Shadowless: Book 1 of the Ilmaen Quartet Read online

  Table of Contents

  Shadowless

  Chapter 1 – The Vision

  Chapter 2 – Jetsam

  Chapter 3 – Shadows

  Chapter 4 – Decisions

  Chapter 5 – Unwelcome News

  Chapter 6 – Far-seeing

  Chapter 7 – Bad Beginnings

  Chapter 8 – The Three Villages

  Chapter 9 – The Eagle Gets a New Owner

  Chapter 10 – Gwrach

  Chapter 11 – Keep Your Enemies Close

  Chapter 12 – The Crossing

  Chapter 13 – Taking It In Stages

  Chapter 14 – Routes East

  Chapter 15 – The Company

  Chapter 16 – A Raw Deal

  Chapter 17 – Something Lost, Something Gained

  Chapter 18 – A Little Learning…

  Chapter 19 – …Is a Dangerous Thing

  Chapter 20 – Karn

  Chapter 21 – Captive

  The story continues…

  Acknowledgements

  Shadowless

  Book 1 of the Ilmaen Quartet

  Helen Bell

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Light-Carillon Publishing

  Copyright ©Helen Bell 2015

  All rights reserved

  Helen Bell has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 978-0-9932599-0-6

  For Karen: thank you for being such an inspiration.

  To everyone out there who knows her, note the word ‘inspiration’.

  Karen is not Jez; Jez is not Karen.

  They just look (and occasionally think and act) uncannily alike.

  Praise for SHADOWLESS

  ‘Has an Epic feel to it with richly painted characters and settings.’

  M.L. Hamilton, World of Samar Series

  A mix of Celia Rees and Mary Webb.’

  Jane Alexander, Walker

  ‘I was pulled in right away. There’s so much energy in the story. It really comes alive.’

  Alecia Stone, Talisman of El

  To find out more about the Ilmaen Quartet, go to helenbellauthor.com

  THINK HOW IT WOULD BE, IF YOU COULD SEE THE FUTURE...

  NOW THINK AGAIN.

  Chapter 1 – The Vision

  The sound of gulls squabbling woke Renia. She lay and listened, picturing the ill-tempered dispute outside, recognizing some of the more distinctive cries. Whatever it was they were squabbling over, it sounded like Notch-wing was winning. No change there, then.

  She yawned and fidgeted till the covers settled closer round her, savouring the warmth. Spring had arrived, but the mornings were still chilly. She could hear Melor was up and about, and judging by the light coming round the curtain that screened off her sleeping space, the shutters were back already. Breakfast was needed; and breakfast was her job. Reluctantly she reached out and pulled her clothes under the covers to warm them up a bit.

  ‘Morning, Melor,’ she called.

  ‘Morning, cariad.’

  ‘What’s it like out?’

  ‘Cold, but bright. Vel thinks it’ll turn into a nice day. He’s lit the range and gone already. Did you get that? The range is lit, the kettle’s on the hob. Does that make getting up any easier?’

  ‘Yes, all right, I’m coming.’ She smiled, thankful he made his point by teasing. Most farm children in the district would have got a clout if they weren’t up with the dawn. That had never been Melor’s way, he had never once lifted a hand either to her or to Vel. A confirmed bachelor until he adopted them, he’d always pleaded ignorance of the accepted wisdoms of raising children and had just worked it out as he went along. As his adopted daughter, she felt he’d done well; and by using a light hand he probably got more work out of them, not less.

  She dressed under the covers, turned the sheets back to air and headed out into the parlour to the welcoming heat of the range.

  It looked like Vel had taken some cold cuts off the joint in the larder before he set out; he had left his dirty plate and knife beside the sink. Since Melor liked a hot breakfast (and today’s chilly start justified it), she put a skillet on the range, cut a few more slices off the joint, and tossed them in the pan. As she pushed the slices round to stop them sticking, Melor came over to check on their progress, ruffled her tousled hair and headed out to the well with a bucket.

  She and Vel had always known they were not Melor’s own children. He’d adopted them when they were very young – in Renia’s case, too young to remember. The early years must have been hard going, but he had promised their dying mother he would bring them up himself, and keep them off the Charity list. He could never quite explain why he had made such a promise; the woman had, after all, been a stranger to him. But then again, as he often reminded them both, he had never had reason to regret that promise.

  A moment of madness, the rest of the village had thought it. Not that Melor cared: the village could think what it liked. He was somewhere between accepted and tolerated by them; they already considered him a little crazy, their godless clansman who lived alone in his strange cave-house up on the sea cliffs. Adopting a stranger’s children was just another example of his oddness, though in their opinion a particularly ill-considered one. After all, the children would bear the brunt if it went wrong, as surely it must.

  He’d proved them wrong though, settling into the sudden and unfamiliar role of fatherhood with much less trouble than everyone expected. Inevitably eyebrows were still raised and tongues were still wagged, when for instance he strapped baby Renia to a hurdle he hauled behind him whenever he worked outdoors. It had made her cross when she’d heard about the gossip, years later. The village seemed to forget that he’d had a farm to run: she was a toddler and, if he’d left her on the loose, it wouldn’t have been long before she went straight over the cliff edge. Vel had been five, a self-reliant and sensible child, so he’d been no trouble. To hear Melor tell it they were both easy children – right up until she started having fits.

  Melor padded back in, topped up the kitchen water barrel, and sniffed appreciatively: ‘That’s cooked enough for me, jewel. You serve up, I’ll make tea.’

  They ate and drank in silence, comfortable enough together not to have to fill the quiet with talk. He had his lambing list on the kitchen table this morning and looked through it as he sipped his tea, working out which fields he needed to check. She let her thoughts run on.

  Renia had started to forget about the fits, it had been so long since she’d had one, but something had roused her during the night and though it might just have been a bad dream she couldn’t quite remember, chances were it was a fit. She had been six when they started, and it had been common knowledge around the village; it wasn’t something Melor had ever tried to keep secret. Sometimes it was just a minute or two of disconnection from the world, as if she was awake and daydreaming. She’d frequently talk to people during such fits, but a prod or a pinch couldn’t wake her from it, not like normal sleep. Others were full-blown seizures, frightening to her and to those who didn’t understand what was happening; she would fall down and go into convulsions. While the sight scared some people, mainly it roused pity in them. If as a child she had a falling fit in the village, folk would sit her up and smile at her when she woke, and tell her she’d ‘seen the fairies again’. That had been her own description for the strange, sparkling haze she saw before a seizure. At six, she hadn’t realized how her words were going to come back and haunt her later.

  One day a
s they got ready to go to market she’d had a waking fit and told Melor in a dreamy voice about all the things that were going to happen in town, from the innkeeper returning some money he’d borrowed so long ago Melor had forgotten about it, through to Old Ifan the butcher dropping a side of mutton and tripping headlong over it. Melor had listened and smiled at her imagination and once she was fully restored from the fit they’d gone off to town. At the market she stayed with the other children, playing tag round the village carts or knucklebones underneath them; Melor went off to sell his meat and make small talk with the stallholders and shopkeepers.

  When he came back he was a different man; unsmiling, unnerved. He’d been silent all the way home. That night he took Renia aside and explained to her that the returned money, the dropped meat – everything had happened exactly as she’d described. He didn’t know how she had done it but she had seen the future… and no one else must ever hear of it, he’d warned her.

  Then she’d understood the change in him. Six was old enough to know how it would be seen. The Catastrophe was long centuries past, but it still tormented the sleep of many and spilled over into waking memory. Not everyone had the dreams; but she did, and Vel, and many others, all the same dream.

  There was a city on the horizon, unfathomably huge. It could be any one of hundreds all across the known world, but all were similar, as was their fate. The city towered over the landscape and burrowed as far beneath it, its citizens beyond numbering, invisible from that distance but imagined, like ants busy about their lives. Then the blinding light from the heart of the city, followed by the absolute dark of the nothingness that replaced it; and finally the implosion that sucked the air from the dreamer’s lungs and woke them, gasping with relief, knowing they were safe in their own bed and not on the edge of oblivion. The belief that witchcraft had done this, wiped every city and its people from the face of the earth and nearly eradicated mankind, wasn’t simply based on a story; the memory was innate in the descendants of those who had witnessed it.

  Renia had been frightened by what Melor said because he was frightened; she was scared that he was frightened of her. She’d never seen him so serious. She’d asked him outright then, ‘Am I one of them?’ and it was like his heart broke and then mended, right in front of her, and he hugged her for what felt like an age. It was the old Melor who’d looked her in the eye when he was done with hugging, the way he always looked at her when he was saying something important. ‘No, Renia. You’re not. You’re not bad or evil. But what you can do – it looks like witchcraft, and that would be frightening to some. People make bad decisions when they’re scared, even sensible people.’

  So they had hidden it from everyone but Vel (who was too close and too smart to miss it), and for years Renia had bitten her tongue and let any events she foresaw unfold as they must.

  By the age of eleven when she was apprenticed to the seamstress Ceri Ty’r Llyn in the village, Renia was less wary and more open-hearted. The passing of several untroubled years made her naïve enough to think she might use her power to do good. It seemed the right thing to do, telling Ceri when she future-saw her little girl Rhyanna becoming seriously ill, but no sooner had the child fallen into a raging fever than Ceri blurted out the warning she had been given, by the girl who saw fairies. From that moment the village was divided into two camps: those who believed Renia truly saw the future and were scared of her powers, and those who accused her of causing the events that she had ‘predicted’ by poisoning the child.

  The little girl had recovered, but fears had been awakened, and they ran too deep to be ignored. Folk would catch sight of Renia and cast a glance east: that was where the Hampton Citywild lay, though no one from the village had ever been there. A forsaken crater miles across, they said, like a bite out of the south coast, where once there had been one of those unfathomably huge cities so many of them dreamt of – gone in the instant of the Catastrophe, along with all its citizens. The crater lay like a scar on the landscape, a constant reminder of the city’s fate, and was not somewhere folk willingly set foot. After all, if you believed in witchcraft you’d like as not believe in ghosts; and if the stories were true, Hampton Citywild had fifty million of them.

  So it was that a frightened eleven-year-old found herself called before the Hendynion, the village council of elders, to see if there was a case to answer. If there was, then eleven or not she would be tried; either for poisoning Rhyanna or, worse, for being a gwrach – a witch.

  She remembered little of it now, five years later, except for certain faces which stayed sharp in her memory. Those of the seven old men who were to pass judgment on her, and Melor’s, and Ceri’s.

  Most of the old men wore unreadable expressions. Two did not, and it was to those faces that Renia’s eyes were drawn repeatedly throughout the hearing. One man’s face spoke a simple message: loathing and distrust. Clearly he had not a shred of doubt that she was guilty. The other face took her a while to read, until the man smiled briefly at her. To her relief she realized he would have been amused by the whole ridiculous business, only he looked at her and saw a frightened child and was angry on her behalf.

  Melor’s face she recalled too. He was always at her side or in her sight, so she knew he was watching over her. Much was made in the Hendynion of her unknown parentage, the fact that she was Melor’s adopted and not his true daughter, but no one would have thought them anything other than blood kin if they had not been told. He was with her unfailingly that day and it was only now, years later, that she realized how much she owed him for that.

  But the face she recalled best was Ceri’s. Her employer did not look Renia’s way at all while she gave her statement to the Hendynion, but she spoke quietly and steadily, and her words were in support of Renia. Ceri told them how perceptive a child her apprentice was, and that she must have seen some sign of Rhyanna’s fever coming that Ceri herself had missed, for she knew that Renia would never harm a child. She confessed now that her reaction to Renia’s prediction had been a hasty judgement, born of fear for her child when she fell ill so suddenly. The signs had been there, Renia had seen them and Ceri had not; she had been thoughtless and wrong to say otherwise.

  Ceri saved her that day, beyond question; there were others in the village who would have pursued the matter, but Ceri was the one who had started the outcry and with her retraction there was no case to answer. So the Hendynion pronounced, and Renia was free to go. Ceri had looked as relieved as Renia at the verdict, and filed out of the hall with everyone else.

  Outside, Ceri’s sister was waiting. Her son Dailo scowled at them from behind her and little Rhyanna squirmed in her arms, eager to get back to her mother. Ceri gathered up her daughter and turned just as Renia and Melor passed by. That was when she finally glanced at Renia.

  There had been no signs of fever on the day Renia had warned her about Rhyanna’s illness. The look said Ceri knew that; and whatever reason she’d had for helping Renia out of trouble, she still believed that when she warned her, Renia had seen into the future.

  After that Renia had kept away from the village. It was the only way Vel and Melor could carry on anything resembling normal life. She lived like a recluse now, avoiding people where she could and rarely venturing far from Melor’s house. She had abandoned training to be a seamstress, much to Ceri’s relief; she was not a bad woman, but like much of the village Ceri believed in evil spirits and would never again be comfortable in Renia’s presence, thinking her a gwrach. And while most who thought like Ceri wanted only to be left alone by Renia, there were others who felt she needed ‘attending to’. The majority contented themselves with remarks and sly comments, but a few hinted they were prepared to go further.

  Eventually the remarks ended Vel’s apprenticeship too; someone repeated them once too often at the blacksmith’s, and the smith reluctantly decided that, talented though Vel was, an angry forge hand with a white-hot piece of metal and a hammer in his hands would not be good for business. Melor’s resp
onse was to say nothing, increase the size of his flock of sheep and start a herd of goats. Vel was promptly taken on on full-time as his assistant.

  There was more than enough work to be done on the farm so Renia threw herself into those jobs that Melor and Vel left her. She also studied herbs and healing; Melor bought her old books – she had learnt to read and write early, at his insistence – and she absorbed from them and experimented. More talk from the village over that, of course, but she was beyond caring, so long as they left her alone.

  oOo

  Melor came back early from the fields, bringing only two ewes ready to drop their lambs. Renia had done her tasks around the house by then, thinking he would need help; now she had some unexpected freedom. She decided to venture as far as the woods to collect herbs – mostly for cooking, but some for her medicinal experiments. The wood was a treasure trove; but it was also the main haunt of the older village boys in their free hours. Still, it was the middle of the day and she could take a route that would help her avoid them.

  Much of what she wanted was to be found in the dappled shade, where the trees sloped down into a flat stretch near the stream, and that was where she headed. Wild ramsons covered the approach to the water, their pungent garlic smell calling to the hungry. She filled most of her basket with them; she also broke off a few strips of bark from the willows beside the stream and tucked those in too – a pain-relief staple for many healers, but one of her books contained a method of concentrating the tincture to make it more effective, and Renia wanted to try it out.

  The low, early-morning sunlight glanced off the stream as she waded through it, looking for early herbs in the ground beyond. She had taken several steps further when she noticed that sparkling lights still remained, dancing in the corners of her eyes. It was not the sunlight on the stream she was seeing but ‘the fairies’, the glittering that denoted the onset of a fit. She sat down quickly and waited nervously for it to arrive, remembering how when she was little, she had truly believed there were fairies who danced there, at the edge of her vision, about to take her somewhere no one else could go…