“Do not trouble yourself a moment longer, good man,” he told their host—with more warmth than Carin generally heard in her captor’s clipped voice. “I’ll ask nothing more of you this evening. Such hospitality as you are able to extend on Drisha’s night is both welcomed and admired, and a credit to your house. I had hoped to reach your fair town some days ago … a lame horse is to blame for the delay that’s imposed myself and my servants on your kindness and torn you from the comforts of hearth and family on this night of nights. Now—I pray you—return to those things that are the proper business of the devout in this season of joy.”
The effect of Verek’s lie was, Carin suspected, exactly what the wizard had anticipated. Their host puffed up, a proud bullfrog, visibly pleased with himself for treating his troublesome guests so indulgently, and delighted with Verek’s intimation that fault lay entirely with the traveling nobleman and his party.
There goes a man unlikely to spread tales tomorrow, Carin thought. She watched the bullfrog happily bow his way out of the room, pausing to accept a coin from Verek just before he shut the door. Should any man of Deroucey speak ill of the nobleman for breaking with tradition on Drisha’s night, their host might be counted on to give out Verek’s fiction about a lame horse, to silence rumor, innuendo, and unwelcome questions.
When the innkeeper had gone, Carin stepped to the table and raised her eyes to the wizard’s. What she saw in them wasn’t satisfaction for the way he’d handled the bullfrog. For an instant—until he realized that Carin was studying him—Verek’s dark eyes were clouded.
With pain? Guilt? Regret? From what Carin knew and suspected of the wizard, any one or all three would answer. But on a night devoted to family, this man who had no one—motherless since childhood, with his grandsire, father, wife, and child all dust in the tomb—must feel pain above all else.
Verek’s eyes regained their guarded look. His face settled into the unreadable expression it usually wore. But when he spoke, his words confirmed Carin’s notion that he thought of the past—of Mydrismas Eves spent with a family long lost to him.
“A poor night it is to be abroad, as our host has said,” he addressed her quietly. “Had Myra won the custody of you, that woman would have spread before you such a feast tonight as would founder an ox. Tell me, for I know little of the customs of the southern country: How did you keep Drisha’s night in the wheelwright’s household?”
Carin shook her head. “Sir, I was not privileged to celebrate the festival with the wright’s family,” she said, coolly formal. From a filled pitcher on the table she poured water into a basin. “I was only a servant in that house,” she reminded Verek as she washed her hands. “I didn’t have anywhere to go on Drisha’s night—no one to be with. Why should someone like me … who’s alone and without a family … care about the customs of Mydrismas?”
Verek’s silence said her barb bit. Neither of them spoke again as Carin knifed the slabs of meat and cheese the innkeeper had set out. Vigorously, angrily, she hacked off chunks to pile on a slice of stale bread. But as she pushed the unappetizing meal across the table toward the wizard, she felt a little ashamed of herself.
I should respect the memory of the dead, Carin thought, especially since they died so horribly. Although Verek’s wife and child had drowned years ago, his pool of magic had retained images of their bodies, like ghostly reflections. Carin’s glimpse of those images had stayed with her: the woman—Verek’s young wife—with the skirts of her gown and the tendrils of her hair floating in the water; and the boy, their five-year-old son, his body grotesquely bloated.
Other things that Carin had seen during her month under Verek’s roof came back to her. Vividly she remembered discovering the family tomb in an overgrown section of the garden behind the house. Buried in that tomb, near his wife Alesia and his son Aidan, were Verek’s father, Hugh, and his grandfather, Lord Legary.
Carin tried to shake off the memories by renewing her attack on the cold beef and greasy mutton. If that man still had his family for Mydrismas, she thought as she sliced portions for herself, he wouldn’t be dragging me along on this mad trip.
The wizard who occupied Carin’s thoughts ignored the food she’d served him. Instead, Verek walked to the door behind her, pushed it open, and stepped through into the second of the two rooms that he’d taken for their party. Carin cast a glance over her shoulder, through the open doorway—and gasped, her heart sinking.
The second room was not the twin of the first. The front room was small, simple, furnished plainly with a wooden table, two backless benches, and two barely adequate cots on either side of its fireplace. But the adjoining chamber made “The Grand” live up to the inn’s name.
That room was twice the size of the antechamber. Tapestries dressed its stone walls, and thick carpets half covered the floor of oiled oak. Near the room’s large fireplace stood a cushioned bench with a curved back. Cloths of linen and lace draped a table that was elegantly appointed with silver candlesticks and place settings. Across from the fire a tall, canopied bed had curtains of wool to draw round the sleeper, for keeping out drafts and guarding privacy. Clearly, that room was meant for gentry; its antechamber was servants’ quarters.
If the second room had been no finer than the first, Carin might reasonably have hoped Verek would share the front chamber with Lanse and put her in the back room, out of his way. But given a choice between luxury and austerity, wouldn’t the Lord of Ruain take the quarters to which he was entitled?—leaving Carin to spend a restless night on a cot three steps from Lanse’s.
I’ll sleep with a knife in each hand, she vowed.
Verek spared hardly a look for the chamber’s furnishings. He walked to the room’s one window and threw open its shutters. In the glow from the fireplace, nothing appeared against the night sky beyond but a cluster of bare branches. They congregated so near the back of the inn, a person could clamber onto them through the unglazed opening. To do so, however, must put the climber far above the ground. Carin’s legs still felt the strain of hauling packs up the long, steep steps that led from street level to these upper-story rooms.
The wind blowing through the opening was icy. Whatever curiosity had led Verek to investigate the window seemed quickly satisfied. He closed and latched the shutters. As he returned through the bedroom, he paused to throw another log on its fire. Then he rejoined Carin in the front room.
“Take what you wish of this rough fare and eat it in there.” Verek jerked his head to indicate the luxurious chamber. “Take also whatever you’ll need for the night.” He pointed his thumb at the bags and satchels that were piled near the front room’s entrance. “Once that door closes behind you, I do not wish it to open before morning. I wouldn’t have Lanse see that your accommodation for the night is finer than his. I’ll say to him that you are sent to bed without your supper. That should gratify his spite and gain us all some few hours’ peace.”
Carin stared at Verek, too deeply wary of her captor’s motives to accept such generosity at face value. The nobleman would relinquish to his “footboy” the comforts that suited a person of rank, and sleep tonight on a servant’s hard cot? Why would he favor her to such a degree?
Verek sat down to his cold meal. When he looked up from the table to see Carin wavering, balancing her supper on a slab of bread and not sure where to turn, he frowned but he didn’t bark at her. Briefly he studied her face, and when he spoke again it was as though he’d divined her unvoiced questions.
“I’d lose a night’s rest, were I to take the better quarters and leave my two young warriors alone together in this room. Which of you would forfeit such a golden chance to harm the other?”
Carin’s surprise must have registered on her face, for Verek continued: “Well do I know the enmity that’s between you and the boy. And well-deserving would I be of a sleepless night, were I fool enough to throw together in one small room the pair of you, unarbitrated, like combatants off the tournament field. It’s for my own sake, not yours, therefor
e, that I choose a straw mattress above a featherbed. So get within, as I’ve commanded, with your supper and your baggage. Bar the door, and be as absent from my sight as is the sun itself until tomorrow comes.”
This time, Carin didn’t hesitate. Spinning on the ball of her foot so quickly that she nearly scattered her supper on the floor, she rushed it to the linen-clothed table and dumped the mess on a silver trencher. Then she grabbed her packs and lugged them into the bedchamber—a room that had never sheltered a less august personage than herself, she suspected. Finally she poured a mug of the innkeeper’s cheap ale, to wash down a meal that looked to be as bad as anything that Lanse had served up.
With her free hand on the bedroom door, Carin paused and looked again at the wizard. Verek sat tearing at the meat and chewing grimly, as if engaged in battle against a tough opponent. Between bites, he stared into the fire. He was so obviously lost in thought that Carin didn’t dare speak to him.
She stifled a sudden, insane urge to apologize for alluding earlier to the losses that he’d suffered. If she said “Sorry,” Verek would make her explain what she knew and how she had learned about the deaths in his family.
Carin’s empty hand slid from the doorlatch to touch, through her layers of heavy clothing, a pocket of her trousers. Nestled within were three sheets of writing taken from Verek’s library. Two pages of it, she could read. But one remained a puzzle she hadn’t solved. Upon those pages was written the greater part of Lord Verek’s family history—a history as dark and brooding as the eyes that stared into the fire. Carin wouldn’t willingly confess to her captor how much she knew of his private torments, nor how much she had guessed.
Leaving him to his thoughts, she closed and barred the door. With her ale-mug delivered to the table and both hands committed to the unswathing, Carin shed her cloak and every garment underneath, down to her chemise. Only with privacy could she enjoy such freedom. She hadn’t been alone for fourteen days.
Too hungry to care what she ate, Carin swallowed whole that part of her supper which couldn’t be chewed, and sluiced it down with ale. She poured a little water to wash her face and hands. The rest of the room’s ample supply, she set aside for a morning bath.
The bed under its goose-down coverlet was a cloud pinioned to earth. Carin, now stripped of every stitch, slipped between smooth sheets and sank into a mattress that was too soft to be the work of human hands, or so her tired thoughts imagined. She drifted into sleep as if carried there on wings.
* * *
Scratch … scratch … scratch …
It might have been a beetle gnawing wood. It could have been a mouse nosing through dry leaves. But the sound—incessantly repeated until it dragged her out of the clouds—announced itself at last, in Carin’s waking brain, as bony fingers on the shutters, seeking admittance through the room’s latched but unbarred window.
Chapter 2
A Droll-Teller’s Tale
She slipped out of bed and into her cloak. From the fire irons beside the hearth she removed a poker, withdrawing it with such care that the crackle of burning wood masked the ring of metal on metal.
Carin hefted the poker and studied the shutters at which something still persistently scraped. Her gaze went to the door that separated this room from Verek’s. Should she call the wizard to deal with this visitor in the night?
Certainly not, snapped the voice of reason—or was it self-respect? Her inner protest bumped up against Verek’s words of perhaps an hour ago: “Be absent from my sight.” Prudence would dictate that she not go running to the wizard for protection—not without first discovering what threatened from the outside.
Carin glided across the carpeted floor, holding the poker before her like a pike. She brought her face as near the bony scratching as she dared. In a hoarse whisper she demanded: “Who’s there? What are you doing at my window?”
“Carin!” came the reply, in a squeak so muffled by the shutters as to be barely audible. “Words fail me. I am more pleased to hear your voice than I can say!”
The heavier end of the poker slipped from Carin’s grasp and thudded on the windowsill, jolting her out of the shocked conviction that she heard speech from the grave. She grabbed the iron before it could clang to the floor and rouse the sleeping wizard …
Are you asleep, warlock? Or are you still staring into the fire? With her head cocked to catch the smallest sound, Carin listened for any stirrings from her captor’s direction and thanked Drisha when all remained silent.
She put down the poker and unlatched the shutters. A breath of cold air ghosted into Carin’s face. But mercifully, the stout wind of earlier had let up. She wouldn’t suffer frostbite to be out in the night with a fey creature she had thought dead at Verek’s hands.
“Shh!” Carin hissed as she swung one shutter past bare tree branches. She didn’t give the living spark that flitted over them a chance to shrill another word. “Woodsprite!” she whispered. “I can’t believe it! You’re alive. And you’re here.”
She reached for a limb as thick as her arm and grasped it so tightly her knuckles whitened. “How, sprite?” Carin demanded. “How did you not die? And how did you get here, so far from the little tree where Verek locked you up? You can’t possibly have made it in one jump, all the way from your prison to this huge old thing.”
Sighting down the tree’s bole, Carin understood why Verek’s curiosity about the bedroom window had been promptly satisfied. To reach the ground below would be at risk of breaking bones. The tree’s lowermost branches ended well above the surrounding roofs. And light spilling from several windows at ground level showed the venerable tree to tower above an enclosed courtyard. Even if Carin could clamber down among the lower limbs, and from there drop to the ground without crippling herself, she would still be trapped by stone walls.
Trapped, and shackled too, was the thought that flitted through her mind, bringing with it a vague uncertainty. Why regard this window—or any other—as a potential escape route, when the ensorcelled anklet that Verek forced her to wear must keep Carin close to him? Did the wizard’s concern for this window hint of a weakness in his spellcraft?
Carin had no time to ponder the possibility. Her lost friend, the sprite of the wood—that nameless, flickering spark among the branches—was shrilling at her in its reedy voice, commanding her attention.
“My friend!” the creature piped breathlessly, its whisper like a flute trying to make music without air. “Though I’ve trailed you for a week through wintering woods, I’ve had no chance before tonight to speak up and tell you the means—or, indeed, the fact—of my escape. How closely the mage guards his last captive! I despaired of having a moment alone with you. How is it that he gives us this chance to talk together, free of his presence?”
Carin glanced over her shoulder for reassurance that they were in fact spared the wizard’s company. Then she answered in a whisper that was almost as thin as the sprite’s.
“It’s because of Lanse. I never thought I’d be grateful to that idiot for anything. But Verek shut me in here by myself to make Lanse leave me alone.” She dropped her voice even lower. “We have to be careful, sprite, to not let the wizard know you’re here. Give me a minute to get dressed and I’ll come outside with you.”
Carin threw on almost as many layers of clothes as she’d earlier shed. Then she pushed open both shutters and sat on the windowsill. From there it was a moment’s work to climb into the branches beyond. Cautiously she pushed the shutters almost closed behind her, but not so far that the latch would catch and strand her in the tree.
“Now, sprite,” Carin addressed the spark that fluttered eagerly beside her. “We can talk while the whole town’s indoors getting drunk.” A glance at the ground below found no one in sight, but snatches of laughter and song drifted up from the night’s festivities. “When they get enough wine in them, they’ll be seeing things that aren’t there and telling wild tales. If we’re spotted up here then, no one will believe that we’re not ju
st another fairy story.”
“Indeed,” the sprite replied, catching her drift so quickly that Carin guessed this wasn’t the first Mydrismas Eve the wight had passed at the window of an unsuspecting reveler. “But it would make a good story, don’t you think?
“‘Now here is the tale, children,’” the creature put forth in tolerable imitation of a wandering droll-teller, “‘of Fair Carin from a Far Country, who was spied on Drisha’s night high in a tree, speaking to a fay the like of which has ne’er been seen in Ladrehdin before or since. Sprite! cries she. You have won free! Clever creature, tell me all! To which the wight replies: Ah, dear girl, I confess to trickery. I did deceive your worthy friend, the plump and graying goodwife who keeps her master’s house in perfect order.’”
“Myra?” Carin interrupted, quite forgetting that she was meant to be the “droll-teller’s” audience. The sprite seemed not to mind, but dropped its playacting and took up the story in its own reedy voice.
“The same, my friend. The lady who showed you such kindness proved as gently disposed towards myself—though she did approach my prison-tree no nearer than she must, our first few days together, to sprinkle water on its roots. But I soon put her at ease with praise for the fine needlework that trimmed her, ahem, roomy garments. So pleased was the woman with my words, she began to visit me throughout the day, though the mage had charged her only with a morning watering and a throwing back of the curtains so the sunlight might reach my leaves. We got on famously. How I wish I’d heeded your advice and made the lady’s acquaintance long before the wizard made me a hostage in her care.”
Carin almost laughed aloud at the picture the sprite’s words painted. She perched more comfortably amid the branches, tucked her legs under her cloak, and patted the limb in which the flitting spark had settled.
“I knew you’d like each other,” she said. “In all of the north country, there are only two that I trust, and either of you could talk the ears off a mule. Together, you must never stop. No secret could be safe with two gossips like Myra and the woodsprite. But I tell you everything, and only hope you’ll hold your tongue when you need to.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 4
