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be no end to the burdens weighing upon his soul? Would he never cease causing them? If he hadn’t in all the eons he’d been thus cursed, it didn’t bode well.
    Standing on the threshold, he examined the double teakwood doors. He distinctly remembered leaving them ajar when he went to the strand to assess the storm. He’d worried about that. Could the wind have closed them? Not likely. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he’d closed them after all. He’d been out of sorts over the incident with Muriel at the time. He entered with a shrug. He was alone on the Dark Isle. It must have been the wind.
    The moment he crossed the threshold and closed the doors behind him, Gideon felt a tremor in the atmosphere. Something was…different…out of balance. Both his sensory and extrasensory perceptions flagged caution, yet everything seemed as it should be, as he prowled through the chambers. The musical sound of the waterfall called to him, and he followed it to the pool. The rippling breast of the water looked inviting. It beckoned like sultry black satin in the misty semidarkness, but he was too exhausted to take up the invitation. Exhaustion always heightened arousal, and he was too tormented to go through that again now.
    Something under his feet nearly tripped him up as he was turning to go. Bending, he snatched up what looked like a pile of rags. At closer inspection, he saw that it was some sort of women’s shift. Giving a start, Gideon glanced about but saw nothing. His night vision was infallible, still he strode back through the corridor and snatched the torch from its bracket. Holding it high, he returned to the pool, his narrowed eyes snapping around the perimeter. Nothing untoward met them, only the waterfall, and the pool of satiny black water, with steam from the mineral spring ghosting over the surface.
    Gideon raised the torn garment to his nose and breathed in deeply. It smelled of sweet clover, and he stood for a long moment, staring into the pool, as if he expected its owner to rise up out of the water. But she did not, and he strode back the way he’d come, taking the shift with him.
    Storming into one chamber after another, he searched every one and found them empty. But someone had been there—a woman. He wasn’t alone on the island. He had left the door ajar, and she must have entered. But who was she? Where did she come from, and where was she now? Could she be a refugee from the storm? She must be.
    Bolting out into the bleak semidarkness, Gideon took flight. There wasn’t much shelter aside from the cave on the Dark Isle. Nothing but rubble too shallow to conceal anyone remained of his original keep after the watchers demolished it eons ago. The petrified forest that hemmed the strand offered the only place someone might hide, and he made a pass over it heading for the strand, for he had decided to start from there.
    The black volcanic sand at the water’s edge was littered with wreckage, none of it human, though he flew the length of it and back before combing the forest itself. But there was no sign that anyone had been there. The evening tide had come in and foreshortened the beach, obliterating any footprints that might have been amongst the assorted debris.
    It was full dark when he abandoned the search. Nothing living moved on the Isle of Darkness. Aside from the sighing, crashing thunder of the waves beating upon the shoreline, all was still. Perplexed, Gideon returned to the cave. He would search again in the morning. If there was someone abroad on the isle, they could go nowhere without a vessel, and he threw the bolt on the double doors, made another search of the rooms without success, and went to his sleeping chamber.
    Unfurling what was left of the shift, he examined it in the light of a rush candle in its hanging bracket beside his sleeping alcove. Whomever it belonged to was small in stature, and slender, young as well, for it was of a style worn by maidens. He raised it to his nose again