“Hold the knee still,” he ordered as he dosed the wound with the bronze stuff. “This will burn.”
Burn, however, was not the word to describe it. A glowing coal dropped into the cut would not have blazed hotter. Tears streamed down Carin’s face but she kept still and made no sound, even as she bit her lip hard enough to draw blood.
He glanced at her face as he set aside the bronze powder and picked up the green.
Sweet mercy, what next? Her fingers dug into the cold ground under her.
But when the man sprinkled the green dust into the wound, the fire in Carin’s flesh died. Her knee went numb. The gash, though alarmingly deep, no longer bled or throbbed. Carin freed her lip and tasted the blood she’d bit from it.
The man resealed the colored powders and slipped both packets back inside the black leather coat that he wore under his cloak. From another pocket, he produced a square of linen and bandaged her knee.
He stood then and walked to his horse, but he did not immediately mount. “Get on your feet,” he snapped.
He’s demented. Carin eyed him, more than a little confused. He’s insane. One minute, he was threatening to kill her. The next, he was doctoring her hurts. And now his anger seemed rekindled.
She pushed up from the rocks and teetered, the toe of her right boot barely touching the ground. The sun hung low in the west. She had to hurry or night would be on them before she could lead this strange man to the edge of the trees and prove her case.
Get on with it, Carin ordered herself. She put one foot ahead of the other and tried to ignore her injury. But she could barely hobble. The numbing effect of the swordsman’s medicinal powders wore off fast. With each step, she stifled a groan. She didn’t get far before the pain shooting through her knee forced her to brace against a tree and give her sound leg her weight.
“If you continue to try my patience,” the swordsman growled, “you will discover how limited it is. Move!”
Carin glared at him. “I can’t walk,” she snapped in a tone that was as sharp as his. “If you want me to show you that hill I climbed, you’ll have to let me ride.”
The man scowled. He muttered an oath—something about “guts and gall.” But after a moment in which he seemed to weigh his options, he led his horse up beside her.
“Mount,” he ordered brusquely. “I am determined to see this place along my borders that you claim is unmarked. Even a blind man must heed those warnings and turn aside. Though you are a clumsy creature, you’re not blind. I will have you show me what you claim not to have seen.”
I didn’t see it because it’s not there, you lunatic, Carin thought. But she said nothing more, only stretched for the pommel and pulled herself up. She barely managed to get her throbbing right leg over the horse’s rump. And she hadn’t quite straightened before the man swung up behind her. He pressed her forward on the flat huntsman’s saddle and gathered the reins in both of his hands.
“Oh—!” She flinched, swallowing another oath, finding herself trapped between his arms. Only the damned should be this close to a devil who had the fires of the abyss in his eyes.
As they rode south at a canter, the swordsman sought no guidance from his captive. Carin would not have been able to direct him even if he had asked. From horseback in the darkening woods, she could see no traces of her previous passage. But the man seemed sure of the way, as if he knew right where she had set foot on his property.
So why make me show him the spot? If he knew the place, then he must know it was wide-open to any traveler.
Covering the remaining distance far more quickly than Carin could have walked it, the man reined up. He had indeed brought them to the slope where these wooded highlands met the grasslands below. Though the day was far gone, enough light remained to pick out a distinctively scarred tree on the hilltop. Carin recognized it. The white mark on its trunk looked like a dolphin. When she had passed by here earlier, she’d particularly noticed the dolphin because it looked so out of place, suspended between the golden plains and the leafless oaks.
She started to point out the tree, to tell her captor that this was the precise spot. But the man behind her spoke first.
“Show me!” he demanded, so forcefully that his hot breath ruffled the hair on the back of her head. He pointed down the slope. “If you value your life, show me the break you claim to have discovered along my well-protected borders.”
What does this madman want from me? Carin half twisted around to vent her frustration on him, but stopped when she thought how close that would bring her face to his. She jerked her head down instead, and brought up her arm. With a sweeping motion, she indicated all of the landscape that lay before and below them.
“What are you talking about?” she exclaimed. “What are you looking at? You can see for yourself that there’s no wall, or fence, or signpost.” Carin pointed out a glade down on the hillside. “The lower you go, the fewer the trees. That’s all I see.” She shook her head. “Sir, I don’t think much of your ‘well-protected border.’ If you want to keep people out of these woods, you need more than a few scarred oaks and an imaginary fence.”
“By the blood of Abraxas!” the man swore in her ear. “You’re a brassy chit.”
Carin swallowed hard and waited for him to hit her. Whenever her old master, the wheelwright of a small southern town, had barked at her like that, he’d always finished by clouting her.
But the swordsman didn’t hit her. He only urged his horse forward, muttering something so far under his breath that Carin didn’t catch it.
The horse took two steps, then stopped of its own accord. It snorted nervously and pawed the ground, clearly unwilling to descend the slope.
Its master did not force it. The man dismounted and ordered Carin down.
She dragged her stiffening knee over the horse’s back, slid past the stirrup iron, and managed to land with all of her weight on her good leg. As Carin wobbled on one foot, the swordsman caught and steadied her.
“Show me,” he ordered again, his voice tight. With the hand that had helped her off the horse, he gave her a push—not enough to unbalance her, but enough to make his meaning clear. He wanted her to go down the hill, back toward the plains below.
Do what he wants. Get out of here. Find another way north.
Carin half hopped and half limped down the slope. Pain lanced through her knee. She had to stop, far above the foot of the hill, and brace against an oak. She closed her eyes and tried to master the pain through willpower alone. She did not succeed.
But in her stillness, Carin again became aware of the silence that pervaded the woodland—a silence in which not so much as a whir of wings nor the distant call of a bird could be detected. The profound hush that had made these woods seem peaceful and promising, when she’d first entered them, now impressed Carin as sinister. No tomb for the dead was more oppressive than this place.
Go, whispered her fear. Get off this hillside.
Carin took a step. “Aaahh!” she cried as the pain buckled her leg under her. She collapsed into a pile of leaves.
Sweet mercy, her knee hurt. The tears came again, wetting her face. She ducked her head to hide them, but an avalanche of profanities made her look sharply uphill.
The swordsman was striding down toward her, swearing with his every step, shattering the stillness. Though the oaths he spoke were unfamiliar to her, she could recognize the inflections of violent cursing when she heard them.
The man stopped swearing just before he reached Carin. He crouched on the slope so that his eyes were only a little above hers. He stared at her, hard.
Don’t scream. Carin beat back a deep need to do so as she endured the searing intensity of his gaze.
Her breath came in short bursts. She grabbed one and panted out, “Got to stop … knee’s gone … won’t take my weight.” She squeezed it tightly. The pressure helped the agony and helped to steady her. As her breathing eased, Carin demanded more coherently: “Leave me here. I’ll sleep unde
r a tree. Tomorrow, I’ll head down.” She pointed to the flats below them. Pain sharpened her voice as she added, “You won’t see me again. I promise.”
The man didn’t answer her. If he altered his expression at all, it was only to deepen his scowl. The sun had set on the hill, but in any light her captor’s eyes would be easy to see. They remained fixed on her. He studied Carin as if he doubted what he saw. His face didn’t give much away, but she detected a veiled astonishment.
“How have you come through the barrier?” the swordsman asked, finally breaking his silence. “Tell me: do you perceive nothing here? Feel nothing? See nothing that alarms you?”
“The only alarming thing I’ve seen all day is you—sir.” The tacked-on courtesy sounded like she was mocking him: unwise, under the circumstances. But her misery was loosening Carin’s tongue. “You want to know what I’m feeling?” she snapped. “My knee’s killing me. I’m dead tired from walking a thousand miles, and I’m hungry.” Ravenous, in fact. She’d long since walked off her last meal of rabbit and redberries. “I’m cold, too,” she added as she shivered so violently that the leaves under her rustled audibly in the stillness.
The man shook his head. “None of that matters. Tell me: what is here?” He pointed to the ground under her. “What do you sense in this place?”
“Sense?” Carin paused to consider her answer, for she’d gradually become aware that she did in fact perceive something—a kind of tingly energy, diffuse and thready, all around her. “It’s hard to describe.” She looked around, as another shiver traveled over her. “But it feels a little like the air does when a storm is building. You know, when it’s thundering and lightning but the air is so dry it crackles, and the rocks are throwing off sparks the way a wool blanket does on a winter night.”
She refocused on him. Though the man’s expression was unrevealing, his eyes narrowed—not enough to hide the glint in them. Carin shuddered, wishing for a good wool blanket to cover her threadbare clothes.
“That feeling in the air is easy to miss,” she added, dropping her gaze to avoid his. “It’s weak. I never noticed it when I came this way the first time. I barely feel it now that I’m sitting here freezing to death. When I passed through before—this afternoon, when I climbed up and went on in to where you found me—I didn’t sense it at all.”
A thought came to her then. Incredulous, Carin snapped her head up and demanded: “Is this little tingly feeling supposed to be guarding your borders? That’s ridiculous! You claim your lands are protected, but there’s nothing on this hillside that would stop a butterfly.”
In response, Carin’s captor raised his right hand and made a motion with his thumb and fingers, as if flicking away an insect.
Then the man rose to his feet. He loomed over her.
“Come away from there,” he growled. With his three-fingered left hand he grasped Carin’s arm and drew her up. His right fist drove at her face. The blow landed.
Or did it? Carin’s head snapped back from the force of it, and yet the fist had failed to connect. Half an instant before striking her, the man’s fingers straightened and arrowed at her eyes. They seemed to go right through her as a cold white flash engulfed her and nearly popped her head off.
She knew every agony, every torment that human flesh could endure. For a moment, Carin hurt as she had never hurt before.
Then all things subsided. Pain, hunger, and weariness slid away, leaving only a vague, lingering bewilderment. She wasn’t entirely gone to insensibility. The white flash had banished vision, but she caught a breath of night-crisp air that carried the scent of the woods.
And gradually, an awareness of movement asserted itself: she or something touching her was in motion. The action had a rhythmic quality, soothing as a baby’s rocker. Carin retained enough mindfulness to know she was back on the horse, swaying with the animal’s steps. She could almost hear the plop and crunch of hooves on earth and fallen leaves.
Soon these impressions faded, all becoming white and smooth and peaceful. The whiteness filled and took her. And the two voices that came to her then, as if from a great distance, had no power to revive Carin. The words of the two seeped through her brain, like snowflakes melting, leaving no residue—
“The girl makes a pretty picture, mage, resting in your arms.”
“Faugh! A drowned cat would look better … and smell better.”
“She is another, you know.”
“Another what, pray tell?”
“Another like me.”
“How so?”
“Unbound by the laws of your world, mage, or by your spells. She is from elsewhere.”
“A fanciful notion, sprite, hardly to be credited. She is a serving-maid, more like, running from her master and ill prepared to fend off starvation in the winter that comes.”
“How then do you explain her utter disregard for your imprecations?”
“Not so. She sensed the magic. She succumbed at the last.”
“Scarcely! And by slow measures, only after swimming in your spells for long enough to drive the sanity from any of your countrymen. You know I speak the truth. Take care how you deny it. I was there. I saw.”
“Be off with you, woodsprite. I find your chatter tedious. Though I may be powerless to banish you from this land, I won’t abide your insolence. Begone, and do not let me see you again.”
“As you wish, magician. I’ll leave you to ride home through the dreariest patch of woods that ever grew. But mark my words: you shall find that this traveler who’s asleep in your arms belongs here no more than I do.”
Chapter 2
The Puzzle-Book
“Myra! Come in here!” a man shouted, loudly enough to wake the dead.
Carin did not wake. Barely sensing a disturbance, she didn’t hear the shout so much as feel it. It made a slim dark splinter that stabbed the whiteness enshrouding her.
Presently, a quantity of particles joined the splinter. The particles were recognizably words, but they drifted over Carin’s confused senses like a soft blizzard carried on a woman’s voice.
“Here you are at last, my lord! How I did worry, when the supper dishes were cleared and the sun had gone down and the stars were out and still there was no sign of my good master. I bade the stableboy ride out to look for you, but he would not. He would only skulk about the stalls and fret that one of his charges was absent. I do believe he cares more for that horse than for you, my lord.”
“It pleases me to hear it, Myra,” said the voice like a splinter. “Lanse knows I face no danger in these woods. But he also knows the harm that hard use can bring a horse. His fears are rightly placed.”
Something moved. As before, Carin registered the motion but was vague about her own part in it.
“I grow weary of this burden.” The splintery voice jabbed at her. “Where would you have me drop the creature?”
“A visitor!” the soft blizzard cried. “My lord, how you do surprise me! We’ve had no visitors for many a year. But always I have hoped—and kept a room ready for any such blessings that might befall us. The blue room, master, at the top of the stairs. Come, if it please you.”
More movements followed, an impression of climbing. Then the voices drifted past again:
“Lay her here, my lord.”
“This creature is filthy,” he complained. “She’ll begrime bed-linens.”
“No matter. Sheets will wash, and so will she. There’ll be time on the morrow for scrubbing clothes and bodies. What’s needed tonight is rest, for our tagrag visitor and for you, my lord. Lay her gently here, then be off to your bed. I will tend our guest.”
“I leave her to you. Gladly.”
Another motion, quick and rough, so unsettled the blank void of Carin’s existence that she almost roused. But her senses could not marshal themselves before the whiteness again smoothed itself across them.
“Look and you will see a covering on one knee,” the splintery voice said. “The cloth protects a wound. Leave it
until tomorrow. The treatment needs no interference.”
“Do you take me for a simpleton, master? I well know that your cures are not to be meddled with. To bed with you now, sir. The wee hours are upon us.”
This time the movement was definitely far distant. Carin felt frozen in place, as quiet and stilled as pond ice in winter. Words settled gently on her, a last flurry from a woman’s voice that strew them about like a force of nature.
“Now, dearie, you’ll sleep the night through. My master’s seen to that. Sleep as late as you like on the morrow, and when you wake I’ll have a good breakfast for you. And I’ll hear of all your adventures. My! What wondrous adventures you shall have had! Few come this far north. Travelers through this land are uncommonly few. I do wonder … yes, I wonder how a maid comes to be in this realm, and comes to my kitchen door like a bundle of rags in my master’s arms. Mysteries upon mysteries. You can’t have seen sixteen winters yet, but wondrous adventures you shall have had, for all your short years. On the morrow, I’ll hear all. Curious as a cat, I am …”
To the subsiding blizzard, Carin was oblivious. The last fragment of awareness left her and she knew no more.
* * *
Sunlight dappled the bed through lace curtains. If it was morning, it had to be late.
Carin stretched between smooth sheets. Then she sat bolt upright and studied the room to which she had been brought in the night.
This can’t be a dungeon, she thought, astonished. It’s too pretty.
The “blue room,” as she’d heard a female voice call it, was aptly named. Linen of periwinkle blue covered the walls. The color repeated in the cushion of a three-legged stool at the mirrored dressing-table beside the bed. On the table were a hairbrush and a comb, both of an iridescent blue shell reminiscent of the jewel-toned beetles Carin had seen in the southern grasslands. An azure vase held the bright feathers of bluebirds. The coverlet on the bed, and the cushions of a chair in the corner, were a deep indigo. A cloth of sea blue draped a small table by the latched entry door.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 2
