Sorcerers' Isle

by D. P. Prior

  A faint scratching sound caught her attention. It was coming from the open doorway at the far end of the room. Fleeting movement in the mirror hanging on the wall opposite drew her eye: Theurig seated at a desk in his study, writing in a thick book with a quill. It reminded her of the Shedim’s stylus, the creature’s talk about a relic buried beneath Coldman’s Copse.

  Then she recalled Theurig’s voice as she drifted in and out of sleep. He’d been talking to someone else for the most part, presumably one of the crones. But she thought he’d said something about her father being dead, that the Weyd had demanded it. She knew she was supposed to feel something, but there was nothing. No relief, no gladness, not even a sense of loss. She tried to dig deeper, to disinter the emotions buried with the Grave Girl beneath a mountain of earth. All she got for her efforts was a needle of pain through her skull.

  A moan beside her. Snaith rolled to his back, blinking his eyes into focus. With his good arm, he pulled down the sheet, gasped like he’d awoken from a nightmare to find out it was true. He stared at the twisted and sutured flesh of his arm, black and purple and yellow. It looked like an extension of the grisly tattoo Theurig had inked on his chest.

  Ripping his eyes from his injury, Snaith turned his head toward Tey, looked straight through her, seeing something else.

  “Mother.” There was a quaver to his voice that would have shamed him, were he himself. It was a voice shredded by broken dreams. “Father.”

  “At last!”—Theurig’s voice from the study.

  Suddenly panicked, Tey lunged out of the bed and grabbed one of the crone’s knitting needles. She felt exposed without the cleaver she’d kept under her straw mattress.

  The sound of the sorcerer’s chair scraping back, the clatter of the quill dropping to the desktop. Footsteps, brisk, on the hardwood floor.

  Quickly, Tey slipped back into bed and pulled the sheet up to cover her. Without care, she stabbed the end of the needle into the dead flesh of her injured leg, then slid the rest through, just beneath the skin, as though she were lancing a boil. She felt nothing: no sting, no pain. It might just as well have been someone else’s leg. It might just as well have been dead. The needle’s hardness reassured her. It would always be within reach. Just in case. She glanced at Snaith, but he’d not seen. His eyes were vacant, locked on to the horrors playing out in his mind.

  Theurig’s reflection grew larger in the mirror, and then he was in the doorway, shaking his head and stroking his beard.

  “I was starting to wonder if you’d ever come back to us. Happens sometimes, with serious injuries. The body’s way of recuperating.”

  Tey cocked her head, kept her expression impassive. Nothing to do with whatever you put in the water, then. Liar, liar.

  “I’m sorry about your parents, Snaith,” Theurig said, approaching the bed, head appropriately bowed to denote commiseration. “If I could have warded them, I would have. The Weyd is no respecter of an old man’s wishes, though, and your parents knew what they were doing, the risk they were taking.”

  Snaith moaned, and Tey met his vacant gaze. His eyes widened, as if he were asking her to make things right. As if he were a child and she his mother.

  Tey could find nothing to say to him. The things she remembered her mother saying were empty platitudes, refusals to stare reality in the face. She thought she should smile, softly. Show him her sorrow. But with no mirror to check herself, she couldn’t be sure how it would look.

  Theurig stood there, midway to the bed, hands clasped in front, eyes on the floor. It was an attitude of mourning and shared grief.

  Tey looked between them, biting down her anger at the sorcerer, stuttering over what she could do for Snaith. She started to mouth something, but there were no clear thoughts to guide any coherent sounds. Her breaths started to come quick and shallow. Her blood began to boil, rising in geyser bursts of hot pain that put pressure on her skull. She felt around for her cleaver; remembered it wasn’t her bed she was on. She reached beneath the sheet for the needle embedded in her skin; found the blunt end that protruded. A scream welled up from her belly, clawed its way to her throat—

  And then the front door opened.

  An old woman shuffled in—the one who’d always been knitting. She had Tey’s black dress and shawl draped over one arm. The dress had been repaired with stitches that pulled the fabric together in ridges like scars.

  “Oh, was I wrong to come?” she asked, dropping Tey’s clothes on the bed, angling a look at the sorcerer, who stood motionless, brooding.

  “No,” Theurig said. “They’re all yours.”

  As the crone bustled off to the kitchen to fetch a pail and wash rags, Theurig called after her, “They must be clean, and they must be fed.” To Tey he said, though he seemed to mean it for Snaith as well, “You’ll need your strength and your wits come sundown. The testing is tonight.”

  Snaith stiffened in an instant. A jumble of emotions battled across his face, then his fighting frown formed like a mask over them: hard-eyed, sharp-boned, driven, relentless. Tey knew he’d crossed a chasm and wouldn’t look back now, same as he did each time he entered the circle.

  Theurig nodded, satisfied with the change that had come over Snaith, then spun on his heel and passed back into his study.

  “I’ll do you first, love,” the old woman said to Tey, coming back in and plonking her bucket down. “You seen my knitting needle?” She cocked a nod at the table. “There was two when I left. No? Well someone moved it.” She glanced warily around the room. “Or something.”

  As the crone pulled the sheet away, Tey covered the weeping wound in her bad leg with her arm and dropped back against the mattress, numb all over, suddenly weak. The frightened girl was two steps out of her grave, and the Witch Woman nowhere to be seen.

  At the first scrub of the rough cloth on her face, Tey’s maimed leg twinged. A shudder ran up and down her spine as she pushed herself free of the crone’s ministrations. She had to see. Blood from where she’d pushed the needle in drenched the sheet she lay on, but the other thing she saw was far worse than that.

  The scales were back.

  She glanced at Snaith, wanting to see if he’d noticed, but he was off in a world of his own, glaring as though he were about to beat an opponent to pulp in the circle. She looked at the crone, but all she got was a shake of the head and a firm hand pushing her back down so she could be washed clean.

  COLDMAN’S COPSE

  Atop the central tumulus within the ambit of Coldman’s Copse, Theurig was a patch of denser blackness against the night sky. The silvery moon above his head was three quarters full, one side a razor’s edge you could cut your fingers on.

  Snaith raised the twisted lump of his ruined arm, glared at it in the scatter of starlight. Hand a swollen mess. Five bloodless slugs for fingers. Cut them, and he’d not feel thing.

  He glanced at Tey, sitting aloof from him and the others, those who’d been injured at the Proving. No sign of her scars now. Back to covering her madness with her black dress. Did she feel anything when she cut? Did she cry out in pain? Or did she take some perverse pleasure from splitting her skin with a knife? Just seeing the sham of her appearance set Snaith’s blood boiling. She’d lied to him all this time. Allowed him to believe she was something she was not. He looked away before his emotions slipped their reins, but the sight of all the other Malogoi rejects seated around him on the tumulus only made matters worse.

  Most of them had it coming. He’d seen them practice in the circles for years, training halfheartedly, relying on hope and bravado to see them through. Tol Brandig, born half deaf, balance off-kilter; now he was half blind to match. His sister Leah, ravaged by spirits that caused her to shake and froth at the mouth. It was supposed to make her berserk, unstoppable in the circle, but instead it had earned her a fractured skull and the drooling speech of an idiot.

  Then there was Balik Haydn, who never stopped eating, and had the physique to show for it. A target like Balik was
difficult to miss, even if you were blind and aiming in the wrong direction. And during the Proving, while Snaith had been fighting for his life after the bear attack, someone clearly hadn’t missed, judging by the backward bend of a knee, the absence of a hand.

  Snaith almost didn’t recognize Grisel Vret. No chance of lustful thoughts upsetting his mind’s hard-won order now. Half her face was missing, and half her chest.

  Not surprisingly, Lars Tabot was among them. He might have stood a chance in the Proving, if he’d not challenged Snaith a day too soon. He’d been stiff and slow, according to Theurig, nursing a dozen injuries from the beating Snaith had given him.

  Drulk Skanfok had been right: the Malogoi were soft, fit only for weaving garlands.

  Snaith hawked and spat. It was an embarrassment, is what it was. The shaming of the clan. And Theurig had no business putting him here among those responsible. There was no justice. Not in the world. Not even in the Weyd. He was supposed to be a warrior. He was supposed to be the best of the best. Even now, with one good arm, he still could be. He knew it for a fact, and no one was going to change his mind.

  He rapped his knuckles against his temple to help him focus on what the sorcerer was doing. Did it again. Then one more time.

  Theurig was going through an elaborate ritual, facing each of the cardinal points in turn and drawing sigils in the air with his finger. The preparation of place, he called it. A banishing of evil spirits and an invocation of the Weyd. All Snaith knew is that it took forever. The sooner this was over and done with, the better.

  He picked at the scab on the back of his ruined hand. Beneath its flaking crust the skin was raw, and he felt the warm trickle of blood. He pressed his thumb into the ulcerated flesh, winced at the stab of pain. His attention grew keen as a well-honed sword. For a moment. And then the flood of vitriol came rushing back in.

  It burned so much—how the Weyd had turned on him since the bear’s attack, how it had battered him into submission. The Weyd always got what it wanted, no matter how hard you tried to thwart it.

  Bas and Jennika Harrow caught the rot within days of the Proving. If they’d listened to their heads rather than their hearts, they might not have been cursed, might not now be outcasts. Thinking of them only made it harder to restore his focus. He needed to know how they were, and where. But first, he needed to see this test through. If he failed here, he was a dead man, and that would be no good to anyone.

  Snaith’s image of Tey forced its way to the surface once more. His still-point amid the chaos. So perfect it could have been mistaken for the woman sitting across the tumulus from him.

  Yet it was a false image.

  He’d never even suspected there was anything but virgin skin beneath her black dress and shawl. He’d pretended not to see as they lay side by side on the bed in Theurig’s house. What else could he have done? Told Tey she’d betrayed him? The idea was ridiculous, and yet he couldn’t deny that’s how he felt. All these years, and he thought she’d just covered up out of shyness. All these years she’d allowed him to go on believing a lie. Tey wasn’t shy. She was mad. Because he had no doubt it wasn’t Khunt who’d scarred her all over: the cuts were too precise, too meticulously organized, just like his armies of wood-carved figures. There was a whole network crisscrossing every inch of her belly, breasts, and thighs, covering both arms, almost to the wrists—everything not hidden by her garments. Only her face, hands, and feet were unscathed. There was even a white line across her throat from where she must have taken a blade to it. Or a noose.

  No, there was nothing random about Tey’s scars. They formed a pattern, a code, maybe even a map. It crossed Snaith’s mind that each scar could be a tally mark for every time she’d suffered. Because he could see that now, so clearly he cursed himself for not seeing it before. Khunt Moonshine had done something to her, probably for years. Probably since her mother died. Whether it was beatings or just treating her like a slave, he couldn’t say. Maybe it was worse. Snaith’s mind constructed vivid pictures, and his muscles knotted with the need to hurt Khunt, even though he was just imagining. And besides, whatever the truth of what he’d done, Khunt had already been made to pay. If what Theurig had told Snaith on the way to the Copse were true, there was going to be one very happy colony of fire ants, grown fat on Khunt Moonshine’s staked-out carcass.

  In spite of the revulsion Snaith felt for Tey’s mutilation, a thread of fascination wormed its way beneath the surface of his mind. Gone was the girl too shy to look a boy in the eye, the young woman too timid to speak in a crowd. In her place he saw something witchy, shrouded in mystique. Something that had been there all along, misleading him with appearances. Some kind of sorcerous glamor.

  He ground his thumb once more into the squishy mush where the scab had been, used the pain to drive his attention back to the sorcerer drawing out the anticipation of what he was about to reveal.

  One simple test, Theurig had told them, then their fates would be known. Even these lackwit others understood what that meant. It was hard to miss the anxious glances toward the trees ringing the clearing, the barely suppressed gasps each time a swaying branch cast a moonlit shadow. Fail, and they’d be dragged off kicking and screaming by the Shedim. But pass the test, and secrets would be unveiled, mysteries explained, either by Theurig himself or one of the other clan sorcerers. Everyone knew of the Malogoi wounded who’d been apprenticed to the sorcerers of rival clans. How they had fared, though, no one could say. Once gone from the village, they were never seen again.

  The whip and snap of Theurig’s robes, the spreading of his arms, the sparkle of his emerald eyes reflecting starlight: all contrived to draw the postulants in, to heap expectation upon anticipation till it was fit to burst. Then, with a sharp inhalation and the glisten of crooked teeth, Theurig delivered the secret they had all been waiting for.

  “The Weyd is…”

  A hush as heavy as thunderclouds settled over the group.

  Theurig paused dramatically, hands held up in revelation.

  A dozen heads thrust forward, eyes wide and unblinking. No one wanted to miss this.

  “Spit it out,” Snaith muttered to himself through clenched teeth. “The Weyd is… The Weyd is…”

  “Nothing,” Theurig finished.

  Like birds startled from their treetop, Snaith’s thoughts scattered in all directions and none. Blasphemy. Heresy. Nonsense. No… joke. He’s joking.

  He glanced at the others for their reactions, already knowing he was wasting his time. Shrugs and blank looks told him nothing. All he saw was self-pity and failure. Frightened children, as out of their depth as they’d been in the fight circles.

  Snaith trailed the dead fingers of his mangled arm through the dirt. He flashed a look Tey’s way, but it was unlikely she noticed. Her lip was curled derisively, her eyes so black it was like seeing the night sky behind her through twin stab wounds in her face.

  For the first time, Snaith noticed Tey’s lame leg was stretched out before her, the other curled beneath her as it had been when the bear knocked her down. Her disfigurement tugged at him like some malign totem. Reeled him in worse than his most deep-rooted compulsions. His heart skipped a beat, then juddered as it set a new and cantering rhythm.

  The Weyd is nothing…

  The thought seemed more like a torpid echo, lagging through the heavy air of the clearing. Or had Theurig spoken again? Snaith rolled his head and felt his neck pop.

  Around the group, there were a few nervous titters in anticipation of the punchline. Someone groaned. Balik scoffed, then grunted as he heaved himself to his feet.

  Pillock. You can’t just walk away from this.

  Even cattle led to the slaughterhouse had a sense of what was about to happen. What did Balik think? That the tales of the Shedim were just made up to frighten children?

  No one was listening to Theurig now, like they’d never listened to him at the schoolhouse.

  Snaith was listening, though. Listening for the rustle o
f the overhanging leaves that had died with Theurig’s words. Listening for the scurry and scamper of squirrels, the reedy whisper of the wind. Most of all, he was waiting for the sorcerer to finish what he was saying. There was a “but” in the air. With Theurig, there always was.

  Coldman’s Copse was as still as it was silent. The mounds that covered the burial chambers of the ancestors were distended wombs, fit to burst open and give new birth to the ancient bones within.

  “But…” Theurig said, passing a shard of flint from hand to hand, then picking another from the tufted earth of the tumulus and starting to juggle them.

  Snaith allowed himself a smug smile. He’d been right to hold his judgment. It was Theurig’s way to make a nonsensical statement, only to follow it up with the truth.

  The sorcerer snatched up a third flint and tossed it into the air. For a few short moments, he kept all three looping in front of his mock-awed face, and then they thudded to the ground in quick succession. Theurig’s lips sagged into an inverted horseshoe, but his eyes glittered with mischief.

  “Did I already say ‘but’?” He glanced Snaith’s way and shrugged. “I think I did, but I’ll say it again: The Weyd is nothing. No-thing. Not a thing among other things. But it is a god worth pouring out your life to. Every last drop of it.”

  “For a lie?” Balik said. “I always knew the Weyd was a load of goat crap. Fuck this, I’m going. You lot coming?”

  “But the Shedim…” Leah said in a drooling monotone.

  Tey burst out laughing, then swiftly pulled her shawl over her head and tucked her chin to her chest.