“Tah! It’s only the colors that make it seem so light and delicate—like a bird,” Megella said. “It reminds me of the woodpeckers I saw in Ruain when I lived with your grandparents all those years ago. Those birds were green and yellow with bright red heads.”
Verek’s face brightened. “Now that you mention it, I remember seeing those woodpeckers when I was a child rambling among the trees.”
He turned to his aunt. “Will you permit me to do the horse-trading for all of us? You may have an eye for a wagon, but I know horses.”
The wisewoman nodded.
“Here,” she said, emptying her little purse into Verek’s hand. “Take it,” Meg insisted as he tried to refuse. “Use it. It will not be enough, but mix the local silver with that foreign gold of yours and you will draw less attention to yourself. We are spending enough in this town to start people’s tongues wagging, and I would rather we not attract too large a following once we’re on the road. Though I do not doubt that one or two cutthroats will slink along our trail, seeking their first opportunity to relieve you of the rest of your gold.”
An hour and a half later, two sturdy cobs—spirited little horses, but mindfully steady in the traces—were hitched to Megella’s painted wagon. And Verek was mounted on a fine-looking silver-dapple gelding. He seemed relieved to see the world from horseback again instead of plodding along at the leisurely pace of a cud-chewing cow named Quandy.
“Where’s my horse?” Carin had greeted him when he’d walked up leading the three beasts. “Don’t I get to ride?”
“Of course you do, fìleen,” he’d replied. “You’re riding with Megella in the wagon.”
“In that? No! You’re not serious,” she’d exclaimed.
“I am perfectly serious. Handling a bow horseback is quite different from having your feet firmly under you when you shoot. I want you where you can square your stance, either in the bed of the wagon or on the ground and shielded by its panels. Do not argue, fìleen. Look upon this as a chance to gain a new skill. Aunt Megella says she will be happy to teach you to drive the team.”
“It will be my pleasure, widgeon,” Meg called down from the wagon seat. “Hop up and I’ll give you a lesson. These two beasts step lively but they are amiable as sheepdogs, and they know their business. You’ll likely learn more from them than from me.”
And Carin did. Well before the end of their first day on the main road north, she was feeling so confident with the reins that Megella climbed into the wagon bed, arranged her surfeit of shawls and blankets, and fell soundly asleep.
“Since I will be keeping watch tonight,” the wisewoman mumbled before nodding off, “I must get my rest while the sun shines.”
Where the road-width permitted it then, Verek rode beside the wagon and talked to Carin, keeping his voice down while his aunt slept.
“Had you any idea,” he asked, “when you knew Megella before—from your time in Granger—that she and I were related?”
“Of course not,” Carin murmured. “In those days, I didn’t know you existed. I didn’t know Ruain existed. When Megella told me to strike for the north, she never breathed a word about having a great-nephew up that way.” Carin shook her head, remembering. “She didn’t give me a clue about my ultimate destination … where she actually meant me to go. She just said, ‘You’re sure to get somewhere if you walk long enough.’ I’d heard stories about the old forests of the North—ancient, empty places—so I got the idea that I should try to reach them.”
Verek cocked his head. “When did you begin to entertain the possibility that Ruain was your destination, and always had been?”
Carin paused to think, running through the events of her first days and weeks under Verek’s roof.
“It must have been that night when you came to my room and brought me the Looking-Glass book,” she said quietly. “You remember? You told me I had come as far north as I could. And the urge to keep going, the compulsion that had brought me into your woods in the first place …“
Carin glanced back at Megella, the creator of that compulsion. Then she turned again to Verek.
“After your visit, with the book—and a lamp to read it by—that feeling gradually faded.” She grinned. “Though you terrified me, my lord, a little part of me felt like I might belong in that house. I told myself it was on account of your books. I wanted to read every book in your library.”
Verek nodded. He, too, smiled.
“You were somewhat easier to handle after that night—for which I was grateful. In the days that followed, my greatest desire was to hear you read to me from the ‘puzzle-book,’ as Myra was wont to call it. The story held me, but what I most valued was my time with you, hearing your voice, watching your face as you translated the words of that alien book. I think, fìleen, that I fell in love with you somewhere around chapter six.”
Carin twitched the reins so violently that the cobs nearly stumbled off the road.
“Steady!” Verek exclaimed, spurring forward to catch the near horse by its cheek-strap and guide the team on a straighter line. When he’d settled the cobs, he eased back alongside the wagon to check on the driver.
“By the powers, girl!” he almost barked at her, but softly enough to not wake Megella. “What did I say to cause such a reaction? Can you possibly doubt my feelings for you? Did you not realize, at least by the time I left you standing alone and forsaken on Morann’s altar of evil, that I loved you?”
Carin nodded, and ducked her head slightly.
“Actually, I knew it before then. I just wouldn’t let myself admit that I loved you back. That I loved you more than life itself. Somewhere between the first and the fourth worlds that I visited out there”—Carin waved vaguely at the afternoon sky, indicating the whole of existence—“I promised myself that I would find you again, or die trying.”
She shifted on the wagon seat to better study Verek’s face. “You surprised me just now, is all. I wasn’t expecting you to say it aloud. It would have been all right if you never did. Like the saying goes: ‘Actions speak louder than words.’”
He laughed. “And my actions since the night we splashed so unexpectedly into Granger’s millpond—then helped each other strip bare to dry off—have convinced you of my sincerity, have they?”
The mere mention of their first night of naked togetherness flooded Carin with melting, tingling, delicious heat. She wanted to jump down from the wagon, pull Verek off his horse, and fall with him into the tall grass that lined the roadside. She might have done it, too, if they hadn’t, at that very moment, met another wagon.
As the vehicle came rumbling south toward them, Verek spurred ahead, riding up past the cobs. He had his hand on the hilt of his new sword.
But the wagon carried only a family—one with so many children, Carin couldn’t count them all as they passed. Though their faces were dirty and their clothes ragged, the children appeared reasonably well-fed. And Megella’s painted “woodpecker wagon” delighted them. The entire brood collapsed into gales of laughter. In a fit of uncontrolled mirth, one of the older children tumbled out, hit the road, jumped up in a cloud of dust, and was climbing back in, over the tailboard, before Verek could begin to ride to him and offer the boy a hand up.
The commotion woke Megella.
“Where are we?” the woman mumbled, digging herself out from under her many shawls. She stretched her arms above her head, and with a few audible pops of her joints, climbed from the wagon box onto the seat beside Carin.
“Wheesht,” the wisewoman exclaimed, glancing around at the sea of grass that still surrounded them. “We are nowhere. League after league of nowhere. I had forgotten how gawpingly empty this country is.” She yawned. “I think you will be glad to sleep in the wagon tonight, my ducks, whilst I sit up here and keep a lookout. There could be anything wriggling through that grass. Snakes. Centipedes. Night-blood spiders.”
Carin looked around at Verek. He arched an eyebrow at her and raised one shoulder, as if to ask, �
�So what?”
She grinned at him, then turned back to the wisewoman.
“It’s all right, Megella,” Carin said. “We’ll take our chances, out in the dark together—where you can’t hear.”
* * *
Hours later, they did better than a bed in buggy grass. Just before sundown the road dipped and began winding through a series of shallow gullies. Here the grass was so short, Megella suggested they leave the beaten track, drive the wagon up a gully, over its bank and down the other side, and camp for the night out of sight of the road.
“That would be safest,” the wisewoman said.
Verek agreed. He rode ahead, scouting for one of the numerous seeps and springs that made these grasslands livable—and crossable even on foot, as Carin had proved during her first journey to Ruain. Verek found them a suitable campsite in a gully that was deep enough to hide them, the wagon, and their horses. Down its middle trickled a spring-fed stream.
Carin unhitched the cobs, watered the pair, and tethered them where they could graze, while Megella built a compact cooking fire and made tea. The wisewoman was unwrapping the ham when Verek came riding back, a small antelope slung over the saddle in front of him.
“The hunting here is excellent,” he said, swinging down from his horse. “No need to eat all our provisions just yet, Aunt. Dig out those knives we packed and help me butcher this beast, if you please.”
The antelope was young and tender, and three healthy appetites made short work of it. Carin noted that Megella ate appreciatively, obviously enjoying the change from the chickens and eggs that had stocked her larder for many years. Beside her, Verek sated himself on the meat and swore he’d never eat fish again.
Carin finished her portion quickly. Her recent travels had instilled a habit of eating on the run, whenever she got the opportunity to down a few bites, and she had not fully adjusted to the slower pace of life in the present dimension. When one jumps the void to go world-hopping, she thought, one doesn’t have time to linger over meals.
Nor to enjoy the beauty of a cloudless twilight beside a babbling brook. In the stream’s cool waters, Carin bathed her face and neck, then sat on a rock listening to the gurgle of the spring. When Verek had eaten all the antelope he could hold, he joined her.
“Does one of those distant suns shine on your native world, I wonder?” Verek murmured as they watched the stars come out.
“How did you know I was thinking of distant worlds?”
Carin pressed up against him and he put his arm around her. The night was turning chilly but he’d keep her warm.
“I’d supposed your thoughts must stray often to the world of your birth,” Verek said, softly but with something edgy in his tone. “Mine do. I cannot help but wonder who your people were, and what became of them.”
Carin shook her head. “I’m just glad you didn’t find any dead bodies in my old house when you arrived there from Morann’s necropolis. Bad enough that you came across those scattered skeletons a few miles off.”
She shivered. Verek held her closer.
“Whatever happened on that island,” Carin added in a whisper, “and whoever my people were, I want to believe they got out alive.”
“Hmm,” was Verek’s only reply.
And what does he mean by that? Carin wondered. An undertone in that noncommittal response suggested that Theil Verek might wish for exactly the opposite.
Surely not, Carin thought, echoing a phrase of Megella’s. Could he really want them all dead? All the people who might once have been in Carin’s life, there on that distant world called Earth?
Chapter 5
Dark Recollections
Megella felt a hand on her shoulder. Startled from sleep, she opened her eyes and did not recognize the face that looked into hers.
She promptly flung a handful of blind-for-now powder into it.
“Ooww!” howled the stranger as he fell back. The man stumbled away from the wagon, tripped, and went to his knees.
Carin came streaking out from behind the low ridge that had given the girl and her lover their privacy last night. “Meg!” she cried. “What is it?”
“Don’t shoot him, widgeon,” Megella said as Carin aimed an arrow at the man on the ground. “He’s quite harmless now. But I had best wash the powder from his eyes before he is permanently blinded.”
Verek raced up beside Carin then, the wysard’s dark hair flying, his bow also at the ready.
“Who is he, Aunt? One of those cutthroats you predicted would follow us?”
Megella shook her head.
“I thought so when I woke and discovered him staring at me. But I see no weapon on him, and highwaymen are generally better mounted than that.”
She pointed at a donkey that was drinking thirstily from the spring. The dawn light clearly showed the scuffed saddle on the animal’s back.
“Lower your weapons, you two,” Meg added, “and help me get this fellow to the water.”
Verek picked the man up, dropped him bodily into the stream that flowed through their campsite, and patted him down while Megella flushed the powder from the man’s eyes. By the time the stranger could see again, Verek had confirmed that the intruder carried no blade.
“What is your business here?” he snapped at the stranger. “Creeping up on women as they sleep! Are you much prone to such behavior?”
“No!” the man cried. “No, sir. I only came to ask the wisewoman’s help.” He looked beseechingly from Verek to Megella. “It’s my son. The boy cut his leg and the wound will not heal. It oozes pus. We fear for his life.”
The man held out his hand to Megella. “My neighbor saw you leaving Winfield. He recognized you. He came to tell me, but I was far afield and late returning. He said to me, ‘It was the wisewoman of Granger! You remember—the sister of our beloved, departed, Merriam. She will have a remedy,’ my neighbor said. ‘For your son’s sake, make haste to follow her.’
“I did make haste, half ruining poor Tilly here,” the man added, nodding at his donkey. The beast, having drunk its fill, stood now with its head hanging, clearly exhausted. “Do you have a remedy?” the man asked Megella. He rolled up his pants leg and pulled a tiny purse from his boot-top. “This is all I have. I pray to Drisha that it is enough. If I cannot buy the cure from you, my boy will die.”
“Keep your money, sir,” Megella said. “I do not need it. I am rich in other ways, having lately discovered that I still have some family left in this world.” She crooked her finger at Carin. “Come to the wagon please, widgeon, and help me shift these blankets. My bags of concoctions have gotten tangled up amongst them.”
When she found what she sought, Megella supplied the man with three measures of a ground and powdered remedy that would draw the infection out.
“Once a day for three days,” she instructed him, “pack the wound with this powder. First flush it with alcohol—any strong spirits will do. Your boy will think his flesh is on fire, but do not let his screams deter you. Follow the flushing with the powder, and you will soon ease his pain. By the third day, the infection will have cleared and your son will be out of danger.”
The man could not find words to express his gratitude, especially when Megella gave his worn-out donkey a dose of a stimulant that revived the beast wonderfully.
“Your Tilly will make the return journey now, but once you have the animal home allow it to rest for at least a week,” Megella warned him. “No animal’s heart can stand much of the tonic I just administered to this poor beast.”
The man nodded vigorously, then rode off back the way he’d come, calling down blessings upon Megella as his voice faded into the distance. She repacked her bags of remedies, folded her blankets and stacked them neatly, and turned to find Carin and Verek watching her—the girl with admiration, but Verek with a touch of amusement.
“I am put in my place, Aunt Meg,” Theil said rather archly, “to be traveling in company with such a venerable wisewoman and her ‘concoctions.’ Now come get you
r breakfast,” he added before she could bristle at suspecting her skills had been slighted. “Carin has made the tea, and we have not eaten all the eggs yet.”
The two of them had, in fact, saved Megella plenty of the hard-cooked eggs that might well be the last she ever ate from her own flock. Meg savored them, sipped her tea, and could not help glancing toward the south, following the man in her mind’s eye, urging him to make the return journey in time to save his son.
Verek’s sharp eyes seemed to miss nothing. “You are not homesick already, are you, Aunt?”
“Not homesick, no.” Megella shook her head. “This plains-country has never been my home. But our visitor of the morning has reminded me how precarious life is for these people. A simple cut becomes infected, and death may result. A family’s sole breadwinner develops a cough, it goes to his lungs and he dies, leaving them begging on the street. A woman perishes in childbirth, and her husband, helpless to save her, has no time to grieve because he is overcome, caring for a houseful of motherless children.”
Meg shook her head again. “Merriam and I devoted our lives to helping these people. She tended her townsfolk, I did what I could for my village, and often people would come to me from afar if their own town had no resident wisewoman.”
She looked southward once more, then leveled her gaze at Verek.
“Merriam’s death is a grave loss to the town of Winfield,” she said solemnly. “And though you, sir, may mock my ‘concocted’ cures, I’ve reason enough to believe the villagers of Granger will also miss me.”
“I’m sure they will,” Carin mumbled as Verek, reddening, stumbled out an apology for his earlier scoffing attitude.
“In truth,” Megella said, looking now at the girl, “I should have tried harder to train a young woman to take my place. But Carin here”—she tipped a nod to the girl but shifted her gaze back to Verek—“was the only outstanding candidate the village ever produced. And of course, she did not belong there. She could not stay in that place.”
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 5
