Verek stood up.
“Come here, fìleen,” he said, and opened his arms to her.
Carin went to him. She huddled against him, shivering.
He held her tightly and did not speak. But after a moment he combed his fingers through her hair, then gave the strands a twist and pulled, hard enough to hurt.
And Carin knew that Theil meant it to hurt. He was trying to distract her. This language of his—the language of his hands—was one she understood well. He meant to refocus her attention and to signal to her that she must get a grip on herself.
Carin’s shivering subsided. She pulled away, and Verek let go of her hair. She stepped close again, and kissed him.
Then she turned to the wisewoman to apologize. “I’m not sure where all of that came from, Meg. Except …”
Carin paused, gathering her thoughts. Then she pointed eastward.
“Sometime tonight I must go out there and try to burn an ocean full of strangleweed,” she said, perversely denying Megella’s desire to remain ignorant of the plan. “If I go wrong like I went wrong with Flynn, if I lose control, then something else will burn, too. I’m wondering what’s going up in flames tonight, and how bad it will be.”
“Believe in yourself, widgeon,” Megella murmured. “Theil Verek believes in you.”
Verek, standing quietly behind Carin, had rested his hands on her shoulders. She leaned back against him now, feeling his warmth, his strength.
“Good night, my ducks,” Megella said briskly then, as though determined to let nothing spoil her make-believe holiday. “I am going to bed.”
“Wait,” Carin and Verek said in unison as Meg rose from her seat.
The wisewoman paused, not yet fully upright, staring at them through slightly narrowed eyes.
“What is it?”
“Only this, Aunt,” Verek said. “Before you go, tell us: What was that other bit of news you started to deliver? The thing you said would interest us.”
Megella sighed and straightened. “I wish now that I had not brought it up. It could have—and likely should have—waited till morning. But this is what I heard, and I cannot in any way vouch for the truth of it:
“The bleeding disease is thought to be wholly waterborne. According to various reports that have filtered up from the south, the illness is not spread by simple contact with a victim. One does not contract it by breathing contaminated air, eating tainted food, or touching the afflicted. By all accounts, the great risk is to those who bathe in the Grenfell River or swim in the shallows where that river joins the sea, far to the south of here.”
“The Grenfell?” Carin echoed. “Isn’t Granger at the headwaters of that river? The millpond where Theil and I bobbed up when we crossed the void from Earth—it’s on Butcherbird Creek, but if you go down the creek far enough, you come to where it empties into the Grenfell. Brin took me down there a couple of times to cut reeds for weaving baskets.”
Megella nodded. “Others, widgeon, are making that same connection. People are pointing the finger of blame at Granger.”
Carin felt Verek’s hands twitch on her shoulders.
“So,” he muttered. “The plague we brought to that millpond flows downriver to the southern sea. Where will it go from there?”
“To every corner of this world, I would imagine,” Megella whispered. “The currents must already have swept it some distance up the coast. How else would that hapless goatherd have contracted the illness?”
Verek made a noise in his throat. His hands slid down to lock onto Carin’s upper arms.
“Yes, it seems inevitable,” he muttered. “Strangleweed from the north, disease from the south, both of them streaming into the great ocean that touches all of Ladrehdin’s shores. In the wake of these invaders will be death and destruction on an unimaginable scale.”
“Unless we stop them before they spread all over,” Carin said, twisting around to gaze at him.
“That, fìleen, will be up to you,” Verek murmured, looking into her eyes. “Can you burn these plagues out of the ocean without destroying the world you hope to save?”
* * *
The town was asleep when Carin and Verek slipped down the back stairs of the Harbor Hill Inn and made their way in darkness to the stables. A guard was on duty there, but he did not seem the least surprised when Verek muttered something about going for a midnight ride. Obligingly the man brought out Verek’s saddlehorse, and then he looked the other way, as if he had learned to be discreet about lovers and their moonlit excursions down to the shore.
Verek had a bow and a quiver slung over his shoulder. Both were Carin’s. Only she would be shooting tonight, and she was content for Theil to carry her weapons until she called for them.
He’d set her on the horse in front of him, and his arms were around her. Neither of them spoke as he guided the animal down the long curve of the spit, heading out to the harbor mouth and the knot of strangleweed that closed it. The weed sparked, making the dark water ahead of them appear to have more stars in it than did the sky above.
Carin found the scene disorienting. She had to close her eyes and feel the horse move under her to know which direction was up.
The gown she wore was crepe-thin, and she had nothing on under it. A cool breeze off the water raised gooseflesh on her arms, but she welcomed the sensation. It countered the heat that was building deep inside her.
Not yet, she thought. Not yet. Summon no fire with Theil so near.
He was so close she could smell him—him, and nothing else. But he wasn’t himself tonight. At home in Ruain he smelled musky, like calendula oil and the other pungent herbs he used for making medicines. After many days and nights on the road, the musky scent had yielded to the odors of sweat, leather, horse, and wood smoke. Now, even those were gone. Now he smelled like rose water and sweet tobacco mixed with syrupy, flowery scents.
“Like a brothel,” he’d said.
Carin had never been in one. But of course Lord Verek could have visited such an establishment. His wife had died years ago, and he’d taken no vows of celibacy.
Maybe he used to spend the night at a sporting house on his way to the east coast of his province, Carin thought, remembering Verek saying that he would occasionally ride to Ruain’s seacoast to eat crab legs.
“It’s quite far,” he’d said. “But the roads are good and the people are hospitable.”
They’re more than hospitable, I’ll bet, in a cathouse.
The thought of Theil knowing what a brothel smelled like didn’t bother Carin—not much, anyway—but she was getting tired of smelling it on him.
“You really stink, you know,” she said without opening her eyes. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“I’m sorry, fìleen,” he muttered. He kissed her on the neck. “Clear the weed so it will not throttle me, and I’ll swim in the sea until I lose my stench.”
“Are we nearly there?” she asked. “At the harbor mouth? I’m not looking.”
“But are you listening? Listen now with me,” Verek said, reining up, “and tell me what I am hearing.”
As the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves died away, a low rumble came to Carin’s ears. She heard the waves lap at the arm of land they were traversing. In the distance behind her, something rattled and squeaked—the noise of a boat anchored in the harbor, she guessed.
It was the rumbling sound, however, that riveted Carin’s attention. She bent her head, her eyes squeezed tight shut, and listened intently.
After a moment, she gripped Theil’s arm.
“Voices,” Carin whispered. “Many voices, like the sound of a great crowd of people all talking at once, nobody shouting, just lots of conversations going at the same time.”
“Yes,” Verek murmured. “That’s what I thought too. Now open your eyes, fìleen, and see who’s doing the talking.”
Carin did as he bade her, and saw great glimmering masses of strangleweed. As she looked out over the mumbling, rumbling throng, she did not
suffer a return of her dizziness. Seen up close, the weed did not resemble stars in the night sky. It looked like a packed crowd carrying candles. Lights flickered, flashed, winked out, flamed up. Their glow lit the scene so brightly, individual stems and clusters of leaves were visible in the mats of weed that writhed just beyond the spit of land.
A band of open water like a moat separated them from the weed. But Carin could tell that the devil’s-guts had once overrun the land here. In the light cast by the weed, she made out leafless bushes and naked trees, their dead limbs as white as bleached bones.
The parasitic weed had fed on the native vegetation here, sucking the life from it. The stuff would have continued its advance, invading Easthaven, killing gardens and orchards, strangling all the animals and any human resident it could have got its tendrils on.
But Carin had halted its advance, at least temporarily. Inland, she’d only meant for her magian fire to burn off the weed-infested scrubland. The smoke from that inferno had bestowed an unexpected benefit in driving back this aquatic variety of weed.
“It’s time I finished the job,” she said. “Take me a bit nearer the harbor mouth, please, Theil.” Carin pointed at the thick knot of weed that made an especially concentrated glow a little farther on, at the bluff end of the spit. “That’s my first target. With luck and a little help from the breeze, it will be the only thing I have to hit.”
A few minutes later, Verek was dismounting and swinging Carin to the ground with him.
His shirt sleeves, under Carin’s hands, were crisply starched and creased. She slid her hands up his arms, then smoothed his freshly washed hair, traced the line of his neatly trimmed beard, and lightly rubbed her thumb across his lower lip.
He responded to her, pulling her close and kissing her deeply. Through the gauze of her gown, she felt his body.
“Sweet mercy,” Carin breathed, pulling away from him with difficulty. “First things first. Give me my bow and arrows, please sir, and stand back—
“Farther,” she insisted, repeating herself three times before Verek had put enough distance between them for her comfort. “Like I told Megella—keeping in mind all the accidental destruction I rained down upon Flynn—I have no idea what’s about to happen here. Every twig and stick under our feet may go up in flames. Your horse may burn to the ground—
“Drisha’s teeth!” Carin swore as various additional possibilities came to her mind. “The ground itself could blaze up in our faces.”
And you may burn, Theil Verek, just like Flynn’s dust burned.
But Carin wouldn’t say that aloud, for fear of making it true. She hadn’t wanted Theil to come out here tonight. She had wanted to do this alone.
But he’d refused to even hear of it. “I’m going,” he’d said, sharply, and after that there had been no point in arguing with him.
When Theil was standing so far back along the spit that Carin could see only his white shirt reflecting the glow from the glimmering weeds, she turned to face her target.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she muttered to the weeds, and remembered Verek telling her the exact same thing.
And now I know that he was right.
Carin took an arrow from the quiver that lay on the ground. She squared her stance and drew, aiming for the southernmost part of the knot that she could reach from here. After an instant that was immeasurably brief but filled with dread, she released the arrow and screamed the command: “Burn!”
And the world exploded with light, heat, and deafening noise. Flames shot into the air, forming a wall of fire that rose in the south, exactly where Carin had aimed. The wall roared its way northward, engulfing the mouth of the harbor, consuming the knotted mass of strangleweed that had blocked it.
Heat of blistering intensity hit Carin. It was a physical blow, knocking her backward. She put out her hand to break her fall and yelped at the pain as her left palm hit the ground.
Struggling to a sitting position, Carin rubbed her hand on her gown to dislodge the grit and pebbles that the force of her fall had embedded in her skin. The rubbing worsened the pain in her palm.
Right at this moment, however, she could not be bothered to see what was wrong with it. She was too busy watching the course of her magian inferno. Unimpeded, the wall of fire sped on, dividing, fanning out, towering up into flames that raced along each thick ribbon of weed. The flames rushed north and east, out to sea, eating their way along the floating bands, strips, and streamers of strangleweed.
From Carin’s vantage point above the harbor mouth, the tongues of flame looked like living beings, like giants made of fire who were dancing their way over the surface of the sea, receding into the distance.
The flames were leaving nothing behind. In the open water beyond the harbor mouth, nothing sparked or flickered.
Carin stood and drew a deep breath of the tangy salt air. She smelled no smoke; the breeze from the south had already cleared it. More importantly, she could not smell the strangleweed. Once Theil had taken his overly perfumed hair downwind, Carin had been awash in the weed’s strong scent. But now that odor had dissipated. The salt-laden air smelled clean, invigorating.
With the weed’s sparking extinguished and Carin’s fires burning out to sea, the only light in the night came now from the stars above. It was too dark to see what was making her left palm throb so. Only when Carin raised her hand to her mouth and licked her skin did she recognize the nature of her injury. She’d burned her palm.
Her bow—it was gone. For the first time since loosing the arrow, Carin realized that she no longer held the weapon. She had not dropped it. She had burned it. Her bow had flamed to ashes in her grip, searing her skin.
Sweet mother of Drisha. What else had she burned by mistake?
“Theil!” Carin screamed, whirling to seek him. “Where are you?”
He did not answer.
Back along the spit where he had been standing, a splotch stood out palely against the dark ground. His ashes?
“No!” Carin shrieked. She kept shrieking that one word, over and over at the top of her lungs, as she raced to the splotch and fell on her hands and knees beside it.
Her hands did not land in a heap of fine, powdery ash. She discovered Theil, a solid form, laid out in the dirt.
Sobbing with relief and with fresh dread, Carin pressed against his chest. She felt him breathing, felt his heart beating.
But when she touched his face, she found blood. Verek’s head seemed to be covered in it, his hair wet with it.
Carin tore a wide strip from the hem of her gown. In the starlight she could not see what she was doing, she couldn’t identify his injury, but by feel she wrapped the gauzy fabric around his head. She snugged it up tight, desperate to stop the bleeding.
After a last check of his breathing and pulse, she left him lying there and raced for help.
Easthaven was now fully awake. Carin’s incandescent, thunderously noisy, magian inferno had jolted every sleeper out of bed. Lights shone from the windows, lanterns bobbed as people took to the streets, and torch-bearing boats were setting out from the docks. She ran toward the brightly lit town as fast as she could manage along the curving spit of land.
In contrast to the town, the rough surface under Carin’s feet lay in darkness. She could not see where she stepped. Time and again she stumbled and fell. She blundered into dead briars and smacked into spiky tree trunks. What was left of her gown caught on branches and thorns.
Each time, Carin tore free and stumbled on. By the time she met a mounted party riding out from the town, she was nearly naked. Her gown hung from her shoulders in shreds.
The sheriff rode at the head of the party. When the light from his lantern fell on Carin, she could do little more than gasp “Help!” and point behind her.
The sheriff, exclaiming at the sight of her, dropped from his horse, shucked his coat, and threw it around her.
“Not me,” Carin managed to gasp, her chest heaving. “Him. Hurt.”
&nbs
p; “Forester? Where?”
“There!” Carin pointed again. “Far down.”
“The end of the spit?”
Carin gave a quick nod. “Hurry,” she panted. “He’s bleeding.”
The sheriff turned to the other riders. “Denys,” he called into the crowd, “stay with this lady. When she has recovered her wind, take her back to Harbor Hill. The rest of you—with me.”
The men spurred away, leaving Carin alone with a boy who could not have been more than twelve. He stood stiffly at attention, gripping the reins of his horse in one hand and the bail of a lantern in the other. The lantern showed Carin a blond head, a heavily freckled face, and an open-mouthed stare.
The boy wasn’t looking at her. He seemed unable to focus on anything this close at hand, even a barely clothed woman. His whole being was directed out to sea.
Carin followed his gaze and saw that her magian fires were still visible, just barely, no more now than gleams in the far distance. But the boy had probably been staring at them since they first roared to life and shook the town awake. His speechless stupefaction told her he had never seen or heard anything remotely like the fires Carin had conjured into existence.
“Pardon,” she muttered when she’d almost caught her breath. “I’ve got to—”
She snatched the reins from the boy’s hand, bounded into the saddle, and made cleanly off with his horse, giving the boy no chance to do more than shout, “Hey!” The animal took her back to town at a long lope.
They were closing in on Harbor Hill when Carin suddenly had to haul back on the reins, bringing the horse to a sliding stop. An overpowering feeling of anxiety had crashed down upon her, a feeling quite separate from her worries for Theil.
She had wanted to fetch Megella, to put the woman on this stolen horse and ride with her to meet the men who should now be bringing Verek back along the spit. She had wanted Megella there to take charge of him, to heal and protect him.
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 20
