The man scraped his platter clean, noisily spooning up the last of the stew. He did not otherwise break the silence that filled the kitchen in Myra’s absence.
And mercifully, he did not look at Carin, though she studied him with many sidelong glances. She’d never seen a face like his in the south. For one thing, his skin hadn’t been tanned to leather by the elements. The northern sun must be less brutal, or the summers milder here. He lacked the windburned, sun-scorched look of the typical low-latitudes male. Different, too, was his narrow, straight nose. Hawk beaks dominated farther south.
The swordsman’s mustache curved down at the corners of his mouth to join the beard that traced his jaw. The dark, neat line of the mustache was thinner than any plainsman would sport, and the beard more closely cropped. He wore his hair swept back from his forehead. It fell to his shoulders, crow-black and straight. His hair was silvering at the temples, but the noontime sun that spread through the kitchen picked out no other gray strands.
His age? Unguessable, she’d say. And not particularly important in defining him. A durableness about him suggested that ordinary concepts of age might not apply in his case.
His housekeeper, returning from her errand, fluttered in like a plump, tame goose. She placed a book near the swordsman’s hand. Nattering on about what a lovely day it was for so late in the season, and how many fine books filled the master’s library, Myra began clearing the table.
As his housekeeper worked around him, the man picked up the book and flipped through it briefly. Not speaking, he held it out to Carin.
She wiped her greasy fingers, took the book, and studied its red and gold cover. After a moment’s puzzled hesitation, she opened the volume and skimmed its first pages.
How? Where … ? Carin couldn’t fully form her questions. She could only stare at the pages. The writing was in a language she couldn’t remember seeing before … but there was so much she could not remember, and other things that she knew, in the deepest levels of her mind, without knowing how she knew them. Though she hadn’t remembered what this language looked like, though she couldn’t remember ever seeing it written down before, she definitely knew what it sounded like. This was her own private language—the one she thought in, and the tongue she lapsed into whenever she came unstuck.
It’s here. My language … it’s real. It’s not just in my head.
Carin looked up from the volume to find the swordsman studying her fiercely, as if he were trying to divine her thoughts. Don’t let him know, said every experience that had taught her to keep her brainwork to herself.
Avoiding the man’s strangely luminous gaze, she whipped her attention back to the book. Part of her—that voice of caution with its whispered warnings—wanted to close the book, hand it back to him, and feign ignorance. But the stronger part leaped at this chance to show off, to raise herself above the level of a scruffy runaway servant.
From the poem that began the book, Carin chose two stanzas to read aloud. She easily translated them for the swordsman as she went:
“Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale. …
“Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness.
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.”
Carin closed the volume and pushed it across the table toward her captor. “Yes, sir,” she said with a shrug, as if it didn’t matter. “I can read this book. It’s called Through the Looking-Glass.”
Chapter 3
Secrets
Myra clapped her hands like a delighted child.
“There, my lord! Didn’t I tell you? A runagate, you called her, and a vagabond and a beggar. But I—I saw right off that she had a good head on her shoulders. ‘A smart young thing, she is,’ I said. ‘Bright as a new copper,’ I said. ‘Had to have her wits about her,’ I said, ‘to be traveling all alone, poor dearie, and fending for herself,’ this far from nowhere. ‘Give her a go at the puzzle-book,’ I said. A bright young thing like her—’tis no surprise to me, my lord. No surprise at all.”
The swordsman scowled at Carin, ignoring the flurry of words from his housekeeper. Then he shoved back his bench and stood. He snatched up the book, stepped back a pace, and pointed, indicating the passageway to the foyer.
“Come with me.”
Deliberately—she would obey, but not too meekly—Carin gave her mouth and fingers a final wipe and rose from the table. She thanked Myra for her double breakfast, which sent the housekeeper into a pother of thinking-out-loud about preparations for supper. The woman flew about the kitchen, gathering ingredients for the evening meal. She was left talking to herself as Carin followed the swordsman down the passageway, past the foot of the staircase, and into a hallway that opened off the foyer.
Indoors on his own two feet, the swordsman wasn’t as imposing as he had seemed astride his tall hunter out in the woods. Carin, trailing along behind him, judged him to be not much over the common height. And though he was muscular, he was too lean to be described as brawny. The grace in his movements spoke of a confident and well-conditioned strength.
They reached the hall’s end. The man pushed open a door and held it for her.
Carin took two steps into the library and halted. “Sweet mother of mercy,” she softly swore, her eyes widening.
Books lined the walls from the tiled floor to the high, painted ceiling. Every inch of shelf space was filled, and the overflow buried the room’s flat surfaces. Books covered a massive oak desk under arching windows. Books spilled from a low table between two cushioned benches. Books sat piled on the floor. Even the windowsills and the fireplace mantel sprouted books. Carin—who had wheedled her former master’s fourteen-year-old daughter to teach her to read the one book in that household—stood in awe of the swordsman’s vast collection. She had not imagined so many books could exist in all the world.
The library door thudded closed behind her. The swordsman brushed past her shoulder, so close she could smell him. Coming from the man or his clothes was the odor of calendula oil, a musky scent that mingled with the woody, leathery smell of old books.
He wheeled to face her. “Explain yourself,” he demanded, holding up the book he carried. “I have studied the ancient languages and I cannot read these words. How is it that you can?”
“No idea,” Carin said and tossed her hair back. “I just look at the words and know what they mean. I can’t tell you how I do it.”
He took a step toward her.
Don’t! snapped her inner voice as she almost backed away from him. By a wrenching effort of will, Carin stood her ground. But she could not look the man in the face and risk seeing too deeply into his glimmering, unquiet eyes.
“I warn you, do not provoke me.” His voice was steel. “I am in no mood for games. The language of this book is foreign. You claim to know the tongue. Tell me where and when you learned it.”
“Sir, I honestly can’t say.” Carin’s tone was calm—firm, almost. And with her hands fisted at her sides, he wouldn’t see that they were shaking. “I don’t know where or when or how I learned to read the language of that book you’re holding. I can’t remember ever seeing words written like that before. There’s just some part of me that knows what they mean.”
The muscles tightened along the man’s jaw. Carin braced for a blow. She had taken so many blows in her time as a servant, she was good at seeing them coming.
But the swordsman didn’t strike her. He turned on the heel of one boot and crossed to the fireplace. With an exasperated sigh, he dropped onto a bench and gestured for Carin to be seated opposite him, with the book-strewn low table betw
een them.
“Tell me, pray, what you do remember,” he demanded. “Do you know your name?”
“Of course. I’m called Carin.”
“Good. That’s a start. Now, tell me where you come from and why you have trespassed on my land.”
He makes it sound simple, she thought, like I ought to be able to give him plain answers. Well it is simple, I guess, if I don’t tell him everything.
She looked down. Her ugly scar was showing, the one on her forearm where she’d sloshed the boiling oil while cooking for her old master. She tugged on her sleeve to hide it, and glanced up to find her captor watching. His eyes made her wince. To avoid them, Carin focused her gaze slightly left of the man’s temple. Then she began the account of her life as bond-servant to a wheelwright …
She had come to the wright’s household as a half-grown child, strong enough to do the chores her masters set her of cooking, cleaning, weaving and the like. For five years they’d given her meals and a cubby to sleep in, and she’d done what they’d told her to do.
The wheelwright lived in a farming town down south—Carin omitted naming the place. On a warm night early this past summer, some five months ago, she had left the family sleeping, slipped out to the stable and saddled the strongest horse there—a gaunt, striding dun that had little beauty but more stamina than the rest combined. Riding through the night, heading north, she reached a farmstead before daybreak. A wagon loaded with straw stood ready to be driven to town. She dismounted, tied the reins to the saddle, and sent the dun home with a slap on its rump. The horse would make its own way back to the wright’s stable—if no one managed to catch the beast and steal it for themselves.
In the predawn, Carin climbed into the wagon and burrowed. She’d barely grown still when the jingle of harness announced the arrival of the farmer with his team. Hitching up, they drove to town. Safe in the straw, she dozed.
Carin woke to the clamor of the marketplace. She dug out and jumped down. In the confusion of wagons and teams, farmers and peddlers setting up to hawk their wares in the open-air market, no one noticed one slim girl dodging carts and threading the throng of horses and people.
“I begged a little food and started walking,” Carin said as she neared the conclusion of her story. Actually, she had stolen more than she’d begged. But stealing was not a crime she would admit to. Thieves were commonly rebuked by having their hands lopped off.
“I just kept walking,” she added. “Heading north always … all summer. Every league I covered, the country looked the same—grassy and empty, nothing much but hay fields and cow pastures, and then just the prairie. But yesterday, things changed. I climbed the hill and got in among the trees.”
She risked a direct glance at her captor to see what effect her next words might have. “Like I told you before, sir, I never saw a wall or any kind of boundary. The way I came, it’s all open—just some trees. And I thought the trees meant I had reached the wilderness. Another league or so, I thought, and I’d be in the old forests where nobody lives”—a place which, until that moment, Carin had never considered as a possible destination. But it would do. She needed to sound like she knew what she was doing and where she was going, even if she didn’t.
In closing, Carin shrugged one shoulder, trying to look unconcerned. “You can believe me or not, but I never meant to trespass on your land. I didn’t know it was private.”
The swordsman heard her out without comment, regarding her through slitted eyelids. As Carin fell silent, he stood and walked to a small cabinet that was set amid the books crowding the shelves. From it, he took a flagon, and poured himself a goblet full of some ruby liquid. Drink in hand, he resumed his seat on the high-backed bench opposite hers.
“I accept the truth of your story, so far as you’ve told it,” he said at last. He sipped his drink. Then he leaned toward her across the table between them and set the goblet down hard. “What you have not told me will make a far stranger tale, I’ll warrant. How did you come to be a servant in the wright’s household? Where is your home? Who are your people? Who are mother and father to you?”
Carin passed a hand over her eyes and rubbed her forehead. These … these were the questions she never answered … could never answer. Just thinking about them made her head ache. It was like straining to see the stars on a night when clouds blanketed the sky. No pinpoints of light pierced the darkness.
She shook her head. “Sir, I don’t have a father or a mother.” Her voice caught; she cleared her throat. “I don’t know where I was born. I don’t remember how or when I came to the wright’s house. They told me they found me one winter. I was lying at the edge of a pond where the wright and his family had come to fish. They said I was soaking wet, like I’d almost drowned, and so cold I was blue. The way they tell it, I was scared to death.”
Carin paused. It felt unnatural to say so much. She hadn’t said this many words in one sitting in maybe ever. But then, this strange man was the first person who had ever said to her: “Tell me about yourself.”
He was looking at her, intent, waiting. She rubbed her throat, and her voice strengthened as she continued.
“I didn’t talk to them then, or for a year after that. When I did start talking, I couldn’t say things right. I mixed up my words. They thought I was ‘sheep-headed,’ as they put it. But I kept trying until I could talk as good as any of them could. I listened to everybody who came into my master’s shop—all the travelers and the people from the town, and the field hands—and I practiced, in secret.
“The youngest daughter heard me practicing out at the millpond,” Carin added, “but she didn’t tell anybody. She wanted to play the game too. When she figured out that I wasn’t as dim-witted as they’d all thought, she taught me to read the holy Drishanna—it was the only book her father owned.” Carin tilted her head, and a strand of squeaky-clean hair came slipping over her eye. She pushed it back. “Around the rest of the family, I just stayed sheep-headed. It kept me out of trouble. If the wheelwright had known I could think, he would have watched me closer.”
This spotty account of her origins and her education earned Carin the swordsman’s hard stare—like an archer studying his target. His next question arrowed straight as a fletched shaft to the part of her story that must sound the least sensible, if he made her say it aloud.
“North, always,” he muttered, half to himself. Then, a great deal more forcefully, he demanded:
“Why? You aren’t the first serving-girl to run from her master, but why strike out for the forests of the far north with winter coming on? How could you hope to survive on your own when the snows begin, and the winds howl, and the air is so cold it freezes in your lungs? You claim to be sound-witted, yet your actions are those of a rattlebrained fool.” He tapped his temple. “Fools have no business in the north country. What brought you here?”
Don’t let him get to you, Carin thought. But her cheeks burned. Too offended to invent any lie that would serve her better than the truth, she gibbered out the very thing she hadn’t wanted to say.
“The village wisewoman told me to go north. She said I didn’t belong in the south, I was no child of the plains country—my place was in the north. She told me to go. So I did.”
Shut up. You are babbling like the rattlebrain he says you are, warned the voice in the back of her head.
As Carin heeded it and stopped talking, the swordsman gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. “The wisewoman … she threatened you?” He lifted his chin slightly. “She bade you leave the town; else, she’d hex you?”
“Hex me? Meg—?” Carin broke off sharply before she fully named the woman. “No! Why would you think—” She stopped again, dumbfounded by the idea of the wisewoman practicing witchcraft. Then she gave a snort of derision. “The woman isn’t young, but she’s not that old. There hasn’t been a witch in the village for a long time.”
“How would you know that?” the swordsman demanded. “What would a foundling like you know of the
village’s history?”
“I heard the stories. All the elders tell stories.”
“Of witches?”
Carin nodded. “Witches, warlocks, sorcerers—the dark ones who were destroyed. The village priest said that decent people shouldn’t talk about such blackhearts, or listen to stories about those days. But that didn’t stop the elders from spinning tales. In one story they swore was true, a witch hexed every home in the village. The people went to her hut at noon, when they could be sure she’d be asleep—she roamed nights, cutting the livers out of dogs and fouling the water-wells with their carcasses. At midday the people burned her hut, with her in it.” Carin shrugged. “The elders said that was the last witch ever seen in the village. It all happened a long time ago.”
“But tell me of the current wisewoman,” the swordsman said, raising one eyebrow. “Had no suspicion fallen on her?”
“Suspicion?” Carin started to shake her head, then hesitated. It couldn’t be denied that the villagers were a wary lot—mistrustful of outsiders. Some of them had criticized the wheelwright for keeping a servant girl who came from nowhere and didn’t seem quite right in the head …
“She’s touched, that one,” people would mutter, pointing as Carin passed by.
“You can see it in her eyes,” their neighbors agreed. “Ain’t no child of Granger ever been born with green eyes. And she’s a sneaky little thing, slipping off to see that witchy old woman every chance she gets.”
Witchy. Carin had thought they were maligning the wisewoman for her eccentricities: her colorful shawls, her fondness for her hens, her general disdain for the company of others. Could they actually think that Meg practiced witchcraft? What utter and dangerous nonsense! But the woman—Megella, to name her in full—had once mentioned that she, like Carin, wasn’t village-born. In Granger, that alone could cast her under suspicion.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 4
