The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  But now, all of that faded from Carin’s mind. She could not think about Theil’s bleeding head, or how he might have come by the injury. She could only drop from the horse and sprint across the graveled lot where guests of the Harbor Hill Inn parked their wagons.

  The place was deserted. Though Carin had earlier glimpsed a guard patrolling the lot, the man had evidently been drawn down to the docks to view, with all the town, the mysterious explosion and fire at the mouth of the harbor.

  Carin clambered into Megella’s wagon. She threw back blankets, searching frantically for the jug of wysards’ waters that Meg had packed among the select few belongings brought from Granger. Had someone stolen it? Was that why Carin felt this overwhelming anxiety?

  No. The jug was there, padded in many thicknesses of blanket, tucked up at the front of the wagon bed under the driver’s seat. Carin pulled off its coverings and cradled the icy-cold jug in her arms.

  “Drown me,” it whispered to her.

  Carin stared at the pottery. “Now? In the harbor?”

  “Yes,” came the reply in a voice Carin knew well. This was the voice of the wysards’ well, the voice of the power that dwelled in Verek’s cave of magic. She had spoken before with that shimmery voice. She even knew its name—Amangêda—and had twice dared to say the name aloud.

  Clasping the jug to her, Carin jumped down from the wagon. She retraced her steps, back to the base of the arm that curved around the harbor. She hurried along the spit a short way, then down the inner slope of it, down to the water. At the water’s edge, Carin paused to uncork the jug. Then she crouched, leaped, and plunged into the harbor, holding the jug to her chest and letting its weight pull her under.

  In the dark depths, Carin could see clearly as the wysards’ waters streamed out of the jug. They formed a long, luminous ribbon that seemed to be spun of liquid glass. The ribbon hung suspended for a moment, pulsing with light. Then it streaked away, arrowing toward the mouth of the harbor and taking Carin with it. She flew underwater as easily as a bird through air.

  When the ribbon cleared the harbor mouth, it dived. Carin, holding on to the end of it, descended with it into the abyss.

  The wysards’ waters pulled her deep, ever deeper under the sea, until the ribbon burst apart. It broke into countless bright droplets, each aglitter like a diamond. The drops swirled, drawing together to form a tall column of shimmering light.

  Up through that column, out of the depths, rose a figure that embodied all the essential elements: air, fire, earth, and water. Air bubbled around it, fashioning a cloak of white that concealed it from the shoulders down. Flames blazed around its head, forming strands of fire that rippled across its face like windblown tendrils of radiantly red hair. What little Carin could see of the figure’s face appeared to be carved from a coarse-grained granite, its umber tones flecked with green. Set into the granite were watery blue eyes that looked out at Carin with infinite sadness but also the glimmerings of hope.

  The eyes locked with hers and drew her in, pulling Carin into a world of slowly unfurling imagery. She drifted through thoughts and memories that were not her own. She saw the world of Ladrehdin when it was young, when volcanoes spewed up the planet’s molten core, when storms whipped the atmosphere into frenzied violence, when underwater earthquakes sent the oceans surging onto the land with force enough to flatten mountains. The young planet was a place of raw power. As eons passed and the world lost some of its violence, the power remained—“undiminished since the dawn of time,” Verek had once told her.

  His family, the wysards of Ruain, knew this history that was now unfolding before Carin. Verek had spoken to her of using the planet’s power, tapping the primordial forces that flowed in stone and water. The blue-eyed figure of granite seemed an incarnation of those forces.

  But now it was showing Carin a diminishment, a gradual draining of the power. Nature’s forces were being siphoned off. The well was immensely deep. The reservoirs of power in this world were vast. But slowly, and for a very long time, they had been emptying. Carin watched as the power ebbed, and she felt the sadness of the figure who was showing her these images.

  She also felt Amangêda’s anger. It came over her in waves that alternated between ice-cold and white-hot.

  The anger was not directed at Carin, but at the otherworldly thieves who took the power for themselves. Greedily they stole from this world, they consumed the power of this place, and the figure of rock, air, water, and fire—Amangêda, its name—could not halt the hemorrhaging.

  Now the images began to blur together, flowing quickly past, too fast for Carin to absorb everything the figure was showing her. But she got the impression that the bleeding disease was fundamentally linked to the hemorrhaging of primordial power. The victims of the disease lost their lifeblood; Amangêda, too, was steadily bleeding to death.

  Powerless though the figure might be to stop its own slow decline, it could effect a cure for the people of Ladrehdin. Carin had given it the means to do so. She had obeyed the summons. She had emptied a jug of wysards’ waters into the ocean—a jug of full strength, undiluted, magical power.

  The figure flashed her a look of gratitude. Then those watery blue eyes closed.

  The column formed by the diamond-bright droplets soared up to hide the figure from Carin’s gaze. The droplets swirled ever faster, gaining speed until the column broke apart as the luminous ribbon had. The individual droplets that shot out from the column sped off then, into the darkness of the ocean.

  Carin could not accompany them this time, but in her mind’s eye she watched their progress. She saw them sweep away the waterborne disease that had flowed downriver from the Granger millpond and contaminated the sea. She watched the droplets travel the world as the natural cycles of evaporation and precipitation lifted them out of the ocean, carried them over the land, and released them as rain. The rain washed the bleeding disease out of the world. Runoff flushed the contamination from pond, creek, and river.

  The cleansing was absolute. The bleeding epidemic was over, or soon would be, defeated by the combined strength of nature’s forces and the power of wizardry.

  But was there any real distinction between the two? Verek had once attempted to make the connection for her, but until now Carin had not really understood it.

  “Wysards draw power from the world,” he’d said. “They use the forces that flow in stone and water—shaping, directing, refining them, subtly changing them. The power of wizardry is both the raw power of the world and the creative potency of magic.”

  Does he know, Carin wondered as she drifted alone through the blackness, what the water in his well of magic was before the first magicians used and altered it?

  Those wysards’ waters she had returned to the sea—those colder-than-ice drops that resembled liquid glass: they were Amangêda’s tears.

  A pool of tears, Carin thought. The wizards’ well is a pool of tears.

  More images flashed through her mind, but this time Carin’s memories were supplying the pictures. She saw the storybook character Alice swimming in a pool of her own tears, trying to find her way out before she drowned in them. Carin saw Alice reading the bottle label that said “Drink me.” But the scene in her mind quickly shifted, shunting Carin into the bed of Megella’s wagon, where the words metamorphosed to “Drown me”—the command that had made her jump into the harbor before she’d been quite ready to do it.

  Oh, she’d been intending to drown herself, just as soon as she burned the strangleweed out of the ocean. Use her strength to destroy that particular threat to Ladrehdin, and then kill herself: that had been Carin’s plan. She could not go on living in this world where she didn’t belong. She was too dangerous.

  Who would die if Carin lost control again? Would she turn Theil to dust? Or Megella? Or the sheriff of Easthaven? Or the whole damned town?

  Unfortunately for all her potential victims, Carin’s plan had been thwarted. Theil had not allowed her to go alone down to the harb
or, and of course she would not have been able to jump in with him watching. He would have dived in after her, if he’d been able.

  But he’d ended up fallen and bleeding, compelling Carin to postpone her suicide while she went for help. And in the course of that attempt, she’d been diverted yet again, summoned aside by the voice of the wysards’ well.

  Obeying that summons should have given her the perfect opportunity to drown herself along with the jug of tears. But the maker of those tears, the elemental figure who had cried them so long ago, had strictly forbidden Carin to destroy herself.

  “Return to Ruain,” the figure had commanded her. “Complete your task.”

  Now a creature came streaking toward Carin. It was a dolphin, a very young one. It still had its baby whiskers. The creature rose out of the ocean depths to push Carin toward the surface.

  But before they arrived, the dolphin turned into a rabbit. It became a white rabbit with pink eyes, and it wore a waistcoat like the White Rabbit from Alice’s storybook world. It kept muttering to itself about ears and whiskers.

  The rabbit hauled Carin up into the night air, and now its long, heavy whiskers were dripping water all over her. Except it wasn’t a rabbit anymore. It was a white-haired man with a bushy beard and a walrus mustache. Water ran from the man’s hair as he dumped Carin on the dock and leaned over her.

  “Breathe!” he ordered.

  Startled into obedience, Carin sucked in a lungful of air.

  It started her coughing so hard, it forced her over onto her side. She curled into a ball next to a blazing lantern on the pier, aware in a moment that she was soaking wet, thoroughly chilled, and hurting in her chest like she’d been cudgeled.

  “You there!” barked the white-haired man, speaking to someone in the crowd of people who stood on the dock watching him rescue her. “Bring a blanket.”

  Carin’s mind was racing. The luminous ribbon made of wysards’ waters … the figure of granite with its frothy cloak, fiery hair, and sad, hopeful eyes … the vision of the combined forces of this world eradicating the alien bleeding disease—

  Were they an hallucination? Had they arisen from the same delirium that had transformed her white-bearded rescuer, making Carin see the man first as a whiskered dolphin and then as a storybook rabbit?

  Her left palm itched. Carin, still coughing, drew her hand into the lantern light to examine the injury she had done herself with her mishandled magian fire.

  But she saw no burn there, no seared skin. Her palm had healed. Moreover, the ugly scar on her forearm where she’d burned herself with boiling oil years ago: that, too, was gone.

  Carin grew quiet, her cough subsiding, as a fog seemed to steal toward her across the boards of the pier. The fog enveloped her, turned her thoughts to mist, and set her adrift, as anchorless as foam, as light as sea-spray. Light enough, perhaps, to float and not drown amidst heaving billows of magic.

  Chapter 15

  Strong Magic

  Megella tried to feel the girl’s forehead, but Carin pulled away.

  “Please, Meg. Don’t fuss,” the girl grumbled. “I’m fine.”

  “You do not act fine,” Megella murmured. “You have not been yourself since that admirably whiskered old fellow fished you out of the harbor that night. He worried for a week afterward that you might yet catch a chill and die.”

  Carin shook her head. “The sun on this beach is way too warm for me to be in any danger of a chill. You’d best put on your bonnet, Megella, before you get heatstroke.”

  Meg grunted, but she did as the girl suggested. Spring was on the cusp of summer and the afternoons were becoming stiflingly warm. Especially now that their route was taking them along the exposed sands of this deserted beach, well north of Easthaven.

  Leaving Easthaven had been difficult. Not for Theil Verek and his lady love, perhaps. Those two had been impatient to resume their journey as soon as both were fit to travel.

  But Megella had found it hard to say good-bye to the place. She had made friends among the town’s gardeners. They’d gifted her with boxes and bags of dried herbs to replenish her depleted stores.

  She had won the respect of the resident barber-surgeon who had helped her tend Lord Forester’s injury. Afterward, the surgeon had let her set up at his place and use his kit of tools to mix a miscellany of herbs and medicines into Meg’s signature potions and remedies. She had even had enough time, sufficient raw materials, and the proper setting for mixing fresh batches of her forget-for-now, blind-for-now, and sleep-for-now powders.

  Megella had not told the surgeon what she was making. The potency of those powders strayed from the wisewoman’s purview and came dangerously near the dominion of witches. Meg had taken care to raise no suspicions among her new friends in Easthaven. Everyone said she was a wonderfully conscientious nurse, hardly leaving her patients’ sides long enough to grab a few winks. What her admirers had not known was that Meg had hovered over Carin and Theil to make certain neither of the convalescing wysards let slip their true identities.

  Verek’s physical recovery had been swift. The sheriff’s men had brought him in groggy but talking. He’d been roundly cursing his horse for taking fright at the sudden flare-up of fire in the harbor. The animal had reared; a hoof clipped Verek in the head hard enough to knock him out. His lacerated scalp had bled profusely, but the surgeon stitched it up and Verek was soon on his feet.

  He had spent the rest of their time in Easthaven schooling the horse, taking it down to the docks and through busy, noisy sections of the town. He had ridden the animal practically into the fires of the blacksmith’s furnaces. He’d repeatedly raced the horse down the curve of the spit and back, and into the shallows of the sea and back. A few days of this treatment, Theil said, would harden the animal’s nerve.

  The sheriff had readily accepted Verek’s account of that night’s events, the gist of which was that Lord Forester had retired to his room after dinner to find his lady, Alice, much revived. The pair of them had gone for a night ride to view the strange, sparkling lights that seemed to cover the Eastern Sea. They had dismounted and were standing on the spit, gazing out over the water, when fire exploded in the mouth of the harbor.

  According to Verek’s account, neither Forester nor Alice could say what had started the blaze. Forester had barely glimpsed the explosion before his startled horse laid him out cold. And, of course, Alice had had no thought for anything then except fetching aid to her injured husband.

  Being unconscious at the time, Forester had not been able to account for Alice’s dunking in the harbor. And “Alice” herself was not talking.

  The girl had come out of the water dazed, disoriented, looking like flotsam cast to the surface. She’d been all but stripped, her gown reduced to tatters that wrapped her like shredded blades of seaweed.

  In the face of the girl’s silence, Megella had found herself called upon to supply a plausible explanation. The story she concocted for the sheriff was that the young lady, half crazed with fear for Lord Forester, had come racing in, the horse careering out of control, tumbling Alice down the embankment and into the water. How very fortunate that the white-bearded dockworker had been there to fish her out. He had done it so speedily that the girl had been in no very great danger of drowning.

  The dockworker—obviously a man of discretion—had not publicly contradicted Meg’s story. Privately, however, the fellow had been blunt.

  “That one—she tried to kill ’erself, she did,” he’d whispered in Megella’s ear. “Weren’t no horse’s fault. That girl put herself in the water. She was holding somethin’ in her arms, like she meant to weight herself down until she were good and drowned.”

  The old fellow had sucked his teeth, then added, “A pretty girl like that—don’t make no sense. But I know what I saw.”

  Carin had neither denied nor confirmed the man’s account. For days after her dunking she had lain in bed, silent and still. She’d slept so much that Megella had tried to feed her raw liver
in an attempt to build her blood. The girl had refused it, coming out of her twilight sleep only long enough to mumble about “going alone,” which Meg had interpreted as, “Let me alone.”

  Exasperated, Megella had snapped at her.

  “Did it never occur to you, ruddy-duck of the millpond, that I might also have preferred to be left alone? If you had not come back to Granger, if you had not appeared in the street that morning, then I would still be in my cottage by the creek, tending to people who desperately need my skills. But here I am instead, wasting my time, waiting on a perfectly healthy young woman who cannot seem to drag herself out of bed.”

  Carin’s response had been to pull the covers over her head.

  “You cannot hide, girl!” Meg had exclaimed, disgusted. “Tah! Get on your feet and admit what you have done. Tell Lord Verek how you destroyed the jug of wysards’ waters. Admit that you robbed him of a power that might yet have been his. Say to him that he is weak and you are strong. You were so flushed with your success that night, after you sparked the raging inferno, you poured out the very wellspring of Theil’s strength to make certain he could not challenge your ascendancy.”

  With each accusation she’d thrown at the girl, Meg had been backing away, crossing the room toward the door that led to her connecting bedchamber. Just before she slammed it behind her, she’d played her final gambit.

  “You know as well as I do, girl, that the longer you keep him here, the longer you delay his return to Ruain, the weaker he will grow. Is that what you want? Are you pleased that he ebbs while you grow strong? … and that he feels himself weakening with each passing day?”

  Megella’s ploy had succeeded spectacularly. She’d barely shut the door between them before it was flung open again.

  “No!” The girl had stood on the threshold looking wild-eyed and wide awake. “That’s not— I never— I didn’t—”

  Carin, stammering, had jerked her head toward the hall door of their suite, as though listening for Verek’s footsteps. Then she’d slipped inside Meg’s room, closed the door softly behind her, and laid her hand on Megella’s arm.