The Shadow Isle. Katharine Kerr
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turned cold and penetrating. He would seem to be looking at the view or whatever lay in front of him from a great distance away, as if he were unsure of its reasons for existing. Yet when he turned away and looked at Branna, he would smile, and the expression in his eyes became soft and warm again. This pronounced change made her feel that she was watching a shape-changer, not an apprentice.
On a morning when the rain kept the alar in camp, Neb spent some hours working through the steps of a simple ritual, tracing out a circle around him, then visualizing blue fire springing up at his command. Branna, who’d been doing some memory work, looked up from her book to watch him as he finished the exercise. This time the look in his eyes made her think of an honour-bound warrior who sees his worst enemy. Then he glanced her way and grinned.
‘This is harder than I thought,’ Neb said.
He’s back. The words formed themselves in Branna’s mind so clearly that she laid a hand over her mouth as if to keep them in. She covered the gesture with a cough.
‘It is, truly,’ Branna said. ‘My mind keeps wandering when I try to see the flames.’
‘Mine too. I keep thinking about that wretched plague back in Trev Hael.’ Neb paused, frowning at the floor cloth. ‘I keep wondering how it spread so fast, and why it spread at all.’
‘Well, my poor beloved, it was a truly ghastly horrid experience. I’m not surprised you can’t forget it.’
‘It’s not a question of forgetting, but of understanding it.’ He looked up, his eyes so grim and cold that she flinched. ‘Is somewhat wrong?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Branna said. ‘It’s like you become someone else at times. When you work dweomer, you turn into Nevyn, don’t you?’
‘Well, so what if I do? I mean, I am Nevyn, really, when you think about it. I was him, and if we’re talking about the long view of things, I am him still.’
‘You’re not, though. You’ve got a new life now.’
His look turned murderous, but only briefly. ‘Well, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Of course that’s true. On some level, anyway.’
‘On all levels. You should tell Dalla about this.’
‘You’re right. I will, then.’
Yet she didn’t believe him, not for a moment. Although she considered telling Dallandra herself, she knew that such would be an interference between him and his master in the craft, to say naught of going behind his back and risking a hellish argument if he found out.
They did argue, these days, in a way they never had during the first idyllic months of their marriage. Branna wanted to think that they were both uncomfortable from the damp and the cold, to say naught of the utter strangeness of their new home, but at heart she was too honest to dismiss the problem so easily. ‘He wants me to be Jill,’ she told Grallezar. ‘And I won’t. At times he even calls me Jill, and I refuse to answer until he uses my real name. Then he gets angry with me.’
Her teacher considered, sucking a thoughtful fang. Since Grallezar shaved her head, she was wearing a knitted wool cap, striped in grey and blackish-brown, that came down low over her ears and forehead. She’d also bundled herself in a heavy wool cloak and wore fur-lined boots against the cold. Back in her home country, she’d spent winters in a heated house, not a drafty tent.
‘Well, he be not my student,’ Grallezar said at last. ‘So this be but a guess. I think me that Nevyn’s life, it were so long that Neb be unable to remember past it. From our work I know that you do see bits and pieces of many lives and deaths.’
‘That’s true. Jill’s life is only one of them. I’m not Jill any more than Jill was Morwen or Branoic.’
‘True spoken. But Neb, the only memory that lives for him is Nevyn, and by all that I have heard, he were a mighty dweomermaster indeed. Neb does covet all that power. To earn it all again, to do the work, it be burdensome, but needful.’
‘I see. There’s another thing, too. He keeps thinking about the plague in Trev Hael that killed his father and sister. He talks about it a lot. It’s so morbid! It can’t be good for him.’
‘Well, mayhap, mayhap not. There may be a riddle there for him to answer.’ Grallezar held up a warning forefinger. ‘Not one word of this to Neb, mind, and no more may you tell Dallandra of your fears. For a student to interfere with another master’s student be a baleful thing.’
‘I promise I won’t.’
‘Good. It would go ill for you were you to throw my words in Neb’s face.’ Grallezar suddenly smiled. ‘But of course, I be a master myself, and if I should speak to Dallandra, well, who’s to say me nay?’
Branna felt so relieved that she nearly wept. I’ve been frightened, she thought, not just worried.
Over the next few weeks, Branna found herself hard-pressed to keep her promise to Grallezar, but every time she was tempted to break it, her own mind distracted her by raising the enormous question that lay just beyond her worries about Neb. If he wasn’t Nevyn, then who was Neb? Worse yet, if she wasn’t Jill, was she truly Branna? Who was any person, then, whether Westfolk or Gel da’Thae or human being, if their body and their personality were only masks they wore for a little while, masks that they’d toss aside at their death only to don new ones at birth?
Contemplating such matters made her turn cold with terror, as if she stood on the very edge of a high cliff and felt the soil under her feet begin to crumble away. She would jump back from that edge and take refuge in any distraction she could find. In a travelling alar, distractions lay thick on the ground, most of them trivial, though now and again Branna found something that hinted at her future role of Wise One.
One evening, just at sunset, she was walking back to her tent when she heard someone weeping, a soft little sound, half-suppressed, unlike the usual loud sobs of one of the Westfolk. She followed the sound and discovered Sidro, standing alone out in the wild grass. Overhead the sky hung low with clouds, dark and gathering.
‘What’s wrong?’ Branna said from behind her. ‘Can I help?’
Sidro swirled around, her eyes wide and tear-wet, her hand at her throat.
‘A thousand apologies!’ Branna said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Sidro tried to smile, sniffed back tears, and finally wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Oh, tis naught,’ she said at last. ‘Just a silly moment.’
‘Oh now here, if somewhat’s made you cry, it can’t be naught.’ Branna laid a gentle hand on Sidro’s shoulder. ‘Tell me. Is it about Laz?’
‘Him, too, but missing my old home in Taenalapan is the most of it. Which be a strange thing, since I was but a slave lass there. It were always warm and dry in the house, and there were warm bread and laughter. I think me that be what I miss the most.’
‘I can certainly understand that! But truly, I don’t see how the comfort would make being a slave tolerable. Didn’t you long to get away and be free?’
‘And how was I to know what being free did mean?’ Sidro smiled with a rueful twist of her mouth. ‘Laz, he did say somewhat about that to me once, that all I did know was slavery, whether slave to his mother or to Alshandra. He were right about that, too. Now, being here among the Westfolk and having Pir, too, for my man, I do begin to see what freedom is, but truly, I see it with my mind, not my heart.’
‘Is that why you’re always waiting on everyone?’
Sidro started to answer, then hesitated, visibly thinking. ‘I suppose it be so,’ she said at last. ‘What we always knew before, it be comforting, somehow. My thanks, Branna! I’ll be thinking on that, I truly will. Though the Wise Ones, they do deserve what service we can pay them.’
‘That’s true.’ I just wish Neb could see it, Branna thought. Well, mayhap someday he will.