was the mist, swirling outside with a hundred pale colors.

Avain hummed a strange tuneless music under her breath as she sat down at her table and reached for a silver basin. A dribble of water slopped over its edge as she pulled it close. She stared into it for a long time, by Dougie’s reckoning, and during that entire long time, nothing seemed to happen, nothing moved, except for the mist outside the window.

Carved deep into Haen Marn’s wall, the sigils of the Kings of Aethyr glowed pale lavender. Nearby a peculiar set of marks that Laz had never seen before glimmered turquoise, though flecked with an unpleasant red orange.

“If I only knew what these sigils be—” Mara pointed to the flecked glow.

“It doesn’t matter,” Laz said. “There’s truly naught that we can do, one way or the other. The island will go where it wills to go, and what we want or think is worth the fart of a two-copper pig, no more.”

Still, she went on studying the symbols carved into the wall, her eyes narrow as if she could force meaning out of them. In his chair by the window old Otho turned toward her with a scowl.

“We’re probably all dead already,” he announced. “I can’t see one cursed thing out this blasted window but an ugly fog. Hah! It’s probably the fog of the Otherlands. I only ever wanted to die in Lin Serr, you know, but I’m not in the least surprised that I won’t get to. Whole cursed life’s been like that. Bound to have a bad end.”

“Otho,” Laz said wearily, “we’re not dead. I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s not the Otherlands.”

“Indeed?” Otho glared at him from under fierce eyebrows. “What makes you so sure we’re going anywhere, eh?”

“The way I came here. I know what it feels like to travel between worlds.” Laz felt a line of cold sweat run down his back.
I may hate it,
he thought,
but I’ll never forget it.

Otho snorted in loud contempt. Mara laughed aloud, the high-pitched giggle of a terrified girl.

“Come sit down,” Laz said to her. “There’s naught else you can do but wait.”

She hesitated, then followed him to the long table. They sat down on one of the benches, but, Laz noticed, they made sure that their backs were to the window. Otho leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared out at nothing.
Are we traveling on one of the Rivers of Time?
Laz wondered,
or are we going through a place where there’s no time at all?
A second trickle of fear-sweat joined the first. He leaned back against the table edge, stretched his legs out in front of him, and did his best to appear at ease for Mara’s sake.

Although he acted confident around others, much of the time Enj felt like a fool in his belief that some day Haen Marn would return. The entire dwarven community of Lin Serr kept telling him that he was a fool or perhaps even daft.
Maybe they’re all right,
he would think,
maybe I’m eating empty hope for a cold dinner
. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from hoping, couldn’t keep himself away from the place where once the lake and its island had lain. Only one thing remained to mark its former location. On a particular riverbank—no one had ever named it, since only a handful of people knew it existed—stood a boulder of gray granite, roughly half-a-sphere and about four feet at its highest point. Just below that point was a red stain that looked like blood from a distance. Up close, however, it revealed itself to be the much-rusted remains of an iron ring bolted into the rock.

A good many times in the past forty years Enj had returned to that boulder, camped for a few days, and then moved on, heart-struck with disappointment. For this visit, however, he had Rori’s news to give him fresh hope. On a fine spring day he hiked up through the budding trees and pale grass along the bank of the river, full and chattering with runoff from the mountain snows. As he came clear of the forest, he saw the boulder in its usual spot, but near the point something winked and gleamed in the bright sun. It shone like silver. He stopped for a moment and took a deep breath.
Don’t get your hopes up too high,
he told himself.
There are other things it could be.

But when he reached the boulder, he saw the silver horn, whole and gleaming, hanging from a bright silver chain, which hung in turn from a polished iron ring. He swung his pack down from his shoulders and took a few steps closer. He was afraid to touch the horn, he realized, lest it prove to be some kind of illusion. He looked upriver but saw only the water winding between the usual pair of low hills, covered with bright new grass. Apparently the Westfolk dweomer had managed to repair the horn but failed to bring back the island.

Oddly enough, it was his disappointment that gave him the courage to pick up the horn. The metal, cool to the touch, weighed like silver in his hand.

“It’s solid enough, then,” he said aloud.

Without really thinking, he raised it to his lips and blew. A long sweet note echoed off the hills and the silent valley, echoed oddly loudly, he realized, as if a thousand horns were singing out in answer. A mist began to rise from the river, a strange, opalescent mist—just a breath of it upon the water at first, then a few long tendrils reaching for the sky—then a sudden explosion of mist. With a roar, a wall of lavender fog rose up like a breaking wave. Silver lights shone within it as the fog poured up and out, spreading into the windless air, rising so high that it blotted out the sun.

Enj spun around, looking up and around him. The opalescent mist gleamed and shimmered in an enormous dome that covered the valley and the two hills. Suddenly the earth trembled, then shook hard. Enj fell to his knees and threw one arm around the boulder. The shaking stopped, the trembling died away, but slowly. He realized that he was still holding the silver horn.

Sound it!

He was never sure if the voice came from his own mind or out of the mist, but he raised the horn again and blew a long call. As the sound rushed out, the mist receded, winding itself up like a sheet and falling back into the river once again. Something—perhaps a tendril of mist—snatched the horn from his hand. The boulder disappeared, and he fell forward onto the grass. When he sat back up, the sun shone down on a changed valley and winked on the surface of a lake.

Enj staggered to his feet and shaded his eyes with one hand. Sure enough, out in the last of the mist sat the island with its long dock and its tower. He began to laugh, then sobbed with tears running down his face, laughed again and wept again, over and over, until he saw the dragon boat putting out from the dock and heading his way.

The dragon prow dipped and swayed as the boat crossed the loch, but near the shore the oarsmen began to back water. Enj saw Lon run to the bow. The boatman shaded his eyes with one hand whilst he peered at the shore.

“Enj!” he called out. “We’re home, lads! It’s Enj!”

Lon began weeping, but the rowers all cheered as they edged the boat closer in. Holding his pack above his head, Enj waded out. Lon took the pack from him, then helped him clamber aboard.

“Oh, well-met, lad!” Lon said, snuffling. “Well-met, indeed!”

“And the same to you!” Enj said. “Here, I’d best take a turn at that gong.”

On the pier two women were waiting for the boat to dock. His mother Enj recognized immediately, a fair bit grayer than she’d been before, but her posture still was straight and strong. Before the boatmen had finished tying up the dragon boat, Enj leaped onto the pier and ran to her, laughing. She threw herself into his arms. They clung together, weeping and laughing in turns, until Angmar at last pulled away.

“This be one of your sisters,” she said, sniffing back tears, “Berwynna, my younger twin.”

The young woman came forward and smiled at him, a pretty lass, as he might have expected of Rhodry’s daughter, with Rhodry’s raven-dark hair, but with their mother’s strength in her cornflower-blue eyes.

“And a well-met to you, then, Sister,” Enj said. “It gladdens my heart to meet you at last.”