The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

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The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 3

by Deborah J. Lightfoot


  “Concentrate!” Megella snapped at him. “You knew it would hurt. But are you drawing strength from it? Do you feel anything except the pain?”

  Verek took one more step, as if to catch his balance. Then he rocked back on one leg and stood with his eyes closed, and his hands grew still. Slowly, he nodded.

  “Yes. It is here. The flow of power … a trickle … but enough, I think. Give me a moment …”

  Carin set the jug on the table, and they all stood quietly. The girl watched the wysard, and Megella studied them both.

  She has grown up, Meg thought. Just a girl when she left here … a woman now. And more than a woman. A sorcerer’s apprentice. My widgeon has discovered where she belongs.

  Verek opened his eyes. Carin went to him. To Megella’s astonishment then, the girl held out her cupped hands.

  “No!” Meg exclaimed before she could stop herself. “Surely not!”

  “It’s all right,” Carin said over her shoulder, not glancing round. “I’ve been dunked in wizards’ waters twice now. It hurts like nobody’s business, but I’m almost getting used to it.”

  Will wonders not cease? Meg thought, gaping at the pair. A wysard who willingly shares the source of his powers? A novice who does not balk at the pain? But maybe … Maybe this strange foundling is not a novice.

  Verek held his cupped hands over Carin’s and let the glob drop. She yelped as it hit her palms.

  “Sweet mercy,” she muttered. But then the girl grew still and, like her wysard, closed her eyes, looking inward.

  After a moment, Carin nodded. “I feel it too. And I hear it. Like seashells on strings, a breeze blowing through them, chiming in the wind.”

  Verek glanced at Megella. “Water-sylph,” he whispered, as if that explained everything.

  When Carin had held the glob as long as Verek had, she opened her eyes, stepped to the table, and dropped the gobbet of magic into the jug’s open neck. Verek put the cork in, and the two of them stood blowing into their hands, looking at each other.

  “Ready?” Theil asked when they’d thawed their palms.

  Carin nodded. “Let’s go the back way. I used to sneak by all the time to visit Megella. I can get us right to Crowter’s shop door with no one seeing us. Into the house, too, in case Brin isn’t with her father. But we should put the spell of forgetfulness on the wright first. He’s a much bigger talker than Brin is. She can keep a secret—she kept mine for years.”

  The girl looked at Megella and smiled. “Do you need anything from town? I’m a good thief—I got plenty of practice, those five months walking to Ruain after you sent me off. It was steal or starve, and I did not wish to starve.”

  Meg paused, considering. Then she nodded.

  “Yes, widgeon, thank you for asking. I would love a smoked ham.”

  Carin laughed. Even Verek smiled—something the wysard did not do readily, Megella suspected.

  Meg walked with them as far as the cowshed. Her cottage was much too small to accommodate guests. She had never housed overnight guests in her life, in fact. If these two wanted a roof over their heads tonight, they would have to sleep in the shed.

  Megella stood watching them go by the back way—Carin’s secret route to her old master’s shop. Briefly she wondered whether to make up two pallet-beds in the straw.

  But just before her visitors disappeared into the stand of trees along the creek, they came together tightly, their arms around each other, locked in a kiss that was so fervid and lasted so long, Megella almost shouted at them to get a move on. At last they broke apart and continued on their way, hand-in-hand.

  “One bed it is,” Megella muttered to Quandy, her milk cow. She smiled, satisfied.

  * * *

  The girl and her wysard were back in an hour. Verek carried the hind leg of a hog on his shoulder.

  “Well done, my ducks,” Megella said. She handed each a bowl of rabbit stew. “I’ve not had ham in years. The villagers sometimes pay me in meat”—she indicated the rabbit—“but they always seem to save the best for their own tables. We’ll feast on the pork tomorrow. You must help me consume the evidence before anyone comes and exposes the crime.”

  Her guests only nodded. Both were busy devouring the stew.

  “It would seem,” Megella commented, watching them, “that you have been rather underfed of late. Why don’t you tell me your story? I know only that you set out to confront the necromancer of the West. Obviously, you lived through it. But what became of you then? Myra, you remember, could tell me only that the boy, Lanse, returned to Ruain without you. Of your further travels, she knew nothing.”

  Carin did not reply until she’d finished the last of her stew. As the girl accepted a mug of Megella’s homebrew, she glanced at the wysard. He was still eating enthusiastically, like a man who appreciated food and had not been happy with the pickings lately.

  “It’s a long story,” Carin finally said. “I haven’t even had a chance to tell all of it to Lord Verek yet.”

  “Tell us both together, then,” Megella said, “and you will not have to repeat the tale. Now’s the time.”

  It’s high time, too, she thought, that you were calling your lover by his intimate name. Is this a case of old habits being hard to break?

  “All right,” Carin said. “Let me think where to begin.” The girl paused, leaning back in her chair. “I told you that a dragon swallowed Morann. Afterward, we had to get out of there fast. She had … things up in those mountains that weren’t, uh, well-disposed toward us. We separated. Lord Verek took all the magic charms that Morann had been saving up. I got the five little ones she had actually used. It took me a while—Myra said I was gone more than a year—but I dropped off the charms where they needed to be, where they couldn’t cause any more damage. Then I worked my way back to Ruain.”

  Carin glanced at the wysard, and Megella followed her gaze. Verek was sipping a mug of homebrew now and listening, looking at the girl. Something that might have been a smile played over his lips, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

  “I expected to find Lord Verek there when I got to Ruain,” Carin went on. “But Myra hadn’t seen him. Lanse had already been there and ridden off again, Myra didn’t know where, looking for his master.” Carin reached her hand to Verek, and he took it. He held it tightly.

  Good, Megella thought. Still a bit shy, these two. Their love is young. Or perhaps it’s their lovemaking that is new. Watching the pair, she had to wonder: Had they been denying the obvious, suppressing their feelings for each other for quite some time before they finally enjoyed their first kiss? What willpower, she thought. No yielding to the heart until the enemy is slain, the quest is over, the goal reached … if, indeed, the objective has, as yet, been fully attained.

  “I had an idea of where Lord Verek might have gone,” Carin was saying, bringing Meg’s attention back to her story. “We each had a little crystal dolphin—”

  “A dolphyn?” Megella interrupted sharply.

  Verek eyed her. “Do you find that significant?”

  “Perhaps … yes, I think so.” Meg shrugged. “But one story at a time. It’s Carin’s we will hear first.”

  “All right.” Verek nodded. “Though I suspect she is omitting more than she’s revealing, we must let her continue the tale in her own way.”

  He leaned in and kissed Carin on the side of her neck. The girl had a moment’s trouble, then, picking up the threads. Meg could see Carin’s thoughts scatter to the four winds. But the girl got a grip on herself—mostly by gripping the hand of her wysard ever more tightly—and resumed her story.

  “Like I was saying, we each had a dolphin. I used mine to take me to Ruain after I’d returned the last of Morann’s talismans to their proper places. But when I didn’t find Lord Verek there in his manor house, I guessed that his crystal must have pulled him to my old home.”

  “And you followed him there?” Meg asked.

  “Yes, right away.”

  Looking either excited or
agitated—Meg wasn’t sure which—Carin rushed on:

  “Megella, I finally figured it out. I was born in a place called Earth. In some ways, it’s like Ladrehdin. But when I was a child on Earth, I lived by the ocean. My home was an island, Lord Verek thinks.” She glanced at him. “He was there long enough to explore it before I came to get him. And any direction he went, he found the sea. Nobody else was there. Just a few empty houses scattered around.”

  “And boats,” Verek put in. “Several beached boats.”

  Carin nodded. “It was strange. My house—where I had a bedroom when I was a girl—felt like it had been abandoned. It was full of furniture and books, with paintings on the walls and clothes in the closets. But no one was there. We think something happened to the people. The land looked deserted. And Lord Verek found a few bodies that hadn’t been properly buried.” She squeezed his hand again. “A catastrophe … that’s what the signs seemed to point to.”

  “War, I thought at first,” Verek said. “Except I saw no destruction, no walls toppled, no evidence of fire. The houses were intact but in a state of neglect.”

  “I found Lord Verek making oyster stew,” Carin added. “He’d been eating whatever he could catch—a few birds, but mostly fish.”

  “And thoroughly tired of fish I was by then, I can tell you.” Verek sighed. “When Carin appeared out of nowhere and called my name, I felt certain I was dreaming—or dead, or demented.” He brought the girl’s hand to his lips and kissed the back of it, an act that seemed to quite rob her of further powers of speech. “But I soon discovered she was truly standing there, flesh and blood. And she’d come for me. Carin had come to rescue me.”

  The pair had eyes only for each other now. Megella cleared her throat.

  “Nephew, am I to understand that you were incapable of rescuing yourself, during your time on that island? You had no magic left?”

  “None at all,” Verek replied. With obvious difficulty, he tore his gaze from the girl’s. “My powers were utterly depleted. I could not summon so much as a flame to a candle. To make my cooking fires, I either rubbed two sticks together or used a sunglass that I found in a desk.” He tilted his head. “It was a humbling few months. I have not been that helpless since I was an infant.”

  Meg pursed her lips. “Then the magic that brought you here…”

  “All Carin’s doing,” Verek said. “Or done, at least, at her instigation. She promised to take me home to Ruain. But instead, we splashed into a southern millpond.” He smiled, rather crookedly.

  “Your presence here is an accident?” Megella asked, and frowned.

  Verek shrugged. “Possibly. We are not certain why the crystals delivered us to the millpond of Granger rather than the wysards’ waters of Ruain. This is strange magic. With it, we feel our way carefully.”

  “The crystals are balky,” Carin added, getting her voice back. “At times, they do what we ask them to. But then without warning, they’ll give us a result we don’t expect.”

  The girl moved her free hand toward the front of her shirt, then away, as if she’d thought better of touching the pendant that Megella could just make out through the linen of her garment.

  “In any event,” Carin went on, “we’re here. When I realized the dolphins had dunked us into Granger’s millpond instead of taking us home, I wasn’t about to leave without seeing you, Meg.” The girl let go of Verek’s hand, stood, and rounded the table to give Megella another hug. “When I left here so long ago, I never expected to see you again.”

  “Nor I, you,” Megella muttered. She held the girl and stroked Carin’s long, thick hair. “But what now, widgeon? Have you and your wysard set your path?”

  Carin stepped back and glanced at Verek. “We’re heading North, of course—to where we both belong.”

  Chapter 2

  The Wrong Place

  Carin almost blackened the breakfast toast. She was absorbed in watching Verek slice the ham and Megella fry eggs. This was a moment she wanted to hang on to as long as she could.

  Did I do this? Carin wondered. Did the dolphins bring us here because I wanted to be with the two people I love most in all of existence? She hadn’t consciously elected to return to Granger and see Megella, but maybe she’d wanted it badly enough, deep inside, to influence the magic of the crystals. It would have been best for Theil Verek, though, if the dolphins had taken him straight to Ruain.

  Verek’s smooth, crow-black hair was slipping out of the leather lace with which he’d tied it back. He tossed his hair out of his eyes, caught Carin studying him, and smiled. Her wysard smiled much more often these days, especially when they were alone together.

  The smell of burning bread brought Carin’s head around. And as she flipped the toast off the fire she glimpsed, from the corner of her eye, the jug of liquid glass that peeked out from under Megella’s bed. She shook her head.

  He can’t settle for one small jug of the stuff when there’s endless magic awaiting him in Ruain. We must get back there before he loses it all, Carin thought, remembering Morann’s threat:

  “Only a fool would leave undefended a place of power that is unrivaled in this world,” the necromancer had said. ”Do you think other wysards do not know what a vastness of magic flows in Ruain’s waters and caverns? Do you think none would take that stronghold from you, given their chance?”

  Morann had wanted to take it for herself. But Carin had summoned the Jabberwock of the Looking-Glass book, and the dragon had quickly and bloodlessly ended Morann’s lust for power.

  Before she disappeared down the Jabberwock’s gullet, however, the sorceress had raised the question: “Who guards your property and your interests in your absence? Jerold?”

  Not anymore. Jerold was dead. The old wizard had passed on during Carin’s interval of world-hopping. She’d returned to Ruain just long enough to hear of his death and to see the evidence for herself—the overgrown, untended garden at Verek’s manor house. That garden had been Jerold’s life purpose, his reason for persevering despite a lifetime of disappointments—in himself, in his old master Legary, and in Theil Verek, the current Lord of Ruain.

  But you’d be proud of him now, Jerold, Carin thought as she plated the toast and went back to watching Verek serve the ham. He’s laid his demons to rest. Ruain’s woods can breathe again, the flowers can bloom in them again, and the creeks can bubble up and flow into the lake the way they used to.

  She glanced through the cottage’s open door at a pure white cloud in the sky that, for a moment, looked like a water-lily blossom. Jerold, she half thought and half prayed, if you see Alesia and Aidan out there in the afterlife, tell them, won’t you? Tell them he’s happy now. Let them know I’ll take good care of him.

  “Megella,” Carin said when breakfast was on the table and they sat to eat it, “did you and your sister ever think about going back to Ruain after Morann had cleared out of there? Wouldn’t Merriam have wanted to meet her grandson?”

  The wisewoman nodded. “We talked of it. But Merri was still furious at Legary, furious to the point of hating him. She blamed him for Hugh’s death. ‘My husband is as guilty as that ghoul is,’ Merri would say. ‘Guiltier. Our boy would have had nothing to do with that necromancer if Legary hadn’t forced him to wed the creature.’”

  Carin glanced at Verek. His attention was on his plate, and his face wore a guarded expression. But she could guess his thoughts without seeing behind his carefully constructed mask. The wysard had revealed his feelings about his mother when he’d led Carin to the necromancer’s eyrie and asked her to kill Morann for him.

  “Of course Merri wanted to see her grandson,” Megella added, reclaiming Carin’s attention. “Myra’s occasional reports, as Theil grew up, greatly eased my sister’s mind, but she would have liked to test the boy’s mettle herself.” Meg shrugged and reached for another slice of ham. “The years went by, as they tend to do, and we stayed in the south. I cannot tell you all of the reasons why Merriam chose not to return. I can s
peak only for myself. I had come to believe that Legary had been looking in the wrong place for rejuvenated magic and gifted apprentices. If they were to be found on Ladrehdin at all, I thought they might be found here in the south.”

  “What do you mean, Aunt?” Verek asked, looking up from his plate and gazing intently at his only living relative. “How could you hope to find magic in the south? These people have been at great pains to stamp out any trace of the gift among their children.”

  “True,” Megella said with a half nod, half shrug. “But the plains are wide and the settlements are scattered. I thought pockets of the power might survive in the South, just as they have in the North. I was inclined to remain here and keep an eye out for promising candidates.”

  The wisewoman paused, then asked, “Just how much news have you had from the south in recent years, nephew of mine?”

  Verek frowned, and shook his head. “Very little. The stories I heard growing up convinced me that I wanted nothing to do with the south. I had no reason to concern myself with plains-dwellers.”

  He reached to take Carin’s hand. Every nerve in her body responded to his rough, strong fingers. A sensation that was equal parts tingling and searing flooded through her. This kind of hunger, breakfast would not satisfy. She returned her last bite of ham to her plate and sat there almost quivering, her nerves afire.

  Verek was still speaking to Megella. With difficulty, Carin refocused on their conversation.

  “When this traveler from a far country reached Ruain and told me she had come up from the south, I nearly killed her on the spot, such was my distrust. What were you thinking, aunt of mine? Did it never occur to you to send me a message beforehand, to let me know you had found a gifted apprentice for the House of Verek?” He tilted his head half accusingly. “It was a close thing, I tell you. I had my blade at her throat.”

  Megella waved away his reproofs. “I had no way to tell you of her coming. As I have said, my link with Myra is infrequent and unreliable. And anyway,” the wisewoman added, pouring them all a second cup of strong tea, “the girl herself was my message. I trusted you to be wysard enough to know what you were looking at. How could she even be there in Ruain if she didn’t belong there? Unless things are much changed since I lived in that land, no one gets past its borders if they have no business in that place.”

 

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