The Gray Isles

by F. T. McKinstry

  Hemlock’s thoughts grew darker and denser, hanging on him like the gathering clouds of a storm. He huddled there in the void of sanity and seagulls until he rolled over and clutched his knees to his chest, fighting tears.

  His whole life was a lie.

  By the sea in my blood, by the silence in my wife’s womb, by the grief in our hearts, let light shine from the Void. Give us your gift, Mother, Old One, Mistress of the Sea. Give us the power of creation. Give us a son, that we may honor you.

  He shouldn’t even exist. He hauled himself up, draped his arms over the beam, and breathed heavily under the crushing weight of despair. No one with any sense asked the Old One for such a thing. She gave; she took; her will was sovereign. One did not question it. Hemlock relived diving after the rag to the bottom of the sea. He smelled the darkness of blood in the threads: his mother’s blood, no doubt, the blood of menses, or worse, a lost child. It was said that the grief of a woman knew no bounds, but respected the forces of darkness nonetheless. And yet his father—the old fool!—had invoked the sea for want of another child. Why? Why not accept the cycles of life as they were?

  A tear slipped from his eye and spiraled into the dark water lapping against the hull of the Dark Mistress. How fitting! The Destroyer had taken his parents for their insolence, and now she would take their abomination of a child. Hemlock let his gaze move up to the empty, motionless horizon. So where was she? His vision blurred with tears. Abandoning him would be worse than killing him.

  Don’t look too deeply into the sea, lest she take you into her arms.

  Barely a gull’s call from throwing himself into the water, Hemlock paused as something on the horizon caught his eye. He got up and slid into the tiller seat. Sails? Impossible. And yet, pale sails billowed in the mist, driven by a stiff spring wind that would have dominated the sea if not for the unnatural pall hanging over it.

  Hemlock’s black mood hadn’t left him; if anything, it increased to the weight of the sky. At the same time, he felt a spark of hope. Aengus? No ordinary fisherman would be sailing without wind. Hemlock jumped up and paced the deck with fresh remorse for what had passed between him and his friend. But no sooner had love touched his heart, it abruptly fled as a craft emerged from the dying light, revealing a man at the helm with snow-white hair and a gray-green cloak billowing on an arcane wind of his own creation.

  At once, Hemlock knew that his despair hadn’t come solely from the weather or the absence of signs. It gathered around this wizard like a murder of crows careening to a battlefield strewn with dead.

  Then it occurred to him. If Eadred was blackringed, how would he have tracked Hemlock out here? Unless it was just a rumor—but if so, Eadred could’ve done any number of things to stop him without setting foot from the shore. Given Hemlock’s lowly station and his having stolen a high wizard’s property, Eadred could’ve had an army sent from Mimir. And yet the wizard had come in person, in a fishing boat.

  Nothing good about this. Every question had a bad answer.

  Hemlock went down into the cabin. He fetched a fishing knife stashed in a compartment near the rear window, and slid the sheath into a pocket in his breeches. Then he strung Aengus’s bow, nocked an arrow and ascended the steps, his heart racing with what small scrap of survival fire he could salvage from the wizard’s presence.

  As Hemlock reached the deck, a shuddering thud resounded into the still air. He stumbled and fell, dropping the bow as the serpent craft lurched beneath his feet under the impact of Eadred’s boat, which had appeared with impossible, predatory stealth from the distance. Hemlock rolled up and tried to regain his footing, but the wizard reached him first.

  Hemlock no longer deluded himself about Eadred’s penchant for using force over magic. He staggered up, and then ducked, avoiding the wizard’s fist and sparing his face from a second imprint from that accursed ring. A snake strike hit him in the gut, then another put him down again. He didn’t need Aengus’s warnings to know he was outmatched. This man’s skill with hand-to-hand shone with masterful expertise. He knew every move Hemlock made before he made it, found every opening no matter how small, and he struck hard, leaving Hemlock with his knees and forearms up, trying to block blows so methodically placed that his only thought beneath the cacophony of shock was how many broken bones he would have after this.

  Eadred withdrew. Hemlock rolled over with a choke and pushed himself against the cabin, blinking up through a swollen eye and the dull scream of a broken nose. The wizard’s expression revealed no more than if he had just emerged from a boring daydream. “From the sea you were born,” he said in a singsong voice, “and to the sea you will return. Get up.”

  Hemlock coughed on a laugh at the notion of getting up. “Whoreson,” he grated. “I’ll call her. I go down, you’re coming with me.”

  “If you had that power, you’d have done it already.”

  “More power than you,” Hemlock returned, ignoring the painful logic of the wizard’s observation, “that you’d rough me before using magic. What did they banish you for, ay? Mistreating servants?”

  Hemlock braced himself for another attack as the wizard approached and knelt at his side. His pale green gaze stripped his spirit from his bones and tossed it over the side like chum. “Fair question,” he said. He drew a breath to continue, but Hemlock interrupted him.

  “Why do you hate me so? I’ve caused you no trouble. Are you this intolerant of anyone beneath you—or can’t you face the fact that the loerfalos favored me?”

  The wizard struck him so hard across the face that for a moment, he knew only darkness. As he came back around, the romance of having nothing to lose fell short of reality. His breath rattled in his throat as his life force moved in stops and starts through his broken body. If he was lucky, he would die from his wounds before Eadred tossed him into the sea with just enough consciousness to experience drowning.

  The wizard rose and slowly paced back and forth. “I made it my business these years to track the energies that move around the Mistress. I saw you, a baby, floating in the sea. I thought you were dead.”

  Hemlock stirred, choking back a gasp as he let his hand move ever so slowly towards the pocket of his breeches. “How did you know it was me?”

  He stilled his hand as Eadred turned to him with cavalier disregard. “I saw your mother set you adrift as a sacrifice.” At Hemlock’s sullen look of disbelief, he smiled. “No prayer, plea or condemnation uttered to the Mistress escaped my notice. When you came to me with your fool’s tale, I knew she had spared you.” A chilling smile. “I wondered why...until now.”

  Hemlock recalled the interchange with Eadred on the steps of the Watchtower. The wizard had recognized something about him—but he couldn’t possibly have known someone he had seen as an infant. Clearly, madness had found this man—loneliness, deprivation, bitterness—who could say. The Masters of the Eye wouldn’t blackring a wizard for just anything.

  Hemlock resumed moving his hand until he clasped the hilt of the knife. What he would do with it remained a mystery, but the feel of it comforted him a little. He cleared his throat, thinking he might as well buy a little time by going along with this.

  “Why would the Mistress spare me?”

  Eadred snorted with derision. “Because you’re hers.” Hemlock tightened his grip on the hilt as the hunter approached him again with reptilian regard that belied the anguish in his voice. “I was tricked, you see. By a witch. Tricked into violating the Old One, whom I swore always to honor.” He spat. “The Aenlisarfon knew, and didn’t say. So I took it upon myself to learn the manner of the Mistress’s vengeance on me. I expected it to be swift.” Some kind of cataclysm fled over his face, and then he grinned. “It will be, now!”

  The wizard hauled Hemlock up by the collar of his tunic and dragged him over the deck towards the beam. “Very clever, your father, to hide you thus,” he said. “Suits my purposes.”

  With a twist and a tug that nearly caused him to black out, Hemlock pulle
d his knife and slashed out with it, aiming at whatever he could hit. The response came so quickly that Hemlock didn’t realize what had happened until Eadred yanked his head back by the hair and pressed the knife to his throat.

  “Fool,” he growled. “The Mistress came to Urd to find you. But I found you first, didn’t I?”

  “Bloody madman.” He felt the vibration of his own voice against the blade at his throat. He wanted to struggle, to fight, but a broken body and fear of having his throat cut kept him still as a stone. “You won’t get away with this.” A silly comment he truly wanted to believe.

  Eadred rumbled with laugher. The sound caught on a rift, a widening dark breath of bitterness and scorn. “I don’t intend to get away with it.”

  Hemlock’s mind shut off as the wizard drew the knife over his throat and then slammed him onto the beam like a gutted fish, clutched his belt and heaved him over. The ice-cold grip of disbelief bit into his body as he hit the water, choking, white and too weak to press his hand into the gaping smile on his neck. His thoughts slowed and whirled into the timeless space of survival throes.

  In the distance, muffled by water, a seagull cried.

  The loerfalos had come for Hemlock to destroy him. That made more sense than any other daft reason he had dreamed up. His father had always meant to send him away—to hide him! Perhaps Alys also knew. He was just the offspring of a deal gone bad, as most deals with the Old One were. And in his childish innocence, he had turned it into a fairy tale.

  No fairy tale, this! Why would Eadred sail out here just to cut his throat when surely, the loerfalos intended to work the deed herself? Why hadn’t she done it already?

  Hemlock sank like the bloodstained rag his father had thrown into the sea. Idgit! Calling a loerfalos, a manifestation of the darkest aspect of the Old One! Where had that gotten them? Cursed. The fairy tale said such was his fate. The reason of a dying man said no such being existed at all.

  Like a song he could barely hear, Hemlock’s life force bled into the sea undulating around him. His blood might not bring a loerfalos, but it would bring something. Fishes scattered as he choked cold water through a single, unnatural gill.

  Mother!

  Paralyzed by pain and shock, no air, no life, just fish food now, the product of a fisherman’s plea for something he was never meant to have, Hemlock drifted into the liquid darkness until a great, swirling current sucked him into oblivion.

  Where Veils are Thin

  Shade of Silence: Life departs unknown.

  On the edge of sleep, Lorth stood before the Void and longed for his beloved, deep in the heart of his homeland. She had taught him a word in the Dark Tongue that sounded like a dying breath. It could part any cloak or shield, but only when his heart knew the way.

  He uttered it.

  He stepped without a sound on the pebble stones, his inner senses gathering focus and deepening in intensity. A forest grew beneath an intricate dome of glass panes set into images of woods, clouds and mountains. By the spell of a god, the panes appeared and disappeared like notes in a celestial song, allowing the elements to nourish the landscape. Late afternoon sun shone through the tops of the trees, refracting from the edges of the glass. The air smelled of fresh leaves and running water. Ahead, in a ferny hollow, emerged the sound of a woman, humming. Lorth’s heart leapt like a stag.

  The Mistress of Eusiron knelt on the ground a short distance from the path, digging in the dirt with a trowel. She wore a moss green dress trimmed in dark blue, and some old boots she had told Lorth five years ago she would replace. A box of seedlings sat by her side.

  “You’ll dirty your dress,” Lorth said. In his heightened awareness, her every color, scent and movement stirred his blood.

  She straightened her back and spun around, then jumped up with a wild laugh and ran into his arms like a girl. Lorth hugged her close, inhaling her warmth and scent, like earth, leaves and honeysuckle. “Leda,” he breathed into her hair, charmed as always by her ageless innocence woven into the seasoned wisdom of her stature in the realm: Ruler of Ostarin, High Priestess of Maern, and the mother of a Dove by the seed of a god.

  She withdrew, tossed a graying braid over her shoulder and said, “Here you are, sneaking around in my garden. Where have you been?”

  He touched her face tenderly and lowered himself to sit beside the path. As she joined him, her expression deepened to a pool. “What can you tell me about the loerfalos?” he asked. He picked up her hand and caressed it.

  The pool cast the Destroyer’s reflection as she answered, “Why do you ask this?”

  “I’m on mission in the Gray Isles. I’m after a rogue wizard and a servant lad who claims to’ve seen a loerfalos four times. Both are missing. There’s a connection I can’t see.”

  The priestess lowered her chin and stared. “Four times.”

  “Each time on the quarter moon, I’m told.”

  She leaned forward and spoke quickly, as if to impress upon him the complexity of his questions. “The loerfalos is a First One. An immortal aspect created by a union between Maern and a god named Om. Always female. She rules the seas. She’s a creature of the Otherworld; she moves above the time-space matrix, so it’s not easy to define her. There are legends, but few actual sightings, and those who do see her will question it afterwards. Like the Old One herself, it’s her nature to defy understanding. For this reason, sailors consider seeing a loerfalos most inauspicious, for she wouldn’t deign to show herself unless the end was near.

  “If you ask me, I think your lad is telling stories.”

  Lorth draped his arms over his knees. “That’s the general consensus.” He looked into his lover’s eyes, gray with a sunrise around the edges. “But I’m in doubt, Leda. My heart has been restless since we sailed into this realm. These waters are as dark as a womb, treecloaked by something within them. It has the breath of the Old One all over it.”

  For several moments, Leda said nothing, her gaze turned inward.

  “What if he did see her?” Lorth ventured.

  “It’s very unlikely a loerfalos would concern herself with a mortal as you’ve described. But your senses don’t lie. Only something such as a loerfalos could treecloak the sea. While the forces of the sea are governed by many things—sun, moon, wind—her nature reflects the Old One. The loerfalos is hers. She can command the elements. You’ll not want to get in her way.”

  The hunter sat there in the ferns and considered the scope of her warning. Given the timing of Eadred’s departure from Urd and Lorth’s mission to find him—not to mention the potential complication of Wychmouth getting involved—he hadn’t considered the full implications of Hemlock’s tale. “If I don’t find him, my mission could be compromised. I have something that’s dear to him. I could use it.”

  The priestess rose to her feet and looked down with a maternal expression of displeasure. “I think you should leave it alone. You know the Destroyer doesn’t always discriminate.” After a moment, when it became clear to her that the hunter wouldn’t abandon his prey, she knelt and took his face in her hands. “Listen. You’re a Web. If you are dealing with a loerfalos, she will sense you. Remember what I taught you, about using the moon to stay focused on the earth?”

  He turned his face and kissed her hand. “The moon is new, this night.”

  “That is fortunate. Remember: When confronted with one of Maern’s creatures, don’t assume you’re dealing with the goddess herself. It’s not the same.”

  Warmed by her scent and the feel of her touch, Lorth drew her close. “You taught me that without a word.” He moved his lips over the slender curve of her neck. “So much a goddess, so much a girl...”

  The priestess withdrew from his ardor with an aching breath. “You mustn’t dally here!”

  His hand moved down. “But I want to dally here.” He rolled her beneath him, dragging her dress through the dirt as he moved it up her thigh.

  She didn’t resist him. “You’ll wake to a mess,” she whispere
d, wrapping her arms and legs around his body like a flower.

  “Uh huh...” he breathed, parting her.

  *

  Lorth awoke in the cabin of the aptly named Spring Gale, the craft given to him and his companions by the Keepers of Urd. A round of seed cooled on his stomach.

  A short time later, he went above. The Spring Gale moved swiftly through the waves, close-hauled and heeled to the wind. Ragged clouds hung over a haze that diffused the setting sun. Cimri sat at the tiller, his blond hair ruffled by the breeze. Samolan leaned against the starboard beam. His expression held trouble.

  Lorth yawned. “What’s happening?”

  The Raptor looked over his shoulder to the west and flared his nostrils like an animal.

  “We saw something,” Cimri said.

  “Something?” Lorth echoed.

  “We don’t know what it was,” Samolan said. He turned and pointed to the sky just above the southwestern horizon. “A light over the sea, just there.”

  “A brilliant light,” Cimri added. “Never seen light like that. Fair as stars, only bigger. As if one o’ them came down.”

  Lorth gazed afar, Leda’s kisses still tingling on his flesh. “What do you think it was?”

  For several moments, they didn’t respond. Then Cimri said, “The only thing comes to my mind is a childhood tale. It’s said, on the northern seas, the stars are so close they sometimes visit. They appear in the west as light.”

  A chill crept over Lorth’s scalp like a touch. “Why do they visit?”

  Cimri shrugged. “To find women.”

  “What sort of women?”

  His companions exchanged glances. Samolan shifted positions and cleared his throat. Cimri laughed. “Pretty ones. Whadye think?”

  Lorth rolled his eyes. “Have you ever seen it before? The light?”

  “Na!” Cimri scoffed. “It’s just a story. I never seen it, or heard of anyone who has.”

  Just a story. Just a myth. Lorth recalled a passage he had read in the library earlier that day, as he waited for the tide. He had opened a book entitled Where Veils are Thin, and read: In the hierarchy of the elements, water is closest to those hidden forces that give rise to basic and yet mysterious manifestations such as birth and death. It is therefore the nature of its physical counterparts, such as rivers, lakes and above all the sea, to reveal the shortcomings of logical boundaries.