Her every nerve prickled, a kind of half-flinching, half-shuddering sensation, as Carin thought of Verek carrying her unconscious body in his arms. If she could prevent it, that sorcerer would not touch her again.
Awkwardly, taking care not to graze the bruise, Carin pulled her hair up, tied it with the twine, and coiled it atop her head. Then she wobbled through the folding doors into the bathing room. With difficulty she stripped off her vomit-soured shirt and leggings. She’d been put to bed wearing every stain of sickness, mold, and rust that she had collected out in the woods and down in the dungeon.
As she sank into the waters of the hot-spring pool and her muscles limbered, Carin scrubbed off the touch of Verek’s hands. The warmth was bliss, but she did not linger. Hunger urged haste.
She wrapped up in a towel and stepped into the bedchamber. As her bare foot crossed the threshold, the room’s outer latch lifted. Someone was coming in from the landing off the stairs.
Not the warlock! Carin silently shrieked. Sweet mercy, keep that blackheart away from me! She stood rooted to the spot, unable to retreat.
The door opened, and in bustled Myra. Seeing Carin afoot and dripping, the housekeeper threw up her hands in surprise and left the door standing open behind her.
“Bless me—you’re up and about so soon! Didn’t I say the master’s medicines would work their good with speed to make you dizzy? I’ve only come up to see if you’re awake and hungry for a bit of veal, and here I find you’ve quit your bed and had your bath and washed the ocher from your face.”
Then Myra was rushing to her side, exclaiming, “Why, you’re gray as ash! Sit down, child, before you fall and hurt your head again.” With warm hands, Myra guided her to the stool at the dressing table.
The woman studied Carin’s face. “You’ve gotten yourself out of bed too soon—that’s what the matter is. Let’s get you back between the sheets. The master will have my head if I let you crack your noggin again.”
Carin kept her seat, resisting the housekeeper’s gentle efforts to tug her off the stool. The quick surge of her terror had given her strength; her blood was racing, and its heat seemed to kindle her voice. She spoke in a rush:
“Myra, I don’t want to go back to bed. I’m much better, not a bit dizzy, just really hungry. But you scared the daylights out of me when you came in just now. I thought you were Verek—and I’d rather see a death’s-head at my door than see him again.”
Ignoring the look on Myra’s face, Carin let the words spill on out. Her voice grew fierce as she released her pent-up anger.
“How I hate that man! No! He’s not a man. He’s something that shouldn’t exist. I’ve seen him shoot arrows blazing with hellfire. I know he’s cast an evil spell over the woods. At a sign from that warlock”—she made the flicking motion of thumb and fingers that she had seen Verek use—“the evil gets out of his way. I can’t see it but I’ve felt it all around me, and I’ve watched him use it. I’ve seen him snap his fingers”—again she imitated the sorcerer—“to set fire to a torch or make a kitchen knife fly through the air.”
Her heart was pounding. “I don’t want to be here!” she cried. “I never meant to come here. I’m so sorry I climbed that hill and walked into those woods. This is a horrible place.”
As Carin gulped a breath, Myra started to speak. But Carin cut her off.
“You see these?” She pointed to the bruises on her bare arms. They clearly showed where Verek had grabbed her and slammed her to the ground. “Your ‘good master’ gave me those. He never misses a chance to hurt me. I thought he was going to run his sword through me the first time he ever laid eyes on me, but then I realized it wouldn’t hurt me enough. It would be over too quick to satisfy him.
“When your ‘good master’ does kill me, he’ll want me to suffer. Maybe he’ll snap his fingers and burn me alive. Or he’ll crush the life out of me an inch at a time. Or he’ll throw me back in the dungeon and leave me to starve in the cold and the dark.”
Carin shivered. All the warmth seemed to leave her. She remembered an abyss so mortally cold it would make the teeth of the dead chatter in their skulls.
Myra was looking at her with an aggrieved expression. It only made her angrier.
“You don’t know!” Carin snapped. “You’re under the spell of that fiend. All that rot you were telling me about Verek being ‘sorry,’ about him regretting his cruelty to me—I don’t believe a word of it. Myra, he’s evil! Don’t you know what the priests all say about blackhearts like him? Can’t you see it in his eyes, like a … a dark light?”
That last was not, perhaps, an altogether sensible way of putting it, but Carin could think of no better description for the shadowed glimmer that haunted Verek’s gaze.
She paused, finally, to let the housekeeper speak. But for once, she’d left Myra wordless. The woman only stared at her in consternation.
At a noise from the landing, they both turned to seek the source.
Standing on the threshold of the open bedroom door was Verek. From the look on his face—a hard rain at midnight could not have been darker—it was clear what he’d overheard.
Myra gasped. The blood rushed to Carin’s face. Fresh from her bath, she wore her hair atop her head like a frayed coil of rope, but under her towel not a stitch nor a thread.
Carin clutched the towel tightly as she spun off the stool and tumbled into the bathing room. “Beggar it all!” she swore through gritted teeth as she slammed the shutter-doors behind her. Whatever that warlock might have to say for himself, he would have to wait while Carin threw on her clothes. She yanked the twine from her hair and combed her fingers through the snarls, wincing as her fingertip jabbed the bruise on the side of her head.
But when she had pulled herself together enough to return to the bedroom, Carin found only Myra. Verek had gone.
The housekeeper sat on the bed, dabbing her face with her handkerchief. When Myra looked up, the hurt in the woman’s eyes was evident.
“Oh, how it pains me to hear you speak so harshly!” she cried. “I wouldn’t have you think this an evil household. I’ve read the holy Drishanna from beginning to end, and I try my best to follow its teachings. Lanse, and old Jerold too, were brought up with Drisha’s words in their ears.
“And the master—” Myra said, with emphasis. “Why, he knows the book better than all the rest of us together. He’s studied it since childhood and knows its whole history.
“Great, too, is the master’s knowledge of healing herbs. Comfrey, woundwort, feverfew, hyweldda, cyhnaith—he knows which to pick when the moon is new, and which reach their potency on Midsummer’s Eve. He can make of herb and flower, salt and sulfur all manner of potions that restore a body to health.”
Myra flicked her kerchief at Carin and rushed on. “Think, child! How many times has he healed your hurts? Didn’t he mend your knee? And when your belly griped as he brought you home safe from the wasteland dogs, didn’t he soothe you with a glenondew mint? Aye, the master told me of your foolishness: first to drink of tainted water, and then to take the powdered cyhnaith on your tongue as if you wished to burn the flesh from your mouth.”
The woman tsked, then added, “And now, this very day, didn’t he fix the potion that eases the hurt in your poor bruised noddle? Why, ’tis hard for these old eyes to see the knot—it shrinks betimes, so potent are the master’s remedies. Oh my, child! With so much proof before you of the master’s goodness, how can you call him wicked?”
“Like I said—” Carin growled.
But Myra put up her hand, staving off interruption.
“’Tis true,” the woman rolled on, though in a whisper now, as if sharing a secret, “that some who have knowledge such as my lord possesses use it for purposes base and ill. They cast spells to do injury to others. They use magic to put gold in their coffers. Their enchantments bring evil and pestilence into the world. But hear me, child, when I say to you that my lord is no evil magician. He uses his powers for good. He’s a wise and learned man, and a h
ealer, and to me a kind and generous master.”
But what about the cursed land that’s just outside the manor’s walls? Carin thought. If Verek uses his powers for good only, and never for “purposes base and ill,” then how did he lay waste to a sizable swath of the woodland? How could he have done such damage unless he commands the powers of evil?
And was it his unrestrained malevolence that Carin felt each time she neared the edge of his stricken woodland, where his spellwork writhed in curtains she could not see?
But now that Myra was finally giving Carin a chance to respond, she decided to repeat no more of her thoughts. A falling-out with the housekeeper would gain her nothing. Carin’s quarrel was with another.
“I’m sorry, Myra,” she said. “You’ve been kind to me, and I shouldn’t have blown up at you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She shut the bathing-room doors behind her, then walked over to sit on the bed beside the housekeeper. “I don’t like closed-in places, is all. When I was traveling on the plains south of here, I almost never had a roof over my head, day or night. I got used to the wide-open spaces. When Verek put me in the dungeon … uh, the cellar … I thought I was going to die. That place … unh. I get the jitters just thinking about it.”
“There, there, dearie.” Myra patted Carin’s arm. “You’ve had a bad time of it, that you have. Poor lamb! To be so young and traveling the countryside all alone, fending for yourself with no one to look out for you. But that’s all past, child. You’ll soon be settled and back at the books in the master’s great library. Won’t that be a fine way to spend the long, cold winter?
“—But bless me!” Myra exclaimed then. She hoisted herself to her feet. “While I chatter away, your supper grows cold in the kitchen. You stay right here in your lovely little room—of all the bedchambers in the master’s house, I’ve always thought this the prettiest—and you rest your bruised noggin. I’ll bring a tray up straightaway …”
Myra’s words faded as she rushed from the room and down the stairs.
With the housekeeper’s departure, Carin reseated herself at the mirror. The face that looked back no longer had an ugly stain down one side. The yellowing from the poultice had washed off in her bath.
Carin inspected her reflection more closely, and her eyes widened as they studied the bruise at her hairline. What had been a deep purple-black an hour before was much faded. The knot in the bruise’s center had shrunk to no more than a slight swelling.
“Drisha,” she swore under her breath. “Is that even possible?”
She shook her head at her reflection. “Bruises don’t fade that fast.” As a point of reference, Carin had the marks on her arms. They were still livid. Verek had not poulticed them.
The warlock’s remedies worked with speed “to make a body dizzy,” so Myra said. Carin had the proof: her knee, healing overnight; and now the warlock’s medicines flattening the lump on her head and lightening the bruise almost as she watched.
Did he use only a knowledge of herbal remedies to work his cures? Carin wondered. Or did he weave magic into his mixtures to achieve such uncanny results?
If Verek relied on sorcery to give his medicines their powers, should she refuse the remedies that came from his hands? Could the magic that healed her also taint her with evil? “They are undone, who meddle with witchery,” warned the priests of Drisha.
Footsteps sounded on the landing. Myra entered, bearing a tray loaded with food enough for a family. There was a platter of veal, as the housekeeper had promised, and also a baked wood pigeon, boiled salad, herbed soup, mashed peas, and for dessert a honey and hazelnut crumble.
“Oh!” was all Carin could say before digging in. Myra stood silent for a moment, watching her shovel in the feast two-handed, then shut the door and left her to enjoy it all in solitude.
Eating her way through every course took Carin awhile. By the time she’d picked the last bits of flesh from the pigeon’s bones and licked the dessert bowl clean, twilight was invading the room.
She grabbed the candlestick off the dressing table and cradled it close. If Myra forgot to come back up to light the candle for her, she’d be left sitting in the dark. And after enduring that black pit of a dungeon, Carin never wanted to be in darkness again.
Of course, she could go in search of a flame. But roaming through the house, she might bump into the warlock.
A shudder ran through her. Which would it be? Sit in her benighted bedroom, fighting off a rising panic, or go to the kitchen for a light and risk a meeting with a sorcerer?
Wait—she had another option.
Flinging herself off the stool with such force that she knocked it over, Carin dove for the bathing room. She yanked open the shutter-doors.
Light streamed into the bedchamber. The glow from the bathing room’s stone walls filled every dark corner. The effect was much like moonlight on a clear winter’s night when snow blanketed the ground.
The moon—had it risen? Carin crossed to the bedroom’s one window and pushed back the curtains. The luminous quality of the world outside said the moon was up, though it hadn’t yet come into view over the cliff behind the house. But when it did, its light would shine in to mingle with the glow from the bathing room. She wouldn’t have to choose between two horrors—Verek or darkness—after all.
Someone tapped at her bedroom door.
Carin whirled, startled. Myra seldom knocked. When she did, she never waited for an answer but simply walked in, blithely unconcerned about any need Carin might have for privacy. Whoever was at the door, it almost certainly was not the housekeeper.
“Yes?” she croaked, the word passing her lips before she knew she’d said it.
Both hands flew to her mouth as if to catch the sound before it could reach the other side of the door. Keep quiet! a frantic voice screamed inside Carin’s head. Wish the fiend away!
But it was too late. The door opened, and a demon stepped into the room.
Chapter 9
The Note
The figure in the doorway seemed half trapped by the darkness of the corridor behind it, its features sunken, hollow, as indistinct as if charcoaled with heavy, slashing strokes. The eyes were lost in pits of deepest black, but still Carin felt the force of the gaze. It drove her back against the window. It made her draw in her breath: one short, quick gasp followed by another so sharp that her throat constricted. And then it gripped her so tightly that she could not breathe again—
—Not until the figure broke its stillness. Stiffly, it leaned to place a lamp upon the table by the door. And as the light fell upon it from this new angle, the face emerged from the gloom to become recognizably Verek’s.
Shadows! Carin told herself fiercely, gulping for her next lungful of air as if the warlock’s movements had triggered a reflex. You’re jumping at shadows. The lamp Verek had held had illuminated his face from directly under his chin, rendering his features grotesque. It was a trick of the light such as children played on Mydrismas Eve to frighten each other with spooky faces.
Carin leaned against the window and kept quiet. With her breath still convulsing her throat, she couldn’t trust herself to speak without a quaver—and any tremble in her voice would betray a fear she didn’t want him to see.
Verek addressed her in cool, clipped tones. “Be easy. I have not devised new torments for you. I know you loathe the sight of me, so I shall keep this visit short.”
He laid a thick volume down, next to the lamp. “This is a book of woods’ lore.” He rested his finger on it. “I charge you to study it well, for your life may depend on a mastery of its contents. From it you will learn the names of plants that grow wild in the north. You will learn which may be eaten and which are deadly. You’ll learn the habits of the beasts that dwell in the far north, how to hunt them and how to escape them. You will learn of glaciers and ice caves, and of snowdrifts deep enough to cover this house. You will study the book until you know it better than you know your own mind.
“W
hen spring comes,” he went on, “I will question you to discover the depth and breadth of your knowledge. If I am satisfied that you’ve mastered every particular of each page, I will allow you to continue your journey northward—if that remains your wish. I think it likely, however, that when you have acquired a true understanding of the rigors of that place, you will see that you have come as far north as you can. Venture beyond my borders, and you will not survive.”
Verek paused. He toyed with the one object he still held. It was another book.
In the combined light of the lamp, the glow from the bathing room, and the moonlight that now streamed through the window at her back, Carin easily recognized the red-and-gold volume. It was the Looking-Glass book that Myra called a puzzle. She gasped.
The warlock looked at her sharply. “So you have not forgotten the book that defeats me.” He hesitated, as if reconsidering the wisdom of what he was about to do. Then, with obvious reluctance, Verek laid the puzzle-book on the table atop the volume of woods’ lore.
“I cannot read it.” The tone of resignation in his voice made Carin think of a man who had lost his sight and no longer entertained the barest hope of regaining it. “I had thought to make you read it to me. But in your obstinacy you would give a false account of it to deceive me and frustrate my desire to know its meaning. Thus I am thwarted. I can see no course but to entrust the book to you, in hopes of hearing a true report of it when your wounds are enough healed that you can speak civilly to me.”
Carin passed a hand over her eyes. They were open; this wasn’t another dream. At best, she’d hoped Verek would mislay the puzzle-book—maybe leave it in the library in a moment of forgetfulness to let her spend a few stolen minutes with it. Failing that, she had planned to search the house when the lord of the manor was away on his rounds. But here he stood, handing her the most exotic book in his collection so she could read it at her leisure.
As if he knew Carin’s thoughts—did she only imagine he had that ability? Or did he use sorcery to pry inside her mind?—Verek quickly corrected her on the matter of how she was to use her time.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 11
