Lord of the Isles Read Online Free Page A

on her haste.
    Nonnus acted as the community’s healer. Granny Halla said he’d arrived from no one knew where some few years before Lora returned to Barca’s Hamlet with a foreign husband and newborn twins.
    â€œThought he was a bandit, we did,” Granny used to say, “but the bailiff back then was the same sort of puffball as Katchin is today. Nobody had enough backbone to interfere when the fellow grubbed himself a place by the creekside. When Trevin or-Cessal’s son broke his leg—that’s the boy who died of a fever the next year—the feller heard the squeals and set the bone neat as neat. That’s how we learned he was a holy hermit. But he still looks like a bandit, if you ask me.”
    If you didn’t ask Granny Halla something, she was likely to tell you anyway. To have told you, that is—Sharina had to remind herself that the old woman was dead five years this winter; found in her bed when the neighbors noticed no smoke rose from her chimney.
    Even Sharina found it hard to think of Nonnus as a holy man, though he’d knelt so often at the shrine to the Lady which he’d carved in the bark of a tall pine that the ground was packed to the consistency of stone. Besides praying, Nonnus tended his garden, fished, and hunted. When folk asked for his help he gave it. He took produce or the occasional flitch of bacon in payment if someone offered it, but in truth
he was as self-sufficient as the squirrels who provided much of his diet.
    Priests of the Lady and her consort, the Shepherd, made a tithe circuit through the borough once a year. Nonnus didn’t walk the way they did. He moved like a guard dog, always alert and as direct as the flight of the short, all-wood javelins with which he struck down his prey.
    A pair of hardwood batons hung on a cord of plaited willow bark where the path to the hermit’s hut branched from the common track. Sharina paused long enough to clatter the rods together. “Nonnus?” she called. “My brother’s found a lady thrown up from the sea who needs your help!”
    The last of the path was down a gully and up the steep other side. Sharina used her hands to slow her, then to tug herself up by the roots of a mighty beech growing on the opposite rim.
    If you didn’t ring the clacker when you came to see Nonnus, you found him waiting for you just the same. There was one difference: those who hadn’t been polite enough to announce their arrival met the hermit with three javelins in his left hand and a fourth poised to throw in his right. No one in the hamlet even claimed to have sneaked up on Nonnus unseen.
    The hermit came out of his low hut with a wicker basket of medicines in one hand and his staff in the other. “Broken bones, child?” he asked. His smile of greeting looked as though it had been carved in a briar root.
    Nonnus was below middle height for a man—shorter than Sharina even—and had a waist the same diameter as his chest. There was some gray in his hair and more in his beard. Sharina supposed the hermit must be over forty years old, though there was nothing except the hair to suggest so great an age.
    He twisted the strap of his basket around the end of the staff and dangled it over his shoulder. His square-cut tunic was of naturally black wool, woven as thick as a cloak and as harsh as horsehair to the touch.
    â€œI don’t know, Nonnus,” Sharina said, gasping now that
she had a moment to pause. “Garric just said she’s been cast away.”
    Nonnus wore a belt of weatherproof willow bark like the rope that held the clackers. From it hung a long, heavy knife—the only metal tool he appeared to own—in a flapped and riveted sheath.
    â€œWell, you know where my comfrey grows,” he said as he plunged down the path ahead of her at an awkward, shuffling pace that nonetheless covered ground. “You can come back and dig enough roots to boil for a