The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [49]
Here in Alban, he felt a rift or a discontinuity, as he decided to call it, between the two planes. Rising to the etheric to work dweomer—to say nothing of the astral plane beyond—cost him an enormous expenditure of energy and a careful attention to all the details of the dweomer craft. So far, he’d failed to elevate his consciousness to the higher planes for more than a few brief moments. He’d not managed to transform his physical body at all. Every attempt brought the dead, ugly, certain feeling that in this place he would never succeed.
And Sidro, of course, was far away. I’m only half the man I was, he thought, without her. His one hope lay in the possibility that it was Alban—or Alban’s world in general—that was to blame, not his damaged self. But would he ever see the Northlands again? Hearing Mara speak of her odd sensation of hope had roused hope in him, but only briefly, a mere spark of light in the night that lived inside him these days, or so he thought of it, a constant gloom of self-appraisal and loneliness.
If Sisi were here, he berated himself, she’d tell me to stop feeling sorry for myself. And she’d be right. It was such a tedious old story, the man who didn’t realize how much he loved a woman until he’d lost her. If there was anything Laz hated, it was tedious old stories, such as the little moral lessons his mother had been so fond of preaching to her brood of children and slaves. He got up from the bench and started back to the manse to see if Mara and Angmar had stopped arguing.
Mara, however, met him on the path. She walked up to him without looking him in the face, and her pretty mouth, normally so soft, stuck out in a pout.
“What’s wrong?” Laz said.
“Mam does say there be a need on me to apologize to you,” Mara said, “for I did say mean things about my sister in front of you.”
“Well, you weren’t saying them about me, so no apology needed.”
Mara looked up and smiled with the life flashing back into her eyes, a touch of harmless malice. Briefly he was tempted to kiss her, but he remembered her warning: I wear this body like you wear a shirt. Did she feel a closeness to the etheric? Did she feel now what he’d once felt, the ease of slipping back and forth between the flesh and the etheric? He would have to teach her far more lore before he could even discuss the subject with her. He was also afraid, he realized, afraid that if she did feel a continuity with the etheric, then Alban’s world was much like his own, and that fault lay deep within himself, not outside in the world around him.
“You do look troubled, Tirn,” Mara said.
“Oh, it’s just my hands. They ache, even in the sun.”
“We’d best go in, and I’ll brew up some herbwater to treat them.”
Laz allowed himself a sigh at the pain ahead of him. It would divert his mind from memories of Sidro, he realized, and as he followed Mara back to the manse, he was almost cheerful at the thought.
"Sidro?” Pir said in the Gel da’Thae language. "What’s wrong?”
"Nothing.” Sidro pushed out a bright smile. “Just thinking.”
“About Laz?”
She hesitated, unsure of how to answer, and concentrated on tying off a thread on her needlework. He waited, as patient as always, standing with his hands shoved into his brigga pockets. She was sitting outside their tent to take advantage of the clear light from the spring sun while she embroidered a horse-head design on the sleeve of the new tunic she was making for him. With a sigh he hunkered down in front of her.
“If you don’t want to tell me,” Pir said, “that’s well, um, understandable. ”
If Laz had been the one to ask, he would have goaded her into telling him exactly what she’d been thinking, she realized.