The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [30]
“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 gray 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 traveling 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.