David Drake - Lord of the Isles 05 - Goddess of the Ice Realm

GODDESS OF THE ICE REALM

[Lord of the Isles Book 5]

by David Drake

DEDICATION

To Andre Norton, whose books have been the first contact many readers have with real Science

Fiction; and whose books have been a training manual, sometimes an unconscious one, in story values for

would-be SF writers.

I'm one of those readers and writers both.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As usual, my first reader Dan Breen has worked to make this a better book. Dan isn't always

right, but he's always worth listening to.

I didn't have an exceptional number of computer adventures with this one, but there were still

occasions when the familiar conclave of Mark Van Name, Allyn Vogel, and my son Jonathan muttered

things like, "I've never seen that happen before...."

A number of people provided me with background material for Goddess. Two who were

particularly helpful were Marcia Decker and my British editor, Simon Spanton.

My webmaster, Karen Zimmerman, has been of inestimable value.

And finally, a general thanks to the friends and family, in particular my wife Jo, who bore with me

as I focused, getting increasingly weird--as usual--until I finished the job.

Dave Drake

david-drake.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As is the case with most of my books, a good deal of the background to Goddess of the Ice

Realm is real. The general religion of the Isles is Sumerian, though in some cases I've interpolated cult

practice from the Late Roman Republic where we simply don't know the Sumerian details.

The magic, which is separate from religion in virtually every culture and in at least my fiction, is

that of the Mediterranean Basin during the Classical Period. The words of power, technically voces

mysticae, are the language of demiurges who act as intercessors between humans and the Gods.

I prefer not to voice the voces mysticae, but I have done so in conjuction with the audiobook

versions of the Isles series. So far as I can tell, there was no ill result. On the other hand, I've also

dropped loaded firearms without anything bad happening--that time. I don't recommend doing either

thing.

The works of literature imbedded in Goddess are Latin classics. Rigal equates with Vergil;

Celondre with Horace; and Pendill is Ovid, whom I find to bountifully repay the close readings I've been

giving him this past year.

Dave Drake

PROLOGUE

The blue and crimson flickers were as pale as the Northern Lights. They quivered through the ice

of the high domed ceiling, along the struts and down the heart of the thick crystalline pillars on which it

rested. The creak and groan of the vast structure filled the half-dark like the sound of moonlit surf. The

ice was alive, but it was coldly hostile to all other living things.

In the hall below were things that looked like men but were not, and things that could never have

existed save here or in nightmare. Lower still, beneath the transparent ice of the floor, monstrous

shadows glided through the phosphorescent water.

She sat on a throne of ice in the center of the hall, white and corpulent. In the air before Her,

wizardlight twisted and coiled; and as it moved, the whole cosmos began to shift.

The ice groaned....

CHAPTER 1

"I think the rain's going to hold off after all," said Garric, eyeing the sky to seaward where clouds

had been lowering all day as the royal fleet made its way up the western coast of Haft.

If it didn't, well, he wouldn't shrink. For most of his nineteen years he'd been a peasant who

herded sheep and worked in the yard of his father's inn, often enough in the rain. But now he was Prince

Garric of Haft, making a Royal Progress from Tisamur, through Cordin, and to Carcosa on Haft. He was

here to convince the folk living in the West that there was a real Kingdom of the Isles again and that they

were part of it. It's hard to impress people in a downpour; all they really care about is getting under cover

as soon as the foreign fools let them.

"Ah, you can believe that if you wish, your highness," said Lobon, the sailing master of the

Shepherd of the Isles. His voice mushed through a mouthful of maca root which oarsmen claimed gave

them strength and deadened the pain of their muscles. "What I say is that we'll have a squall before we've

settled half so many ships into their berths."

He nodded glumly toward the harbor mouth ahead. "That's if Carcosa even has berths for a

hundred warships. We're at the back of beyond!"

"Carcosa can berth a hundred warships," Garric said, a trifle more sharply than the sailing

master's comment deserved. "A thousand years ago when Carus was King of the Isles and Carcosa was

his capital, the harbor held as many as five hundred."

Lobon was a skillful judge of winds, currents, and the way to get the best out of even a clumsy

quinquereme like the Shepherd, but he'd been born on the island of Ornifal. He was just as much of an

Ornifal chauvinist as a landowning noble like Lord Waldron, commander of the royal army.

Garric came from Barca's Hamlet on the east side of Haft. All the time he'd been growing up,

Carcosa was the unimaginably great city that held all the wonder in the world. And besides Garric's own

background--

"Aye, lad," said the ghost of King Carus, alive and vibrant in Garric's mind. "Five hundred ships

in harbor--but only when I wasn't off on campaign with them, smashing one usurper or another.

And that was most times, till the Duke of Yole's wizard smashed me instead and the kingdom with

me. But you'll do better, because you know not to solve all your problems with a sword!"

Garric smiled at the image of his ancient ancestor. He and Carus could have passed for son and

father: tall and muscular with a dark complexion, brown hair, and a quick smile unless there was trouble

to deal with. Carus had never fully mastered his volcanic temper, a flaw that'd proved fatal as he'd said.

But--

If I'm doing better, Garric said in his mind's silence, then in part it's because I have your skill

to guide my swordarm when a stroke is required.

"I wouldn't know about what went on before my time," muttered Lobon. He spat over the stern

railing, threading the gobbet between the helmsman at the starboard steering oar and one of Garric's

young aides. The helmsman remained unconcerned, but the aide jumped and smothered a curse.

Generally an aide was somebody's nephew, a second son who could run errands for the prince

and either rise to a position of some rank at court or be killed. Either would be a satisfactory outcome,

since a family of the minor nobility couldn't afford to support another son in the state his birth demanded.

This youth, Lord Lerdain, was an exception. He was the heir presumptive of Count Lerdoc of

Blaise, one of a handful of the most powerful nobles in the kingdom. Lerdain's presence at Garric's side

made it more likely that Lerdoc would remain loyal.

Lobon understood Garric's glance toward Lerdain. He scrunched his face into a smile and said to

the aide, "Don't worry, boy. I've been chewing maca root since before your father was born. I won't hit

you less I mean to."

His face shifting into a mask of frustration, he added, "Not room to swing a cat aboard this pig,

there's so many civilians aboard. Ah--begging your pardon, your highness.”

"I understand, Master Lobon," Garric said with a faint smile. "We'll be on land shortly... and I

fully appreciate your feelings."

The Shepherd of the Isles was as large as any vessel in the royal fleet. She had five rows of oars

on either side and a crew of nearly three hundred men. Despite the quinquereme's relative size, she was

strictly a warship rather than a yacht intended to carry a prince. Garric's personal bodyguard, twenty-five

Blood Eagles, took the place of the Shepherd's normal complement of marines, but he and the dozen

members of his personal entourage were simply excess baggage so far as the ship's personnel were

concerned.

"Though as for being civilians...," Garric added mildly. "I think you'd find I could give as good an

account of myself in battle as most of the marines the Shepherd's shipped over the years."

For his formal arrival in Carcosa, Garric wore a breastplate of silvered bronze and a silvered

helmet whose spreading wings had been gilded. If the sun cooperated, Prince Garric would be a dazzling

gem in a setting formed by the polished black armor of his bodyguards.

Garric's armor this day was for show, but the sword hanging from his belt had a plain bone hilt

and a long blade of watered steel. There was nothing flashy about the weapon; but swung by an arm as

strong as Garric's, the edge would take an enemy's head off with a single stroke.

"Yes sir, your highness!" Lobon said, looking horrorstruck to realize what he'd said to his prince.

To avoid a further blunder, he stepped forward on the walkway and bellowed through the ventilator,

"Timekeeper! Raise the stroke a half beat, won't you? This is supposed to be a royal entry, not a funeral

procession!"

Obediently the flutist in the far bow of the oar deck quickened the tempo of the simple four-note

progression on his right-hand pipe; the other pipe of the pair continued to play a drone. The rate at which

the oars dipped, rose, and feathered forward increased by the same amount. In time the Shepherd would

slide marginally faster through the water, but a quinquereme was too massive to do anything suddenly.

Even the much lighter triremes which made up the bulk of the fleet accelerated with a certain majesty.

"The trouble is, lad," said the image of Carus, "you don't act like a noble and they treat you

like the folks they grew up with. Then they remember who you really are and they're afraid you'll

have them flayed alive for disrespect to Prince Garric of Haft."

I'd never do that! Garric thought in shock.

"No more would I," Carus agreed, "though I showed a hard enough hand to enemies of the

kingdom. But there's some in your court who'd show less hesitation over executing a commoner

for disrespect than they would over the choice of a wine with their dinner."

"I don't belong here," Garric whispered, but he didn't need the snort from the ghost in his mind to

know that he did indeed belong. The Kingdom of the Isles, wracked by rebellion and wizardry, needed

Prince Garric and his friends more than it needed any number of the courtiers and Ornifal landowners

who'd claimed to be the government of the Isles for most of the thousand years since the Old Kingdom

collapsed in blood and chaos.

Thought of his friends made Garric look toward the bow where his sister Sharina, his boyhood

friend Cashel, and the wizard Tenoctris leaned against the railing. Like Garric they were mostly

concerned with keeping out of the way. This was a particular problem for the women since they'd

dressed for arrival in Carcosa in spreading court robes of silk brocade: cream with a gold stripe for

'Princess Sharina', sea green for the aged wizard. In a manner of speaking, Tenoctris was much older

than the seventy years or so she looked: she'd been flung a thousand years into the future--and onto the

beach at Barca's Hamlet--by the same wizard-born cataclysm which had brought down the Old

Kingdom.

Sharina wore a fillet, but the golden flood of her hair streamed out beneath it. She was tall--taller

than most men in Barca's Hamlet--and blonde unlike anyone else in the community. Her mother Lora had

been a maid in the palace in Carcosa when tall, blond Niard, an Ornifal noble, had been Count of Haft

through his marriage to Countess Tera....

Even a brother could see that Sharina's willowy beauty would be exceptional in any company.

"But I know a prettier woman yet," whispered Garric, and smiled wider to think of Liane bos-Benliman.

She'd be meeting him here in Carcosa for their wedding.

Sharina felt the weight of her brother's glance. She turned and waved, her smile like sunlight.

Tenoctris and Cashel turned with her. The old wizard was cheerful, birdlike, and as doggedly

determined as any soldier in the army. Cashel was almost as tall as Garric, but he was so broad that he

didn't look his height unless you saw him with ordinary men. Mountains would crumble before either

Cashel or his sister Ilna, aboard the two-decked patrol vessel following the Shepherd, ever failed their

duty. Sharina was fortunate to love a man so solid and so much in love with her.

There's never been a man luckier in his friends, Garric thought as he smiled back. Then he

turned and waved to the small woman in the stern of the patrol vessel astern.

"And never a better time than now," Carus said, "for the Kingdom of the Isles to have

friends--and luck!"

***

When Ilna saw Garric wave, her first thought was, What does he mean by that?

Then, feeling foolish--feeling more of a fool than she usually did--she waved with her right as her

left held the cords she was plaiting. The movement was polite and a little prim, the way Ilna os-Kenset

did most things.

Garric didn't mean anything by it. He was just making a friendly gesture to a childhood friend

who didn't, after all, mean very much to him.

Near Ilna--and on a deck-and-a-half patrol vessel like the Flying Fish, anyone could be

described as near everyone else aboard--Chalcus talked with Captain Rhamis bor-Harriol, a nobleman

younger than Ilna's nineteen years. From what Ilna had seen of the captain during the voyage up the

western shore of the Isles, he was a complete ninny.

That didn't matter, of course; or at any rate, it didn't matter any more than if Rhamis was being a

ninny in some job on shore. The Flying Fish's sailing master took care of navigation and the ordinary

business of the ship, limiting the captain's responsibilities to leading his men in a battle. In Ilna's opinion,

ninnies were quite sufficient for that task.

"Is something wrong, Ilna?" Merota asked from Ilna's elbow, unseen till the moment she spoke.

The nine-year-old was, as Lady Merota bos-Roriman, the orphaned heir to one of the wealthiest houses

on Ornifal. Ilna was her guardian, because... well, because Ilna had been there and nobody else Ilna

trusted was available.

The girl was related to Lord Tadai, who acted as chancellor and chief of staff while Garric was

with the fleet and those who held the posts officially were back in the palace at Valles. Tadai would've

taken care of Merota, but to Tadai that meant marrying the child to some noble as quickly as possible.

Merota was young? All the more reason to pass the trouble of raising her on to somebody else.

Ilna and her brother Cashel had been left to raise themselves after their grandmother died when

they were seven. Their father Kenset had never said who their mother was; he'd kept a close tongue on

the question of where he'd been when he went off adventuring. The only task Kenset applied himself to

after coming home with the infants was drinking himself to death, and at that he quickly succeeded.

Ilna and Cashel had survived--survived and prospered, most would say. They were honored

members of the royal court, after all. But Ilna wouldn't willingly see another child deal with what she'd

gone through herself. If that meant she had to take responsibility for the child, well, she'd never been one

to shirk responsibility.

"Nothing's wrong with the world, Merota," Ilna said. She smiled faintly and corrected herself,

"Nothing more than usual, that is."

Which is enough and more than enough! she thought, but it wasn't the time to say that, if there

was ever a time.

"And as for myself, I'm in my usual state," she continued, still smiling. "Which is bad enough also,

I suppose."

When Ilna had last glanced at Merota, the girl was amidships with Mistress Kaline, the

impoverished noblewoman who acted as her governess. Mistress Kaline was still there, lying flat over the

ventilators--the Flying Fish had no amidships railing--and looking distinctly green.

Ilna's stomach flopped in sympathy, but she'd learned early in the voyage not to eat until they'd

made landfall for the night so that she could digest on solid ground. The patrol vessel was agile and quick

in a short dash, but it pitched, rolled, and yawed in a fashion that Ilna didn't have words to describe. It

wouldn't have been her choice for the ship she wanted to travel on, but she'd never wanted to travel in

the first place.

The rest of Garric's staff was aboard quinqueremes or the three-banked triremes that made up

most of the fleet. The bigger ships were equally crowded, but they were a great deal more stable.

Chalcus had picked the Flying Fish because it was similar to the pirate craft he'd commanded in the

days before he met Ilna; and since Ilna had picked Chalcus, that was the end of the matter so far as she

was concerned.

Chalcus caught Ilna's eye; he bowed to her and Merota with a flourish before resuming his

conversation. Chalcus was no more than middling height. He looked slender from the side, but his

shoulders were broad and he moved with the grace of a leopard. If you looked closely at his sharply

pleasant features, , you saw the scars; and when Chalcus was stripped down to a linen kilt like the

sailors, you could see he had scars of one sort or another over most of his body.

From taste and habit Ilna dressed plainly, in unbleached woolen tunics and a blue wool cloak

when the weather required it; Chalcus by contrast was a dazzle of color whenever circumstances

permitted. Today he wore breeches of red leather, a silk shirt dyed in bright indigo, and between them a

sash colored a brilliant yellow with bee's pollen which matched the fillet binding his hair. Ilna knew that

the nobles gathered on the quay to meet them would think Chalcus looked like a clown; but they

wouldn't say anything, at least not the ones who took time to note the sailor's eyes and the way use had

worn the hilt of his incurved sword.

"I do hope Mistress Kaline won't still be sick when we're introduced to Count Lascarg," Merota

said in a carefully polite voice. "She'll never be able to live down the embarrassment if that happens."

Ilna looked sharply at her ward, thinking for a moment that she was serious. Then Merota's

angelic expression dissolved in a fit of giggles.

"Yes," Ilna said, allowing herself to smile minusculely before her face stiffened again into its

accustomed sternness. "But if necessary we'll both help her stand. I've found it settles me to hold on to

others."

She didn't care for Mistress Kaline as a person; but then, she didn't care for very many people.

Ilna had continued to employ Mistress Kaline after Merota became her ward, in part because the stern

old snob did in her way truly love the child, but also because Ilna was more afraid of her own power than

she was of anything else in this world or beyond it. It would be easy to dismiss the governess who'd

sneered at Ilna as an orphan with no culture and no forebears... but for Ilna, it would have been equally

easy to weave a pattern that would rip Mistress Kaline's soul straight to Hell.

That way lay damnation. It was a path Ilna had once travelled, and from which she would never

fully be able to return.

"You're really all right, Ilna?" Merota asked softly.

Ilna reached down with her right hand and squeezed the girl's. Sometimes Merota acted younger

than her nine years, but at others it seemed that she was taking care of Ilna instead of the other way

around.

"Yes, child," Ilna said, deliberately resuming the pattern she'd been knotting from the hank of

short cords she kept in her sleeve. "I've made some bad decisions in the course of my life, and I'll

probably make more mistakes as I get older. But in the main, the pattern's not one anyone has a right to

object to."

Ilna glanced at the fabric her fingers were knotting while her mind considered other, less pleasant,

things. Her pattern in coarse twine would calm those who looked at it, raise their spirits or cool their

anger. Ilna didn't weave charms any more than the sun was a charm because it warmed those on whom

its rays fell. What Ilna wove had the same natural certainty as the wind and the rain, as daylight and

death.

She put the finished fabric in her right sleeve, then took a fresh hank of cords out of her left and

began again. The patterns were just a way of occupying her fingers; the work didn't calm her, exactly, but

her irritation was more likely to come to the surface if she wasn't doing something.

A trumpeter signaled from the flagship, the five-banked monster to the right of Garric's. Captain

Rhamis looked as startled as a mouse surprised in the pantry. "What's that?" he cried on a rising note.

"What're we to do, Plotnin?"

Before the sailing master could answer, Chalcus laid a hand on the nobleman's shoulder and

spoke reassuringly. A trireme pulled ahead, but nothing else about the fleet's stately progression changed.

Rhamis bobbed his head, rubbing his hands nervously together.

Ilna smiled at an idle thought. She gave her completed patterns to oarsmen and soldiers, common

people. She'd been around the rich and powerful enough in recent days to know that they had problems

also, but somebody else could worry about them. Ilna would take care of her own first.

She'd always had a talent for fabrics. As a young girl she'd woven so skillfully that the other

women in the borough surrounding Barca's Hamlet brought Ilna the thread they'd spun and instead of

weaving themselves took a share of the profits from the cloth she finished. That as much as her brother's

early strength explained how two orphans had survived in a community which, while not unkind and fairly

prosperous as peasant villages went, had no surplus for useless mouths in a hard winter.

Ilna's talent was natural or at least passed for it, but when Ilna left Barca's Hamlet she'd taken a

wrong turning that had led her to Hell. She'd met what looked like a tree there. The skills the tree had

taught her gave Ilna the power to let or hinder souls, to change a heart or steal a life. She'd used her new

abilities for what she thought at the time were her own ends but which she knew now were the purposes

of Evil alone.

While Evil ruled her, Ilna had done things that she couldn't forgive and which couldn't be put

right. She knew that she'd never be able to make amends for the evil she'd done casually, callously, if she

spent the remainder of her life trying.

So be it. Ilna would try anyway, in small ways, in all the ways that she could. Eventually she'd die

with her job undone. She assumed death would end her responsibilities. If it didn't, well, she'd deal with

what came then.

Chalcus sauntered back from where he'd been talking to the captain. His stride anticipated the

deck's motion with the same unconscious ease that Ilna's fingers demonstrated when weaving. The

Flying Fish was short, narrow, and relatively high. She carried fifteen oarsmen in the upper tier on either

side with ten more below them in the center where the hull was wide enough--barely--for them to work.

Chalcus said the design made the patrol vessel nimble and fairly fast, but she wobbled like a slowing top.

"There's a shipload of Blood Eagles gone ahead to make sure things are safe for Master Garric,"

Chalcus said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the trireme which was already driving

through the harbor entrance. "Not that the lad showed much need to be protected the times I've seen him

with a sword in his hand."

Ilna wasn't a seaman, but she could judge patterns like few other people: the men on the trireme's

flashing oars were strong and willing, but their timing wasn't as smooth as that of other vessels in the fleet.

The bodyguards were picked men, but they weren't picked oarsmen.

She smiled again, recognizing a familiar truth. Every task has its special skills, rowing and weaving

no less than the sweep of words that poets use, or that wizards speak for other purposes.

Merota took Chalcus' left hand in hers and began to sing a her clear soprano, "Lord Lovel he

stood by his ship so fine, a-rigging her snow-white sails...."

The sailor himself had taught Merota the ballad along with many others. For a wonder this one

wasn't as bawdy as those the child usually chose to sing in public. Perhaps she didn't think any of the folk

aboard the Flying Fish would care; except for Mistress Kaline, perhaps, but as sick as the governess

looked, probably not even her.

At another time Chalcus would have joined in with the child, singing about the nobleman who

came back from a long voyage just in time for his true love's funeral, but the admiral's trumpeter sounded

another signal. "Chalcus!" Lord Rhamis called, trotting up the deck toward them. "What do they want us

to do?"

Chalcus slipped his hand from Merota's, tousled her hair, and gave Ilna a quick nod of regret

before turning back to the dithering captain. Chalcus was determined that the ship he'd brought Ilna and

Merota aboard should proceed smoothly, or at any rate without needless embarrassment. It was a

responsibility he'd accepted without having sought it, much as Garric was ruling a kingdom though Ilna

was sure that he'd have been happier helping his father run a village inn and reading the verses of Old

Kingdom poets in his free time.

Garric's big ship began to draw ahead of the other vessels. Prince Garric of Haft would enter the

harbor in solitary state, with the rest of his mighty fleet following at a respectful distance.

Ilna's fingers wove twine. She knew that Merota was speaking, but for the moment she didn't

have attention to spare for the child.

Being a prince was a great burden, she was sure. Ilna didn't care about 'the Isles' as a thing in

itself; but she cared about people because it was her duty to care about people, and she knew that the

people of the Isles were far better off with Garric ruling the kingdom than if he hadn't been.

A prince deserved a wife worthy of him; a well-born, well-educated, beautiful woman like Liane

bos-Benliman. It was far better for everyone that Garric should marry Liane than that he throw himself

away on a peasant girl who couldn't write her own name; even if the peasant happened to have a talent

for weaving.

"Ilna?" called a child's voice from far away. "Please Ilna, what's wrong?"

And Ilna's fingers knotted a pattern that would bring warmth and calm to the man she offered it

to.

***

"It's more like standing on the seawall at Barca's Hamlet than it's like being in a boat," Sharina

said, looking down at the sea almost a dozen feet below the level of the deck on which she stood to the

left of Cashel and Tenoctris. Foam boiled back as the Shepherd's bronze ram dipped and rose

minusculely at the thrust of the oars. The water was gray today; all Sharina could see in it was an

occasional bit of weed churned up as the quinquereme's huge weight slid past.

"We're moving," said Cashel simply. "I don't think I'll ever get used to that. I don't mind, but it's

not like being on solid ground."

Sharina laughed. "Cashel," she said, "so long as you're around, everything seems solid."

She hugged herself to him, a great, warm boulder. He didn't respond--they were in public, after

all--but he smiled as he continued to watch the approaching shore. The great stone moles which

extended Carcosa's fine natural harbor had survived the thousand years of neglect following the collapse

of the Old Kingdom. One of the lighthouses which originally framed the entrance remained also,

streaming a long red-on-white pennon to welcome the fleet, but the other had fallen into a pile of rubble.

The lighthouses had been built in the form of hollow statues: one of the Lady wearing the crescent

tiara of the moon, the other of the Shepherd holding the sun disk. Celondre had written a poem when the

lighthouses were dedicated, likening them to the children of King Carlon, the hope of the Kingdom's

future.

Sharina's arm was still around Cashel's waist. She felt it tighten involuntarily, drawing her to

Cashel's solidity in an inconstant world. She'd first read Celondre's verse as a child in Barca's Hamlet

where she and Garric were tutored by their father Reise. The twin statues, decorated with gold-washed

bronze, had seemed the most wondrous objects in the world, and the kingdom when Celondre lived and

wrote was the next thing to paradise. She'd never dreamed that some day she'd see the statues herself.

But these weren't the shining triumphs of a child's imagination. One had fallen and time had so

worn the other that Sharina couldn't be sure which deity it was meant to represent. The twin children

Celondre praised in the same lyric had both died within a year: the boy had drowned on a sea voyage,

while the girl was carried off by a fever. Carlon had died old and bitter, withdrawn from the world and

his duties to the kingdom; and a generation later, when the forces which turned the cosmos rose to their

thousand-year peak, the Golden Age had fallen in mud and slaughter.

And those forces were rising again....

"Is anything wrong, Sharina?" Cashel asked. He'd felt her tremble, so he shifted his quarterstaff to

his right hand in order to put his left around her. His strength was more reassuring than stone walls or a

sheet of iron.

"No, nothing that we can't take care of," she said, sorry to have caused the big man to worry. "I

was just thinking about a poem Celondre wrote a thousand years ago."

Cashel nodded. Sharina knew that he wouldn't understand what she meant, but now he knew

that it wasn't anything he needed to be concerned about. If it was about books, then there were plenty of

other people around to take care of it. "Well," he said, "that's all right, then."

In Barca's Hamlet, few people could read or write well. Reise came from Valles on Ornifal, the

royal capital, and had been unusually well-educated even there. He and the children he'd taught were

unique exceptions. Cashel and Ilna were almost completely illiterate--able to spell out their own names,

and that with difficulty. As best Sharina could judge, Cashel regarded books much as he did the depths

of the sea: they were vast, hidden reservoirs of the strange and wonderful.

Tenoctris glanced at Sharina, leaning over the bow railing to see past Cashel's bulk. The old

David Drake - Lord of the Isles 05 - Goddess of the Ice Realm

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