The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  The two horses started back, snorting their uneasiness. But they did not run. Their goggle-eyed fear diminished to a nervous curiosity. They watched as the wizard touched the third animal’s forehead. That horse, also released from the spell, joined its mates.

  Verek spared no glance for the bodies on the ground. He pulled on his gloves, remounted, then led the way westward at no quicker a pace than he had set before the three riders challenged them. The entire episode—from the initial confrontation to the executions and the release of the horses—had cost the party from Ruain little time. Now Carin found herself as before, trailing Verek and Lanse, just behind the packhorse that the boy led by its rope. For a time, she kept close.

  Hoofbeats sounded behind her. Carin twisted in her saddle to find the three newly riderless horses almost at Emrys’ heels.

  Gluttons for punishment, she thought.

  But after an hour or so of uneventful riding, Carin dropped back and joined the trailing herd. She loosened her clothing to get at the sprite’s seedling.

  “My friend!” the sprite shrilled with the voice of a cracked pipe, the moment its topmost needles cleared her coat collar. “What has happened? For a long while, I could hear only the pounding of your heart. ‘We’ve met with some grave misfortune!’ I thought. When your heart finally quieted and I could make out a few sounds from the outside world, I heard the mage speak of ruffians. Were we attacked? Does danger threaten still?”

  “Easy, sprite,” Carin said. She patted the bundled roots under her coat. “The three men who came at us lived hardly long enough to regret their mistake.” In a whisper, her voice masked by the beats of hooves all around her, she told the creature what had happened.

  “It’s a bad end for those fellows,” the sprite said, “but perhaps no worse than they deserved. Though the mage is hardly less villainous than they were, I am glad to be under his protection when such scoundrels are abroad. But tell me now: do you see a tree anywhere? Are we to leave this plain by evening, do you think? Or must I spend the night in this sprig?”

  Carin scanned the line where brown grass met gray sky, saw nothing reminiscent of a tree, and said so. The sprite took this news cheerfully, but asked then to be tucked back inside her coat to rest.

  “It might be prudent of me to save my strength. We could be days crossing this land—as you warned—and I’ll be a sapless wight at the end of it if I’m careless of my health. Too, it’s been a bit of a strain, leaping through the trees all this way from the mage’s house. I could count it a fine piece of luck that we came to this wide plain when we did. Now I have the chance for a good long rest, going horseback for a change. So if I’m quiet for a time, don’t be anxious for me. I’m only sleeping deeply, the way some trees drowse through the cold months.”

  Carin returned the creature’s “Good night.” She slid the seedling down in her coat and pulled her cloak around them both. What was left of the afternoon plodded by, with not so much as an interesting new thought darting into her head to break the monotony.

  Just before sunset, they reached the creek that Verek had named as their night’s stopping place. Does he know the way only from maps and travelers’ journals? Or has he made this trip before? Carin wondered. Was it, perhaps, a sort of pilgrimage for the wizards of Ruain? The “craggy heights” of Lord Legary’s ensorcelled narrative suggested that possibility.

  The creek was a ribbon meandering across the plain, frozen over at its edges. But seven thirsty horses soon had the ice broken—the three newcomers as eager to drink as Verek’s four.

  They left the beasts saddled for warmth, but Lanse slipped the bits from seven mouths so the horses could graze. The four without riders, including the sorrel packhorse, had to make do with grass. Only Brogar, Emrys, and Lanse’s gelding got rations of oats in nosebags. As the horses munched their feed, Lanse moved among them, checking their hooves and feeling for swollen tendons.

  “The boy will be a while with that lot,” Verek commented as he dropped his saddle-roll and bags on the ground. “Be pleased to fetch me wood off that pack animal. The evening’s too cold to wait for a fire.”

  “All right.”

  Carin went to the sorrel and discovered a number of tree limbs, bundled in canvas. Most were longer than her arm and thicker than her wrists. Evidently Lanse and Verek hadn’t been idle at the forest fringe while she’d attended to private business in the pine grove. They had packed enough wood to see them through two suppers on this treeless plain, if they used the fuel sparingly.

  She returned along the creekbank with an armload and found Verek clearing a circle at the water’s edge, a precaution against any sparks from their campfire setting the grassland ablaze. Carin dropped the wood there, then walked back to the packhorse for a frozen slab of stewed venison and strong sage tea. Above the horses’ watering spot she broke the ice and filled two pots.

  Within the circle at the creek, when Carin got back, the wizard already had a small fire laid and lit—no great feat for one who could summon a flame with a snap of his fingers. By the time the tea was made and the first cups drunk, the meat was thawing at its edges. The two of them sat on their blankets to eat it. They did not wait for the preoccupied Lanse to join them.

  “I’m curious, sir,” Carin ventured, trying to sound casually conversational. “Why are the dead men’s horses following us? Wouldn’t most go back to their stable when they’ve been given their heads?”

  Verek scowled. “Have you added horse-thievery to your list of charges against me?” he growled, with his maddening habit of answering a question with a question. “At last count, I believe your indictment of me alleged only lunacy, villainy, fiendishness, and murder.”

  Carin shook her head. “I’m not saying you did anything wrong—about those horses, I mean. I just think it’s strange that they’ve come with us.”

  The wizard sighed—whether to express or to subdue his irritation, it was hard to say. But perhaps more the latter. He took a bite of half-thawed stew, then gave Carin a fuller answer than she expected.

  “So that we need not kill the beasts, I placed upon them the spell of forgetfulness. For the next four days they will not remember to whose stables they belong, but will trail us. On the fifth day, their memories will reawaken. Then we’ll see which yearning is strongest in their simple intellects: the desire to stay with this new herd they’ve joined, or a wish to return to their familiar places.”

  Carin thought it over as she chewed her supper. Then she asked the obvious question.

  “Sir, the spell of forgetfulness … Couldn’t you have cast it on those three men to make them forget they’d ever seen us? Did you have to kill them?”

  Verek sipped his tea and eyed Carin over the rim of his cup. Uneasily, she traced the rim of her own with her fingertip, hoping she hadn’t made a misstep.

  The wizard, though, proved to be in a patient mood this evening. He lowered his drink and answered her, again at some length.

  “It’s not as simple with men as with horses. When these beasts regain their memories, they may return to their owner, but they will tell him nothing of what took place. Stripped of saddles and their riders’ gear, they’ll offer no clue to the fate of the three. If some enterprising comrade of the dead men chooses to mount a search, he may discover their corpses on the plain. What conclusion will he draw from what he finds there? That thieves murdered the three for their horses and goods. He’ll think the horses somehow escaped—perhaps while the killers drunkenly divvied up the spoils.

  “Were the men themselves to return to their master, however,” Verek went on, “they would return in full possession of their memories—and their tongues. Those placed under enchantments—even with the spell of forgetfulness upon them—do not forever unknow what has happened to them. Don’t you recall very well the times you succumbed to spellcraft?” he asked, watching her.

  Carin nodded. Her brushes with the supernatural under Verek’s roof were etched into her memory. Those recollections would
be with her always.

  The wizard took another sip. Then he continued, with no prodding from his listener.

  “The returning riders would raise a cry of ‘Sorcery!’ from one edge of this plain to the other. The ignorant and the superstitious would be rallied against us until every bowman and dog in the country were on our trail. I could deal with them, but at the cost of many lives. The result of such a bloodbath would inevitably be war.” Verek’s voice hoarsened, and he swallowed more tea to clear it. “The wounds have not yet healed from Ladrehdin’s last ‘Wizards War.’ I have no wish to start another. But neither would I choose to burn.”

  “Burn?” Carin asked. “Like … at the stake?”

  “Yes. If I allowed a mob of the mindless to fall on us, such would be my fate. Yours could be worse. The worthless spriccts might find it amusing to brutalize for a day, or a week, a lass who was found to be masquerading as a lad. But they would also, in time, consign you to the flames.”

  Carin reached for the steaming pot of tea. Wordlessly she refilled Verek’s cup, then her own. The lull in the conversation stretched on. She didn’t know how to react to the wizard’s use of the coarsest swearword in the Ladrehdinian tongue. Nor could she comment on her fate at the hands of those to whom he applied the obscenity. So she returned the pot to the fire, and kept quiet.

  Verek, however, seemed reluctant to let the matter go until Carin had conceded the point. He pressed her:

  “In light of what I say, do you believe that Lanse and I were wrong to kill those scoundrels? Had they more right to their lives than we three to ours?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir, I don’t believe they did have. I understand that it was self-defense. They raised their weapons first and left you no choice.”

  Carin glanced around, looking for Lanse. He was still with the horses. She turned back to Verek and asked, “Both of you killed those men, right? I mean, you put them under the spell, of course. But then Lanse didn’t just watch while you shot all three of them, did he?”

  Verek was looking at her almost warily.

  “Why should you wish to know that?” he asked, his head atilt. “Would it surprise—or trouble—you to learn that two of those ruffians died with Lanse’s arrows in them?”

  Carin studied Verek’s silver headband to keep safely at the edge of his glances. “I wonder whether Lanse had ever killed anyone before,” she muttered.

  Slowly, the wizard shook his head. He did not take his eyes from Carin.

  “To my knowledge, no, he had not. But it’s a long lane that has no turning. None of us is likely to end this journey unchanged from what we were when we began it.”

  Surprised into meeting Verek’s gaze, Carin held it for a moment. She tried to read a deeper meaning there. But the wizard’s face did not betray him.

  She continued then on the subject of Lanse’s first kill, not quite sure why it interested her so much. “Was Lanse reluctant to do it? Did he hesitate at all? Or did he kill those men willingly?”

  “Not willingly,” Verek said, his voice quick, his words clipped. He inspected Carin narrowly. “One does not take another’s life willingly, nor casually. Lanse did what he had to, bravely and without hesitation. We all do what we must—if we would not be guilty of shirking our duty.”

  The wizard fell silent while he studied Carin. Then a gleam of understanding seemed to flash in his eyes.

  “I begin to plumb the well from which spring these questions about the boy. No very great while ago, you might have taken a life, but you found that you had no stomach for murder. You were weak. You hesitated, and the chance was lost. Isn’t that what troubles you? Haven’t you been seeking in Lanse’s actions some grounds for excusing your own? But in that hope, you have been frustrated. For Lanse did not hesitate. He acted, while you dithered.”

  “Yes,” Carin muttered. “Something like that.”

  The wizard shook his head. “Your reasoning is faulty. To say that you should have done as Lanse did is to compare the way of the root to that of the leaf.”

  Carin started, and almost put her hand on the roots of the pine seedling that nestled in her clothes. To hide the gesture, she deliberately rearranged her cloak, snugging it tight around her.

  Verek seemed to see nothing in her fidgeting. He went on with his argument.

  “It best serves the root to burrow downward, toward rich, well-watered soil. The leaf, however, prospers upward, reaching for the sun. It would not behoove either to behave as the other. They follow their contrary paths because it profits each to do so.

  “Lanse had good and urgent cause to kill those men. He was preserving not only our lives, but also this venture in which we are joined. You, conversely, had sound reason to stay your hand, the night in the chamber of the wysards when you found me gone into darkness. It is not for my sake alone that I commend the good judgment you showed that night. If you had acted rashly, the consequences would have fallen on the shoulders of many besides yourself and me.”

  “And the woodsprite,” Carin added. Again she resisted the urge to touch the bundle near her heart.

  The wizard paused, as if finding her remark worth heeding. Then he nodded. “And the sprite.”

  M’lord Verek is in a talkative mood tonight, Carin thought. Now might be a good time to get some answers—if she could avoid asking the wrong question, the sort that got his ire up.

  Verek hadn’t frowned when she’d mentioned the sprite. Maybe that subject would be safer than others Carin could raise, given that Verek might think the fay was still imprisoned in Ruain. Or if he suspected otherwise, the wizard might hope to extract the truth from her. The creature that was hidden in her coat would enjoy hearing itself talked about, if it were awake enough to attend to this exchange.

  So Carin ventured on. “You call it my ‘good judgment,’ sir. But I think I probably made the worst mistake of my life, when I didn’t knife you through the heart that night. I told you why I didn’t do it—I was afraid the sprite would be trapped if you died. Was I right about that?”

  Verek raised his mutilated left hand to his chin. He stroked the formerly close-cropped beard that had grown ragged since Deroucey. His three bare fingers did not linger there, but slid quickly back among the folds of his cloak.

  He shook his head. “No, you were mistaken. The spells that safeguarded my apartments would have failed at my death. Many kinds of enchantments will retain their full potency long after their crafters are no more. The spells on my doors, however, were not magic of that sort. Had you killed me, you might simply have walked in and carried the sprite away.

  “But I suspect,” Verek added, “that this news does not trouble you overmuch. For it wasn’t solely your regard for the sprite’s welfare that stayed your hand, was it?”

  Carin sighed. Slowly, she shook her head. Since she was the one who had sent the conversation down this path, she might as well speak openly—where both the warlock and the woodsprite, if the creature was listening, could hear her confession.

  “No, I had other reasons. Mainly, I doubted that the pool of magic would let me hurt you. If I’d walked into the cave carrying a knife, wouldn’t the power that lives in the water have stopped me before I got anywhere near you? Same with the dragon,” she added. “If I had tried to call up the Jabberwock from the Looking-Glass book, wouldn’t the pool of magic have destroyed the dragon from another world to save a wizard from this one?”

  Carin questioned for effect, not expecting Verek to answer. But when she paused to sip her tea, the warlock gifted her with a surprising reply.

  “In truth, I cannot say.” He cocked his head as he spoke, but his gaze was direct—disturbingly so. “To my knowledge, never has the chamber of the wysards been visited by such a one as you—nor by any otherworldly dragon. You were a witness to my astonishment when first you summoned the creature to those waters. A participant you were also—though unwilling, as I recall—in my efforts to know the beast’s nature. Surely you cannot profess to wonder at my o
wn uncertainty upon the points you have raised. Until the question is put to the test, I am no more able than you are to say whether the waters of the wysards will rise against your uncanny dragon to protect an adept of Ladrehdin.”

  ‘Whether the waters will rise’? Not ‘would’—but ‘will.’ Verek made it sound like the question wasn’t a conjecture from the past, but a puzzle for the present and a test for the future.

  Carin barely had time to wonder about Verek’s phrasing—and to note his use of the word “adept”—when the wizard redirected her attention to the subject they had strayed from.

  “I fear my case stands bootless,” he said, “in defense of the decision you made in the cavern of enchantment. Of the two reasons you have given me for sparing my life, I tell you that the first was mistaken and the second debatable.” Verek shifted on the blanket under him. “Perhaps I may do better, if you have a third to offer.”

  Indeed she did. But she hesitated to reveal it. Carin looked at the ground and began to pluck at dead, dry grass. She couldn’t stand the cold for long; it forced her hand back under her cloak.

  She didn’t look up then as she answered Verek. “My third reason will probably sound lame to you. But I felt like it would be”—she searched for the word—“dishonorable to murder someone who had just saved my life. I would have drowned if you hadn’t come in after me. You knew you’d get hurt. That pool is an ocean of pain.” Carin shuddered as she recalled it. “After what you did, getting me out of there even as hurt as you were, I felt like I owed you … especially when I saw you afterward. You looked awful.

  “So instead of finishing you off that night, I just walked away.” Carin shrugged. “Now you know all my reasons for not trying to kill you. Take your pick. None of them is very good.”

  She awaited his scorn. But Verek withheld it.

  “No reason serves better than this last one as grounds for any decision,” he replied, softly. “No higher justification is there than the voice of conscience. To commit a deed that is dishonorable in one’s own eyes is an unpardonable offense. The criminal may more easily make amends for a lifetime of unscrupled crime, than the man who forsakes his conscience—even once—will rid himself of that shame.”