Finder's Shore by Anna Mackenzie Page B

needn’t be this way.” She tops up our cups. “And what of you, Ronan? How do you come to be in Vidya, if it’s Ister you’re from?”
    Though he’s taken little part in the conversation till now, he answers easily. That Ronan and Merryn will get along is plain to see.
    “I don’t know what happened to the others who left,” he finishes. “We went to Banon and Tay trying to find them, but both islands had been abandoned.”
    Merryn nods slowly. “I’d heard about Tay.” She frowns. “How did you come to meet Ness?” 
    “ Explorer found us adrift and took me to Vidya.” He shrugs. “I didn’t much care. I … by then it was only me left.”
    Merryn reaches across the table to grip his hand. “Life offers us hard things to cope with,” she says, and I think of her own family, her daughter dead before she was yet a year old and her husband taken by the wasting sickness two winters later. “Dunnett is no easy place to come to, Ronan of Ister, but you’re welcome at my hearth.” She turns to include me in her question. “What do you plan from here?”
    I’m thinking of a way to answer, or at least to begin asking the things we need to know, when a battering at the door stills us all in our seats.

CHAPTER 10
    Merryn is first to react. Standing abruptly she whisks our mugs into a cupboard and upends a basket of lichens on the table. With a tilt of her head she directs us towards the door at the far side of the kitchen. Ronan reaches for our pack and, as the banging comes again, pulls the door closed behind us.
    “Malky!” I hear Merryn say. “What brings you this way? Not one of your youngsters, I hope? They’re all well?”
    I hear the voice of my one-time neighbour, Malky Shehan, low and gruff. “There’s trouble in the making Merryn, but not of that kind. I saw Ton on the road. He was on his way here and I offered to come in his stead — I know you and he don’t see eye to eye.”
    “Come in, Malky. The kettle won’t take long to boil,” Merryn says.
    “I’ve disturbed you in the middle of something.” We hear the scrape of a chair. “I’d begun to think you weren’t in.” There’s the hint of a question — surely not suspicion — in his voice. The Shehans have always been friends toMerryn — and to me, though whether that still holds true I’d rather not put to the test.
    “I’m slower from my chair than I used to be. My knee’s troubling me a little.”
    “Jannie mentioned it had been bad this past winter. Arthritis, she said.”
    “It seems so.”
    I frown at this information. Merryn was my refuge from the storms of my childhood. It pains me to think of her ageing.
    Water runs and there’s the familiar clank as the kettle is set on the hob. Merryn. My eyes drift around the room: the bed with its quilt sewn in cross-hatched red and gold, cupboard carved along its edge with a tracery of flowers, shawl of moss green tossed across the room’s only chair.
    “Let me clear you a space,” Merryn says. “I’m sorting lichens. Some are better for dyes than others. This one — it’s rare enough — I save for my tonics. Young Ellen had it in the medicine I made up for her when she suffered with croup last winter.”
    The reminder of the help Merryn’s given the Shehans over the years is intentional, I’m sure.
    Malky clears his throat. “There’s been a report of strangers in the woods near Leewood,” he says, his voice sounding hollow through the wall.
    “Near Leewood?” Merryn’s tone is disbelieving. “I can’t think what Colm could have to gain from further discrediting Marn.”
    “Merryn, you do yourself no favours with such talk.” 
    “This is my house, Malky. I believe I’ve a right here to say what I think.”
    A chair scrapes. “I don’t mean to argue with you: you know my views. But Ton seemed in a mood that spelled trouble and I thought it best to let you know.”
    “And I thank you for that consideration, but I don’t credit a tale carried from