The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  When the snow was too trampled to give firm evidence of the afternoon’s skirmish, Carin stood still and drew the circlet back out of her pocket. It was an oddly pretty thing, with Verek’s crow-black hair weaving between her rich auburn strands, and Welwyn’s girding them up in light and shade. How could she have guessed that her use of the wisewoman’s charm would so disturb the flow of magic on this world, that—according to Verek—every living wizard would feel it?

  She peered through the ring again, studying the forest as she slowly turned. Carin’s last recitation of the charm still held its power. The magian flames of the campfire—to the naked eye, cold blue in color—were dazzling through the ring, like flickers of lightning. Carin couldn’t bear to look at them, even from this distance. She turned her seer’s circlet upon an object nearer and dimmer: the tall pine where the woodsprite slept.

  “Oh—!” She bit off a shriek of astonishment and not a little disgust. Seen through the circlet’s magic, the sprite was no disembodied spark. It was … what? A belly with its guts spilling out?

  No, those weren’t guts. They writhed outward from the central mass like the tendrils of a vine, twisted things that seemed to move deliberately, groping along the branches of the tree where the creature slept. Several of the tendrils had embedded themselves in the wood and appeared to be feeding on the tree. Others coiled tightly around the branches. The tendrils looked tough, wiry—strong enough to choke the life from a tree … or a human being.

  Carin gawked at the creature, trying without success to square the woodsprite’s pleasant personality with its shape. It looked like an uprooted clump of the parasitic strangleweed that farmers in the south called “devil’s-guts.” Was this a true image of the creature’s body?

  She took a step toward the sprite’s tree, intending to wake it and see whether that made a difference in its appearance. But a terrified scream from the deer stopped her.

  Carin swiftly pocketed the circlet and whirled to face the field of boulders. As she turned, she unshouldered her bow. One hand drew an arrow from her quiver and had it on the string before her searching eyes found her target. When she saw it, she gasped.

  The cat crouched on the highest rock above the deer. It stared at Carin with huge yellow eyes. Its fur, white with irregular black bands, blended almost invisibly with the snow and rocks. Nothing stood out clearly except for those eyes—their gaze unblinking, and colder than winter.

  The giant dropped its head to study the three panicked deer below. Its hindquarters wiggled as it gathered itself for the jump. The tip of its tail—as black against the snow as Verek’s hair—twitched with excitement.

  Carin aimed her shot halfway between the head and the tail. The cat screamed and tumbled backward off its rocky perch.

  But no sooner had she nocked a second arrow than the beast, spitting its rage, came sprinting around the base of the boulders, rushing at Carin over the snow. This arrow must fell the monster; there would be no time to loose another. And the prick of an arrow must be about as dangerous to the giant as a thorn in its paw. The weapons of mortal men would not stop this creature.

  “Your greater strength is in the wysard’s art.” Verek’s words flashed through Carin’s mind. “Remember the wasteland dogs and save yourself.”

  A ghostly foursome of the dogs seemed to join the cat’s attack—memory overlapping her present reality. Carin released the shot. At the same instant, she expelled her pent-up breath in an explosive shout of “Burn!” In the face of death, she felt euphoric—with the same sense of elation that had shot through her at the moment she transfigured Welwyn’s twinkling orb into her own bit of magic, a spiny sea urchin.

  The arrow struck. The cat burst into flames. Its agonized scream lasted no longer than a heartbeat. Then there was nothing on the snow between Carin and the boulders but a great heap of gray ash.

  The roaring in her ears was like the sound of the surf pounding a distant shore. Carin collapsed into the snow, unable to tear her eyes from the cat’s ashes.

  In the tree behind her, the woodsprite was shrilling. “What’s happened? What in the name of fortune has happened? What means all this shouting and screaming?” She could no more answer the sprite than if her tongue had been torn from her head.

  Then Verek was there. He moved among the deer, resecuring their ropes and stroking their necks, calming the terrified beasts.

  Of course. He must have been nearby all along, watching the cat’s attack and magically kindling Carin’s arrow at the final moment.

  She watched the wizard approach her as though she were outside the event, looking in. He stepped around the ash-heap, pausing briefly to gaze at it. Then he reached Carin’s side. He took her hand—she was still holding her bow—and pried open her fingers one by one. They were white-knuckled, aching from the force of her grip and as cold as death.

  “Excellent,” Verek murmured. “I am pleased that you have at last found the marrow of your powers.”

  Carin blinked.

  “My powers?” she whispered, staring at him. “I don’t understand you. I would have been killed if you hadn’t bespelled my arrow to burn the cat.”

  Verek shook his head. “No magic of mine touched that shaft.” He pressed the icy fingers of Carin’s bow hand between his palms. “Yours was the voice that invoked the wizardry. And yours will be the magic that burns the last bridge.”

  Chapter 16

  Choices

  Lanse was strong enough to travel. But with his injured arm in a sling, he couldn’t handle the lines of a deer team and sled. It fell to Verek to drive the Trosdans, which he did with a great deal of cursing and shouting.

  In harness, the deer missed their dead teammates. By morning they stood in the traces forlornly, reluctant to get under way. When the sun dropped low, their uneven progress proved far easier to stop than the headlong runs they’d been making before the cat reduced their numbers.

  No complaint was heard, however, from the snowshoers who followed the sled. The slower pace suited them. Lanse had to rest frequently. Carin now carried her few possessions, and what was left of the tea and dried fruit, in a pack on her back to take some of the load off the diminished team. Verek no longer stowed his heavy longsword on the sled; he wore it slung across his back, over his cloak. With his quiver, bow, and blade, and the dagger he wore at his side, he looked like a walking armory. Even that fit swordsman found breathing more difficult and rest stops more necessary as they climbed ever higher into the mountains.

  The woodsprite, although it had no trouble matching their slackened pace, had developed a handicap of its own. More than half of each day, the creature slept. Often they would leave it behind as it dozed in some ancient evergreen. In a few hours it would catch up, full of apology and unable to account for its chronic drowsiness.

  “Is it the cold, do you think?” Carin asked when the sprite huddled with her in a wind-whipped stand of spruces. She glanced up as a raven flew past, and watched the bird swoop and swerve in the grip of a particularly violent gust. “Or is it because we’re so high? The air is thinner up here.”

  “I cannot guess,” the creature replied, almost whimpering. “Truly I am at a loss. It’s most provoking, this weakness of mine. Just as I was beginning to think myself master of the domain of trees, each day learning more of wood and how to wield it, I fall to this infirmity. I’m not much use to you like this, am I, dear girl? Should the mage break his promise to go easy with you, it’s scant help I’ll be if I’m a league behind and out of my senses in a pine.”

  It’s scant help you’ve been for a week, Carin thought. But she suppressed the remark and told the creature little of the events that it had slept through on the afternoon of the cat’s destruction. By unspoken agreement, she and the wizard had given the sprite and Lanse the same story: that the cat met its end with one of Verek’s fiery enchanted arrows in its ribs.

  Why the warlock favored a lie, Carin couldn’t be sure. Her own reason was simple. The less evidence Lan
se had of her growing powers of wizardry, the smaller the risk of rekindling his old hatred. The boy had made no overt move against her since Welwyn’s glen. It was a state of affairs she wanted to continue.

  But was she hiding her burgeoning abilities only from Lanse? In the dark of the night, when the snow-mantled slopes were far quieter than the turmoil inside Carin’s head, the answer came as a clear no. Her misgivings about the sprite were growing from a vague uneasiness—planted by Verek, with his probably malicious suggestion that the creature couldn’t be trusted—into a gnawing suspicion that the sprite’s friendly ways might hide a harder nature.

  I’m judging a book by its cover, cautioned the voice of reason. It was true that Carin’s glimpse of the sprite through her seer’s circlet had fed her uneasiness. The creature comes from another world, her rational mind argued. Among its own kind, it might even be thought beautiful. If I find its shape ugly, maybe the fault doesn’t lie with the creature, but with my way of looking at it.

  Even so, Carin couldn’t shake the feeling that her magical circlet showed her something more disturbing than an unattractive body. The way the sprite’s tendrils pierced the branches, they seemed to bleed a tree. Its sinews, wrapping around the limbs and coiling tight, looked like they could cut through any wood—which would explain the sprite’s ability to drop tree branches on people’s heads. All in all, the creature seemed as capable of choking the life from a tree as was the hated strangleweed that invaded coppices and farmers’ fields down south. Maybe Carin’s circlet had revealed, not just the sprite’s outer appearance, but clues to its fundamental nature.

  I’m imagining things, she tried to tell herself.

  But maybe she wasn’t.

  A week after Carin used the circlet to break Legary’s spell of concealment and to spy out the woodsprite, the mountains remained deserted. No mustering of wizards had descended upon them. No unwelcome visitor named Morann had appeared at their nightly camps.

  So Carin dared to recite the charm again, this time turning the seeing on her “escorts.” The morning was clear and cracklingly cold. She stretched herself behind a pillow of wind-drifted snow that offered an unobstructed view of Verek having his breakfast while a convalescing Lanse tended the deer. Thin, willowy Lanse …

  She raised the circlet to her eye, and the boy became a brawny executioner in a black jerkin and a masked hood. Carin buried her face in the fur ruff of her hood to stifle her astonished swearing. Then she jerked her head up and peered through the ring again, only to see Lanse the executioner carrying his single-bitted ax over one shoulder as he walked to the campfire.

  Carin dropped her circlet and stared. And in the pure light of early morning, the boy was himself again. He looked pinched with cold. The arm the cat had clawed was bound up in a sling under his cloak.

  She marveled. Had the magic of the braided circlet revealed something of Lanse that did not lie on the surface? If so, what did his executioner’s guise signify? Carin considered the three ruffians on the plain of Imlen—two of them dead by Lanse’s hand, Verek had said. That’s it. The charm sees what he did in the past, whispered some part of her that was more hopeful than convinced.

  Tightly pinching the circlet’s edge, Carin raised the ring to her eye once more. She must know what the magic would reveal to her of Verek—though the prospect of seeing into the wizard’s depths put knots in her belly.

  She looked long, her breath suspended. Slowly, Carin lowered the circlet. Her lungs resumed their work. She looked again, and her stomach settled.

  The wizard was unchanged. From the glossy blackness of his hair to his long, deft fingers to the self-assured way he moved, he was the same man who had held a sword to Carin’s throat in an autumn woodland and made her his.

  No—not the same. The image through the circlet was not exactly right. The longer Carin studied him, the clearer the aberration became. Around the warlock hung a shadow, so faint and clinging so closely to his tangible self that it was nearly invisible. But as she watched, the shadow grew more distinct until it appeared as a somber duplicate imposed on Verek’s form.

  What was it? His double?

  To meet one’s double was unlucky in the extreme, for when a man and his wraith met face-to-face it was a sign of imminent death. Many times Carin had heard that favorite story of Mydrismas, the legend of the fisherman who saw his own wraith standing on a sandbar. His only safe path had been to address it boldly. “What’s thou doing here?” he’d demanded. “Thou’s after no good, I’ll go bail. Begone wi’ thee! Hie thee home.” Whereupon the wraith had slunk off abashed, and the man met no early death, but lived to a ripe age.

  The shadow that enfolded Verek, however, was not a double such as the fisherman had seen. It didn’t face him. It clung to him like a second skin. And the wizard seemed as unaware of its presence as Carin had been before she trained her seer’s circlet upon him.

  She put the charm away. After that morning, Carin had nothing but time to mull over what the magic had revealed. Shuffling over the snow, toiling up steep slopes, burying her face in her arms to avoid the gusts that drove swirling snow plumes across the face of the mountain: Carin endured it by feeling little and thinking much. If Verek with his shadow and Lanse in his executioner’s garb were images from their deeper selves, was it unreasonable to suppose that the sap-sucking tendrils and strangling sinews of the woodsprite proclaimed the creature for what it was?

  * * *

  A fortnight after the cat took two of their number, the surviving deer sadly showed the effects of overwork. Their long, thick hair barely hid their protruding ribs.

  Carin watched them with mixed sympathy and anxiety. If the Trosdans died, the three snowshoers would break their own trail through the ever-deepening snow and pull their own sled, hauling the essentials of food, furs, tent tarp and ropes, the ax, and the bowcase that held Carin’s indigo-blue weapon—discreetly returned to Verek’s custody to avoid alarming Lanse. The boy would surely think his master mad for letting Carin go armed. He looked askance when the wizard handed her a shovel to carry, giving the other to Lanse.

  But when Verek, in his efforts to spare the deer, abandoned his great sword to shoulder the ax in its place, Lanse could not hold his tongue.

  “No, my lord!” he protested. “Do not cast it off, I pray you. Such a fine weapon—wielded by your grandsire and his before him—must not be surrendered to these soulless heights. I will carry it. My wounds are trifling. Allow me the honor of bearing the sword of Ruain, I beg you!”

  Verek hesitated, holding the weapon across his mittened palms. The gold and garnets on its hilt shimmered in the cold sunshine. The warlock swept his gaze along the sheathed blade. Then he laid the weapon almost reverently on the rocks.

  Carin said nothing, but she drew from her pack her only extra pair of felt-lined wool breeches. She held them out to Verek.

  The wizard eyed her thoughtfully. Then he accepted the garment with a short nod of thanks and wrapped the sword in the sturdy cloth. The bundle fit invisibly into a crack where two standing stones angled together.

  Your chances of returning along this trail to reclaim that heirloom are slimmer than quillwort leaves, Carin told him silently. She wasn’t sure where the thought came from, but she trusted the truth of it.

  Verek turned to Lanse and shook his head. “Your wounds are serious, and I would not see you waste your strength. Where we are going, we’ll have more need of this”—he hefted the ax—“for hacking timber, not flesh.” With a frown, the wizard quelled Lanse’s further protests. He slung the ax across his back and shouted the tired Trosdans into motion.

  Not another week passed before the wizard’s prophecy was proved. The deer topped a rise that was thick with tall yaran cedars. They halted abruptly. Verek edged up to the head of the team, to stop just as suddenly. Lanse joined him.

  When seconds passed with neither of them saying a word, Carin’s curiosity brought her shuffling up along the other side of the deer team to stand with
them. The sight that met her eyes rendered her as speechless as her companions were.

  Below gaped a canyon, steep-walled and packed with a sloping mass of snow. To the left, suspended like a mountain monarch’s crown above an immense ermine train, was a frozen waterfall, its facets diamonds in the sun. Down-canyon, the snow-filled chute sliced away through the rocks. Beyond, on the opposite rim, trees grew thickly. But if ever a bridge had crossed this gorge, no trace of it now remained.

  Verek was the first to recover his voice. “Unhitch the deer, Lanse,” he growled, “and find them something to eat. I’ll be a time at this task.”

  Ax in hand, the wizard gazed up at the cedars that flanked this side of the canyon. He selected one which towered above the rest and struck it a mighty blow. The ax blade bit deeply.

  Carin listened for the woodsprite’s shrill cry, but it didn’t come. Wherever the creature was—it had been absent from their company since early morning—it wasn’t lodged in the cedar that Verek was felling for a bridge.

  She built a fire, starting it mundanely with tinder and flint, set pots of snow to melt, and rigged a spit to roast their last hunk of Trosdan venison. The oily flesh ended up making both their supper and their breakfast. Verek had to work until nightfall to fell one cedar across the canyon’s width; then he labored through the next morning to topple a second tree.

  The two crashed down near each other, but with a gap between the trunks that would easily let a deer or a human slip to their deaths. Verek balanced his way along one trunk, out over the canyon to the far side. As he made the crossing, he didn’t glance down. On the opposite rim, safely beyond the chasm, he took his ax to the treetops to chop through both trunks below their first spreading branches. Then he stretched his right hand above the boles. One lopped trunk rolled to meet the other, closing the gap, doubling the width of the “deck.” His bridge was finished.