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The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

Page 13

by Deborah J. Lightfoot


  “Easy.” Carin stroked the mare’s neck. “Shh. I’ll get an arrow in my back if those two at the fire mistake me for a horse thief. They haven’t left me anyplace to get warm, so I’ve come to you.” Carin stood close, sharing the mare’s body heat.

  “Would to Drisha that you could tell me where we’re going,” she whispered into Emrys’ ear, “and when we’ll get there. What’s going to happen to you and me? Will your dark master take you home to Ruain eventually?” Carin scratched the mare’s forehead. “He promised to free me when spring comes. I just hope I’m alive then.”

  The mare’s white blaze caught the moonlight as Emrys brought her head up to peer over Carin’s shoulder. For a moment, the animal seemed to study the fireside sleepers as though pondering her rider’s questions.

  But then Emrys swung her head the other way, toward the thicker growth of trees up the slope from the streambank. Her nostrils flared. Large dark eyes and sensitive ears fixed on the timber, searching for … what?

  Carin stood still, hardly breathing, probing the moonlit scene. Deep in the shadows under the trees—was that a shadow blacker than the rest? And had it just moved?

  Emrys snorted. The other horses trained their gazes on the same stand of timber that the mare studied. They showed their uneasiness with low nickers and hesitant foot-stamping.

  Carin backed away. She dropped her bedroll, whirled—

  —And ran straight into the outstretched fingers of a hand. The fingers jabbed her in the face as the hand reached for the hood of her cloak, closed on it, and hurled her forward with bruising force. She fell on her knees, rolled, and came up in a crouch, her fists raised.

  Lanse’s voice cut through the night. “Witch! Stay away from the horses. What are you about, creeping around in the dark? Hexing the beasts so they’ll come up lame tomorrow?”

  By way of answer, Carin picked up a rock, and from her crouch launched herself at the boy. He sidestepped, and she lunged past him. Lanse helped her on her way with a boot to her behind. As Carin hit the ground again, the rock did not leave her grasp. Twisting, she flung it with all her might.

  The rock streaked past Lanse and struck Verek a blow to the chest as the wizard came up behind his groom.

  “Umph!” Verek huffed like an angry danbuck. He started back. “What in the Kingdom of Greatrakes is going on?” he bellowed. “By the powers! Can’t I close my eyes for three minutes without I find the two of you at each other’s throats?”

  Lanse got in the first word. “The trull was out here in the dark bothering the horses, my lord. As sure as I stand here, she’s been bewitching the beasts.”

  “You gilded ass-end of a black dog!” Carin swore at him. She scrambled to her feet.

  The moonlight couldn’t show her their faces clearly, but in her captors’ silence she read surprise. It seemed she had astonished them both by refusing to hold her tongue at this latest abuse from Lanse, the way she’d resolutely remained silent in the past.

  “Lord Verek,” Carin snapped. She looked past Lanse to the wizard. “I’m not the one who’s bothering the horses. Something is out there—up there.” She pointed to the sloping ground above their campsite. “I’m not sure what I saw, but Emrys saw it too.”

  She turned toward the horses and found both the mare and Brogar still watching the black patch up the slope. Though the other two animals had lost interest, Emrys and Verek’s hunter had their heads up and their eyes on the trees. Each flicked an ear toward the quarrel behind them, as though wondering when their riders would leave off squabbling and attend to business.

  One glance at the pair, so obviously on alert, and Verek was striding toward them. He brushed by the boy’s shoulder.

  “Get your bow, Lanse. It seems we have company.”

  Carin stepped aside to let the wizard and his boy pass. Then she withdrew to the nearly dead fire. She kneeled beside it, listening. What was out there? Nothing now seemed to move, either on the slope or among the horses. Only a breath of a noise reached her, a muffled whisper as Verek and Lanse conferred.

  The two were no more than a quarter hour returning.

  “A wolf, I think,” the wizard said. He crouched near Carin and the embers. “Alone, and not so desperate for meat—before storms and snows are upon the land—as to stalk humans or horses. It looks us over more from curiosity, I’ll wager, than from hunger.

  “Be that as it may,” he added, “prudence demands that a sentry be posted. As you seem to be the liveliest among us tonight”—by the moon’s rays, the look Verek gave Carin was ill-defined—“you will stand the first watch. Wake me at once if the horses grow restless. If all remains peaceful, call me when the moon is overhead or lacks but a hairsbreadth of it.”

  Verek did not await her answer. He reached for his blankets and stretched out beside the embers. Lanse returned sulkily to his place opposite.

  Carin didn’t protest. The evening’s string of alarms had her wide awake. She’d be on the lookout, whether Verek wished it or not.

  She walked back to the horses, retrieving her bedroll on the way. With her hands gloved and her blankets drawn round her shoulders, she sat with her back to a tree at the edge of the clearing. From there she could see the horses and the stand of timber that might yet hide a prowling wolf. Though after the commotion that Lanse had raised, the animal should be long gone.

  Was this a hopeful sign, Carin wondered, to be trusted with this guard duty? Stay awake, see your watch through, don’t annoy the warlock, she told herself, and maybe he’ll agree to take that damned iron off you.

  She felt for her anklet. The iron made a hard ring under the soft leather of her boot. The wound the thing had given her in Deroucey had healed completely, leaving only a pink scar where it had cut her. But the next time she “goaded” it, the iron might strike with such force that even the wizard, with all his skill as a healer, would not make her whole again.

  Carin looked over the horses that dozed now in the moonlight. Her gaze traveled up the slope, but she saw nothing except trees and motionless shadows. Even the moon seemed stilled. It progressed little along the climb to its zenith.

  The cold seeped through the layers of wool swathing Carin. It crept up with special vigor from the ground under her. She folded one blanket to put more layers between herself and the frozen soil. Then she resettled against the tree, her eyes watchful and her mind far from sleep.

  The woodsprite’s condition worried her. Would morning find the creature fit to travel? Or would the spark be too weak to follow as they resumed their journey westward through these trees? Carin wouldn’t be hiding the sprite in a seedling and carrying it as she had across the plain. The creature could not stand much more of that “cozy” form of transport.

  If the sprite wasn’t strong enough tomorrow to keep up with them, then it must rest here until it felt able to follow. It could trail her. Of course it could. After all, the sprite had caught up with Carin in Deroucey despite the fortnight’s head start that she’d had.

  Were these western woods as unfamiliar to the sprite as they were to her? Carin wondered. The wandering woodsprite had been none too clear about recollecting its first weeks—or even years—on this world of Ladrehdin. Could it have arrived in this realm so far from the wizards’ well under Verek’s library—the pool that had coughed up the honeywood wand that was, presumably, a relic of the creature’s homeworld?

  Carin could believe it possible. Her own landing on the shores of this world had been at the edge of a millpond far to the south of Ruain—five months, to travel it by foot, away from Verek’s estate in the highlands and from the wizards’ well where “her” puzzle-book had washed up.

  The sprite was lucky, Carin mused, that it didn’t have to climb half-drowned out of the same millpond that received me into this world. The creature might have found shelter in the willows that shaded the pond’s banks. But beyond them, it could not have forged a path. The grasslands of southern Ladrehdin stretched treeless around the millpond where Cari
n had been found.

  She’d been a cold, wet, terrified child “rescued” by a wheelwright into years of servitude. Given that the sprite remembered no time when it wasn’t flitting unfettered through the trees, it would seem that the creature had had the good fortune to live freely in woodlands since its first hour here.

  What was the force that had brought woodsprite and wand, Carin and puzzle-book, to this world—from wherever they had once called “home”?

  The question, more properly, she corrected herself, is not “what,” but “who.” Who is the “master wizard” who made the magic that awes Verek?

  Every word her captor had said in Deroucey played now in Carin’s thoughts. “I cannot send living flesh through the void,” Verek had maintained. He’d marveled at the power that had seized the life-spark of the woodsprite, and then snatched a child from distant shores, stripping the memories from both and depositing the two otherworldly beings here on Ladrehdin.

  What else had the warlock said that day?

  He spoke of possibilities … the possibilities that would open to a master wizard who wields the power of passage between the worlds. And in the next breath, he asked me about the whirlpool that I saw in his cave of magic—the vortex that carried vermin from a nightmare.

  Carin gasped. She sat forward from the tree at her back. She scanned the pines on all sides—behind her toward the stream, as well as up the slope where the supposed wolf skulked.

  What if Verek’s “wolf” was not a natural beast of Ladrehdin? What if the creature that stalked the horses—and their riders?—was in fact a freak, a horror from another realm?

  If it’s a question of possibilities …

  Who knew where that maelstrom of sorcery might have disgorged its cargo? In Verek’s cave of magic that night six weeks ago, the wizards’ well had shown them a powerful image of the approaching whirlpool. But it had not shown the vortex’s ultimate arrival in Ladrehdin. The alien monstrosities that rode the storm of magic could have landed anywhere—maybe on the banks of the very stream where Verek’s party now camped.

  The thought almost brought Carin to her feet to rouse the wizard and tell him what she suspected. A glance at the horses, however, showed no cause for alarm. All four dozed peacefully, bathed in moonlight. The silver glow revealed the plain east of the stream to be the same empty landscape that Carin had come to hate in the days it had taken to cross it. Westward, the trees formed crooked ranks on the slope, a motionless army of conifers.

  The trees were silent except for the occasional hoot of an owl and the rustlings of small creatures that were out hunting a meal. Once, Carin nearly came out of her skin at a cry, like a baby’s, from deep in the woods. It was only a hare dying in an owl’s talons. If any beast larger or more menacing stole through the timber, it moved as noiselessly as the stars above.

  Carin pulled her blankets up to her nose and checked the moon’s position. Another hour, and it would reach the top of its climb through the night. Another hour, and she could turn this cold duty over to the wizard and get the sleep that she was finally beginning to want.

  When she woke Verek, should she tell him her speculations about the whirlpool and the vermin it had carried?

  The warlock is way ahead of me there, Carin realized with a flash of insight. Why else would Verek have urged her to remember the maelstrom?

  Her thoughts returned to that night—the night the voice of the wizards’ well had summoned Carin to the cave to witness the oncoming whirlpool. The vortex had carried a matched pair of monsters—creatures so huge and hideous that Carin had dubbed them mantikhora after the similarly misshapen vermin of an old folktale she’d once heard.

  Together she and Verek had watched the whirlpool spin faster and grow larger, until the wizards’ well engulfed the vision. For all its violence and thunder, what they had seen had been only an image—a distant view of the magical storm that had surged to shore elsewhere on Ladrehdin.

  The flotsam the storm had left behind in Verek’s cave was not, however, mere vision or image. Carin only had to close her eyes to feel again the texture of that artifact … tough yet limber … a weight like a pane of split horn as she picked it up from the rim of the wizards’ well … but thinner and more translucent than any sheet of polished horn ever was. And in its graceful teardrop shape, it showed a tracery of veins. If the artifact—a fragment as long as Carin was tall—resembled anything earthly, it seemed to be the wing of a dragonfly, but almost big enough to support a horse.

  Emrys’ soft, questioning snort blended with Carin’s reverie for the briefest moment—long enough to bemuse her with the thought of the mare sporting wings. Then another snort brought Carin’s eyes fully open, like a dousing with cold water wakes a sleeper.

  She jumped to her feet. Her gaze swung from the horses to the shadowed stand of trees that again claimed the animals’ attention.

  Carin dropped her blankets and raced to Verek. Though she made no effort to be quiet, the shed pine needles under her boots were a cushion that muffled her steps.

  The wizard heard her anyway—or sensed her coming, by whatever means he used. Verek was throwing off his blankets and grabbing for his bow and quiver before Carin reached him. Neither spoke as he trotted at her heels back to the clearing. He stopped beside her at the tree where Carin’s blankets lay spilled in a heap.

  “The wolf is back,” she whispered. “But I don’t think it is a wolf. I think it could be the mantikhora. You know what I mean—those scorpion-alligator vermin that came across the void right before we left Ruain.”

  The wizard seemed not to hear her. He held his bow ready as he ran his gaze over the trees that Brogar and Emrys studied. Those two seemed more curious than alarmed. The other horses, as before, had lost interest. Both were grazing. Whatever lurked in the trees up the slope was undetectable to Carin’s human senses and almost beyond what a keen horse’s hearing and eyesight could perceive.

  If Verek made out more than his animals did, he kept it to himself. He lowered his weapon and let down his draw. Then he questioned Carin, in a whisper barely above her own.

  “Why do you say that our prowler is no beast of this world? Have you glimpsed it tonight? Was there, perhaps, a flash of the moon off an armored claw?”

  Carin’s face warmed. She shook her head. “You don’t need to mock me. No, I didn’t see a mantikhora in the moonlight. I didn’t see a wolf, either.” She stared at the trees. “To keep myself awake, I’ve been wondering about the magic that brought the woodsprite to Ladrehdin. I’ve been thinking about the wand that supposedly arrived at the same time as the sprite … like the Looking-Glass book drifted to you when I surfaced down south. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about the mantikhora and that weird piece of a flying wing that washed up in your wizards’ well.

  “It’s made me wonder: where are the mantikhora now? If they’d landed near a town, the people would be up in arms. We might have heard something of it in Deroucey. But what if those monsters came to ground up here? They might be hiding up in these trees … stalking us.”

  Verek didn’t scoff. Somewhat to Carin’s dismay, he nodded as though her every word had merit.

  “Good!” he exclaimed. “Excellent. I am heartened to find your thoughts turning at last upon matters that may not be neglected much longer. You’ve done well tonight. But now I would counsel you to put those mantikhora devils from your mind and get some sleep.”

  Verek leaned his bow against the tree and collected Carin’s blankets from the foot of it. “These covers, I claim for the rest of this short night. Mine at a cold fire will be yours. There’s little enough to recommend the one above the other.”

  Carin eyed him. Verek did not seem concerned about venomous monsters infesting the forested slope above. But he hadn’t denied that the possibility existed.

  In the act of arranging her confiscated blankets over one shoulder and under the other so that his bow arm wouldn’t be hampered, the wizard paused. In the moonlight, he studied Ca
rin’s face. The look she gave him wasn’t meant to hide her misgivings.

  As though in answer to it, Verek reached for her and rested his ungloved hand on her shoulder.

  Through the layers of her clothing, Carin could barely feel his touch. But her heart quickened. It was a gesture that Verek used often when speaking to Lanse; never, until this moment, when addressing his “footboy.”

  “You say that I mock you,” he murmured. “You’re mistaken. I do not. It is quite possible that the phantom in the trees is a thing that belongs not to this world, but far beyond the void. I have a notion, though, that the monsters you and I witnessed in the vortex are—at this moment—firmly in the grasp of the one who brought them to Ladrehdin. Surely the adept who wields such weapons would not suffer the beasts to roam at large, this far from the castle keep.”

  Verek tipped his head to indicate the hillside that hid some unknown creature of the night. The prowler seemed once again to have withdrawn. The horses were easy, dozing on their feet or nosing aside fallen pine needles in search of grazing.

  “I do not say that we won’t meet up with the devils before this journey’s done,” Verek went on. “But all that threatens tonight, I believe, is a restless wolf or maybe a mountain cat out hunting hares and finding us instead—interlopers in her territory. Curious she is, and puzzled, but not so dangerous to armed, well-mounted travelers as is more of this cold air and broken rest. So to bed with you now, or be hard put to rise in the morning.”

  Carin nodded. She tiptoed back to the spot beside the stream where Verek and Lanse had spread their blankets. She slipped into the warlock’s and pulled them over her head. The wool smelled of him—like an herbalist’s workshop musky with the odor of calendula oil and earthy vetiver. Her eyes closed. She breathed in his scent …

  … And felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake.

  “Get up,” Verek ordered. “Day breaks. We ride on.”

 

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