“Tah!” Carin scoffed, sounding like Megella. She wadded the paper and tossed it into a wastebasket, then stood frowning over a fresh blank sheet, trying but failing to remember how to write English.
“Well, look at some of it!” she growled under her breath. “Look at it, and practice.”
Carin returned to the living room to snatch Through the Looking-Glass off the shelf where she had left the book before vacating the house with Verek. She half expected his note to her to flutter out from between its pages. But that specimen of Theil’s penmanship—his tersely worded but exquisitely decorated instructions for taking a medicinal draught—no longer existed. Carin had wanted to keep it, but Verek had insisted on burning it before their return to Ladrehdin.
“It has proved its ability to link the worlds,” he’d explained. “I must destroy it, as I destroyed the untested amulets from the necromancer’s eyrie. Their remains lie miles from this house.” Which was all Verek had ever told Carin—and all she’d ever wanted to know—about his disposition of the pack of magical amulets he’d hauled with him to Earth.
Carin opened the Looking-Glass book and pored over the pages she knew so well. If she could still read the language of her childhood, it stood to reason that she could still write it. She picked out several words to copy, printing carefully to capture the shape of them, getting the feel of the written form.
With the book lying open on the desk beside a clean sheet of paper, Carin began again. Painstakingly, with many pauses during which she chewed the end of her pencil and scanned the open book for guidance, Carin crafted a letter that she knew her parents were unlikely ever to read. But she did not want to disappear again without leaving them a message.
Dear Mom and Dad, I’m all right. I didn’t drown. I went missing because I got kidnapped. But then the person who took me dumped me—
Carin looked up from writing, remembering what Morann had said about that abduction: “Nothing appeared in the vortex but an artless girl-child … a gasping fish not worth keeping … she fell out far from here”—plop into Granger’s millpond, as it happened.
Bent again over her letter, Carin went on:
—dumped me near a village, and people found me and took me in.
Afterward, I traveled around a lot—
Another pause ensued as Carin recalled the intricate loops of her travels: from Granger north to Ruain, thence to the western mountains of Ladrehdin; then four off-world side trips; a brief return to Ruain that sent her straight to Earth to fetch Verek; from Earth back to Granger; from Granger to Ruain again—
And now here she was earthly once more, preparing for what would be, if Carin had any say in the matter, her final trip across the void.
Shaking off the distractions, Carin resumed:
—and I fell in love and got married—
Not formally, perhaps. She and Theil hadn’t managed to fit in a ceremony yet. They’d been rather busy. But there would be plenty of time for exchanging vows after Carin got home.
I’m glad I’ve had this chance to come to the beach and leave you a note. But I must be going now.
Please don’t worry about me. I have everything I need … a man I love, and friends who watch out for me—
Including an otherworldly woodsprite that had saved Carin’s life countless times. And a wisewoman—Megella was really a witch, Carin supposed—who had given Carin a purpose in life by sending her to help a hot-tempered wizard save a world—and save himself, into the bargain. But her parents need not know those details.
I hope you are safe. I know about the bleeding disease, how deadly it is. But I also know that people can survive it. We did—you and me. And other people have lived through it, too—
—“back on Ladrehdin,” Carin started to write, but then scratched that out. No point in confusing her parents more than was necessary.
So I’m hoping you’ve found people still alive. I hope you’re not alone in this world.
I’ll be going now. I don’t know if I’ll ever come back here. I may not be able to. But I will always remember you.
With love from your daughter—
Carin first wrote a Ladrehdinian C, but scratched it out and signed her name as her parents would expect to see it: Karen.
She read the letter over and found it disappointingly childish in tone. She had wanted to communicate confidence, competence, and maturity. But the basic words of her native language that Carin still had at her command, and the blocky way she’d printed them on the paper, made her seem hardly older than she’d been when Morann’s magical vortex had dumped her—wet, cold, and terrified—in Granger’s millpond.
But the letter was the best Carin could do. She grabbed another blank sheet and copied the message over—not to improve it, only to have a second note for slipping inside an empty water bottle. With that duplicate, Carin enclosed a paper fish she unpinned from the kitchen corkboard. The fish was exactly like those that dangled from the ceiling of her old bedroom. She tightly capped the plastic bottle to protect its contents, and triple-tacked the original letter to the corkboard in place of the fish.
Then, as a final test of her control, just to be sure that nothing was interfering with her now, simply to be certain she could make the magic obey her to an infinite degree, Carin sand-spelled a single drop of the kerosene inside the lantern’s reservoir.
A few grains of dust clouded the liquid briefly, then settled to the bottom. Carin smiled.
She carried the lantern to her parents’ bedroom. Changing out of her mother’s clothes, Carin put on the garments she’d worn here. She felt for the lump in the pocket of her trousers, making sure she still had the bead of Ladrehdinian wood.
By lantern-light, Carin went round closing every door and window in the house and lowering the bamboo blinds. She lingered for a moment at the window of her childhood bedroom, looking out to sea. Under the moon, the water glittered like liquid silver, bounded by a long line of foamy white spray dashing against the shore. The sound of the surf was the sound Carin heard whenever she worked magic—wherever she was.
With the house shut up tight except for the door that opened onto the porch, Carin puffed a quick breath down the lantern’s chimney, throwing the room into near-darkness. She set the lantern back where she had found it, on the fireplace mantel next to a miniature chessboard. Stooping, she scraped together the embers of her cooking fire and put the screen in place to contain any spark the dying blaze might throw off. As she passed back through the kitchen, Carin collected her message in its bottle.
She stepped with it onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind her. Taking the wooden bead from her pocket, Carin walked down the beach and out to the same jutting point of land from which she and Verek had previously jumped.
With the ocean on three sides of her, smallish waves chafing the rocks at her feet, the heavier surf crashing against the cliff across the bay, Carin looked up at the stars. Was one of those points of light the sun that shone on Ladrehdin? Or was the world of the wysards in another dimension altogether?
Don’t overthink it, Carin told herself. Just go.
She flung the bottle into the ocean and watched it bob away on the swells. The message had a vanishingly slight chance of reaching Carin’s seafaring parents. Even so, she set more store by it than by the identical letter she’d left behind. In the distance, under the moonlight, Carin glimpsed a dolphin leaping out of the water. She whispered to it:
“Find them. Take them my message. Let them know I haven’t forgotten them.”
She watched the dolphin disappear. Then she glanced at the lump of wood in her hand. Carin could feel its flattened side, the part she’d filed off to ease the woodsprite’s departure from the bead. She twiddled it around so the scraped area was up, the damage turned to the moon of this world, not the surrounding ocean that was Carin’s source.
“Take me home,” she commanded the wood. “Or as near to Ruain as you can get me.”
Carin stepped off the point
of land—
—and splashed into the shallows of Ladrehdin’s eastern sea. The magic had brought her to the exact spot north of Easthaven where she had picked up the bead of driftwood.
She’d left Earth in the dark of its night, and here in Ladrehdin the sun was also below the horizon. But not far below. A band of pink heralded the coming sunrise. A crescent moon, a brilliant slice of light, hung low in the deep-blue sky of predawn.
It cast enough light that Carin could see the driftwood jumbled onshore. From it she picked out another lump of bleached wood that waves, winds, and abrasive sand had rounded to a bead. Carin pocketed both the flattened original and the perfect spare. One never knew when an extra talisman might come in handy.
She stepped along a low promontory that glistened with moist, slippery, native seaweed. The sea splashed round her, and spray fell upon her like a light rain.
“Amangêda,” she called. “Did I complete my task?”
Waves came bounding to the shore, dashing against the rocks and sending up feather-white spume. Beyond the tip of the promontory, the water boiled. Up came droplets of the sea. Flung high into the clear morning light, they glittered diamond-bright as they showered down. The droplets struck the ocean’s surface with a sound like seashells on strings, chiming in the breeze.
“Yes,” came Amangêda’s shimmery voice. “Now the healing begins.”
And Carin understood, that for years without number Amangêda had put on a brave front, had sent the waves unerringly ashore, had dressed the forests in spring green and the mountains in winter white, had done all else that was needful as the world turned on its axis and traveled round its sun. Yet the whole time, the world’s heart—Amangêda’s heart—was being ripped from it, and its breath strangled in its lungs.
No more. Now the healing began.
A seabird screeched in the dawn. Its cry cut across Amangêda’s next words. But Carin thought she heard the embodiment of this world say, “Welcome home.”
She smiled as she pushed her damp hair off her face.
Quitting the promontory, Carin strode rapidly up the coast, heading north. As she walked, the tide receded, leaving little streams to trickle across the firm sands. The sun, climbing higher, picked out a limpid pool of seawater trapped between rocks.
Carin paused to look into the pool. Then she took off her boots and stepped carefully in, at pains not to stir the sediment and cloud the water.
When the tide-pool had stilled, Carin built a mental image of the wysards’ well in Ruain. She pictured its glassy surface reflecting the rough ceiling of the enchanted cave. She called to her mind the stone benches that were arrayed around the pool like the points of a compass.
A mist rose around her. Peering through it, Carin saw Theil lunge to his feet. He had been sitting on the cavern’s polished floor, leaning back against the bench that bore the carved outline of a fish. Now he was staring at her open-mouthed. He dropped the flagon of dhera he’d been holding. Carin heard it hit the floor and shatter with a tremendous noise of breaking glass.
“Stop! STOP!” she yelled as he started to launch himself at her. “I’m not in the wysards’ well. I’m down on the coast, south of that waterfall.” Even half drunk, Theil would vividly remember the place where the storm broke over their heads and touched Carin with a finger of fire.
“I’ll be at the sea cliffs as soon as I can,” she called to him through the swirling mists. “Can you meet me there?”
Verek let out a whoop. “I’ve a foot in the stirrup already!” he cried. “And when I find you, fìleen … when I find you—”
Carin threw out her hands for balance as a sensation rose under her feet, as if the rocks below her had suddenly swelled. But a quick glance showed her the motionless tide-pool and the steadfast stones that enclosed it. The surface was unaltered. Yet the lifting sensation came again—a feeling of lightness that seemed to well up from the core of the planet … as if the rocks breathed a sigh of relief. Carin fancied she heard a long, low, happy hum—the world all but purring with pleasure. A breeze played in her hair, and the sun and the sea dazzled her eyes.
She shifted her position, trying to see Verek more clearly through the mists of distance and the brilliance of sunlight. But her motion broke the tenuous connection between this temporary pool of seawater and the ancient well of Power.
“Do you feel it?” Carin shouted as her toes stirred up clouds of sand and fogged the tide-pool. “The healing?” She doubted Theil could hear her words—the momentary link between them was too near lost. But perhaps he’d received the same impression Carin had: of a world on the mend, no longer bleeding to death.
She splashed from the pool, grabbed her boots, and sprinted barefoot, north along the shore. Overhead, seagulls screeched, wheeling, their white wings flashing in the sun. Away in the distance, Carin heard waves breaking against a rocky cliff. She laughed aloud.
When she couldn’t run anymore, she put on her boots and settled into the ground-eating stride that had once carried her across half a continent. Her journey, this time, would be a little shorter. And this time, Carin knew exactly where her destination lay.
She was going where she belonged.
END of BOOK THREE of WATERSPELL
About the Author
Castles in the cornfield provided the setting for Deborah J. Lightfoot’s earliest flights of fancy. On her father’s farm in West Texas, she grew up reading extraordinary tales of adventure and reenacting them behind tall ramparts of sun-drenched corn. She left the farm to earn a bachelor of science degree in journalism and write award-winning books of history and biography, including The LH7 Ranch (University of North Texas Press) and Trail Fever (William Morrow, New York). High on her Bucket List was the desire to try her hand at the genre she most admired. The result is WATERSPELL, a complex, intricately detailed fantasy that begins with Book 1: The Warlock and Book 2: The Wysard, and concludes (for the present) with this Book 3: The Wisewoman. But a legal pad filled with notes and tucked away in a desk drawer suggests a possible Book 4 before the saga may fairly be said to be finished.
Deborah J. Lightfoot is a member of The Authors Guild. She and her husband live in the country south of Fort Worth, Texas. Find her online at www.waterspell.net.
~~~~
Table of Contents
Critical Praise for the WATERSPELL Trilogy
Copyright © 2012 by Deborah J. Lightfoot
For Laura and Amanda, with love
CONTENTSPrologue: The Path Home1. Strange Magic2. The Wrong Place3. Settled Accounts
Wherever one finds oneself,
PrologueThe Path Home
Chapter 1Strange Magic
Chapter 2The Wrong Place
Chapter 3Settled Accounts
Chapter 4Distant Suns
Chapter 5Dark Recollections
Chapter 6Earth’s Blood
Chapter 7An Opened Gate
Chapter 8The Ashen Curse
Chapter 9
Chapter 10Carin’s Confession
Chapter 11The Second Scourge
Chapter 12
Chapter 13Liquid Fire
Chapter 14“Drown Me!”
Chapter 15Strong Magic
Chapter 16Amangêda
Chapter 17The Last Wysards’ Stronghold
Chapter 18Unification
Chapter 19Revelation
Chapter 20Restoration (Carin’s Evidence)
About the Author
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 36
