The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Instead, they had spluttered up in Granger’s millpond.

  Now, Carin ate salty soup cold from the can and washed it down with water from a towering stack of plastic bottles that filled what had once been the laundry room. Clothes-washing, if any was to be done these days, would have to be done outdoors on a rub-board.

  As the sun went down, Carin struck a match and lit a kerosene lantern. She built a fire in the fireplace, getting it going with the help of a wax-coated pinecone fire-starter.

  Then she sat on the porch, gazing at the stars and listening to the roar of waves breaking onshore. The surf was loud; the swells were up tonight. After a time, Carin took the wooden bead from her pocket and rolled it between her palms, and shifted so she could watch the forested slopes for any sign of the woodsprite’s return.

  Deep in the night, Carin dozed. She woke at dawn to the twittering of birds. And picking herself up stiffly from the porch’s weather-beaten floorboards, she found herself entirely alone.

  * * *

  Carin spent the morning cleaning house: shaking spiders and other small intruders out of bedspreads and sheets, brooming scorpions and centipedes from almost every corner, and wiping the dust from shelves and furniture with such vigor that she worked up a sweat. Then the dust stuck to her damp skin.

  To cool off, Carin went skinny-dipping in the bay. A pod of dolphins joined her there, leaping around her, squealing and whistling as if in animated conversation.

  Are they talking about me? Carin wondered. Whatever they were saying, even if it was uncomplimentary, she didn’t care, just so long as they kept her company.

  After her swim, as she stepped up on the porch, Carin noticed a dozen or more multicolored seashells scattered under a window. With them was a chunk of volcanic glass—obsidian as dark as Theil Verek’s eyes.

  Carin stooped to examine the pieces and found a broken cord: the shells had been strung together, with the obsidian a-swing as their striker, to make a simple wind chime under the eaves.

  She restrung the pieces and hung them from the porch railing. Their chiming only intensified the silence of the cove. But if anyone remained within earshot, perhaps the tinkling of the seashells would signal that the beach house was again occupied.

  Indoors, Carin toweled her hair dry and dressed in clothes that had once belonged to her mother. The closet in her parents’ bedroom was half full. Apparently the couple had packed light when they sailed away in search of survivors. Carin donned soft, faded shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a huge yellow hibiscus flower, and slipped her feet into sandals.

  She paused to study her reflection in a looking-glass that hung on the wall. Her bruises from flying fragments of river-rock had faded to nothing. The puffiness was gone, and even the deepest of the cuts had healed—evidence, perhaps, that a substantial amount of time had passed while Carin sped through the void, carrying the crystals far from Ladrehdin. Or maybe the wisewoman’s salve had promoted a rapid healing. In any case, the ointment had not prevented scarring. Thin white lines like cat scratches crisscrossed Carin’s face.

  Sighing, she turned from the mirror to go back outside and walk to the orchard for a lunch of fresh fruit.

  Near the orchard was the horse barn. Studying it as she peeled and ate an avocado, Carin remembered a blue roan she had grown up riding.

  “Where’s he now?” she murmured aloud, simply to hear the sound of a human voice. The paddock gate was open and wired to stay that way. Someone—Carin’s father, probably—had turned the horse out. By now, these many years later, the horse that had been left to fend for itself might be dead. Or it could have strayed miles inland. If it still lived, it would probably be so wild and wary, Carin would never catch it.

  But the effort to recover the horse might give her something to do. Carin, strolling through the orchard, halted mid-stride at the thought of the lonely years that stretched ahead of her. The crystal amulets—her safe-conduct back to Ruain—were gone.

  And even if she’d had a way to return to Theil’s world, she owed it to him and his people to stay away. That wreckage she wrought with the sand-spell—not just blasting boulders to rubble, but reducing human beings to flyaway mounds of dust: that magic made her too dangerous to live in the same world with the man she loved.

  As if to prove the point to herself, Carin grabbed a papaya, and carrying it past the house, dropped it on the beach. That smooth expanse of sand had first given her the idea to adapt Verek’s original, far less dangerous spell of stone. Kicking off her sandals, Carin dug her toes in, then cast her perverted sand-spell upon the papaya’s yellow-orange flesh.

  Her control was exquisite. Slice by tiny slice, she worked her way from the stem end through the fruit’s inner cavity and gradually out to its slightly pointed tip. Watching the papaya crumble away so delicately, a mere few grains of sand at a time as Carin eased the spell through its flesh, she felt an unexpected—even unseemly—surge of pride at the quality of her spellwork.

  But never before had she achieved such mastery. Back on Ladrehdin, when she’d sand-spelled the strangleweed—and the goatherd—the magic had felt coarse in comparison to this, as if only roughly controlled, much in the vein of “all or nothing.” Great clumps of strangleweed and loutish eastern goat-herders: those, Carin had reduced to powder at a clip, in a heavy handed, lumpish, and violent kind of way: quick and effective … horribly so … but exhibiting nowhere near the artistry that she had just displayed with the papaya.

  This was finer work than she’d done even when she sand-spelled the strangleweed spores that had sprouted in her nostrils. Only once before had Carin achieved such perfection: when she’d conveyed to Amangêda the power to bespell every alien spore in Ladrehdin while touching no other atom of that world.

  And then, as now, Carin had not been wearing a crystal. On the black-sand beach beside the thundering waterfall, she’d shed the amulet before joining Amangêda.

  “Both times,” Carin whispered, thinking back.

  Each time she’d communed most closely with Amangêda, she’d been free of the crystal. The amulet had been tucked away, discreetly hidden at the Harbor Hill Inn, when Carin went into the water at Easthaven. And she’d dropped the crystal into Megella’s wagon before again meeting Amangêda face-to-face during the storm on the beach.

  First, separation. Then … clarity.

  A veil was parting within Carin, teasing her with ideas not fully formed.

  Slowly, thoughtfully, she ambled back to the orchard. She spotted an overripe papaya that had fallen from the tree and split open on the ground, spilling out its round, black seeds. Carin was reducing those seeds to sand, one by one, marveling at how right it felt to be so perfectly in control, when the woodsprite came sparking into the grove.

  “Carin!” the creature panted, sounding out of breath. “I will live forever in your debt for bringing me to this wonderful world!”

  Carin laughed to cover up the way her knees had almost buckled. Flooding her was an overwhelming sense of relief at the sprite’s reappearance. Until that moment, she had not admitted, even to herself, how desolate this secluded bay felt when she had no company but her thoughts. No wonder her parents had sailed off in search of other living souls.

  “And ‘hello’ to you, too, sprite,” Carin said, smiling at the creature. “I’m glad you like it here. It is a beautiful place, with plenty to eat and lots of sunshine.”

  “And trees, Carin! Such trees—towering majesties full of life, loaded with fruit and flowers.”

  The woodsprite sparked closer, as if to share a secret. Though who could overhear them in this solitude?

  “Do you know, Carin,” the sprite whispered, “I believe I heard voices in the forest.”

  “Voices?” Carin shouted. “You found somebody?”

  She grabbed the trunk of the sprite’s tree and shook it so hard the creature shrieked.

  “Stop that! My friend, you are rattling me to pieces.”

  “Sorry.” Carin released th
e tree and stepped back a pace. “But who did you hear? Where? What were they saying?”

  “I could not make out their meaning, nor determine exactly where the voices came from. But …” The woodsprite hesitated, as if choosing its words. “I do not believe I heard the voices of any two-legged creatures such as yourself, Carin. What I heard, I believe, was the murmur of the trees themselves.”

  Carin stared at the sprite. “Like the sound of the wind sighing in the leaves, you mean?”

  “No, not that. Not at all like that. I believe I heard the trees talking among themselves. For hours I stayed still and silent as a bud, listening, struggling to understand. I would be with them now, still listening, still attempting to join that conversation. But I did not want my prolonged absence to worry you, Carin. And so I have returned, to tell you of my discovery … and to ask you to let me go.”

  “Let you go?” Carin repeated as a sense of foreboding rushed upon her. “Sprite, I’m not holding you here. Of course you can go. Anywhere you like.” She swept her arm sideways, then up, indicating the whole landscape of sea, shoreline, grass, flowers, and the jade-green forest that climbed thickly upward, growing inland from the bay.

  “But to leave you alone in this place …” the woodsprite murmured. “It pains me, my friend, to think of you here with no one to talk to.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Carin said, trying to sound careless, though her heart was crumpling within her. “You go and listen to the trees. It won’t be long, I expect, before you’ll learn their language. Aren’t the trees here pretty much the same as you’re used to?”

  “In some ways, the same,” the woodsprite said, sparking rapidly. “But in other ways … vastly superior. I have seen nothing to suggest that the trees in this place lose their leaves and sleep away the cold months. Indeed, I am hopeful that there is no winter here. You know I have never liked the cold, my friend.”

  Carin nodded. “I remember. On Ladrehdin, you preferred the evergreens. How did you put it? Something about the heart of a dormant oak in wintertime being disagreeable to you, while the wood of a tree that doesn’t lose its leaves always feels comfortable.”

  The woodsprite flickered. “Quite so. In my brief time here, Carin, I have come to feel very much at home in this world. Here, I can be as I should be. This land has a vitality within it, a fresh, raw strength in the earth where the trees root. I wish to explore far and wide and to learn of the trees that grow in these soils, and strive to converse with them in their native speech.”

  “Then do it, sprite. And if you flit back by here sometime and I’m not around, don’t worry about me. I’m thinking of going to look for a horse that used to be mine.” Carin pointed at the empty, overgrown paddock. “It might still be roaming these parts.”

  For a moment then, both were silent. Carin thought of the times on Ladrehdin when the woodsprite had hinted that the trees possessed a kind of consciousness. Once, when the sprite broke branches off an oak to help Carin escape a pack of killer dogs, the tree’s pain had been so intense, the woodsprite had found it unbearable. Then later, the sprite had boasted of becoming “more the master than the guest” of the trees in which it dwelled.

  Perhaps the sentience of trees rose nearer the surface on this sunny island of Earth, in its never-ending summer, and the sprite could hear the trees’ siren song.

  “I’m glad you’ve found others to keep you company,” Carin whispered in all sincerity. “You deserve that.” She added, after another pause, “Let me give you a hug.”

  She wrapped her arms around the tree the creature was temporarily inhabiting. She squeezed, hard.

  In response, music seemed to come from the tree, the branches rubbing one across another like fiddles and fiddlesticks. The whole tree shook, its limbs swishing through the air above Carin’s head. Then the music died, and a few of the tree’s limbs arched down to tickle Carin’s ribs.

  Giggling, she jumped away.

  “Good-bye, sprite!” Carin called and waved as the creature sparked into the densest trees and disappeared from her sight. “Good luck!”

  She was still staring after it, but with her gaze unfocused, when the realization hit her:

  The sprite had just deserted Carin the way she had left the creature to fend for itself on Angwid. All its cheerful talk about “missing the boat,” its seeming willingness to blame itself for not keeping up when she jumped into the void: that had been an act. The woodsprite knew perfectly well that Carin had deliberately abandoned it.

  “Go on then,” she muttered to the empty landscape. “I did as you asked—I brought you home to a world of trees. I just never expected you would find yourself more at home than I am on my world.” Carin tilted her head. “You’ve reached your goal, sprite. I hope that whatever new friends you make in this place will stay truer to you than I did.”

  She hung her head then, and a single tear fell on the burst papaya at her feet. Many of the fruit’s seeds had been reduced to dust; many more awaited her spellcraft.

  Carefully, precisely—with her whole attention, so that she need not think of the sprite—Carin went back to sand-spelling the seeds one by one, noting with a growing sense of confidence how clear-headed she felt, how dominant, how un-interfered-with.

  Interference.

  The word stuck in Carin’s mind as she walked back to the house and busied herself with more dusting and straightening-up. She thought about it all afternoon. And she was still thinking about it when the sun got low and she rekindled a fire on the hearth, opened a can of beans for her supper, and heated them in a saucepan.

  Interference.

  In the long, lingering twilight, Carin took the pan and her dirty dishes down to the beach and scrubbed them. She toted them back to the house, dried them on a cup towel, and put them neatly away. Then she pulled the fish-patterned coverlet off her old childhood bed, gave it another good shaking—in case a scorpion had crawled back in—and spread it on the porch. Carin stretched out on the cushiony cloth, her hands behind her head, listening to the seashells chime in a light breeze and watching the stars brighten as the dusk deepened.

  Interference.

  Which crystal dolphin, Carin wondered, had she been wearing when she killed the goatherd, and later when she exploded the boulders with lethal violence? Had it been the crystal the space-faring strangers had brought to Ladrehdin? Or had Carin been wearing the second crystal, the one that should have stayed in the pestilentially slime-covered world where the strangers had meant it to stay?

  Theil had said he could feel his amulet against his skin, could feel the potency coursing through it. Carin had assumed she knew what he meant: She, too, had sensed something unnerving when she first picked up both dolphins together, when both had been suspended from a single silver chain.

  But then she had separated the pair and sent Verek through the void wearing one, while Carin pocketed the other before she, too, leaped into nothingness.

  And Verek had gone mistakenly to Earth. And when Carin used her crystal to cross the void to find him, it had taken her exactly where she wanted to go. But then they had stood together at the edge of Earth’s ocean and leaped again into the void, and instead of going straight home to Ruain, they’d gone to the Granger millpond.

  Interference.

  Carin lay awake in the night, examining the evidence from every angle. In memory she saw the two dolphins emerging from the magian inferno in which she had tried to destroy them. The crystals were unharmed, but the chain from Verek’s and the ratty string on which Carin had worn hers had been burned away—making it impossible to tell one from the other. By chance, she could have picked up the crystal that Verek had previously worn: the crystal attuned not to Ladrehdin, but to the pestilential world.

  “It hurt me,” Carin murmured. “Those twinges …”

  She fell silent, thinking of the discomfort, like cramps in her muscles, that had afflicted her from time to time as she journeyed back to Ruain. The pain had not bothered her constantly.
It had come and gone at such irregular intervals that Carin had not detected a pattern, or had been too distracted to recognize the pattern.

  But each time that the pain had worsened, Carin’s spellcraft had gone awry.

  She chewed the knuckles of her right hand, remembering a few twinges when she initially began sand-spelling the strangleweed along the road to Easthaven. That minor discomfort had deepened into real pain at the moment of Carin’s first and worst miscarriage of magic: the disintegration of the goatherd. She’d felt more twinges as they’d continued north along the coast, none of them as severe as that first episode. But the pain had again been noticeable when she’d shattered the boulders into hurtling shards instead of neat sand-piles.

  Interference. The misattuned amulet had unsettled Carin’s spellwork. The whole time she’d worn that particular dolphin, it had undermined her, had kept her off balance.

  “Not my fault,” she muttered to the stars. “That crystal was twisting me.”

  And now Carin had to wonder: How far back did the interference go? When Morann said, “The charms act in unexpected ways,” the necromancer had been holding a bejeweled, ruby-red bottle. But she’d been standing very near a tiered dais upon which rested both dolphins: the one the strangers had assigned to Ladrehdin, and also the crystal that was attuned to the pestilential planet. Perhaps that stolen amulet—twice-stolen, in Morann’s case—had disrupted the necromancer’s sorcery too.

  And now it was gone. All the crystals were. The three power-draining devices had been the ultimate bridges between the worlds. And Carin had disposed of them.

  She scrambled to her feet and hurried inside, to light the kerosene lantern and set it on the small desk in the kitchen. She rummaged in the drawers for paper and a pencil.

  Hunched over the desk, Carin began to write. She had filled half a page before she realized she was scribbling away in the language of Ladrehdin—a script her parents could not possibly read.