Lord of the Isles Read Online Free PDF

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.

5
    G arric returned to the inn at early evening with the shovel on his shoulder. The stars were barely visible in the east; an early day for a field laborer, but Getha had insisted he’d done as much as two men already and paid him in full.
    Getha was a widow with her eldest son only ten. The family could handle most of the farm’s chores, but grubbing the drainage ditches meant levering up rocks that might turn out to be the size of a sheep. Getha and the children had helped as they could, but Garric had indeed done more than a man’s work.
    Chickens clucked peevishly as Garric walked across the courtyard to the stables. For the most part the hens fended
for themselves, but Lora tossed a handful of grain into the yard at evening to train the fowl to come where they could be caught and killed at need. Oats spilled when horses were fed in the stable served the same purpose, but there were no guests at the inn at present and no coach in as long as Garric could remember.
    Garric hung the shovel on its pegs against the sidewall. The tool was shaped from close-grained hickory but the biting edge of the blade had a shoe of iron. Garric felt the metal critically. It was worn to the wood at one corner and should be replaced the next time a tinker made his rounds through the hamlet.
    He heard water slosh and stepped out of the stables. His father was pouring a bucket into the stone wash trough beside the well in the center of the courtyard.
    â€œI saw you come in,” Reise said. “You took care of the widow?”
    â€œYes, sir,” Garric said. “She’d let the ditches go too long, so the storm made the lower field a bog. I think we drained it soon enough that her oats’ll come through all right.”
    He plunged his arms to the elbows in cold water and rubbed his hands together. He had the good tiredness of a task that worked all the muscles and had been accomplished fully. He’d been bragging, really, with the amount of work he could do in front of a woman and her four children. The last boulder Garric moved would likely have broken bones if he’d let it roll back from the top of the ditch—and that had almost happened.
    Reise handed Garric a loofah to scrub himself with. The gourd’s dried interior was harsh on skin that wasn’t armored with callus.
    â€œThe woman you found is going to be all right, Sharina says,” Reise said. “I suppose the hermit told her. Her robe is silk. I don’t recognize the cut, but it’s of higher quality than this inn has ever seen before.”
    He paused, then went on, “Why did you ask about Yole, Garric?”

    Garric looked at his father. It would have been hard to describe Reise or-Laver in any fashion that didn’t make him sound average, but for all that he stood out in Barca’s Hamlet like silver plates in a cowshed. Reise was the same height as most of his neighbors. He wasn’t slender, not really, but beside him local men looked somehow rugged. Compared with them his hair had been a paler brown before it went gray, his face was slightly foxlike instead of a rectangle with a strong chin, and the sun turned his cheeks rosy instead of deep tan.
    Reise had lived in Barca’s Hamlet for seventeen years, and in Haft’s capital, Carcosa, for six before that. The locals still referred to him as “the foreigner from Ornifal” when they spoke among themselves.
    â€œWell, she thought that’s where she was,” Garric said. “At least that’s what I heard.”
    Reise shook