The Shadow Isle (51 page)

That will give them somewhat to brood over,
he thought,
them and their cursed Alshandra!
He swung wide to turn toward the south and Cengarn, but as he did, he spotted what appeared to be more horses farther off to the west. With a smooth heft of one wing, he swooped back. Below him he saw a large, flat barrow, further fortified with a ramshackle stone wall and guarded by a ragtag group of human beings and a pair of dwarves. He was willing to wager that he’d found the Horsekin’s prey.

He adjusted his wings to glide down lower and circled around the hill, far enough away to avoid panicking the horses and mules tethered in the midst of the defenders. He was planning on calling out a greeting, but one of the dwarves got in before him. At Rori’s distance the voice sounded thin and faint, but he recognized it.

“Rhodry! It’s Mic! It’s Mic! Help us!”

“Mic!” Rori called out. “Ye gods! Here, I’ll land!”

The entire mob inside the wall answered him with a roar of cheers. Rori glided past, turned to the west, and settled on the road downwind of the improvised fort. Mic, who’d grown stout over the years, came puffing down, staff in hand, to join him. The other dwarf followed, dressed in baggy shirt and brigga. She, Rori was startled to realize, was not a man of the Mountain Folk at all, but a young human woman with a long knife clutched in one fist. Her hair was dark, and her eyes cornflower blue—
Eldidd coloring,
he thought,
but all the way up here?

“Mic it is, indeed!” Rori sang out. “And here I was a-feared you and Otho had been slain by Horsekin. Long years ago now, it was.”

“Naught of the sort,” Mic said, grinning, “but Otho’s gone to his rest, slain by old age and naught more. I cannot tell you how much it gladdens my heart to see you.”

“No doubt. Did you know there were Horsekin raiders on the road behind you?”

“Know? They attacked us once already, and it’s a marvel that any of us are still alive.”

“Then it’s a good thing I scattered them.” Rori allowed himself a long rumble of laughter. “They won’t be following you any longer, I’ll wager.”

Mic’s eyes filled with tears, but he grinned, then turned to call out the good news to the others still in the improvised dun. Rori took a good look at the lass. The calm way she looked back and the wide set of her eyes, her short but sturdy build, reminded him of someone—of Angmar, he realized suddenly.

“Here,” Rori said in as gentle a voice as he could manage. “Do you come from Haen Marn?”

“I do,” she said. “You be my father, or so I were told. I be Angmar’s daughter, one of them, for we be twins, Marnmara and me. My mam be well, though truly she were fair taken aback by the news that you be a dragon now.”

“No doubt.” Rori found himself unable to say more.

“Ah, indeed, this is Berwynna,” Mic said, “and truly, she’s your spawn, no doubt about that! Ye gods, we’ve got so much to tell you. And you to tell us, no doubt.”

“Such as how I came by these wings?” Rori recovered his voice with a gulp and a snap of fangs. “Here, I don’t dare go any closer to your mules and horses. As long as I’m with you, the Horsekin aren’t going to attack, so you can leave them inside that wall and camp outside of it.”

“Well and good, then,” Mic said. “I’ll go tell the others.”

The dwarf hurried back up the hill, leaving Rori alone with this strange lass, his bloodkin. She was a pretty little thing, he decided, but nothing about her struck him as delicate. She stood with one hand on her hip, the other holding the dangerous-looking knife at an easy angle.

“Da,” she said, “you be hurt! That thing on your side—”

“—is an old wound. I have hopes that it will heal soon.”

“Be there somewhat I can do for it?”

Rori was about to dismiss the offer, then remembered that she had hands. “There is,” he said. “When we find willow trees, you can brew me up a medicine from the bark, if you’d be willing.”

“Of course I be willing.” She smiled at him. “I be your daughter, after all.”

Her smile reminded him of Angmar’s. The resemblance acted like a spark in the dry kindling that had become his heart over the years. He remembered how it had felt to love a woman, one like himself as he’d been then. The blood of two races ran in their veins, dwarven and human for her, elven and human for him. They had each lost other loves. They had understood each other’s sorrow when they’d met and found a way to assuage it for a little while. Now here was their child, considering him gravely, as small in relation to a dragon as a hound would be to a human.

“It gladdens my heart to meet you.” Rori made his voice as quiet as he could. “But what, by all the gods, are you doing out here in the middle of this blasted wilderness?”

“Looking for you.” Suddenly she turned away, and tears choked her voice. “My betrothed, he were with me, Da, but the Horsekin, they killed him.”

“Oh, did they now? Don’t trouble your little heart, Wynni. We’ll have our revenge.”

She turned back, and through her tears she smiled. “My thanks,” she said. “That eases my heart somewhat.”

“Good. Now, here, I’ll take you and Mic back to the island. You’ll be safe there.”

“And desert the caravan? I can’t do that.”

Her soft words struck him like a blow. Had he really been thinking of leaving all those other men to the mercy of the Horsekin?
Dalla was right,
he thought.
I stand in danger of losing my human soul.

“No more can I,” Rori said briskly. “Just a passing thought. We’ll get everyone safely to—where were you all going?”

“A place called Cerr Cawnen,” Berwynna said. “I know not where that be.”

“A good long ways ahead of us, that’s where, at least a hundred miles away, maybe two.”

Berwynna said nothing, but her mouth slackened, and her eyes filled with tears. With a little frown she wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“Then we’d best start soon, hadn’t we?” she said.

“I like your spirit, lass, but I’ve got a better idea. Let me talk with Mic and your caravan leader. If we head straight south, we’ll reach safety far sooner. Have you ever heard of the Westfolk?”

“I have.” She started to say more, then choked it back. A look he could only call terror flitted across her face.

“What’s wrong?” Rori said.

“Naught.” Her bright smile came back, but he noticed the knife trembling in her grasp. “I just be so weary, Da, and so sad, too, thinking of my Dougie dead and gone.”

“No doubt! Well, the prince of the Westfolk sent me off to scout for Horsekin. I’m to meet him at a place called Twenty Streams Rock, which is—” He paused to work out how long the journey would be for a caravan rather than a dragon. “Well, five or six days away rather than thrice that number. I’ll escort you there, and then we’ll decide what to do next.”

“My thanks.” She walked over to him and with her free hand stroked him on the jaw. “I always did think I’d run to my da’s arms one fine day.”

“At the moment I don’t have any, alas. But here, don’t look so distressed. Someday mayhap I’ll become a man again. There are powerful sorcerers among the Westfolk, and they tell me that they might be able to discover how to reverse the spell.”

Berwynna flinched, looked away, looked back, then suddenly turned and ran back to camp. As she climbed the hill, she passed Mic and a Cerr Cawnen man, who came on down to greet him. Mic introduced the fellow as Richt, the new caravan master.

“My master in the craft, Aethel,” Richt said, “he be dead, alas.”

“That saddens my heart to hear,” Rori said. “Now, I owe you my thanks for saving my daughter’s life.”

Richt made an odd noise, half a laugh, half a yelp of terror. “Ye gods!” His voice shook. “It be true, then. Our Berwynna, she be a dragon’s spawn.”

“Not precisely,” Mic said. “I’ll tell you the tale later. For now, I’m more interested in what we’re going to do next.”

In her grief over Dougie and her terror of Horsekin raiders, Berwynna had quite simply forgotten about the dweomer book. While Richt and Mic conferred with Rori, she ran back to camp. She noticed Laz’s men standing in a tight knot between the two trees with Laz in the center of the group. They were arguing about something, but she couldn’t understand a word of their language. They ignored her, as did the muleteers from the caravan, even when she began searching through the pack panniers, hoping desperately that her saddlebags had turned up on one of the returning mules. She never found them.

When she asked the muleteers, none of them had seen a pair of tan leather saddlebags with dwarven runes upon them. She went through every pannier and sack again—still nothing.

The mule she’d been riding had galloped off into the wilderness and never returned. She forced herself to admit that the magical book, which may well have been her father’s only hope of returning to human form, had disappeared.
And I’m to blame,
she thought. She knelt in the dirt among scattered packsaddles and panniers and cursed herself. Why had she taken it? Why? It could have been safe on Haen Marn instead of wandering through the wilderness on the back of a panicked animal.

Wolves would doubtless find the mule and pull it down to eat it. The book would be lost forever. In sheer frustration she began to weep. When she heard someone walk up behind her, she twisted around and saw her uncle, looking at her sadly.

“Ai, weeping again?” Mic said in Dwarvish. “Mourning your Dougie, no doubt! Ai, my poor little lass!”

“Worse.” Berwynna scrambled to her feet. “Uncle Mic, I’ve got to go hunt for my mule, the one I was riding, I mean. I had my saddlebags on the saddle, the ones Grandfather Vron gave me, and in them—”

“No!” Mic shook his head vigorously. “You are not going out there, whether it’s alone or with a guard. Wynni, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“But Da’s here to protect us—”

“He can only do so much. For all we know, there’s a whole army of Horsekin around here somewhere. We’ve got to get off this road and start south today.”

“But I had—”

“Hold your tongue!” Mic laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “I won’t hear it. You could be killed out there. Ye gods, you nearly were! Those men who tried to grab you—do you want to end up raped and a Horsekin slave?”

“No, no, of course not.”

Now was the moment, Berwynna realized, that she should confess, tell her uncle that she’d taken the book and lost it again.
But no one else knows,
she thought.
Maybe I’ll never have to tell Da or anyone else.
Yet such would be a coward’s trick, she realized, one unworthy of her Dougie’s gift.

“Wynni, are you listening to me?” Mic said.

“What? I’m sorry, Uncle Mic. What did you say?”

“I said, here come the men to load the mules. Come along, let’s not get in their way.”

Mic grabbed her hand; she pulled free.

“You don’t understand,” Berwynna began. “Do let me explain.”

“Here, what’s all this?” Laz walked up to them, with his men close behind him. They walked warily and kept their hands on the hilts of their weapons. When they formed a half circle behind him, some of the men turned around to keep watch, as if they expected another attack at any moment. The man called Faharn stood next to Laz and glowered like a winter storm.

“Wynni,” Laz said, “I know your heart aches for your Dougie, but—”

“It be not only Dougie!” Berwynna drew herself up to her full height, not that it amounted to much over five feet. She spoke in the Mountain dialect so Laz could understand her. “It be the book, that book with the dragon on it, the one Dougie did bring to Haen Marn. I did carry it in those saddlebags, and now it be gone.”

Laz did the last thing she would have expected: he laughed. “So you did steal it,” he said, “and here I thought Mara had just mislaid it.”

“I did, and I know not why. It were sitting on a bench among the apple trees, and somehow I did feel there were a need on me to have it. It did will me to pick it up.”

“Wynni!” Mic said with a groan. “Be honest, now! Books don’t will people to do things.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Laz’s mood changed to the utterly serious. “I’ve had that experience myself, with things that had dweomer upon them.”

Berwynna felt a thin sliver of hope that she’d not disgraced herself. “Be that true?” she said.

“Very true.” Laz held up his hands with their stumps of fingers. “This is the result of listening to a pair of wretched dweomer crystals. The book might well have influenced you. I know that the wretched thing could move itself.”

“It what?” Mic’s voice turned feeble. “That’s impossible.”

“But, Laz,” Berwynna said. “There be no dweomer in my soul.”

“Very true. That’s what makes you so vulnerable to it. Mic, that book is crawling with guardian spirits. I’ve no doubt they could move the thing and bend Wynni to their will. The only question is why they wanted to.” Laz frowned, thinking. “Well, here, let me scry for it.”

Laz turned a little away. Berwynna could see the change in his face: a slackness, a loss of focus about the eyes. After a moment he shrugged. “I suspect it’s still in the saddlebags. All I see is a vague impression of darkness. How were you carrying it? Did you have those oiled wrappings around it?”

“That, and one of my dresses.” Berwynna felt like weeping in frustration. “I did wish no harm to befall it.”

“Alas, unless someone finds it and opens the bundle, I’m blind to it.”

“What about the mule? Could it be that you can scry for it?”

“I never saw your mule, so I cannot. But don’t be too harsh on yourself, Wynni. For one thing, we don’t truly know what was in the wretched book. For another, its spirits were in charge, not you.”

“My thanks. Yet my heart does ache with shame—”

“Tell your heart to hold its tongue.” Laz flashed his knife-edge grin, but she saw no humor in his eyes. “Mic’s right about one thing. You’ve got to get this pitiful excuse for a caravan moving again.” He hesitated, then shrugged. “As for me and my fellow outcasts, we’ll be leaving you.”

“What?” Mic said. “Why? Are you daft? Those Horsekin outnumber you.”

“It’s the dragon,” Laz said. “He hates me, you see. I don’t know why, but he does, and he’ll kill me. My one chance is to try to slip away. I’ve told my men that if he comes after me, they’re to run like the hells are opening up under them. There’s no reason for them to perish miserably with me.”