The Gray Isles

by F. T. McKinstry

  THE GRAY ISLES

  F.T. McKinstry

  Copyright © 2017 F.T. McKinstry

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

  First edition published 2012 by Double Dragon Publishing Second edition 2017

  Cover Art by F.T. McKinstry

  Table of Contents

  Map: Sourcesee and East

  Map: The Gray Isles

  Prologue

  A Wizards’ Thrall

  The Raven of Ostarin

  The Watchtower

  The White Gull

  Where Veils are Thin

  Dirala’s Tea

  The Folciel Sphere

  The Netweaver’s Tale

  The Rising Tide

  Remember the Earth

  The Master of Wychmouth

  The Destroyer’s Own

  Birth of an Immortal

  Glossary

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry

  Connect with F.T. McKinstry

  Prologue

  Ciron, the brightest star in the constellation of Eala, the Swan, came into focus on the evening horizon over the North Derinth Sea. On the northernmost point of Solse Isle, high above the village of Lafin glimmering amid the trees crowding a crescent harbor, a restless breeze rippled the grasses and brush to the breath of a cold tide.

  With the eyes of the wind, an assassin followed the movements of a young woman threading her way through the shadows of stone houses. She moved in the peaceful silence, making her way to the rocky path that led up to the point. The hunter drew around his bow, deftly nocked an arrow with an obsidian tip, and waited.

  Cloaked in ash gray, she emerged onto the outcropping at the edge of the field. A maelstrom of invisible shadows surrounded her. Near the edge of the cliff, three standing stones stood with the patience of an age. The woman approached the stones as she did each evening, stepped gracefully widdershins, and then faced north.

  The waters beyond the cliff’s edge swirled into a rough band, as if agitated by a strong rip current or a shoal of large, air-breathing creatures.

  The witch knelt to make an offering. To what or whom she held out her elegant hands, the hunter couldn’t guess. She spoke in the Dark Tongue, the language of formlessness. Raw and primordial, the sounds flowed from the essence of nature, bending it. Though trained as a wizard to the highest order of the Keepers of the Eye, the assassin couldn’t discern her intent in the obscure weave of the ancient tongue.

  In much the same way, he had knelt before the Aenlisarfon, an ancient and venerable council of high wizards who watched over the patterns of consciousness that draped the world of Ealiron. Master Eadred, they had said, their thoughts stirring the center of his mind like a pine-scented breeze. Raven of Nemeton, Siomothct of the Third Regard. Honor us with a mission.

  And not just any mission: the Masters had sent him to this remote place to hunt a shadecaster. No mere hedge witch, she made an art of seducing wizards, collecting their pearly seed, and using it to create shades to do her bidding. Eadred clearly perceived the rift that surrounded her, a chasm in the delicate balance of the world. Darkness flowed on the north wind, the voices of death without life, pain without joy, dissolution without initiation. Shapeless and yet distinct, they surrounded her like bees, whispering under her warmth and attention.

  The Council would raise his assassin’s rank to Second, after this.

  With the stealth of a viper, he lifted his bow and drew back the string, focusing on the vibration of the homing spell singing in the tension of the arc.

  The witch rose and turned, pulling the hood from her face. Beautiful as a summer meadow, she had lily-white skin and straight, dark red hair that flew like fire in the wind. Eadred had spent a fortnight tracking and identifying his mark, camouflaging his presence with the soul of the isle—and yet her gaze settled on him as simply and dispassionately as moonlight.

  She smiled.

  He released the arrow.

  The force of the blow knocked her from her feet. Eadred rose and went to her as she writhed by the northernmost stone, clutching the arrow in her chest with a mewling cry. As he knelt by her side to watch her fly into the unholy, narrowing crack of her magic, she moaned a word that sounded like a wing crunching under a boot.

  An eerie roar from the north brought him to his feet. The tide bent and rose to the setting sun as an enormous serpent the size of a harbor strand surfaced as if responding to a call. Its force on his heart bore the unmistakable mark of the Destroyer, the aspect of death and transformation inherent in the Old One, the Mother of all things.

  Stunned beyond thought, Eadred returned his attention to his dark deed. Just then, something moved on the edge of the field in the direction of the path. “Mummy!” a child cried. A boy ran into view, then stopped and gaped at the woman splayed in blood by the standing stone.

  Bow in hand, Eadred stepped back and turned to leave. His stomach flipped over as the child began to cry. The Aenlisarfon never told him the witch had children by her intercourse with wizards. How could they not have known that?

  They never told him she had the power to invoke sea dragons, either.

  He crossed the field, merging with the shadows of dusk. Behind him, the boy screamed a tangle of words in the Dark Tongue that hit the hunter in the gut like a volley of poisoned darts. He stumbled and fell as the howling blast passed through his body and mind, splintering it.

  Thunder rent the sky as Eadred peered up, trembling, weak and disoriented. The child had gone. His mother’s cloak and hair flapped in the gale like the feathers of a dead bird. And the sea wept and crashed against the isle, driven by the icy north hand of the Destroyer herself, bent on avenging the death of her own.

  A Wizards’ Thrall

  Sailors called his realm the Swan, for so it appeared to them, the pattern of stars shining on dusk’s fading arc in the seeding time of year. They knew his name, Ciron, as its heart and brightest star. But she knew his touch. She had lain with him in the warm waters on the shortest night, when the wind from the stars caressed the depths and revealed the Gates of the Palace of Origin, and conceived.

  On that night, Ciron sang a spell that brought their child into a human womb. He sang to protect the child from water. The Shining Ones did not always say what they knew; nor had Ciron said, even when she wept and thrashed in the glistening sea beneath his cold light, where her child had gone. First a boy, now a man, he had vanished with the death of his innocence.

  She had asked the stars, whales, rocks, the sun and moon. She had asked terns, seals, herrings, crabs, and the white horses that roamed the cliffs on the western coast of Waleis. She had asked the trees and the north wind. She had asked the dead, their pale eyes staring. She had even asked the beryl spire focusing the energies of the earth into a mighty web. But nothing in Ealiron’s creation knew where the mortal shell of her child had gone.

  Until one came, bearing news.

  As she released the snow-white gull to the north, her immortal lover twinkled with the silence of deep winter on the hard, gray land.

  *

  Wind ruffled the stunted pine hedges on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the North Derinth Sea. Evening settled from a turbulent sky laden with swiftly moving clouds. The setting sun beamed through the rifts in intervals of gold. Seagulls dotted the crags in the water below, and dark, slender cormorants lifted their wings to the wind.

  Hemlock strode along the rocky path, humming under his breath. A cool, salty breeze filled his lung
s and caressed the grasses, broom, and heather that grew on the western side of the Isle of Urd. An elusive dream touched his thoughts, and then vanished into darkness.

  Earlier that afternoon, Maeve, the cook’s daughter, had pressed a sickle knife into his hand and said, Now you can only find black heather in the west when the moon is new. You must cut it with this. Hemlock had never seen black heather, and he wondered, as always, if Maeve was teasing him. But after the love she gave him last night, her freckled cheeks shining in the candlelight and her sunshine hair bouncing around her face and breasts, he would’ve climbed every cliff on Urd to find black heather, new moon or not.

  The sun fled behind a heavy cloud as he reached a knoll on the edge of the cliffs. He pulled a strap from his shoulder and dropped the bow and quiver his friend Aengus, a fledgling wizard who had taught him the craft of archery, had loaned him for practice. Aengus belonged to the Order of Hawk, the second level up in the hierarchy of the Keepers of the Eye. Though they were roughly the same age, Hemlock often wondered why the wizard bothered to spend time with him. Once, Aengus had told him: You have the eyes of the sea. A mysterious comment, from a wizard. But Aengus liked to hear Hemlock tell stories, a skill he had learned from his father.

  Like most fishermen, Hemlock’s father had known many songs, tales, and obscurities. The old man had often gazed at the watery horizon, his gray eyes glassy with longing. Don’t look too deeply into the sea, he would say; lest she take you into her arms.

  He had failed to take his own advice, unfortunately.

  Shortly before Hemlock’s parents had drowned in a freak storm characteristic of springtime in the Gray Isles, his father told Hemlock he possessed the eyes of the Old One, the goddess of storms, the heart of the sea and the darkness that gave life to all things. The fisherman had promised his son that one day he would send him to the Urd Conservatory as an apprentice. Instead, Hemlock had come here as a thrall, to serve wizards, not learn their arts. He earned his keep dusting books, tending herbs, harvesting vegetables, feeding animals, and repairing stone walls. Reared to the craft of seafaring, he often went out to catch fish. Whatever they required of him, he did quietly, his dream of being a wizard hidden like a shining jewel in an old rusty box. But at least he ate well and had a warm place to sleep. And an older member of the staff had taught him to read and write.

  Aside from longing, Hemlock had kept one token from his lost family: a small black shell carved into the shape of a turtle. A turtle always knows home, his older sister Alys had told him as she knelt and tied it around his neck on the morning she gave him to the Masters of Urd. He had stood there half-listening to her daft comforts as the wizards’ ship entered the port of Gefion and lowered its dark sails. He hadn’t considered what she would do without him, how she would live. Now a young man, aflame with the thoughts and desires young men knew, he shuddered to think. His memories were innocent, captured in a gift that he wore still.

  Hemlock moved his fingers over the prickly swells of heather by his side. Shades of purple, pink and white—but no black. Surely Maeve had sent him on a goose chase, an affectionate comment on his love for a good yarn. He could almost hear her laugher ringing like bells in the servants’ hall. Black heather, indeed. He lifted his gaze to the sea, glistening in the setting sun. He would bring the little sprite something for her basket all right, and it wouldn’t be heather.

  The sun emerged from a low cloud. In an airy moment of distraction, something in the distance caught Hemlock’s attention. He shaded his eyes. The waters offshore spread into a swirling arc that flipped up into the coil of some massive sinuous creature. It looped back on itself, shone in the light and then submerged, heaving the water in a moving froth that rose up and over the rocks near the shore like a tidal surge.

  “Maern!” he breathed, using the wizards’ name for the Old One. His heart thumped wildly. It was too large and uncanny to be a wave, a dolphin, or even a whale. A chill crept over his scalp like a rippling breeze. Had he just glimpsed a loerfalos? Impossible.

  Every sailor in the isles knew the legend. Called the Mistress of the Sea, an immortal that lived in the cold waters of the world, the loerfalos was said to have been the first creature, emerged from the void before the stars. Conveniently, no one laid eyes on a loerfalos and lived to tell of it. Hemlock had even heard rumors that one took his parents’ boat on the morning they had gone out to make their living. He had since brushed that off to fishermen’s tales, having heard such stories about every weird thing the sea offered up and then some.

  So what did he just see? He stared at the restless ocean with all his might until twilight cloaked the isle and the waters turned as dark as a tourmaline sphere. Perhaps he had imagined it. A rip current or a trick of the sunlight on the waves.

  Shivering, he stood up, gathered his things and stumbled home, the dark moon weighing on his heart like a brooding shadow.

  *

  In the days that followed, Hemlock used his prodigious imagination to invent excuses to venture afar from the conservatory. But he didn’t look for rare herbs, a missing cat, a certain kind of tree from which to carve arrows, or quartz crystals for the Faceter. Had the isle not been so desolate, Maeve might have thought he had found another sweetheart. He stayed busy, kept quiet, and took every chance to return to the heather knoll on the western shore. He went there at dusk and dawn, in the afternoon, even in a rainstorm, hoping to see the strange creature again.

  After five days, he decided it had to be either his imagination, or the kind of thing a man sees once in his life. Fodder for tales. While this saddened him, in a romantic, storyteller’s way, it relieved him too. A loerfalos existed beyond the dreams and definitions of mortals. Seeing one was at best unlikely; at worst, ominous.

  On the eve of the first quarter moon, in the afternoon, Hemlock walked through the pinewood forest of Helgrind on the northeastern shore of the isle. At his side, a dirty white pony laden with large baskets plodded through the blooming raspberry bushes. Hemlock picked up deadwood and placed it into the baskets. A storm the night before had left plenty scattered about.

  “Well Hoarfrost,” he said to the pony. “That’s enough for your old back for one day, ay?” As he stroked the animal’s neck, he spotted a fallen tree a short distance east. Leaving Hoarfrost to graze, he went to see. The top of a tall pine had cracked off in the wind. He would return with his ax and a draft horse in the morning.

  He stretched his back and turned to leave, then hesitated. Beyond the rocky rift of a small stream, the gray sea moved strangely between the trunks of the trees.

  Hemlock bounded through the woods to the shore, a sprawling tumble of boulders strewn with seaweed and gull droppings. To his left stood a steep, craggy rise that blocked the sky and echoed with the pounding surf. He splashed into a shallow pool and stared. Past the breakers, a great, black coil rose out of the water, and then splashed with a thunderous roar, creating a swirling maelstrom as it submerged behind the edge of the rise.

  Hemlock’s blood ran as cold as a fading dream, a startling return to the moment. Stunned by disbelief, he returned to the pony, dragged its head up out of the ferns and made for home.

  Now, he had to tell someone. Seeing a loerfalos once could be brushed aside as a trick of the sea—but twice, on a different part of the isle? Not a chance. He lived in a Keepers’ Conservatory. Surely, one of these wizards would know something about this. He didn’t dare approach Master Farous. Perhaps the Beastmaster? Or Master Filothin, a shipwright.

  Then one came to mind and stuck there: Master Eadred. Though just middle-aged, the wizard had pure white hair. He kept to himself; Hemlock had never met him. He held mastery over some art to do with hunting or seeing, no one seemed to know. He lived in the Watchtower, an ancient spire that had stood on the eastern shore of Urd for so long that the sea now surrounded it. Hemlock had once heard that Eadred possessed great knowledge of the sea. He would know about the loerfalos—he might even have seen her himself.

 
Now Hemlock had only to muster the nerve to approach Master Eadred. It was said the wizard had a brooding, surly disposition. But such was talk. There wasn’t much else to do on this isle but talk.

  *

  That evening, beneath low clouds drizzling rain, Hemlock approached the Watchtower. Located a mile north of the conservatory, the tower could only be gained at low tide; when the tide was high, it stood alone in the water. A stone wall over six feet high provided not only a path to the tower, but also time on either side of the low tide in which to cross. Aengus had once said that Farous enchanted the tower, as had every Master of Urd for generations, to protect it from being swept into the sea by the mighty storm surges that razed Urd’s coasts.

  The water level rocked just below the top of the wall. Hemlock picked his way over the path, clutching his cloak against the wind. At the end, he climbed the long stairs that wound around the tower to the door some distance above. Wind and rain sang like wolves around the height. When he reached the door, Hemlock lifted and released a large corroded doorknocker in the shape of a grimacing fish. A metallic echo boomed across the water, a lonely sound that made him doubt his resolve. He moved down a step.

  As he waited there, Hemlock studied the tide creeping in rhythmic swells. He imagined dropping the ghastly knocker again.

  The door opened. Eadred stood there, gazing down like a stone. He wore a gray-green cloak trimmed with silvery fur. On one hand, which held the door, he wore a ring of green-black metal in the shape of a serpent.

  As befitting a servant, Hemlock dropped to one knee. The wizard’s presence crushed him like an undertow. “Master,” he ventured, “I have seen a strange thing and seek your counsel.”

  No response. Hemlock let his gaze move up past the wizard’s knee to his eyes, pale green as sea foam. A subtle and unlikely expression of surprise fled over Eadred’s face, followed by a lighter shade. “Of what do you speak?”