A thousand torches couldn’t cast such brilliance. Carin, peering through her fingers, beheld a world gone radiantly white. Off the featureless expanse that was visible from her bedroom window, the morning sun glistened. What looked like an immense field of milky diamonds reflected the light into her eyes, nearly blinding her.
Welwyn’s chuckle came through the door.
“It snowed all night, straight down—not a breath of wind to stir a flake of it. Come get your breakfast now, my dear, and then we’ll be about the morning’s lessons.”
Lessons?
Carin pushed the shutter nearly closed. The narrow beam that shafted through the crack lit the bedroom like a column of fire. She splashed her face at the washbasin near the room’s hearth and finished dressing. When she opened the door, she stepped directly into the kitchen half of the cabin’s front room. Welwyn had given her his bedroom for the night. The monk had shared the other back room with the convalescing Lanse. Verek, by his own insistence, had got the couch under the books.
“Spare me another night in the company of either of those matchless fools,” the wizard had growled to Welwyn, not softly enough to keep the remark from Carin’s ears. “I tire of playing peacekeeper to that pair of quarrelsome bratlings. But you may tell the boy for me, if he rouses in the night sufficiently to comprehend the warning, that he has overreached himself for the last time. Should he dare again to disobey me and raise a hand to that girl save by my explicit order, I will throw him off the mountain and let the buzzards pick the flesh from his bones.”
Not even the good-natured Welwyn had been able to laugh away the warlock’s foul mood. The monk had exited the room almost as speedily as Carin had, leaving Verek alone with his temper.
This morning, at the long table in the front room, only one place was set. Dirty dishes on the sideboard suggested that Welwyn’s other guests had already eaten and gone about their day’s business, whatever that might be.
The monk said nothing of them. He greeted Carin warmly, waved her to a seat, and served her such a plowman’s breakfast that three people her size couldn’t have finished it.
“Master Welwyn,” she began, speaking between bites of fried mutton. She had many questions to ask him. But the monk, as he dropped into a chair opposite her, held up his hand in warning.
“A master of my old profession, I truly was. But nowadays I’m only a humble man of the cloth.” Welwyn chuckled. “So call me Brother if you please, my lady. If we then are overheard by any visitor to this glen, it shan’t mean burning for the both of us, don’t you know.”
Carin stared at him. “I’ll, um, try to remember that, Mas— uh, Brother Welwyn.” She toyed with her food. “It’s got to be a lonely way to live, staying hidden. In Deroucey when we stopped at an inn, Verek warned me not to reveal to anyone his true identity. And here you are, ‘Brother,’ hiding your deep, dark secret by pretending to be a monk.”
“It’s no pretense, my dear.” Welwyn shook back the sleeves of his habit and grinned. “I took a monk’s vows, and as Drisha is my witness I live by them as best I’m able.” He tapped his chest. “But under these robes beats a wysard’s heart, it’s true. I cannot change who I am. Nor would I want to.” As Welwyn refilled Carin’s teacup, a bit of caginess crept into his smile. “Living as I do affords me the best of both professions.”
Welwyn set the teapot down, and his smile faded a little. “I will admit, Lady Carin, that any wysard who lives as long as I have is bound to see the art magik used in ways that twist and corrupt the power. If my years in the monastery taught me anything, however, it’s that evil may be done by the practitioners of either profession: the monastic, or the magian.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Carin said. “But monks don’t often get roasted over a fire. If sorcery isn’t wicked, then why do sorcerers hide away? Why are ordinary people afraid of magic?”
“They’re ignorant, my dear.” Welwyn shook his head. “Only those who are unaware of the power’s true nature presume to call it wicked.”
His smile brightened. He reached for Carin’s hand. “You have much to learn, and I am more than pleased to help you learn it. Let’s begin with this idea of aptitude—one’s natural gifts. Each of us comes into the world strong in some ways, weak in others. We have no more choice in these matters than we may choose from the womb to be short or tall, well-favored or unlovely.
“Pray tell me, Lady Carin,” Welwyn said, still holding her hand. “Which would you think more contented with his lot: the young man who is born with music in his soul who barely ekes out a living as a wandering minstrel? Or his brother, endowed from birth with a poet’s sensibilities, who studies the law and grows wealthy in that profession but never puts to paper a single line of verse?”
Carin eased her hand from the monk’s moist grasp. She cut a chunk of goat cheese to nibble while she thought it over. Then she replied, “I think the minstrel will be happier than the lawyer.”
Welwyn beamed. “And why is that, Lady Carin? Surely the musician’s precarious life isn’t so enviable as his brother’s easy living?”
She shrugged. “His brother might have money. But the musician has his freedom. He’s following his heart, but his brother is just making a living. If a poet doesn’t let himself write poems, if he won’t let the words out, then he’s put himself in a cage. He’s like a falcon that’s afraid to fly.”
Welwyn clapped his hands.
“Exactly right, Lady Carin. And it’s the miserable soul indeed, who is born with the power to partake of the mysteries but fears to embrace the gift. Down that path lies, at the end, only madness. Happy, though, are those who accept what Fate has given them, who respect the power of the wysards for the force of nature that it is, and apply themselves earnestly to mastering their craft.”
Happy? Hardly that, Carin reflected. But she sipped her tea and kept the thought to herself. She now knew three wizards, and only this one—Welwyn—seemed satisfied with his lot. Verek, moody on his best days, was a cauldron of seething anger at his worst. Unsociable old Jerold had sadness hanging over him like a cloud. Only this monk who lived a double life could by any stretch be called “happy.”
Carin pushed back her chair and stood. Hoping to change the subject, she thanked Welwyn for her breakfast, then began to clear the table.
The monk, grinning broadly, also lent himself to the task and left hanging, for now, the question of Carin’s “embracing the gift.” Welwyn scrubbed dishes; she wiped them dry. He made small talk; she answered politely while she studied the white landscape outside the kitchen window.
The trampled snow on the cabin’s front porch was too thin and scuffed up to show clearly how many people had stepped across it this morning. But there were dishes for four in the pile that Carin dried. Evidently Lanse had recovered from the woodsprite’s attack well enough to be out with his master. Did that mean the merry monk had custody of her today?
Carin looked over at Welwyn and smiled. The monk didn’t worry her the way Verek did. A sorcerer, the little brown man might be. Villainous, he was not.
Welwyn grinned back. “If I might be so bold as to advise your ladyship,” he said, “you should wear a smile more often upon those rosy lips. It suits you.”
He dried his hands on a cup towel. Then he crossed to the room’s front door, his rolling gait taking him there surprisingly swiftly. “Bundle up, my dear,” he bade her. “The most agreeable task has been given me today, to be your instructor. And if it’s an apt pupil you prove yourself to be, then we’ll be showing those two ornery escorts of yours a thing or two by dusk.”
Sudden apprehension darkened Carin’s almost-sunny mood. “Instruct me in what, Mas—uh, Brother Welwyn?” Though wary, she reached for her coat and cloak. “If you plan to teach me magic, then I can tell you already—I won’t be a good student.”
Welwyn sighed and smiled. “Far be it from me to criticize your ladyship. But in one regard at least, my dear, Theil Verek has your measure: you are rat
her a stubborn little jenny on that point.” He chuckled. “No matter. You’ll come to it when you’re ready. You’ll figure out for yourself who you are and where you belong. In the meantime, if this morning’s lesson finds you a clumsy pupil, you’ll not be the only lowlander to take a tumble your first time out.”
The monk opened the door and ushered her onto the porch, into a world of crackling cold and pristine white. Squinting against the brightness of sun on snow, Carin nearly stumbled over a pair of objects that leaned against the cabin’s wall. They were ungainly structures of wood and rawhide that resembled winnowing baskets, or perhaps rackets for a game of kirree. But they were neither. They were snowshoes.
Alongside the first pair leaned another set of similar design, somewhat wider and longer. Welwyn handed the smaller set to Carin. He claimed the larger pair for himself and walked to the porch’s edge. The snow on the ground came up level with the top boards, burying the steps.
“Now the lesson begins,” the monk said. He gave Carin a waggish grin. “Do as I do—and don’t be discouraged if you find that it’s harder than it looks, don’t you know.”
Welwyn positioned a snowshoe flat on the porch and put his foot in the middle of it. He crisscrossed two rawhide straps over and around his boot to bind his foot snugly to the device’s woven center. In the same way, he strapped on the other one. Then he supervised as Carin secured her own bindings. It was like tying drying racks to her boots. She had to stand with her feet far apart to keep from stepping on one with the other.
The monk chuckled but said nothing as he shuffled off the porch onto the snow. He scuffed over its surface, lifting one snowshoe just enough at each step to pass its inner edge over the resting shoe. His strides looked uncomfortably long for such short legs, as he swung his foot far enough forward with each step to avoid bringing that shoe down on the other.
Almost as quickly, however, as Welwyn might have walked the distance on solid earth, he moved over the snow to a nearby stand of trees. From their midst, he took a pole—obviously planted there before the morning’s lesson began—and used it for balance, like a hiking stick, on his return journey.
“And that, my lady, is how one walks on Briga bearpaws,” Welwyn said as he neared the porch. He didn’t rejoin Carin on it, but stopped about four steps away and stood there grinning. “Now you try it.”
“All right.” Carin squinted from the monk to her strapped-in feet. “It looks easy enough. Just slide one foot onto the snow, step out with the other a good long way … and—”
She lost her balance and slammed the moving “bearpaw” down on the fixed one. Finding it impossible then to move either foot, Carin pitched sideways into the snow with all the elegance of a falling log. The powder, like a cloud of feathers, swallowed her up. She floundered about and got snow in her eyes and mouth. The racks on her feet kept her boots up and her head down.
Welwyn laughed so hard, he would have toppled over into the snow with her if he hadn’t had the pole to lean on. Carin, quite comfortable in the white cloud after the first shock wore off, wiped the flakes from her face. Then she lay still; flailing her arms only dug her in deeper. From her powdery nest, she watched the monk’s round, brown body shake with his laughter. When a giggle also escaped her, Carin almost started. It had been a long time since she’d heard herself laugh.
Finally the little man wiped his watering eyes and composed himself enough to shuffle over and help her up.
“That’s the spirit, my lady,” he said when Carin was on her feet, awkwardly, standing with her snowshoes spread wide and feeling the strain in her thigh muscles. “There’s but one way to learn to walk on bearpaws. You must stumble around until you’ve got the feel of them—
“Here,” he added, and handed her his walking stick. “Lean on this if you start to tip over and whenever you need to untangle your paws. You’ll soon learn how not to stand on one with the other.”
And after several hysterical minutes of muddling up her feet and barely managing to keep upright, Carin had the hang of it. She shuffled along on the snow behind Welwyn like one old drunk on the trail of another. On snowshoes, the monk’s rolling gait became a sort of waddling slide that, from behind, was a funny thing to see. Carin laughed at him so mercilessly that he stood aside and let her lead.
This first taste of breaking trail in powdery snow soon silenced Carin’s giggles. Not twenty steps later, she was gasping for breath. When Welwyn shuffled past her, she gratefully—and quietly—fell in behind and stepped easily in the track that he packed for her.
They made their way to the shed behind the cabin, to find the powder as compacted there as if a legion had snowshoed across it. Soft snow was no obstacle, evidently, to a herd of Trosdan deer that were intent on getting to their grazing. Verek’s four horses, though untethered, did not venture beyond the shelter. They stood under the shed’s sloping roof and eyed their visitors indifferently. The fresh hay in stalls and feed troughs showed that Carin and her instructor weren’t the first people to come that way this morning.
“Mas—uh, Brother Welwyn,” she said when they paused on the packed snow outside the shed’s open south side. “Did Lanse haul his worthless self out of bed this morning and feed the horses? That’s his job. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if he moaned about his head hurting and tried to slack off.” She sniffed. “He really did try to kill me, you know. I’m not sorry about the tree limb smacking him.”
“Young Lanse is quite recovered in his head today, my dear,” Welwyn replied. He glanced toward the oak grove, as if watching for inexplicably falling branches. “You two younglings must count yourselves fortunate to be traveling with such a master healer as Verek. He’s kept in practice, patching up the one or the other of you.”
“Fortunate!” Carin snapped. “That’s not the word I’d use. The day I accidentally trespassed on that warlock’s land has to be the unluckiest day of my life.” Well, second unluckiest, she amended silently, remembering the whirlpool that had spun her between worlds. “Before Verek took me prisoner, I didn’t think wizards and magic still existed.”
This conversation was drifting dangerously close to Welwyn’s earlier talk of “partaking of the mysteries.” But it also brought up something that had puzzled Carin now for nearly three months. She decided to pursue the matter.
“Brother Welwyn, if you don’t mind me mentioning your first profession, I have a question I’d like to ask.”
“Ask away, my dear,” the monk said. “I am here today to instruct you, whether the subject be of the mundane or the magical.” He tapped one Briga bearpaw against the other, knocking off loose snow.
“What I’m wondering,” Carin ventured, “is why there’s no magic in the south of Ladrehdin. Oh, a few old women brew potions and make charms for luck. But according to the priests and all the stories that people tell their children, real magic is a thing of the past, there and everywhere. I believed the stories—until I came north and met up with that warlock friend of yours.”
Welwyn chuckled, half to himself as though enjoying a private joke. “The reason, my lady, for a dearth of wysards southward is simple. The good folk of the plains chased us all off, long years ago. A few of our number were determined to stand their ground, and many mortals died at their hands. Those wysards who stayed too long and grew too weak to defend themselves did burn. But most made the decision to leave. The ones who came north hide up here still.” He gestured at the peaks above their heads. “In these mountains and forests it’s hard, don’t you know, to find a magician who doesn’t wish to be found.” He chuckled again—rather morbidly, Carin thought.
“But you should know also, my dear, that the adept weren’t always outcast,” Welwyn went on, still smiling, but grimly. “There was a time, even in the south, when we took our places alongside the physicians and the judges and the men-of-arms. And for generations after they drove us from the plains, wysards lived openly in these northern woods and mountain towns.”
He sighed. “Th
en came the first rumblings here—the first stirrings of the ignorant against their neighbors who were different, and therefore to be abhorred. Well did the gifted ones remember the horrors of the south. They didn’t tarry to seek the understanding of the masses, but fled. Or changed their habits … some later than others.” Welwyn brushed the snow off his brown robes and winked at Carin, with a grin this time of genuine amusement.
“Maybe I’ll be pardoned now, my dear,” he added, “for daring to say again that you are nowise ill-fated, but a most fortunate young adept, to have fallen into the custody of Theil Verek. His lands in Ruain are the last wysards’ stronghold in Ladrehdin. The people there know that the House of Verek is a house of the gifted. They know … and yet, they do not know. It’s as if a spell of—how shall I call it? omission?—hangs over the whole province. Those who come and go from Ruain carry no tales away with them. And you’ll not find the name of the place on any map.”
That was true. In the thick volume The Lands and Realms of Ladrehdin that Carin had studied in Verek’s library, a map had depicted the southern grasslands in great detail. But where the plains shaded into Verek’s wooded highland estate to the north and east, the maps said only “The Wildes” or “The Interior,” with no mention of any place called Ruain.
Boldly the wizard had identified himself in Deroucey as the lord of the province Ruain—confident, he must have been, that no one would know the name or raise a cry against its uncanny master. Whatever magic hid the place from those inimical to wizardry must be magic as old as House Verek itself, to have kept the family and its lands out of Ladrehdin’s enduring folklore.
Carin shifted on her snowshoes to rest her weight on one leg and idly dig an edge of her other bearpaw into the packed surface under them. “Brother Welwyn,” she said, “you seem to know a lot about Verek and that whole family. Did you know his grandfather? The old lord, Legary?” She watched for Welwyn’s reaction as she named names. “Or Hugh? Ever meet Verek’s father? I’m curious about him—how he died so young, when Verek was just an infant.”
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 18
