And although he had restrained himself lately—he hadn’t threatened to kill her for a good three weeks now—Verek was capable of violent rages. His earlier fits of temper had instilled in Carin a dread that went deeper than the bruises he’d given her. In her weaker moments, Verek only had to turn his penetrating gaze upon her, and terror would grab at her heart. He’d made Carin fear his anger. Would she risk his full fury now, to betray him to these townspeople whose ability to protect her was highly questionable?
No, she wouldn’t. Quite apart from the calamities Carin might call down upon herself and the villagers, there was the matter of the woodsprite and its desperate desire to return “home.”
Though it’s good having the sprite back, the creature does complicate things, Carin realized. I’ve got to look out for it now, and not just myself.
Looking out for the sprite meant helping it to go home. As long as she had a hope that Verek might give her both the means and the opportunity to fulfill the creature’s wish, Carin must seem to go along with the wizard’s plans … and watch for an opening to free herself when she had what she wanted from him.
More of the trooping servants came through from the front room, bearing armloads of firewood and fresh water by the pitcherful. Carin hobbled aside, on an ankle that was beginning to ache now from overuse, to let a sour-faced woman toss her morning’s bathwater out the window. It splashed the trunk of the old tree that grew outside the building. That’s a cold wake-up for the sprite, Carin thought, if the creature is trying to sleep out there.
Having put the room to rights, the servants withdrew. The chambermaid paused to tap Carin’s shoulder as the mistreated “footboy” went back to gazing out the window.
“Leave that devil quick as you can,” the maid whispered into Carin’s ear, “and circle back to Deroucey. Don’t be long about it, or you’ll be slogging through snow up to your arse. Winter comes fast to these parts after Mydrismas.”
The girl was gone. Carin stood another moment at the window, then shuttered it against a breeze that felt decidedly wintry already. The fire that the servants had built on the hearth brightened the room but didn’t cheer Carin. With the departure of the innkeeper’s troops, she had little to do but hang up her clothes to finish drying, and then return to the front room, where Verek waited.
The antechamber was as tidy now as Carin’s quarters—the beds made, a fire dancing up the chimney, the scrubbed table bearing dried fruit, fresh bread, cheese, and a bottle of the best that the inn’s wine cellar could offer. Carin walked in to find Verek frowning over a bundle of clean, pressed clothes. One of the servants who had descended upon their lodgings was evidently the washerwoman to whom he’d sent his own laundry and Lanse’s.
Verek drew the top shirt off the pile and tossed it at Carin.
“It’s ripped,” he growled. “Can you do anything with it?”
She stuck her fingers through a parted shoulder seam, and nodded. “I can’t sew like Myra, but this I can fix.” Carin got the mending kit Myra had packed for her. Then she settled at the table with her foot propped up. The green powder’s painkilling worked best with her weight off the wound. Carin threaded a needle and waited in silence for Verek to return to the subject that he’d raised before the housekeeping horde interrupted them.
He was not long in doing so. Verek took the bench opposite Carin’s at the other end of the table. The wizard poured himself a glass of the innkeeper’s wine and swallowed a small, dubious sip. Carin felt his gaze on her but she didn’t look up as he asked the question that had been left hanging:
“So—how do you plead in the matter of your bedroom window? Did you shutter it last night, or throw it open to wraiths and night-horrors?”
Hmm, Carin thought. That’s no way to talk about the sprite. But she gave Verek the answer she had prepared while servants worked around her in the next room.
“To convince you—if I can, sir—that you can trust me, I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I opened the shutters long enough to see what was out there. Then I did what any sane person would do: I closed them against a dark, cold night.”
Verek nodded. “A sensible course of action.”
The wizard seemed primed to say more, but he held back at the sound of boots on the landing and a hand on the latch. Through the door from the stairs entered Lanse, wrapped in coat and cloak.
Carin glanced up at him briefly, then returned to the shirt in her hands. She’d never speak to Lanse if she didn’t have to.
“What news, boy?” Verek asked him. “Do you horse-trade with the best in Deroucey?”
“I do, my lord,” Lanse answered, cocky. From inside his coat he drew out a leather pouch and set it on the table. “Before nightfall, there will be delivered to the stables a strong sorrel gelding, a healthy four-year-old that shan’t balk at any load strapped on it. And from this purse, sir”—Lanse tapped the pouch on the table—“you are missing but a single piece of gold. It needed only that, with the price I bartered from the knacker’s for the foundered brute, to buy a beast two hands the dead gray’s better.”
“Well done!” Verek exclaimed. “You’ve a good right to be proud of so keen a bargain as that.”
Lanse shed his hood and his coat—basking in his master’s praise, he hardly needed them—and joined Verek at the table. While he ate, the boy related in tedious detail the particulars of his horse-trading.
Carin ignored him. She bent to her needlework with resolution. Taking small, even stitches, she managed to make the job last until the wizard and his boy had finished their meal. Then they rose for a walk to the stables to see that the sorrel gelding’s owner honored his end of the bargain.
At the exit, Verek paused and sharply cautioned his captive: “Stay clear of the door. I won’t take time now to correct the imperfect spellwork that guards it.”
She gave him a curt nod.
The moment the door closed behind the pair, Carin knotted the thread and tied off the mended seam. She folded Verek’s shirt and laid it on his bed. Then she stepped into her room and barred its door. To remove the tracks of her tears and the streak of blood that had earned her the maid’s pity, she dampened a kerchief and wiped her face.
At the window, Carin pushed open one shutter. No one stirred in the courtyard below. Now that their duties were done, the innkeeper’s servants were probably sleeping off their Mydrismas hangovers. She and the woodsprite could talk privately again.
“Sprite!” Carin hissed, too softly to rouse a human sleeper. “Are you there? Woodsprite?”
Nothing answered at first but the wind in the branches. Then a spark raced across the yard, arrowing to the bole of the tree. It flickered its way up the trunk like a will-o’-the-wisp and came to rest in a branch that Carin could touch from her window.
“I’m here, my friend!” the sprite piped, sounding out of breath. “But do we dare to meet so boldly, with the afternoon sun shining on our secrets?”
“Sometimes it’s safest to hide in plain view,” Carin replied. “Don’t worry, I’m alone. The wizard isn’t here.”
Quickly, she shared her suspicion that Verek might know about the woodsprite’s escape and its appearance at her window last night. “If you have to go anywhere near that warlock, move as fast as elf-fire,” Carin cautioned the sprite. “Don’t give him a chance to recapture you.”
“Be easy about me. I’ll stay as distant from that villain as he is from goodness.
“But now,” the sprite added in the same breath, “keep your promise from last night, and tell me of your journeys from the cave of magic to worlds beyond. Where did you go? What did you see?”
“I saw another life.”
Though her words couldn’t do justice to the weirdness of her travels, Carin described her journey to the child’s bedroom on an unknown world: her crossing of the wizards’ pool … how she’d traded the Looking-Glass book for the crystal pendant that Verek wanted … how a book half-hidden under a pillow had caught her eye, and how she’d
lingered to read from it. Carin told about the ocean that she’d discovered lapping at her feet, when she’d put down the “Wonderland” volume and looked round for the sorcerer who held her life in his hands. She tried to explain how the space between them had seemed enormous then, as though the wizards’ well had become a universe.
“I thought I was lost,” Carin murmured, “when Verek let me fall. Drisha’s teeth! Sprite, try to imagine a winter rain that freezes as it hits and coats the tree limbs in black ice. Imagine yourself frozen in that ice, so achingly cold that you don’t have a spark of life in you. Verek’s pool of magic is even colder than that. I couldn’t stand it. I blacked out.” Carin swallowed. “When I came to, it took me a minute to realize I wasn’t dead.”
“How miserably I’ve failed you, Carin!” the sprite cried, its distress thinning its voice. “It was for care of me that you suffered wizardry’s cold agonies. I may not be forgiven for causing you such pain.”
“Of course you may,” Carin retorted. “You didn’t drop me into the pool. The warlock did.”
She paused to listen for sounds of Verek in the next room, but he remained absent.
“Then that second night,” Carin resumed her story, “when you were still his prisoner and Verek ordered me off on another magical errand, I was determined to get out of it. But I had to find a way to disobey him without making him so angry that he’d kill you, sprite.”
Carin repeated to the creature what she’d confessed to Verek: how she’d emptied her mind when he’d ordered her to conjure with the wand an image of the world that had produced the artifact.
“If you had been with me in the cave that night, my friend, I might have gone on the trip,” Carin added. “If I had been able to see your world across the pool, then maybe you could have made the crossing and found your way home. But for me to go alone while you were locked in your prison-tree—that was too big a risk. I could have lost the wand out there.” She signified “out there” with a vague wave of her hand.
“Sprite, from talking to Verek I get the feeling that the wand must be a kind of bridge. If I’m right to think that it ties this world to yours, then you should be glad that I didn’t let Verek get rid of it—the way he used me to get rid of the puzzle-book.”
“Carin!” The sprite’s voice was low and horrified. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Have you caught the drift of your own words? If the wand is the ‘bridge’ that I must take to return to my home, then surely your path lay by the book. But the book is gone. Aren’t you stranded here now, upon this world called Ladrehdin?”
Carin stared at the branch that had spoken. The creature had put its finger, so to speak, on an obvious parallel between her book and its wand—assuming that either object had, in fact, once belonged to “footboy” or woodsprite. She hadn’t missed the drift so much as ignored it. Carin, after all, wasn’t the one who nursed thoughts of “home” so tenderly. But the sprite’s consternation at her loss of the puzzle-book stirred her misgivings.
Had Verek ditched the book to keep Carin from ever going back to “her” world?
What had he said to her, the night he bade her conjure that forgotten place from the pool’s mists? When she’d told him that she had no desire to regain that world—not like the sprite, who could speak of little else—Verek’s response had been: “Good. That will render the task ahead of you less distressing.” The task being, as he had emphasized, to return the book and retrieve the crystal.
How had she missed what the wizard’s choice of words clearly implied? That the puzzle-book, in its alien language, belonged to that other world—but the crystal’s destined place must be here, on Ladrehdin.
Carin nodded—not at the sprite, but to herself—as a bit of the puzzle seemed to slip into place. The book and the crystal … they’re both bridges. But they no longer link two worlds. In trading one for the other, she may have destroyed the unearthly pathways between the two places—and cut herself off for all time from the land of her birth.
The sprite was making inarticulate sounds of woe.
“Easy there,” Carin said, trying to soothe the creature before the innkeeper had half his staff looking for the moaner. “Don’t be sad for me. I can’t grieve for a life that I don’t remember. But I promise I’ll help you look for your ‘homeworld.’ And I’ll escape from Verek, too—I’m determined to be free of him. For now, though, we’re both in his power. He’s got the wand that may be your only way home, and he’s got the key to the shackle that keeps me a prisoner.”
For a long moment more, the sprite gave vent to its emotions. But finally the creature quieted and took its leave of Carin. Though still sounding a bit teary, the sprite renewed its promise that it would follow wherever Verek was leading her on this journey—and however early in the morning the travelers might depart, now that last night’s “trouble with a horse” had been remedied.
After the sprite’s departure, Carin latched the shutter and stood in her bedroom, chafing her arms. She threw another log on her fire, then went into the front room for a glass of the innkeeper’s passably good wine and a nibble at the cheese and fruit that Verek and the boy had left untouched.
What now? Walk the floors? Sit and stare into the fire? The hour was only a little past mid-afternoon. The wizard and Lanse might be out past dusk. Was there no good way to use this rare gift of private time?
Have a go at that mystery you’ve been carrying around in your pocket—and your head—for a month.
The thought was barely framed before Carin was retreating back to her bedroom and barring the door behind her. She cleared a space at the room’s white-linen table, then drew from her trousers pocket the three compactly folded sheets that nestled there.
One sheet, she returned to her pocket unread. She knew it almost by heart. The other two, she spread flat on the table.
Carin wasn’t quite able to focus on the sheet that bore the longer inscription. A wilder jumble of meaningless marks and characters couldn’t be imagined. The writing was not foreign. She had penetrated its secrets far enough to know that its author—Verek’s grandfather Legary—had penned it in the common Ladrehdinian script. Upon the page, however, the old wizard had placed a spell of concealment so powerful that it had survived when Carin—praying that no lethal enchantments protected the book from such desecration—had torn the page from the sorcerous text that held it.
Smoothing it now, she relived the astonishing spectacle of the stolen page rebuilding itself in the Book of Archamon like a lizard regrowing its tail. Within seconds, she had been viewing two identical but unreadable manuscripts—one on the torn sheet in her hand, the other on the left-hand page of the two leaves to which the book lay open.
The work on the right-hand page hadn’t been bespelled. Carin had easily read and written down the words Lord Legary had placed there. Her fair copy of his narrative was on the sheet that had gone back into her pocket. Deciphering that twenty-year-old account wasn’t the task that faced her now. If she wanted to know the genesis of the tragedies that had struck Verek’s family, Carin had to make sense of his grandsire Legary’s older work. The ensorcelled writing dated to the year when Verek’s mother had disappeared and left the boy-wizard orphaned, at ten.
Carin slipped the case off a pillow and used the linen to cover the bespelled writing. Would the trick that she had devised in Verek’s library—of concealing the characters, then quickly revealing them—work on this purloined page far from the magic that permeated Verek’s strange old manor house?
Yes. As she snatched the pillowcase away, the word corruption rose from the chaos, briefly legible.
Carin jotted it down on the third paper that made up the secret archive she had smuggled from Verek’s library. That paper held only a smattering of deciphered words and phrases—the fruits of many hours of tedious labor. For all her determined probing with her cover-and-reveal trick, she’d lifted from Legary’s bespelled writing only a handful of terms. Among them were sacrificed, sorceress, evil, a
worthy heir, the adept, ungifted, Morann, craggy heights, grieving widow, and wife of Hugh.
That the “grieving widow” and the “wife of Hugh” were one and the same, seemed evident. Myra had told Carin that Legary’s son Hugh had married at eighteen, fathered a child—the present Lord Verek—at nineteen, and gone to his grave that same year. Master Hugh’s untimely death had left a young widow—surely the grieving widow of the narrative—to raise their son … but not alone, for the boy’s grandfather had taken an active part in young Verek’s education.
What had happened to that widow? What had taken her from Legary’s household when her son was only ten?
The few words Carin had picked out of Legary’s cloaked narrative hinted that the lady might have met a sad end. Had she fallen to some “evil sorceress”? Was she the one “sacrificed”? Or had the old wizard been describing other players in this drama?—the unknown beings he called “worthy,” “adept,” “ungifted.”
And who was “Morann”? Legary had named that entity in this account and again in the later narrative that he would pen on his deathbed.
In that second, unconcealed work, which he had written when his grandson and heir Theil Verek was no longer a boy but a nobleman of twenty-four, Legary had warned the mysterious Morann away from Verek in the strongest terms. By the oath of my House, I command thee: Touch him not! the dying sorcerer had written.
The phrase “craggy heights” hadn’t seemed significant when Carin first extracted it from the depths of Legary’s spellcraft. But now she wondered. Verek had made it no secret that he was leading his party into the western mountains. Could the “heights” in his grandfather’s decades-old narrative be their ultimate destination?
The rattle of the outer door’s latch announced her captor’s return. Hurriedly, Carin refolded the bespelled page of writing and her sheet of notes. She stuffed them in her trousers pocket, then re-covered her bed pillow and curled up with it.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 8
