The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  But slowly this time, easing their way past the mock defense raised by Carin’s out-turned palms—proving that, as a counter-charm against a sorcerer, the old superstition of the crossed wrists was no more potent than the supposed power of rowan-wood had been against the sprite.

  Where is the sprite, by the way? wondered that self-possessed extremity of Carin’s wit that was the last to flee under duress and the first to return when her mental state improved. What’s become of its promise to watch over me?

  But maybe it was just as well that the sleeping sprite hadn’t seen Verek lay hands on Carin. The creature would only shriek loudly and accomplish little to help her. Over the rock pile, there were no trees. And here in the snow, any timber dropped on the wizard couldn’t fail to hit Carin as well.

  The unhurried approach of Verek’s fingers had closed the gap at last; he touched Carin’s cheeks. She flinched and tried to turn away. But he pinned her face between his palms, forcing her gaze to meet his.

  “Why do you persist in this?” he hissed, and drew her nearer to him. “How does it serve you to set your prying eyes upon my secret torments?” His warm hands slid over Carin’s temples as he pushed the hair away from her face. He continued in a voice that was softly intense: “What do you care for deeds done long years ago? Aren’t our present perils—and the dread of those yet to come—occupation enough for that fretful brain of yours?”

  Carin found rational thought impossible with the wizard’s hands on her. She caught his wrists and tugged his fingers out of her hair.

  Verek let her. With her still holding his wrists, he lowered his hands to rest them on the skirt of Carin’s cloak where it straggled over the broken snow between them.

  She swallowed dryly, unable for a moment to speak. But then her words came in a rush.

  “I persist because I want to know what kind of a man you are!” she cried. “Myra said you were a loving husband who grieved so bitterly for those he lost that he fell into madness. Are you that man? Or are you the devil your grandfather wrote about? ‘He with demon’s taint upon his gift’!”

  Verek winced visibly, but he didn’t try to silence her as Carin went on spilling out the words.

  “I also want to know what kind of man your grandfather was. You must remember the day I found the Book of Archamon. What you can’t possibly know is how sad I felt when I read what Legary had written on the book’s final page—that poem from twenty years ago, as he lay near death. It was like I could feel the sorrow of the heart that cried those words. ‘Dead was the first by guileful craft,’” Carin recited from memory. “‘Dead was the third by blackest art.’

  “‘How the old wizard must have suffered,’ I thought at the time, ‘to see death come to half his house.’ But then I started having doubts about him. I began to wonder about the old lord’s dying confession. ‘My crimes are great.’ Why did he write that? ‘The lad is slain.’ I know he’s talking about your father. But how did Hugh die? Who killed him?”

  Only vaguely aware of her actions, Carin released one of Verek’s wrists and pointed at the charred paper that lay in the snow not far from them. “For months I’ve tried to read what your grandfather hid in the book of magic. Today finally, I broke the spell and came a little closer to the truth. There on the page that you set afire, Legary wrote of a son ‘sacrificed.’ He called you—his grandson and heir—a ‘fiend.’ It’s right there.”

  As Carin gestured again, Verek caught her hand and held it. Still he said nothing. He only eyed her with awful severity, and she felt the boldness running out of her like wine flowing from an open spigot. She pressed on before the cask emptied completely.

  “What is the truth?” she whispered. “That sadness I felt when I first read your grandfather’s words … Was that the sorrow of a man who was grieving for the dead children of his blood? Or was he confessing his guilt—his shame at having done something so terrible that he couldn’t admit it, except in riddles?”

  Carin looked without cringing into Verek’s glittering eyes. “I want you to answer the question I asked you that night on the plain of Imlen: Did your grandfather kill your father? I also want to know if you’re the fiend who drew a mother and her child to their deaths. Did you drown your wife and son? And afterward was it guilt—not grief—that drove you to madness?”

  The wizard did not break his silence. Neither did he avert his gaze. He released Carin’s hand and pointed without looking at the crumpled paper that lay near them. It flew to his fingers. Reaching them, the paper bore no trace of charring.

  Carin stared, uncomprehending, as the restoration continued. The ball of paper that Verek cupped in his hand began to uncrumple. Slowly at first, then with astonishing speed, the wad opened and smoothed into an undamaged sheet. Even the fold lines were gone, where Carin had repeatedly creased the paper to fit in her pocket. The page from the Book of Archamon was as perfect as on the day she’d ripped it from the ancient volume.

  Moreover, it no longer had a spell of concealment upon it. The paper lay draped over Verek’s palm with its head toward him and its foot to Carin, so that the closing stanzas of Legary’s narrative hung before her eyes. The lines were clearly readable. She scanned them quickly:

  By the oath of my House,

  And in these pages

  Bathed in the light of the wisdom

  Of Archamon, I swear:

  The boy shall not fall to darkness.

  As long as there be breath in this body,

  I will guide him on the bright path,

  And Morann shall touch him not!

  Carin jumped as Verek pulled his other hand from her grasp. She’d forgotten that her fingers still circled his wrist.

  The wizard took the smooth sheet in both his hands and refolded it. Then he slipped the paper inside his shirt. Although he sat in the snow wearing neither coat nor hood, he didn’t seem to feel the cold. Carin’s legs, however, were beginning to suffer, both from being stuck in the snow and from him sitting on them.

  Her concern for her legs vanished immediately, though, as Verek grabbed her upper arms, seizing her this time with unnerving speed.

  “By the powers, girl!” he barked, quitting his silence furiously. “No sooner does a thought pass through your head than you take it as proved! Haven’t you already charged, tried, and condemned me, body and soul? Upon whom shall I call, then, to witness my avowal of innocence? Shall I swear it by Drisha? By Archamon? Is there any oath I could take that you would honor?”

  Verek shook Carin hard enough to rattle her teeth. Then he pushed her away roughly, releasing her arms.

  Carin nearly fell back into the snow. But she rocked upright again, flexing at the hips like a string puppet. The movement of her upper body sent one buried leg plunging sideways through the snow, nearly unseating the wizard. He caught her by the hands, steadying both of them. Then he pulled Carin to him, though she tried to hold back.

  “I never thought to see a day,” Verek breathed into her face, “when I would defend myself to a prying chit. Were it anyone else speaking these accusations, I’d rip the bleeding heart from the defamer’s chest, set it afire, and stuff the burning organ down its owner’s throat.”

  The wizard studied her. Apparently satisfied with what he read in Carin’s eyes—a reflection of the nausea in her belly, surely—he went on. “But you, minx, may say these things and meet with nothing from me except my plea of innocence. I ask you again: By whom or what shall I swear? How do I make you accept my words?”

  “Swear on your conscience,” Carin whispered, looking him in the eye, “and I will believe you.”

  Verek’s hands tightened on hers. Something went out of the wizard’s dark gaze, like the fight fleeing the beast.

  “If you only knew all that hangs heavy there,” he murmured, “you might think it an unfit place to put your trust.”

  Carin shook her head. “I think it’s a good sign, if it hurts you. It couldn’t cause you pain if you lacked one.”

  The wizard
brought Carin’s hands together against the front of his shirt and pinned both of them there with one of his. His other hand—the mutilated one—took her by the chin. “Be assured that I note its presence daily,” he muttered.

  He continued then in a firm, clear voice. “On my conscience, I swear to you: I did not kill my beloved wife, Alesia, nor our son, young Aidan, whom we cherished. In the core of my heart, I may have suspected that they had not drowned by accident. But it was not until I read my grandfather’s words in Archamon’s great Book that I could bring myself to face the truth: that they were murdered … by one whose love of power surpassed even my grandsire’s.”

  Verek held Carin’s chin so firmly, she couldn’t shut her mouth. “If you would condemn a broken man,” he went on softly, “then know that he committed no crime worse than ambition. Lord Legary’s ambition, it’s true, led to the death of his son—that youth who was my father, whom I never knew. The knowledge of what he had done—of the grave mistake he had made—weighed so heavily on my grandsire’s conscience as to make these accusations by a foolish little sylph smack of arrogance—such an arrogance as I would not tolerate from anyone but you.”

  The wizard’s eyes held Carin through a long moment of silence, more forcibly than his hands. Then Verek turned her loose and got to his feet, not with his usual easy grace, but stiffly. “Drisha blind me,” he swore. “I cannot say who the bigger fool is—you or me. For who but an ass would sit out here in the snow half dressed?”

  Carin struggled mightily to stand. But the cold had prickled the blood in her legs, leaving them too numb to support her. She was sinking again into the powder when the wizard caught her arms. Before she could protest, he had pulled her out of the snow, slung her over his shoulder, and carried her to the pile of rocks where the Trosdans grazed. The deer eyed them indifferently. The affairs of men and women did not concern them.

  Verek set Carin down on the same flat-topped rock he’d thrown her off of. He picked up her bow and quiver from the stone where they waited and put them into her hands. Then he stood looking down at her, his hands on his hips.

  “There is not a wysard alive in the north of Ladrehdin,” he said crisply, “who did not feel it when you broke Legary’s spell of obscurity. Our incursion into these mountains could not be more obvious to an adept now, were we to blow horns and beat drums to announce our coming. I propose, therefore, to go after the cat. The beast that will not fall to steel may succumb to art—and we no longer have cause to go artless, have we?”

  Verek gestured at the weapons Carin held. “Use them, but do not rely solely on them. If I flush the cat from cover, it may come here. Remember the wasteland dogs and save yourself as I once saved you.”

  Abruptly he turned away. With long strides, he made for the distant campfire.

  “Wait!” Carin called to Verek’s retreating back. “I don’t understand!”

  He ignored her. She watched him reach the snowdrift that held his den and Lanse’s. He disappeared into the boy’s cave, soon reemerged, and crawled into his own. When he came out again, he had his coat and cloak.

  Verek drew them on as he walked to the grove where the two deer had died. He shouted at the woodsprite to wake up. A spark came to life in the treetops, then dropped down nearer the wizard. What passed between them was beyond Carin’s hearing, but their conversation was brief. After a moment, Verek stalked off on the cat’s trail. The sprite came flitting through the trees. It lit in the one nearest Carin’s patch of boulders.

  “Good day to you again, my friend,” the creature called cheerfully. “I trust you’ve shunned that ill-tempered magician since we last spoke today? My, what a surly mood he’s in! I am ordered—not asked, not invited, but ordered—to join you at these rocks. Indeed, I am pleased to do so. A chance to speak with my dear friend Carin is always welcome … though I might have done with just a bit more sleep before I took up my watch.”

  The blood was flowing again in Carin’s legs, filling them with broken glass. She stretched and kneaded them, but she didn’t try to stand. The sprite obviously knew nothing of what had just happened near these rocks. She meant to give the creature no hint of it.

  “Go back to sleep,” she said. “Just because the wizard is awake doesn’t mean you have to be. Stay in these trees close by, while I watch the deer, and I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “That’s most satisfactory,” the sprite piped in tones that were already fading. “I do think I must doze again … for only an hour … if that will not … inconvenience …” The creature’s sleepy voice trailed off mid-sentence.

  Carin breathed a quick, soft sigh. Then she began examining the crevices in the rocks around her, searching for her circlet of witches’ hair. It came to light at last, damp and limp, trampled into the snow. Carefully she worked it free, reshaped it with the tip of her finger, and sat looking at it as her thoughts whirled.

  After everything it had revealed to her from Legary’s ensorcelled writing, could she trust Verek’s denials? If he was blameless in the deaths of his wife and son, then who was the murderer he accused?

  One whose love of power surpassed even Legary’s? There’s no answer in that, only a new riddle. Carin frowned, toying with the circlet.

  She closed her fist on it. Digging in her trousers pocket, Carin retrieved her copy of the verses that Legary had set down only days before his death. Verek hadn’t discovered that page. She glanced over her shoulder, then unfolded the paper. The stanzas on it were easily read and as familiar as the back of her hand. But was something else concealed within them?

  Carin held the circlet over the page the way she would hold a sunglass that could set the paper ablaze. Quietly she spoke the charm of seeing. The words of the narrative responded by doubling their apparent size, but there was no other change. The paper held nothing beyond what was openly written there.

  And as Carin reread Legary’s deathbed “confession,” the sigh that escaped her was one of—provisional—relief. She hadn’t wanted to believe the old lord was capable of such evil, although he had seemed to think that his transgressions went beyond redemption. My crimes … my penance … the lad slain …

  “Slain,” Carin whispered to thin air, “because of you and your ambitions, Legary, but by somebody else—somebody greedier than you were, your grandson claims. Who did it? Is there one killer at work in this story, or two? Did your son’s murderer return all those years later to drown little Aidan and leave the House of Verek with no heir except for its present lord—the ‘tainted seed’?”

  Shaking her head, Carin slipped the page back into her pocket. She would find no new answers there. The solution to this puzzle lay in the narrative that she’d come so tantalizingly close to reading before losing the paper to Verek. She shut her eyes and struggled to recall the few stanzas she’d unveiled before the warlock tore them away.

  What had Legary written about “the grieving widow,” that mysterious lady who had lived under his roof for a decade after her young husband’s death, and then had suddenly vanished? Something in the verse struck a discordant note:

  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.

  What did Legary mean, she “played her role”? Was her grief for the dead Hugh only a pretense? Was that the “grotesquerie”? Legary’s disapproval was palpable. Evidently Verek’s mother hadn’t been convincingly heartbroken over the death of Verek’s father. She didn’t convince Legary, at any rate.

  Carin could picture the entire forbidden narrative as if it were an inscription carved into her thoughts, but with its middle sections defaced and unreadable. Her mind’s eye went to the final two stanzas, which she had hastily skimmed while the paper lay across Verek’s palm. In the closing line, an enigmatic name had appeared: Morann.

  Who or what was that? What threat did this unknown entity pose? Theil Verek had been a boy of ten
when his grandfather’s pen declared that “Morann shall touch him not.” Fourteen years later, Verek was a married man and had fathered a son, yet his dying grandsire had repeated the prohibition: “Touch him not, Morann!” What danger had hung over Verek as he was maturing into manhood? Could it be the same menace that killed his father? The same, perhaps, that killed his wife and child?

  Carin had barely seized on that possibility when another thought came to her. This was no idle conjecture about events twenty and thirty years in the past, but a dangerous prospect for the present day. Could it be that the sinister “Morann” of Verek’s youth was still out there, still threatening, and no longer constrained by Legary’s interdictions against harming him?

  “Maybe the warlock said as much,” Carin muttered to herself. “After the avalanche, he talked about someone being up in these mountains … someone watching us. He’s been trying to hide his magic. He doesn’t want the ‘watcher’ to know we’re coming.”

  She glanced around sharply. Then Carin pocketed the circlet, stood, shouldered her quiver and bow, and moved quietly to the patch of churned-up snow where Verek had sworn his innocence. Across it she paced repeatedly, distorting the signs of their struggle. The sprite had been too groggy to notice the traces before, and Carin didn’t want the creature asking questions when it woke.

  If these mountains hid a force so powerful that Verek feared to face it—and his grandfather before him had invoked taboos against it—then Carin wanted the sprite here near her, not chasing after the warlock to dash out his brains. A riled-up sprite might do just that, as a matter of honor, if it became aware of how Verek had chucked her around. But the creature’s growing aggression would be better turned against the unknown threat in these mountains than directed at the wizard who might be their only hope of escaping that threat.