The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [18]
Dallandra laughed. “Val, your image looks so sour! Not that I blame you, mind.”
“Thank you, I suppose. The omens are so tangled! It’s enough to drive one daft.”
“I couldn’t agree more about that. But tell me, how are you surviving the winter?”
“Well, I miss everyone in the alar, but I have to admit that I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.”
For a while they spoke of trivial things, then broke the link between them. Valandario leaned back in her chair and considered the set of rough shelves across from her, a precious library of some fifty books protected by the solid walls of her chamber. For the first time in her life, Valandario had spent the winter inside a house rather than a tent.
In the winter the Westfolk and their herds usually moved south, until, by the shortest day in the year, they camped along the seacoast. Although it snowed only rarely that far south, it did rain three or four days out of every five. In a Westfolk tent, Grallezar’s library of dweomer books would have stood in as much danger as it had faced from the devotees of Alshandra back in Braemel, its original home, although the danger would have come from water, not fire.
Another place, however, had offered it shelter—Linalavenmandra, the new town that returning elven refugees had built at a natural harbor near the Deverry border. Although the name meant “sorrow but new hope,” its eight hundred inhabitants generally called it Mandra, simply “hope.” They were young people, by and large, fleeing the minutely structured life of the far distant Southern Isles where they’d been born. To them, having a Wise One, as the Westfolk term their dweomermasters, among them was not merely an honor, but a sign that their town had achieved the same status as the ancient cities they’d left behind.
So, when Valandario had volunteered to live in Mandra and tend Grallezar’s library, the townsfolk had responded by finding a house with room for her and the books both. She had moved all her belongings into a big upstairs chamber with a view of the sea from its window. Elaborately patterned Bardekian rugs covered the floor, her red-and-blue tent bags hung along the walls, embroidered cushions of green and purple lay piled on the narrow bed. The townsfolk had added a wooden table and chair so the Wise One could study her books in comfort and a small wooden coffer to keep her supply of oil, wicks, and clay lamps handy.
“Wise One?” Lara, the woman who owned the house with her husband, appeared in the doorway to the chamber. “We’re preparing dinner. Would you like some meat with your bread and soup?”
“No, thank you. I’m not very hungry.”
Lara smiled, made a little bow, then silently shut the door again. Laradalpancora, to give her her full name, and her husband, Jinsavadelan, insisted on acting as if they were servants in Valandario’s house rather than the owners of the house in question, cooking, cleaning, mending her clothes, and generally fussing over her. They also fussed over each other.
“They never would have let us marry back home,” Lara told her one evening. “Even though we’d loved each other for years. So we had to come here.”
“I don’t understand,” Val said. “Who’s they, and why would they forbid it?”
“The Council, of course. Jin’s birth-clan was too far above mine in rank.” She held her head high with a defiant lift to her chin. “That doesn’t matter here.”
Jin smiled at her with such a depth of feeling that Val quietly got up and left the room. Seeing them so happy had woken an old grief. At times after that conversation, she missed Jav as badly as if he’d been murdered only a few years past.
Val used her work to blot her memories from her mind, reading for hours on end by pale sun or flickering candlelight until her eyes watered and ached. She was searching for information concerning a particularly powerful act of dweomer, one beyond the capabilities of any living dweomermaster, elven or human. Any one of Grallezar’s books might have held a clue. Fortunately, most of them were bilingual, with a roughly-translated elven text on one page