“‘Think on this,’ I advised that pair of miscreants. ‘As you go afoot through these mountains, seldom will the sky be the only thing above your heads. Trees are aplenty on these slopes, stretching their limbs over you both by day and by night. You cannot keep me from the treetops. You won’t see the flash of my passage if I am high above you in the branches. You won’t know that I am there, readying a great bough to fall upon you. Only an instant’s warning will you have as the limb cracks and plummets downward.
“‘You have seen that I can do it,’ I reminded those two. ‘I could have killed that treacherous horseboy. Hear, therefore, my solemn promise: Harm one hair on the head of my dear friend Carin, and you’ll not leave these mountains alive. I won’t rest until I’ve crushed both your worthless skulls.’”
The sprite twinkled with excitement as it relived its confrontation with Verek. Even through her mitten, Carin felt the thrumming in the bole of the creature’s tree.
“The mage took only a moment to ponder my words,” the sprite went on. “Looking daggers at me, he replied in a voice that was harder than ash wood: ‘Then let there be this understanding between us—you goblin. The girl will not be mistreated, but to the end of this journey she must accompany me. You will not cause harm to befall the boy or myself. Dare an attack upon either of us, and you had best be certain that we both die under the same fatal blow. Else, the one yet alive—though he survive the other by scarcely a moment—will slay the girl, no mercy shown. Do you mark me well?’
“‘I do,’ I told him. But perhaps you will understand, my friend—as certainly the mage did!—when I declined to approach so near as to shake his hand on our agreement. I took myself off instead to a pine. Deep in its heart, I shivered for an hour or so, marveling at my own temerity. And yet, haven’t we all profited by my boldness? You needn’t fear the mage or his horrid boy; they needn’t fear me, and I am free to travel in your company, not skulk through the trees like a criminal.”
‘In your company,’ as the sprite construed it, seemed to mean traveling at Carin’s heels, as close as her own shadow. Yet its constant nearness did not make for easy conversation between them—not with Verek glowering at it over his shoulder if it dared to shrill out a syllable to her, and Carin too winded by perpetual climbing to reply. Only when the wizard allowed them to rest could they speak together at length, out of his earshot.
During a moment of necessary privacy, Carin brought up a matter that had puzzled her since Deroucey. As she retied the drawstring of her trousers, she asked, “Do you remember the evening we met, sprite, when I escaped from Lord Verek’s cursed woods and you led me to the old oak in the wilderness north of his property? You broke a limb out of that tree, and it fell on those dogs that were going to tear me apart. Remember?”
“Assuredly I remember,” the sprite replied softly. “That was the night my life began on this world. Before we met, I’d moved aimlessly through the days, friendless and afraid. You saved me from a cruel loneliness and from an existence that had no meaning. My dear girl, how could I possibly forget that night?”
Barehanded, Carin patted the sprite’s tree. “Don’t go all weepy on me, all right?” she muttered, a little embarrassed by the sprite’s earnestness. “I’m glad to have you for a friend, too.” She pulled on the deerskin mittens that Welwyn had given her and went on with her question.
“That night when you broke the branch, you told me you felt pain. It was bad enough to drive you out of that old oak, at least for a minute or two.” Carin spoke quickly while their rest break lasted. “But then in Deroucey, you made the tree limbs scratch at my bedroom window. When I locked myself out, you broke me off a sliver of wood to lift the latch. Then at the monk’s cabin, you dropped the branch on Lanse’s head. And when the wizard threatened me over it, you went flinging branches at him, he told me.”
“Indeed I did,” the sprite trilled, sparking proudly.
“But doesn’t it hurt you to snap off limbs like that?” Carin asked. “The first time you did it, you seemed to be in terrible pain. But now you act like it doesn’t bother you at all.”
The creature flickered restlessly in front of her.
“Ah, dear friend,” it piped. “You’ve unearthed a mystery there, I confess. Precisely when the change came upon me, I cannot say. But between the evening when we met, there at the edge of the magicked woods, and the week when I slipped the mage’s noose and joined you in Deroucey, I found myself more the master than the guest of the trees in which I dwell. Now I feel no pain when I cause limbs to break. I may even make them move a bit, as I made the twigs scrape at your shutters.”
To demonstrate, the sprite dipped the end of a pine bough and thrust it at Carin’s face. She ducked, barely avoiding a poke in the eye.
“Apologies,” the creature mumbled. “I haven’t such fine control of my movements as I would wish. But each day I practice a little and seem to know some improvement.
“But I digress. As to the reason for—or the source of—my new talents, I suppose it might be only that I’ve lived long in the trees of this world, and slowly I have reconciled myself to such a life. But I was in Ladrehdin many years before you befriended me, and only since that happy day have these new powers come to me. Therefore I think that you, Carin, must be the source of them, or at least their inspiration.”
She frowned and started to object. But she broke off in the middle of a word as Verek’s impatient shout drove her from the trees. The sprite, as skittish as if it were still a fugitive, flitted off in the opposite direction.
By the time the creature rejoined her, Carin didn’t have the breath to argue with it. They were climbing again, up a slope so steep that even the Trosdans struggled. With the hiking staff that Welwyn had given her, Carin pulled herself along. She fixed her stare ahead, on the hem of Verek’s cloak, and trudged after it. The single point of focus caught her up and kept her moving when her legs begged for rest.
Her thoughts, free to drift, went back to the sprite and its new talents. Carin couldn’t help wondering about its growing mastery of its living hosts.
What was happening to the creature? Had it drawn some uncanny strength from that half-ruined stoneheap of sorcery that Verek called home? The sprite had often come to the door of the manor’s decrepit hall to watch Carin practice with her first crude, homemade bow. And for the better part of a week, the creature had been locked in Verek’s private sitting room, behind doors that were bespelled to invisibility. Who knew what weird forces had writhed up from the underground vault of enchantment to envelop the sprite during its imprisonment—the same way they had affected Carin in that house?
Verek’s alarming speech—never far from her thoughts—sounded in Carin’s head: “Exposure to the wizardry within these walls has built in you a susceptibility to the magic. You sense, at first, only simple patterns. Then you begin to see more. The time shall come when all wizardry will be present to your senses with perfect clarity.”
Had something of the sort also happened to the sprite, during its captivity in that labyrinth of ensorcelled cellars and bewitched corridors? Was the creature now a budding wizard—as, indeed, Carin stood accused?
Hot from her exertions, she threw back her cloak and opened her coat. Cold air bathed Carin’s neck, but that wasn’t what made the hairs prickle at the nape of it. Twining with her thoughts was Verek’s warning: “In trusting the fetch-life, you have made an error.”
* * *
Ten days after setting out to gather “three hairs from the heads of three witches,” Carin was no nearer her goal than she had been on the morning of leaving Welwyn’s glen. The monk’s salt-and-pepper strands lay safely folded in the papers within her pocket. With them was a single long black hair, which she’d gleaned from the couch under the bookshelves where Verek had slept during their stay with his friend. How to collect two more was a puzzle rather like the dilemma the mice had faced when they wished to bell the cat.
Though dreading the close quarters of
a tent, Carin had expected nights with her “escorts” to fill out the charm’s last threesome. It wouldn’t need a sharp eye to spot two shed hairs from Verek’s dark head against the silvery gray of the rabbit-fur sleeping robes that Welwyn had supplied them with.
The tent, however, stayed on the deer sleigh. There was no crowding under the canvas at night. As they had done since this journey began, they slept under the stars.
And a bed in the snow, Carin discovered, was a great improvement over a blanket on hard ground. Following Verek’s example, she gathered enough pine boughs to spread on the snow a span deep. Over the soft needles went an oilcloth; over that, a thick wool blanket. Her fur sleeping bag topped the stack. After sliding within it, she drew a rabbit-fur robe over the whole heap and snuggled down. Carin stayed warm every night, though she might wake to a liberal dusting of new powder on her furs.
The snows, however, got heavier the higher they climbed; the winds, harsher; the drifts, deeper.
Late in their second week of snowshoeing, they made camp protected by a monstrous drift that constant winds had packed into a firm mass. No one gave, or needed, instructions as they went about the late-afternoon routine of setting up camp. Lanse tended the animals, tethering them where they could graze lichens off trees and rock outcroppings. On nothing more than that and a daily watering, the beasts thrived. While Verek got a fire going, Carin scooped up snow to melt for water for themselves and the deer.
Only wizardry could account for the speed with which Verek—working sometimes in a near white-out—kindled their evening blaze. A mortal would be long at the task that the wizard accomplished in minutes, in any kind of weather. He deigned to simplify the nightly work of making camp with only that one bit of magic: a fire that crackled brightly before Lanse had the deer unharnessed or Carin had scooped up her pots of snow.
This evening, at the base of the tall drift, Verek conjured a blaze with his usual ease. Then he got a shovel off the sled.
Wielding it with vigor, he dug into the mound of hard-packed snow, burrowing like an animal. Scoopfuls came out of the drift until Verek lay stretched in a tunnel so long that only his boots showed. In and out he crawled, bringing out more snow each time. Finally he disappeared inside and was gone for several minutes. When he reemerged, he stepped carefully up the side of the packed drift and bored the shovel handle into it, above where he had been working.
“Go in,” the wizard said. He looked down at Carin and spoke between pauses to catch his breath. “Tell me where the rod pierces the ceiling. What is clearly seen from within is only guesswork from without.”
She bit her lip. A snowy tomb wouldn’t please her any better than the stony black pit in which he’d once buried her. But if Verek meant to put her in harm’s way, he didn’t need to work at it this hard. In the course of tunneling, he had shed his layers of outer garments. He now stood knocking snow off his trousers and underjacket.
And though he didn’t repeat his instructions, he frowned at Carin’s hesitation. In the face that looked down at her, muscles tightened, most noticeably along his jaw.
She pulled a skillet of half-cooked oatcake off the fire so the bread wouldn’t burn, untended. Then Carin made for the tunnel’s entrance, where she paused again, but only briefly. The smooth, white passageway into the drift was nothing like the stairway of stone that plunged to the warlock’s cellar-dungeon in Ruain. This shaft did not lead downward into deathly blackness. It angled slightly upward. And at the top of the tunnel, a light showed.
Carin wriggled through and hauled herself into a small, dome-shaped room that was cleanly cut from the packed snow. The curved roof was smooth. A carved niche in one wall held a glowing witchlight orb. It bathed the snow cave with a light like the winter sun’s. The wind that relentlessly whipped across the mountainside was absent here. The cave had a welcome stillness, and the promise of warmth. It would hold the heat from an occupant’s body.
The den was so snug, in fact, that Carin saw right away the reason for the shovel handle that poked through the ceiling. Without an airhole or two, a person could smother in here.
She tapped the handle to get the attention of the wizard who held it. “It’s coming through at the back of the cave,” she yelled. “If you want to make another hole, go toward the fire about half the length of a snowshoe before you poke it in again.”
The wood withdrew. It left a puncture too small to admit wind or snow. After a moment, the tip of the shovel handle reappeared, punching through as Carin had directed.
Verek met her outside the mouth of the tunnel. “Good,” he said, and handed her the shovel. “You see how it’s done. If you would sleep tonight out of the wind, then start digging.”
Gamely Carin commenced, while the wizard got the second shovel from the sled and attacked the drift beside her. She’d tunneled into the snow barely her own length—sweating, shedding garments layer by layer—when Verek called her to guide him in punching airholes in the second cave. He didn’t offer then to finish her shelter for her, but joined Lanse at the fire.
The horseboy’s getting off easy tonight! Carin grumbled silently. Why does he get his dug for him?
Leaning on her shovel, she watched Verek and Lanse eat heartily of Welwyn’s stew. The boy had finished baking the bread Carin had started. On a bed of coals, slices of raisin cake were thawing, to be served with the dried apples that simmered to tenderness in a little water. Unvarying though the diet was, what the monk had sent them off with was far better than Lanse’s cooking had been.
And it required no preparation beyond heating. The cooking chores that Carin had once gladly avoided had become easy work for Lanse. But she got the finger-numbing job of scraping the pots clean afterward, and—this evening—digging her own snow cave.
Verek saw her watching them.
“Make haste,” he snapped. He waved her back to her task. “It will soon be too dark to see what you’re doing. Without some brightness in the sky above to help you judge the thickness of the roof, you’ll likely dig too shallow or too deep.”
Carin groaned, but crawled back inside the tunnel. At the end of it she hollowed out a space smaller than the domed rooms Verek had shaped. After a time, she worked entirely by feel. With the dusk came blackness inside the snowbank—and a cold drench of dread along Carin’s spine. How she loathed enclosed spaces in the dark!
A light appeared at the mouth of the tunnel behind her. “Take this,” Verek called. “Make a place for it in the wall.”
A witchlight orb bounded toward her. Its crinkly shell hissed a little as it struck the snow.
She was glad he couldn’t see how eagerly, how gratefully she clutched at the light. She scooped out a nook to hold the orb. When a shovel handle came through the ceiling, Carin directed the making of airholes. Then she crawled out of her small but serviceable burrow, beat the snow off her clothes, and pulled on her coat.
Verek crunched down off the drift and laid his shovel aside. He motioned to the fire, where Carin’s supper waited.
While she wolfed it down, Verek swigged a little dhera and instructed her on the finer points of carving a snow cave. “Do not neglect these things that I tell you. Before you blanket the floor and arrange your sleeping furs, make the roof smooth. Carve from it any sharp edges. Else, as your presence warms the den tonight, drops of ice water may drip on you from those nubs and ribs. Know also that you made the tunnel too straight. From its mouth, it should rise gently to the chamber of sleeping. A slanting passageway keeps out the cold.
“To remedy your error,” Verek added, “block the opening once you’re inside—or shiver through a night that should find you as warm as you were in Master Welwyn’s lodge.”
Carin almost strangled on her tea. She shot the wizard a look. This was the closest either of them had come to mentioning the Ladra incident. But whether Verek alluded, in fact, to her bewitchment of that night was known to him alone. His face gave no hint.
She cleared away the remains of supper, then reti
red to her den to follow Verek’s advice. Smoothing the roof took several minutes; her jabs with the shovel had left myriad nubs and ribs. When all were removed, she wriggled back through the tunnel to collect her bedding.
Her cave proved too small to accommodate it all. Her sleeping bag would lay flat on the floor only if the foot of it extended into the tunnel.
But that wouldn’t trouble her. Tonight she’d curl up. With snow gouged from the tunnel’s walls, Carin plugged the passageway against a wind that, by the sound of it, was building to a gale. Up inside her den, its roar was hardly audible.
Carin slipped her boots off and nestled into her furs. For a time she lay awake, too pleased with these new—if temporary—quarters to abandon herself to sleep. She hadn’t enjoyed this much privacy since Welwyn’s cabin.
She felt for the papers that were hidden in her trousers pocket. If she wanted to, she could work on deciphering Lord Legary’s ensorcelled writing, and the sleepers in the neighboring caves would know nothing of her secret labors.
Carin’s patience, however, had worn thin with the slow cover-and-reveal method by which she’d sifted a little meaning from the jumble. Far more promising was the spell of seeing. With it, she might strip away the shroud and expose everything Legary had hidden.
Had he put pen to paper, thirty-something years ago, to confess his slaughter of his son, Hugh? Had he revealed the fate of his daughter-in-law, the young widow who mysteriously disappeared from the household? Was it written, on that paper in Carin’s pocket, why the lady had left the care and rearing of her son—a ten-year-old Theil Verek—to a sorcerer who might be guilty of the most heinous crime?
Among all the questions that bounced around in Carin’s thoughts, however, one especially preoccupied her. What “taint” sullied the present Lord of Ruain? Why had the old lord, Legary, hidden the Book of Archamon from him? Had he sensed something so malignant in his grandson that he hadn’t wanted Theil Verek to have the Book, or the power it might give him? Perhaps Legary had prophesied the family’s ruin, when his “tainted” heir came of age and fathered a son—a child without the gift and therefore doomed, perhaps, to die as Hugh had died.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 22
