The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “But sprite, I’m dying to know: how did you escape? The last time I saw you, you were stuck in that potted plant in Verek’s sitting room. I imagined him doing horrible things to you.”

  “Be easy on that point,” the sprite said. “Though I chafed at captivity, I could not complain of my treatment in the mage’s house. Indeed, it was his command to Myra—he told her she must keep me alive through the winter—that let me slip away.”

  “While she was tending you?”

  “Just so. From the tree that was my prison, I caused the leaves to wither and fall. ‘Alas!’ I said when Myra came with her watering can. ‘Look how my host sickens! Soon it will die, and I’ll perish with it.’

  “‘Oh my, uncanny creature!’ the woman cried. She swept up the fallen leaves and fretted over me. ‘What’s to be done? My master bids me preserve the sprite. I daren’t disobey him, and I shouldn’t like to see such a cheerful fay pass from this life. Tell me the remedy, wee goblin, and I’ll fetch it as quick as I may.’

  “‘The remedy,’ I said, ‘is a young, healthy sapling brought to me forthwith. Dig up a vigorous sprig with a great ball of roots, pot it, and hasten here with my new prison. Quickly, dear lady, I beg you. Another day will see the death of this sickly shrub, and my own demise as well.’

  “I’d hardly got the words out before the woman was bustling forth to do my bidding,” the sprite went on gleefully. “And within the hour she came again to me, with a slender branch of rowan in a flowerpot.

  “‘Oh no, my lady!’ I greeted her in consternation. ‘Not the rowan tree! Never rowan! Do you not know the rhyme? To rowan, amber, and red thread / Weirdling wights cannot be led. I must have a sapling of hazel—a scion of the limber tree, fairest in the woods.’

  “With a cry of dismay then, Myra snatched up her potted rowan and flew to the door with all the speed such a plump goose could make,” the sprite continued. Carin heard amusement in its voice. “And with a great leap, like so”—the creature sparked away in the night, coming to rest in a distant limb—“I flung myself from my prison-tree and into the twig in the lady’s hands.”

  The sprite flashed back to Carin, with a light like steel on flint, to finish its story. “For as you well know, my friend, the wood of the rowan holds no terrors for such a one as I. Safely hidden in the vessel of my escape, I was as silent as a buried root until the woman had carried me from the mage’s rooms down the stairs and out to the garden. There I sparked away, happy in my freedom and lingering only a moment to reveal the trickery and beg her pardon.

  “I’m not proud to have deceived Myra,” the creature said. “But I couldn’t stay behind while you, my friend, journeyed into danger. I cannot doubt—having tasted of the mage’s treachery—that he may yet throw you into harm’s way. A month ago, I believed the wizard to be your protector. Now I suspect that you’ve had the right of it all along, to doubt him. The mage doesn’t scruple to deceive; he deserves no one’s trust. Didn’t he break his word to you, by keeping me captive though you did the task that was to win my freedom?”

  “He certainly did,” Carin replied, her voice low and strained. She felt her anger rise again, as blistering as when she had first realized that the wizard would not honor their bargain. “He went back on his word the very next morning, after he and I both had almost drowned in his pool of magic. Like I told him then, ‘I did what you wanted. Now you have to let the woodsprite go. That was our deal.’”

  “But how did the mage presume to justify his reneging?” the sprite asked, flickering hotly.

  Carin sniffed. “He didn’t. He just went around in circles.” In her best imitation of the wizard’s clipped voice, she repeated Verek’s reply: “‘I will fulfill my obligations when you have fully met yours.’” She shook her head. “I should have known I couldn’t trust him. Sprite, I’m really sorry I let him trick me in the first place. If I hadn’t brought you into his house—right into that trap he set for you—he never could have taken you captive.”

  The sprite flared up. “If I hadn’t been such a coward,” it cried, “I would have thrown myself into the fire that night. My self-destruction would have broken the mage’s hold on you. It was hardly the act of a true friend, to value my own life above your safety.”

  “Dead friends aren’t much use,” Carin retorted. She put her palm on the branch where the sprite flickered. “I prefer you living.” Before she slipped her hand back into the folds of her cloak, Carin tucked the hood closely around her face and throat. Then, trying to ignore the cold that deepened with the night, she went on with her story.

  “Anyway, sprite, you’ll be glad to know that the wizard ended up in worse shape than I did that night. When the painful part was over, I was standing and he wasn’t. But soon enough, he got on his feet—and he came after me.”

  As Carin talked, she relived every moment of that night. She heard again the wizard knocking at her bedroom door. Verek’s insistent rapping had brought her out of sleep the way the woodsprite’s scratching had roused her tonight.

  It occurred to Carin then to wonder how the creature had made the sound. The woodsprite possessed no fingers with which to scrape at window shutters.

  She’d ask later. The agitated sparking in the tree limb at her side spoke of a listener who was impatient to hear her tale.

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” Carin went on, “when the wizard came to my door. Was he going to be furious that I’d gone to bed and left him in a bad way? Would he light into me for falling into his wizards’ well—like it was somehow my fault? Or could he possibly be happy that I’d managed to trade the puzzle-book for a trinket that he wanted from that other place? But everything else aside,” she admitted, “I never expected him to ask why I hadn’t killed him.”

  “Carin!”

  The sprite’s shriek nearly startled her off the branches. She grabbed for the nearest limb and avoided a fall, but threw her tucked cloak into disarray. Winter’s frosty breath swept up her legs and down her neck.

  “Sweet mother of Drisha!” Carin swore. She drew her cloak tight before cold air seeped through every stitch. “You scared me out of my skin. Keep your voice down!”

  “Your pardon,” the sprite said. “But your words—or rather, the mage’s—have me wonderstruck. What did he mean when he spoke of you slaying him?”

  Carin sighed, and half wished she’d omitted that part of her story. But the sprite—whose destiny might lie in the wizard’s hands as her own fate did—deserved to know how Carin had thrown away her one chance to destroy the sorcerer.

  “Verek was helpless,” she muttered. “The way he’d just collapsed, after getting me out of his pool of magic, I would have thought he was dead—except for his beating heart.”

  That heartbeat: Carin might have stilled it with a single stroke. But she had chosen not to. And when Verek’s wits returned, he’d come to her to know her reasons: Why had she spared him?

  The woodsprite held its peace during Carin’s preoccupied silence. But it signaled by a rapid fluttering in the branches that it wanted her answer, as Verek had.

  Did the sprite need to know all of her reasons? No. The same half-truth she had told the wizard would do.

  “I was afraid to finish him off,” Carin said, “because I didn’t know what would happen to you, sprite, if Verek died while you were still his prisoner. I thought the spells holding you captive might become permanent, like walls without doors. Then you’d never get out. When your prison-tree withered away, so would you.”

  “How did the magician answer,” the sprite asked, “when you’d stated your grounds for showing him more mercy than he deserved?”

  Carin shrugged. “He hardly ever gives me a straight answer. All he said was: ‘I am heartened to find so much wit in you, that you’d give thought to consequences and choose your way with reason, not passion only.’”

  She leaned against a branch. “What do you think he meant? That I was right? That I would have ended up killing you, too, if I had kn
ifed the wizard? Or is Verek just glad that I let myself get distracted? If I hadn’t worried about ‘consequences,’ he wouldn’t be alive now. And you and I wouldn’t be up this tree, hiding from him.”

  “Perhaps not,” the sprite replied. “Who can say? You and I cannot know the wizard’s mind—not without more practice than either of us has had. You’ve known the mage—how long? Some six weeks, if memory serves. My acquaintance with the wizard is of longer standing but lesser intimacy. You speak with him daily; I, hardly ever. Indeed, he held aloof from me until you astonished us both by entering lands so bewitched that no natural being of this world may walk there.

  “But I digress,” the creature interrupted itself. “I have questions yet to ask you, of what transpired in the cave of magic that first night of my imprisonment. But for now, I’m satisfied to know that no irreparable harm befell you.

  “What of the second night, however? Did I only dream it, or did you come to my prison-tree long after sunset that next night, and speak a few words?”

  “You weren’t dreaming,” Carin said. “I was there. But I didn’t get much out of you—just mumbles and yawns, you were so sleepy. That’s all I needed, though, to know that you were still alive.

  “By that time, sprite, I was ready to scratch Verek’s eyes out. There he’d made me think that I only had to run the one ‘errand’ for him, but I was realizing how he’d double-crossed me. That next night, he wanted me to go off again, somewhere else. He said I’d have to, or he wouldn’t ever release you.”

  She sniffed. “I told Verek I wouldn’t go on any more magical journeys to ‘other worlds’ until he proved to me that you were all right. I wasn’t taking his word for it. He’s such a liar,” she grated.

  “He burned with anger, and I thought he would blow up at me. All the signs were there.” A shudder hunched Carin’s shoulders like a spasm, not entirely from the cold. “But he gave in. He took me up to his rooms and let me see you.”

  She shrank deeper into her cloak. As Carin told the woodsprite of that second night’s confrontation with the wizard, she was, for long moments of mental flight, out of her high, cold perch and back in Verek’s library … the scrabbling of the wind against the room’s windows conspiring with the hiss of the hearth-fire to lull her into sleep … her head sinking to the cushions of the bench where she had sat reading … waiting …

  It wasn’t a noise—no tapping or scratching—that had woken her then, but an uneasy sense of no longer being alone in the library. The hairs rose on the back of Carin’s neck like waking thoughts starting up from a bad dream.

  Her eyes flew open to see a glowing witchlight orb resting on the back of the bench opposite hers. Just below and to one side of the orb gleamed a head of dark, glossy hair. Verek’s eyes like coals of fire looked back at her from a face half in shadow. The witchlight shining on the right side of his face was the only light in the room.

  Carin’s wide stare traveled, from the orb and the unsettling face it illuminated, down to Verek’s right hand. In it he held a glass of dhera that reflected the witchlight like liquid rubies. His left hand rested on his leg, with his fingers hooked over a slim stick that was so highly polished, it seemed to glow in the magical light.

  She knew the stick. It was the honey-colored wand with which Verek had baited his trap—the well-laid trap that had made the sprite a prisoner and Carin a slave to the wizard’s schemes. Was the wand really a piece of the woodsprite’s homeworld, as the creature so desperately wanted to believe? The lure of the wand had been the fay’s undoing. It had wagered its freedom against a chance to touch the artifact, and it had lost.

  Verek said nothing of his captive, but with the flat of his hand he idly rolled the wand along his leg.

  “You’ve missed your supper, and I’m to blame,” he remarked almost conversationally. “I persuaded Myra to let you sleep, which she was pleased to do. She saw you dreaming in here. Now the woman reproaches herself.

  “‘I’ve overworked the girl,’ she said to me. ‘The chores I give her are too much for the lass.’ Though I knew of other reasons for your fatigue, I kept silent and let the woman blame herself alone. For if our Myra knew of the errands I send you on by night, running you ragged until the wee hours, I’d get an earful.”

  Verek sipped his drink and regarded Carin over the rim of his glass. She gazed back less boldly. Of the ashen-faced, shivering, disheveled man who had slumped in her doorway early that morning, no trace now remained. The wizard was himself again—neatly groomed; dressed in a fresh white shirt, dark vest and woolen trousers; and fully possessed of all his faculties, both magian and mortal, to judge by the light of sorcery at his shoulder and the mockery in his words.

  Lowering his glass, Verek said, “If you’re hungry, go now to the kitchen and eat. Myra will have set aside your portion. But if you’ve worried yourself out of an appetite, then come with me to the cavern of wysards and journey again as you did last night. You will not, I trust, delay again in the otherworld as you delayed at your last destination.”

  The wizard leaned forward, casting his face into shadow as he left the illumination of his witchlight orb. “Didn’t I warn you in the strongest terms to hurry back from that other place?” he asked, an accusation in his voice. “Were my instructions not precise and firm upon that point? Yet you tarried over a book—began to read it, as though you had all of eternity to spend beneath that other sky!

  “I tell you distinctly: you very nearly lost yourself in the oblivion between the worlds. And such losing would have been for all eternity. Once parted from you, I haven’t the means to bring you forth from that emptiness. Do not, therefore, risk again such a fate. From the world to which you will journey tonight, return at once, delaying not for the wink of an eye to marvel at whatever oddities may present themselves.”

  Verek leaned back against the cushions of his bench, back into the light, and Carin forced herself to meet the gaze of those darkly brilliant eyes. Slowly, she shook her head.

  The wizard frowned, then took another sip of his drink. As Carin’s silence lengthened, the muscles of Verek’s jaw tightened visibly. His quick anger, always just under the surface, was threatening to explode. In the face of it, Carin receded into her cushions but still said nothing.

  “Tell me,” Verek snapped. “To which of my instructions do you mount the resistance signified by a wordless shake of your head? Surely you don’t mean to disobey me in a matter that bears so directly upon your safety? When I tell you that any delay in your return may mean the death of you, I expect your thanks for my concern—not your defiance of the warning.”

  Carin swallowed in a dry throat and found her voice.

  “I’d return right away, sir, just like you say—if I was going anywhere. But I’m not. I’m staying clear of the wizards’ pool and any journeys that start or end down in that cave. So I don’t need to take your advice—though I’m sure you’re offering it out of a deep concern for my safety.”

  The wizard, scowling, leaned toward Carin across the low table between their two benches. He set his half-full goblet down so hard that dhera sloshed over his hand. Heedless of the drops he flung Carin’s way, Verek flicked the fingers of his right hand at her—exactly the gesture he’d used to subdue the spells that guarded the boundaries of his woodland. Did he think he could control her, as he controlled his conjurings?

  Triumph flashed in the midst of Carin’s fear. The warlock’s gesture had no effect. Though it might bend the forces of wizardry to his will, it brushed past her as harmlessly as air.

  Carin allowed no hint of gloating into her face, however. She couldn’t let Verek see how much it pleased her to thwart him. Her immunity to much of his magic—apparently a consequence of her otherworldliness—had been a goad to him since their first meeting.

  The wizard stared at her, as if seeking a sign that Carin would yield. Finding none, he settled back and sighed. He raised one booted foot and rested that ankle on the opposite knee. With his dhera-stained han
d Verek massaged his propped ankle as though kneading sprained ligaments.

  It was a pose Carin had seen him adopt before, when he sought to curb his temper or restrain his impatience.

  “So,” he addressed her finally, his voice sharp with displeasure. “You have chosen to let the woodsprite die. Never doubt me: I will kill the creature, as I’ve promised, if you resist me.”

  Carin sprang from her seat with a ferocity that caught the usually self-controlled Verek by surprise. He recoiled as if a viper had struck at him.

  “Never doubt you!” she exclaimed, almost strangling on the words. “Never doubt you? How can I do anything but doubt you! You’re a man without honor.”

  She rushed on, ignoring the look he gave her. “I have such a deep mistrust of you now, after your dishonesty of these last two days, that I wouldn’t believe you if you said the sun sets in the west. We had a bargain. Last night I kept my end of it—and I thought I would die before it was over. But now, you’re refusing to honor your promise to turn the woodsprite loose. You’re just a two-faced liar.”

  Although Carin had more to say, she paused as Verek rose and stood over her, glaring. His gaze threatened to sap her courage. She hurried to finish while she could.

  “I think the sprite is dead. I think you’ve already killed it. Why bother to keep it alive, after you blackmailed me last night into doing what you wanted?” Carin flipped her hair back defiantly. “If you’ve got rid of the sprite already, then you’ve made a big mistake. Without it, you can’t force me to do anything.”

  Verek heard her out, his hands toying with the polished wand. The bright stick had the look of crystal in the witchlight. He pinned the wand between his opposing palms so that the whole of its length lay open to Carin’s view, only its tips pressed into his palms like a crossbeam between two upright posts.