The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Carin shook her head. Though the wizard squeezed her fingers painfully, she didn’t jerk them away.

  “I made you a promise that morning. Remember?” she said quietly. “I swore I’d never summon the dragon again. I said I wouldn’t help you lay a trap and then walk right into it.”

  “A trap? Set for you?”

  Verek’s jaw muscles tightened perceptibly. His nostrils flared as he drew in a long breath. For a moment he held it. Then he let it out slowly.

  Just as slowly, he released Carin’s hand and raised his fingers to her face. She sat perfectly still, barely breathing, as the wizard’s fingertips stroked her cheekbone, then traced the line of her jaw.

  His fingers made a sudden move alongside her throat. Carin grabbed, but caught only his wrist as the wizard cupped his hand tightly around the back of her neck. As unyielding as a shepherd’s crook, it pulled her to him.

  “No.” Verek breathed the word into Carin’s face. “You cannot believe that. Even in the midst of the doubts that you harbor in droves, you cannot ignore all that you have seen and understood. You have witnessed the whirlpools that carry living beings between the worlds, and you have seen the vermin of an unearthly domain infest this realm where you now reside. You have befriended one lost creature, and watched it wax and wane on this world that can be no home to it. You’ve faced a monstrous cat that never was begot on Ladrehdin.”

  “The cat!” Carin exclaimed. She pulled away from Verek—in surprise, not fear.

  He let her go. They settled just beyond one another’s reach. Carin’s hands came to rest in her lap. Verek’s clasped his upraised knees.

  Wonderingly, she asked her questions. “The cat came through the void? The same way those mantikhora scorpion-vermin did? The same way the woodsprite got here … and me?”

  Getting only the wizard’s nod for an answer, Carin pressed on.

  “But—when? The woodsprite came to Ladrehdin quite a while back. You told me you felt the magical storm that brought its wand, like driftwood, to your wizards’ well. And about five years ago, you saw the whirlpool that carried me, so I guess I was the second to arrive.” Carin tilted her head, adding it up. “Then, barely a week before you led us out of Ruain, I was in your cave of magic watching the mantikhora wash into this world. So we know when all of these invaders got here.”

  A poor choice of words! warned the corner of Carin’s mind that had the job of policing her tongue. That makes me an ‘invader’ too.

  Before the thought had intruded too far, she shook it off. “But what about the big cat? If it came here in another storm of magic, wouldn’t your wizards’ well have shown you the whirlpool that fetched it to Ladrehdin?”

  Verek shrugged. “That the waters of the wysards were in much turmoil at the cat’s passage, I little doubt. We both would have witnessed the creature’s crossing of the void—had we not, by that hour, already left Ruain.”

  “Already left,” Carin repeated, mulling it over. If the cat had been brought across after they were embarked on this journey, how had Verek—separated from the wizards’ well that showed him the magic as it happened—known about the beast’s arrival?

  “I sensed the upheaval as the creature neared this world,” the wizard continued, as if answering Carin’s unspoken question. “Though I do not know where the cat came to ground, I am certain of our location at the time. We were at the edge of the pine forests west of Deroucey, soon to begin our crossing of Imlen.”

  Carin slowly nodded. “I remember. You seemed wrapped up in your thoughts. When I asked if I could have a little privacy before we left the trees, you barely heard me. And when you turned around and looked at me, it was like you were looking past me.”

  Verek canted his head. “I wonder that you, too, did not sense the cat’s passage through the void. Though clearly your susceptibility to the flow of magic was not as keen then as it has become since, still you might have felt something of the powerful tremor that I detected.”

  Carin shook her head. “I didn’t feel anything except my saddle sores and how badly I wanted to get down off my horse. In fact, just about the time you would have been concentrating on the cat’s arrival, I was trying to make you hear—in your head—how tired and achy I was from riding.”

  The wizard leaned slightly toward her. Carin recoiled just as negligibly before quelling her jitters. I don’t need to go into spasms of terror every time he twitches a muscle, she scolded herself. The fact that he’s talking to me like this is proof enough that he’s not ready to be shut of me … yet.

  “I do not understand you,” Verek said, eyeing her sharply. “What do you mean, you strove to make me aware—inside my mind—of your complaints?”

  Tersely, Carin told him how she had suspected, from her first days under his roof, that he could read her thoughts; and how she’d put the idea to the test at the edge of the plain of Imlen, in trying to convey to him by thought alone how sore and weary she’d felt.

  A corner of Verek’s mouth turned up, but the expression on his face was not a smile. He leaned back, and straightened one bent leg. His stockinged foot slid past Carin’s. He seemed far less conscious of its movements than she was.

  “Therein, I’ll wager, lies the reason you knew nothing of the cat’s passage,” he muttered. “Your wits were too fixed on this curious attempt to speak in silence.” Verek shook his head. “I cannot read your mind. If I seem at times to have done so, it is because your thoughts were written on your face. You can be as obvious one moment as you are incomprehensible the next.”

  The briefly straightened leg drew back and bent under him, taking his weight as he leaned again toward Carin. “If you should wish, therefore, to make me aware of a thing, then you must express the matter by means more direct than merely thinking it at me. I live in hope that you will tell me, in language open and simple—and before many more nights have overtaken us—that you have reconsidered your decision in the business of the looking-glass dragon. For if you hold to your resolve and refuse to summon it when the crucial moment is upon us, then I will die. Whether you will also be destroyed, I cannot say. The wysard who will slay me may elect to spare you—for what purposes, I leave to your fruitful imagination.

  “Though I would choose life for us both, were it my choice to make,” Verek went on, his eyes ruthlessly upon Carin, “I tell you plainly that it’s neither my fate nor yours that most concerns me. My fears are for the blameless people of this world—and for beings equally innocent, though they follow strange ways on unknown other spheres—whose lives may turn on your decision. Exercise your office when the time comes, and you will remove the danger to Ladrehdin and to any realm from which a bridge has been built. Fail in your duty, however, and horrors not to be conceived of by the mortal mind may come stalking over those bridges to devastate worlds upon worlds.”

  Chapter 17

  A Realm Beyond

  Carin woke to an empty cave. Verek was gone.

  Her heart raced. She sat bolt upright, feeling as lost as the child who had been snatched from a distant realm and set adrift in this world.

  Carin’s gaze darted to her knee-boots, coat, and cloak, which were piled to one side of the blue-flamed magian fire. With them was her pack, which had somehow made the ride down the snow-chute without tearing from her back.

  Across from her gear was her breakfast, prepared and keeping hot by the fire: a mug of tea and slices of dried apple from the provisions in her pack, and a stale oatcake that must have entered the cave in Verek’s gear. Carin had no bread in hers.

  She pressed her fist to her heart, willing it to slow. “Take it easy!” she muttered. “He hasn’t abandoned you … yet.”

  Relief became apprehension. The tea and fruit testified mutely that Verek had been in her pack. Had he also gone through her pockets?

  Carin checked, and could breathe again. Legary’s deathbed narrative was still folded in her trousers pocket, and with it the magical circlet of braided hair. The loss of the paper she c
ould endure; each line of that poem was imprinted on her brain. But she would not willingly part with the circlet before she had turned its power of seeing upon matters that were still hidden.

  She swallowed every crumb and drop, then pulled on her boots and coat. Her mittens were missing, lost in the avalanche. Those on her hands when she went into the snow had been her last pair.

  Carin slipped her empty tea mug into her pack, rolled her cloak into a bundle, and squeezed herself and her gear through the cave’s narrow mouth. The day outside was gray, the lowering sky as wintry as the landscape. She stood on a snow-covered ledge, overlooking a field of avalanche debris. The snow, violently broken and churned, no longer mimicked an ermine mantle but resembled a battlefield. Out away from the ledge was a deep pit such as a boulder shot from a catapult might dig.

  “Good. You’re here,” Verek snapped from behind her, dispensing, as was his habit, with the basic civilities.

  Carin turned to face him. “Good morning,” she said, too happy to be alive to bristle at his gruffness. “Thank you for my breakfast. Is that”—with her thumb, she indicated the battle-scar behind her—“the hole I was buried in?”

  “Yes.” Verek reached for Carin’s bundled cloak and impatiently demanded her pack too. When she’d handed them to him, he turned without another word and tied her gear to the end of a rope that dangled down the canyon wall. His own cloak and pack were already thus secured.

  Carin’s gaze followed the line upward and found Lanse at the top. The boy stood on the canyon’s rim, holding the rope in one gloved hand. His other arm remained in a sling, under his coat. He wore no cloak; the snowslide had claimed it.

  “Up!” Verek yelled.

  The gear began its climb as Lanse, backing away from the edge, disappeared from view.

  Verek glanced at the mouth of the cave that had sheltered the sorcerer and his apprentice last night. He snapped his fingers. From the uncanny fire inside, the faintly blue reflection died away. His movements were quick and tense. He seemed to be in a powerful hurry to strike camp and leave this place.

  “My lord,” Carin addressed him politely.

  The wizard half turned to her, but his eyes were on the rope. That he chafed at even this much delay was clear from his fixed study of the gear’s ascent.

  She persisted. “How deep was I buried?”

  The question got Verek’s attention. His gaze dropped upon her like a raven from the heights.

  “Deep as catacombs,” he said. “So deep that no air could penetrate. Had I reached you a moment later, you would not now be alive.”

  Carin nodded, wordlessly acknowledging what she owed him. “But how did you find me so fast, under that much snow? It felt like every drift from here to Welwyn’s cabin was piled on me.”

  The wizard gestured toward Carin’s boots. “You still wear the chalse upon your ankle. It tells me always where you are.” His fingers closed, making a fist. It was not a threatening motion, but suggested possessiveness. “Had you thrown it off as you often speak of doing, you would have suffocated in an icy crypt.”

  “And satisfied Lanse,” she said. “One of his schemes against me would have finally succeeded.”

  Verek shook his head. “The boy denies evil intent. He did not wish you to fall. He was struggling to save himself. You were gone before he could do anything to help you.”

  Carin sniffed. Believe what you want to, warlock, she thought. I’ve seen the executioner’s face.

  The rope came down in a coil, hitting the snow behind Verek with a slithering sound and terminating their conversation. He worked out the free end and wound it tightly around Carin’s hips, tying the rope off into a sort of seat. Then he climbed the anchored line hand-over-hand, gained the rim where Lanse stood, and hauled Carin up more easily than the one-armed boy had hoisted their gear.

  As she reached his level, Lanse wouldn’t look at her. He busied himself loosening the hitch that had made the rope fast to a sturdy balsam fir.

  It was a walk of some two hundred yards along the canyon’s rim to join the waiting Trosdans at the western end of the bridge. With the deer was the sled that had caused so much trouble.

  Carin eyed it, and wondered. Not only had Verek dug her from the avalanched snow—No, not ‘dug,’ she speculated, recalling the wizard’s spectacular eruption from his own snowy tomb—he had also managed to right the sled and bring it across. How much had been done by mortal labor, and how much by sorcery? Either way, the demands on him had been heavy.

  They lost no time in harnessing the deer, strapping on their snowshoes, and resuming their travel. Carin’s hiking stick, a gift from Welwyn, was nowhere to be seen. Ruefully she recalled leaving it eastward, across the canyon. It had been her plan, after setting the woodsprite’s stepping-stones, to return for it.

  It doesn’t matter, she consoled herself. I couldn’t hold it now, gloveless, in this cold. She pulled up her hood, tightened her cloak around her, and stuffed her hands deep into her pockets.

  The evergreen boughs she’d stuck in the cedar bridge spanned a little less than half the distance. Would they serve for the sprite’s crossing? Carin watched for a spark in the trees but saw no sign of the creature.

  The urge to call to it died in her throat. Over the mountain and its thick covers of forest and snow, a brooding silence reigned. It seemed to have infected her companions. Verek said nothing to the deer, never cursing them even when the beasts hung the sled on a fallen tree limb that poked up out of the snow. The Trosdans, too, were uncommonly quiet. Their guttural huffing sounded hushed.

  Not much sky was visible through the dense canopy of the trees, but what showed was slaty and ominous. A storm brewing? Was that the reason for Verek’s haste and the tension that showed in his every movement?

  Their midday meal was a rushed affair of cold leftover venison and day-old bread. Then they were on the move again. The wizard allowed them no more than a few minutes’ rest at long intervals throughout the afternoon. The going here was flatter and less taxing for the deer and the snowshoers. Beyond the gorge that had nearly swallowed Carin, the terrain was less rocky, less steep, and more densely forested.

  If the gentler slopes offered an illusion of ease, the threatening sky dispelled it. Clouds hung down in a solid, gray mass. Out of the corner of her eye, Carin glimpsed lightning, but no sound of thunder broke the stillness.

  As evening drew on, they pitched camp in a balsam grove protected by heavy forest, in deep, soft, unpacked snow. The loose powder made digging snow caves impossible. Verek had them stamp out a tent platform with their bearpaws. He strung a rope between two trees to support the ridge of their tent. Then he lopped enough green boughs off small balsam and spruce trees to make a pile nearly as tall as Carin. She spread the greenery inside the tent, over the platform of packed snow, in a thick layer that would keep the cold from their sleeping furs.

  She emerged from her task to find Verek alone at the fire. Lanse was tethering the deer to graze what food the grove afforded them.

  Quickly she scooped pots full of snow to melt on the blaze. Then she jammed her freezing hands back into her pockets. Her fingers met the circlet of braided hair and toyed with it as they had all day.

  The wizard gave her no notice. He gazed steadily at the fire, as though far gone into thought.

  Now is not the time, whispered caution’s small voice.

  Carin ignored it. The circlet under her fingers had been murmuring to her since this morning of questions unanswered and puzzles unsolved. If she did not raise the subject now, with Lanse absent, she might never get another chance.

  “My lord?” she addressed the wizard softly.

  Verek did not look up, but a throaty “Hmm?” said he heard.

  “Will you let me read the rest of what your grandfather wrote about you?”

  The wizard’s gaze flicked away from the fire like a hot spark. When he fastened it on Carin, she flinched as if singed.

  “What?” He packed the word full of s
uch menace that Carin’s stomach twisted.

  But she stumbled onward. “In the Book of Archamon … what your grandfather wrote when you were a boy. I couldn’t read that page at first, not until I made the—”

  She broke off, almost swallowing her tongue. The wisewoman’s charm, she’d started to say. Rocked back on her heels by the whopping mistake that she’d barely avoided, she cleared her throat and tried again: “—the right kind of effort. Now that I’ve seen part of it, I’d like to read it all. May I?”

  Verek’s gaze burned a hole through her. His mittened hands tightened their grip on the bow that rested across his knees.

  Carin braced, hoping for nothing worse than a tongue-lashing, dreading his ready violence. But he did not lash out. He gave her a blunt answer, in a voice that was almost calm:

  “No. You are not at liberty to pry into my affairs of family.”

  Let it go! cried her inner sentinel. But resolve’s proved to be the stronger voice.

  “Then why didn’t you just let the paper go up in flames? If you’re determined to not let me read it, why didn’t you burn it, the way you started to?”

  Verek’s bow hand came off the weapon. Carin drew back a little. But he only raised his hand to his chin, to stroke a scraggly growth of beard.

  By Drisha, he needs a bath and a barber, interjected that corner of Carin’s wit which kept its own serene counsel.

  Like I don’t? she shot back, and ran a hand through her dirty, tangled hair.

  The wizard’s relentlessly direct gaze chased these and all stray thoughts from Carin’s head. He stared her down, saying nothing, as still as a stone except for the gloved hand that rubbed his chin.