Katharine Kerr - The Shadow Isle

That night, when the family lay asleep, Dougie still waked, thinking over the vision in the gem. His curiosity had been well and truly roused. Through the narrow slit of window he could see the moon, full and bright in a clear sky, its light a further temptation. He wondered, in fact, if somehow Evandar had meant him to look into the gem at the full moon. The wondering prodded him to action. Although he shared a bed with his two younger brothers, Dougie as the eldest had the privilege of the spot on the edge. He slid out of bed without waking them, put his plaid on over his nightshirt, then climbed quietly down the ladder of their loft.

The dogs, asleep at the kitchen hearth, roused enough to sniff the air and recognize him. With a wag of tails they settled themselves again and went back to sleep. Dougie crept through the dark kitchen, barked his shins on a bench, stopped himself from swearing, and very carefully unbarred the door. It creaked, but no one called out at the sound. He slipped out into the moonlit farmyard, then took his boots from the doorstep and put them on.

A shovel stood leaning against the hen house. Dougie fetched it, then strode over to the apple trees. In the shadows cast by their branches, he found it hard to see, but he dug as carefully as he could to avoid damaging the tree roots. He’d not gone more than a foot down when the shovel clanked on metal. Dougie laid it aside, then dropped to his knees and felt around with one hand in the damp chilly dirt. His fingers touched something cold, hard, and dirt-encrusted. By feeling around he found its edges, then dug with both hands. Finally he managed to pull free a casket, about three feet long and two wide.

Behind him lantern light bloomed. Dougie twisted around to see Domnal, dressed only in his long nightshirt, walking over, a candle lantern held high.

‘What damned stupid thing are you –’ Domnal said, then stopped, staring. ‘God’s wounds! What’s that?’

‘I don’t know, Da.’ Dougie scrambled up, carrying the casket. ‘I had a dream, you see, about Evandar. He was telling me to dig here between the trees. I tried to ignore it, but it kept gnawing at me, like.’

‘Oh.’ Domnal lowered the lantern. ‘Well, let’s take it into the barn. I don’t want to wake your mother.’

His father’s sudden meekness troubled Dougie’s heart. He’d just lied to his Da, he realized, but somehow he hadn’t wanted to tell him about Tirn’s strange gem on Haen Marn – he just hadn’t, though he couldn’t say why.

In the barn Domnal hung the lantern on a nail above a little bench. Dougie laid the casket on the bench, then found an old sack and used it to wipe away the dirt. Its long time buried in the wet earth had turned the casket so green and crusty that he couldn’t tell if it were silver or pot metal. When he tried lifting it, the lid came away in his hands. Domnal took it from him.

‘What’s inside?’ Domnal said. ‘It looks like old rags.’

‘So it does,’ Dougie said. ‘I wonder if there’s somewhat inside them?’

One at a time Dougie peeled away the swaddlings – wads of rotten cloth on the outside, then a layer of oiled cloth, then layers of stained but sound cloth, until finally he came to a sack of boiled leather. Inside lay something solid and flat. Another casket? But when he slid it out, he found a book, bound in white leather, stained here and there from its internment. A black dragon decorated the front cover.

Dougie was too disappointed to swear. ‘I was hoping for a bit of treasure, Da.’ He opened the book, but in the candlelight all he could see was page after page of writing.

‘I wasn’t,’ Domnal said. ‘When Evandar’s involved, you never know what you’ll get, but you can wager it’ll be a strange thing.’ He took the empty casket and held it up to the light, twisting it this way and that as if he were looking for a maker’s mark. ‘It’s too filthy to see anything.’ He set the book down on the bench. ‘Put that book back in, lad, and we’ll hide it under some straw for the morrow.’

‘Well and good, then. Do you think this belongs to Haen Marn?’

‘I do. The night he saved me, Evandar told me that he needed a messenger, and it was going to be my son, when I had one. I’m supposing he meant someone to bring them this.’

‘And why couldn’t he have taken it over himself?’

‘Witches can’t travel across water, nor the Folk of the Seelie Host, either, or so I’ve always heard.’

‘So he needed a man to do his ferrying for him. I suppose that makes sense of a sort.’

‘Naught about Haen Marn makes sense.’ Domnal smiled with a bare twitch of his mouth. ‘I think me it might be dangerous to forget that.’

Dougie went back to bed. He woke just before sunrise, got up and dressed for the second time, then went out to the barn in the cold grey light to feed the cows. His brother Ian arrived soon after with his milking stool and pails. Dougie fed the horses, turned them out into pasture, then returned to the house to talk with Jehan. He found her in the kitchen, kneading a massive lump of bread dough.

Over the years she’d borne eight children and done plenty of farm work as well. She was stout and her hands were a mass of callouses, but despite the grey in her red hair and the lines around her green eyes, Dougie could see how beautiful she must have been when his father had won her.

‘I was thinking of going back out to Haen Marn today, Dougie said. ‘Will you be needing me for aught?’

‘Not truly,’ Jehan said. ‘But you know, it’s time you married your Berwynna and brought her home.’

‘I’d like naught better, Mother. Berwynna says she wants to marry me as well. It’s Lady Angmar who’s dead-set against it. She doesn’t want Berwynna to ever leave the island, not for a single day. She keeps saying it’s too dangerous.’

‘It is the local folk she fears? Once you two were married by Father Colm in the chapel, then all this stupid talk about witches would stop.’

‘It’s not that. She won’t explain why.’

‘You’re sure she has a real reason, then?’ Jehan frowned at him. ‘Or does she look upon us with scorn?’

Dougie shrugged to show that he didn’t know. He was suddenly afraid, wondering if his Wynni was a witch, after all. His father had told him that witches couldn’t cross water, hadn’t he? Jehan paused to push a stray lock of grey hair back behind her ear with her little finger.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Dougie said. ‘This very day, I’ll ask Lady Angmar about claiming my Berwynna. If she says me nay again, I’ll keep after her and see if I can find out if she truly doesn’t want the lass to leave the island or if she thinks I’m not worthy or suchlike.’

‘Well and good, then.’ Jehan looked up from the kneading. ‘You might as well know the truth.’

Before he left, Dougie put a clean shirt on under his plaid, then fetched the mysterious book from the barn. Since he was going to Haen Marn anyway, he figured, he might as well run Evandar’s errand for him.

Towards noon Lon brought a bucket of fish into the kitchen hut behind the manse. Berwynna put on her oldest tunic, wrapped a fragment of stained, fraying plaid around her for a skirt, and set to work cleaning the catch. Marnmara’s six cats rubbed round her ankles and whined. The orange brindle leapt up onto the workbench with its usual dirty paws. When she yelled and swatted, it jumped down again. Berwynna chopped off the fish heads and tails with efficient strokes of her long knife, then tossed them down at varying distances to give every cat a chance at this bounty. She gutted the fish, then threw the innards to the mewling horde as well.

Feeding the island took hard work. Despite the presence of so many large beasts in its water, the loch supplied netsful of fish all year long. Berwynna suspected that some sort of dweomer made the loch unusually productive, but neither her mother nor her sister would confirm her suspicion nor deny it, either. Man and dwarf, however, do not live by fish alone, as old Otho was fond of saying. The local villagers and farmers paid for Marnmara’s healing services with produce and what little grain they could spare. Mic’s coin bought beef, oats, and barley from the farmers on the richer lands to the south. Occasionally the boatmen managed to kill a deer. As well as medicinal herbs, Marnmara raised vegetables in her garden, and apple trees grew around Avain’s tower.