Shade & Sorceress (The Last Days of Tian Di, #1)(3)
“You’ve been expecting us,” she said, her voice high and melodic.
He shook his head.
“You know that we have been looking for you for many years,” said Aysu, and she laid a hand on his shoulder. “It is very lucky for you, your daughter, and all your kind that we have found you.”
Rom didn’t answer, but he flinched slightly at her touch.
“You may think you are protecting your daughter,” said the Mancer. “But you are leaving her open to great danger, along with all of Di Shang. The Crossing is unguarded still. You know this.”
“She is not what you think,” said Rom hoarsely. “She doesn’t have her mother’s gift.”
Obrad lost patience and stepped forward. “This is unheard of! We have come for her and we will not leave this place without her. Will you tell us where she is?”
Again, Rom uttered simply, through clenched teeth, “No.”
“Then we will find her ourselves,” said Obrad.
~
On maps of the archipelago Holburg looked like an upside-down comma. The cliffs in the south were the thickest part of the comma, a long broad wedge of land surging high up out of the sea. The northern part of the island was lower ground, a sliver that stretched out around the bright harbour. Holburg was one of the smallest of the inhabited islands in the archipelago, and its only town was Holburg Town. The island was thickly wooded in the north and also riddled with caves from the war. The citizens of the island had prepared themselves for a possible attack by creating these underground warrens in which to hide. The attack never came; now the caves were mainly used by children, who dared one another to go deeper into the tunnels, and young lovers who wanted to hide from prying eyes. Given the danger of a collapse, entering the caves was strictly forbidden, which naturally made them all the more appealing to the island children. Nell and Eliza knew every inch of this underground world and could find their way from one end of the island to the other through the maze of narrow passages and dark, low rooms hacked out of the ground. The southernmost opening was near the cliffs, beneath a rocky outcrop. As they climbed into the cool, dark tunnel, feeling instantly the relief of the shade, Eliza whispered, “I didnay bring a flashlight.” They always whispered in the caves.
“Neither did I,” Nell whispered back. “I thought we were just swimming today. Lah, if there’s something really going on, maybe nobody will notice we were nay at school and we’ll nay get in trouble.”
At a brisk pace it was half an hour to Sunset Hill on the south side of the harbour, overlooking the town. Going through the caves in total darkness, it took rather longer. They felt their way along the walls, whispering theories about what was going on, how they might have to rescue Roje Gerombe, Nell’s latest crush, and whether or not they would try to save Mentor Frist’s life if he ended up in mortal danger. Eliza felt they should, but Nell was undecided.
Eliza and Nell had been inseparable ever since Eliza and her father had come to the island three years ago. Each girl secretly longed to be more like the other, and a friendship between them sprang up immediately and naturally. Nell was pretty and self-assured, with chestnut hair that fell arrow-straight down her back, large violet eyes and a smooth, honey-coloured complexion. She was the picture of enchanting innocence, though most on Holburg knew better by now. She had lived in the same house on the island since she was born, with a father and a mother and a great crowd of noisy brothers. Eliza loved nothing more than to have supper at Nell’s house, pretending to be a part of this boisterous family, even as she felt a twinge of guilt for leaving her father to eat his supper alone.
As Nell saw it, her own life was painfully dull compared to Eliza’s. Eliza had traveled all over Di Shang, and even better, her father was Sorma, which Nell found so incredibly glamorous that she could hardly speak around him. The Sorma were nomadic desert people, reputed to be great healers and good with animals. Eliza and her father had not lived with the Sorma since Eliza’s infancy, however. Rom Tok said it was because he didn’t like the desert, but Nell and Eliza had come up with various other theories, the most convincing of which was that because Eliza’s mother had not been Sorma her father had been cast out of the tribe. If there was anyone who fascinated Nell even more than Eliza’s father, it was Eliza’s mother. First of all, she was dead, which in Nell’s opinion made her infinitely more interesting than anybody living. Second, they knew next to nothing about her and so were free to make up whatever they chose. Eliza barely remembered her mother, who had died of pneumonia when Eliza was just two years old. She had only one photograph of her. It was her most prized possession and she had showed it to Nell many times. In the photograph a red-haired woman with hazel-green eyes and a narrow face stared at the camera as if she’d just been asked an unexpected question.
For as long as Eliza could remember, she and her father had moved from place to place, never staying put for long. He had been a veterinarian in various bleak, far-flung towns, mostly indistinguishable from one another, a rancher for one sun-scorched year in the plains of Huir-Kosta, and a trapper for many months in the snowy, inhospitable Karbek Mountains. The closest they had lived to the desert was in the town of Quan, on the outskirts of the Great Sand Sea, where he had trained horses for a season.
Eliza was nine years old when they first came to Holburg. She was much darker than the island children, and her features were rather too severe for a child, with a pointed chin and a sharp little beak of a nose, big black eyes and heavy eyebrows. She was small for her age, all sharp elbows and knees, with hair that would neither lie down flat nor curl nicely, but whose disorderly tendrils sprouted from her head in total defiance of both fashion and gravity. She had a big crooked smile just like her father’s, but she was accustomed to solitude and wary of strangers and so she struck the islanders at first as a prickly, unfriendly little girl. In all those years moving from one isolated, sparsely populated place to another, she had never made close friends among the children her age who ran about, dirty and rough, in little bands. She had never grown attached to any place, because she knew her father was a nomad at heart and they would not stay long.