The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Wizardry for the fine touches, but sweaty work for the rest, Carin mused, watching him. Why hadn’t he called on his magic to fell the trees and save himself the better part of two days’ hard labor? Her breaking of Legary’s spell should have released him from his self-imposed restraint, if hiding from the “watcher” was his only reason for abstaining from sorcery.

  It followed, then, that there must be another reason: Verek expended his physical strength to avoid overtaxing his powers of wizardry. What had he told Carin, that evening in Ruain when he healed her fractured cheekbone with a flash of uncanny light? “The apothecary,” he’d admitted, “may mix a multitude of remedies for each solitary cure that is worked through magic … and yet retain the strength, at day’s end, to do other than seek his bed.”

  It seemed a plausible explanation, that Verek still used his powers sparingly to conserve them. But why did he find it necessary to store them up? Carin wondered. Her own excursions into the realm of magic hadn’t left her exhausted. Quite the contrary. It had been as exhilarating as it was weird to craft the sea urchin from Welwyn’s twinkling orb, and to burn the cat with magian fire.

  Verek left his ax and most of his weapons on the far side, and returned to organize the crossing of their party.

  “The deer first, one by one,” he instructed Lanse. “It seems that accursed wood-goblin has deserted us, so I will coax the animals across with Ercil’s fire. Then you and I together will convey the sled over.”

  He took the shovels that Carin and Lanse had carried and bore them with him to the far rim. Then, standing at the bridge’s end, he conjured a witchlight orb and signaled for Lanse to send the first deer across.

  The beast went willingly, single-minded for the glowing orb and never looking into the chasm that would be its death if it fell. The splayfooted Trosdan’s hooves struck the timber with an almost metallic ring that sounded utterly unnatural after their many weeks of muted snow-travel.

  Before the animal had taken six steps, Carin understood why Verek had bothered to chop down two cedars when one thick trunk would have sufficed—if terrifyingly—for the passage of people. The Trosdan was as clumsy on a firm surface as it was sure-footed on snow. It skittered down one bole, then the other, weaving its way drunkenly along the bridge. Carin held her breath. And when the deer stumbled into Verek and the orb, her sigh was as loud as Lanse’s.

  The others made the crossing just as precariously and were tethered with the first to scrape a meal from lichen-covered rocks. Verek, returning empty-handed, strapped himself into the sled’s harness.

  “Follow closely, Lanse, and be ready to kick the runners over should they approach too near an edge,” he instructed. “I will do the pulling, but you may be called on to lift the contrivance past the rough spots.”

  Lanse gave him a shallow nod, looking anything but confident. The wizard faced west, leaned into the traces, and hauled the sled from the snow onto the bridge.

  He barely avoided instant catastrophe. The runners—made for snow, not unpeeled timber—could not track straight over the trees’ grooved bark. The sled lurched up from the depression where the two boles met, to straddle the curvature of one trunk and careen dangerously close to its edge.

  With his sound arm, Lanse grabbed the sled’s tail and wrested it back into the center trough. Slowly, the two men worked their way out over the gorge, Verek straining to pull the balky sled, Lanse close behind, frequently kicking or yanking it back in line.

  Left to follow as she would, Carin called urgently to the woodsprite. The creature did not answer.

  She eyed the canyon’s width. Could the sprite leap it? Was this where she’d leave the clump of “devil’s-guts” behind permanently?

  Carin’s conscience quashed the thought. The creature saves me from the wasteland dogs, drops Lanse before he can put an arrow in me, and forces that dimwit and his master to leave me alone, on pain of their deaths—and I’d even think about abandoning it here in the wilderness?

  Working quickly, Carin gathered every bough and branch that Verek’s woodcutting or her own fire-making had scattered on the snow. If the sprite turned up again before the boughs withered, they might serve it as easy stepping-stones down the bridge’s length, if the lopped boles weren’t themselves good highways for the creature’s crossing.

  Carin followed behind Lanse and wedged a bough every few steps into the crack where the two cedars pressed together. She caught the boy easily as he and his master struggled to haul the sled across. She could see neither face, but Lanse’s breathing was loud and labored, while ahead of him Verek’s shoulders heaved.

  The sled tipped up, one runner riding perilously higher than the other. Carin crouched to study the problem. At Lanse’s feet the two boles arched away from each other. One made a hump while the other dipped. The trunks—which had looked as straight as arrow shafts reaching skyward from the canyon rim—now betrayed, on their fallen corpses, their imperfections.

  “Watch out!” she shouted, but too late. The sled had skidded down off the humped crest so suddenly that its tail dropped over the side before Lanse could catch it.

  “Unhh!” Verek cried out as the harness bit into his shoulders. The front of the sled tried to follow its back end into space. The wizard fought it. His strength alone kept the sled from plunging off the bridge and dragging him with it.

  Lanse made a grab for the rope that lashed down the sled’s load. But it was too great a stretch to attempt one-armed. Unable to fling out his bound arm as a counterweight, he lost his balance and sprawled across the sled, adding his weight to the strain on Verek’s shoulders. From the wizard came a sharp “Hunnh!” as though he’d been hit in the chest with a cudgel.

  Carin dropped her armload of stepping-stone boughs. She grabbed Lanse’s cloak and reared back, pulling with all her might.

  The garment came with her—and kept coming. Lanse rolled backward off the sled, temporarily pinning one skirt of his cloak between himself and the cedar bole under him. But the unsecured edge slid unimpeded over his arm and shoulder: Carin peeled it off him as she pitched backward off the bridge.

  For a moment she dangled in air, her fingers twisted in the cloth. Then she was falling, clutching Lanse’s cloak as if it were a snapped rope. The part of her that could still think had only a moment in which to wonder: did Lanse shed the garment deliberately?

  Carin hit the snowpack with a whoompf. It shuddered like a thing alive. Then whiteness engulfed her. She was rolling, tumbling inside a flood of snow. The avalanche hurtled down the chute of the canyon, gaining speed, almost noiseless. There was only a whooshing in her ears.

  Breathing was impossible. Carin flailed at the churning mass, fighting to rise to the daylit world above the maelstrom. But the torrent pressed her down. She was as helpless within it as a rag doll.

  Like fast-freezing slush, the flow subsided. It set up around her with crushing heaviness. Carin tried with all her strength to thrust her body upward. She couldn’t move. Openmouthed, she gasped for air that did not come. The avalanche crunched to a stop and sealed her in.

  Within her tomb, there was no sensation except the tight grip of the ensorcelled iron on Carin’s ankle. Then that, too, was gone, spiraling down into oblivion.

  * * *

  The heartbeat in her ear couldn’t be hers. She was dead.

  Yet the sound persisted … a strong, steady whump, whump.

  Carin forced her eyes open. She saw whiteness tinged with blue.

  Ice, reasoned her muddled brain. Dead eyes, frozen in Drisha knows how many spades of snow, might very well see ice.

  Her gaze drifted over the blue-white stuff to linger on a ribbonlike shape that was too supple to be an icicle. Carin’s eyes—they’re not too frozen to move, noted an increasingly lucid corner of her mind—traveled up the ribbon until her gaze found a throat, the hollow of it faintly pulsing in time with the whump in her ear.

  Between them, her vision and her brain sorted it out. The ribbon was the tie
of a man’s linen shirt. The throat was her rescuer’s.

  Carin drew a slow, deep breath. Deliberately she focused her eyes beyond the shirt that her cheek pressed against, seeking clues to her whereabouts.

  The blue-white light that gave an icy cast to the linen picked out rough, dark walls. As Carin’s gaze climbed up them, she slowly eased her head off the chest and shoulder that cushioned her. She traced the curve of the walls; they met to form an irregular ceiling. Overhead, a few rounded nobs with a stony luster threw back the light that the darker rock absorbed.

  This was a cave. Not a snow cave, but a cavern of rock thrice the size of the shelters she’d dug in the drifts. Carin rolled her head to take in the rest of it: curving walls all around; no visible opening. But a heap of woolen garments near her feet seemed to have been piled there for a reason, most likely to close a gap. Peeking from the mound was a bit of dark-green frieze cloth. Her own cloak was in the stack.

  The source of the cave’s blue-white illumination was a flame that burned with no wood to fuel it. It hung suspended in the air a handsbreadth above the dirt floor. It was not witchlight—that cool flame Verek called Ercil’s fire, which gave off a clear light but no warmth. This was the wizard’s other magian fire—blue-tinged, undying, and hot. The flame had been ablaze in the confined space long enough to subdue the stony chill.

  By fits and starts, Carin sat up. For a moment, her head swam. When the dizziness passed and she reopened her eyes, she found Verek propped on his elbow, watching her. Furrowing his brow was something that might have been concern.

  “Do you know who you are?” he asked. His voice, though low, filled their cave.

  Carin eyed him narrowly. “You’re asking me?” she rasped from a raw throat. “I’ve got no clue. Only what I saw in your wizards’ well.” She paused to swallow painfully, provoked to speech but hard-pressed to force out the words: “That other world … that ocean I crossed … my room by the sea.” She shook her head. “Silly question,” she grated. “I have no idea who I am.”

  The wizard lay back. His three-fingered hand settled on his face, hiding his eyes. Quietly at first, he began to chuckle. Then the chuckle grew to a full-bodied laugh.

  Carin stared. A laugh from Verek was so uncommon, she could almost forgive him for enjoying it at her expense.

  He lifted his hand from his eyes and pushed himself upright. He sat looking at Carin, leaning slightly on one arm, resting the other across his bent knees. Still he chuckled, but with his lips pressed together as though he tried hard to stop. Presently he shook himself and ran his hand over his face. The expression that emerged from behind those long, slender fingers was entirely composed, showing no trace of the amusement that had threatened to run away with him.

  Verek fished in the pack that had pillowed his head. He drew out a flask, unstoppered it, and handed it over.

  Carin knew its bouquet: dhera. A few sips of the agreeably warm liquor eased her frost-burned throat.

  “The akiltered workings of your mind jolt me, at times,” the wizard said. He gazed at Carin with oddly bright eyes as she drank his liquor. “The snow-slide swept you through a scattering of rocks. Though I found no injury on your scalp to suggest it, I thought perhaps you had struck against them and cold burial had hidden the wound. And so I sought to discover the soundness of your wit and the state of your memory: whether you knew your name, and mine, and were sensible of your situation. Nothing more profound than that did I ask you, fìleen.”

  “Oh.” Carin’s face warmed. She put her hand on her head, feeling for a knot or for soreness. There was nothing but her much-grown-out mane of wavy hair—the hair Verek’s fingers had combed through while she lay unconscious of his touch.

  She took a breath and tried to sound matter-of-fact. “All right then. My name is Carin. You are Theil Verek of Ruain. This place”—she indicated the cave that sheltered them—“is a mystery to me. But I’m guessing we’re still in the mountains, and you’re still planning to go on until we die up here.”

  The wizard pursed his lips. “It would seem there’s nothing wrong with your memory. Be pleased to tell me how it is that you know my given—” He broke off. “Of course. You heard Welwyn call me by my first name.”

  Carin nodded. “And before that, I heard it from Jerold. He called you ‘son’ and used your name.”

  Verek crossed both arms over his bent knees. His eyes never left Carin’s. “And so you have learned that matters of rank and title and birthright mean little in the society of wysards. To Masters Jerold and Welwyn and a handful of others, I am only a colt. They were deep in the magic art before I was seeded in my mother’s womb.”

  Carin could not suppress her sharp intake of breath. Verek had never before mentioned his lost mother. Her thoughts seized on his words, struggling to shape a sea of speculations about the missing woman into a question that the wizard would permit her to ask.

  But he gave her no chance. Looking aside into his magian fire, Verek almost squirmed—aghast at his own words? Quickly he returned to the subject of old wizards.

  “You may think me aged,” he began, but he paused when Carin firmly shook her head.

  “No, I don’t. Myra told me that your grandfather was at the height of his powers when he was in his eighties. She said wizards live a long time—it’s the ‘art magik’ in you.” Carin shrugged. “I can see how time would count differently, when it’s counted in wizard years.”

  “‘Wizard years’?” Verek echoed. He looked a little startled. As he gave Carin a moment’s silent study, the expression on his face shaded toward the peculiar—a look she couldn’t read at all. “I have never heard it put like that,” he muttered.

  Then he tipped his head and continued. “It’s a sad truth, nonetheless, that of Ladrehdin’s small band of living adepts, I am the youngest. Hence the fatherly ways of those worthies, Welwyn and Jerold. Not so long ago, both of them—and every other wysard in this world—would have contended hotly with me for the right to train such a promising young apprentice as you.”

  Verek paused. But getting no reply from Carin, he slowly went on. “Now it appears the masters have given up hope of disciplining the young in the ways of magic. And indeed, why should we not resign ourselves to the inevitable? Magic is dying—is all but dead—in this world. On Ladrehdin, none now are born with the gift.”

  A chill ran up Carin’s back. Out of habit, she reached to pull her cloak around her, forgetting that she wasn’t wearing it. Both she and the wizard were in shirtsleeves. Her face warmed again as she imagined the warlock stripping her of her cloak and coat—and going through her pockets? Or had the avalanche emptied them for her?

  “You seem troubled by my words,” Verek said, his eyes missing nothing. “Oblige me, pray, with a glimpse into your thoughts.”

  Carin fidgeted, suddenly unsure of what to do with her hands, finding no fullness of fabric to hide them under. After a moment she simply sat on them, and shook out of the tumult inside her head an answer to give Verek.

  “I’m thinking about children … a few of them born with this thing you call a gift, but most lacking it … and what happens to them, if an accident of birth lands an ungifted child in a family of wizards. I’m also wondering if the shortage of sorcerer’s apprentices on Ladrehdin had anything to do with our leaving Ruain and coming to these mountains.”

  The wizard did not so much as raise an eyebrow at Carin’s first comment, about children gifted and wanting. If her oblique reference to the dead sons of House Verek meant anything to him, he gave no sign of it. To her second remark, however, he offered an uncharacteristically direct response.

  “Yes. I think we will find, at the end of this journey, that Ladrehdin’s lack is precisely the reason you and I both are here—and the woodsprite also, for that matter.”

  Carin blinked at him. “You ‘think’? Come on! Of course you know why we’re here. I’m pretty sure Lanse knows what this trip is all about, too. I’m the only one who gets to lie awake night
s—wondering, imagining—and dreading the day when we get to where we’re going.”

  Verek shook his head. “You know hardly less of this affair than I do. If our presence here remains a mystery to you, it’s because you will have it so.”

  “That’s not true!” Carin protested. “I don’t know where we’re going, or why.”

  Verek sighed. He slid his hands down his shins and began to massage his ankles. “You can deceive neither me nor yourself. Look into your understanding and tell me this: What do you suspect our destination to be?”

  She pondered only briefly before answering in a low voice, “I suspect we’re going to the master wizard who made the whirlpools that brought the woodsprite and me to Ladrehdin.”

  Verek nodded. “Good. A plain and honest answer from you is a rarity that I treasure. Continue. For what purpose do we seek this wysard?”

  Carin hesitated, long enough that the warlock scowled. As she looked at him, she chewed her lip. Then she muttered, “The woodsprite wants to ask the master wizard to send it back to the world it came from.”

  Nothing of Verek’s reaction showed in his face, but his tone sharpened. “The sprite does not interest me. Pray favor me with less of that weirdling’s thinking and more of your own. Tell me: Why do we undertake such a difficult journey in the dead season to find the adept who stole you from your home?”

  Still Carin wavered. Her hands renewed their fidgets. One tugged at her sleeve. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I really can’t say. Only … I’m afraid the sprite will be disappointed,” she muttered, unable to keep the creature out of the conversation. “Somehow I don’t think the woodsprite will find the master wizard willing to send it back through the void.”

  “Nor do I,” Verek snapped. “Speak to me no more of that goblin. You hide behind it like a child clutching its mother’s skirts.”

  He reached over and pinned Carin’s restless fingers, stilling them in his warm, strong grasp. “You know our purpose here,” he whispered, leaning in, bringing his face so close to Carin’s that she felt his breath. “Indeed, your course has been clear since that morning in my library when we spoke of the dragon which you conjure from the words of the looking-glass book. I told you then that the creature could be used for good, not evil. By wielding it as a weapon, you may save lives without number. If you deny your duty now, it’s because you find it abhorrent—as do I. But you will not persuade me that you are yet in ignorance of this thing that you must do.”