Tales of Noreela 04: The Island (3 page)

“And we should have seen more,” her mother said. “There’s something missing. A weight. Something out to sea.”

“A weight of what?”

Her mother frowned, staring at the groundstone. “I’m not sure.” Then she smiled. “Probably just the storm stirring the magic. It happens sometimes, especially when there’s lightning.”

Namior looked at the groundstone—as high as her chest, planted deep in the family home generations before, polished and smoothed by centuries of her ancestors’ contact—and she almost reached out again. But there was still a gentle throb behind her face, and her nose prickled at the thought of communing with the land’s magic again that evening. A dribble of blood ran down to her top lip.

Her great-grandmother shuddered awake and looked up. “No more for you tonight, Namior,” she said, her voice weak and tremulous.

Namior nodded, dabbing the blood away.

“Don’t go too far,” her mother said, leaning in close enough to kiss her daughter’s cheek.

“Only the Dog’s Eyes,” Namior said. “Kel is coming down.”

“There’ll be damage to clear up in the morning. Stay in the heights, away from the harbor.”

“I will.” Namior was becoming unsettled by her mother’s concern. “You know I can look after myself.”

The woman nodded and smiled, but her eyes were still clouded by whatever was missing. Namior could hear it in her voice, and she was unused to the sound of fear. “You’re a good girl,” her mother said. “And you’re growing to be a great witch.”

“I’ll be away,” Namior said, smiling, then glancing pointedly at her great-grandmother. “Don’t forget you both need sleep!”

She felt them watching her as she left the main room and
stood in the hallway behind the front door. Closing the hall door was almost a relief. Alone again, listening to the wind batter the door in its frame, hearing the whistle of a machine rumbling by, she cast her mind back to her own visions from that afternoon. She had sensed a storm coming, as had they all. She had seen the waves and rain, boats swaying and bobbing in the upset harbor, and cloaked shapes pushing against the wind as they navigated the dark streets, steps and winding paths of Pavmouth Breaks. She had not been aware of any absence; no void where there should be something; nothing to disturb.

She sighed, hoping that her great-grandmother would not descend into one of her crazes.

“I’m still young,” she whispered. She touched the stone charm that hung around her neck—a shard from the same rock that had gone to make her family’s groundstone—and breathed in the energy it gave her. “Still young, and I trust their word.”

Vowing to be careful, she pulled the door open and went out into the storm.

STAY IN THE
heights, away from the harbor
, her mother had said. But upon leaving their house and taking the short, cobbled path down to the wider street, Namior looked right, down the small slope toward the harbor, and in the dusky light she saw the sparkling glare of spray as the sea struck the mole.

Storm’s not anywhere near its height
, she thought. So she turned right and walked along the hillside, heading toward a lower path from which she knew she would be able to view the whole harbor. It wasn’t every day a storm like that came in, and Namior reveled in the power of nature.

The path curved slowly around the hip of the hill, exposing itself to the sea winds, and with every step Namior felt the power of the gale increasing. She hugged the jacket close
across her chest and lowered her head. It was raining so much that the water was not draining away fast enough, and her feet sloshed, leaving wakes like those of small boats. She winced as a gust of wind threatened to unbalance her, driving rain horizontally against her face, stinging her exposed skin, soaking her trousers. Still the storm felt young, and she sensed that it had yet to find its rhythm.

She walked on, passing a couple of people going in the opposite direction. They offered her a brief nod, and she nodded back, unable to identify them in their storm gear. Their faces were covered. They could have been anyone.

The path sloped down toward the harbor, and once it was free of the buildings crowding it, Namior could hear the roar of the sea as it broke against the land. It was immense, shuddering through the ground and into her feet as well as shaking the air. She paused in the lee of a tall retaining wall to watch, sheltered from the worst of the rain but still with a good field of vision. Waves broke against the mole and pushed their spray right over, and the water of the harbor itself was in turmoil, tossing boats against each other. The front was awash, the swell lifting against the harbor wall and occasionally surging across the ground. She could see a few hardy people struggling here and there, dashing from one building to the next, but mostly the streets were sensibly deserted.

Worse to come
, she thought, and for the first time she felt the twinge of concern she had seen in her mother’s eyes. There would be broken boats to fix when the storm had spent itself, and perhaps more.

She turned and hurried back up the hillside, and when she drew level with the narrow path to her house, a transport machine rolled down the street toward her. It stopped before her and lowered itself on wooden wheels, and she climbed onto its back, touching the control stone beside the metal seat and casting her thoughts. The machine turned, trailing limbs stroking the ground as it drew power from the land, and started along the hillside toward the Dog’s Eyes Tavern.

WHEN KEL BOON
entered his favorite tavern, a score of faces turned his way. He smiled and received a dozen smiles in return, but some of the older men and women barely nodded. He’d only been there for five years, and it would take a lot longer than that for him to become one of them.

Such was the atmosphere in a small fishing village. Even on a day like that, when the skies were opening, the sea was battering them and the rest of the world felt very far away, Pavmouth Breaks’ residents feared the stranger.

His attention was grabbed immediately by the small tone-bone band playing in the large window bay. There were two men and a woman, the same three who regularly supplied music in the tavern in return for drink and food. And though he’d heard much of the music before, it never failed to stir his soul. The woman had caught a fresh whistle fish that day, and she had it draped across her lap, stroking its scales and passing her fingers across the many bony protuberances on its back and sides. A whistle fish took days to die out of water, and its death sounds could be manipulated into hoots, clicks and whines. The two men played a variety of instruments, ranging from a whalebone harp to a large hollow bone around which much legend had been built. No one knew where it came from, but these were fisherfolk; there were a thousand tales of its origin, and all of them true.

“Kel!” Trakis called from a smoky corner. The big man stood and waved his arms and Mell, sitting beside him smoking a pipe, nudged him in the ribs.

Kel looked around quickly but saw no sight of Namior. Maybe the witches had held her back, after all.

“You look like a drowned furbat!” Trakis said. As Kel drew closer, his friend’s face grew stern. “You need ale.” He strode toward the bar.

“Hello, gorgeous,” Mell said. “You’re dripping on the table.”

Kel stepped back and shed his coat and hat, hanging them
on a hook set into one of the tavern’s many rough timber columns. It was one of the oldest buildings in Pavmouth Breaks, so the landlord Neak said, and he also claimed it was home to the most wraiths. Kel always smiled when he heard Neak telling that to a visiting fisherman or a newcomer to the village:
Most haunted place in Noreela!
Kel had visited a dozen places in Noreela City itself that also laid claim to that dubious title.

“No Namior?” Mell asked.

“She’s coming. I spoke to her earlier.”

“Storm from the deepest Black,” Mell said, taking another draw on her pipe. She gasped, then exhaled a stream of pure green smoke. “You can almost hear the wraiths screaming in the wind.”

“No wraiths out there,” Kel said, perhaps a little too harshly. “It’s just weather.”

Mell nodded and stared at him a little too long. Of everyone in Pavmouth Breaks, she seemed most suspicious of his past. Sometimes he thought she could see deeper than he knew.

Trakis returned and lowered a tray of drinks carefully to the table. Four jugs of Neak’s Wanderlust ale, and a tall, dark bottle. “I’m splashing out,” Trakis said. “Tonight it’s us against the world.”

“A militiaman who can afford Ventgorian wine,” Mell said admiringly. “You must be corrupt.”

“Eat sheebok shit, fisherwoman.”

Kel raised his jug and offered his squabbling friends a toast. “Us against the world.” He drank, closing his eyes as the initial bitter taste changed into something sweet and wonderful. Neak swore that he brewed naturally, without the help of magic or machines, and Kel believed him. Nothing that tasted so good could be so false.

The tavern door opened, conversation stopped and Kel joined with everyone else in looking at the newcomer. Namior Feeron entered, slamming the door behind her and
shaking water from her long hair. She spied Kel immediately and smiled. As she came across to them she swapped greetings with most of the tavern’s patrons, and Kel looked away. Seeing how well she knew this place sometimes stung him, because he also knew how much she wanted to get away. She was desperate for travel, exploration and adventure. She craved to see Noreela City, Pengulfin Heights, the islands of The Spine, which curved out from the north of Noreela, and she even dreamed of a journey far enough south to see the dangerous mountain ranges of Kang Kang. But every time she mentioned this, Kel Boon told her no. He was staying there.
I’ve had my adventure
, he would say, and however much she pressed, he could tell her no more. That was the dark space between them—a gap that seemed, at present, unfordable.

“The harbor’s mad,” Namior said even before taking a seat. “Boats are crashing about, and some of those waves are breaking over the mole.”

“There’s been worse,” Mell said. She had been a fisherwoman for almost eighteen years. She’d been involved in three wrecks, seen two friends drowned and one taken by sea creatures, and nothing seemed to disturb her anymore. At almost forty—just younger than Kel, and two decades older than Namior—Mell had lived enough to fill many lives.
We’d have such tales to tell each other
, Kel sometimes thought. But if he wanted to stay in Pavmouth Breaks, he could never speak of his past.

Not if he wanted to stay alive.

“And what do you say, young witch?” Trakis asked Namior.

Namior’s eyes darkened for a beat, then she smiled. It lit up her face. “My mother says there’s to be a waterspout just along the coast.” She glanced at Kel, the smile slipping so slightly that he thought he was the only one who noticed.

“I’ll drink to that!” Trakis said. He raised his mug, and the rest of them joined him in toasting the storm.

Namior sat on a bench close to Kel, and it only took one
mug of ale before she pressed herself against him. He slung his right arm loosely around her shoulders and drank with his left. She looked at him frequently, her ale-tainted laughter a welcome addition to the tavern’s underlying noise. Kel drank slowly; he had never enjoyed the sensation of being drunk and the loss of control it brought on. But he had always enjoyed watching Trakis and Mell drink together, and that night both of them were truly in form. Conversations turned to bickering, bickering to full-blown arguments, then they would hug each other, laughing and swearing undying friendship. Kel supposed this was just one of many taverns filled with such people, but these were special because they were his friends.

The door opened occasionally, letting a sample of the storm inside to blow out candles and spatter the wooden floor with rain. Whoever stumbled in was subject of the tavern’s appraisal, and more often than not they would have stories of how the storm was progressing. Waves fifteen steps high, they said, battering the mole and smashing boats against the harbor wall. Rain so heavy that some of the paths up to Drakeman’s Hill had turned into impassable torrents. “Looks like I’m definitely staying with you tonight,” Kel said at this, and Namior’s hand squeezed his thigh, remaining there afterwards.

The evening turned to night, though daylight had been stolen long ago by the thundering clouds. Lightning flashed at the tavern’s windows, followed soon after by the rumbles of thunder. The heart of the tempest was almost upon them.

Kel knew that Namior saw this as an adventure. Whatever had troubled her earlier had been melted away by the Wanderlust ale and fine Ventgorian wine, and her smile was a pleasure, her laughter a welcome song.

But with each flash of lightning, as though the space between blinks was another world, Kel was taken back to that night in Noreela City.