Katharine Kerr - The Shadow Isle

‘Burned.’ He formed the words carefully. ‘How badly?’

Angmar looked at her daughter and quirked an eyebrow.

‘I doubt me if you’ll have the use of all your fingers,’ Marnmara said. ‘But mayhap we can free the thumb and one other. The right hand’s a bit better, I think me. Mayhap we can free two and the thumb.’

‘Free them? From what?’

‘Scars. They might grow together.’

Panic struck him. Will I be able to fly again? The one question he didn’t dare ask was the only question in the world that mattered.

‘Why is the pain gone?’ he asked instead.

‘The herbs,’ Marnmara said. ‘But the healing, it’ll not be easy.’

‘It’s very kind of you to help me.’

‘I will heal any hurt that I ken how to heal,’ Marnmara said. ‘Such was my vow.’

‘We have your black gem.’ Angmar held up something shiny. ‘Fret not about it.’

‘My thanks.’ Dimly he remembered that he once had owned a pair. ‘Not the white one? I carried a gem in each hand.’

‘The boatmen did find this one clutched in your left hand. Your right hand trailed open in the water. I think me the other be at the bottom of the lake by now.’

‘So be it, then.’

He realized that he could now see Angmar more clearly. Whether because of the herbs or time passing, his eyes were clearing. What had blinded him? The flash of light. He remembered the pure white flash and the sensation of falling a long, long way down. Why didn’t I listen to Sisi? For that he had no answer.

Angmar glanced at her hands, flecked with black. Marnmara picked up a rag from the bed on which he lay and offered it to her mother, who began to wipe her fingers clean.

‘Those cinders are bits of me,’ Laz said.

‘I fear me they are.’ Angmar cocked her head to one side and studied his face. ‘Need you to vomit? I’ve a basin right here.’

Instead he fainted again.

‘I hear that the island witches have a new demon,’ Diarmuid the Brewer said. ‘Maybe he’s that snake-eyed lass’s sweetheart, eh?’

‘They’re not witches,’ Dougie said. ‘Avain’s not a demon, just a mooncalf. And how many times now have I told you all that?’

‘Talk all you want, lad. You’re blind to the truth because of the young one. A pretty thing, Berwynna, truly.’

‘But treacherous nonetheless,’ Father Colm broke in. ‘Never forget that about witches. Fair of face, foul of soul.’

Dougie felt an all too familiar urge to throw the contents of his tankard into the holy man’s face. As for Diarmuid, he wasn’t in the least holy, merely too old to challenge to a fight. Dougie calmed himself with a long swallow of ale. Father Colm set his tankard down on the ground, then pulled the skirts of his brown cassock up to his knees, exposing hairy legs and sandalled feet.

‘Hot today,’ the priest remarked.

‘It is that, truly,’ Diarmuid said.

In the spring sun, the three of them were sitting outside the tumbledown shack that did the village as a tavern. Since most of the local people were crofters who lived out on the land, four slate-roofed stone cottages and a covered well made up the entire village. It was more green than grey, though, with kitchen gardens and a grassy commons for the long-horned shaggy milk cows. From where he sat, Dougie could see the only impressive building for miles around, Lord Douglas’s dun, looming off to the west on a low hill.

‘If this new fellow’s not a demon,’ Diarmuid started in again, ‘then who is he, eh?’

‘He doesn’t remember much beyond his name,’ Dougie said. ‘It’s as simple as that. Tirn, he calls himself. Some traveller who ended up in the lake, that’s all.’

‘Burnt a fair bit, and him with unholy sigils all over his face? Hah!’ Father Colm hauled himself up from the rickety bench. ‘Now, frankly, I don’t think he’s a demon. I think he’s a warlock who was trying to raise a demon and paid for his sinful folly. Speaking of paying –’ He laid a hand on the leather wallet hanging from his rope belt.

‘Nah, nah, nah, Father,’ Diarmuid said. ‘Just say a prayer for me.’

‘I will do that.’ Colm fixed him with a gooseberry eye. ‘For a fair many reasons.’

With a wave the priest waddled off down the dirt road in the direction of Lord Douglas’s dun and chapel. Diarmuid leaned back against the wall of the shed and watched the chickens pecking around his feet. Dougie had stopped by the old man’s on his way to Haen Marn to hear what the local gossips were saying – plenty, apparently. Diarmuid waited until the priest had got out of earshot before he spoke.

‘Well, now, lad, you’ve seen this fellow, haven’t you? Do you think he’s a demon?’

‘I do not, as indeed our priest said, too. He must be a foreigner, is all, and most likely from Angmar’s home country.’

‘Imph.’ Diarmuid sucked the stumps that had once been his front teeth in thought. ‘Well, one of these days Father Colm’s going to work his lordship around to burning these witches, and that will be that. I’m surprised he’s not done it already.’ Diarmuid spoke casually, but he was looking sideways at Dougie out of one rheumy eye.

‘It’s Mic’s hard coin,’ Dougie said. ‘Who else around here can pay his taxes in anything but kind? A silver penny a year the jeweller gives over, and that buys my Gran a fine warhorse for one of his men.’

‘Well now, you’ve got a point there. The village folk keep wondering, though, if his lordship holds his hand because of your mother.’

‘Are you implying that my mother’s a witch?’ Dougie rose from the bench and laid his free hand on his sword hilt.

‘What?’ Diarmuid nearly dropped his tankard. ‘Naught of the sort, lad! Now, hold your water, like! All I meant was that she’s the lordship’s daughter, and you’re her son, and there’s Berwynna, and uh well er …’ He ran out of words and breath both.

Dougie put his half-full tankard down on the bench.

‘I’ll just be getting on,’ Dougie said. ‘You can finish that if you’d like.’

Dougie strode out of the yard and slammed the rickety gate behind him for good measure. Although he owned a horse, he’d left him behind at the steading. Still glowering, he set out on foot for Haen Marn.

Dougie had good reason to be touchy on the subject of witchcraft. All his young life he’d overheard rumours about his mother and father. In the impoverished loch country of northern Alban, the steading of Domnal Breich and his wife, Jehan, had flourished into a marvel. Every spring their milk cows gave birth to healthy calves, and their ewes had twins more often than not. In the summer their oats and barley stood high; their apple trees bowed under the weight of fruit. When Domnal went fishing he’d bring home a full net every single time.

Some neighbours grumbled that Domnal must have made a pact with the Devil. As those things will, the grumbling had spread, but not as far as you might think, because Jehan was the local lord’s daughter. Lord Douglas, whose name Dougie bore, disliked nasty talk about his kin. No one cared to have their gossip silenced by a hangman’s noose.

The gossip had transferred itself to the mysterious women on the island to the north of Lord Douglas’s lands. Lady Angmar – everyone assumed she was of high birth because she had dwarves in her household – and her twin daughters had spawned ten times the gossip that Domnal and Jehan ever had. Partisan though he was, Dougie could understand why the folk spoke of demons and witchery. The women and their island had turned up some seventeen winters ago, in the year before he’d been born. The older people around remembered its location as a wide spot in a burn, not a loch at all, but when the island arrived, one winter night, it brought its own water with it.