The Shadow Isle

by Katharine Kerr

  “We’re going home,” Angmar said, “and Dougie’s going with us, whether he wants to go or not.”

  The light around them suddenly dimmed. Dougie shook his arm free of Berwynna’s grasp and spun around to look at the lake. The sunny spring day had vanished. Like a silver bowl, fog arched over loch and island both, a strange swirling fog, touched with pale purples and blues. He saw the boatmen hauling the dragon boat up onto the shore and heard them yelling back and forth in near panic.

  “I should go help them,” Dougie said.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Angmar said. “You don’t truly belong to the island, and it can’t protect you. Let’s go to Avain’s tower. We’ll be safer there.”

  The square stone tower rose gray and menacing over the apple trees. Angmar hurried them inside to an oddly cold room, empty except for the rickety wooden stairs. Marnmara’s cats, their ears laid back, their tails bushed, bounded up ahead of them.

  Avain met them at the landing by her little chamber. She was abnormally tall, perhaps an inch taller than Dougie, and pudgy, with a big puffy face and a round head crowned with a tangled mass of blonde hair. She kept rising up on her toes and then falling back on her heels while she grinned and clapped her hands. She was repeating a single word over and over, not that Dougie understood it, “Lin, lin, lin.”

  “What may that mean?” Dougie asked Berwynna.

  “Home, home, home,” Berwynna said, then began to tremble.

  Angmar ushered them into the chamber, where a wooden table stood by the single window. They sat down in the straw on the floor. With a cautious glance at Angmar, Dougie put his arm around Berwynna’s shoulders and drew her close, but Angmar never noticed. She was staring at the window. When Dougie followed her glance, all he could see was the mist, swirling outside with a hundred pale colors.

  Avain hummed a strange tuneless music under her breath as she sat down at her table and reached for a silver basin. A dribble of water slopped over its edge as she pulled it close. She stared into it for a long time, by Dougie’s reckoning, and during that entire long time, nothing seemed to happen, nothing moved, except for the mist outside the window.

  Carved deep into Haen Marn’s wall, the sigils of the Kings of Aethyr glowed pale lavender. Nearby a peculiar set of marks that Laz had never seen before glimmered turquoise, though flecked with an unpleasant red orange.

  “If I only knew what these sigils be—” Mara pointed to the flecked glow.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Laz said. “There’s truly naught that we can do, one way or the other. The island will go where it wills to go, and what we want or think is worth the fart of a two-copper pig, no more.”

  Still, she went on studying the symbols carved into the wall, her eyes narrow as if she could force meaning out of them. In his chair by the window old Otho turned toward her with a scowl.

  “We’re probably all dead already,” he announced. “I can’t see one cursed thing out this blasted window but an ugly fog. Hah! It’s probably the fog of the Otherlands. I only ever wanted to die in Lin Serr, you know, but I’m not in the least surprised that I won’t get to. Whole cursed life’s been like that. Bound to have a bad end.”

  “Otho,” Laz said wearily, “we’re not dead. I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s not the Otherlands.”

  “Indeed?” Otho glared at him from under fierce eyebrows. “What makes you so sure we’re going anywhere, eh?”

  “The way I came here. I know what it feels like to travel between worlds.” Laz felt a line of cold sweat run down his back. I may hate it, he thought, but I’ll never forget it.

  Otho snorted in loud contempt. Mara laughed aloud, the high-pitched giggle of a terrified girl.

  “Come sit down,” Laz said to her. “There’s naught else you can do but wait.”

  She hesitated, then followed him to the long table. They sat down on one of the benches, but, Laz noticed, they made sure that their backs were to the window. Otho leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared out at nothing. Are we traveling on one of the Rivers of Time? Laz wondered, or are we going through a place where there’s no time at all? A second trickle of fear-sweat joined the first. He leaned back against the table edge, stretched his legs out in front of him, and did his best to appear at ease for Mara’s sake.

  Although he acted confident around others, much of the time Enj felt like a fool in his belief that some day Haen Marn would return. The entire dwarven community of Lin Serr kept telling him that he was a fool or perhaps even daft. Maybe they’re all right, he would think, maybe I’m eating empty hope for a cold dinner. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from hoping, couldn’t keep himself away from the place where once the lake and its island had lain. Only one thing remained to mark its former location. On a particular riverbank—no one had ever named it, since only a handful of people knew it existed—stood a boulder of gray granite, roughly half-a-sphere and about four feet at its highest point. Just below that point was a red stain that looked like blood from a distance. Up close, however, it revealed itself to be the much-rusted remains of an iron ring bolted into the rock.

  A good many times in the past forty years Enj had returned to that boulder, camped for a few days, and then moved on, heart-struck with disappointment. For this visit, however, he had Rori’s news to give him fresh hope. On a fine spring day he hiked up through the budding trees and pale grass along the bank of the river, full and chattering with runoff from the mountain snows. As he came clear of the forest, he saw the boulder in its usual spot, but near the point something winked and gleamed in the bright sun. It shone like silver. He stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. Don’t get your hopes up too high, he told himself. There are other things it could be.

  But when he reached the boulder, he saw the silver horn, whole and gleaming, hanging from a bright silver chain, which hung in turn from a polished iron ring. He swung his pack down from his shoulders and took a few steps closer. He was afraid to touch the horn, he realized, lest it prove to be some kind of illusion. He looked upriver but saw only the water winding between the usual pair of low hills, covered with bright new grass. Apparently the Westfolk dweomer had managed to repair the horn but failed to bring back the island.

  Oddly enough, it was his disappointment that gave him the courage to pick up the horn. The metal, cool to the touch, weighed like silver in his hand.

  “It’s solid enough, then,” he said aloud.

  Without really thinking, he raised it to his lips and blew. A long sweet note echoed off the hills and the silent valley, echoed oddly loudly, he realized, as if a thousand horns were singing out in answer. A mist began to rise from the river, a strange, opalescent mist—just a breath of it upon the water at first, then a few long tendrils reaching for the sky—then a sudden explosion of mist. With a roar, a wall of lavender fog rose up like a breaking wave. Silver lights shone within it as the fog poured up and out, spreading into the windless air, rising so high that it blotted out the sun.

  Enj spun around, looking up and around him. The opalescent mist gleamed and shimmered in an enormous dome that covered the valley and the two hills. Suddenly the earth trembled, then shook hard. Enj fell to his knees and threw one arm around the boulder. The shaking stopped, the trembling died away, but slowly. He realized that he was still holding the silver horn.

  Sound it!

  He was never sure if the voice came from his own mind or out of the mist, but he raised the horn again and blew a long call. As the sound rushed out, the mist receded, winding itself up like a sheet and falling back into the river once again. Something—perhaps a tendril of mist—snatched the horn from his hand. The boulder disappeared, and he fell forward onto the grass. When he sat back up, the sun shone down on a changed valley and winked on the surface of a lake.

  Enj staggered to his feet and shaded his eyes with one hand. Sure enough, out in the last of the mist sat the island with its long dock and its tower. He began to laugh, then sobbed with t
ears running down his face, laughed again and wept again, over and over, until he saw the dragon boat putting out from the dock and heading his way.

  The dragon prow dipped and swayed as the boat crossed the loch, but near the shore the oarsmen began to back water. Enj saw Lon run to the bow. The boatman shaded his eyes with one hand whilst he peered at the shore.

  “Enj!” he called out. “We’re home, lads! It’s Enj!”

  Lon began weeping, but the rowers all cheered as they edged the boat closer in. Holding his pack above his head, Enj waded out. Lon took the pack from him, then helped him clamber aboard.

  “Oh, well-met, lad!” Lon said, snuffling. “Well-met, indeed!”

  “And the same to you!” Enj said. “Here, I’d best take a turn at that gong.”

  On the pier two women were waiting for the boat to dock. His mother Enj recognized immediately, a fair bit grayer than she’d been before, but her posture still was straight and strong. Before the boatmen had finished tying up the dragon boat, Enj leaped onto the pier and ran to her, laughing. She threw herself into his arms. They clung together, weeping and laughing in turns, until Angmar at last pulled away.

  “This be one of your sisters,” she said, sniffing back tears, “Berwynna, my younger twin.”

  The young woman came forward and smiled at him, a pretty lass, as he might have expected of Rhodry’s daughter, with Rhodry’s raven-dark hair, but with their mother’s strength in her cornflower-blue eyes.

  “And a well-met to you, then, Sister,” Enj said. “It gladdens my heart to meet you at last.”

  “And mine to meet you.” Berwynna dropped him a curtsy. “Ofttimes Mam did speak of you, but I wondered if ever we would meet.”

  “Well, now we have.” Enj glanced around. “I take it our other sister’s up in the manse?”

  “She is, and Mara’s her name.” Angmar slipped her arm through his and gave him a significant look. “Marnmara, that be.”

  The Lady of the Isle reborn, then! Enj wondered exactly how to greet a grandmother who was now your younger sister, then decided that questions of courtesy didn’t truly matter on a day as happy as this one. Arm in arm, they walked up to the manse with Berwynna trailing after.

  In the great hall the others waited for them—Mic, old Otho, Lonna, a lass so like Berwynna that Enj knew she must be his other sister, and two young men, red-haired Dougie, enormously tall, and tattooed Tirn with his scarred and malformed hands. As the introductions went round, Lonna and Mic both wept.

  “Ye gods!” Otho snarled. “There’s no need for everyone to carry on so! For all we know this wretched island’s got some evil plan in mind.”

  “Ah, Otho!” Enj said. “I take it your sunny mood means you’re glad to be home.”

  Otho, a frail whitebeard now, shook a feeble fist in his direction, then suddenly smiled. Lonna wiped her eyes on the hem of her apron, and Berwynna took her handkerchief out of her kirtle.

  “Here, Uncle Mic,” she said.

  Mic snuffled, smiled at her, and wiped his eyes vigorously.

  “Dougie, well met to you, too,” Enj said.

  Dougie gave him a blank look, then shrugged, holding up empty palms.

  “He’s deaf?” Enj murmured to Berwynna.

  “No!” She laughed at him. “He doesn’t speak Dwarvish, and he doesn’t know much Deverrian, either, that’s all. I’ll translate for him.”

  “Tirn does speak Deverrian, though,” Marnmara said, “and Dougie had best learn more of it, so I say we all use it this day.”

  “I agree, but first,” Enj spoke in Dwarvish, “since the outlanders can’t understand us, what’s all this about ‘uncle’ Mic?”

  “He’s Mother’s half brother,” Berwynna said. “Didn’t you know?”

  Enj turned to Mic in some exasperation.

  “I didn’t want to tell you when I was here before,” Mic said, “because Rhodry Maelwaedd was with us at the time, and it was none of his affair—”

  “Hah!” Otho broke in. “I should think not, him a cursed elf and all!”

  Everyone laughed, perhaps at the predictability of the insult, perhaps in general good feeling. At length everyone sat down at the long head table, and Lonna and Berwynna bustled off to bring tankards and flagons of ale. Enj sat at Angmar’s right hand, and Marnmara took the seat to her left. The others sat randomly toward the far end, though Enj noticed Dougie keeping the seat next to him clear. While Berwynna poured ale for the men, Enj leaned close to his mother.

  “I see the twins favor Rhodry Maelwaedd mightily,” Enj said, too softly for the lasses to hear, “but they look too young to be his children.”

  “What? Of course they be his!” Angmar spoke normally. “How long think you that we’ve been gone in Alban?”

  “More than forty years, Mam, getting on to fifty, truly.”

  “Ye gods!” Mic put in. “To us it seemed a bare seventeen years.”

  Enj shook his head to show his bafflement. He shouldn’t be surprised by anything that happened on or to Haen Marn, he supposed.

  “Time be like water,” Marnmara leaned forward into the conversation. “Rivers flow at many different speeds.”

  This pronouncement struck Enj as more a riddle than an explanation. He had a long swallow of ale to help clear his mind. Haen Marn’s good dark brew, and the sight of the great hall around him—he’d worry about the Rivers of Time some other day, he decided, and enjoy this one.

  “It’s been so long here, then,” Angmar said suddenly. “Ai! I doubt me if my Rhodry still walks the earth.”

  “Um, well.” Enj hesitated, then decided that blurting the news out would be best. “He does, Mam, but not as you remember him. He ran afoul of great dweomer, and it turned him into a dragon.”

  Angmar stared, her mouth half-open. Berwynna translated for Dougie, who made a strange gesture with one hand, describing what appeared to be a cross in midair in front of him. Marnmara, however, nodded as if she were merely thinking things over.

  “Not the silver wyrm?” Tirn leaned forward as if to ensure that he’d heard a-right.

  “The very one,” Enj said. “Mam, my heart aches for you. He’s been changed into a dragon, a real dragon, huge, wings, the lot. But there’s hope. Some of the Westfolk dweomerworkers are trying to turn him back, but it seems to be a blasted hard job.”

  “Mayhap I can help them,” Marnmara said. “After all, he be my father.”

  Angmar started to speak, then let out a sigh that carried half the woe in the world. She leaned her head against the back of her chair.

  “Mam?” Enj said in Dwarvish. “Are you going to faint?”

  Angmar shook her head no. Her eyes gazed far across the room and her lips moved briefly, as if in prayer. Marnmara got to her feet.

  “Mam, Mam!” she said. “The shock’s been too much for you, hasn’t it? Here, Dougie, help me! Let’s get her up to her chamber.”

  The Albanwr, a giant by Enj’s standards, rose and joined her. He easily picked up the exhausted Angmar and carried her away up the stairs with her two daughters trailing along behind. The men left behind merely looked at one another for a long space of time; then Mic broke the spell by burying his nose in his tankard and drinking deep.

  “Goes to show,” Otho snarled. “This is what happens when you have dealings with a wretched elf. Turning into dragons! Hah!”

  “Now, now,” Enj said, “it’s not somewhat that happens every day. He’s the only man of the Westfolk I ever heard of who grew wings.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” Otho snorted again. “You never know what they’ll do if they get some crazed thought in their minds.”

  Enj decided that arguing the point was hopeless. Fortunately, Tirn changed the subject.

  “The silver wyrm hates me,” Tirn remarked. “And I don’t even know why. Are you saying that he’s got Westfolk blood in his veins?”

  “Cursed deep in them, apparently,” Mic said. “With all that dragon covering them.”

  �
�True spoken.” Tirn flashed him a grin. “But I’d best be gone ere he arrives here.”

  “Well, I don’t know if or when he’ll arrive,” Enj said. “There’s more trouble brewing with the Horsekin, you see, off to the east of Dwarveholt. He’s sworn to help protect the border.”

  “Yet more war?” Tirn’s grin disappeared.

  “Mayhap. No one’s sure if these raiders are a feint or a sign of worse to come.”

  “I see. I was hoping that the burning of Zakh Gral would put an end to it, but obviously I was being an optimistic fool. Enj, I have Gel da’Thae blood, but truly, I hope the Deverry men beat the Horsekin back.” Tirn spoke quietly but firmly. “They represent the worst of my kind.”

  “So we’ve learned,” Enj said. “Unfortunately.”

  In her usual brisk way, Marnmara took charge of her mother. She helped her lie down on her bed, then opened the windows of the bedchamber to let in fresh air and sunlight.

  “I’ll go get some herbs,” Marnmara said. “Dougie, you may go. Wynni, stay here until I get back!”

  “As if I’d leave!” Berwynna said.

  Marnmara bustled out as if she hadn’t heard her sister. Dougie gave Berwynna a comforting pat on the shoulder, then left the chamber. Berwynna sat down next to her mother and clasped Angmar’s hand in both of hers. Angmar sighed and lay limply, her eyes half-closed.

  “I’ve had many a hard slap in my life from the Fates,” Angmar whispered in Dwarvish, “but this has to be the cruelest. I swear, Wynni, it would have been easier to hear that your father was dead than this.”

  “Well, maybe those dweomerworkers can turn him back.” Berwynna did her best to sound optimistic. “After all, if magic made him a dragon, it should be able to unmake him. Shouldn’t it?”

  “I’ve no idea, none.” Angmar let her eyes close, then opened them again. “My poor darlings! It must be just as hard on you.”

  “Not truly. We never knew him like you did. Don’t vex your heart about us, Mam. You’ve got enough grief to bear as it is.”

  “My thanks.”

  “Besides, in a way it’s rather splendid, thinking I have a dragon for a father. Do you think mayhap he was always a dragon and could just take human form? If that’s so, then maybe he can change himself back and be with you again.”