4

Ilna 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 adventurous said that the youth who returned with two children was a different man—and less of one. Kenset had left searching for something; but after he returned the only place he looked was the bottom of a mug of hard cider. He borrowed money from his brother against the mill's earnings; and borrowed more money. He didn't pay much attention to anyone, least of all his children; and nobody paid much attention to him.

Kenset died when Ilna and Cashel were seven, not of drink but from the cold of the winter night as he lay drunk in a ditch a few miles from the hamlet. There was nothing left of Kenset's inheritance save an undivided half-interest in the millhouse itself.

The children's grandmother had raised them while she lived. When she died in her sleep two years after her elder son, Ilna took charge of her twin brother and herself. Cashel did jobs that required his growing strength, and he watched sheep; he'd become chief shepherd for most of the farmers in the borough. Ilna wove with such speed and skill that by now a dozen of the local housewives brought the yarn they spun to her rather than weaving the finished cloth themselves.

And Ilna kept house. She took cold pride in the fact that when Katchin finally married—bought a wife, more like—everyone in Barca's Hamlet could contrast the spotless cleanliness in which Cashel and Ilna lived with the monied squalor of the other half of the millhouse.

In the early years charity for the orphans had been increased by the fact that nobody cared for their uncle. Ilna had seen to it that every kind act was repaid with interest as soon as she and Cashel could.

Katchin had become bailiff, responsible for Count Lascarg's interests in the borough, because he couldn't get respect from his neighbors any other way. The office hadn't changed anything. Katchin the Miller was by far the wealthiest and most successful man in the community. His ancestors had lived in Barca's Hamlet for ten generations. For all that, drunken Sil the Stutterer got warmer greetings from those who met him on Midwinter's Day than Katchin did.

Cashel or-Kenset had grown into the strongest man most people had ever seen. His sister was so petite she could pass for half her eighteen years if she hid her eyes from the person guessing. But if you asked locals who the hardest person in the hamlet was, there wasn't a soul but would have named Ilna. She knew that, and because it was true she told herself that it didn't matter.

Her sister-in-law was screaming at her two-year-old again; Fedra was no better a mother than she was a housewife, and she'd never lose the weight she'd gained during pregnancy, either. Ilna smiled coldly. She understood revenge as well as she understood duty. Sometimes the best way to pay someone back was to let nature do it for you.

Ilna had fabric in the loom on her doorstep and no reason to bother with the robe until it was time to turn it and reposition the shade. The cloth kept drawing her eyes nonetheless. Cautiously, almost as if she were reaching toward a cat in pain, Ilna stroked the fabric again.

She'd seen silk before, though mostly as trim to the garments of wealthy drovers; there weren't to her knowledge three silken garments in Barca's Hamlet, and those were sheer, very different from this heavy brocade. But that wasn't what fascinated her about the robe.

Fabric spoke in images to Ilna, when she handled it and especially if she slept in it. For the most part wool was placid in a way that she found calming; Ilna's own personality had a birdlike jumpiness very different from that of a sheep. Still—she'd only worn once the shift she'd been given by a grieving mother, though she'd never told the giver why her daughter took the poison or who the child's father would have been. There had been other visions as clear and certain, and as impossible to describe to others as the sunrise is to a blind man.

The castaway's robe was different in another way. The scenes that shimmered through Ilna's mind as she touched the patterned weave were too brief to leave tracks in her memory, but they weren't disturbing in a normal sense.

The trouble was that when Ilna touched the fabric, she was absolutely certain that it didn't belong in this world.