Shadowborn (51 page)

Until early in the second year, when he heard the village bell ringing an alarm. He was running down the path toward the village before he knew it, knife on belt and ax in hand. The villagers gathered on the beach were too distraught to notice his sudden arrival among them, a gaunt figure with knife-barbered hair and beard, and ragged clothes covered by a length of plaid. Something had come from the sea and seized two of the children collecting crabs and clams on the water’s edge. Something . . .

He strode to the edge of the sea, hand coming across to unsling his rifle, sonn hammering the water . . . but only the waves moved, and he had no rifle. . . . He felt some new force spread out from him, vastly more powerful than sonn, thrusting across the waves, down through the water, along the bed of the bay, finding the fading vitality of a child, and beside it, something hungry. Not all Shadowborn were sustained by magic and had died with their makers. He raised his ax and brought it down to cleave sand, and felt the magic cleave water and bone. The smell of brine and blood rolled in with the wind, and with a heave of its skin, like an obedient dog, the sea laid two small bodies onto the packed sand at his feet.

After a few weeks, the rumors died down, the village sages agreeing that the children’s lives were a gift of the Mother. But now when the children foraged, one or more of the women or old men stood guard; they knew not to presume on the Mother’s generosity. It was a pitifully weak guard, had there been anything dangerous in the bay—which he knew there was not—but he did not interfere. He was too busy. The islanders might give charity to a hapless madman washed up on their shores, but a grown man with some of his wits come home must make shift to feed himself. So he was busy learning how to make his dory watertight, how to braid a line that would not break, how to choose bait, how to weave and repair a net, and how to cast the net from a boat without following it into the water. And how to put up with being teased for getting seasick on waves gentle enough—so they said—to soothe a baby in its cradle. He found their mockery as welcome as their kindness. He also found a name to give them: Ish.

He did not leave his cave to move into the village. He trusted himself to work around them, but not to sleep, not to dream. He took to storing his supplies and provisions outside after once too often finding them strewn around him when he woke. He had too little to break it carelessly. He refused all offers to help him make the cave more livable, to enclose it, for instance, or build furniture. He would not be able to explain a splintered wall, shattered furniture—or, rather, he would not have wanted to find an explanation for such violence. And he needed time alone for the exercises that, years ago, he had learned to focus his small strength, and now had to find a way to apply to the mastery of more power than any sane man could want. The magic seemed bent on emerging, no matter how firmly he tried to sit on it.

Though he supposed he would not be considered sane by most measures, while scratching out an existence on a crumb of rock on the borders of the known world, learning to fish and taking lessons in magic from dead men, bringing to mind everything that the archmages of Darkborn and Lightborn had tried to
gift
him as they died. If he did not master this strength of his, he would be the one breeding monsters and sending out his Call.

In the third year, during the quiet seas of midsummer, he let himself be talked into crewing for a visit to the mainland. By then he rarely woke in a shambles, and he had been able to equip his cave with a bed and a table and a chair, build a fireplace and chimney, and start on a curved stone wall to enclose the mouth of his cave before winter. He thought he dared risk leaving the island. He needed to risk leaving the island. He was half delirious with island fever. Since his sixteenth year, he had been constantly on the move, and now his world was circumscribed by the shores of one small island and the unfriendly sea. He needed off the island, whose every crack and crevice he knew, and he needed to taste and smell something other than fish. He needed news from the north, needed to know that those who had fought and lived had won what they deserved. He wanted to buy spice seeds, remembering how far to the north and long ago, he had sat in a prison cell and told Lady Telmaine that he wished to retire and grow spices on a remote island.

He needed to know that he had not killed her, too.

So he took ship to the mainland. The port was a third the size of Stranhorne Seaport, but still seemed so crowded to senses and magic after the island that he spent the first day in the fisherman’s inn, sleepless, afraid he had made a serious mistake. The second night he forced himself into the market to bargain for seeds, and for the herbs for a recipe against seasickness he’d learned years ago. No surplus of magical strength seemed to suppress his body’s conviction that it did not belong on water. After that, he found his way to a sailors’ bar and used some of the small stash of coin to order a plate of lamb stew and start a round of drinks and gossip. The north was at peace, he learned as he nursed his beer. The mages had gone south into exile, like the archduke’s half brother. Always trouble when two brothers shared the same dam but not the same sire . . . Heads nodded complacently—as if all the men in the room were the sons of the fathers they claimed. There was talk of a railway line running all the way from north to south, crossing the Shadowlands, to terminate a mere two hundred miles along the coast. A new type of steam-driven ship was being built in Minhorne. Ishmael sighed, regretting the want of sailors’ wives. The one accomplishment Vladimer had ever conceded women as a sex was their effectiveness as gossips. If Ishmael wanted to know more, know about the people, he would have to go north.

He was not ready. He went back to the island instead, to fish and plant spices in the salt-soaked, barren earth, and then to learn to read the soil and change it. That autumn, the island had its best-ever potato crop, and Ishmael his first meal of seasoned sole. He wondered if he could grow lemons.

The following year, he went again to the mainland, though his purse could not produce lemon trees, and he had greater concerns than farming. The coast had suffered a summer of raids by a lawless band that had established itself in a village to the west. Ishmael, listening with a veteran’s ear to the accounts of their atrocities, agreed that the raiders needed to be cleaned out before their numbers and ambition swelled further, but was appalled at the proposed tactics. With considerable bellowing and a show of his marksmanship, rusty as it was, he gained a hearing, and more roaring and storming got him time to start training the scratch troop they mustered. Not to mention to recover some of his old form. But if he could win arguments with men, he could not win them with the seasons; the onset of winter forced their attack long before he felt prepared. Fighting men was grisly, sickening work, and they took far too many casualties for him to call their success a victory. The worst was that he could neither help the wounded nor escape their pain. He stayed awake three days and nights straight, until he was staggering with exhaustion and could sleep like the dead.

The next summer he kept to the island, fished, planted spices and potatoes, guarded the bay, and built the wall that might eventually enclose an orchard. He told himself he might be wise to be circumspect, in case a report had traveled up the coast. He remembered Vladimer saying, “If a man truly intends to disappear, he must give up his old habits.” He healed a seagull’s broken wing, and then the gashes to his hands from the bird’s beak, and stroked away a cancer that was slowly killing the village-hall cat.
Sheep,
he thought. He should keep sheep. If the shepherds in Strumheller were to be believed, sheep were susceptible to every ailment known. Sheep would give him practice.

He was sitting on a barrel outside his cave one night in late summer, mending a net. Though the night was still clear, a gale was rising in the west, and only the hardy and hungry had gone far beyond the bay. He was neither, but he was keeping vigil over those flecks of vitality in the cold sea. So it was that he sensed the ship running before the wind, even before he heard its passing bell. Sensed the ship, its living crew, and its two passengers, and that familiar, magical touch, gloriously matured and refined.

He stood up, the net sliding unnoticed from his hands. He drew a deep breath of the storm-heavy wind, aware of the sudden cessation of pain from a wound that had not closed until now.

ALISON SINCLAIR is the author of the science fiction novels
Legacies
,
Blueheart
, and
Cavalcade
(which was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award), and the fantasy novels
Darkborn
,
Lightborn
, and
Shadowborn
. The Darkborn trilogy began with a meditation on the light-dark motif as it is used in fantasy, met up with years of eclectic reading and cities remembered and imagined, and took flight in directions almost as unexpected to the writer as to the characters. Alison Sinclair presently lives in Montréal.