Lord of the Isles Read Free Page A

was twisted into his sweat-soaked bedclothes, not bound by the coils of a whirlpool. The glass of his smallpaned window was pale with the half-light of the hour before dawn.
    â€œMay the Lady and Shepherd protect me,” Garric whispered as he waited for his heart’s pounding to slow. “May Duzi who watches our flocks watch over me also.”
    He pulled the window sash open to let the air cool him. The bull’s-eye glass of the panes distorted images too greatly to show anything but changes in the general level of light. When Garric looked through the opening he saw a robed figure sprawled on a raft just short of the shoreline.
    Garric pulled himself free of the linen sheet and light blanket he’d been sleeping under; the storm had brought cool nights even this late in the spring. He didn’t bother to cinch a belt over the tunic he slept in, and like everyone else in Barca’s Hamlet he went barefoot as soon as the ground thawed.
    He swung from his window and dropped to the ground a few feet below. He didn’t call out to rouse the others, because he was afraid he was still dreaming. Garric’s first thought was that the figure in the surf was the hooded fisherman of his nightmare. If there was a real person floating offshore on a
raft, Garric wouldn’t need help to carry him to solid ground. If his imagination was tricking him, then he didn’t want other people to know about it.
    He ran easily down the retaining wall to the gravel beach, his tunic flapping around his legs. Garric was big for a seventeen-year-old, though he was rangy and hadn’t filled out. His sister Sharina was tall also, but with a willowy suppleness that matched the curls of her long blond hair, while their friend Cashel was built like an oak tree. Cashel was so thick and solid that he looked squat despite being almost as tall as Garric.
    Fishermen had dragged their six-oared cutters to the top of the wall, but the surge of yesterday’s storm had flung them farther. Three were overturned, and the other two were stacked like a couple cuddling—the upper one smashing the thwarts of the lower.
    The Inner Sea rubbed against the beach with its usual hiss. The sound was louder than you realized until you went far enough inland that the first line of hills finally blocked it. Wavelets slapped against the raft as well. It and the woman lying facedown on it were as real as the knee-high water Garric splashed through to reach them.
    The raft had grounded on a bar of shells and gravel so slight that at low tide you could miss it on the generally flat strand. To Garric’s surprise the raft was part of a building, not a ship’s hatch cover as he’d assumed.
    The woman moaned softly as he lifted her; at least she was alive. She was older than Garric’s mother, though he couldn’t be sure quite how old in the dim light. She weighed very little in his arms, although seawater washing over the raft’s low edge had soaked her robe’s thick brocade.
    Garric turned and plodded up the sea-washed slope, careful not to lose his footing and dunk the poor victim again. A wave tugged the hem of his tunic as if in a spiteful attempt to bring him down.
    â€œHere’s a castaway!” he bawled at the top of his lungs. He couldn’t expect anyone to hear him until he reached the
inn, though there might be a fisherman looking over damage from the terrible storm of the night and day before. “Get a bed ready and water!”
    Garric couldn’t imagine where she’d come from. There wasn’t another island with heavy-timbered buildings on it within fifty miles of Haft’s east coast. If the storm had driven the makeshift raft—and it must have done so—it was a wonder that the castaway had the strength to cling to a flat wooden platform for so long in the worst weather to flail the Inner Sea in a generation.
    â€œHelp, I’ve got a castaway!” He climbed the sloped