She laughed again, a full-throated sound of sheer pleasure. I could have hit her.
“I can be kind when I choose,” she said, grinning. Her teeth were white and sharp, the teeth of a young, strong woman. “You may rest for a few days before we begin.”
“Thank you.” I tried not to imagine a warm bath, clean clothing, a soft bed. She had promised none of these. “Will I see Tali again?”
“Aye, you will. That lassie does not trust me an inch. She’ll be waiting on the jetty, like as not.”
We sailed on around the southwestern corner of Far Isle, and I saw ahead of us another little cove, and a precipitous path zigzagging up what seemed a sheer cliff. In the cove was a jetty, and beside it a tiny shelter. There were people on the jetty, but I could not make them out clearly.
“I like your anger,” the Hag said mildly. “I like your resistance. It makes you less than courteous, but altogether more interesting. Let us sail for shelter. There are storms in the west, and they will pass this way at dusk. Your skerry will be underwater.”
The vessel made its graceful way into the cove, and as we drew closer, I saw that there were indeed several folk on the jetty waiting for us. A man in heavy woolen gear, perhaps a fisherman, holding a boat hook. Beside him, unmistakable, the lean, tattooed figure of Tali. She raised both hands in a salute of welcome.
And … a third person. A tall, blunt-featured man in a worn gray cloak, his scarred face wearing quite openly its love and anxiety. The sight of him snatched away my breath. Against all common sense, against every decision that would have kept him and his perilous secret safe, Flint had come back to the isles.
No time for talk, then. The vessel came in, the fisherman held it against the jetty with his boat hook—hardly necessary, but the Hag made no comment—and Tali held out a hand to help me ashore. I stepped onto the jetty and threw my arms around her, and then around Flint, blinded by the tears I had held back all the way from shore to shore. Then I stepped away, wiping a hand across my cheeks. I had seen the looks on both my comrades’ faces, and I knew I must speak before either of them did.
The Hag had not moved from her boat. Beside it in the shallows, the selkie’s head broke the surface. He bobbed there, regarding us with mellow eyes. I wondered what he was to her. Lover, husband, friend, guardian, conscience? He would chide me for treating you too harshly.
“Thank you for bringing me safely here,” I said to the Hag, and when Tali would have spoken, I silenced her with a quick gesture. The strength I had gained from the wee man’s draft was ebbing fast. I had spoken with some discourtesy on the boat; I had been angry. It was plain the others felt the same. I was not ashamed that I had challenged the Hag, but we must put this behind us now. She would teach me; that was enough.
“I will return for you in due time.” She fixed me with her gaze. “Rest, recover, consider those matters of which we spoke. The folk of this island will shelter you. They will ask no questions. They will reveal no secrets.” Now she turned that look on Flint. “Step down to the boat. Collect your friends’ belongings.” Then, in a different tone, “You’d want to be leaving this shore as soon as you can, laddie.”
I saw Flint gather himself, swallow furious words. “With your permission,” he said carefully, “I will stay until tomorrow.”
The Hag looked at me.
“Please,” I said.
She did not say yes or no, merely watched as Flint got into the boat and passed the staves, the bags, the bedding, the bundled weapons across to Tali. If Tali was relieved to get her knives back, she gave no sign of it, merely took each item and stacked it tidily on the jetty. Her features were well governed now, though the set of her body told me a different story. When I tried to help, she murmured, “I’ll do it, Neryn.” Flint stepped back onto the jetty.
I waited for the Hag to say Flint must leave immediately. Such a decision would be typical of her, I thought. But she said nothing, simply exchanged a glance with the selkie, whose sleek head still showed above the water by the boat. It was only an instant, and then he dived down and was lost to our eyes. The Hag looked at the fisherman, and he withdrew the boat hook. The vessel turned and headed out to sea. The selkie swam alongside, a dark form keeping steady pace. The Hag did not look back.
Silence for a few moments. Then the fisherman put the roll of bedding over his shoulder and picked up the two bags, and Tali hefted the weaponry and the staves. I looked up at the zigzag path to the top of the cliff. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to make Tali proud of me. I wanted to show Flint that I was a worthy member of Regan’s Rebels. But my chest hurt, and my legs felt like jelly, and my eyes were blurry. “Just give me a moment to get my breath,” I said, or perhaps I did not say it aloud, for rocks and sea and white faces began to swirl around me, and I was falling down, down, so far down.
Then up again, in Flint’s arms, to find myself over his shoulder with my head dangling.
“I’m sorry, Neryn,” he said. “But it’s steep. I need one hand free to get you up safely.”
We climbed. After a while I shut my eyes. I didn’t much care for cliff paths even when I had my own feet and hands to rely on. I clenched my teeth and ordered myself not to faint or otherwise disgrace myself.
“It’s all right,” Flint said. “I have you safe. We’ll soon be in shelter.”
“I can’t believe she did that to you,” came Tali’s voice from somewhere behind us. “What if you’d died out there?”
“Thought … you …,” I managed.
“Shh,” said Flint.
We reached the cliff top and he lowered me gently to my feet. My knees buckled; I could not stand. He picked me up again, this time in his arms as if I were a child, and we walked on. It was a small isle. We soon reached a southern settlement, nestled in a hollow a mile or so inland. Its size surprised me. There were at least twenty cottages, each with its drystone wall and its well-protected vegetable patch. Trees were very few, but I spotted one or two survivors, near-prone from a lifetime of westerly gales. Smoke arose from hearth fires; chickens pecked on the pathways. From not far off came the peaceful voices of grazing sheep. This place, I thought, was surely like the Alban of old, the Alban before Keldec.
By the time we went in the gate of one of the little houses, I was struggling to stay awake. The fisherman dropped the bags on the doorstep, exchanged a few words with Tali, and went off. Tali pushed the door open. Flint carried me inside and deposited me on a bed. I was too tired to do anything but lie back on the pillows.
“Get off the bed, you’re wet through.” Tali put an armful of folded clothing on the storage chest. “Flint, turn your back.”
He went to busy himself making up the hearth fire, while Tali helped me strip, then dress in what must be borrowed garments—a shift, a woolen dress, a warm shawl. “They’re generous folk here,” she said, making an attempt to comb out my hair with her fingers, then giving up. “We have the use of this house, they’ve lent us clothing, and we’ll be provided with food and fuel as long as we’re here.” She gave a crooked smile. “Not like Alban at all, is it? And yet, more like Alban than anywhere.”
She collected my sodden garments and took them off out the back. Flint covered me with a blanket, then stroked my filthy hair back from my face, gazing down at me. The only thing I could think of was that I might sleep too long and wake to find that he was already gone. This was the precious time I had wished for the day we met the Hag. I could not bear to lose it all over again.
“Wake me up,” I murmured. “Please. Not too long … Flint … why … you here?”
“A dream. I saw you out on the skerry, all alone in the storm. Coughing as you did last autumn, when you nearly died. How could I not come back?”
Perhaps I should have realized this as soon as I saw him in my own dream, but I had not thought he would act so rashly. “Saw you …,” I whispered. “Looking like death … running … too risky … the others … the king …”
“Don’t trouble yourself with
that,” Flint said.
“But … but what about …”
“Sleep now.” It was an order. “We’ll wake you before dusk, I promise. Here you can have a warm bath, a good meal, time to recover.”
“Don’t …”
Tali appeared beside him, wearing her most ferocious frown. “Stop talking, Neryn. You’re safe, you can rest. We’ll still be here when you wake up; nobody’s planning to leave you on your own. Shut your eyes now, and not another word out of you.”
Well practiced at obeying her commands, I closed my eyes and surrendered to sleep.
By nightfall I was well rested. I had bathed, then consumed a bowl of vegetable broth, a hunk of grainy bread, and a small cup of watered mead. The food had been brought by a woman of the island. She hadn’t come in, but I’d seen her at the door, where she’d spoken with Tali and handed over the basket. Something else too—Tali had produced a tiny bottle with a curious stopper made from a seed, and added a drop of the contents to my mead.
“I was given instructions. By the Hag, after she brought me back here. Both for this, to restore your health, and for afterward. Where to go for your learning; who’s to take you there and bring you back. All thought out, perhaps from the first. I was surprised she didn’t give me my own set of orders, for while I’m waiting.”
“What will you do?”
Tali shrugged. “In a place like this there’s always work to be done. Mending things, digging the vegetable patch, helping with stock. Might go some way to repaying these folk’s generosity.”
We had the cottage to ourselves: one sizable room with several shelf beds, a privy out the back, and a lean-to where animals could be housed in winter. There was no livestock about the place now except for a large gray cat with a tattered ear, which had come in while I slept and settled itself heavily on my feet. Now we sat over our mead, the three of us on benches before a little hearth fire. I had been woken, not by Tali and Flint, but by a violent storm sweeping across the island, rattling at the shutters and pounding on the door with such force that I knew the Hag had been right—if she had left me out there one more day, I would have drowned. Now the island had fallen quiet. The distant sound of the sea was like the peaceful breathing of a creature worn out by a tumultuous day. The cat had shifted to my lap. It had one eye slitted open, as if not entirely sure it could trust us.
Flint was beside me on the bench, his arm around my shoulders. I felt the warmth of his thigh against mine, the occasional brushing of his fingers against my hair. Tali said not a word about this. Her opinion was all in her eyes. Oh, you fools. To risk so much.
“I don’t understand why this Hag subjected you to such a grueling test,” Flint said.
“Neryn coped well,” said Tali unexpectedly. “But I concur with you that the test was extreme, and it’s hard to understand the reasoning behind it. Can we trust that the Hag won’t do something like this again, Neryn?”
“I had hoped,” Flint said, “for one certainty at least: that for the period of your training you would be safe.”
I rested my head against his shoulder. I must speak truthfully, though a lie would ease his mind. I hated to think of him back among the Enforcers, or worse still at court, where he must tread so carefully every moment of every day, being distracted by thoughts about my safety. “There’s no certainty, Flint. But we must go on. We need the Good Folk. We need their support when we challenge Keldec. I have to learn, I have to become expert, I have to be able to call them to battle without fearing the result will be some kind of catastrophe. If the training puts me in peril, that’s the way it must be.”
“I’ll be praying that doesn’t happen,” said Tali with a grimace. “Not much scares me, but that surely did. Not only being snatched up and conveyed over here on the back of a selkie, but before that, watching you get thinner and paler, and hearing you coughing, and knowing you weren’t going to call her even if you were down to your last breath.”
“I would have called some smaller being. Not Herself.”
“But she sailed across to meet us; came up the cliffs to share our supper. What brought her if not your gift?”
“She came because she knew it was time. Just as she arranged for us to be on the shore when Flint was there with the boat. It’s the messengers—birds and other creatures. What we started at Shadowfell, with our council, has moved with startling speed.”
I had wondered if they would talk of Regan and the others, and how they might be faring, but perhaps they had done that while I was sleeping, for neither of them spoke of it. After a while our conversation dwindled and died to a murmur here, a few words there. We sat quiet, wrapped in our own thoughts, while the fire crackled and the cat purred on my knee. In my mind was Flint’s mission to the isles, the one he had carried out for the king. And his return here now, solely because a dream had shown him I was in trouble. I wanted to ask him if he would fall under suspicion when he returned; if the rest of his troop was back in Pentishead already; if he would be able to invent a plausible excuse for racing off without proper explanations.
But I didn’t ask. He wouldn’t tell me anyway; he’d say it was something I need not know. All I could do was hope he could talk his way out of trouble yet again. I feared for him. His double life could not go undetected forever.
I must set those things aside for now. Tonight was a gift. I must not darken it with my fears for tomorrow.
Gods, I was tired. Even after that sleep, my eyes were closing now despite my best intentions. I put up my hand to shield a yawn.
A glance passed between Flint and Tali.
“I’ll be off, then,” she said, getting up. “Sleep well, the two of you, and don’t forget entirely who you are and what it is we’re here for. I’ll be back at dawn. You’ll be wanting to get away early.”
“Good night,” Flint said, perfectly calm, and after she had slung on her cloak and gone out the front door, he moved to bolt it after her.
I was fully awake now. “Tali agreed to go and sleep somewhere else?”
Flint was standing just inside the door, in the shadows. His expression was difficult to read. “Only after I promised we would be mindful of all the reasons why this was not a good idea,” he said. “If you prefer, I can call her back.”
“No!” I protested, then felt myself blushing. This was not at all what I had expected. A somewhat awkward night with the three of us in the same sleeping quarters, yes. That would likely have meant Tali and me sharing the big bed while Flint took one of the others. The best I had hoped for was to snatch some private conversation with him while she slept. “No, of course not.”
Flint came over to crouch in front of me, taking both my hands in his. “I hoped this was what you wanted,” he said a little unsteadily. “It was one reason I came back. The look on your face when she said you could only take one of us … But, dear one … I don’t intend that we … I believe some things must wait. You and me … what is between us … Our lives are perilous. Every moment of every day, we’re in danger of discovery. The closer we become, the more likely that one of us may be used against the other. That is the way Keldec’s forces work. Neryn, we cannot risk lying together as lovers. What if I got you with child?”
My mind leapt treacherously to the image of a child Flint and I might make together, a boy with strong, blunt features and beautiful gray eyes. I imagined myself singing him to sleep; I let myself picture Flint carrying him on his shoulders, a wide-eyed toddler gazing out over the sea. Then I banished those images from my mind. What Flint had said was right. To have a child who might fall into Keldec’s hands was unthinkable. “Tell me what you do want,” I said.
A sweet smile appeared on his face. “What I truly want must wait for another time,” he said. There was a long pause; I knew he was thinking of the time of peace, the time when Keldec was gone, and wondering, as I did, whether that time would come too late for us. “For now, I will be content, more than content, if we lie side by side as we once did by our campfire.”
/>
“Really?” I asked, smiling in my turn, though in truth my heart was beating fast now, and my breath coming unevenly. “As I remember it, as soon as we woke up, we moved apart. And then pretended we had not been lying quite so close that night.”
“Believe me,” Flint said, “I have relived that morning many times. Are you happy to share this bed with me tonight, so we can sleep in each other’s arms?” Unspoken was the understanding that at dawn he would be gone; that it might be years before we had another opportunity to spend a night alone together. That, for us, this might be the one and only time.
“That was what I hoped for, when we first came here,” I said, getting up. “Only …”
“I promise I will not—”
“I’m not concerned about that. Only that I may fall asleep quite quickly, and that you may find that a little … insulting.”
Flint laughed. I realized I had never heard him do so before. Let there be a time in the future, I prayed, when he laughs with his children, and plays on the shore with them, and spends all his nights in loving arms. Let us have that. To whom I was praying I did not know. The future was in our own hands. If we wanted a world where such things were possible, it was for us to make it.
“Sleep all you will, dear one,” Flint said, pulling down the covers on the bed. “I will be content to hold you. Come, lie down by me.”
It was a sweet night, a night that would return many times later, in memories and dreams, to sustain me through loneliness, fear, and confusion. By warm firelight we lay down together and explored each other’s bodies with gentle hands and courteous mouths; we brushed and touched and stroked with tenderness and passion. We were home and comfort and friend, lover and partner and wondrous new world to each other. We were careful and slow, and at the time when our bodies became too urgent in their need, we moved apart and lay side by side, hands clasped, whispering the tender words we had never spoken before, save in our dreams. The fire died down to glowing embers; the timbers of the cottage roof creaked in the wind. In the distance, the waves sighed against the shore. The cat jumped onto the bed, then crept across to wedge itself solidly between us. And I drifted into a deep, healing sleep.