The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “Widgeon,” Megella murmured, now with a slight hesitation—perhaps a resurgent wariness—in the woman’s voice.

  Carin shook her head.

  “No use denying what we all know is true. My sand-curse is a lethal spell. To keep it under control, I must risk myself to it. If I’m in harm’s way too, then I’ll be certain to take careful aim—the way I did with the spores. If they’d only been up your nose and not mine, Meg, I might have turned you to sand right along with them.”

  Carin tightened her lips, trying but mostly failing to smile at the woman. “Maybe you got lucky, back with that first clump of strangleweed. A tiny slipup, and I could have killed you.”

  Megella murmured something Carin didn’t catch.

  She wasn’t looking at the wisewoman now, but had shifted her gaze back to Verek. Meg’s mention of the Eastern Sea had made Carin think:

  I had a better plan—foolproof. What became of it?

  She rubbed her forehead, trying to remember. A while back, she’d contrived a way to be absolutely sure she never inflicted her sand-curse upon Theil or Megella or anyone else. But she hadn’t followed through, she hadn’t acted as she’d intended. And now she could not remember what she’d meant to do. Thinking back—or trying to—Carin got the feeling that something had slipped through her fingers in the Easthaven harbor. If she’d known of a way to keep Theil and Meg safe from any possibility of her spellwork miscarrying, why hadn’t she acted?

  “Widgeon,” Megella said again, breaking into Carin’s thoughts. “Let us consider that lone clump of weed you just destroyed. I was struck by its sickliness—how it languished by the side of the road, more dead than alive. Might its predicament suggest a weakness?”

  “Oh … right.” Carin turned to look at the pile of sand under the dead branch. She nodded. “That’s what stops it. The weed works itself into a corner. It chokes the life out of every plant it touches, and then it doesn’t move on to a new victim fast enough.” Carin gestured at the swath of devastation the strangleweed had left in its wake. “That clump was starving because it couldn’t reach anything new to feed on. All the plants around it were dead. It had nowhere to go.”

  Megella craned her neck, looking back toward the verdant expanses they had passed before coming upon this dead patch. She clucked her tongue.

  “Tah! If not for its lack of foresight, the weed might have overrun the whole country by now. It does not think ahead—if ‘think’ is a term that can be applied to such a parasite.”

  “It can be,” Carin muttered. And Megella glanced at her, as though remembering that they had argued this point before.

  “But from what we’ve seen,” Carin had to concede, tipping her head, “the stuff shows precious little sense when it thinks it has plenty. It kills whatever it can reach.”

  “And when it is done with one clutch of victims,” Megella added, “it finds that it has left such a wide swath of destruction on all sides that it cannot reach across to fresh pickings.”

  “Which is why it spreads by spores.”

  Carin’s remark brought a frown to Meg’s face.

  “If that is the case,” the woman murmured, “then the next wind that blows through here will carry the spores into those ‘fresh pickings’ that it could not otherwise infest. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the strangleweed succeeds in overrunning the entire country.” Megella sighed. “Seeing so much of the weed lying dead and shriveled in the dirt, I had begun to hope that the worst was over. But this may be only a brief lull before the next onslaught.”

  Carin stood with her back against the wagon, gazing at the killed vegetation, studying the pile of strangleweed sand. An idea was trying to form in the back of her head, something to do with nature and wizardry, their forces combining to defeat a common enemy.

  Before the thought could crystallize, however, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked around. Verek was still sitting up in the wagon bed. And having reclaimed her attention, he pointed at his horse.

  Carin had left the animal standing in the road when she’d slipped off its back. Now the silver-dapple had ventured on ahead and found itself a patch of decent grazing. Past the dead swath, away to the north, the land was green again. Distant, tree-covered foothills beckoned them onward.

  “We ought to get going,” she said, taking her cue from Verek and the horse. “There’s no water here, and not enough for all these animals to eat.”

  “And we should get clear of this patch of death before the next breeze kicks up.” Megella shook the reins, signaling the cobs to move on. “I prefer to avoid another ‘snootful’ of strangleweed spores.”

  “So do I.”

  Carin walked beside a slowing rolling wagon wheel until they had caught up with Verek’s horse. Then, remounted, she trailed along for a while behind the bobtails, motioning for Theil to lie down again. She wanted him to rest, to get his wind back, to regain his voice. She longed to hear him shout at her again … for any reason he chose, or none at all.

  * * *

  Over the next several days, from Carin’s lead position, she could see the road starting to vanish. It was narrowing, angling up into tree-mantled hills. The last settlement they’d come to, a coastal village that was little more than a huddle of fishing huts, was well to the south of them now. To judge by the neglected state of the road, those villagers seldom ventured into these hills.

  The road continued to veer slightly eastward, and eventually it brought them through the wooded hills and back to the coast. And there it dropped them onto a shoreline that was distinctly different from the coast at Easthaven or the beaches they had crossed north of that port. The sand here was black. It gave the shore a shadowy cast.

  Deepening the shadows were tall cliffs that rose steeply just inland. The farther north they traveled, the closer the cliffs approached the shoreline, until finally the bluffs loomed practically overhead, blotting out the daylight each afternoon as the sun glided behind them.

  Carin welcomed the shade the cliffs cast. Summer was well advanced now, and the afternoon sun beating down on the black sand of the beach would have made for unbearable heat. The cliffs kept them cool, however, as did the fresh breezes off the ocean. Carin turned her face to the breeze, enjoying the way it played with her hair, breathing deeply of its sharp salty tang.

  The sea air seemed to do for Verek what no amount of mint salve or onion syrup had done. He still could not speak above a whisper, but he breathed easier now, with no audible wheezing. And the day after they reached the black sand, he climbed out of the wagon and got on his horse.

  “We’re close, aren’t we?” Carin murmured as she gladly relinquished the animal to him. “Ruain’s not far now, is it?”

  “No, fìleen,” he rasped. “Not far.”

  As he led them on up the coast, the sun picked out a silver ribbon that tumbled straight down the cliffs ahead. Long before they reached it, the ribbon became recognizably a waterfall. It cascaded off a high cliff that was rimmed with towering cedars. Roaring down the cliff’s granite face, throwing rainbows into the air amid a bright silvery mist, the water plunged into the large pool it had dug in the onyx sand of the beach.

  They camped at the edge of that pool, drawn by the abundance of fresh water even though the roar was so loud they could not hear one another speak.

  After supper, Carin and Verek pulled off their boots. Hand in hand they crossed the stretch of sand that separated the pool from the sea. Tiny waves lapped at their bare feet as they stood at the ocean’s edge taking in the beauty of the scene, neither of them trying to speak.

  Carin turned to study the cliff-top where the cedars rose like sentries. She ran her gaze down the waterfall that was veiled in a frothy, ever-shifting fog. She followed the trickles of water that escaped from the pool and spread over the beach, making its sand glisten like black glass.

  A wind gusted at her back, blowing her hair into her eyes. She turned and looked out to sea.

  In the near distance,
a few rocky islands rose out of the water. Nothing else broke the surface. The sea stretched uninterrupted to the eastern horizon.

  Theil, drawing close at Carin’s back, swept her hair aside and kissed her on the neck. Then he put his arms around her. Together they stood facing into the wind, breathing deeply of it, watching the white, foamy ruffles it made on the water.

  As the dusk deepened, lightning streaked, so suddenly that they both jumped. Theil’s arms tightened around Carin, pulling her back against him. An open beach was no place to be if a storm was brewing. But for a moment they stayed where they were, startled into immobility:

  The lightning had not flashed out of the evening sky. It had shot upward from one of the offshore islands. And now more lightning streaked through the air, bursting up from all the rocky islets.

  In the sky above, clouds were forming. The lightning flickered between the ground and the sky, and then among the clouds, seeming to puff them up. As Carin watched by the light of the bolts that made them, the clouds billowed into a massive, menacing storm-front.

  Verek grabbed Carin’s hand. Together they ran, sprinting across the beach toward their camp.

  Megella had already flown into action. The woman had dug out the large oilcloth she’d purchased in Easthaven. She was trying to spread it over her wagon, but the increasingly gusty wind made it an impossible task to accomplish alone. Carin leaped to help.

  Verek raced around to a grassy crescent at the foot of the cliff where they had tethered the horses. In short order he was back at the wagon, apparently satisfied that the animals were adequately secured.

  The three of them together managed to stake the eastern edge of the oilcloth into the sand, angling it from the top rail of the wagon down to the beach to form a sort of lean-to tent. Megella crawled under it and huddled beneath the wagon, seeking protection as the storm broke overhead.

  Carin, however, stayed out in the wind, leaning into it to keep on her feet. It drove grains of sand into her face with stinging force. Then came the rain, the windblown drops hitting her hard enough to hurt.

  Painful, too, was the crystal amulet around Carin’s neck. The muscle-cramping sensation she’d felt during her murder of Flynn, when she’d carried the crystal in her pocket, had returned in force. The drenching rain seemed to intensify the energy that flowed through the object. It burned her skin.

  “Ow!” Carin cried as she yanked the amulet’s cord over her head. To escape it, she dropped the crystal into the wagon.

  Then she squeezed her eyes shut and gave herself over to the power of the storm. The noise shook her to the bone—the roar of the waterfall behind her, the scream of the wind, the claps of thunder.

  No human voice could have made itself heard over the sounds of the storm. Nevertheless, a command reached Carin.

  “Drink me,” chimed a voice that sounded like sunlight and seashells.

  Carin obeyed. Opening her mouth to the rain that sluiced over her, she took it in, gulping without pausing to breathe.

  She opened her eyes too, and the rain washed away the grit that the wind had blown under her lids. The rain became her tears, and in it she felt the coldness of Amangêda’s tears.

  The wysards’ waters Carin had poured into the harbor at Easthaven: they’d come full circle. They had spread through the ocean, risen as vapor, condensed into droplets. And now they were raining down, washing over her, washing the world clean. They would flush out any lingering traces of the bleeding disease. After tonight, after this climactic storm, Ladrehdin would be wholly free of that alien plague.

  But a threat remained.

  The first wave of strangleweed had died, true. Except for the one clump of yellowing weed, they had seen none living for weeks now.

  “Weeds die in a season,” the woodsprite had once told Carin.

  As its last act before death, however, the weed made spores. And those spores would not only spread the strangleweed to every field and forest that had escaped the first wave, they would invade the airways and lungs of people and animals. The spores were the most sinister, the most deadly form the weed could take.

  Carin thrust her right hand toward the heavens.

  “Amangêda!” she screamed, spraying water and misty air from her mouth like a whale explosively exhaling through its blowhole. “Touch me!”

  Directly overhead, lightning flashed and a finger of fire descended to meet Carin’s outstretched hand.

  In that instant she worked the spell of sand—rigorously, specifically. She worked the spell more accurately even than when she had felt the spores sprout inside her nose. This magic was precisely aimed. It could touch nothing else, no flesh, no other living being.

  The streak of lightning would spread the magic through the clouds, into the storm. The rain would carry it back to the land. And every drop that touched a strangleweed spore would strike it with Carin’s spellcraft. One by one, the world over, she would bespell each spore to a harmless grain of sand.

  Everything else the rain fell on would be safe from her curse. She had taken very careful aim.

  The lightning flash momentarily blinded Carin. As she dropped her hand she spun on her heel, ducking to shield her eyes.

  When she raised her head again, she was facing the waterfall, not the storm-tossed sea.

  In the cascade down the rock face—in the granite of the cliff, in the flowing water, in its evanescent veils—Carin glimpsed a figure. Lightning striking the cliff-top added its final element: fire.

  For an instant Carin gazed into the blue eyes of Amangêda the immortal, the spirit of this world, the embodiment of its natural elements. She heard the shimmery voice say, “Complete your task.”

  Then the figure was gone, flashing out of sight with the next lightning bolt.

  Carin dropped to her knees in the saturated sand and discovered Verek staring at her through the rain that continued to pelt them. He stood with his back to the waterfall. He could not have seen the figure there—his attention was entirely on Carin. He stared at her as though nothing else existed for him, not the noise of the storm, nor the rain in his face, nor the gale that threatened to flatten him.

  Oh, right. Now I remember, Carin realized, feeling as though the onslaught of nature’s forces had parted a veil in her mind. “Drown me.” That was my foolproof way of making sure I never sand-cursed Theil—I thought I would drown myself. But she’d been put on notice: to do so would not serve Amangêda’s purpose.

  Carin lurched to her feet and stumbled toward Verek, the wind at her back pushing her on until she staggered into his arms. Speech was impossible. Even if she could have made herself heard, she lacked breath enough to form the words. So Carin pantomimed her wishes, looking up into the deluge, opening her mouth, drinking the rain, getting it up her nose.

  After a moment Verek managed to tear his gaze from her and do as she did. They stood together in the storm like a pair of empty vessels, filling themselves with the rain that carried in each drop the magic of the wysards intermixed with the natural energy of the world.

  Gradually, the wind abated. The lightning moved inland and took the rain with it. The clouds thinned overhead. Stars popped into view.

  Carin was shivering. They both were. Water trickled from the ends of their hair, dripped from their drenched clothing, dribbled over their bare feet, and seeped into the sodden sand under them.

  The wet fabrics clung. But with each of them determined to peel the clothes off the other, they quickly stripped, piling their garments in soggy heaps.

  His skin against hers felt cool at first, and his lips were cold, like he’d been sipping an iced drink. But Theil’s breath was warm. Carin could not hear him breathing. The roar of the waterfall drowned every sound. As their bodies twined together, though, she could feel his chest heaving, and feel his breath coming fast and strong. Gasping, yes, but with pleasure, not in the shallow, painful way he had gasped for air after inhaling the spores.

  Carin was not shivering now. The pounding of her hea
rt pumped liquid fire through her veins. Her body was hot, she was melting inside. In the starlit night, on the wet sand beside the thundering waterfall, neither of them cooled again until the first hint of dawn in the east.

  Chapter 17

  The Last Wysards’ Stronghold

  Megella shook her head.

  “Absolutely not. I cannot ride a horse. Most certainly, I cannot ride a horse up that.” She pointed, indicating the path that climbed upward from the beach in a series of steep switchbacks.

  “You must,” Verek said in a clear, strong voice.

  The storm that had soaked him to the skin, and his lady with him, should have sent them both into paroxysms of fever and chills. Both, however, had emerged stronger for their drenching. Theil’s voice and lungs were working properly again, and Carin absolutely sparkled.

  Megella found herself casting sidelong glances at the girl, wondering whether her radiance was simply the glow of a girl in love. Or had Carin claimed for herself a bit of the lightning from that eerie and magnificent storm?

  “I cannot,” Megella repeated, returning to the problem at hand. “When this journey began, nephew of mine, I told you I would not and could not ride.”

  She glared at Verek, exasperated. “Did you know our road would end here at the foot of this impassible cliff? If you knew it, then you should have left me in Easthaven. It is a fine town, I would have been content there. But now you have brought me to the edge of nowhere, and I suppose that you and Carin must leave me here. For I certainly cannot ascend that”—again she pointed—“on the back of a horse.”

  But “edge of nowhere” did not do justice to this place, Meg thought, looking around at a wilderness of sea and stone. Northward from the waterfall, the beach had rapidly narrowed. The cliffs had crowded in, leaving less and less sand under the wheels of Megella’s wagon. Finally Verek had led them onto the last sliver of beach. Just ahead, the cliffs rose straight up from the sea.

  The sound of the ocean chafing against the rocks seemed to mock her. “You can’t,” it warned. “Don’t try.”