The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Footsteps tramped into the front room. She heard the clatter of cutlery and serving dishes. Low voices exchanged remarks Carin couldn’t make out. After a time, silence reigned again in the antechamber. A safe guess was that the innkeeper’s servants had been and gone, bringing supper.

  No one disturbed her. No knuckles rapped at her door. She was not summoned to the front room.

  Lying on the bed staring into the fire, Carin felt the strain of the day fall away. The pain in her ankle was no more now than a bad memory. Verek’s healing dusts had worked their magic. Her reunion with the woodsprite had left her much encouraged. She wouldn’t continue this journey friendless. Together, they might manage to get what each wanted: Carin, a way clear of the wizard; the sprite, its passage home.

  She woke with a start. How long had she slept? The world was dark outside the diamond-paned eaves-light over the bed. The flame that had blazed high on the hearth when she’d drifted off was sinking low among the embers. Carin bounded up and tossed a fistful of oak chips on the fire, then another log.

  Hunger pangs were reminders that the two in the front room had not asked her to share their evening meal. Should she invite herself?

  Carin inched her door open. The modest blaze that licked at the firedogs on the antechamber’s hearth showed a motionless form on the far bed. Just enough wavy hair fell over his blanket to identify the sleeper as Lanse.

  But when she widened the crack enough to get her head through, Carin discovered Verek still awake. He sat cross-legged on his bed, in his shirtsleeves and stocking feet. Before her intrusion, the wizard might have been staring into the fire, as Carin had often caught him doing on this trip. Now, however, his gaze was full upon her—and an unnerving gaze it was.

  She started to retreat. But Verek gestured toward the laden table, which he and Lanse had not nearly cleared of meat and bread.

  With a short nod, Carin accepted his invitation. Quickly but quietly, she loaded a platter for her cold, late supper.

  Verek reached for his saddlebags at the foot of his bed and in the same motion got to his feet. He preceded Carin into the bedroom that she had come to regard jealously, in the space of a day, as her own private retreat.

  Get out! she wanted to shout at him. But she said nothing, only trailed Verek into the room.

  The wizard shut the door behind them, but he didn’t bar it. He set his bags down, drew out the wallet of medicinal powders and the rolled linen bandages, and put them on the table.

  “I would see how your wound fares,” he said, his voice low. “Be pleased to bare it to my examination.”

  Carin hesitated, but then sat down and bent to remove her boot and stocking. She started to shift the ensorcelled anklet so she could unwind the bandage underneath it. But Verek was a falcon stooping to the attack, so swiftly did he crouch to take over the unwrapping, leaving his patient staring uneasily—and skeptically—at the top of his head.

  Was this change of dressings really necessary? Was the injury so severe that it needed another dose of Verek’s curatives?

  Carin glanced up at the shuttered window. The wizard was here, she suspected, not for her health, but to check her quarters for the escaped woodsprite.

  Verek wadded the cast-off bandage in his hand, moistened the linen with cool water, and bathed Carin’s ankle more thoroughly than she could have stood that morning, when the wound was fresh. Now the gash had almost closed. The wizard dusted it anyway with pinches of the bronze and green powders. The cyhnaith stung, but its effect on a quickly healing wound was nothing like the inferno it touched off in a raw, bleeding cut.

  He rewrapped her ankle with clean linen. Then he stood, and dodging Carin’s hanging laundry, spread the damp, stained bandage on the hearth in front of the fire.

  “In the morning, when the cloth is dry, burn it,” Verek instructed.

  He looked at her with something peculiar in his gaze, which suggested that Carin’s ankle wasn’t the only thing occupying his thoughts.

  Verek turned to the shuttered window. He pushed the leaves open and stood gazing into the brittle night.

  Carin reached for her plate of cold supper and smiled at the warlock’s back. If he expected to catch her talking to the woodsprite tonight, he’d be disappointed. Her exchange of news with the sprite had been so satisfactorily completed that afternoon, she and it wouldn’t need to risk another meeting for days. The creature only had to follow at a safe distance as Verek led his little band westward, until Carin and it got the chance to talk privately again.

  She did away with her smile as the wizard pulled the shutters closed and turned at the window to face her.

  “It’s late,” he said. “You and I must speak of many things, before this journey’s done, but tonight you should rest—for we’ll be off on the morrow before the sun is over the world’s edge.” He canted his head. “Pray favor me, however, with a bit of thought in that nimble brain of yours, and consider the words I spoke to you today. As the sleeper shuts the window against the fiends of night, and the gateman hoists the drawbridge in the enemy’s face, you may be called to like service. Perhaps your thoughts have not yet ordered themselves as mine have, but you possess knowledge enough to reckon as I do. Think on what I say.”

  The wizard retrieved his bags, strode to the door and was gone, leaving Carin to finish her supper in solitude. She gnawed her way through it, then barred the door and stripped to her skin for another night of luxury between smooth sheets.

  Sleep did not come easily, however, on top of a cold, greasy meal and Verek’s odd speech. His words echoed in Carin’s mind. Was it a coincidence that the wizard had mentioned a “drawbridge” hard on the heels of her own remarks to the woodsprite, that the wand might be the creature’s “bridge” home? And why did the warlock speak so pointedly of evil things crawling through the night, as though he wished to fill her dreams with frights?

  The last misty notion in Carin’s head, before sleep nudged it away, was a vague impression of a wobbly rope bridge—its near end anchored to the side of a mountain, its far reaches seeming to float on a mirror-smooth ocean—with an army of demons and firedrakes, corpse-candles and creeping horrors, massed on that far shore and making ready to cross.

  Chapter 5

  A Worthy Heir

  Ten days out of Deroucey, thoughts of bridges, night-crawlers, and other matters of conjecture competed for Carin’s attention with the monotonous concerns of the traveler. When would they stop to rest the horses and eat a little? Where would they camp tonight? Would the weather hold, or give them reason to regret their late start on this journey?

  The days since Deroucey had been cold; the nights, freezing. So far, however, the woolly clouds overhead had not dumped sleet or snow on them. No blizzard had come howling off the distant mountains to turn an uncomfortable ride into a deadly one.

  Since Deroucey, Verek’s party hadn’t seen a village, only a pine forest that sheltered a few deer. Once, Lanse’s quick shot had downed a buck. Fresh venison that night was a welcome change from their trail diet of jerked meat and ash-baked oatcakes.

  Lanse had almost stopped harassing Carin, these days. He ignored her when he could. When he had to talk to her, he spoke curtly and contemptuously. But he had quit playing tricks on her. The boy seemed to feel himself so securely back in his master’s good graces that he had less spleen to vent on Carin.

  Verek had shown great faith in his nineteen-year-old groom, to give him a purse of gold and leave the horse-dealing entirely to Lanse. The boy’s choice of the sorrel gelding had proved sound. The packhorse didn’t balk at the pace the wizard set. Lanse’s success in that trade must have pleased him almost as much as hearing Verek praise him for it.

  Too, the boy had jumped at the chance to be in his master’s company without Carin at hand. Lanse never complained about Carin having a room to herself in Deroucey. He’d happily occupied the servants’ quarters with Verek, glad to shunt his “rival” aside.

  His rival? Carin, as she
rode through the pines behind the wizard and his stableboy, had to shake her head at that idea. She would not willingly deprive Lanse of any of Verek’s company. Quite the contrary. She kept out of the warlock’s way as much as possible. Lanse had little reason to see her as his competitor.

  But Myra had thought otherwise. “What the boy begrudges you are the hours you spend with our master,” the housekeeper had told Carin in confidence. “He fears to lose, to you, his place at the master’s side. Lanse fancies himself angry with you for drawing to yourself the notice that he craves.”

  The woman’s fondness for talk had led her into other revelations as well. “Once,” Myra had whispered when she and Carin were alone, “Lanse did aspire to learn the arts of alchemy and magic. But that was not to be. The boy hasn’t the gift.”

  The gift. It was revealing of Myra’s long service to the House of Verek that the woman would speak of sorcery as a gift, not an evil. How many among the ancestors of the current Lord Verek had been as “gifted” as he was? Verek’s grandsire, Legary, was reputedly an adept of fantastic power—“a wizard beyond compare,” Myra had called him, reminiscing about her early years with the family.

  The hairs prickled on the nape of Carin’s neck as she thought of the old wizard, dead these twenty years. In the narrative that the dying Legary had written—his words unconcealed in that treasury of wizards’ lore called the Book of Archamon—one stanza hinted that he had put himself in the grave with his own magic:

  I have paid the dearest price

  To invoke the forces primal;

  They draw me now into the tomb,

  Where lie the first son and the third.

  The “first son,” if Carin’s speculations went anywhere near the mark, was Legary’s child Hugh. Teenaged Hugh had died when the present Lord Verek was only an infant. Counting Verek, then, as the second generation, the “third son” had to be Verek’s little boy, who had drowned with the child’s mother, under mysterious circumstances, in a lake within walking distance of the wizard’s manor house.

  When Verek found their bodies tangled in the water lilies, his grief had turned violent. “’Twas a terrible thing,” Myra had said, moved to tears by her memories of that day, also twenty years past. “He raged, and cursed the lake, and drove the life from it. He sorrowed night and day for the loss of his wife and child.”

  The wizard, Myra confided, had appeared to go quite mad. And in his madness he laid such a malignant curse on the woodland bordering his home that it became an empty, silent ghost forest. Nothing lived in those woods now but the trees themselves. As barren as a tomb, Carin thought with a little shiver, recalling her unintended trespass into those woods—the mistake that had thrown her into Verek’s power.

  How much of Ruain would Verek’s curse have blighted, if Legary hadn’t stepped in to halt the devastation? What unimaginable powers of wizardry had the old lord summoned to his service, to keep his grandson’s derangement from destroying the estate that had been the blood-right of that lineage for generations? With his own hand, Legary had written of “invoking the forces primal”—and paying for it with his life.

  An eyewitness to those events had also testified that nothing less than the “magic of life” protected the lush garden at Verek’s house from the desolation of the adjoining woodland. Old Jerold—master gardener, minor magician, and onetime sorcerer’s apprentice to the powerful Legary—had chosen his words tellingly.

  Jerold … scowling at Carin over his pink rosebushes … a wrinkled, grumpy elf … perpetually sad, with an air of resignation about him that was worlds away from Verek’s aura of angry melancholy …

  A new idea careened into Carin’s musings, so unexpectedly that it brought her hands up in a gesture of surprise. She jerked the reins that hadn’t so much as twitched on Emrys’ neck for the last several miles.

  Startled, the mare threw up her head and almost stumbled.

  “Easy, girl!” Carin exclaimed, and stroked the trim black neck. “Please excuse your rider. My mind is wandering. It’s just come across an interesting thought. Would you like to hear it?”

  A glance, however, toward the black-cloaked wizard a few steps up the trail showed further conversation with the mare to be unwise. Verek was glaring at her over his shoulder, his meaning clear: “Stop your noise.” Carin satisfied herself and Emrys, therefore, with a few reassuring pats, and returned to her silent meditations as soon as Verek quit scowling at her.

  Think, ordered reason. What do Jerold and Lanse have in common?

  Both could be considered failed magicians. Myra had described Jerold’s gift as “slight”—not a dead loss like Lanse, but nearly as inept.

  So Legary had been disappointed in artless Jerold; and Verek even more disappointed in his would-be apprentice, Lanse. This family of adepts seemed fated to attract only ungifted disciples.

  Ungifted …

  As the word lingered on Carin’s mind, her hand stole to her breeches’ pocket where three sheets of paper nested. The term “ungifted” was among the few she had wrested from Legary’s ensorcelled narrative. Up from that murk had also come “the adept” and “a worthy heir.” Would an ungifted child not satisfy the House of Verek as a “worthy” heir? Must the line of succession in a house of wizardry pass only through an adept?

  Was that why “the first son and the third” of Legary’s noble house had died before either boy reached his majority?

  Carin shuddered. The day was growing increasingly overcast. And with the clouds came a harsher cold than the riders had endured, at least during sunlit hours, since leaving Deroucey. But it wasn’t the sharp breeze alone that made Carin hunch deeper into her cloak. In her mind’s eye she saw, as clearly as if the page were in front of her, the narrative Legary had penned on his deathbed. Four lines from the end he had written: “The lad is slain, the infant drowned; / The tainted seed is future’s hope.”

  The tainted seed. Elsewhere on the page, Legary had left Carin in no doubt about the identity of that one. One stanza of his poem could hardly be viewed as anything but a description of Legary’s grandson, Theil Verek:

  The second—the troubled, the tainted seed—

  Vented wild rage upon the living wood.

  Dead and barren, as his heart within,

  Left he the woodland with fury spent.

  Carin narrowed her eyes at the wizard riding ahead. Then she dropped her gaze, for fear that Verek’s magian senses would detect her staring a hole in his back as her thoughts unfolded …

  The tainted seed is Legary’s only surviving heir. The future of an ancient house lies with that blackheart Verek. He’s an adept, no question. But what about his son, the child who drowned? Did the boy bear the mark of his ancestry, or was he “ungifted”? What about Verek’s father, Hugh, who was laid in the tomb before Verek’s first birthday? Did he have the gift, or didn’t he?

  “The lad is slain,” Legary wrote, hinting that his son was murdered. But by whom? And for what reason? Did Hugh die because he was judged an unworthy heir?

  Did Legary kill him?

  Carin’s sharp intake of breath was loud enough to provoke a twitch of the mare’s ears. Had her first impression of the old wizard’s narrative been wrong? As Carin had read the unsteady handwriting that slanted across a page of the Book of Archamon, she had seemed to feel Legary’s sorrow—his heartsickness at the tragedies besetting his family. But was she really sensing his guilt? His remorse for the murder of his own son?

  “My crimes are great, my penance vast,” the dying sorcerer had confessed. Was he thinking—not of the sorts of regrets any man might have, as he looked back on his eighty years of life—but of crimes more explicit, and foul? Had Legary gone to his grave burdened with guilt for what he had done, unable to confess it except through a vague line in a poem?

  Maybe …

  Carin tried to stifle her thought before it was fully formed. But there was no stopping this next conjecture that flowed naturally out of the first. Maybe the tragic h
istory of Legary and his son had repeated itself in the lives of Verek and his boy. Was it possible that the warlock had caused his own son’s death by drowning?

  She chewed her lip as she mentally recited the opening stanzas of Legary’s narrative. In them, Carin searched for clues that might support or refute this new and disagreeable interpretation. When Legary wrote of an “evil that slew the first and tainted the second” that “hath no power over the third,” he seemed to suggest that a force outside the family had wreaked destruction upon it.

  But was Carin misreading the clues? Had she missed the real meaning of two passages in Legary’s narrative? They were several lines apart, but apparently related: Dead was the first by guileful craft; / Dead was the third by blackest art … and its echo near the work’s end: The lad is slain, the infant drowned.

  She had been imagining a nameless evil that was bent on the destruction of House Verek. She’d pictured an external force—the Fates or the Furies—taking two of the old wizard’s heirs. But maybe Legary and his grandson had killed their respective offspring because neither Legary’s son nor Verek’s infant were “gifted.”

  Carin threw back her shoulders in a joint-twisting stretch. She was stiff from riding. For hours she’d sat astride Emrys, barely moving, woodenly staring into the middle distance.

  And her head ached from filling it with questions she couldn’t answer. She rubbed her forehead.

  Stop this! Carin pleaded with herself. Leave off before your head explodes. If you must think, then think of a way to get off this horse’s back. Was that blackheart up ahead never going to call a halt?

  As Carin’s thoughts swung round on this new heading, she became intensely aware of her cramped muscles and sore backside crying for rest. Could she make him hear? Could she make the wizard read her mind when she wanted him to, not the other way round? She locked her gaze onto the back of Verek’s head, and consigned to the space between his ears the wailing of every nerve in her body.