All Megella and Flynn could see then was Verek bursting out of the pond, Carin in his arms, both of them fighting for breath. He dropped the girl on the bank and rolled her on her side to expel water from her lungs.
Harsh, grating sounds had come from the girl’s throat, and her entire body heaved with the effort to draw air. But she breathed—that was what mattered.
Megella had rushed to get a blanket, yelled at Flynn to fetch firewood, and left Verek to watch Carin. For a few moments then, no one particularly watched Flynn.
The sight of a supernatural firebolt flashing through the water had obviously staggered the goatherd. He had backed away from the pond, half in a crouch as if fearing a blow.
Megella had glimpsed his retreat as he reeled aside in stumblebum fashion, but she had been too focused on the girl to notice the fellow’s next moves. Only when Verek shouted at the man, then cursed at him, did Meg realize that Flynn was stealing a horse. She looked up to see the fellow kicking one of the bay bobtails into a run, racing toward the road, sobbing and shrieking as if he fled a host of demons.
“Spricct!” Verek yelled, profanely. “Come back here!”
Theil, leaping into his saddle, had caught the man easily; the lumbering bobtail was no match for the nimble silver-dapple. Verek had knocked the man to the ground.
And Flynn, lacking the good sense to hold his tongue, had cursed Theil then and called him a “blackheart.” Whereupon Verek had dismounted, slugged the fellow again, slung the unconscious goatherd over the bobtail’s back, and led both horses back to camp.
Now dusk had folded into the deeper darkness of night, they had eaten the last of the goat meat, and Megella was sipping her tea. Branches of brushwood crackled in a hastily built firelay, and by the light of the flames Meg watched Theil watch Carin.
“Nephew, what did I see?” she murmured. “That fire from your fingertips … have your powers returned?”
Verek shook his head. “No, Aunt. You saw a fire that was not of my making.” He reached to smooth back the hair from the sleeping girl’s forehead. “Carin cast that spell.”
“How?”
“I have no notion. She draws strength from an ocean that is a world apart, while I cannot call upon one atom of power from the waters of the wysards.”
“She used you—no, I mean to say that she worked through you—to bespell the devil’s-guts?”
Verek nodded. “You may say it, Aunt. She used me.”
In the flickering light, Theil’s eyes glittered. “She filled me with fire—liquid fire, burning through my veins … raw power. Her power.” He smiled. “It was a searing pleasure—the deepest, most intensely physical pleasure that I have ever felt.”
“Pleasure?” Megella muttered. She nodded at the girl who had been passed out for more than two hours. “What is pleasure for you may be pain for her, I think.”
“I doubt it. To Carin, the working of magic brings delight. She has described for me, vividly, the tinglings of elation that accompany her spellcraft. The more magic she works, the easier the art becomes for her … and the stronger she grows in it.”
“Ah,” Megella said. “To what end? Will she grow, perhaps, too strong?”
“Perhaps. There was a time when the prospect troubled me greatly.” Verek threw back his shoulders and bowed his neck, stretching. “Now I watch eagerly for each new manifestation. No wysard of Ladrehdin ever had such an apprentice as this one.” His stretch ended with him bending over the girl, his ear turned to catch the soft sounds of her breathing. Then he touched his lips to her throat.
“Her pulse is strong,” Theil said, straightening. “Her breathing is easy and regular. This is a healing sleep, gentle and deep.” He jerked his head at Flynn, who was beginning to stir. “But that one, I’ll wager, will have an aching brow when he wakes.”
Verek stood, throwing off his blanket. He wore only his underclothes. Meg had made him strip down so she could drape his wet shirt and trousers over the wagon seat to dry in the cool breezes of the night, alongside Carin’s garments.
Theil circled the campfire to where Flynn lay. He hauled the man up, hoisting the fellow as easily as he might shoulder a hundredweight of flour.
As he disappeared with Flynn around to the far side of the wagon, Megella scrambled to her feet, anxious for her still-unconscious patient.
“Do not hurt him, nephew. Please,” she called as she followed in their wake. “He cannot help his ignorance. All his life, since childhood, he has likely heard stories of evil sorcerers and wicked witches. I daresay none of his ancestors fought in the Wizards War—those troubles never got this far east, this near the coast. But surely he has heard the tales and the myths—and all the lies the priests spout—and with each telling of them, the wysards grow fiercer and more diabolical.”
Verek did not answer. He had dumped Flynn on the ground next to the right-front wagon wheel and got a long rope out of the wagon. He was proceeding to lash the fellow tightly to the spokes.
“How much sleeping powder do you have left, Aunt?” Verek asked, straightening from his work.
“Not a great deal,” Megella admitted. “Three more light doses, or two heavy ones.”
“And the other—the dust for forgetfulness?”
“Even less. Barely one effective measure.”
Verek shook his head. “Then do not waste your rare compounds on this spricct. I will be only too happy to keep him prostrate.” Theil fisted his right hand again, then seemed to think better of it and flexed his left instead.
No sense bruising the hand that may yet serve the Powers, Megella inwardly agreed. Aloud, however, she spoke on her patient’s behalf.
“If you keep punching Flynn’s lights out, Theil, he will end up with even fewer brains than he now has. Be still a moment. I have caught a whiff of numbwort—it is blooming tonight, somewhere near. Those flowers, brewed, make an excellent deadener. I once assisted a surgeon in removing a gangrenous limb from a patient who slept through the entire procedure, dulled out of his senses on numbwort tea. Before you strike our friend again, let me gather those flowers and brew him a sleeping draught.”
“As you wish,” Verek muttered. “Take a candle to light your way. I suspect that Carin’s spell of sand obliterated every sprig of strangleweed in our vicinity. But if any of the stuff should remain, I want you able to see it before you stumble into danger.”
Megella nodded. “If I meet with any of it, you shall hear. I will shriek like the demon Flynn supposes me to be.”
As she rounded the back of the wagon on her return to their campfire, Meg reached in for a candle and also for her favorite digging stick, a sturdy blackthorn limb. Its sharpened point would serve to unearth any edible roots or bulbs that might be growing wild near this pond. Come tomorrow, they would need something to eat. Except for tea, their provisions were exhausted.
Just as Meg reached the fire and stooped to light her candle at it, a cry tore through the night, the most piercing cry that a human throat could utter. It was Flynn.
“Witches!” he screamed. “Sorcerers and night-fiends! Drisha help me. Get away, warlock.”
Flynn’s screeching woke Carin.
“Warlock?” the girl muttered sleepily, but with curiosity. “Where?”
Carin sat up, rubbing her eyes and yawning. The girl’s blanket fell away, leaving her naked in the night, with only her hair tumbling over her shoulders and half hiding her breasts. She was, Megella thought, the very image of a young goddess from Ladrehdin’s myth- shrouded past, a water-sylph waking from her eons of sleep.
Theil Verek has good taste in women, Meg thought, studying Carin’s figure in the firelight. But perhaps I might say the same of myself. It was I, after all, who sent her to him. Such a promising wencel. And now she has ripened, fulfilling that promise in every possible way.
“Widgeon, your warlock is over there,” Megella said. She crouched beside Carin and pointed at the wagon. “He is, um, tending to our friend the goatherd.”
Or strangling the fellow, Meg thought with a brief glance their way. Flynn’s outcry had not been repeated.
Returning her attention to Carin, Megella murmured, “That was a sound sleep you had. How do you feel?”
“Wonderful,” the girl replied. She stretched her arms over her head. “I feel absolutely great.”
Suddenly Carin whipped her gaze around to the pond. “Oh!” she exclaimed as if she had just remembered. “The weed had Theil! Is he all right?”
“He is perfectly well, widgeon. The two of you destroyed every last tendril of devil’s-guts in that pond.”
“Good,” Carin snapped. “By Drisha! I hate that stuff. It’s evil.”
“It is a weed, my duck,” Megella said, surprised by the girl’s ferocity. “It’s a noxious weed, certainly, and we must bend every effort to control it. But it is not evil. It lacks a mind, and thus it cannot think evil thoughts.”
Carin shook her head.
“You’re wrong, Meg. The stuff can think. On the weed’s native world, the plants made it quite clear what they thought of me. I could hear their anger and their hatred in the way they shrilled and shrieked. The woodsprite said I put them ‘out of temper’—which was an understatement,” the girl muttered, pausing as if she were remembering.
When Megella, her mind busy with her attempt to imagine a society of thinking, bad-tempered plants, offered no reply, Carin tilted her head and went on.
“Looking at it from their point of view, though, I suppose the weeds would have to regard all animals as their enemies. Sheep and goats and other grazers eat plants, and us two-legged types stew and boil them.” The girl glanced at the teakettle, then added, “You’ve seen for yourself, Meg, that the green vines of Angwid will kill, or try to kill, any animal they can wrap themselves around—goat, man, woman, or wizard.”
“They are alarmingly aggressive,” Megella conceded.
“They’re alien invaders,” Carin muttered with another glance at the pond.
The girl lifted her chin, then raised her arm to point at the bushes and the scrubby trees beyond their campsite. The fingers of Carin’s right hand were stiff. This young wysard was not indicating the greenery, Megella realized, but bespelling it.
Nothing visible flew from the girl’s fingertips. Had they been underwater, however, Meg had no doubt that she would have seen the magic burst forth as streaks of fire, with the power to destroy any tangles of devil’s-guts that might remain in this vicinity.
“Be that as it may, widgeon,” Megella murmured when Carin lowered her hand and flexed her fingers. “If you kill every last sprig of strangleweed, you may allow the bleeding disease to spread through this world unchecked. A sauce of strangleweed, you will remember, is the only effective remedy we have found.”
“Then let’s boil it all down!” Carin growled. “Every last stem of it. Before it’s too late. The stuff not only thinks, it’s getting smarter. It’s learning to hide. The reason we didn’t see weed in the trees around the pond is that the smart stems were hiding, waiting in the water for some beast to come there to drink.”
“Instead, they got you,” Megella said, and smiled. “If these exotic weeds do indeed have the power of thought, then I am sure you gave them the shock of their lives—if they had time to realize what was happening as you reduced them to dust.”
“I hope they did,” Carin muttered. “I hope they knew their fate.”
The girl reached for her blanket and pulled it over her shoulders, as if she had only then realized she wasn’t wearing a stitch. “I’m kind of hungry. Do we have anything to eat?”
Megella sighed in a profoundly guilty way. “Very little. There’s tea. But while you were sleeping, Theil and I polished off most of the goat meat before either of us remembered that we ought to save some for you.”
“How inconsiderate of you both,” Carin said, laughing lightly. “Well, I’ll take a cup of tea, if I may.” She glanced again at the pond. “We probably could have had fish, except the strangleweed will have killed everything that once swam in that water.” The girl’s laugh turned to a frown.
As Meg poured tea for Carin, Verek came to the fire.
“That fool woke you, didn’t he, fìleen,” Theil muttered, sitting beside Carin, reaching to share her blanket.
“It was Flynn screaming about fiends and warlocks?” Carin looked around as if trying to glimpse the man. “Then our secret’s out?”
Verek nodded. “He witnessed the destruction of the pond weed, and now he is certain we are the demons of farsinchia. I do not know what to do with him. We are drawing near the coast. If these were normal times, I would seek to dull his memory, then abandon him here to fend for himself. He could easily make it as far as the sea, and walking north or south along the coast would bring him, soon or late, to a fishing village.” Theil sighed. “But if he is left afoot, he’ll likely blunder into the next knot of strangleweed that lies in wait. The man’s wits are not keen,” Verek grumbled, tapping his temple.
“Let us decide in the morning what’s to be done with Flynn,” Megella said, getting to her feet. “I am off now to gather numbwort and make him a sleeping draught. Whatever we decide, however far up the road we take him, it will behoove us to keep him quiet. For the safety of all concerned, we cannot have him wailing about sorcerers when we are passing through a village—assuming, of course, that the twin plagues of disease and weed have left anyone alive to wail at, anywhere along this coast.”
What’s gotten into me? Megella wondered as she left the two at the fire and walked back to the wagon. We’ve troubles enough without me giving in to despondency. A healer must always hope for the best.
And in fact, she had every reason to expect survivors along this midsection of the coast. The bleeding disease was reportedly worst to the south. And Carin’s talents for burning and blasting strangleweed had thinned the stuff in this immediate vicinity. Hereabouts, they might find substantial numbers of survivors.
The trick, then, would be to turn Flynn loose to join his fortunate fellows, but in such a manner that three “fiends”—a warlock and his witches—would be able to flee the area before Flynn could raise a cry against them.
It would not help, Megella thought, to be hauling a bruised and battered man into a coastal town. Anyone looking at Flynn in his present state would know he had been mistreated. Meg found the goatherd still tightly roped to the wagon wheel, but now he also had a stocking stuffed in his mouth to quiet him. He was unconscious again—half suffocated by the gag, perhaps, or punched into insensibility by Verek’s fist.
Shaking her head, Megella removed the gag. She bent close to be certain the man still breathed. She felt Flynn’s hands. They were warm, the blood still circulating through them, not cut off by the lashings that seemed, to Meg, to be cruelly tight.
“You are indeed a fool,” she whispered to her former patient. He probably could not hear her, but it was Meg’s habit to speak to her patients whether they could hear or not. “We saved your life. And we would have fed you, sheltered you, hauled you in comfort for as many days as you chose to travel with us. But now, you have offended Forester. And by learning our secret, you have become a potential threat to his Alice. That is your great mistake, Flynn. You imperil his Alice.”
Megella sighed. “No good deed goes unpunished, does it? You cried out to save a young woman from drowning, you ran to the water to help, and what you saw in those depths frightened you. I cannot blame you for that. It frightened me as well.”
She stood. For a moment Meg stayed where she was, peeping over the side of the wagon, watching Carin and Verek. The pair had had little privacy since Flynn joined their party. Now when they thought they were alone, hidden by the night, they were taking full advantage.
Carin was in her lover’s arms, kissing him as though she were starving for him. Theil’s hands were stroking the girl’s hair, caressing her bare back, drifting down toward her hips. His words from earlier in the evening whispered in Megella’s thoughts
.
“She filled me with fire,” he’d said, “liquid fire, burning through my veins … the deepest, most intensely physical pleasure I have ever felt.”
Megella’s sister had known such pleasure. Merriam was much too much the lady to speak of what went on in her bedchamber. But it had been obvious to all in their household, that every night Merri spent with her husband, Lord Legary, had left her richly satisfied. Indeed, the lovemaking skills of wysards were legendary. They were said, in fact, to fill their partners with liquid fire.
Meg caught her breath, a bit disconcerted to find herself still watching from behind the wagon. By starlight and firelight she could not clearly see the lovers, but she could hear them gasping as if they were again on the verge of drowning. And again they would live or die as one. Relations between Theil and his fiery water-sylph were reaching a peak, and they obviously did not need an old spinster hovering over them. It was high time she left them to enjoy their privacy and each other.
* * *
Her foraging was successful beyond her expectations. Megella found a massed bunch of the night-blooming numbwort—enough to drug Flynn for days. She also dug up pounds of edibles. The hour was well after midnight when she came back to camp, toting bush turnips, beetroot, and sweet groundnut tubers in her skirts. She tiptoed past the lovers who were sated and sleeping, blanket-covered, their hair over their faces.
At daybreak, as Meg was peeling the vegetables and heating water for a breakfast feast, Carin and Verek ambled into camp from their own successful outing. They had shot a heath hen apiece.
Thus the day began exceptionally well for everyone but Flynn. When the goatherd regained consciousness, Carin joined Megella in trying to reason with the fellow, to mollify him, to explain away the supernatural, underwater fire he had witnessed. But everything they said seemed only to harden his resolve against them.
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 16
