The Book of Isle

by Nancy Springer

  It started off at once, veering away from the river. Tirell and I scrambled to gather our gear and get our horses. Grandfather rose stiffly to his feet. “I had better be getting on,” he remarked. “Farewell, you two.”

  “Has the King tried to harm you?” I asked worriedly.

  “Harm me!” He snorted. “I’d like to see him try! Harm me!” He extended a hand, and our little fire winked out as if it had never been. In the dim interstices of the forest I could hear him chuckling. “Do you want me to put it back again?” he called to Tirell.

  But Tirell mounted his horse and rode off without word or notice. I faced my grandfather a moment longer, and suddenly there were tears on my cheeks, childish tears of hurt and despair.

  “Grandfather, come with us,” I whispered. “We need you. He is a very son of Abas. To him I am only the burr that clings to his horse’s tail. He is as mad as any Sacred King since the line began.”

  “Frain, you know I am too old to ride,” Daymon replied gently. “Do your best for him, as you always have. He needs you far worse than he knows. Someday you will be able to measure the love beneath his anger. But for now, will you take my word that quite surely love is there?”

  I could not speak or touch him, or I would have sobbed. “Thank you, Grandfather,” I murmured at last, and mounted my white mare and hastened after Tirell.

  Chapter Six

  The beast was leading back the way we had come. Tirell followed it willingly. I tore through the brambles to catch them, too tired and confused to realize what we would meet when we came to the edge of the forest.

  It was the Boda, of course, with their scarlet tunics and their bronze helms and their curved, slicing swords. They were camped at the river bend, and they sighted us as soon as we cleared the trees. A dozen of them vaulted onto their horses and clattered toward us with a shout.

  Tirell sat still on his horse, watching, with sword and shield at the ready. I galloped up beside him and came to a disorderly halt, hurriedly arming myself. The beast was nosing about, looking for a passageway into the intertwining wall of the forest. For a moment it stopped its searching and snorted at the approaching riders. Tirell glared, and it went back to its prodding, snorted again, and disappeared into the forest.

  Before we could follow, the Boda were upon us. We set our horses’ haunches between the trees and met them. I was exhausted, utterly spent, but I had not yet realized it. Because my heart was thumping and my head felt light, I believed I was a coward. The attackers swam in front of my eyes and nothing seemed real; I had never fought for blood before. My training saved me. My sword moved in the ways it had been taught as I watched it, bemused. The Boda came at us three or four on one, but a long straight sword was enough to hold them off. Their scimitars are ugly things, good for lopping heads off peasants and footmen, but they have no reach.

  “Whoreson cowards!” Tirell shouted.

  I killed one man while I parried another with my shield. Then somebody cut me on the head. I swung my sword in a wide arc, and the Boda moved back. They were fighting cautiously, methodically, from which I guessed that they had been told to bring us back alive. But Tirell was raging.

  He had never fought well or correctly. He did not have discipline for that. But his reckless rage struck fear even into me, and his long iron sword bit through bronze armor as if it were so much cheese. Three men lay dead to his account—I could see that through the haze before my eyes—and there was blood on many more. But I was failing, swaying on my horse’s back, still not understanding why. I tried to swing my sword and found I scarcely had strength to lift it. Then I had to let it drag as I clung to my horse’s neck. I would not close my eyes, blur though they might; I was fighting for consciousness. I felt the hands of the Boda dragging at me—

  Then Tirell was there. Tirell was everywhere, charging and lunging and shouting. The Boda scattered before him. He stopped beside me, still swinging that great bloody sword, and the Boda, the six or seven of them that were left, clustered at a little distance, conferring among themselves. I raised my head with an effort, desperately shaking it to clear it, but blood got in my eyes.

  “Go on!” Tirell roared, and gave my horse a whack. The black beast was peering out of the forest, waiting for us. The passageway it had found was veiled by a light curtain of spring-green leaves. My mare bolted through, and Tirell followed.

  “They’ll be after us,” I mumbled, wrestling with my sword.

  “Put it away before you hurt yourself,” Tirell said.

  I did not put it away. Already I heard hoofbeats. But in a moment a sort of rustle shook the forest, and then trees cracked and fell with a thud across the passageway behind us. The whole forest wall collapsed into ruins, putting up a barrier that no man could penetrate. Grandfather’s doing, of course; I silently thanked him. The crash sent our horses lunging forward, and I felt so weak and sick that I barely kept my seat. I had to drop my sword and grab for my horse’s mane while I hauled it to a stop. Then I clung there, swaying. Tirell picked up the sword and brought it to me, slipped it into the scabbard himself, without a word. I think he was panting from his exertions, and for my own part I could not speak for faintness. Still, in an odd way, I felt very happy. Tirell had helped me, rescued me from capture. He could no longer pretend complete indifference to me.

  “Come on,” he said roughly, and we rode into the forest. The angry shouts of the Boda faded away behind us.

  The black beast led us a crooked path that day, around rocks and roots and fallen logs and impassable entanglements. The forest clung to us at every step, its boughs groping for us. The way was so narrow that sometimes we had to get down and lead the horses afoot. When he could not stand our crawling progress, Tirell would draw his sword and slash away at the branches that imprisoned us; the wood seemed to shrink back from the blade. Most of the time I lay on my horse’s neck, not caring where we were, nearly in a swoon from the cut on my head and from some malady I could not identify. As the day wore on, I lost all sense of time or direction. When the gloom beneath the trees grew even darker, I thought it was my eyes that had failed me. But Tirell’s muted cursing informed me that it was nightfall.

  “And what the bloody flood am I to do with you?” he muttered.

  I did not understand, but rode along stupidly as we followed the beast through the darkness. I believe I fell asleep on my horse until I felt it come to a stop. “Hah!” said Tirell. “A light!”

  I sat up groggily and saw a small, steady glow in the distance. Tirell had been leading my horse as well as his own, I discovered. He stood as still as the trees, frowning at the tiny speck far ahead of us. The beast looked around, awaiting his decision.

  “You need food and water,” he grumbled at me, “and we have neither. Confound it.” He gave the reins a jerk, and we went on. Presently the forest gave way to a clearing that seemed to have been punched out of the latticework of trees, a clearing in the shape of a shield. Its upper end was bounded by a towering cliff that looked down on dark water. A sort of pool wandered out of a low cave in its roots and filled an oval basin. Small lights flickered in the water—or was it the white reflections of the black lotus blossoms that clung at the edge? By the pool sat Shamarra, holding a piece of white light that looked like a caught star. It lit her fair face. I straightened on my horse when I saw her, though a moment before I would have said that I could not muster the strength.

  “How did you come here?” Tirell asked her curtly.

  “Through the watery ways.” Shamarra glanced up at him archly.

  I managed to speak; I wanted her to look at me as well. “Lady, are you queen of this place also?”

  “One of me is.” She spoke kindly, as if she thought me a nice, polite child. “Come here, Frain, and drink my water. You’ll find it nourishes you.” She rose from her seat on mossy stones and beckoned us toward the basin.

  “Drink that?” I heard Tirell protest. “It’s full of—” But I didn’t care what Tirell said. I stumbled do
wn and drank deeply. The water satisfied me as if it were food. I was not surprised, for I was coming to expect all manner of marvels. Tirell drank, grudgingly, then led the horses over. The black beast drank and lay down quietly by the cliff. I flopped down in like wise, without a thought, utterly weary. Tirell sat and faced Shamarra.

  “You have lured me here,” he said to her in a low voice. Listening hazily from a place somewhere between sleep and waking, I found it hard to gauge the anger in his voice. Anger seemed fixed and ever present in him those days anyway. It did not matter, I thought drowsily. He had saved me. Tirell my brother the prince was faultless even in anger.…

  “No, I have only met you here,” Shamarra answered courteously. “You came of your own device, and very prettily, I must say. Moreover, it is your destiny as a Sacred King, a very heir of Aftalun, to roam in dark and tangled ways. You carry that destiny with you wherever you go.”

  “The shield? But it was you who chose it and gave it to me. What is this game you are playing with me, lady? Why come to meet me here, as you will have it?”

  “A whim to see you again,” Shamarra said, sounding amused.

  “A whim?” Tirell laughed, sounding not amused at all. “A powerful whim, that takes you under the roots of a mountain along with the swimming dead.… That way can be neither short nor easy, whatever you say.”

  “It is not a hard journey,” she said lightly, “to anyone with my powers.”

  “Powers? But I know nothing of them. To me you are only what you appear to be, a lass and a liar. Why are you here?”

  I jerked out of my drowse at his discourtesy. That he should have called her a liar! But the lady answered him coolly enough. “I wish to ride with you awhile.”

  “Ride with me!” Tirell laughed again, the harsh laugh I did not like. “Why? And on what?”

  “I can ride the beast, if I must,” the lady remarked quietly. “But I would rather sit behind you, on your horse.”

  “You lie again. No one can ride the beast,” Tirell said flatly. “And there’s no room on my horse for you.”

  “Tirell!” I struggled to my elbows, full of protest at his rudeness. But even the lady ignored me.

  “You do not own the beast,” she told Tirell. “It serves you freely.”

  “Very true. And we do not want your company, or any other.”

  “She will ride with me, then!” I shouted, on my feet at last. “And I ride with you whether you wish it or not!”

  Tirell did not bother to rise and face me. “The youngster fancies you better than I do,” he told Shamarra. I could not bear his insolence to her.

  “She is a lady, and therefore a goddess, and she has done you all good and no harm!” I cried. “How can you so churlishly refuse her?”

  “Goddess, lady, wench, or maid, she is but an ash pit to me,” Tirell said. “You rut with her, if you like.” His face was masklike, unreadable, as foreign to me as a face in a nightmare.

  “By Adalis, if you were anyone except my brother,” I whispered, “I would kill you for that.” I was raging, but as feeble as a child, an infant. My hands felt at the air for support. The night blackened around me.

  “Frain, lie down before you fall down.” It was Shamarra’s calm voice. “That healing you did this morning has sapped your strength; you will be weak for a few days yet. Lie down and think no more of anger. We will stay here through tomorrow at least, for the beast also must rest.”

  “I will say how long we stay,” Tirell snapped.

  “Try to find the way without me,” she challenged him.

  “The beast will take us out.”

  “Even the beast cannot find a way if the trees will not let you pass. And the trees are mine to command. The beast only solved the riddle they set.”

  “Then you admit you lured me here!” Tirell roared. “To your creeping pool of spook lights—” He sounded like Abas.

  Their voices faded away from my hearing after a while. I lay on the ground, unnoticed, with a spinning head, and if I had not been too proud, I think I would have wept. Tirell’s locked eyes struck me to the core. Though I had said he was mad, I believe I had not really comprehended his madness until then. His stony despair would not quickly pass.

  “So the beast has left Abas to come to you!” Shamarra mused. “Have you thought, Prince, how ardently he must search for you both? He needs you and hates you, as he needs and hates the beast—but his eye flinches away from Acheron.”

  An odd thing happened as I lay choking on tears. The black beast got up from its place, came over, and lay by my side.

  I felt somewhat better when I awoke in the morning, and I decided to set things to rights in any way I could. But Tirell sat in sullen indifference beside the black beast, and Shamarra sat in graceful relaxation beside her oval pool, and I could get no talk from either of them. I fed on water—a peculiar pool, that, with no outlet to be seen; it must have been another eye of the flood beneath. Then I groomed the horses, cleaned my sword, and rubbed my shield and my hacked helm. Finally, in a kind of desperate boredom, I began to groom the black beast.

  I brushed at its sleek neck and picked the brambles from its mane. My loathing of the creature had entirely disappeared. I don’t think I could hate the thing I had healed, or perhaps I could not heal a thing I hated. Now I regarded it as a fellow, a curious sort of horse or perhaps a very queer bird. If it had stepped on me, or tossed its head and hurt me, I don’t think I would have found any malice in the act.

  I was combing the forelock with my fingers when Tirell spoke. “Do you think you could heal that wing?”

  This was a fairer speech from Tirell than grunts and glares. I gave thought to my answer.

  “I know nothing at all about healing, brother,” I said finally, “except what little I learned yesterday. I would never have guessed it was in me. What made you think I was a healer, Tirell?”

  “Anyone with eyes can see it in you!” Tirell replied, a bit crossly. “There is healing in your every movement and glance. Since you were born, you have been healing me.”

  “Then that is why you turn from me now!” I said quietly, with sudden insight. “Because you wish to bleed yet a while.”

  He stiffened and gave no reply. I continued silently with the beast. I ran my hands softly over its sturdy flanks; all the wounds were dry and mending well. I touched the big lump of crooked bone in the wing, held my hand on it tenderly, but no power nudged within me; I only felt tired.

  “You and Mother and Grandfather all have gifts of vision,” I said after a while. “And also our fa——And also the King, and he seems to have power over people as well.… But I had never felt power of any kind in me until yesterday, and maybe that was a fluke. Where is there healing in our family?”

  Tirell said nothing, but Shamarra’s lovely, liquid voice sounded unexpectedly; I felt blessed just to hear her. “It is true that a gift of healing seems to run in families,” she said. “Smiths and metalworkers especially tend to have an aptness for healing that makes them highly honored among common folk and royalty alike.”

  Tirell glared fiercely at her, but she continued unabashed. “However, many folk feel that this propensity is due more to their familiarity with metal than to their parentage. Metal, you know, is a marvelous and magical substance, brother to fire in value and peril. Those who know metal deeply know much that is hidden from the rest.”

  “I know nothing at all about metal,” I sighed.

  “Indeed, knowledge is the key,” Shamarra remarked silkily. “Your grandfather the seer Daymon Cein knows many things deeply, and consider: Is not his knowledge power and healing in itself? All of those who sleep under the Stone of Eala carry hidden in them the seeds of healing, for they know the stone that is dragon’s tooth and Eala’s bone, and metal is the marrow of the bone of earth.”

  “I am not one who has slept under the stone.”

  “Grandfather is,” said Tirell sharply, “and our mother carries the seed to us. Haven’t you heard her try
ing to tell you?”

  “I don’t know—” I hedged.

  “That is right,” Shamarra broke in smoothly. “And until you do know, you will not be able to heal that wing. Knowledge is the key. Truth, if you will.”

  I stared at her—stupidly, I am afraid. “What truth?”

  She looked me full in the face for the first time that day and smiled a smile that did not comfort me. “The truth about yourself,” she said.

  I asked nothing more. I had had talk enough. I kept silence till dark.

  The next day, with his face still hard and flat as a slab of Eala’s rock, Tirell mounted the black and rode away. I sprang onto the white. Shamarra watched us both with a look as blank as Tirell’s.

  “Come on,” I said, offering to help her up behind me. But she shook her head.

  “I’ll walk.” Her delicate, pale face reminded me of a sculpture in ice.

  “You are too proud!” I urged her earnestly. “Come, share my mount, though I may be unworthy of the honor.” But she scarcely looked at me, and I knew that she had shut off the sound of my voice from her ears. I was on fire with love and anger and pity all at once. I loved her ardently, as I had loved her from the first—even though, I suppose, I scarcely knew her.

  I urged my horse after Tirell, since there was nothing else I could do. He was another whom I loved and who would not accept my help. He rode with heart locked on pain like a dungeon gate. The black beast led him. I followed, and Shamarra walked barefoot, straight and proud, in the rear, a shimmering vision within the gloomy, tangling forest.

  We all walked more than rode that day anyway. The beast took us under dark arbors of interlacing boughs, through twisting passages between boulders and bulging roots, around standing boles wider than a chariot and over fallen branches half waist high. The weird trees of Acheron seemed to have gone as wild and extravagant as Tirell. We picked and fought our way slowly along. By nightfall we had found no clearing. We slept uncomfortably in niches between rocks and roots, and hunger began to gnaw at us. We had seen, or at least I had seen, no living creatures besides ourselves all day. Not even birds seemed to live in the giant snare we moved through.