Lord of the Isles Read Online Free Page B

cast if we turn out to need them.”
    Nonnus planted annuals near his hut. Perennials and vegetables cropped in their second year—parsnips, turnips, and adult onions—grew in a separate plot beyond. Though he had only a sharp stick to cultivate his garden, the early growth showed a pattern as regular as a fish’s scales.
    â€œNonnus?” Sharina called to the hermit’s back as she hurried after him. His speed had nothing to do with haste; he simply never made a false move. “Where do suppose she came from? The castaway, I mean.”
    â€œAh, child,” the hermit said in a suddenly distant voice. “I don’t suppose anything about other people. Not anything at all.”
    His solid black form strode down the path. And no one should suppose anything about me, his back said silently to Sharina, who bit her lip in embarrassment as she followed.

4
    I lna os-Kenset carefully arranged the castaway’s robe to catch the afternoon sun on the drying rack outside her entrance to the millhouse. Embroidered symbols stood out against the background; they reminded Ilna of the carvings
on old stones reused for the foundation of the inn. The fabric shone green from one angle but blue when she looked at it the other way.
    It seemed to Ilna that the symbols changed with the light also, but she found the thought disquieting. The feel of the garment disturbed her even more, though in ways she couldn’t explain to another person.
    She adjusted the wicker screen slightly so that it would continue to shade the fabric from direct sunlight for another hour. By then it would be time to turn the garment anyway. There was enough breeze to dry even such thick brocade before Ilna took the robe in at sundown to avoid the dew.
    Pigeons rose with a clatter of flight feathers from the cote on the side of the mill she shared with her brother Cashel. They circled overhead, then banked to settle again on the roof coping. What went through a bird’s mind? But it was hard enough to tell what drove another human being. Especially a man.
    Especially Garric or-Reise.
    Sharina had brought Ilna the robe in the morning, explaining that Garric had found the woman who owned it tossed up on the shore and that the garment needed to be cleaned. Cleaning wasn’t precisely the problem. Ilna quickly determined that she didn’t need to work oatmeal into the fabric to absorb dirt and body oils which then could be beaten out with the meal. The fabric’s colorfast dyes hadn’t been damaged by soaking in the sea, but now the salt residues had to be washed out in fresh water.
    If the mill had been powered by a creek, Ilna would have suspended the robe in a wicker basket in the millpond or even the spillway. Her uncle Katchin the Miller might have complained; his slatternly young wife, Fedra, certainly would have. Ilna would have done it anyway as her right and no harm to anyone else—her kin included.
    Because the impoundment pool was salt, the question hadn’t arisen. Part of Ilna—not the part she was proudest of but part nonetheless—regretted the chance to force Katchin
to give way even more than she regretted the work of carrying buckets of well-water to sluice salt away under the gentle working of her fingers.
    Kenset or-Keldan had been the elder of the miller’s two sons. “The adventurous one,” folk who’d known him described Kenset. He’d gone away from the hamlet for a year, no one knew where. When he returned as unexpectedly as he’d left, he had with him two puling infants—Ilna and her brother Cashel—but no wife.
    Keldan had died while Kenset was away. Ilna had enough experience of her uncle Katchin to know how furious he must have been to have to divide an inheritance he’d thought was his alone, but he’d done it. The law was clear, and Katchin was a stickler for the letter of the law.
    The same folk who’d described the young Kenset as