She jumped up, no longer distanced from the scene. Now was not the time for shock, disbelief, anger—all the emotions she might have vented on her assailant, if the night were not so cold and danger not still lurking, perhaps very near.
Kicking through the snow, Carin stepped to the wizard’s side. Verek had finished a quick probing for broken bones; now he peeled back the boy’s blood-soaked sleeve. The cat’s claws had left long, deep gashes down Lanse’s arm.
“Do you want me to lay a fire?” Carin demanded more than asked, biting off her words. “I suppose you’ll need water—lots of it, and hot.”
The wizard twisted his face up to hers and gave Carin a startled look, as though he was surprised to discover her standing there. Then he nodded. With two blood-smeared fingers of his right hand, Verek pointed at the timber that the sprite had attempted to drop on the big cat. It looked like the sprite had torn the entire top out of the tree and flung it down with great force. The broken-off limbs responded to Verek’s magic by unburying themselves from the snow and splitting into firewood-sized lengths.
“Stack those for me,” he muttered, his voice no longer full of menace, but subdued. “I’ll kindle the blaze presently. First I must control this bleeding.”
Neither of them spoke again for many minutes. Even the sprite held its tongue. It watched mutely from its tree as the wizard bent over Lanse.
Carin hauled the firewood to a spot clear of the grove. She made a platform on the snow from wrist-thick pieces of the green timber and crisscrossed those with heavier logs.
She was stacking the last of the wood when the wizard got to his feet with Lanse in his arms. Verek floundered through the powder, struggling with the boy to the mouth of Lanse’s snow shelter. He paused there, to lay the boy on the snow and snap his fingers at Carin’s stacked wood. It burst into flame. Then he wriggled feetfirst into the tunnel and dragged the boy in after him.
By the time Verek reemerged, Carin had one pot of water steaming, another of snow melting, and a third of tea steeping. The wizard crouched at the fire and dipped up a little hot water to wash the blood off his hands. He accepted a mug of tea from Carin and sipped it in preoccupied silence. Finally, with his tea half drunk, the wizard seemed to order his thoughts and find his voice.
“The boy has lost a deal of blood,” he muttered. “When—or if—he will be able to resume this journey, I do not know. I must rely on you to take a share of the duties that were his. Will you tend the animals, give them water and tie them where they may find food of the sort they favor?”
Carin gave him a curt nod but no other answer. She rose, scooped up more snow, and stirred it into the pan where the first was melting. The deer would need several firkins of water. Then she started for the grove where the three surviving Trosdans were tethered … and where one carcass lay in the snow, bathed by the light of Verek’s uncanny orbs and rapidly freezing solid.
“Wait,” the wizard called, and Carin stopped.
Verek brushed past her on his way to the sled. He unlashed and threw back the canvas and shifted packs until he uncovered an item of gear that Carin had not seen since they loaded the sled in Welwyn’s glen. It was the leather case that held “her” indigo bow.
The wizard drew the weapon out, braced it expertly, and put the bow into Carin’s hand. She accepted it without a word, blinking from the wizard to the weapon and back again.
“The cat is most likely too gorged on the meat that it made off with, to return soon for its other kill,” Verek said. “But we’ve hours yet until sunrise, and I would not have you straying far from the fire, unarmed. If the sprite can be trusted to look out for you—and evidently you are a better judge of its character than I am—then set the creature to watch for danger while you tend the animals.”
Verek cleared his throat, then added, “Walk with me to the boy’s burrow. You shall have his arrows.”
The wizard started to reach for Carin. For a moment his hand hovered above her shoulder. But then he withdrew it, not touching her, and still making no turn toward Lanse’s den.
“If the beast appears, cry out,” he muttered. “Send the sprite to fetch me. Do not face the cat alone—unless it attacks so swiftly that you have no choice. If it comes for you, shield yourself with the deer. Better to forfeit another of the team than to lose your life.”
The wizard paused. Though he stood barely an arm’s length from her, Verek moved still closer until a fold of his cloak brushed Carin’s fingers where they curled around her bow.
She wanted to back away, but she couldn’t. Verek’s eyes held her. The flash of the fire—or a glimmer of magic—reflected in their black depths.
“If you are in mortal peril,” he whispered, “do not rely solely on the weapons of mortal men. You are only a novice with the bow. Your greater strength is in the wysard’s art. Call on the power firmly but with respect, and it will serve you.”
Verek’s gaze bound Carin to him another moment. Abruptly then, he stepped past her and returned to the fire.
Using his cloak to protect his hands, Verek picked up the pot of steaming-hot water and carried it to Lanse’s snow cave. Carefully he slid it into the entrance tunnel, pushing it ahead of him as he crawled inside.
Shortly after Verek had disappeared within, a quiver of arrows slid down to the mouth of the tunnel. Carin stepped over and picked them up. For the first time in more than three months, she was armed.
She shouldered quiver and bow and went to water the deer. While they drank, Carin took a pine-knot torch from the fire and began the search for fresh grazing. The animals had consumed everything edible near camp. At last Carin located a lichen-covered jumble of boulders that rose out of the snow worrisomely far from the fire.
“That’s a good place for a big cat to hide, don’t you think, sprite?” she muttered to the spark that dogged her steps.
“Indeed,” the sprite replied, its voice thin and anxious. “Do wait here and permit me to check for tracks. Such a huge creature could hardly approach through fresh snow and not leave us a sign of its passage.”
Watchful, Carin stayed where she was while the sprite flitted from tree to tree, near the ground. It made a circuit of the heaped boulders. When it reported nothing amiss, Carin jammed her torch into a chink in the rocks and hurried back to the grove where the deer were tethered.
One by one, she teased the three survivors to the new feeding ground, charming each with a witchlight orb that she plucked from the trees around the cat’s kill. The deer stepped along willingly, with their bright, interested gazes darting from the light Carin held to the woodsprite that sparked ahead to guide them. Their wild-eyed distress at their mates’ slaughter had faded. Each deer took in its new surroundings with a brief glance, then fell to grazing as Carin tossed each orb into the rocks before retracing her steps to collect another Trosdan.
Two of the survivors were the more lightly built lead deer. The third—the team’s one remaining heavy puller—was so eager to join its fellows that it threatened to drag Carin. Her third witchlight hit the snow as she made a two-handed grab for the beast’s halter. When she had the animal securely tethered, Carin retrieved the dropped orb and set it amid the boulders with the other lights. They bathed the rocks in a comforting glow.
Would their brightness repel the cat?
Or attract it?
At the thought, Carin unshouldered her bow, nocked an arrow—and hit what she aimed at, but barely. The head buried up in the target pine, as far from the middle of the tree’s bole as it could be and not have missed completely.
“That’s not a bad try,” she said aloud, determined to be optimistic, “from someone who hasn’t touched a bow in months.”
“A credit to her teacher,” commented a clipped voice at her back.
Carin whirled. Verek stood there with his back against a tree, appraising her.
Breezy though the night was, Carin’s own footsteps crunching the crusts of snow were perfectly audible over the moan of the wind
. Yet she hadn’t heard the wizard approach.
She heard him now, and watched him closely, as he made his way to the jumble of boulders that the deer were stripping of lichens. He pulled the pine-knot torch out of the cleft where Carin had stuck it.
Verek held the palm of his right hand so close to the blaze that it should have burned him. He never flinched. The fire slanted away from his fingers as though blown by a steady wind. Subtly, its color changed. Joining the reds and yellows were flickering tongues of blue and white.
The wizard dropped his hand. The flame licked upward again, seemingly free of his influence. But it was no longer a natural blaze. The wood and resin of the torch did not crackle. The fire didn’t consume them. When Verek handed the torch to Carin, she took it knowing it for magian fire.
Verek jerked his head in the direction of their cave-pocked snowbank. “Mingle this with the flames of our campfire and they will burn high through the night. If the cat returns for the remaining carcass—and it would be bold to do so, after the uproar that met its first foray—then a blazing fire should blunt its curiosity about dens in the snow and the sleepers within.” Verek folded his arms. “To judge by the state of your den, you were nearly clawed out and eaten like a snow-hare. Am I right?”
Carin nodded. She gave him a terse account of the cave-in and her escape.
“I’m freezing out here,” she added. She raised the torch in one of her bare hands and her bow in the other. “My gloves and everything else got buried when my roof fell in.”
A sudden gust whipped up the powder around them. In the blowing snow, Verek became a specter of the winter night. He was a white-veiled figure indistinct around the edges, faceless under his fur-trimmed hood. Carin shivered.
The apparition spoke. “I will stay out here and guard these animals. Go back to camp.” Verek gestured at the magicked torch he’d given Carin. “Stoke the fire as I have told you, but do not lie out by it. Once you have touched these flames to those, the campfire will not need tending, and I want you out of this wind. Take my bed.”
“Your bed?” Carin needed a moment to digest this. “Oh. Your snow cave. You don’t mind me going in there?”
Verek tilted his head slightly. “While I am on watch, you may as well have shelter. I’m hardly being generous.” He shrugged. “Mine is a gesture that costs the giver nothing. But it behooves one who has wronged another to make amends as best he can.”
Carin stared. Oblique though it was, Verek’s remark was as much an apology as she had ever heard him make.
Adding to the wonder of it, his contrition didn’t seem to end there. “Sprite!” he called. He pushed back his hood. “Do you hear what we say here?”
“Every word,” the creature piped from the same tree that, until a few moments ago, the wizard had stood under. “It’s poor compensation you offer, you know, for holding a knife to the throat of an innocent who’d already bled on the snow for you, saving you from a cold grave. You would do better to beg her forgiveness for having so abused her.”
If Carin had had a hand free, she might have put it to her throat at this reminder, to feel again the tender spot where Verek’s dagger had nicked her skin. But she only stood quietly and listened.
“What must I do, mage,” the woodsprite went on, as sharp-voiced as a clewbird, “to assure that you do not act again in so mistaken a manner? Shall I keep still, watching from afar and doing nothing, should danger again threaten the boy or you? If there is the least chance, that by my actions I may bring harm to my friend Carin, then I promise you, warlock, I will be as small and quiet as a bud. Let the monsters devour you! Better that, than I rush to strike your enemy and have for my reward the death of my friend.”
As the sprite finished, Verek drew in a long breath through his nose. Then he let it out slowly. His right hand made a fist.
Carin ignored the sprite’s angry sparking. She watched Verek’s hand. Maybe the wizard could not hurt the sprite with his magic. But that hand would signal his intentions, if he meant to try it.
Slowly, however, Verek’s fingers relaxed. The wizard took another deep breath.
“If you are quite done,” he growled, “then give me leave to speak as I began. That both you and the girl have a grievance against me, in consequence of my misjudgment tonight, I acknowledge. I do not doubt that both of you will have satisfaction from me, before we three part company. Be that as it may: pray choose a better time than this to seek a reckoning. Other matters press tonight.”
Verek lifted his chin. “I ask a service of you, woodsprite, on the girl’s behalf. Return with her to the snow-slope where we camp and mind the sleepers and the cat’s abandoned kill. If the monster comes again, alert me. I cannot watch both there and here. It’s the deer, I think, that are in the gravest danger, and so it’s here that I must stay. To lose another of the beasts could be our doom. We will not find the crossing of these mountains easy now, with only three Trosdans to take us over.”
He pulled his hood up and tucked the fur around his face. “In this rock pile, then, is my night’s burden. Yours, sprite, is with your mistress. Can she rely on you? Will you watch and neither stray nor slumber?”
The woodsprite sparked a little closer to the wizard, as though it wished to be clearly heard. “I will watch, steadfast as the trees themselves, and from a branch with a view of all that moves. I won’t be caught unawares again—by man or by monster.”
Verek turned away without replying to the sprite. He didn’t speak to Carin either, but dismissed her with a sharp jerk of his head.
With the sprite flitting alongside, Carin walked back to camp. There she touched the magian flame to their wood fire. Instantly the fire took on a magical aura of blue and white. She huddled beside it, shivering but too keyed up for sleep.
“Sprite,” she called softly.
“I’m here,” the fay murmured from just over her head.
“Tell me what you saw tonight—everything that happened. Until you lit things up and Verek made his witchlights, I couldn’t see what was going on. I only know what I heard.”
The sprite sparked down the trunk of its tree to be level with Carin’s gaze. “Alas, my friend, I do not know all that occurred. I was fast asleep until a horrible scream woke me. Terrified, I was, that you were in deadly danger. When the cry came again I leapt toward it, and I saw the giant cat rip the throat from one of your animals. Another carcass lay on the snow at its feet—the first to scream, it must have been, and the first to die.
“And then the boy was there, like a shadow in the darkness.” The sprite flickered brightly, warming to its tale. “With an angry roar, the cat swiped a paw at him. He yelled out and tried to stab the monster. But the cat was too strong and too fast. It slapped at him again and sent him sprawling.
“Hardly knowing what I did,” the woodsprite added, “I dropped a limb on the beast. But the cat had already taken the first of its kills in its jaws and was sprinting away through the trees. The bough I felled barely brushed the monster’s flank, doing it no damage.
“And then, dear girl, you hailed me, and a moment later I heard you cry out.” Distress tightened the sprite’s reedy voice. “Until that instant I’d had eyes for nothing except the battle below me. I looked for you, and saw—to my horror—the mage pressing a knife to your throat.
“‘What madness is this?’ I thought, for a moment too stunned to do more than stare. Then the fiend spoke, and I understood. He knew nothing of the cat’s attack, but believed I had dishonored our agreement and was designing for the boy’s life.”
Carin nodded. The sprite’s account filled in the scene much as she’d imagined it. Absently she drew one bare hand out of her cloak and started to stir the fire. But then she stopped short, touching nothing. Verek’s magian flames were best left alone.
Go in, she counseled herself. It’s freezing out here, even around a magical campfire.
But Carin still had a question to ask the woodsprite, although the creature probably could not an
swer it any more confidently than she could.
“Sprite,” she whispered, “would he have gone through with it? Would that warlock really have killed me, do you think?” Carin touched her throat, where the blood that had oozed from the knife-nick had dried into a line of hard little beads. “I remember you telling me that I didn’t have to be afraid of Verek anymore. But I am afraid of him, sprite. I’ve been scared of him since Ruain, when I thought he was going to feed me to the puzzle-book dragon. And that might still be his plan.” She shook her head. “I don’t trust him.”
The sprite flickered in its tree. It came to rest a little higher, as if trying to glimpse the blackheart who minded the deer out at the rock pile.
“I think, my friend, that you are right to doubt the wizard,” it said, “and that I must be more careful of him. I was so happy to join your company, I persuaded myself that now the mage and I understood each other, and all would be well.” The sprite scoffed. “I won’t be a saphead anymore. You may rely on me, Carin, to watch over you as the mighty rhonabwy pines guard these peaks.
“But you’re trembling,” the creature interrupted itself. “The night is too cold. Retire and sleep soundly. I will not slumber, nor let danger approach.”
Carin thanked the sprite, then took her leave of it and crawled into Verek’s snow cave. The first thing she did inside was to pull the witchlight orb out of its open niche. Just as she had done in her own den, Carin carved out a shielded space for the orb so that only its light reflected into the cave.
Having taken this precaution against being “watched,” she turned to examining the wizard’s lair. It was roomier than hers had been, and an oilcloth and furs covered its floor completely. Verek’s sleeping robes were thrown back, as one would expect to find in a bed that had been hurriedly abandoned. Carin studied the spot where the wizard’s head had rested, and she smiled. There, caught in the gray fur, were two long black hairs.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 25
