The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “You young fool,” he muttered.

  He knelt to feel for a pulse in Lanse’s neck. But Verek’s every movement seemed slow and uncertain. Theil was in shock, Carin thought. And he could be harboring no hope that Lanse remained alive.

  The woodsprite had not dropped a heavy bough to crack open the boy’s skull. The sprite had driven a branch like a spear through Lanse’s midsection. The long limb, dripping blood and what Carin assumed were strings of gut, lay at the side of the road, dark but visibly glistening now that the westering sun was low enough to throw its rays into the tunnel.

  “By the powers!” Verek swore, straightening up like a shot. “The boy breathes! Quickly, Megella: help me stop the blood-loss. Carin—empty the cart. We must take Lanse home and petition the waters of the wysards to save him.”

  The two healers went to work. Meg lugged her satchels of medicinal supplies to where the boy lay in a pool of blood. Verek caught the bundle of bandages that Carin threw to him from the wisewoman’s cart.

  While they poured remedies into Lanse’s torn body and fought to stem the bleeding, Carin ejected the cart’s contents. She was tossing Meg’s last bundle of clean clothes into the road when Verek approached, carrying the boy in his arms. Lanse’s middle was wrapped in so many layered linen strips, the boy’s willowy frame looked almost fat.

  “Wedge him in,” Verek ordered when he had the boy in the cart. “Cushion him. Carin, ride with him and steady him.”

  Carin froze in the act of retrieving the cushiony bundle of clothing she had just pitched aside.

  “Um, n-no, sir, my lord,” she stammered, relapsing into her nervous habit of addressing Verek formally. “Not me.” Carin pulled a leaf off the nearest tree, bespelled it, and let the grains of sand trickle through her fingers. “You don’t want me near Lanse. I might not be able to stop myself.”

  Verek didn’t argue.

  “You then, Megella,” he barked. Reaching for the woman, he hoisted her bodily into the cart—a feat of strength that only his anxiety for the boy could have made possible. Before Meg was safely settled, Verek leaped into the seat and snapped the reins, nearly tumbling the woman into the road.

  “Wheesht!” Megella cried, grabbing for the cart’s top rail.

  “Carin—my horse,” Verek called back as he raced away, urging the cob to greater speed than he had ever before demanded of it.

  Verek’s silver-dapple barely gave Carin a chance to swing up on its back. The horse had stood firm during all the commotion. Carin’s chestnut mare, in contrast, was nowhere to be seen: the mare had bolted into the woods the moment Carin left it.

  But now Verek’s horse was keen to follow its master. Carin just managed to get her foot in the stirrup and tumble into the saddle. Then she was racing after the cart careening toward the setting sun, too intent on keeping her seat to do more than glance ahead at their destination.

  Verek’s manor house—the huge old building that, long ago, had gone by the name “Weyrrock”—was fully screened by the walls of stone that loomed against the salmon-colored sunset. Not the peak of its roof, not even a chimneystack was visible above the outer walls.

  But Carin glimpsed the main gates. They stood open, the massive iron doors pushed back, leaving a gap more than wide enough to admit Megella’s cart.

  Carin and the silver-dapple caught the cart when it was still a few yards outside the walls. As they raced through the gate together then, into the courtyard, Carin saw a flock of red-headed chuffers flutter out of a tree that grew just to the side of the opening, on the woodland side of the wall.

  The birds were a final proof that Verek’s curse had indeed been lifted. No birds could have been roosting in the tree if a curtain of spells still bound the woodland, shutting out every creature that was natural to the forest.

  “Myra!” Verek shouted as he reined up directly in front of the kitchen door. “Boil water! Lots of it.”

  Carin dropped from the saddle and ran to slap open the door. She nearly smashed it into Myra’s face. The housekeeper had been reaching for the latch at the same moment, from inside.

  “Oh my!” the woman exclaimed. “What—? Dearie! Your face!”

  “Not now,” Carin panted. “Tell you later.”

  She dashed to the trestle table and swept everything from it. The saltcellar hit the floor, along with wooden spoons and a carved bowl that held the remains of a meaty stew—Myra’s supper, Carin surmised.

  “What—!” the housekeeper exclaimed again. But Myra quit trying to grope her way toward a full sentence when she spotted Verek charging in, carrying Lanse in his arms.

  “Myra!” he cried. “Water.”

  “Oh my!” the housekeeper gasped, staring at the layers of blood-soaked linen wrapped around Lanse. Then she whirled to fill the kettle and swing it over the fire as Verek laid Lanse flat on the table.

  Now Megella was pushing her way in through the kitchen door, and Carin sprinted to help the wisewoman haul in her bags of remedies. She shoved a bench away from the table so Meg could stand at her patient’s side.

  Seeing no other way in which she could help, Carin slipped aside into the long passageway that connected the kitchen with the rest of the house. Myra was rushing around the kitchen, lighting lamps. The sun had fully set now, and except for the light that reflected into the passageway from the lamps and the kitchen fire, Carin stood in darkness. She watched quietly as Verek and Megella removed Lanse’s gory bandages.

  “Sweet mercy,” Carin murmured, feeling as if she’d been carried along in a windstorm for the last half hour, a twister that had suddenly dumped her in a secluded corner where she could catch her breath—though the air that now wafted from the kitchen stank of blood and bowel. Recoiling from it, she pressed up against the cool stonework of the passageway and stuck her hands in her pockets.

  “Beggar it all!” she swore then softly, through gritted teeth, as her fingers touched the wooden bead stuffed deep in her right pocket: the bead of satiny smooth driftwood she had picked up along the east coast of Ladrehdin, the little memento of her travels that reminded her of the beads in the necklaces she and her parents had worn in the old photograph from Earth.

  The wood in her pocket was shivering. Now that Carin was standing still, not dashing around in a probably futile effort to save the life of the woodsprite’s victim, she could feel the bead tremble. And it was warm under her fingers, as warm as a mouse in her pocket.

  Carin jerked away from the wall and stood poker-straight. What could the woodsprite have been thinking, to put itself in her pocket! To put its life in the hands of someone who had proved herself unworthy of its trust, who had abandoned it to its fate.

  She did not draw the bead out to look at or speak to it. The sprite might spark or glow and give itself away. The creature was capable of emitting blindingly brilliant flashes. To judge by the way it was vibrating, like a knot in a tautened bowstring, the creature was terrified. If Carin took it from hiding in her pocket, it might go into hysterics.

  And then it would certainly die.

  “By the powers,” Verek had once sworn at the woodsprite, “if I catch you in a twig I’ll use it for tinder and laugh as you burn.”

  Verek had, in fact, once managed to capture the sprite. But then he had spared the creature’s life because Carin had claimed it as a friend.

  After what the woodsprite had just done to Lanse, however, the creature could expect no mercy from Theil Verek.

  What can it expect from me? Carin asked herself. What will I do? Pitch the bead into the kitchen fire and rid Ladrehdin of this final invader from the world of the strangleweed? Or repay the woodsprite by saving its life as it just saved mine?

  There was no real decision to make. Carin gave the bead a slight squeeze of reassurance. Then she drew her hands, empty, from her pockets and started to edge toward the side door from the kitchen, aiming to slip through into the courtyard and release the sprite. The creature should be sparking away through the trees now, rushing
to freedom and safety. Why in Drisha’s name had the sprite lodged itself inside the wholly inadequate bead in Carin’s pocket?

  She had not done more than ask herself that question, however, and start for the door, when Verek rushed around the kitchen table to grab her hand and almost yank her off her feet.

  “Come with me,” he ordered, half dragging Carin as he raced down the passageway.

  She caught her stride with him, and together they ran full tilt to the foyer, thence along its connecting hallway to the library. As Verek led Carin through stacks of books, heading for the room’s darkest depths, he threw a hurried, breathless plea over his shoulder:

  “The well … if I go under … help me!”

  Theil means to dive into wizards’ waters, Carin mentally interpreted. He wants his powers back; he wants magic to save Lanse. There’s every chance he’ll black out in that pool of glacial glass. He’s counting on me to keep him from drowning in it.

  Just before they reached the library’s shadowed depths, from the corner of her eye Carin glimpsed movement. At first she thought it was only the fire flickering on the hearth. No lamps burned in the room. Except for a dwindling blaze in the fireplace, the library was lit only by the gleams of twilight fading outside its tall windows.

  But in the dusk, Carin saw a figure stir. A shapeless, featureless form rose from one of the high-backed benches that were paired before the fireplace. The figure moved clumsily, as if groggy.

  We woke it up, Carin thought.

  “Theil!” she shouted. “There’s someone—”

  But Verek had reached the door that was shrouded in stygian blackness at the back of the library. He flung it open, and from the landing just inside that door he leapt onto the winding steps and spiraled down them, all but falling toward the pool of magic that welled up in the cavern below the house.

  Carin was at his heels. And now it was not Verek’s sense of urgency that propelled her along at top speed. Now the crystal that hung from her neck was dragging Carin toward the cavern, pulling her down as though a rope stretched between it and the cave. Invisibly the rope tugged at her—

  —and at Verek, too. As he flew down the steps in front of her, Carin saw him grab the crystal he wore. He clutched it through his shirt, wadding the fabric of his garment around the amulet.

  The moment both of them reached the bottom steps and burst into the cave of magic, the crystals tore themselves free. Carin’s ripped a hole in her shirt, so violently did it leave her. Its cord bit into the back of her neck, then popped like a whip as the fibers snapped.

  “Aaghh!” Verek bellowed as his amulet not only tore through his shirt but burst through his fingers. Punctuating his cry of pain were multiple loud cracks—his neck-cord snapping strand by strand? Or were those his fingers breaking?

  Carin wanted to turn to him, to embrace and protect him. But she could only stare at the two crystal dolphins as they flew through the air toward the pool of magic—

  No. The pool was not their goal. Soaring up from one of the stone benches that ringed the wysards’ well came the third crystal, trailing its golden chain. It was the dolphin that had been Carin’s in childhood. That particular crystal was the trinket Verek had forced her to bring him from her seaside bedroom on Earth.

  In midair, the three crystals met. The figures seemed to stretch and flatten from bottle nose to tail fluke, the dorsal fin rising upward in a peak until each amulet’s shape was no longer that of a dolphin, but had become a triangle.

  The angular figures whirled around each other so rapidly that the golden neckchain snapped off the crystal which had been Carin’s long-ago plaything. The broken chain whipped past her head and struck the cave wall behind her with a sharp high ping.

  But Carin did not take her eyes from the three transformed crystals. She watched the glassily smooth, sharp-edged triangles meet at their points and fuse, forming a three-sided pyramid.

  “Away! Take it away!” shrieked the pearlescent, shimmering voice of the wysards’ well.

  Carin did not hesitate. She felt Amangêda’s pain: she shared that pain. The spinning pyramid was bleeding away the life of this world at an agonizing pace. For eons, the world of Ladrehdin had been giving up its power, gradually drained by the two crystal amulets that had been devised to sap it of its natural energy.

  But all three together! Unified, they made a vacuum, a great cosmic emptiness into which Ladrehdin’s very essence now poured like water through a burst dam.

  “No!” Carin shouted as the ground under her quaked and chunks of rock fell from the ceiling to clatter onto the cave’s floor.

  Sprinting ahead of Verek, she hurdled the nearest of the benches that separated her from the wysards’ well. The leap brought her even with the spinning pyramid. Carin grabbed the object out of the air, and without breaking stride jumped into space above the pool.

  “Stop!”

  Verek’s command sliced through the rippling veil that rose briefly between them. But then his voice died in an ocean of nothingness as Carin hurtled into the void between the worlds.

  Chapter 19

  Revelation

  Megella was satisfied that she had done all she or any wisewoman could do for the boy. Lanse’s wound was packed with compounds to stem bleeding and promote healing. But he was gravely injured. Meg had never attempted to treat an impalement this severe. The only experience that even came close was a dog of Granger that, while tearing after a rabbit, had skewered itself on a rusty iron spike.

  The dog had not survived. And though Megella would not admit it to the housekeeper, Myra, who sat at the kitchen table blubbering into her handkerchief, she had no hope that this young man would live to see the sunrise.

  Could wizardry save him? Verek had seemed to think so.

  More than an hour ago the Lord of Ruain had raced to his wellspring of magic, intending to submerge himself in the power of that place until he was fully restored. How long should such a thing take? Megella could not guess. She had never heard of a wysard losing his powers, and so she could not imagine what effort might be required to regain them.

  “Madam Megella,” blubbered the housekeeper through her tears. “’Tis more than I can bear, this sitting and waiting for my good master to return with the means of making the boy whole. Will you not go and see what delays him?”

  Noisily, the housekeeper blew her nose. Then Myra tried to dry her eyes on a corner of her apron, but her tears continued to fall so thickly that the effort was pointless.

  “I would go myself,” the woman sobbed, “but I cannot descend to that deep place where my master has gone. In all my years of service in this house, I have never set a foot through the door that leads to the cavern. I can have no business in such a place.”

  And you think I can? Megella wondered.

  But aloud she answered, “Yes, I will go. I, too, grow anxious about our Lord Verek.”

  And about his astonishing young lady, Meg added silently, who by rights should be a novice still, but who has demonstrated abilities beyond most of Ladrehdin’s master wysards.

  As Megella rose to leave the kitchen, the housekeeper began ticking off directions:

  “’Tis down the passageway to the anteroom, then along the hall—”

  “I remember the way perfectly well, thank you, Myra,” Megella said, more sharply than she had intended. “You forget, I think, that I lived in this house many years before you came to service here. I had the run of Lord Legary’s library long before Legary welcomed his grandson Theil into the world.”

  “’Tis so, ’tis so,” Myra sobbed. “I cannot think. My mind is sorely vexed. My heart is breaking.” The housekeeper fluttered her kerchief in the direction of the passageway. “Do hurry, madam, I beg you.”

  As Meg brushed past the woman, she touched Myra’s shoulder—a gesture meant to console her, but which seemed to have the opposite effect. The housekeeper burst into new floods of tears.

  Megella left her sobbing into her soggy kerchief, and wal
ked off puzzling over Myra’s striking resemblance to Meg’s long-deceased mother.

  In the moonlit magic that evoked a voice and a face from an oaken water bucket, Meg had never glimpsed Myra’s features with any great clarity. The one time they had spoken in daylight, by means of a brimming bucket drawn from Shen’s water-well, the sun’s blinding flashes had made eye contact impossible.

  But coming face-to-face with Myra was like meeting a sister—admittedly a weak sister—whom Megella never knew she had.

  Is it possible?

  Thinking back to her childhood, Meg had to concede that it was. During her growing-up years, no man had lived under the roof with Megella, Merriam, and their mother. But there had been “callers,” mysterious figures in the night who slipped into their mother’s attic room and were gone before morning.

  By the time Meg and Merri reached puberty, they were too accustomed to “Mum’s ways” to ask questions. They teased each other, half seriously, about their paternity. “Who could have fathered you?” Merri would ask, laughing. “Not the same handsome devil who sired your big sister—of that, we can be sure!”

  Two daughters, separate fathers: that had seemed the likely makeup of the family over which Mum had presided. But a third?

  Having seen Myra in the flesh, Megella was more than half persuaded that a third daughter had been conceived in that shadowy attic room. That would go far toward explaining the water-bucket magic by which Meg and Myra had occasionally been able to exchange news.

  Apologies, Theil, Megella thought as she went in search of the wysard. I may have been mistaken when I assured you that Myra was not also your great-aunt.

  Questions of kinship aside, Megella was finding it surreal to walk the halls of Weyrrock again. She had never expected to return to this place.

  Though I did allow myself to dream, just a little, every now and then, Meg admitted, after I sent Carin to find this house and its master. With my purpose in the South fulfilled, why not lift my eyes and gaze homeward? Had I not earned the right to return?