The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “For the sprite’s sake then,” she told herself with a little less shame. “It’s as good an excuse as any, if I need a reason not to murder a warlock tonight.”

  Carin stood, but then hesitated anew as another dilemma presented itself. Should she go to bed, as she very much wanted to, and leave Verek as he had fallen? Or should she try to help him?

  With her head tilted to one side, as if to force her contradictory sentiments to settle one way or the other, Carin walked to the small cabinet in the bookshelves where the wizard kept his liquor. The tart dhera that tasted of currants would warm a body, as she knew firsthand, from tongue to toes. From the cabinet she took a flagon of the glowing red liquid, but no goblet. If the warlock wanted the liquor, he could drink from the bottle.

  Carin gathered the blanket from Verek’s bench and threw it over her shoulder. With the bottle in one hand and a candle in the other, she retraced her steps through the library and down the stairs. She descended quickly, unwilling to linger with her thoughts.

  At the foot of the stairs she stepped over the crystal trinket, then approached the wizard’s inert form. Verek’s right hand now lay over his heart, where Carin’s head had rested. Otherwise, he was as she’d left him.

  Carin set the flagon of dhera on the bench of the fish, where the wizard must see it when he woke. She spread the blanket over him and tucked it close around his body. Verek’s wool vest, retrieved from the floor and folded, made a serviceable pillow. Carin lifted his head to slip the vest under it, and her fingers buried up in his hair. It was satin smooth and, oh, so cold. To the touch he was a cadaver.

  But she’d barely lowered Verek’s head to the pillow when he began to shiver lightly, with a motion as slight as the trembling of an aspen’s leaves on a still day. Her ministrations were bringing him around—

  —And she had no wish to be there when the sorcerer regained his senses. The morning would be soon enough to speak to him of promises to be kept and an odd woodsprite to be freed.

  Carin grabbed her candle. She didn’t need its light in the cave’s ruddy glow, but the way to her bedroom would not be so preternaturally lit. She took a step toward the library stairs. Then she paused and studied the wall opposite, behind the bench of the carved key.

  Nothing in the wall indicated a doorway. But four times Carin had passed through a concealed portal in that expanse of stone—thrice with Verek’s permission, and once in a dangerous turn of spying. The secret doorway led far more directly to her bedroom. If she could go that way, it would save another stiff climb to the library and get her to her bed that much sooner.

  Carin glanced back at the wizard. His shivering had grown more pronounced; he would rouse soon. She looked toward the library stairs, and almost elected to make her way up that familiar ascent rather than risk detection by the awakening Verek.

  But then, like a rift forming silently in a canyon wall, a portion of the stone face swung inward, opening to a lightless stairwell. Carin stared, and didn’t try to suppress the shudder of mingled fear and awe that traveled her length. Whatever it was that haunted this cave had evidently chosen to grant her unspoken wish, perhaps reading her thoughts in her quick glances around the room. If that were so, then the presence must be watching her right now.

  “It”—Carin did not dare say its name, even to herself—must follow her every move in the cave. It would have seen her throw a blanket over its servant Verek. Could it know that she had contemplated murdering the wizard, but she’d lost her nerve for fear of what that unfathomable force might do to her?

  Unwilling to disturb the silence, Carin only nodded her obeisance to the invisible presence. Keeping her eyes lowered, she walked to the portal. The moment she passed through into the stairwell, the door swung shut behind her. The gap sealed itself as completely as if it had never been.

  Exhaustion weighed on Carin by the time she climbed the last of three flights and gained the upper corridor that would take her to her bedroom door. She slipped along the chilly, unlit hallway, holding her candle barely an inch from the wall. Her free hand trailed over the stonework, feeling for any break that might reveal the entrance to Verek’s private rooms. But his wizardry of last evening held firm: the bespelled doorway remained as hidden to Carin’s touch as to her sight. She wouldn’t be fetching the sprite from its prison-tree in Verek’s sitting room as long as the sorcerer’s concealing magic prevailed against her.

  Staggering the last of the way, Carin reached her own door and pushed through into shadows. She stripped and crawled into bed, and cradled her knife-hand close to her body. Despite the severe wrenching Verek had given it when he disarmed her, Carin was vaguely aware, as she drifted off, that her wrist barely hurt now.

  The knocking came from the underside of a black lagoon. It sounded both muffled and remote, like a diver with a mossy hammer tapping the hull of a ship below the waterline. The tapping, repeated again and again, brought Carin swimming up from deep sleep.

  And when she roused enough to know the sound for knuckles rapping at her door, she also knew whose hand made the fist. On those rare occasions when the housekeeper bothered to knock, the good-natured Myra never waited for an answer, but simply let herself in. Only the master of this house condescended to give Carin some privacy.

  “Just a minute,” she called, thick-tongued. She fumbled back the bedcovers and reached for her clothes, leggings first. The light outside her window was the colorless paling of the sky before cockcrow. She’d not been permitted much sleep.

  The fist rapped at her door.

  “Wait! I’m coming,” she snapped, louder, and hurried to pull her oldest, shabbiest shirt over her head. She drew her long auburn hair from under the neckline as she walked barefooted to the mortised timbers that closed off her bedroom from the corridor. Her hand on the latch, Carin sucked in a breath and held it as she opened the door to the warlock she knew was standing there.

  The apparition who faced her across the threshold was hardly recognizable, however, as the wizard Verek. His hair hung around his face like lank seaweed beached by a storm. His skin was pallid. Bouts of shivering shook his lean frame as though a fitful wind assailed him. He clasped around his shoulders the blanket Carin had spread over him in the cave. A faint scent of dhera intimated that he’d also accepted her gift of his liquor.

  Verek’s eyes, which could burn like white-hot iron when he worked wizardry or lost his temper, were subdued. His gaze expressed only a weary surprise as he studied her from the doorway.

  Carin let out her breath but said nothing. Just because she hadn’t killed him didn’t mean she was happy to see him.

  Verek eyed her for a moment more, as silent as she was. Then, braced against the doorpost to keep on his feet, he addressed her in a voice that had more life in it than the rest of him appeared to possess.

  “So—it goes easier with you than I had foreseen, and worse with me than I might have imagined. It seems you do not suffer so deeply the wasting cold of wysards’ waters.

  “Tell me, then,” he growled. “As you have endured the trials of this night with body whole and mind sound, why didn’t you take the opportunity that was laid before you to do me violence? Shall I dare to hope you have at last divined that I am not the enemy?”

  Chapter 1

  Ghostly Reflections

  Carin knifed the wizard in the neck.

  She riddled the stableboy with arrows and gloated as Lanse’s corpse tumbled off his horse into a pile of wind-drifted leaves. His blood tinged them more brightly than autumn had colored the forest when this miserable journey began.

  What are you going to do to me now? she silently demanded of her captors. What could be worse than this mad errand you’ve dragged me on?

  As if in answer to Carin’s unspoken query, the wizard Verek turned in his saddle and glared at her. “I tell you for the last time: ride up and join our company.” His voice was as brittle as the leaves under her mare’s hooves. “To lag behind with your sullen face hiding your bl
ack thoughts is a fool’s pastime. These woods harbor cutthroats.”

  Like me, you mean? If only, she thought, and suppressed a mirthless smile.

  “Leave off with daydreaming,” Verek ordered, “and put your eyes and ears to use. These woods have ears and the scheming eyes of scoundrels who may watch us even now.”

  To have died so many times in Carin’s imagination, Lord Verek and his groom remained irksomely healthy and in charge of her. Carin heaved a sigh through clenched teeth. She tapped her heels, urging Emrys to a brisker walk that brought them quickly up to the leader of this small expedition.

  But before the mare was well settled behind Verek’s mount, an arrow—this one real—thudded into a birch tree so close to Lanse that the boy could have touched the shaft with his fingertips.

  Verek jerked his bow up and sailed an arrow toward the unseen attacker. Lanse’s shot followed hard on his master’s. The wizard’s cry of “Cover!” was wasted breath. The three riders were off their horses, diving for the underbrush, even as the forest returned the echo. Carin ducked behind a tree near enough to her captors that she could watch where they watched and, straining her eyes, probe past them into the gloom at their backs.

  All was peaceful. The sudden disturbance had interrupted the quiet of the forest as might the brief, bounding flight of a deer. Now the hush of early winter descended again. A chill breeze brought to Carin’s ears no hint of booted feet trampling dead leaves. Nothing flitted past bare branches to betray a concealed archer or to suggest any renewed attack upon the party led by Lord Verek of Ruain.

  While their riders waited motionless, the horses of Verek’s company nosed aside fallen leaves, searching for tufts of grass that the lateness of the season hadn’t rendered unpalatable. The almost-silent skirmish and the quick dismounts had not alarmed the beasts. Verek’s dark-gray hunter, called Brogar; Carin’s trim little mare, Emrys; Lanse’s nameless gelding, and the packhorse that carried the bulk of their supplies browsed placidly, as though glad for this chance to rest.

  Silent minutes later, Verek nodded to his groom. Both stepped from behind their trees. Lanse caught the horses’ trailing reins and tied them beside the forest track they traveled. Then he stood with his bow bent, an arrow on the string to answer any thief who might have designs on the animals.

  Verek worked his way, soundless as a thought, in the direction of his bowshot. Carin glided after him like a slim shadow, preferring the wizard’s company to the society of his servant or the hidden dangers of this remote but inhabited forest.

  And anyway, she reflected, it isn’t as though I have any say in who I stick with. The ensorcelled band of iron that Verek had fastened around her right ankle ensured she wouldn’t stray far from him.

  Before they’d left his lands in Ruain, Carin had put his wizardry to the test and discovered why Verek had full confidence in the iron’s ability to keep her from escaping. The farther she traveled from her captor, the tighter the band drew about her ankle. It snugged up appreciably when she ranged out of his sight to change her clothes or relieve herself. Beyond those limits, she began to know the extremity of pain that such an instrument could inflict. Should Carin stray too far, the iron would tighten its grip until it severed her foot from her leg.

  The wizard couldn’t make much protest, therefore, against her following him now. Indeed, Verek seemed too intent on his quarry to even notice her.

  Watching the black-garbed warlock slip like a night-bat from tree to tree, Carin was glad not to be the one he hunted. Verek had ferreted her from hiding, espied her through walls—even read her mind, she suspected—often enough to prove that he perceived things mortals couldn’t. His magian senses were acute, and not easily eluded. If the bowman who had shot at Lanse lacked the good sense to take himself far from this place, then Verek would find him.

  The wizard dropped to a crouch.

  Carin froze.

  In a moment, Verek straightened and strode boldly between two leafless alders, making no further effort at concealment.

  As she hurried to join him, Carin nearly tripped over the reason for his lack of caution. A body already on its way to becoming a skeleton lay in the leaves. Verek’s arrow protruded from the thin chest. The wretch’s clothes were threadbare, his feet wrapped in rags. So emaciated was the corpse, Carin marveled that the man had had strength enough to draw the bow that sent an arrow Lanse’s way. It was clearly an act of desperation. A half-frozen derelict on foot attacking a mounted party of three—two of them well armed—could hardly have hoped to succeed.

  Carin looked away as Verek put his foot on the bony chest and yanked out his bloodied arrow. She returned her gaze to find the wizard bent over the body, taking the bow from the dead man’s hand.

  “Fool!” Verek spat the word with such vehemence that Carin slid him a look to be sure he indicted the slain bowman and not herself. Very often, the wizard called her a “young fool.” But he generally did it with a sort of half-tolerance, and not in the tone he was using on the corpse at his feet.

  “Better for all, had this half-wit laid aside his weapon and made petition as a beggar,” Verek grumbled, partly to Carin and partly to the forest around them. “His folly has cost us time, and himself his life. Had he stood at the wayside to beg a meal, pity would have moved me to give it to him. Prudence now demands that I take the wretch’s only treasure, this well-made bow, to keep it from the hands of those who might use it more tellingly than he did.” Verek glanced at Carin, then away. “Drisha take this fool’s soul and leave the body to the wolves. We’ve no time to dig a grave.”

  He shouldered the dead man’s bow. “Come,” he ordered. “Thanks to this vagabond’s error, we’ll have a harder ride than we once faced to reach Deroucey by nightfall.”

  Returning to the horses and their guardian, the wizard slipped the confiscated weapon into the case on the packhorse’s back that held Carin’s own indigo-blue bow. That beauty was “hers” only in the sense that she’d loved the weapon from the moment she found it leaning against the door of the bedroom where she’d slept during her month under Verek’s roof.

  She’d been allowed to use the bow for only one afternoon, while the wizard tutored her in shooting. That afternoon’s archery lesson remained among the more astonishing of all the events Carin had lived through in Verek’s labyrinthian manor house. Why the wizard had indulged her, if only briefly, in her desire to master the bow had never been made clear.

  Why he would bring “her” weapon along on this crackbrained expedition was even less apparent. Both he and Lanse used their own bows with surpassing skill—the boy’s ability proof that his master had trained him well. Besides their bows kept at the ready, both wore dirks at their sides. And Verek carried a longsword in a saddle scabbard.

  Even if he were willing to let Carin go armed—which he was not—the wizard didn’t need her inexpert bowmanship to bring another measure of protection to their company. Quite apart from the weaponry he carried was the formidable arsenal of magic that Verek commanded.

  Fear whispered to Carin—a vestige of recent terrors—as scenes flitted across her memory: the wizard conjuring fire … summoning a knife to his hand with a snap of his fingers … draping spells over the woodlands of Ruain to make an impassable curtain of enchantment … or—most dreadful of all—trafficking with bodiless spirits.

  And if cold iron or wizard’s cantrips should fail to protect this expedition, they might fall back on Verek’s uncanny mastery of the healing arts. By such craft alone he could keep his companions safe from the ordinary hurts to which mortal flesh was subject. Carin’s gashes and bruises had healed within hours when the wizard applied his herbal remedies. If the vagabond’s arrow had found its mark in Lanse’s back, the wizard’s skill as a healer would have mended the boy within a day, she didn’t doubt.

  Weaving with Carin’s thoughts were the words of Verek’s housekeeper, the talkative Myra: “So long as the wound doesn’t reach the vitals, dearie, the master’s healing du
sts will stitch it up in no time. My good master can stir up a potion to cure ’most any ailment.”

  Myra’s “good master”—the woman’s estimation of him, not Carin’s—mounted his horse and led their party off down the forest track at a brisker pace than before. As they chased the winter sun that dropped low in the sky, the breeze out of the north freshened. Carin reached with a gloved hand to pull up her hood and tuck it around her face. Then she retreated again into her ruminations, much as she withdrew into the folds of the cloak that Myra had sewn for her from napped woolen in a green “to match your eyes,” as the woman had said.

  If I’ve got to go adventuring when the winds and snows of winter lie ahead, Carin mused, at least I’m not going afoot and threadbare.

  In the days before this journey began, Verek’s small household had been frantic with the preparations for it. The wizard’s own wardrobe and trappings had needed few additions to have him ready for travel. But Carin, and to a lesser extent the stableboy Lanse, had required much new clothing and gear. Besides the cloak Myra had made for her, Carin had received three pairs of felt-lined wool breeches, knitted stockings and linen smallclothes enough to don fresh every day for a week, three linen shirts, overgarments of soft, warm wool, a quilted underjacket, and a coat with twenty pewter buttons down the front. Her mid-calf boots, crafted of soft-tanned horsehide, were made-to-measure to cover her small feet as comfortably as their own skin.

  No doubt, I’ll be the best-dressed manservant to accompany a noble traveler into Deroucey tonight, Carin congratulated herself wryly. Her roving thoughts replayed the fit that Myra had pitched when Lord Verek ordered the woman to transform his maidservant into a footboy.

  “Cut the girl’s hair!” Myra had exclaimed. “Nay, my lord, I cannot! I pray you, do not ask it of me. Bob her lovely hair? That great ruddy mane? To comb and dress it gives me much joy. Would you cause me sorrow in equal measure, with this hateful act you bid me do?”