The Gray Isles

by F. T. McKinstry

  He took three bites of food he didn’t taste before the waters rose. Chewing slowly, he studied the faces around him, waited like an owl for a pause in the conversation, and then said, “I wonder that Eadred is not with us.”

  Time froze as everyone there turned to Farous. Faena moved as if to leave. The man next to her, an Eagle named Eric, placed his hand on her arm. She shook it off.

  Lorth leaned back comfortably and settled an inquiring gaze on his host.

  “Well,” Farous started with a troubled breath. “I was hoping to—”

  Faena stood up and glowered at him. “How long did you think to keep it a secret?”

  “Sit down,” Farous growled.

  “Eadred has left this isle!” she said to Lorth, her green eyes flashing.

  “Faena!” Farous bellowed, rising from his seat. “You dare to dishonor—”

  His words caught in his throat like a fishhook as Lorth lifted his hand, fingers pointing loosely skyward. “Please let her continue.”

  The Master of Urd sat down, his cheeks a ruddy shade of brown.

  “We don’t know where he went or why,” Faena said, her voice trembling but no less defiant. “He just took a boat and left.” She sat down, her task accomplished.

  Lorth stuck a piece of veal with his fork and put it in his mouth. It was cold. As he chewed, he envisioned Cimri waving from the longboat wearing an idiotic grin. “When did he leave?”

  “Yesterday, we think,” Farous said, placing a hand on the table. “We’re not sure. No one saw him.” He hesitated. “I would have projected an apparition to Eyrie, to notify them, but we cannot pass through the grid.”

  Filothin said, “We learned only recently that you were coming. Eyrie sent word by albatross.”

  “A real one,” Eric added. Someone farther down the table hissed a laugh.

  Lorth drained his glass. “How long have these seas been dark?”

  The wizards exchanged glances. Faena said, “Since the last new moon.”

  A month? Lorth had never experienced a treecloak for longer than a few days. No wonder these people were acting so cagey. He said, “I’ll need a small craft rigged for speed.”

  “The Spring Gale,” Filothin suggested easily, looking up from folded hands.

  “Can you have her ready by next high tide?”

  “By sunrise. Tide will be ebbing, but high enough.”

  Farous leaned on the table, causing it to creak. “We have no idea where Eadred went. The treecloak is concealing him.”

  “Perhaps that was his intention,” Eric said. Several others muttered in agreement. Faena stared down into her lap as if the comment hurt.

  “Eadred wouldn’t see a treecloak under a blackring,” Lorth informed them. At the mention of that word, the wizards stilled. “Unless someone told him about it.”

  A flurry of shaking heads and denials moved around the room. Filothin leaned towards Lorth and said, “Only we can perceive the treecloak. Eadred doesn’t talk to us.” As the Northman’s stony gaze fell on Faena, she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

  “How will you find him?” Farous asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Lorth said. “But the shadow over these isles wasn’t cast by a god.” In the void of their questioning stares, his second vision cleared beneath the murky depths of an Otherworld tide. “The sea is doing it.”

  The Watchtower

  Shade of Low: The earth keeps secrets.

  A chill settled into the corners of the library as the fire burned low. Lorth leaned back in his chair, blinking at the narrow scrawl on the page before him. An oil lamp cast warm, wavering light on a stack of volumes containing history and lore of the Gray Isles. He had chosen them at random, following his intuition. But after hours of studying, he had come no closer to understanding the visions that haunted him.

  After dinner, he had asked the high wizards of Urd for information about Eadred. Their blank stares and sidelong glances told him enough. The blackringed wizard lived in an old watchtower, and befriended no one. He spoke no greetings in passing. He walked the isle during the thinly veiled hours of dawn and dusk, and sometimes went into the forest to cut plants. He spent time in the farthest corner of the library, reading old texts.

  They couldn’t have related anything more predictable for a wizard who had been cast from his order and banished. Eadred appeared to be doing exactly the sort of thing the Aenlisarfon had sent him here to do.

  So what had changed? Lorth hadn’t expected the wizards here to know that, and they didn’t surprise him.

  He had earlier sent one of Farous’s sailors to the Oak Leaf with a note for Captain Thorin and instructions for Cimri and Samolan to be ashore, armed and ready to go, by dawn. It took no feat of imagination to envision their drunken response to those orders.

  The shaggy head of a wolfhound appeared over his shoulder. It made a soft whining sound and then directed its nose towards a plate on the edge of the table that contained the remains of Lorth’s dinner, kindly brought to him by one of the kitchen staff. “Manners, now,” the hunter said. The beast sat, its tail thumping on the floor. “Good lad.” Lorth plucked up a cold piece of veal and handed it over.

  He took a long pull of whisky that tasted faintly of peat. Comforting, but not productive. He returned his attention to the script on the open page, a dry passage on weather patterns and tidal currents. On the edges of a yellowed map, the waters stormed and heaved amid the lengths of a grinning serpent inked with blackish green and twilight blue.

  “En fosin aerlin onte las maltaeros,” he said softly, in Aenspeak. When in doubt, follow the senses of beasts. He turned again to his companion. “What say you?” The hound answered with a low woof! Lorth took the last tidbit on his plate and held it out. As the hound took it, Lorth stroked its neck with the backs of his fingers.

  Beyond the shadows of an archway, a door opened and closed. The hound rose and trotted across the floor, disappearing into the darkness. A woman’s voice spoke a name. After a moment, the wolfhound reappeared and returned to Lorth’s side.

  Faena entered, drawing her cloak around her body. The light caught in faint lines around her eyes and mouth. She had been conspicuously absent from his questioning earlier that evening. “Master,” she said with a breath. “You’re still up!” She gazed over the books on the table for several moments before moving abruptly towards the hearth. “It’s cold in here.” She leaned down and placed a piece of wood on the fire.

  Lorth took another sip of whisky as he stroked the hound’s brindled fur.

  Faena glanced in his general direction and said, “His name is Forlsc. He must like you. He’s not usually friendly to strangers.” Her smile fled.

  Lorth studied the intricate ink work on the map before him. “Were you lovers?”

  She whirled around. “What?”

  “You and Eadred.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, her cheeks flushed. Breathing heavily, she stomped past the table in the direction of the door.

  Lorth rubbed his jaw. Nice work, Siomothct. “Faena.”

  She stopped in the archway as the resonance in his voice surrounded her, then turned like a moth realizing it had just flown into a spider’s web.

  Lorth said, “I said nothing about your absence earlier, though I requested that all of you be there. Now you’re in here making small talk with me in the middle of the night. I don’t mean to pry into your personal business. But I am here to speak to Eadred, he’s gone missing, and if you didn’t get this before, the sea herself is cloaking it.” He reached for a green decanter and poured. “If you have light to shine, please do.” He took a drink, his gaze unwavering over the rim of the glass.

  She moved again into the firelight. A tear glistened on her cheek. “He’s not evil.”

  Lorth lowered his glass. A strange thing to say. Complicated. “I was told he kept to himself. Are you the exception?”

  “I don’t know,” she said evasively. “Two seasons past, just after the equinox
, I was in here.” She gestured to the surroundings. “I heard him enter but paid no mind until he came up behind me and commented on the book I was reading.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was about the birthing cycles of sea turtles.” She looked down at the floor. “I study things like that, tides, cycles, seasons, and how they affect creatures of the sea.” She brushed the hair from her eyes. “Anyway, after that, he began to come here to talk. He always seemed to know when I was here. He knows so much about the sea; he could write books himself.”

  “Did he say anything to you before he left the isle?”

  “Not exactly, but...” She trailed off with a shaky exhale. “A fortnight past, I walked with him on the strand. He spoke of creatures that can take human shape, to mate with us. He said they are beautiful, of course, and immortal. I laughed, for I thought he was teasing me. But he wasn’t. Later, I came here to look for information about it.” Her gaze crept over the rows and hollows of the library. “I couldn’t find anything.”

  Lorth made a temple of his hands and leaned his forehead on the apex. “They are called eamoire. Earth shapers. They are the offspring of a union between an immortal creature and a god.”

  “I thought that was a myth.”

  “Myths are truth, to such beings.” He lowered his hands. “Was that the last time you spoke to him?”

  She nodded. “He stopped coming to the library. I thought he might be angry with me for not taking him seriously.” She fumbled with the edge of her cloak. “I decided to wait before apologizing, to let things settle. But then one of the fishermen noticed Eadred’s boat was gone. No one saw him, but the Watchtower was locked with a powerful sealing spell not even I could break.”

  Lorth lifted his brow in inquiry.

  “I have an affinity for mindkey and cloaking spells,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Do you.” He held up his hand and turned it as he projected his mind into the door beyond the archway. As he stopped his hand, he spoke a series of words in Aenspeak, and then closed his fist. “Go open that one,” he said, motioning with his chin.

  Faena tore her gaze from his hand and glanced over her shoulder. “You sealed it?”

  “Give it a try.”

  She hesitated, and then strode through the arch with a tomboyish gait. Lorth focused on the door. He had once used this variation on a mindkey spell to bar the gates of a fortress from an army’s assault. For some moments, he heard nothing; the space around the door hung still as a frozen pond. Then Faena spoke. A straining, rising force hit the spell and shattered it. As it rippled across Lorth’s solar plexus, the door flew open and hit the wall with a resounding crack.

  As Faena stepped back into the room, Lorth grinned like a wolf. “Impressive.”

  Her cheeks colored. “Think I broke the door.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He rose and closed the book. “Meet me by the tower at first light. Bring Farous.”

  “Watchtower path will be flooded at first light. I can fetch you later, if you wish.”

  Lorth pursed his lips. He didn’t want to miss the tide, but this new information alarmed him. Faena had just crashed a Master’s mindkey spell—and yet she hadn’t been able to open Eadred’s tower. What was he hiding? No ignoring that. “Very well. Wake me as early as the tide allows.”

  “Aye, Master.” She bowed her head. “Good night.” She departed, leaving the scent of rosemary in her wake.

  Silence returned. Lorth knelt and rubbed Forlsc’s belly as the wolfhound reclined before the fire. Sea turtles. Cycles. Myths. Eamoire. Like one last turn in a synchronistic pattern, a passage from a book called Legend and the Sea: Interaction came to his mind: The forces of the sea give rise to imagination, which reflects them according to the nature and disposition of the perceiver. The sea itself is undifferentiated and without bias.

  Lorth scratched behind the hound’s ears. “Without bias,” he murmured. “Do you think that’s true, Forlsc?” The wolfhound made no response. “Na? Neither do I.”

  *

  Heavy clouds shrouded the morning with stillness. The scent of the sea hung in the air. Wearing a plain gray travel cloak, Lorth stood with Farous and Faena at the far end of the stone jetty that led to the tower in which Eadred had made his home.

  “For what was this place used before Eadred came?” Lorth asked as they headed towards the dark stone spire looming in the distance.

  “Training,” Farous replied. “We sent apprentices up here periodically to learn the value of solitude. The sea is a good teacher. Eadred took great interest in it, and I saw no reason to refuse him. The Council agreed.”

  They reached the tower and began to ascend. Lorth cleared his mind of dreams and texts and released his exterior perceptions to the world beneath, the source of the physical. Images and impressions began to emerge from the darkness.

  Blooming heather rippled in the wind. A large, snow-white gull swooped down with a squawk and alit on a rock jutting out of the water. They neared the top of the spiraling stair. A rusty box, locked with no key...

  Lorth stopped so abruptly that Faena nearly ran into him. “Stand back,” he said quietly. As the others moved clear, he knelt on the step and held his hand over it. He spoke a word, deepening the space. A raging stream of emotions fled through: doubt, confusion, violence. He stood up and turned to Faena. “Did you ever come up here?”

  “No, Master,” she said solemnly, her gray eyes wide.

  Farous came down a step. “No one but Eadred came up here. I forbade it. He was free to come among us as he wished. But this place was his, for the time he stayed.”

  “Someone was here,” Lorth said. “It didn’t go well.” He leaned over the edge of the stair. Depending on the tide, it would be a perilous fall, if not fatal. But he hadn’t sensed the terror that comes with imminent harm. That tended to leave a deep mark.

  “You don’t think...” Farous started.

  Lorth shook his head. “Let’s proceed.”

  When they reached the door, the hunter wheezed a laugh. “Maern!” he swore. The energy around the weathered door spiraled slowly inward like the vertigo of a whirling galaxy, timeless, drawing in and throwing out, destroying worlds. Lorth took a step back as a chill climbed up his spine. This was not a mindkey spell: Eadred had removed the door from existence. “Do you see this?” he asked Farous.

  “It’s dark indeed,” the Raven replied. “I couldn’t penetrate it. Can you?”

  “I’ve never seen a mindkey spell like that,” Faena put in.

  “That’s because it isn’t one,” Lorth said. “It’s a portal.”

  “He did that under a blackring?”

  “He invoked the Old One,” Farous explained. “Blackring has no effect on her.”

  Lorth rolled his shoulders. His breakfast turned in his gut as a knot gathered there like a tangle of rope. “I know some Dark Tongue. But there are many paths and there’s no telling how he did this.” He placed his hands on either side of the door, leaning forward. He closed his eyes, but he didn’t have far to go to reach the underflow of his heart, so close to the surface of his awareness since he had entered this realm.

  He spoke a series of words that invoked the powers of water: graceful, patient and incessant. His focus shifted out from under him as if a wave had swept it away.

  Desolation spread out without hill or stone, a pale rift on the horizon. An eon passed, slow and unyielding, in the blink of an eye. The light vanished. On a starless plain, the ground dissolved in a bottomless current swirling and heaving from the depths of the earth, drawing it like dry leaves into the maelstrom.

  A ripple spread out, widened, and grew still.

  Sound vibrated on the formless void. A tower stood alone in the sea, its reflection shimmering on glass. A black shadow darkened the door. He looked through, as if to peer into a keyhole; a pale green eye stared back, and then closed. A shudder coursed through his body.

  From vast distance, a man spoke. His voice shone li
ke a beam through the fog, beckoning...

  Lorth opened his eyes. He lay on a bed in a circular chamber. A hand touched his forehead, and three faces hung over him.

  “You did it!” Faena said to Farous.

  “So it is,” Farous said, his hand sliding away.

  “Thank you,” Lorth whispered, as he realized the Raven had called him back. Farous and Samolan helped him to sit up.

  “Thought we’d lost you,” the Raptor said.

  “How long...” Lorth started.

  “Couple hours,” Farous said. “You got us in.”

  Lorth took in the room, his senses as wide as an open wound. He saw nothing but the trappings of a person’s living space, immaculately cleaned and arranged. Eadred had either planned a long absence or intended not to return at all. “Did you search this place?”

  “Thoroughly,” Farous replied with a sigh. “There’s nothing here.”

  Lorth glanced at Faena. “Nothing cloaked or sealed?”

  She shook her head, and lowered her gaze. “Not that I could see, Master. We looked for dark places too.”

  “He didn’t need to do anything in here, after sealing that door,” Farous said.

  As Lorth swung his feet to the floor, Faena walked to the window and stared at the sea like a sailor’s widow.

  “We have a sturdy, swift craft,” Samolan said. “I got your things and brought them aboard. Tide is low, now. We’ll have to wait.” He crooked a smile. “Cimri had a red-faced fit.”

  Lorth stood up, swaying on his feet. Marked fatigue weighed heavily on him, an aftereffect of his contact with the Old One. “Unfortunate. But it’ll give me time to return to the library and recover.” To Farous he said, “You two go ahead. I want to have a look around. I won’t be long.”

  The Raven hesitated, then nodded and headed for the door. “Faena?”

  “I’ll need her help,” Lorth said.

  “Very well.”

  “I’ll find you later,” Samolan threw over his shoulder as he followed Farous outside.