Lord of the Isles by David Drake

heart when she looked from the kitchen and saw Tenoctris chanting as smoke rose from the brazier. She’d wanted to say something, but Garric’s family was watching as if it were all as natural as daybreak, and the hermit went about his business undeterred. Some of the visitors spoke in shocked whispers, but none of them tried to interfere.
    Nor had Ilna.

    â€œI thought wizards did things in the dark,” Sharina said in a miserable voice. “I thought they sacrificed babies and called terrible things out of the Underworld. She just burned a piece of kindling and spoke some words. I didn’t know what I should do, so I didn’t do anything. It seemed so harmless … . But she really is a wizard.”
    â€œYes,” Ilna agreed. The same thoughts had gone through her mind. The core of her being had decided that she wouldn’t interfere with anyone who was obviously trying to help Garric, even if they had been practicing blood magic at midnight. “I knew she was … something. As soon as I touched the robe she came in. The cloth was different from anything in this world.”
    Sharina nodded absently, accepting the comment as meaning there was something odd about the fabric rather than about where the fabric came from. She didn’t question the statement any more than she’d have doubted something Cashel said about the behavior of sheep.
    â€œNonnus doesn’t mind her,” Sharina said after a moment. “I asked him later. He said that he doesn’t decide what’s right for other people, but anyway Tenoctris wouldn’t go any places he wouldn’t go himself. I think I understand what he means.”
    She didn’t amplify the last comment, any more than Ilna would have tried to explain why the robe felt unusual.
    â€œI’m afraid about the things that are happening,” Ilna said softly. She hadn’t been sure she was going to speak. The noon sun flooded the beach and the dancing waves, but she pressed her arms close to her sides because her body felt frozen. “I feel it squeezing me and I don’t know what to do.”
    Sharina glanced at her in the sort of blank-faced silence with which one greets a friend’s embarrassing revelation.
    Something wriggled on the eastern horizon. Ilna straightened up. “That’s a ship,” she said. “It’s too big for a fishing boat.”
    Sharina shaded her eyes from above and below with her hands held parallel, forming a slit that cut the glare from the
water as well as direct sunlight. “We have to get back,” she said in a tight voice. “Let’s run.”
    The girls broke into a trot, tunics fluttering about their legs. They’d strolled half a mile north of the hamlet; it seemed much farther, now that they wanted to return.
    â€œIt must be a big merchantman that was caught in the storm,” Ilna said as her toes kicked gravel behind her. “It wouldn’t be putting in to Barca’s Hamlet unless it had been damaged.”
    â€œIt’s not a merchant ship,” Sharina said. She glanced over, coldly measuring her friend’s stride and deciding whether to go on ahead.
    Ilna lengthened her pace, knowing that Sharina could outrun anyone else in the hamlet over a distance this long. “It’s too big for a fishing boat!” she gasped.
    â€œIt has hundreds of oars, not just a few sweeps like a merchantman,” Sharina said. “A merchant couldn’t afford to pay so many rowers and still make a profit on his goods. This is a warship like the ones in the epics!”

9
    A metallic screech awakened Garric on what he first thought was bright morning. A moment later he realized that he was in the common room, not his own garret, and the sunlight flooding in the south-facing windows meant it was midday and past.
    He tried to rise and found his senses spinning to the edge of gray limbo before his head even left the horsehair pillow. He