The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Carin, especially, did more harm than good. Though the girl expressed herself well in the common tongue of Ladrehdin, she did not speak it as a native speaker would, but in the manner of someone who had learned it as a second language. The noticeable strangeness of her speech—which Megella had always thought charming—only further convinced Flynn that the girl was a native denizen of the demon-realm.

  “Begone!” the man screamed at her. “Witch! May Drisha damn you to farsinchia.”

  Verek had not deigned to speak to the fellow this morning. But at the man’s cursing, he sprang up, scattering the last bites of his breakfast. He bore down on Flynn like a red-eyed hellhound.

  “Shut your mouth,” he barked, “or I will shut it for you.” Theil raised his fist threateningly. “Dare again to show such disrespect to anyone here, and you will never speak another word.”

  Flynn, already purpled around both eyes and bruised along his jaw, ducked his head. But then the man showed the poor sense to cut a sideways glance at Verek, and another at Carin, in a way that expressed deep loathing and revulsion … and also something lewd, as though the man had, in his mind’s eye, paired the warlock and the witch, and found the union obscene.

  “Tah!” Megella exclaimed. “Enough of that!”

  She turned her back on Flynn and stepped between him and Verek. Shaking her head, she reached to grab her nephew’s arm to restrain him from doing further damage to the fellow—though, in truth, Meg would not particularly have minded now, had Theil beat the goatherd bloody.

  What an ignorant clod of a man, she thought. Just as she was releasing Verek’s arm to let him get on with delivering a thrashing, if he so chose—

  Carin screamed.

  At the sound, Megella whirled. In the same moment, Verek leaped toward Carin, shoving Meg out of his way so hard that she fell to the ground.

  No, not to the ground. Meg fell into a pile of sand.

  A shirt lay atop the pile, and trousers legs protruded from under it. Megella recognized the garments. They were Flynn’s.

  The man himself was dust.

  Chapter 14

  “Drown Me!”

  Carin dropped to her knees.

  “I didn’t— I never— I only—” she stammered, then clapped her hand over her mouth. A coldness gripped her as she stared at the sand and at Megella sitting in it.

  Verek was reaching for the woman, as if he meant to help Meg to her feet. “I beg your pardon, Aunt,” he mumbled. “Please, come away from there.”

  Megella did not wait for help, however. The woman sprang out of the sand as though it crawled with whipscorpions. She backed away from Flynn’s remains, flailing at her skirts, dusting them hard with both hands.

  Verek came then to kneel beside Carin. He’d been flushed with anger at Flynn, but now all the blood seemed to have drained from his face.

  “What happened, fìleen? Did you mean to … ?”

  “No!” Carin cried, and felt the coldness turn to heat. “I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t lift a finger at him. But that look Flynn shot us, like flinging muck in our faces! I wanted … I wanted …”

  “To kill him?” Verek asked softly.

  “No! I didn’t!” Carin’s voice shook. “I wanted to slug him, but—”

  She broke off. “Oh, Drisha!” she cried, pointing. “Look!”

  Megella shrieked something unintelligible. The wisewoman also pointed at the sand that was heaped against the wagon wheel where Flynn had been tied. The sand had ignited. It burned up, crackling and fizzling like the smoky powders some droll-tellers used to add dramatic flair. Except those theatrical powders smelled good, like spice and incense. Flynn’s remains stank.

  Carin and Verek scrambled to their feet and backed away with Megella, upwind. For several seconds, the smoke was so thick they could not see the wagon.

  “We must fetch water, Theil!” the wisewoman cried. “If we do not douse that fire, my wagon will burn.”

  Verek took a quick step toward the pond, then paused as a freshening breeze from the east cleared the air of smoke. The fast, hot fire had already burned itself out. Nothing remained of Flynn now, neither his clothes nor a grain of his sand. The wagon wheel, however, appeared untouched.

  “Oh, Drisha,” Carin mumbled again, sinking into a grassy patch. “I cast that spell of sand—and fire—without meaning to do it. I murdered that man.”

  As she huddled in the grass, Carin felt an unpleasant sensation in her upper thigh, like a muscle burning from overexertion. But when she grabbed the spot and squeezed, she knew it wasn’t a muscle. The twinge came from the crystal dolphin in her pocket. The way her legs were folded under her, with her trousers pulled tight to her thighs, the amulet was jabbing her through the fabric of her pocket. Carin felt the power in the crystal, its harsh, quivering energy.

  She shifted her position so the amulet wouldn’t stab her, and at the edges of her vision, Carin saw Megella and Verek exchange glances.

  Are they afraid of me now? They should be. I might kill them too.

  Theil returned to Carin’s side. She wanted to push him away, to make him stay far away where she could not hurt him. But she didn’t dare touch him.

  “What is happening, fìleen?” he whispered. “How is the power manifesting?”

  “I don’t know!” Carin cried. “I’m not doing it on purpose. I’m not even thinking about doing it.” She paused, then said the thing she was thinking: “I am a monster.”

  “No,” Verek countered, emphatically. “You are not a monster. You are a young, powerful, untrained wysard.” He sighed. “Not for the first time, I wish my grandfather were here. He would know how best to help you regain control.”

  Verek rubbed the back of his neck as if to ease tense muscles. Then he reached for Carin’s shoulder.

  She flinched from his touch.

  “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t come near me. I’m dangerous.”

  “To others, perhaps,” he murmured. “I, however, have no fear of you.”

  Verek rose and rejoined Megella. Though they spoke in whispers, Carin could hear what they said.

  “How shall we proceed?” the wisewoman muttered. “This near the coast, we may encounter others. Have we the right to endanger their lives, exposing them to such ferocious, undisciplined wizardry?”

  Verek tilted his head. “Consider the circumstances. Carin was deeply offended. Livid, as was I. If she had not rid us of that lout, I would have.”

  Megella glanced at the wagon wheel as if the woman still couldn’t believe what had happened there. “But you, Theil, would have chosen to act. That is quite different from dashing a man out of existence in an unconscious, will-less flash of temper.” Meg seemed to shiver. “Would you object to my giving the girl a small dose of numbwort? It will cool her blood and quiet her thoughts … and save us—I trust—from a repetition of this morning’s horrors.”

  Verek frowned. “What else will it do? Are there attendant dangers?”

  The wisewoman shook her head. “None that I know of. But then, I have never administered numbwort to a wysard.”

  “I’ll take it,” Carin said, speaking up from her seat in the grass. “I’ll do anything you want. Just help me. Please help me. I don’t want to kill you.”

  * * *

  The drug affected her badly. Megella gave her such a tiny sip of numbwort tea, Carin could hardly taste its pleasant, nutty flavor. But seconds later, her head swam. She went limp.

  Verek scooped her up and settled her gently in the wagon bed. Meg arranged a mountain of blankets to pillow and cushion her.

  Carin lay there motionless, watching puffy clouds scoot across a bright blue sky. They’d been enjoying beautiful spring weather. The nights had been cool but not sharp; the days warmed up nicely while never getting sweaty hot.

  Now, however, Carin sweated. First her scalp, which felt odd since her head did not normally perspire. Even that long summer when she’d walked alone, across the plains from Granger to the highl
ands of Ruain, she’d sweated into her clothes but not into her hair. Prostrated now in Megella’s wagon, though, Carin could feel the sweat popping, soaking the roots of her hair, seeping along each strand until her head was wet.

  Sweat overtook her then, like a slow-moving wave that traveled her length. The nape of her neck, down her back, under her arms, between her breasts, in her groin, behind her knees, between her toes … she was wet from head to foot. And the cool morning air chilled her deeply. She shivered.

  Megella noticed. The woman reined up, clambered over the wagon seat, and rearranged the blankets until Carin was smothered in them. That, of course, made the sweating worse. But Carin could not complain. The numbwort had stopped her tongue. She couldn’t do more than grunt, which Megella evidently took as a “thank you.”

  As the wisewoman resumed her seat, clucking to the horses to move on, a new sensation added to Carin’s misery. The muscles of her ribcage seemed to grow cold, as though they had atrophied into slabs of lifeless, bloodless meat.

  She worried that they would stop working. Carin forced herself to stay awake, to pay attention to the steady rise and fall of her chest. In … out. In … out. She breathed with conscious intent, marking every lungful and every exhalation.

  The rhythm became hypnotic, until nothing remained real to her except the air she breathed. It was fresh and clean. Early in the day, it carried the scents of springtime: damp soil, bursting buds, flowers opening to the sun. Carin smelled ginger-blues, sorrel thorns, butter herbs, and milk flowers.

  Then she caught a whiff of something that made her heart race: she smelled the sea. Mingling with the sweet fragrances of the wildflowers were the tangy scents of salt air, salt water, and seaweed.

  It smelled like home—Carin’s old home, on the world called Earth. When she went there to fetch Theil back to Ladrehdin, she had stood for a time at the window of her old bedroom, looking out to sea. The ocean breeze in her face carried impressions that were almost memories. She had been a child of that world. She’d grown up swimming in that ocean, diving in its depths, playing with its dolphins. Its salt flowed in Carin’s veins. That ocean had given her life.

  Brother Welwyn’s voice came to her. “Those of mundane bent have no power over the mysteries,” the wizardly monk had said. “The mysteries answer only to the artful, each according to his or her own source. And your source, Carin, is that faraway sea of your world.”

  Art … bane. Gift … curse.

  Carin’s thoughts rose and fell in time with the breaths she took. In … out. Up … down. Coming and going like ocean waves and tides.

  Another voice rose in her memory. This voice she knew in all its moods: gentle, sharp, angry, cold, clipped, or caressing. In Carin’s head, Theil Verek was speaking of his intention to destroy the woman he loved:

  “You grow too powerful, too quickly,” he had said. “You threaten Ladrehdin. You must not be allowed to live in this world that is not your own. You must die before your art sweeps all before it like pebbles in the flood.”

  Die … flood …

  The words repeated, beating time with Carin’s heart, rising and falling with her deep, slow breaths. Sweat flooded her face and dripped into her mouth. Carin tasted its salt, the salt of the ocean. She jumped in. She had to swim in that salt water, except now it wasn’t sweat, and it wasn’t the sea. It was tears. She was sinking in a pool of tears.

  Alice’s words came to her. “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” the looking-glass girl had said. “I shall be punished for it now by being drowned in my own tears.”

  Drowned …

  That was the way she had to die. Carin knew it now. She had to drown.

  Back in Ruain, in Verek’s house, she’d had it all wrong. She had thought she would die in the jaws of the Jabberwock dragon. Use a conjuration from an alien world to kill an invader from that same world: it would have been an elegant solution. But that was not to be Carin’s fate.

  No, her fate was sealed on the day she climbed a hill and entered the woodland of Ruain. On the crest of that hill, where the plains ended and the highlands began, Carin had seen a dolphin. The tree with the scar on its trunk, the white mark that looked exactly like a dolphin: it had foretold her fate, if only Carin had known enough to recognize the omen. She was as unnatural to this world as the dolphin was to the woodland. She could not live here. She posed too great a danger to this place.

  You knew, muttered another memory. You understood, early on, how you threatened this world. Carin remembered her exact words to Verek. She had once asked him the question that he and Megella must now be asking themselves:

  Could she do something, without meaning to do it, that would hurt people?

  Yes.

  The answer, obviously, was yes. Carin could hurt people without half trying. She had killed that poor stupid goatherd without a single spark of conscious intent. She might, just as easily and inadvertently, murder an entire village—or an entire world.

  The numbwort was wearing off. Carin’s chest muscles felt warm and alive again, and she got her arms working well enough to push some of the blankets off. A cool sea breeze bathed her face and neck, further hastening her revival.

  Carin didn’t want reviving. She wanted to stay safely in a stupor. She was about to ask Megella for another dose of numbwort—a bigger one this time—when a stranger’s voice hailed them.

  “Afternoon, sir … ma’am,” a man called pleasantly. “Begging your pardon, but I am the sheriff of these parts, and it is incumbent upon me to ask: Is there any sickness in your party?”

  “None, sir,” Verek said in a bristly tone of voice.

  Don’t pick a fight, Theil, Carin thought. The sheriff is only doing his job.

  In horror then, she realized it had required hardly more provocation than this, to trigger in her the spellcraft that had killed Flynn.

  Be quiet! Carin ordered herself. Don’t act. Don’t think. Just be still.

  Stillness. The idea of it summoned another memory. When Verek first showed Carin the spell of stone, and showed her how easily she could break the spell and free herself, he’d added a warning. “In some predicaments,” he’d said, “you may find stillness a better course than action.”

  This was just such a predicament. To be sure of not harming the sheriff, or anyone on whose behalf he was asking questions, Carin must stay very still, invisible, nonexistent.

  Megella ruined her plan.

  “No sickness, sir, only a severe reaction to a scorpion sting,” the wisewoman lied. “My niece is asleep in the wagon. She is recovering, but weak.”

  “I am sorry to have to disturb her, ma’am,” said the sheriff. “But I must satisfy myself that she does not have the bleeding disease. We’ve had no cases of it here in Easthaven, but traders have brought rumors of a great contagion and many deaths to the south of here. And so I must halt all who journey up from that region. I must see for myself that none of you is bleeding from the nose or mouth, for such are the symptoms of the contagion, we have been told.”

  “We, too, have heard the rumors,” Megella said. Carin heard the woman climb down from the wagon seat. “That is why we head north, to take ourselves out of danger. I have not seen the disease with my own eyes,” she lied again, “but one story I got along the way is that a sauce of stewed strangleweed will effect a cure.”

  “Is that right?” the sheriff replied, sounding interested. “I must remember to mention it to the physician who sails through here from time to time.”

  “Yes, do,” Meg said. “I heard that one only has to boil down the weed, then smear the sauce over the patient, taking special care to get it into the mouth, nose, eyes, and ears.” The wisewoman chuckled, then added in a voice half mischievous, half embarrassed. “They do say it works best if the sauce is also shoved up the patient’s behind. ‘Poke it into each of nature’s holes and openings,’ they say.”

  The sheriff roared. Carin could hear the man slapping his thigh. He was still laughing when he came t
o the side of the wagon.

  “My apologies, young lady,” he said. “I am sure you can’t be sleeping still, with all the noise I’ve made. But that’s the best thing I’ve heard in a week. ‘Poke it up the behind.’” He roared again, sounding thoroughly delighted.

  Carin didn’t open her eyes. She could feel the man’s presence, though, feel him blotting out the sun as he leaned over her. She could smell him, too—a not unpleasant mixture of tobacco, rum, and fish. He smelled more like a sea captain than a sheriff.

  “Ooh,” Carin moaned, provoked by the man’s nearness into going along with Megella’s ruse. She rubbed her arm as if feeling the pain of a scorpion sting. “Ow.”

  “The girl has had fever and chills,” Megella said. Carin felt the rest of the blankets being pulled off her. “As you can see, sheriff, she’s damp with sweat, but she is not bleeding. There is no disease here. By morning, Alice will be fine.”

  “That’s right,” the sheriff said jovially. “Best thing for the young lady. Sweat out that poison.”

  The brightness of sunlight returned. Even with her eyes tight shut, Carin could tell that the man had left her vicinity. She heard the squeak of saddle leather as the sheriff remounted.

  “All’s well, then,” he said. “I’ve no reason to hold you further. Ma’am … sir.” Carin could picture the sheriff touching his hat brim in salute. “I welcome you to Easthaven. And if you’ll pardon my saying it, you all look like you could use a drink. Go on up into town and get a tankard or three at the inn. And maybe sample the local fare. Though I’m sorry to say you’ll find no fresh fish on the table. That damned weed has spoiled the catch.”

  “Weed, sir?” Verek asked. “Are you speaking of the strangleweed that we have seen alongside the road? The pest the farmers of the south call ‘devil’s-guts’?”

  “Aye, my lord,” the sheriff said, using Verek’s title as if instinctively. “We’ve had the devil’s own time with that wicked weed. It choked the harbor and invaded the docks. We feared it would bury the town.”