The Gray Isles

by F. T. McKinstry

  A forest crowded the strand on all sides. The sun descended in an orange-yellow blaze through the trees. He had no idea where he was or how he got here. He gathered his legs under him and rose unsteadily to his feet. A dizzy spell drove him back to his knees, panting.

  The sea whispered on the shore. No healer in the Gray Isles or beyond could’ve brought him back from where Eadred had sent him. But this didn’t resemble anything he had once imagined as an afterlife.

  He turned at the sound of something scurrying over the rocks behind him. A small shape vanished into the trees, and then appeared again, peering through trunks laden with evergreen.

  “Hai!” Hemlock called out in a raspy voice that hurt to use.

  The child withdrew. Hemlock got to his feet again, but as he tried to take a step, he lost his balance. On one knee, his gut turning over with nausea, he looked up and saw a girl of eight or nine summers in a pale, frayed smock and dark boots standing on a boulder near the forest’s edge. He held out a shaking hand. “I’ll not harm you. Please help me.”

  “She brought you,” she said in a voice just loud enough to hear. “You’re not human.”

  Hemlock lowered himself to sit, his heart thumping with exertion. He hung his head and considered the tangy air moving in and out of his throat. The child could be right, for all he knew. Though he certainly felt enough pain to be human, he couldn’t defend the fact, under the circumstances.

  He looked up. “My boat was wrecked. I nearly drowned. Who brought me?”

  The girl hovered there, her dark hair moving on the wind. “The Mistress.” She lifted a thin arm and pointed to the sea.

  Mistress. His head swam. That couldn’t be, but this child obviously believed it. “Do you honor her?” he ventured.

  A slow, wide-eyed nod.

  “I’ll not harm one who honors her.”

  She appeared to ponder that logic, and then stepped from the rock and gingerly made her way over the shore. When she reached him, she looked down with expectant brown eyes.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Leki.”

  “Leki, where am I?”

  She looked over her shoulder. “Roskva.”

  A village known for its weavers, Roskva stood roughly ten miles northwest of Gefion. To make sure, he asked, “Mimir?”

  She nodded. “You’re hurt.”

  He wheezed a laugh at the understatement. “I need food. Water.”

  Behind a mask of uncertainty, she nodded. “I know where.” She turned and headed towards the trees. Hemlock got up, steadied himself, and staggered after her.

  They entered the woods, which were alight with the last patches of the setting sun. Downed limbs from a recent storm made passage tedious. Leki moved over the obstacles as lightly as a squirrel, occasionally looking behind to see if Hemlock still followed. Her manner reflected more fright than concern. You’re not human. A chill swept over him. Like animals, children often perceived things lost on adults. Perhaps he had died and now wandered this land in search of...what? Vengeance? Truth? He rubbed his face to bring the blood back into it. Right now, he only wanted water and something to eat.

  After a time, he glimpsed farms and fields through the trees, not drawing nearer, but remaining just out of sight. Hemlock had been to Roskva once or twice as a boy and didn’t recall the village being far from the shore. They should’ve reached it by now.

  Then he realized Leki was skirting around the village, avoiding it. Fair enough; he had no strength to deal with suspicious townsfolk. Leki had made it easy for him by forming her own conclusions, mysterious as they were, but adults would be another matter. Assuming they would even see him.

  Dusk fell, cloaking the woods in shadows. No birds flew or called; no squirrels chattered in warning at their passing. An odd sense of strength flowed into Hemlock; his steps grew more solid and his vision improved. But his confidence reflected an equal measure of anxiety in his guide. She had quickened her pace and no longer looked behind her.

  As if to echo the child’s unease, Hemlock’s forehead began to float in his skull. Whispers brushed his thoughts, and images surfaced on the seemingly solid forest around, like ghosts moving through it. The space in his forehead shifted and began to flow upwards.

  The landscape rose into gentle hills carpeted in deep shades of indigo and gray-green. The last of the sunlight limned the tops of the trees. Leki led him through a stand of maples. A short distance ahead, a square tower of gray stone stood nestled in the lush foliage. A cerulean pennon moved in the breeze. Faintly lit by the fading day, it opened in the wind just enough for Hemlock to make out an ash branch and the wing of a bird: the standard of Osprey, a high-ranking order of the Keepers of the Eye.

  He stopped in his tracks. “Leki?” he called out. “Are you bringing me to a wizard?”

  The girl appeared from the brush. “You’re not human,” she repeated. “You need help.” As Hemlock tore his gaze from the tower and leveled it on her, she blurted, “I know her. She’s nice.”

  Not good, Hemlock thought. But he did need help, and if he had died, a wizard would know that. Swallowing hard, he followed Leki as she melted into the trees. No path led from the woods to the house. Blackberry bushes carpeted the hill. Hemlock tore through them, feeling weaker with every step, though whether from hunger or anxiety, he couldn’t say. The thorny patch ended on the edge of a garden and didn’t arc over or push up from runners in the soil, as blackberries do. In the garden, each plant flourished in its own way, entwined with the things around it in a stunning pattern of color and texture.

  The sun descended behind the hills, leaving the land in twilight and Hemlock with senses he had never possessed. The scent of the sea made his heart shiver. He moved past the garden, ignoring the whispers.

  Ahead, Leki skipped up to the door of the tall house, leaned up on her tiptoes, and grabbed the silver knocker. As she let it fall, a glittering, rippling sound caressed the space around Hemlock’s head. He doubted a human would’ve heard anything but a resounding crack.

  Some painful moments passed before the door opened. A grayish form moved in the dimness of the interior. Leki smiled and spoke a name as a wolf twice her size filled the opening. Hemlock froze, his senses reeling as the beast came through. It had fur of silvery black, eyes of gold and the presence of a blizzard.

  Leki vanished inside the house.

  The wolf moved up to Hemlock on long, powerful legs, sniffed and barred its teeth with a low growl. As Hemlock gazed into its eyes, eerie confidence came over him. The wolf’s growl abruptly softened to a whimper. It hunkered down into submission, and then ran around the side of the house like a frightened cat.

  Just then, a woman’s voice sounded from the doorway. “Baltos!”

  Hemlock looked up slowly. A stunning woman approached him, tall with skin the color of roots, doe-shaped eyes as dark as rich soil, shining black hair and an expression of knowledge that unnerved him worse than the wolf had. Leki emerged and clutched at the woman’s plain brown cloak as if to seek shelter there.

  “Who have you brought me, child?” the woman breathed. She had an accent that reminded Hemlock of Farous, the Master of Urd.

  “My name is Hemlock.” He bowed his head, feeling the night stir at the base of his neck.

  “Get you home now,” the woman said to Leki. The child hesitated, and then scampered into the dim woodlands to the west. The woman turned to Hemlock. “I am Dirala, Order of Osprey. Do come in.” She stepped aside and gestured him into the house.

  A short time later, Hemlock sat in the wizard’s kitchen surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with pots and pans, linens, books, jars, crystal orbs and various artifacts that appeared to have come from other parts of the world. A large black stove dominated one end of the narrow room. Light from a heavy candelabrum over the table flickered on the diamond-shaped panes of two windows. Dirala had opened one of them to let in the cool night air, laden with the scent of lilac.

  Baltos
lay on a rug near the stove, eyeing Hemlock with guarded tolerance. He wondered what the wizard had done to persuade the wolf to enter the room.

  After Hemlock drank enough water to slake a horse, Dirala gave him a bowl of thick soup and some bread, which he took with trembling hands and thanks that did no service to the thing—no one had ever served him before. He spooned the soup into his mouth as ravenously as he could without being impolite. It tasted of barley and sage, and the bread of cinnamon and rye. As he ate, he watched the beautiful wizard move gracefully around the kitchen. She gathered dried leaves, flowers, and roots from containers on the shelves and stalks hanging from the rafters and placed them into a basket. Now and then, she touched him with a dark, mysterious glance he couldn’t guess the nature of, for all his new perceptions.

  If nothing else, this certainly outmatched the welcome he’d received on the steps of Eadred’s tower.

  Finally, he placed his spoon into the empty bowl and drew a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  She lifted a round teapot from the stove, brought it to the table and set it on an iron stand. Humming faintly under her breath, she began dropping dried things into the pot. Without looking at him, she said, “Leki tells me you washed up on the beach.”

  “My boat was wrecked.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Just mostly.

  She flashed a dry smile. “When the sea deigns to spare sailors, she often neglects to release them completely. You have all the structural solidity of a merman.”

  Hemlock studied the wood grain on the table and considered the magnitude of his circumstance. He imagined asking her, Am I dead? He doubted she would’ve served him soup, if that were so. But something had changed; starlight whispered in his body like silvery blood, and the night had given him the awareness of a nocturnal predator.

  The wizard tilted her pot over a cup with a thin gray basket on top. Dark bits of plant matter gathered there as the golden-green liquid passed through. When she had finished, she set the cup before him. Then, she settled herself onto a big pillow by the hearth with her knees crossed. She moved her hand over the wolf at her side.

  “How did you come by that scar on your neck?”

  Hemlock looked up with a gulp that stuck in the wound. “An unfortunate skirmish.” He reached for his tea and brought it to his lips. It smelled like dirt. As he sipped it, his body shuddered with a low-frequency ripple. The sensation of acuity and oneness with the night lessened.

  He looked up again to find the wizard eyeing him. “Are you on the run?” she asked.

  Hemlock hesitated. If the loerfalos hadn’t devoured Eadred, and the Raven came to these shores and told his version of the tale, Hemlock would never get a chance to refute it. He sipped his tea again, and then set down his cup. “I did nothing but speak the truth. It put me on the bad side of a wizard. He tried to kill me.” He cringed inwardly at the claim, which sounded ridiculous spoken aloud.

  Her expression yielded nothing. “Who is this wizard?”

  “His name is Eadred.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “Order of Raven.”

  A faint smile touched Dirala’s lips, but it held no amusement. “That's a serious claim, Hemlock. Perhaps you could start at the beginning.”

  Once again, Hemlock found himself before a wizard with a tale to tell. He stared into his teacup and sifted through what parts to say and what parts to hold. Unfortunately, the only believable explanations for his being here lay in the untellable parts.

  “It started with a loerfalos,” he said finally.

  She leveled a gaze on him that could’ve skinned a rabbit. As Hemlock sagged under the weight of loneliness, mysticism, dreams, and dirt-smelling tea, he began to speak.

  He told her almost everything: his desire to be a wizard, his life as a page, the loerfalos appearing to him on the moons, Eadred’s reaction—he touched the scar on his cheek—his flight from the isle. He told her about his dreams of his father and the bloody rag. And finally, his hands clasped before him and a tremor in his voice, he told her what had happened when Eadred caught up to him. “He threw me into the sea,” he finished, his voice quiet. “I called the loerfalos for help. Next I knew, I awoke on the beach where Leki found me.”

  Fearing to look up, he gazed at his hands until Dirala rose and strode to the door. She called out to someone, and then moved into the hall to speak. She kept her voice low, and Hemlock couldn’t understand what she said. She could’ve been asking for bath water—or ordering his execution.

  She returned to the room and approached him, her arms folded over her chest. “You’re quite a storyteller.” Her dark eyes glittered in the candlelight.

  Hemlock flushed with shame. He would’ve reached into the night and raised a gale, if the tea she had given him hadn’t made him feel so heavy and mortal. But he wouldn’t be put down by another wizard for an honest account, even if he had made a tale of it.

  “On my honor, I speak the truth,” he declared.

  “Your ‘truth’ is steeped in legends and dreams,” she returned with a maternal air. “My advice to you is to return home. This isn’t something to make claims about.”

  Hemlock let out a sharp breath of disbelief. “You think I made this up?”

  “Whether you did or not, the matter now belongs to the Keepers of the Eye.” Thus dismissing him, she turned for the door. “I’ll show you to your chambers, now. In the morning, I’ll see to your safe passage to Urd.”

  The fisherman’s son sat there for a moment in incredulous defiance, then rose and stomped after her, leaving his hope to rot like the leaves in his tea.

  *

  Hemlock lay in a soft bed high in the Keeper’s house staring at the ceiling and listening to the clamor of gulls in the distance. He had opened the window to hear the sea. A rainstorm had passed, leaving the night air humid and fragrant.

  Dirala’s tea had left him as sluggish as bait left too long in a bucket; however, anxiety kept him alert. Once again, he had been laid on the rocky shore of his inadequacy by a wizard. Always a wizard. What had ever made him aspire to that? The only wizard who believed his story had proven corrupt and now held the only proof Hemlock had, an attack that could’ve been provoked by much more believable reasons. His mysterious healing had only whisked away an already shaky alibi. He stole a Keeper’s property. Why would anyone believe anything he said?

  As Dirala had so painfully pointed out, Hemlock had based his decisions on dreams and fantasies. Driven by his poor station in the world and the memory of a father who loved stories, he had crafted a colorful collage of misinterpreted visions, bad dreams, sailors’ legends, and rumors around a banished Raven in answer to an unhappy turn of fate. Irony pummeled him. He had so yearned to become a wizard one day. But the Keepers of the Eye saw through his delusions and found him wanting.

  He reached up and touched the scar on his neck. Had he dreamed the incident with Eadred at sea? Had the wounds not been as bad as he thought? He could toss most of his ideas about things overboard, including—especially—the loerfalos, but he couldn’t ignore the scar, and if that had happened, then everything Eadred had told him could be true.

  The Mistress came to Urd to find you.

  Unless the wizard was plain mad. Perhaps Hemlock had only managed to open the chasm and let the shadows out.

  Safe passage, Dirala had said. Really? Suppose Eadred had returned to Urd, his dark deed accomplished and then Hemlock showed up? He would be right back to existing as a slave under the Raven’s shadow. And what about Hemlock’s crime? Dirala hadn’t even mentioned it. Did she think he had lied about that, too?

  If he returned to Urd, the Masters of the conservatory would lash him without any encouragement from Eadred.

  He lay there with a burning fist in his gut, turning this way and that, fighting tears, fighting sleep. The night passed with little care for his troubles. Finally, the sea lulled him into a doze riddled with swift-moving images of red and black.

  Water swelled and receded beneath him, and the sky fl
ed in pale rifts overhead. A pure white gull descended on the wind, its wings shivering as it cried in his face in a ferocious assault.

  Hemlock’s eyes snapped open.

  He breathed deeply as the night returned to him and, with it, a powerful sense of unease. He rolled over and pushed himself up on an elbow. Voices. He got up and stole to the window, taking care to remain in shadow as he peered outside. Wind ruffled his hair and caressed his cheek. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  Below, in a sheltered courtyard laden with ivies, stood a tall figure in a dark cloak with the hood down. Mist surrounded it. Someone Hemlock couldn’t see said something from the shadows. The figure moved into the darkness of the house. A door closed.

  Hemlock looked at his bed. I have to get out of here.

  He went to another window and leaned forward. The distance to the ground made a jump too risky; Dirala must have put him up here to prevent that. Even if he could make it, using a rope tied up from bedding or such, someone below might see him. For that matter, the wizard might have cloaked his room with a spell that would alert her if he tried to leave.

  Think! If he could dream up a fairy tale elaborate enough to impress a wizard, surely he could dream a way out of this. Starlight and the motion of the sea stirred in his body. He stood there on the precipice of sanity until he began to tremble and tears to burn in his eyes. Did the Mistress even exist? Surely his life amounted to more than just a fisherman’s tale.

  He released a plea to the ocean, a silent cry with no more weight than a heather bloom. He waited for a time, listening to his heartbeat. Nothing happened; no ideas came to him. He tiptoed to the bed, sat, and dropped his face in his hands. Why had he drunk that awful tea? Had he not, he might have the prowess to accomplish this. Had that been a delusion too? You have all the structural solidity of a merman, Dirala had said. He didn’t think she jested with him. But who knew, with a wizard?