The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  After a long moment of this, Carin swallowed hard and turned back to the fire. She busied herself mixing oatmeal from their dwindling food supplies with the last raisins from the almost-empty packets of dried fruit that it had become her duty to carry. Oatcake-baking had also fallen to her. It was a two-handed job that Lanse couldn’t manage, even after he’d recovered sufficiently to resume much of the care of the deer.

  Verek’s silence stretched on. Carin didn’t look at him. The bread browned under her fixed gaze, its progress watched more closely than a beetle’s by a hungry bird.

  He spoke. She jumped.

  “I did not burn the leaf you tore from the Great Book,” the wizard muttered, “because I could not. You forbade it.”

  Carin stared at him now, openmouthed but speechless. He could hardly fail, however, to read her question from her expression.

  “Do you not remember?” he asked. “Your words were: ‘It must not burn.’”

  Verek pulled off a mitten, reached inside his coat, and drew out the folded paper, pinched between two fingers. He flipped it into the fire.

  Carin gasped. She grabbed the forked stick she’d been using as fire-tongs and made a stab at the paper.

  The wizard parried with a bigger stick, thwarting her rescue attempt. “Leave it!” he barked. “Look at it.”

  She looked. The paper was untouched. Flames licked around it, but no edge curled or caught.

  Verek finally raked it out of the coals. “‘It must not burn,’ you decreed. Never, therefore, will it burn.” He shook off the wood-ash and slipped the undamaged paper back inside his coat.

  Footsteps approached. They paused at the sled. Then Lanse came to the fire, clasping two bricks of Welwyn’s frozen stew against his dirty coat with an equally grimy glove. There was nothing magical in the campfire conversation then, only worried talk of weak, starving sled-deer.

  Lanse’s weariness showed in his face. The boy retired to the tent as soon as he’d eaten, leaving the cleaning up, as always, to Carin. His recovery from the cat’s attack had been slow and uneven—hardly a testament to Verek’s powers as a healer. But if the cat was no natural creature of Ladrehdin, as appeared to be the case from what the wizard had said last night, that could explain the injury’s sluggish response to his medications.

  Verek did not stay up long either. He conjured a witchlight orb to help Carin with her chores. From the sled, he got his bundle of blankets and sleeping furs, and hers also. She watched him spread them over the green boughs, his in the middle of the tent platform, hers at his right hand. Lanse’s place was to his left.

  That was the arrangement whenever they must use the tent, although Carin suspected that all three of them preferred the privacy of separate shelters in the snow. She frowned as the sound of Lanse’s labored wheezing drifted out of the tent. It was loud in the forest’s stillness.

  Such a deep silence hung over the trees that it brought the word “despairing” to Carin’s mind. She remembered a poem she’d read in Verek’s library. The poet who had used such language might have been describing these very trees, except it seemed impossible that any mortal could have ever before disturbed the snow-muted solitude of this place.

  Carin, alone now with the night, glanced around uneasily, then prodded herself into motion. With a packed snowball for a dish scrubber, she made quick work of their dirtied bowls and pots, and rinsed them in steaming water from the snow-melt on the fire. With that same hot water, she washed her face, and dried on a linen chemise that she kept in her pack for the purpose. It didn’t do to leave skin damp for even a few seconds in this cold. She hung the linen from a tree to dry—to freeze, rather. She’d knock the ice crystals out in the morning. Stepping a few paces into the balsam grove that enclosed their camp, she relieved herself, trained by long practice to do it quickly and hitch up her trousers forthwith.

  She lingered in the grove, wanting to call to the missing woodsprite but constrained by the oppressive silence. Was the creature cut off from them? Had the canyon defeated it, despite her efforts to help it across?

  Maybe the sprite is only sleeping, Carin told herself. Which is what I should do. Tomorrow will be as long as today was.

  In the tent, she slid under the furs, into her sleeping bag, without disturbing her companions. At least, Lanse was asleep. His breathing was shallow, regular, and noisy. She couldn’t tell about Verek. He wasn’t gently snoring, which was the only sure way to judge the wizard’s state. But he lay motionless, giving Carin no reason to think him in his waking senses.

  Sleep eluded her, though. Restless thoughts lurched through her brain, in time to the annoying rhythm of Lanse’s wheezing. When she closed her eyes, she saw the folded page that held Legary’s once-obscure writing … Verek flinging it into the fire … the paper emerging unscathed.

  “I did not burn the leaf from the book because I could not.” The warlock’s words were the melody to Lanse’s maddening cadence. “It must not burn, you decreed.”

  Pulsing just under that memory was another, only slightly older: Verek standing with Carin near the mouth of the rock cave, having lately played again the role of rescuer, gesturing at the ensorcelled iron on her ankle. “Had you thrown it off as you have wished to do,” he’d said, “you would have suffocated in the snow.”

  Had ‘I’ thrown it off? Carin wondered. He talks like I can get rid of that thing just like untying a bootlace. If it were that simple, I would have got it off me long ago.

  Long ago … It was many weeks now since she’d stood with another wizard and heard from him, also, a suggestion that she could choose of her own will to be free of Verek’s shackle. “You’ve the power yourself, don’t you know,” Welwyn had said, “to rid yourself of the fetter … to think it away, as Theil Verek thought it onto you.”

  Whatever the truth of the monk’s claim, Carin’s fretful brain threatened to think the night away. The harder she tried to clear her mind, the louder her cogitations clamored—and the noisier Lanse’s wheezing grew. Finally, with a scarcely breathed curse of “Drisha take it!” she eased from her furs and crawled out into the winter night.

  The world outside the tent was a twilit fantasy so vastly altered from her earlier view of it that Carin stood dazed, unsure of her senses. The air seemed hardly to be air at all, but a phantasm of frozen mist, floating snow, and cloud draggling on the ground. It was fog, she realized as she swept a bare hand through the stuff—but no ordinary fog. It stuck to her skin like cold, wet spider-silk.

  More bizarre than the air’s texture was its radiance. Though the night was moonless, the fog seemed to glow. Its light was less than firelight; their dwindling campfire, some distance away, gleamed through it. The fog was dimmer by far than Verek’s witchlight orb, which still illuminated the snow that Carin’s washing-up had stained. Yet the stuff had its own cold, cheerless luminosity. It suffused the night with the sort of sepulchral sheen that might attend a gathering of ghosts.

  Carin pushed through it to the failing blaze—this campfire was no magian conjuration that could burn unattended all night. She stirred up the embers and sat by the fire with her hands in her pockets, peering into the spectral vapor until her eyes hurt. There was nothing to see.

  Presently, she looked back toward the tent. When all remained quiet there, Carin drew out the braided circlet of witches’ hair.

  She pulled off her right boot, then her stocking, and propped her bare foot on her clad one to keep it out of the snow. She fingered the ensorcelled anklet that had led Verek straight to her burial place under several feet of suffocating snowpack.

  If you hadn’t been wearing it, you would have died, Carin reminded herself.

  “I don’t care for ‘would haves’ and ‘might haves’,” she countered in a whisper. “I will have the damned thing off me!”

  Eyeing the fetter through her circlet, Carin muttered the charm of seeing. And when the words were said, she gagged, nauseated. This shackle was no dead, metallic thing. It was hideously alive:
a coal-black, smooth-skinned snake that clenched its tail in its teeth to hold its pulsating body tight to her ankle.

  “Uggh!” Carin straightened her leg so fast that her knee popped, her nerves atingle with the need to kick the serpent off her. But immediately upon leaving the narrow field viewable through the seer’s circlet, the snake became again a ring of iron.

  The warlock was wise to hide its true form! Carin seethed, recalling that morning in Deroucey when Verek had concealed the ring under his hand. I would have cut my foot off to get rid of this thing.

  Now, perhaps, such a drastic remedy would not be necessary. From the fire, Carin drew out a small branch, its tip glowing red. Gingerly she returned her girded ankle to its propped position. She gulped a breath and held it to steady both hands: the firebrand in one, the circle of magic pinched in her other and raised to her eye.

  Verek’s sorcery, which had been impervious, in its inert form, to furious blows with a rock, yielded instantly to this craftier attack. The snake writhed as Carin touched the firebrand to its head. Its mouth gaped open; its freed tail lashed like a whip: the ring was broken. The serpent fell into the snow, its body convulsing.

  Carin scrambled away in violent haste, kicking up enough snow to bury the creature. She searched frantically for it then, peering through the circlet. A spasm in the snow attracted her hotly glowing stick. The firebrand made a snaky hiss as she punched it into the powder and under the ripple. A quick flip scooped the serpent up and sent it flying into the campfire. Its death throes lasted only a moment. It shriveled, turned to ash, and was gone.

  She pitched the firebrand into the fire after it, then massaged the ankle that was finally free of it supernatural burden. Carin’s skin felt smooth, her flesh unmarked except for the thin white scar of the injury that the fetter had given her in Deroucey.

  As she sighed in relief, Carin glanced up and froze. The luminous fog was no longer barren. Winking at her from its oddly radiant depths were flashes and glimmers of colorful lights … vague on detail when viewed directly, but at the edge of her vision strongly suggesting eyes.

  “Woodsprite?” Carin called, and jumped when her voice echoed softly off the fogbank. “Sprite,” she repeated in a more cautious whisper. “Are you there?”

  The only answer was a low, barely audible hum, as if a multitude of beings whispered behind her back.

  Carin grabbed a large flaming branch from the fire and stuck it into the snow on her dark side, to ward off possible attack from that quarter. With urgent haste she pulled on her stocking and boot, sprang to her feet, grabbed the torch, and plowed through the fog back to the tent.

  Verek was waiting in front of it. The rabbit-fur robe draped around his shoulders was frost-tipped, hinting that he had stood there for some time. His hood was back. The glow of the fog and Carin’s torch lit features that were alert but not openly alarmed. The wizard’s hands held no weapons. He only clasped his furs around him.

  The sight of him standing calmly, unprepared for battle, reassured Carin. She stuck the flaming branch into the snow beside the tent, within reach but not guttering in their eyes.

  She approached him a little warily, not at all sure of her welcome. Could the wizard fail to know that she had cast off his sorcery?

  Verek said nothing. He only stood like a safe anchor in a fogbound sea. All around them the colorful lights winked, like disembodied eyes floating in icy vapor.

  “What are they?” Carin whispered, edging so close to Verek that her breath ruffled his furs. “Are they alive?”

  The wizard shook his head. “I don’t know. We are in a realm beyond. Here are many things of which I know nothing.”

  A light drifted by, closer than most, and ended its existence in a brilliant green fire-flash at the corner of Carin’s vision. She gasped and made a startled grab for Verek.

  He flung open his robe and took her in, wrapping her tight in rabbit hair. Carin pressed against him, shivering, unable to put into words the question in her mind: A realm beyond what?

  Abruptly the wizard reclaimed his furs and directed Carin to the tent behind him. “Go to sleep,” he said. “We need not fear these spectral flickers.” His fingers rested for an instant on Carin’s shoulder, then withdrew. “I cannot promise that you will like what you find in this land, but tonight it may give you some comfort to know that our long journey together is nearly ended.”

  * * *

  The lights were gone by morning, but the uncanny fog remained. For the first time since leaving Welwyn’s glen, the deer seemed not to know the way. As they stood in the traces bewildered, it wasn’t balkiness that hindered them, but indecision. They took a few faltering steps, then refused to go farther. They shied from the fog as if from the edge of a precipice.

  Verek didn’t curse the beasts. He dropped the reins and stood in silence, his eyes closed. Lanse made a nervous sentry at his master’s elbow, his gaze darting everywhere as if he thought the featureless fog must have something to show him.

  Carin kept close. The vapor pressed her inward, toward the nucleus of their little group. She wouldn’t risk becoming separated from food, shelter, and her two armed companions in this formless, ghostly domain.

  Verek opened his eyes. He flew into action, issuing commands with the brisk authority of someone who had reached a decision that must be implemented at once.

  “Take the snubbing line, Lanse. You can manage it one-handed. The land here lies gently enough to pose little threat of runaway. But if need be, you will help the girl to hold the team, should nerves get away with the wretched beasts as we push on.”

  The wizard summoned “the girl” with a jerk of his head.

  Will his lordship never bring himself to say my name? Carin wondered. Irritated but compliant, she ’shoed over the snow to join him.

  He worked the second strap—the guide rein by which the lead deer was nominally controlled—out of the traces. Verek neatly coiled the long line and handed it to Carin.

  “You take this,” he said, “and lead the team in my tracks. Unfamiliar though this country is, I would be no sort of wysard if I couldn’t find a seat of power that lies not a day’s journey hence.” He paused, eyeing the bare hands to which he had entrusted the rein. “Take my gloves.” Verek pulled them off and thrust them at her. “Today I will be the one shuffling along with my hands stuffed in my pockets.”

  Carin gazed at him, more than mildly astonished. The wizard seemed buoyant—not quite, but almost, cheerful.

  What you see, don’t you know, is the quickening of a warrior who’s primed for battle, murmured a voice in her head that so closely resembled Welwyn’s, Carin was glancing over her shoulder for the monk before she realized that the thought was her own.

  True to his word, Verek paced with his hands in his pockets, his head down, his eyes—closed? Possibly. Carin could not see them.

  Certainly he didn’t watch where he was going. He couldn’t. The fog shrouded the trees so thickly that one might stub the turned-up toe of a snowshoe against a snag before its presence was guessed at. Yet the wizard avoided every obstacle, leading Carin and the deer smoothly over deep, loose powder. Her one experience with breaking trail in unpacked snow, back in Welwyn’s glen, had had her floundering breathlessly through the new-fallen flakes, exhausted in twenty steps. Yet Verek tramped on all morning, setting a steady but unhurried pace that alone felt natural in this nebulous dreamworld.

  “I would be no sort of wizard if I couldn’t find a seat of power that lies not a day’s journey hence.” Carin rolled Verek’s words around in her thoughts, exploring them from every angle. “A seat of power” could be a chieftain’s stronghold. Landholders of all stripes flung their nets over as much territory as they could grab, but held title and blood-right through some well-fortified property that might have been the seat of the family for generations.

  Worldly power, however—the kind that one amassed by running roughshod over one’s neighbors—was not the sort to which Verek made reference. Of
that, Carin was certain. The power he sought was the kind he could sense in the very air … the kind he could find with his eyes shut … the sort he made himself. The power to which he was leading them derived from the forces of magic.

  And are you fit to be called ‘adept,’ if you can’t also sense this power? challenged Carin’s inner skeptic. She glued her gaze to the tails of Verek’s snowshoes, opened her awareness to whatever might brush against it … and was rewarded, after some minutes, with a fleeting impression of blue water and summer green. Nothing more, only the colors, rich and warm and alien to winter.

  The hint of warmth should have been welcome, but Carin received it with foreboding. If Verek was right, they would reach that green oasis before nightfall: it “lies not a day’s journey hence.” Soon, she might find her suspicions, her speculations—and her options—all at an end.

  “Midday” being a matter for guesswork in the fog, they stopped after several hours, ate, and briefly rested. The deer were tethered at a patch of decent grazing, but only two gave it their attention. The animal that traveled in the middle of the string, between lead deer and heavy puller, stood listlessly, hanging its head, eating nothing. When Verek roused his party to move on, the worn-out beast refused.

  The wizard’s temper didn’t flare. He stood looking at the animal thoughtfully. Then he turned to his companions.

  “The beasts are finished. They have done what they can for us; I won’t force them. Lanse, walk with me. I would speak with you regarding the Trosdans’ fate.”

  Verek gave Carin a hard look. “Will you wait where you are? Or must I tie you to a tree to stop you wandering off?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere in this soup. I could step off a ledge before I knew it was there.” She half raised her hand to him, then dropped it. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”