Her fingers were so cold, Carin could barely bend them. But she managed to comb the hairs out and lay them side by side on the shelf of snow that held Verek’s saddlebags. That was all she could do for the moment. Braiding nine hairs into a neat circle would have to wait until her fingers thawed.
The wizard’s furs wrapped Carin in soft warmth. But she couldn’t sleep. Her eyes wouldn’t close. She stared at her prize, the dark hairs that looked like inky threads against the snow. The cat that had mauled Lanse and rousted Carin out into the night had done her a strange service. If the giant feline hadn’t caved in the roof of her den, she certainly would not be here now … breathing in the herbal scents that clung to the wizard’s furs and eyeing two shed hairs from his raven head.
Nothing about them should cause Carin anxiety. But she did begin to feel a sense of disquiet. And gradually, her uneasiness deepened into real apprehension.
What was here? What was worrying her?
On the snow-shelf directly behind the hairs, Verek’s saddlebags rested. As Carin focused on them, she recoiled with a sensation that went far beyond worry: this was revulsion. And the longer she lay looking at the wizard’s bags, the more repugnant they became.
“Sorcery,” she whispered to the walls. “That warlock is using magic to guard his secrets.”
What did Verek carry in his bags that he would want to protect with this powerful spell of abhorrence?
The woodsprite’s pretty wand, for one thing, Carin guessed. The honey-colored stick was as alien to the world of Ladrehdin as was the sprite—or herself. And if the warlock intended to free this world of all the unnatural things in it, then he could hardly have left the wand behind, hidden in his library in Ruain, could he have?
“There,” she muttered aloud. “You’ve put it into words. And you’ll never get the thought out of your head now, will you? Admit it: you know what he’s planning to do. You know how he means for this journey to end.”
Carin shot out her hand and picked the two precious hairs off the snow near the bags. Her fingers prickled, partly with the warmth of returning circulation, but partly because the move was like reaching blindly around a rock where a snake or a scorpion might lie in wait. She couldn’t yank her hand away fast enough.
She rolled over to face the opposite wall. The feeling of aversion didn’t entirely leave her then, but it dwindled from an almost nauseating disgust to a mere dislike of the packs at her back.
As she lay on her side under Verek’s sleeping robes, Carin fished in her pocket for the three sheets of paper and what was folded within them. Carefully she added the black strands to her collection, and refolded and pocketed the sheets.
With her prize secured, she lay quite still, closed her eyes, and took deep, slow breaths. Gradually her mind quieted. Her body relaxed. Though approaching the threshold of sleep, Carin lingered this side of it, vaguely aware that nothing remained in the cave to trouble her now. There was nothing detestable about the packs behind her. What could there be, in fine leather fitted with brass, to fill her with disgust?
Slowly, Carin rolled over. With her eyes still shut, she sat up. As gently as if they sought the face of a lover in the dark, her fingers reached for the saddlebags. They brushed the leather. Their tips slid under the flap, feeling for the pouch’s lip and whatever the warlock might have stowed in his bags.
“By all that’s unholy!” Carin breathed as her fingers met something that was not kidskin leather. This had a sliminess to it—
—And worse, it moved.
She gasped, jerked her hand away, and opened her eyes.
From the snow-shelf where Verek’s packs had been, two grinning skulls looked out at Carin. The strips of rotting flesh that hung from them writhed with maggots. A stench of decay filled the cave. Her fingers that had touched the illusion bore a brown, mucky stain.
“Phew!” Carin clenched her eyes tight shut and willed the skulls away. “Get out of here,” she told them. “You’re not real—not the way you look, or the way you feel, or the way you stink!”
She fanned the air vigorously and waited until the odor had dissipated before she opened her eyes again. The illusion was gone. Only Verek’s saddlebags rested on the shelf. The stain on her fingertips was neither putrefaction nor worm-slime, only a sooty smudge from the campfire.
“You win, warlock,” Carin muttered to the packs’ absent owner. “Keep your secrets. I have my own.” She touched her pocket.
She turned her back to the bewitched saddlebags, curled up under Verek’s furs, and tried to summon the sleep that had nearly come before. Carin’s slow, deep breaths caught no whiff of corruption, only the scents of the wizard’s healing herbs. Quieting her thoughts took a little longer this time. But before the night was over, she slept.
* * *
Verek evicted her midmorning.
“The boy will live,” he replied, gruffly, to the question that Carin asked him over tea and a late breakfast at the magian campfire. “He is too weak to travel. We must remain here another night at least. And I must sleep. The day is yours, therefore, to do with as you will.”
The wizard stood and stretched. He looked tired.
“I trust you’ll be safe enough in the sunlight,” he said, “for the cat is a night-hunter. But be vigilant. Game is scarce in these mountains this winter. If the beast is hungry, it may come prowling back to our small herd before darkness falls. I caution you again as I did last night: if the monster appears, summon me. Do not try to face it alone.”
With that, the wizard disappeared into his snow cave. Carin finished her breakfast, then checked on the deer. The three surviving Trosdans seemed content with their new “pasture.” The boulder field wasn’t yet denuded of lichens. Today she could take her time and search out fresh grazing while the sun shone.
Following the trail that she and the deer had made last night, Carin walked to the grove where the cat had attacked Lanse. The woodsprite met her there, calling down a greeting from a high branch.
“Doesn’t the light of day paint a fairer face on all,” the creature piped, “whether roving traveler or rooted tree?”
“Things always do look better in the morning,” Carin agreed. “But this picture is missing something.” She gestured at the grove. “Where’s the dead deer? Where’s the blood? The snow was covered with it. Now I don’t see a drop.”
The sprite sparked down close to the ground. “The mage busied himself early today,” it said, “with removing all evidence of last night’s trouble. He took the ax to the carcass and chopped off the good meat. That, he put on the sled. What was left, he burned.
“And an odd fire it was,” the sprite added. “Although it consumed the deer’s remains and even the blood that was spilled last night, it did not melt the snow. The mage snapped his fingers and queer blue flames sprang up everywhere. The whole grove seemed ablaze. I leaped to the far side of the snowbank to be clear of the inferno. I felt sure the pines would ignite.” The sprite flickered in a good imitation of a flashing blaze.
“I’d hardly gained my new post, however,” the creature went on, “before the fire died. As the mage walked away, I returned and discovered the spot as you see it now—the trees unharmed, the snow pristine, as though no violence had ever touched this place.”
Carin nodded. “That warlock is good with fire. He can make it hot enough to singe the sun, or cool enough to hold in your hand.” She patted the pine where the creature sparked. “I’d worry about him killing you in one of his fires, except I know you can outrun him. You must be tired, though, from all your jumping through the trees. Verek is sleeping now. Why don’t you get some rest, too?”
“I am fatigued, I confess,” the sprite replied. “But I do not wish to leave you alone, not with a giant cat aprowl on this mountain.”
“I’ll be all right,” Carin said. “I’ve got my bow. And anyway, the cat will probably den up until dark. You can watch for it then. I’d sleep better tonight, knowing that you and Verek both got some
shut-eye so you won’t be staggering around, dead on your feet after sundown.”
“You’re right, my friend,” the sprite said. “Without rest, I’ll be a saggy stem tonight. But you must rouse me if you see or hear the cat. I’ll drop a tree on it and break its back. Promise me you’ll call out if you need me.”
Carin promised, and the sprite withdrew deep into the grove, where the sun wouldn’t keep it awake.
After the creature left her, Carin stood quietly under the trees. She studied the unmarked snow at her feet. Here, Verek’s magic had left no trace of last night’s events. But beyond the edge of the grove, the cat’s tracks were not obliterated. They showed plain.
She unshouldered her bow, fixed an arrow to the string, and stood a moment longer, studying the cat’s huge pawprints. Then she whirled and walked back to the heaped boulders where the surviving deer grazed.
For the next hour or so, Carin worked her way through the forest that surrounded their camp, searching for another good patch of grazing for the Trosdans, looking out for spoor, and practicing with her bow. What Verek had taught her in one grueling afternoon session, months ago, came back as vividly as if the lesson had been yesterday. Soon Carin was hitting her targets, not by the barest margin, but dead center.
It helped her shooting, that the day was utterly calm. Last night’s wind had died. The forest was still, except for an occasional sharp report from a tree expanding in the cold. Carin’s streaking arrows hissed audibly in the silence that pervaded the sunlit, motionless landscape.
By the time she finished the circuit around their now perpetually burning campfire, the sun had passed the apex of its low arc through the winter sky. Back with the deer at the field of boulders, Carin sat down on a flat-topped rock. She laid her bow and quiver nearby, on a stone out of the snow.
Through her layered clothing she worked her hand, and drew from her trousers pocket the neatly folded papers and the strands they held. She plucked the final two from her own mane. With quick fingers, she knotted the strands together and braided the “three hairs from the heads of three witches”—auburn, raven, salt-and-pepper—into a circle that was as big around as her wrist.
When her handiwork was finished, Carin spread Legary’s ensorcelled writing on her knee. As she held the braided circlet like a magnifying glass over the paper’s top left corner, for a long moment she couldn’t bring herself to recite the incantation. Could she bear the disappointment if this magic failed?
“Say the words,” she ordered herself. “Let’s see if I really have the gift.”
Carin took a deep, shaky breath, then closed her eyes and muttered the charm in one exhalation:
“Peering-eyed woman, seeing all;
Keen-eyed man, seeing all;
Virile sons, nubile daughters,
Dark-eyed fey ones, seeing all.”
The magic did not fail. Carin pried her eyes open and let out a little yelp. Perfectly legible through the circlet of witches’ hair was the first stanza of a long narrative poem:
The evil in our midst has fled,
But not in time to save
The son I sacrificed
To arrogance.
Chapter 15
The Wysard’s Art
“‘The son I sacrificed.’”
Glee gave way to gooseflesh that rippled along her arms as Carin read the line aloud and felt its significance sink in. Her suspicions were valid. Whether Lord Legary had delivered the deathblow himself or had ordered the execution, by his own pen he confessed himself guilty in the death of his son, Hugh.
She moved the circlet to peer through it at the second stanza, and felt her mouth go dry.
Only the issue survives—
The issue of a union corrupt,
And he with demon’s taint
Upon his gift.
“Sweet mercy,” Carin breathed. He with demon’s taint upon his gift had to be “the tainted seed” that Legary had written about in his later narrative. In that second poem, the tainted one was unmistakably identified as the present Lord Verek—the warlock Carin had been living and traveling with, all these months.
“His own grandfather called him a demon,” she muttered, feeling sick. “And that’s coming from a murderer. Drisha’s teeth, what a family!”
In two verses, Legary’s ensorcelled narrative had not only confirmed Carin’s worst fears, but also raised a disturbing new question. What had the elder wizard meant by “a union corrupt”? Had the marriage of teenaged Hugh and his unnamed bride been a bad match? If so, on which side?
With a mind that was divided between dread of what she might learn and determination to know the darkest of House Verek’s secrets, Carin read on. Legary’s words put rot in her belly.
How was I blinded?
How could I not see
The nature of the pestilence
I loosed upon this House?
“A tragic loss!” the mourners cried.
“But comfort shall you take
In the babe so gently held
In the grieving widow’s arms.”
Beseemly garbed in widow’s weeds,
She led the progress to the tomb
And wailed and keened, and played her role
In the grotesquerie she wove.
The heir she suckled at her breast
Was two parts innocence, one part fiend.
Damn my ambitions! Damn—
A bare hand materialized as if from the ether. It snatched the paper away and almost took Carin’s bespelled circlet of braided hair.
She dropped the circlet into her lap, acting more by instinct than wit. It disappeared in the folds of her green woolen cloak.
“By a cur’s pocked hide!” Verek swore. “What in the name of Drisha or all that is unholy are you about here?” He stood over her, wrath personified, his glittering black eyes flashing from her upturned face to the paper in his hand.
Carin would have run, if the wizard hadn’t been standing squarely in her way. Hemmed in on three sides by the piled boulders and blocked in front by a violently angry sorcerer, she could only stiffen at his feet.
For a moment, Verek was silent. His eyes skimmed the leaf Carin had torn from his treasured Book of Archamon. Then he cursed again, scaldingly, and crumpled the paper into a tight ball. He twisted away from her, and with a mighty heave like a spear-thrower’s release, he hurled the wad at the sky. While it was yet airborne, he snapped his fingers. The paper burst into flame.
“No!” Carin shouted.
She sprang up and crashed into Verek, staggering him back a step. She beat at him with one hand as she stretched her other skyward toward the blazing wad. “Stop! It must not burn!”
The fire went out before the crumpled paper fell from the air. What landed in the snow was charred and blackened, but it was not wholly destroyed.
Carin lunged in its direction and collided again with the wizard. He caught her by the arms. His fingers clamped down with enough force to bruise her through her five layers of heavy clothing.
She cried out. Then she was hurled away from the rocks, to fly through the air as the wadded paper had flown.
Carin hit the snow near the paper, her landing so cushioned by the powder that the impact didn’t knock the wind from her. She flailed at the fluffy stuff, struggling to right herself. Then her eyes fixed on Verek and she froze, as suddenly still as a portrait.
The wizard stood with his ungloved right hand outstretched, his fingers as stiff as tent stakes and all pointed straight at her. His look had something unearthly in it—something that scorched.
Carin tried to invoke divine help and found that prayer was beyond her capacity in that moment. She locked her gaze onto the wizard’s outthrust fingers. Her skin burned in anticipation of the magian fire that would sear her, that would consume and destroy her, just as the wizard had sought to destroy stolen secrets.
How long they stayed like that—she sprawled in the snow, staring at the hand that could obliterate her; he leveli
ng his fingers at her face, the look in his eyes unspeakably wild—Carin had no idea. Time ceased. She didn’t even blink—
—Until, abruptly, the sorcerer lowered his hand and flung himself down on her. He pressed her into the snow so deeply that heaps of loose powder tumbled over Carin’s face. Choking and spluttering, she tried to fend him off with one hand while she cleared her mouth with the other.
Verek caught the arm that pushed against him. Roughly, he hauled her up to a sitting position. He swiped at the snow on her face.
“Stop!” Carin spat. She slapped his hands away with stinging force. Then she crossed her wrists in front of her face, the same way a superstitious peasant might ward off a night-horror. She blinked to clear her vision and rubbed her face on her coatsleeves, wiping away the snow that stuck to her eyelashes. When she could see again, Carin glared at the warlock through the “V” of her intersecting wrists.
Verek, sitting before her in the snow, wore a liberal dusting of white in his hair and clothes. He was coatless, evidently having quit his cave too hastily to don his outer garments. His legs disappeared into the powder that their skirmish had churned up. Carin, with deepened alarm, tried to straighten one of her legs and discovered that his had hers pinned.
The wizard’s arms were folded now. His long fingers rested above his elbows, and Carin couldn’t help counting them: three fingers on his left hand, four on his right. A moment later, she cursed herself for letting her gaze linger so obviously. This warlock who seemed to know her thoughts must read volumes in a wide-eyed stare. Carin had hardly shifted her gaze from his left hand to his right before both were reaching for her again …
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 26
