The road ahead pitched and fell, curved and straightened, as the lay of the land dictated. One morning, the travelers found themselves skirting a placidly steaming volcano. Then they dropped into a canyon to weave between high, broken bluffs, past gigantic boulders that had crashed down into the shadows. In several places the reddish rocks lay piled so closely together that Megella’s cart could barely squeeze past them. The going was slow as they maneuvered through the rubble.
“Hmm,” Verek murmured. “I have always ridden horseback through here, never before attempting to drive a conveyance through this gap.” He studied the boulders and added, “I once possessed the power to shift any rock that blocked my way. But I find myself still incapable of working even that small specimen of magic.”
Verek stretched forth his right hand, his fingers stiff and pointed at a boulder that was crouched like a massive troll directly in their path. It did not budge.
In wordless frustration, Theil made a fist and struck his leg bruisingly hard.
Then he turned to Carin.
“Fìleen,” he murmured, “be pleased to cast upon this rock your spell of sand. I weary of the delay occasioned by these obstacles.”
Carin’s every muscle stiffened.
No, she wanted to say, but doubted she could force the word past the dread that had grabbed her throat. Not here. Not in Ruain. This is sacred ground, and that curse is profane.
But Theil needed to return to his source, to the wellspring of magic that bathed the roots of his moss-grown manor house. Nothing stood in his way now except a hulking great rock.
And it’s only a rock, Carin told herself. It’s not alive—I can’t hurt it.
She drew a deep, steadying breath, then slipped off her horse and stepped to the boulder. Its surface was riven with gouges and grooves and felt cool to the touch as she laid her left hand on it.
Carin looked inward, seeking confidence, then straightened the fingers of her right hand and snapped the spell deep into the boulder’s core. With a whooshing sound the stone crumbled, leaving nothing under her fingers, only a big pile of sand at her feet.
And deep in her mind, as though her skull were a conch shell, she heard the distant crashing of ocean waves on the rocks of Earth, that world from which she drew her strength.
“Excellent!” Verek exclaimed, swinging down from his horse. “Keep on, fìleen. Work your way toward the river. With you crushing every obstacle, we shall soon clear this rubbled canyon.”
She did as he asked, moving attentively among the boulders, touching them, trying to pulverize as few as necessary to open a path for Meg’s cart. Though Verek seemed entirely comfortable with Carin turning chunks of his province to dust, to her it felt like sacrilege.
“Oh, thank Drisha,” Carin breathed in an undertone as they neared the river. She could see the road curving alongside the water, following it upstream into a wide, tree-lined canyon that was free of hulking boulders.
To reach that open road, however, they must first cross the river. And in their way loomed a great jumble of boulders, some of them fallen from the cliffs overhead, others obviously washed downstream during times of high water. The river—what Carin could see of it through the heaped rocks—appeared shallow at this crossing point. But clearly it could flood at times, bringing with it massive, water-smoothed boulders and wedging them tightly together like eggs in the nest of a sea turtle.
“Nearly there,” Verek called encouragement from behind Carin. He was leading—or tugging—Megella’s cart-horse through and over the sandhills that Carin’s spellwork had created. “Only clear those final impediments from the riverbed, and we will be away at speed once more.”
She studied the whitened rocks in the river. They seemed different in character from the boulders of reddish stone that had littered the floor of the gap behind her. The river-rocks were wet, some of them embedded in mud, others lodged in damp gravel along the edge of the water; still others sat in the river channel. Their tops were dry but their undersides were saturated.
Careful, whispered a wary little voice in the back of Carin’s head. Wet rocks in a campfire will shatter.
She flinched as the crystal dolphin round her neck gave her a sudden twinge. Carin grabbed the amulet through her shirt and held it away from her skin.
As she waited for the cramping sensation to subside, she walked along the gravel streamside, seeking the highest and driest of the river-rocks. When she thought she’d found it, Carin released the amulet and bent from the riverbank to prop herself, left-handed, on the smooth stone—sticking by her pledge to curse only what she could touch. Stiffening the fingers of her right hand, she cast the spell.
The boulder did not crumble to sand. It exploded, with a noise as if the world itself had shattered.
Chunks of rock hurtled past Carin’s head. The force of the blast flung her away from the river, but somehow she kept her feet amid the billows of dust that fogged and boiled around her.
Choking on it, Carin stumbled backward but found only suspended clouds of dust, the air unbreathably thick with it. She whirled and tried to run. But her feet slipped on shards of rock that lay atop the sandhills made by her earlier, successful spellwork. Wherever Carin stepped, she could get no good purchase. She could only skid unbalanced on the jagged stone fragments that littered the sand. Her feet sent the broken layer tumbling and clattering off the mounds of debris she was attempting to cross.
Then strong hands caught her, lifted her, and carried her clear of the dust.
Carin couldn’t breathe for coughing. Her lungs burned. She was seeing stars behind her closed lids when she finally quieted enough to throw back her head and gulp great draughts of clean air.
She tried to force her eyes open, but the lids felt glued together. Carin raised her hand, intending to rub her vision clear, but felt Theil’s hand catch hers and force it aside.
“Wha-a-a—” she croaked in a mouth and throat so dry that attempting to speak was like swallowing a wood rasp. The effort seemed to scrape away the lining of Carin’s gullet.
“Quiet,” came Verek’s voice from far away. “Be still.”
With her throat scoured raw and her face and mouth feeling as if they were coated with plaster, Carin was only too willing to obey him. She felt her muscles go lax, while her mind focused on the puzzle of Theil’s distant-sounding voice.
Obviously he was right beside her, kneeling on the ground with her. His fingers were working gently across her face, stopping here and there to press or squeeze her skin. His touch, soft and light, should cause her no pain, but once or twice Carin felt a stab and had an impression of something sharp being withdrawn, like a needle.
Then Verek poured water over Carin’s face. Though she welcomed it, was glad of the cool wetness that washed away the dust-caked feeling, the water stung her so smartly that she gasped. With her sharp intake of breath Carin sucked in some water, and also the taste of blood.
The blood in her mouth brought a sense of clarity: She knew she’d been cut in the face by flying fragments of rock. Theil was picking slivers of stone out of Carin’s flesh, flushing the wounds, washing off the blood.
Carin realized something else, too. The crystal she wore was paining her again—with the same muscle-burning sensation it had given her when she pulverized Flynn.
“No!” she rasped and tried to pull away from Verek. “Don’t touch—”
“Be still!” he barked.
Carin froze. Like before, she thought. Be empty—hollow. Do no harm.
Now Theil was working on her eyelids, rinsing away the grit—and finding plenty of blood mixed into the dust that coated her lashes, Carin guessed, to judge by how firmly her lids seemed glued together. First one eye, then the other … he washed the outsides clean and gently lifted each lid to flush out the grit that had blown under them.
His touch, deft and assured, helped her sink into stillness. She found a harmless and silent space within herself, and stayed safely there until Verek quit pou
ring water over her and Carin sensed that he had left her side.
Then she dared to blink, cautiously. She moved her lids as slowly as she could in anticipation of encountering a sharp, stinging grain of dust. But Theil seemed to have rinsed it all away. Carin could blink without sandpapering her eyes, though they felt scratchily raw and irritated.
With a jolt, she saw that Verek and Megella were standing directly over her, talking. This close, Carin should have been able to hear them clearly. But she could pick out only a few words, and those only by listening so intently that her every sense seemed united in the single faculty of hearing.
“… ointment … calendula,” Carin heard, and knew the two healers were discussing remedies for her sliced-up face.
By slow degrees, Carin reached to touch the crystal dolphin through the fabric of her shirt. By the time she got her hand around it, the amulet had ceased its worrisome, muscle-aching emanations. She gripped it, and feeling nothing within it—except its steady urge to take her westward—she relaxed a little … though she felt oddly cut off from the world, isolated.
Why can’t I hear? Carin stuck her finger in her ear and dug around.
Verek saw her. He crouched, pulled her finger out, and inserted his. She could feel, and sort of hear, his blunt nail scraping at the hollow of her outer ear. And when he withdrew it, Carin saw the blood-darkened crust that coated it. Her ears were packed with stone dust.
Theil fetched more water and flushed them. It helped, but still she could not hear properly. Instead of voices, or the scritchy sounds of boots on sand, or the piercing cry of a hawk hunting above the canyon, Carin mostly heard a ringing in her ears.
With Verek’s help, she managed to stand and stagger to Megella’s cart. It, and all its contents, were coated in white powder. The explosion had reached this far into the gap, dusting the pair who had labored to maneuver Meg’s cart over the sandhills. But they had been spared the full force of the blast.
Carin leaned against the cart, took a long swig from Megella’s waterskin, then propped herself up while the wisewoman rubbed a salve into her cuts. It hurt, then soothed her.
Megella appeared perplexed as the woman started to wrap a strip of linen around Carin’s head. Before she had made more than three turns with the bandage, Meg seemed to lose the pattern, as though she could not decide how best to cover all the damage that had been done to Carin’s face.
That bad, huh? Carin thought. She pulled her hair back—apart from the damp strands around her face, it felt chalky, full of grit—and Meg finished off the binding with a few more wraps across Carin’s nose and chin.
Though the worst of the dust cloud had settled by now, a haze hung in the air, down toward the river. Carin saw Verek approaching from that direction. He was wiping the blade of his dagger on a clump of spongy moss that he must have picked up at the river.
Carin whipped her gaze around, counting heads. Three people, yes … but only two horses. The cob hitched to Megella’s cart stood quietly in the traces, although a confusion of hoofprints in the sand at the animal’s feet suggested that the normally unflappable beast had pitched and reared when startled by the explosion.
Behind the cart, and behind several boulders that were far enough to the side of the trail that Carin had left them alone, Verek’s saddlehorse was browsing a patch of grouseberries, one of the few plants that grew at the bottom of this sunless, steep walled ravine. Apparently the “hardening of the nerves” the horse had undergone in Easthaven had inured the silver-dapple to sudden shocks such as exploding boulders.
But where was the second cob, the horse that had been Carin’s mount since they’d abandoned the woodpecker wagon at the sea cliffs? The animal had followed Carin to the river, walking just behind her as she worked her way to the last obstacle, all those smooth white boulders that had clustered in the water like huge eggs …
“No!” Carin croaked, her throat still as raw as if someone had taken a grater to it. “Not—“
As she ran past Verek, heading for the river, he put out his hand: not to stop her, more a gesture of compassion.
Carin did not slow, but crunched her way through the shards of stone that covered the sandhills. Her feet raised new but thinner clouds of dust as she raced to the scene of her mistake.
And there lay the cob, so covered in chalky dust that the animal would have been invisible, except for the bright-red line and the large crimson pool where the horse had bled out after Verek slit its throat.
Carin fell to her knees beside the horse’s head and gently lifted away chunks of stone and rubble until she saw why Theil had ended the creature’s life. A jagged fragment, blasted into the air as Carin’s spell miscarried, had smashed the horse’s head, shattering bone and penetrating deeply into the brain. Yet the animal had evidently not died instantly, since Verek had found it necessary to knife the horse to put it out of its misery.
Again Carin was visited by the urge to cast the curse of sand inward to the organs of her own body, destroying herself before she could further injure this world or its inhabitants. But a memory, like an echo of the shimmering voice of the wizards’ well, stopped her:
“Return to the wellspring of power,” the voice had commanded. “Complete your task.”
Carin re-covered the horse’s remains, then trudged back to Verek.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped, and found she could hear almost properly again. The ringing in her ears was subsiding.
She hesitated to slip into Verek’s arms, fearful that she might reduce him to dust as soon as they touched. But as always, Carin’s need for him was so great that she could not keep her distance.
Theil pulled her close and made her safe against him.
“The fault is mine,” he muttered. “I could have avoided this route. A road exists that skirts this gap. But it is far longer, and I had no mind to straggle home by such a roundabout way.”
“Well, there’s only sand to stop us now.”
Carin eased out of Verek’s embrace and tried to smile, though she doubted he’d see her expression under her bandage. “Let’s go.”
They walked the horses to the river, Verek in the lead with the silver dapple. Carin followed, holding the surviving cob by its cheek strap and guiding Meg’s cart past the carcass of the dead animal. The wisewoman said nothing. But Carin thought she saw Megella sprinkle something on the horse’s body, as a mourner might toss a flower into a loved one’s grave, as they passed the scene of the animal’s death.
The force of Carin’s spell had disintegrated all the clustered river-rocks. Dust from the boulders had settled in the riverbed to such a depth that crossing it was like wading quicksand. Carin’s feet sank in, as did the horse’s hooves.
Over his shoulder, Verek shouted at her: “Quickly!” He raced to the far bank, then slapped his horse’s rump to send the animal cantering farther along the road, well up from the treacherous sands. Turning, he started to wade back to Carin, but stopped when he saw that she was managing, after a fashion.
“Come on,” she urged the cob, tugging it along. Glancing around, Carin could see the wheels of Megella’s cart sink threateningly into the sand. And from the seat, the woman was looking down with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed expression of alarm.
“Meg!” Carin cried. “Snap the reins. Get your horse to pick up its feet and move!”
The woman did as instructed, and the cob responded. The sturdy little beast leaned into the traces, made a grunting sound like a hog, and dragged them all—Carin, Megella, and the cart—to safety.
For a while then, Carin walked beside the horse, no longer touching it but trying, through her presence, to convey her remorse for destroying the animal’s fellow. The horse kept looking around, first at Carin and then ahead at Verek on the familiar silver-dapple. The cob seemed confused by the absence of its near-twin. In its glances Carin imagined she could read the horse’s questions:
“Where is my mate? What have you done, you witch?”
When the trail
began to climb away from the river, steeply enough to make walking difficult, Carin accepted Verek’s offer to ride with him. She climbed up in his arms, and for the rest of the day she blanked her mind and thought of nothing.
They spent the night at a modest inn in a quiet village, surrounded by thickets of black currants, wild grapes, and plums. Verek left his womenfolk to shake the dust of the explosion out of their clothes and all the bags and bundles that were heaped on Megella’s cart. While the inn’s serving-girl helped Meg reload the cart and lash it all down, the wisewoman sent Carin upstairs to bathe. Carin was covered in so much dust, she looked like a rock troll—what she imagined a rock troll must look like, anyway.
Peering into a small, cracked mirror, Carin unwound her bandage. By the uncertain light of a single flickering candle, she could not see all the damage she’d inflicted upon herself. But her face was puffy and bruised, and within the dark discolorations were webs of cuts and punctures.
None of them seemed frightfully deep, but hardly an inch of her skin had been spared. The areas that had not sustained cuts were abraded, as though she’d rubbed her face against gritstone.
And now that the soothing effects of Megella’s salve were wearing off, Carin’s skin felt shredded.
She bathed carefully, washing as gently as she could, rinsing the dust from her hair. She found places Verek had missed, needle-fine slivers of stone embedded in the skin of her neck and arms. Her clothing had mostly protected the rest of her. But why Carin had not suffered the same fate as the horse—victim of a skull-shattering chunk of flying rock—only Drisha knew.
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 28
