On that table were a pitcher and a plate of bread and cheese.
Carin sprang out of bed, sprinted to the table, and was devouring the food before she even thought of her injury. While ripping into a chunk of bread, she drew up her right knee for inspection. The knee felt stiff but moved with none of yesterday’s ache.
She unwrapped the bandage. “Oh!” she exclaimed, so startled that she momentarily neglected to eat. The gash had healed, leaving only a pale scar in place of a bloody wound.
The colorful powders her captor had sprinkled into the cut: did they do this? Could they heal a wound so quickly? “Potent stuff,” Carin mumbled with her mouth full again. If she could steal a supply, she ought to pack some along when she quit this place.
This place? Where was she? Carin finished everything edible, then began a closer examination of the room. She was drawn to a set of doors like tall shutters, painted a shiny blue, which closed a floor-to-ceiling opening in the wall to her right. The shutters’ narrowness suggested that a smaller room—a pantry? a closet?—lay beyond.
She was at those doors when a glimpse of herself in the dressing-table mirror brought her up short. The swordsman had been generous in calling her filthy. Carin frowned at her reflection, knowing he’d said it but unable to remember when.
He wasn’t wrong. Her shirt, formerly ivory, was mud-colored. Her hair, an oily mat of tangles, trapped straw and dead leaves. On her leggings, grass stains alternated with black patches of muck, and the ripped and tattered cloth from her right knee down was stiff with her dried blood.
Carin rubbed her forehead, then her eyes, struggling to make herself think back—or better, think ahead. She succeeded only in deepening her sense that she could do nothing for now, except live in the moment. She ought to be planning an escape, but all she could focus on just now was finding more food—she’d forgotten how good bread could taste—and maybe finding something clean to wear until she could wash her rags. She pulled open the blue shutters.
Neither a closet nor a pantry lay beyond. The doors opened to a cavernous room—a vaulted chamber of stone much bigger than the bedroom, and furnished for bathing.
“What the—?” Carin’s mouth fell open as she surveyed the fixtures.
A pedestal of blue-veined marble held a crystal washbowl. From the wall above the bowl, a spigot protruded. Carin thumbed it open. “High holy almighty!” she exclaimed in a rapture of delight as warm water swirled into the basin.
The room’s most arresting feature was more delightful still. A perfectly circular pool claimed nearly half the open floor space. Stone steps descended into it. Carin crouched and tested the water. It was warm like the flow from the wall spigot.
She tore off her clothes, and with them her sling. She grabbed a cake of soap from the washstand and slipped into the pool. To bathe warmly and with soap—glorious. This was simply glorious. From scalp to toes she scrubbed, and thrice lathered her hair.
As she floated in the pool, Carin scanned the room for the source of the steady light that filled every corner. The cavern had no windows, nor lamps or candles. Yet the chamber was well lit, with a diffuse glow like sunlight through clouded crystal. Were the walls not the solid rock they seemed? Were they made of split horn or another material that let the sun in?
The gentle current that stroked her body continually freshened the pool. Where was it coming from? When she had finished scrubbing and the water cleared, Carin dived and located the source of the inflow: an opening in the rocky bottom the size of a serving platter. Surfacing, she found outlet holes between the upper steps. This pool was fed by warm springwater that welled up continuously and drained out the sides.
The design, ingenious, was unmatched in her experience. Could that devil-eyed swordsman of the woodland be the architect of this heavenly pool? Carin wondered, remembering her captor’s strong, work-stained hands.
Another memory of his hands, less distinct, struggled to shape itself. They’d grabbed and beaten her—hadn’t they? She pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to remember. She touched her face where the blow had been aimed. No soreness there, nothing to suggest she’d been struck.
But something had happened last evening, some violence she couldn’t fully recall. A persistent mental sluggishness burdened her thoughts and blurred her memories.
Carin left the pool, squeezing rivulets from her hair. Wrapped in a towel, she returned to the bedroom. At the dressing table she took up the comb and attacked the snarls in her long, wet hair.
“Ouch!” and “Ouch!” again. After several minutes of painful and unsuccessful yanking, she dropped the comb and began to search the table’s drawers for a knife.
The first yielded only white kerchiefs embroidered with blue flowers. As Carin tugged at the second drawer, a soft knock came at the bedroom door.
Carin jerked her hand away and stepped back from the table. She would have retreated further, had her visitor given her time. But the latch lifted, the door opened, and in bustled a short, sturdy woman.
“Oh my, dearie, aren’t you a sight!” the woman exclaimed. “Awake already, and scrubbed. So clean you are, I’d swear ’twas not the same tatterdemalion my master carried up the stairs in the wee hours. Against skin that fresh, you’ll be wanting good clean clothes, not those rags we put you to bed in. Let’s see how this shift fits.”
Carin stood staring, doubly dazed by the woman’s sudden, chattering appearance and a sense that the feeling was nothing new, although the woman was a stranger to her. “Who … ?” she started to ask, then decided it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be here long enough—wherever “here” was—to get to know the inhabitants. With a nod, Carin accepted the shift that the woman offered. As she pulled it over her head, her towel fell to the floor.
The woman fished with both hands in the pockets of her housedress and drew out a length of blue fabric. This she twisted several times around Carin’s waist, snugging up the folds of crisp linen.
“Now, sit yourself down and we’ll comb out those tangles. What a mane you have!” she said admiringly as she pulled Carin’s damp hair from under the shift’s neckline.
“Ma’am, where can I get a knife?” Carin asked. A knife? Careful, she warned herself. Don’t alarm the nice lady. She flicked a strand out of her eyes and added, by way of explanation, “It’s hopeless. I’ll have to chop most of this off before I can get a comb through it.”
“Oh no, dearie! We needn’t cut your lovely hair,” the woman replied. “I wouldn’t see any guest of this house so disgraced.” She dived again with both hands into her roomy pockets. “It only needs a bit of coaxing … Patience, patience,” the woman mumbled—to Carin? to herself?—as she rummaged around. After much searching, she produced a flask and unstoppered it. “This will tame those tangles.” She poured out a dollop of a creamy liquid and began massaging it into Carin’s hair.
Heavenly. Another blissful sensation suffused Carin, as good as her soak in the pool. Her already draggy thoughts slowed to a crawl. Entranced and dreamy, she watched in the dressing-table mirror as the woman combed out the tangles. It took what seemed forever, but under her deft touch the snarls relaxed and Carin’s hair fell down in waves.
“Now then, you’re fit to appear at the court of any king,” the woman said, rousing Carin to attention. “I’ve never seen the master’s tonic to fail, be it scurf, snarls, or the baldness that troubles ye!”
“The master’s ‘tonic’?” Carin asked, suddenly wary.
“Aye, dearie. My good master can stir up a potion to cure ’most any ailment. ’Tis a wondrous gift he has.”
“The swordsman? Him? He’s an apothecary?” Carin pressed her.
“Apothecary and alchemist. Herbalist, metalsmith, and worker in stone. There’s little in this world that my master cannot turn his hand to for benefit.”
Are we talking about the same bare-fisted brute? Carin wondered.
She twisted around on the stool to face the woman. “Yesterday, when I tripped on a rock
in your master’s woodland and busted open my knee, he sprinkled some powders into it to stop the bleeding. Now, the cut’s closed up.” Carin showed the woman her faint scar. “It’s healed already, like magic. I’ve never seen any medicine work that fast. Did your master make it?”
“Aye, indeed,” the woman said. “I’ve used the stuff myself, many a time. And Lanse, and the old gardener—the horses, too. So long as the cut does not reach the vitals, the master’s healing dusts will stitch it up in no time.”
All the better for me, then, that he didn’t make good on his threat to remove my head. Carin shuddered a little. He couldn’t have stitched it back on, dusts or no dusts.
“Goodness me, child!” the woman said so suddenly that Carin jumped. She walked to the window and pushed back the bedroom’s lacy curtains. “If I’m any judge of the sun, I’ve stood here chatting the morning away. ’Twill soon be time for the master’s midday meal. And you, dearie—you’ve barely made a start on your breakfast with those morsels I left to whet your appetite. Oh my, a good wind could blow you away, so thin you are! You need meat on that spare frame. And aren’t I the one to fatten you up? Come along now, down to the kitchen, and I’ll fix you a bowl of porridge with bacon, and bread dripping with honey.”
Carin wiped her hand across her suddenly watering mouth. She trailed the woman out onto a landing, down a narrow wooden staircase, through an unfurnished foyer, and along a connecting passageway to the kitchen. She sat on a bench at the table and watched the cook throw together the promised breakfast. The meal was served with a mug of hot mint tea and another of fresh milk. Carin delayed only long enough to say a sincere “Thank you,” then attacked with firm intent to leave no crumb or drop.
Only when she had eaten partway through her second full breakfast did she begin to pay less heed to her stomach and more to the swordsman’s housekeeper—as she’d decided this woman must be. The latter had been chattering ceaselessly while chopping vegetables and stirring a pot over the fire. Her talk was a running commentary on the weather, the shortcomings of Lanse the stableboy, and the faults of someone called Jerold. He, presumably, was the gardener previously mentioned.
Not once did the woman speak of Carin’s late-night arrival. If she had questions, she did not ask them.
Carin volunteered nothing. She only ate and listened and nodded politely, and made her plans to leave. Soon now. She must go soon, while she had only this gabby housekeeper to contend with.
But she wouldn’t leave empty-handed. A coarse bag hung on a wall of the kitchen between bunches of dried fruits and herbs. It would comfortably hold whatever bread and jerked meat Carin could pilfer on her way out the door.
And don’t forget the medicines. She’d also have to check this room for the swordsman’s cure-alls. Given those dusts’ impressive healing powers, she shouldn’t take off without her own supply. She hadn’t been safe for a very long time, but those powders that could close a wound and keep the lifeblood from draining away would make her a little safer, a little less likely to die before she found the place where she belonged.
Thirty-odd pots and jars lined the shelves. As Carin eyed them, wondering which to search first, the kitchen door opened to the courtyard beyond. Through it stepped the swordsman.
He belonged in darkness—not in this cheerful, caraway-scented kitchen. The man wore black, as before, but his garments today were of fine wool, not the leather of his riding gear.
“Myra, is my—?” He bit off the question as his gaze found Carin at his table.
Now she was standing behind it, and she had no memory of getting to her feet. Her head swam and could produce only one thought: Run.
But she couldn’t run. She couldn’t move. She could only stand and stare at him as a coldness surged up from her stomach and jellied all her senses.
He stared back. Fleetingly, he looked surprised. Then his expression grew guarded, aloof.
The housekeeper—Myra by name, obviously—greeted the man warmly and prattled on: Her master’s meal would be served in an eyeblink, and hadn’t their midnight visitor cleaned up well, just as Myra had foretold?
The swordsman made no reply as he unclasped his cloak and hung it by the door. Carin caught a gleam from the silver badge that fastened the garment. In the sunlight that streamed through the open door, the horns of the crescent moon flashed like sparks from a firestone.
Carin’s captor took the bench opposite her. Silently he nodded his thanks to the efficient Myra as the woman set ale on the table for him. He sipped from the tankard and continued his wordless study of a stock-still Carin. Finally, he answered:
“Myra, I am humbled to the ground by your talents in these matters. I scarce gave credit to your claims last night that the revolting creature I carried aloft could shed the muck and emerge a human. Though it doesn’t alter her vagrant nature, the outward change assuredly is welcome. At least she does not stink now.”
Carin clenched her fists at her sides so tightly that her fingernails cut her palms. For a moment, she had no voice. Then she found it.
“Try losing your horse,” she snapped, “and walking all summer, with no clothes except the ones you’re wearing. Try it, and see if you don’t get as dirty as me and every bit as ripe. Or riper—to the point of a real stench … sir.”
That’s enough. You know you can’t talk to him that way, muttered her reflexive aversion to bodily harm. Like your old master told you every time he belted you: “Remember your place.”
But of all the nerve … If her unwashed state offended the man, he should have left her where he found her. I suppose he’s accustomed to abducting a better class of person—
Carin planted her fist on her hip and grated out her words in much the same tone she used when swearing. “Thanks for letting me wash up in that hot-spring pool upstairs where the walls glow. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing.” She gave a little sniff, trying to appear disdainful.
But the pool IS amazing. And I sound like I actually AM thanking him for punching my lights out and manhandling me here.
Desperate to avoid giving any impression of gratitude, Carin added, “I can’t guess how a marvel like that came to be. Who gets the credit? Not you, I wouldn’t think.” She cut her eyes at the man’s scarred hand, the one that was short a finger.
No sound greeted Carin’s attempts at sarcasm except the bubbling of the stewpot on the fire. Even Myra had fallen silent. The woman kept her eyes lowered and said nothing as she heaped meat and vegetables on a platter for her master’s lunch.
When Myra had set the dish before him, the swordsman buttered a slab of fresh-baked bread and balanced it on the platter’s rim. Then, with the butter knife, he waved Carin back to her seat.
“I hardly hoped to find so much wit in you, to know a marvel when you see it.” He looked across the table at her. His tone, though sharp, was more dismissive than angry. “The pools—two of similar design are in this house—are extraordinary, as you say. They were crafted by my noble ancestor whose estate this was long ago, and whose descendants, myself among them, have abided here in an unbroken line since the family’s establishment.”
The swordsman paused to take bites of bread and stew. Then he sipped his ale and eyed Carin speculatively.
“As you have nothing but rags to ward off autumn’s chill,” he said, “and you travel—by your own admission—on foot and without provisions, I take you for a runaway bondmaid. Undoubtedly you carried off whatever you could steal from your master. But it seems your thievery has proved inadequate for your journey. Starvation would have found you, if I had not.”
Hold on there, Carin protested, but only inwardly. She wanted to say that she had borrowed—not stolen—from her old master. To survive, however, in the months since leaving him, she’d played the thief time and again. Remembering her plan to ransack Myra’s kitchen, she kept still and let the accusation stand.
Now it’s coming, she thought. He’d demand to know where—and to whom—she belon
ged. How much did she dare reveal?
The swordsman’s next question, however, was not what Carin expected.
“Do you know your letters?”
She stared at him blankly. “Sir?”
“It is a simple-enough question,” he said, raising a bite of stew to his lips. “Can you read?”
She considered, then shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
He scoffed. “The question does not lend itself to much uncertainty. Can you, or can you not?”
“The people I—” Carin broke off. Slaved for, she’d started to say. But why confirm his suspicions? “The people I used to live with,” she amended, “owned one book. I learned to read it. I don’t know if I can read any other books. Do you have one for me to look at?”
“I do. None here can comprehend it. Since you are from elsewhere, perhaps you can make it out.”
To his housekeeper he said, “Myra, go to the library and open the bottom drawer of my desk. Bring me the book you find there.”
“I obey, master, with as much haste as these old legs can make,” Myra responded. She bustled off into the passageway that connected the kitchen to the house. Her footsteps trailed away on the ground floor past the foot of the staircase.
The hairs rose along Carin’s arms. Breathe, she told herself. You’ve been doing all right with him. Don’t lose it now. But where was he going with this “Can you read” business?
Sitting alone with the swordsman, Carin felt her nerve-ends prickle as if he were again holding a blade to her throat. She had to lock her hands around her now-empty tea mug to keep from clutching her neck—a defensive gesture that would only tell him how vulnerable he made her feel.
But a man with a sword was an understandable threat … not like his second, bare-handed attack, when he’d knocked Carin senseless. Why could she remember the cruel hurt, but no fist-to-flesh contact? Sitting at the mirror this morning while Myra combed her hair, Carin had had ample time to examine her face for cuts or bruises. There were none. If her captor had hit her hard enough to put her out cold for the night—and wasn’t that what he had done?—she should be wearing his mark now.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 3
