The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Carin was sitting on the bed, with Megella working a fresh application of salve into her cuts, when Verek entered the room. He sank into a chair by the window and receded into the shadows that the one candle could not dispel.

  “I have had good news from the sheriff of these parts,” Verek said, sounding tired but pleased. “He reports that the strangleweed never crept this far west. The damage it inflicted to fields and forests seems to have been confined to the territory immediately surrounding Penfield, where the fletchers’ maple groves grew. And from there, as we saw on our journey, it spread south across my borders to invade the lower lands of Ladrehdin.”

  Verek sighed. “Serious though the damage is to the Penfield region, crops elsewhere in Ruain promise to be bountiful—largely due, I am told, to that spectacularly rainy storm-front that swept through the whole province, east to west.”

  Carin could feel Verek’s gaze on her. From his shadowed corner he was studying her, no doubt recalling that night on the beach when a finger of lightning had dropped from the clouds to accept from her the magic that would vanquish the strangleweed. That had been her contribution. If the rain from that storm had made Ruain’s farms unusually productive this summer, Verek would need to thank Amangêda for it, not Carin.

  “There will be a surplus,” he was saying. “Enough, the sheriff believes, to share with the people in the east so that none need go hungry this fall and winter. I have given instructions that the stewards of the prosperous areas are to deliver every grain of surplus to the sheriffs at Glimmerdon and Penfield, there to be distributed among those who lost their livelihoods to the plague of weed.”

  “Your grandfather would have approved, Theil,” Megella said, turning from examining Carin’s face to peer into the gloom where Verek sat. “Though Lord Legary was a deeply flawed man—”

  Verek gave a snort but did not contradict her.

  “—he always treated the people of Ruain with kindness and respect. Had he ever known, during his time as lord of this province, such a damaging plague as that devil’s weed, he would have done all in his power to ensure that no one, not the lowest beggar, starved on account of it.”

  Megella turned back to Carin. “Are you in much pain, widgeon?” she asked. “I can prepare a dose of numbwort, if you think it would help you to sleep.”

  By candlelight, Carin studied the woman, wondering whether Meg wanted to knock her out—and keep her out—to avoid another miscarriage of magic. She hesitated, strongly tempted to swallow enough numbwort to strip her of her senses from now until they rode through the gates at Verek’s manor house.

  But recalling how sick and sweaty the herb had left her before, Carin shook her head.

  “Let’s skip the numbwort, Meg. My face is sore, but the salve helps. Am I going to be scarred?”

  “Not badly, I wouldn’t say. Maybe in a place or two, where the fragments penetrated most deeply.” The wisewoman sighed, then added, “The sooner we get you home and the quicker your wysard resubmerges himself in the power of that place, the better for you both. Theil needs to take over the working of strong magic and allow you to abstain.”

  And with that—the only rebuke Megella had offered either of them over the slaughter of her loyal little horse—the woman walked to the door and opened it.

  “Good night,” Meg said. “Tomorrow we must rise early and hurry onward. I recognize this town. It is not far from the village where I was raised. So neither is it terribly far from Weyrrock. I want us there as soon as possible.”

  Megella shut the door behind her, and Carin could hear the woman’s footsteps on the creaking wooden floor of the inn’s back hallway as Meg walked down to her own room. Another door opened and shut. Then silence filled the nighttime.

  Carin was almost asleep already. She lay back on the bed, wearing only the sheet she’d wrapped up in after her bath.

  “Weyrrock?” she muttered groggily. “Where’s that?”

  Verek rose from his chair in the corner and walked over to stand looking down at her.

  “It’s home, fìleen,” he whispered, and lightly stroked her face. “That is the ancient name of my house. Our house,” he amended. “I did not know there was anyone still living who remembered what the manor had been called.” He tilted his head. “Great-aunt Megella continues to surprise me.”

  “When will …” Carin began, but did not finish her question: we get there? She was asleep before the last words passed her lips.

  * * *

  They were on the road at dawn, Carin mounted on an easy-going chestnut mare that Verek had purchased for her the night before. They proceeded briskly, stopping only for quick meals and short rests.

  No one spoke much. It seemed, after so long a journey together, they had said what there was to say.

  Carin resumed the close watch of the landscape she’d been keeping since before the river-rock explosion. As they entered another belt of woods, where the trees seemed to go on forever, she scanned the oaks alongside the road, searching for anything threatening. Carin had an idea of what form the threat might take, but she did not speak of it to Verek or Megella. Naming it would have made her dread too distinct.

  Theil was increasingly eager as they continued westward. On the fourth morning after the incident at the river, Carin heard him humming, and marveled. She had never heard any sound of music, not a note, pass his lips before.

  She was looking at him, smiling at his excitement, sharing it, when she glimpsed a familiar presence: a flickering in the branches, as bright as the sun, sparking through the leafy trees. It was keeping pace with them.

  “Sweet mercy!” she gasped, flinging up her hand. “Look!”

  “What?” Verek jerked his head around to peer where she pointed.

  But the sparking had slipped away through the trees, leaving them no hint of its existence.

  “A light,” Carin whispered. “A spark, like flint striking steel.”

  Verek whipped his gaze back to Carin. “You are certain?”

  She nodded. “It’s here. I didn’t kill the woodsprite after all.”

  They rode on, saying nothing to Megella, who was dozing while sitting up in her cart behind them. As the sun dipped toward the west, they continued to search the trees for any flash of the woodsprite.

  “It’s gone,” Verek muttered after a while.

  Carin looked at him in surprise. “Why do you say that? The sprite could be following close by us.”

  Verek shook his head. “I am not speaking of the wood-goblin. What I mean to say is that the barrier is gone … the barrier that was raised to protect the greater part of Ruain from the curse I unleashed in my madness.”

  “Oh … that.” Carin did not bother looking round for the curtain of spells that had draped the trees around Verek’s manor house. To her, those spells had always been invisible.

  But long ago when she first entered Ruain, stumbling half-starved into this land, she had been able to sense the curtain, to feel the tingling, thrumming energy of that ensorcelled barricade. Remembering how it had felt, Carin shut her eyes and opened her senses to whatever magic might brush across them. Nothing came to her, though.

  Nothing but a memory. She recalled the verses Lord Legary had penned on the final page of the Book of Archamon, the verses that had helped her understand what the barrier was, and what it had meant. Though she had lost her copy of that poem—stolen on the world of the woodsprite—Carin could recite the passages from memory, so closely had she studied Legary’s writing for the clues hidden therein:

  The second—the troubled, the tainted seed—

  Vented wild rage upon the living wood.

  Dead and barren, as his heart within,

  Left he the woodland with fury spent.

  “Stop him!” shrieked the man of the green.

  “Wilt thou suffer the spread of his venom

  O’er all the Land of Ruain, and the blighting

  Of all bright flowers within thy vast domain?”

  �
�Stop him!” I cried to the four winds.

  “Halt this furious plague.

  Stem the life-force’s ebbing;

  Let not the curse prevail!”

  The winds took heed:

  An edge was made.

  Within these walls and past the wood

  The poison floweth not.

  But I have paid the dearest price

  To invoke the forces primal;

  They draw me now into the tomb …

  Legary’s desperate effort to “make an edge,” to raise a barrier that would confine Theil’s curse to a section of the woodland near the manor house, had put the elder wizard in his grave. It had also weakened “the man of the green,” the minor wizard whom Carin had known as Jerold the gardener.

  Running mentally through the lines of the poem, Carin was struck by the mention of “this furious plague,” Legary’s phrase for the curse his grandson had cast upon the woodland where Theil’s wife and child had died. That plague would have spread through the whole of Ruain, chasing the life from it, if Legary had not “invoked the forces primal” to stem the life-force’s ebbing.

  Plagues, Carin thought. That’s twice the people of Ruain have almost come to ruin. First by Theil cursing the place when he was mad with grief, and then from the strangleweed invasion, which could have meant starvation for the whole province if things had played out differently.

  Carin realized she had been riding at Verek’s side with her eyes tight shut for some time now. She opened them and glanced at him.

  “What happened to it, do you think? That barrier. I never glimpsed it, you know. I guess it was the wrong kind of magic for me—a power that was far beyond me.”

  Verek shook his head. “Not beyond you, fìleen. Beneath you, more like. That was the wrong kind of magic for any sane wysard. A cursed brew of rage, lunacy, and death.”

  He stared intently toward the southwest, then nodded, as if satisfied.

  “In times past, I could see the barrier from here when I rode home from the easterly districts of Ruain. And I could feel its dark power. Now—nothing.” Theil sighed, sounding relieved. “I am very glad it’s gone. For years it lurked in my woodland, a constant reminder of all that I had lost to evil, and all the evil I myself had committed.”

  “What happened to it?” Carin repeated. “What could have destroyed it?”

  “You did not bring it down, fìleen? I thought, perhaps, that you had.”

  “Me?” Carin exclaimed, startled. “How could I have?”

  Verek tilted his head. “You bled on the rocks in my woodland. Do you remember? You lost your footing and suffered a gash to your knee. The wound bled freely.”

  He moved as if to slip his hand inside his coat for the medicinal powders he had carried at the time. But now it was summer and he wore no coat. And he had lost or exhausted those remedies long ago during his far-flung travels.

  Carin nodded. “I remember it perfectly. My blood was running into my boot and dripping on the rocks.”

  “Yours was the first blood to have been spilled in those woods in twenty years,” Verek said, eyeing her. “I could neither hunt nor butcher game under those trees, for the deer and the birds had all fled. In the midst of the desolation wrought by my madness, your blood, as it splashed the rocks and wet the soil beneath, must have been as a red bloom of life in a colorless desert. How eagerly the land would have drunk it in!”

  “Then maybe you should have done as you threatened, and put me in the dirt as a blood sacrifice,” Carin teased him. “If you’d struck off my head, my lord, you could have drained almost every drop from me.”

  “And lifted the curse that much sooner?” Verek murmured. He shot her a questioning look.

  Carin raised both shoulders in a don’t-ask-me, or don’t-blame-me, shrug.

  “Now, sir, I guess we’ll never know. Whatever happened to bring down the barrier, I haven’t been near that edge since we left Ruain together to ride to the mountains in the far west. All those months later—after the Jabberwock made, er, its final appearance and we got separated on the mountaintop, and I popped back to your house looking for you—I left again right away to find you on Earth.”

  She fingered the crystal dolphin she wore, the amulet that had made it possible for Carin to have “popped back” to the manor house, and then to have recrossed the void to rescue Verek from his stranding on Earth.

  “No, I see that you could hardly have had time to deliver a fresh infusion for countering old curses,” Verek said, smiling at her wryly. “Your last visit to the manor of Ruain was discourteously brief, as I am sure Myra will remind you when you see that woman in half an hour or so.”

  “Oh!” Carin exclaimed. In her startlement she jerked the reins, sending her mare dancing. “Drisha! We’re that close?”

  “We are. Just through there”—Verek gestured at a sort of tunnel the overarching trees formed above the road—“we will be able to see the main gates.”

  He was leaning forward in the saddle, Carin noticed, straining ahead, so eager to reach home that he could barely restrain himself. Verek would have kicked his horse into a dead run and covered the remaining distance in minutes, had it not been for his Aunt Megella trundling behind them, asleep in her cart, her one remaining cob stumping steadily along.

  Go on, Carin started to tell him. I’ll follow with Meg.

  But then she looked at the branches that arched thickly over the road, their leaves shaping an opening like the private entrance to a castle courtyard, and Carin was afraid. She remembered the woodsprite promising, long ago, to put itself in a tree above its enemy’s path: ”I’ll make a great bough fall”—delivering a fatal blow.

  The woodsprite knew exactly which road Carin and Verek were taking on this return journey to the manor. The creature had seen them coming. And the sprite knew these woods better than any living being—possibly better than Lord Verek himself, though Theil had grown up exploring these woods. He had ridden through them on many a hunting trip.

  The sprite, however, had lived in these woods—had inhabited the very substance of these trees, feeding on them, becoming part of them. Again Carin heard, in her thoughts, the creature’s piping voice:

  “I bide in the magician’s woods, kept from harm by his spells. In them I rest peacefully … ”

  But Carin and Verek could not ride through these woods with anything like the feeling of security the sprite had enjoyed—not with the sprite flitting its way through the branches, positioning itself high above them, unseen, preparing to drop a skull-cracking limb on them to take its revenge for Carin’s betrayal.

  “It fell when I left this world,” Verek said, so suddenly and unexpectedly that Carin jumped. “That must be the answer.”

  “What?” Carin asked, tearing her gaze from the tunnel of trees that darkened the path ahead of them. “What do you mean?”

  “The barrier. It fell at my first crossing of the void, when I left Ladrehdin. My absence from this world caused the spellwork to ebb away, as an absence of air will cause a candle’s flame to die.”

  “Oh. Yes, I see what you mean. I wasn’t thinking about the barrier just now, though,” Carin said. “I am worrying that something else might be about to fall—and right on top of us, if the sprite is angry about me flying off and leaving it on its home world.”

  They were in the tunnel now, where it was so dark that Carin felt sure she ought to be able to spot the woodsprite sparking. She craned her neck, trying to look in every direction at once, but especially upward, the direction from which she expected the attack to come.

  Of what happened next, therefore, Carin saw almost nothing, only confused images at ground level, accompanied by loud, desperate shouts and blinding flashes of light.

  “Lanse! No!” Verek all but screamed. “Stop!”

  An arrow hissed past Carin’s head, flying toward Megella.

  “Meg! Down!” Carin shrieked.

  The warning would have come too late to save the woman, had the arrow
been on track to impale her. But Carin heard no cry from Megella as she dropped from her horse and raced to the woman’s cart.

  “Take cover!” Carin shouted, reaching to tug Megella off her seat.

  “What is happening?” the wisewoman demanded, sounding half asleep. Then: “Uff!” Megella grunted as she hit the ground and had the wind partly knocked out of her.

  “It’s an ambush,” Carin snapped. “Lanse—the stableboy—shot at me. Missed. Almost hit you.”

  “Where is he?” Meg huffed, breathless.

  “No idea. But close. Verek is looking—” Carin rose cautiously to peer over the side of Megella’s cart, trying to locate both men.

  “Lanse!” Verek shouted again from nearby, though in the darkness of the tunnel Carin could see only a dim blur—his silver-dapple horse, she thought. “Stop this! I command you, stop! I rescind my previous order.”

  An arrow thudded into the cart barely an inch below Carin’s eyes.

  “Drisha!” she swore and fell to the dirt. Peeping from under the cart, inadequately concealed behind its near wheel, she was straining to see her attacker when a light exploded low in the trees.

  It was so painfully bright, Carin’s eyes clenched shut involuntarily. She wrenched them open at once, but in that brief moment the woodsprite had struck.

  Lanse was on the ground, facedown, spread-eagled over the moss-cushioned roots of an old oak. His bow had been knocked from his hand. It lay in the road practically under the hooves of Megella’s cart-horse.

  The horse seemed bewildered by the sudden tumult that had risen on all sides. Not knowing which way to run, the cob crow-hopped in place, its jerky little jumps barely jiggling the cart.

  The jingling of its harness was the only sound now. In the suddenly peaceful woods, Carin slowly stood and scanned the trees for any sign of the woodsprite. Seeing no sparks, no flashes, she helped Megella up. Together they walked a short way through the trees to join Verek, who was off his horse now and standing above Lanse’s motionless form.