Carin looked where the sprite indicated and saw a gently sloping hill much like the one they sat atop. Just visible in the rocks was a ball of brown fur, unmoving except for an occasional shudder.
“You’re no coward, sprite,” she corrected her friend. “You’ve saved my life again. I’d be boiling in the pot right now, just stewed meat, if you hadn’t chased that thing away. But as long as it stays clear of us, I think I’ll help myself to some of its hot water.”
At the fire, Carin sat where she could keep an eye on the hairy hummer. She shrugged off her pack, bow, and quiver. A quick examination showed the weapons to be undamaged, though she had lost patches of skin from her arm, scraped off when the hummer dragged her on her side up its hill.
Carin dug her tea mug from her pack and dipped up boiling water from the hummer’s pot. A cautious sip confirmed that the liquid was, in fact, water. She dumped in a little tea, and while it steeped she threw a handful of dried fruit into the pot to stew. It was a meager meal but her pack held no other food.
Theil Verek, she thought ruefully, wasn’t the only one to go off unprepared.
The woodsprite settled into a woody knob at the hill’s summit. From its watchtower it kept an alert and impatient vigil, whining at Carin to hurry.
“I am hurrying,” she mumbled around a mouthful of fruit. “But while I eat, why don’t you tell me where you disappeared to, that last week we were in the mountains. What became of you? And why in the name of Drisha did you try to save that witch from the dragon? Verek told me you’d be treacherous. I didn’t believe him, but you worried me when you dropped that limb on the Jabberwock.”
The sprite, so distracted that it hardly seemed to know what it said, babbled out a rambling story. Carin pieced together the essential points: The closer it got to Morann’s citadel, the sleepier the sprite became, until it could barely rouse itself for a single hour in a day to follow its companions. Well after they had crossed the canyon, the sprite groped its way over the cedar bridge. Then the uncanny fog caught it, and its movements through the trees became leaps of faith. Each time the sprite jumped, it did so blindly, unable to see whether any tree waited to catch it. The forest west of the gorge was thick enough, fortunately, to bear the creature up through an exhausting day of such travel.
When the fog lifted, then the sprite knew where it was. Long-forgotten, or long-suppressed, memories surfaced … of the grove, the ruined city, the topaz steps leading to Morann’s high altar, the golden-hued trees that overhung her wizards’ waters. The sprite had been there before. In fact, the creature had arrived in Ladrehdin by way of those waters, and it had dwelled for a time in the ancient grove. But Morann’s inability to enslave the wood-goblin had infuriated her. The creature eluded her just as it would later frustrate Verek. So Morann drove the sprite away, with a spell that blotted out the creature’s memories of her realm.
Upon its reapproach to Morann’s stronghold, the sprite encountered that spellwork anew, and felt so wearied, so sapped of life, it thought it might die. Such persistent and powerful magic should have kept the creature at bay forever. But the woodsprite that returned to the sorceress was stronger than the otherworldly being she had exiled years ago. It defied her ensorcellments and came flashing through the grove, leaping into the golden trees just as the Jabberwock took her.
“I could think of nothing then,” the sprite admitted, “but keeping the enchantress alive. Without her, how was I to return to my homeworld? I never meant to oppose you, Carin. I had no idea of anything but saving the witch from the dragon, then forcing her—somehow—to send me home.”
Carin nodded. “I understand. It’s too bad, though, that the dragon clubbed Verek with the tree limb you gave it. That was sort of an accident, but he’ll never trust you now.”
She got to her feet. “But it doesn’t really matter if he trusts you or not, I guess. If we manage to find your homeworld, then you’ll never see him again.”
That sounded final, in a way that made Carin pause. She needed a moment to refocus.
When she did, she reached for her pack and dug out the vine brooch, the lily pin, and the bit of tree-bark. She laid them against the sprite’s woody outpost so the creature could feel them.
“Let’s keep looking, sprite, until we find where you belong. Which of these do you want to try next? One of them must be the bridge that will take you home.”
Eagerly the sprite flitted over the talismans, biding for a moment within the bark. Even so, it could not say whether that object had arisen on its own world.
“But it seems like our best choice.” Carin spoke cheerfully, trying to boost the woodsprite’s spirits as she returned the two pieces of jewelry to her pack. “So let’s see where this scrap of another world takes us.”
She shouldered her pack and weapons, held the spindle up for the sprite to reenter, and headed downhill with both that wood and the tree-bark gripped in her left hand, leaving her right to wield the dagger. But it seemed word had spread among the meaty trees, hairy hummers, sulfurous mushrooms, and rolling sheep-stones of this place, warning them away from the armed stranger. The trees kept their twisted limbs to themselves, none offering to swat her. The sheepish rocks scattered before her. Of mushrooms and hummers, nothing could be seen.
On the creekbank, Carin halted and turned, holding the dagger out. A few of the braver sheep-rocks that had trailed her from the base of the hummer’s hill fell back again, “oohing” their consternation.
Assured that no denizen of this place contemplated an attack, she stuck the dagger in her belt and held out the bark. “If you’re ready, sprite,” she whispered to the spindle, “we’ll be going. I think we’ve worn out our welcome here.”
The woodsprite answered with a quick, silent sparking. Carin hung the toes of her boots off the clay bank, over the sluggishly flowing brook as though she stood on the rim of a wizard’s well. She turned her attention to the tree-bark.
And she’d hardly filled her lungs with the fusty air that came off the water before the image of yet another tree rose like a mirage. This tree’s limbs, however, were well-formed, and shaggy, covered with the same sort of bark she held in her hand. Carin eyed a high branch that offered numerous hand- and foot-holds. She crouched, and sprang for it.
Again came the sensation of arrowing through a black nothingness that had to be something. It streamed around her, fluid and floaty. Again she heard an ocean, distant but familiar. She entered a period of torpid thought that faded to semi-awareness.
This time, one observation rode out the cotton-witted part of her journey. At the moment Carin jumped from the creekbank into the void between the worlds, an exhilarating little thrill shot through her. She knew it now—that sense of elation—as the quickening of magic. Her passage through the void was her own wizardry—not Verek’s, not Morann’s, but hers. Maybe she wasn’t in perfect control of this magic that she made, but it was born of her own gift.
It took a frightfully long time for the shaggy tree to emerge from the backdrop of nothingness to loom below her. But finally she was landing in its branches.
Carin dropped the shred of bark to gain a free hand with which to steady her arrival—or fend off a blow, if this tree was so minded. But the tree accepted her as it might take a high-flying falcon into its limbs, with the slightest nodding of its small, green, juniper-like leaves and no exclaiming or thrashing. The scrap of bark tumbled into a heap of others so similar that Carin couldn’t, from her high perch, make it out. The snow under the shaggy tree was strewn with shredded bark.
Snow? Yes. The scene was wintry. This tree and a scattering of others rose above a rolling, snow-drifted landscape. The air was cold and fresh, and it chased from Carin’s nostrils the last whiffs of decay from Morann’s necropolis and from the world of carnal trees.
The woodsprite gave a little cry that was half delighted, half perplexed. It flashed from its spindle to enter the tree that held them. The sprite flickered down the bole, then jumped into a nearby
shrub.
Carin watched the creature’s explorations with quiet pity. She already knew the sprite must soon return to her, for this was not its world. This was the domain of …
She scanned the horizon for confirmation, and saw it. Gliding silently over a snowdrift, its white fur almost invisible, was the beast that so clearly belonged here. A huge cat with a thick ivory pelt was hunting its dinner. The magnificent brute paused under a tree, well removed from Carin’s, and reared up on the trunk. With long, sharp claws it shredded the bark, like a house cat sharpening its claws on a length of firewood, or on a leg of its mistress’s prized dining table.
Here was no one to scold it. The cat moved off. When it had disappeared in the snowdrifts, Carin wriggled out of her pack and fished out the next talisman. This one was the water-lily pin—not an obvious emblem for a woodsprite, but they were running out of possibilities.
Like a lamp that had only a little while left to burn, the sprite leaped with an unsteady flicker into the branch that held Carin. Without a word it crept back into its spindle, woefully signaling its readiness to resume their journey.
Carin gripped the piece of jewelry tightly, as if to force it by strength of will to take them to the world they sought. With narrowed eyes, she stared at the pin.
Nothing happened. No image rose before her gaze.
As the seconds passed, she began to feel the cold. Her heavy woolens were long gone, stripped off and abandoned in Morann’s ensorcelled meadow.
“Beggar it all,” Carin swore with a passion that would have done Verek proud. “If I’m going to freeze to death or starve in the snow, I would rather have done it on Ladrehdin.”
Her voice cut cleanly through the cold stillness. “Sweet mercy,” Carin muttered then, when she saw what she had done. Her swearing might have been the death-cry of an expiring deer, the way the cats reacted. Two of them appeared at once, prowling sinuously toward Carin’s tree, their blue eyes upturned to study her.
“Mother of Drisha!” she cursed again, but softly now, calling on a divinity that might or might not hold sway in this domain. Could such gigantic cats climb?
While the down-to-earth side of her wit weighed that question, a more abstract corner wrestled with a possibility that could not be ignored. Had her inexpert wielding of magic thrown her into a predicament from which escape was impossible? The snow under Carin’s tree showed no evidence of a stream or a pool, frozen or otherwise. For the first time, no waters were in sight, magian or otherwise. Without water to support the magic of it, maybe no talisman could work.
Hastily Carin repacked the unresponsive pin and took out the vine brooch. Below, one cat had reached her tree. Launching itself nearly halfway up the trunk with a powerful leap, it began climbing. Thus was her first question answered.
Carin raised the vine brooch to her eyes and gathered her wits to study it with mortal intensity. She had to make it work.
And like anything stared at long and hard, the brooch gradually began to reveal aspects that had earlier escaped her notice. Carin saw the network of veins in its leaves, the tiny spike at the base of each midrib, the fine hairs along the tendrils that coiled from the main stem.
But … should it appear to move? Wasn’t this certainly a delusion, this strong impression it gave, that the elaborate spiraling pattern of its stem was slowly unwinding?
No. Her eyes weren’t tricked. The brooch was no longer an exquisite jewel fit to fasten a lady’s cloak. It was a long stemmy vine, writhing in Carin’s hand as though it had enough sense to realize it shouldn’t be there.
Out of nothingness, a green lacework of leaves fell like a hood over Carin’s head. Tough green strings bound her feet and legs. The vine in her hand made itself fast around her wrist, stabbing its spikes into her skin, securing its tendrils to some nearby anchor that indisputably was not the shaggy tree of the cats’ world.
A multitude of shrill, reedy voices rose around Carin, piping away like the woodsprite made legion. She could pick out no intelligible words, but the voices seethed indignation.
Around her neck a wiry stem wrapped, pulling tight as a garrote. The last thing Carin heard was the woodsprite’s protests shrilling above the rest:
“No! No! Stop! Angwid, stop this. Make room. She is a friend. She’s brought me home.”
Chapter 21
Broken Bridges
“Carin, dear girl. Do wake up, I beseech you.”
Cool, sweet water dripped on her lips. Her tongue licked it off and sought more.
A veritable flood came then, pouring into her open mouth.
Carin sat bolt upright, spluttering. Her eyes flew open to behold a mass of leaves, tightly bunched, looming in front of her face like the wildest jungle greenery.
She recoiled, one hand flying to shield her throat.
“Be easy!” the greenery cried. It slithered backward a short way, spilling some of the water that it cupped in its leaves. From the mouth working in the stem came a voice she knew well. “It’s your faithful woodsprite that you see in this spindly excuse for a vine.”
“Sprite!” Carin exclaimed. She struggled to take in everything at once: the soft green creature before her; the smooth, water-washed boulder under her; the verdant expanse like a seaborne pasture that floated all around her; a cloudy, green-tinted sky and a breeze that smelled strongly of cabbage. “What—? How—?”
The breeze chilled her skin. Without conscious thought Carin reached for her shirt collar to pull it higher around her neck. But her questing fingers found no cloth. She glanced down, and stared. Where once her whipcord figure had boasted few curves, she now had, as Myra would have said, some meat on her bones. But she wasn’t wearing a shirt. From the waist up, she was naked.
“Drisha’s teeth!” Carin swore, her voice raspy and choking in her bruised throat. “Sprite! What’s been going on here? Where’s my blouse?”
“My apologies, dear girl, for the unseemly conduct of my people,” the sprite piped in a thin, strained tone. “It was all I could do to keep them from strangling you. When you, um, arrived so suddenly, crowding in on them as you did, you put them quite out of temper.” The vine leaned closer. It seemed to shiver.
“I crowded them?”
Carin crossed her arms over her chest and glanced around. The boulder she was sitting on rose out of an ocean that was choked with greenery. Everywhere—except for a band of open water immediately surrounding her vantage point—vines and water-weeds slithered and writhed, riding the gentle swells. At the edge of the open water waited a tangled, lush mass that reared above the ocean’s surface—clenching, then spreading, uncountable stems and tendrils as though dreaming of getting them around her neck again.
In the distance, a few hummocks bulged up from the general mass of greenery—other boulders perhaps, but all of them completely buried under the rampant plant life. No rock or soil showed anywhere. A sloping contour on the far horizon suggested a possible surface of land rising above the level of the sea, but it too was wholly overgrown. If any beach existed at that meeting of water and land, it was invisible beneath an unbroken mat of green. Every surface inch, from sea to shore to distant hilltop, wore a solid carpet of plants.
“I don’t know how they could be more crowded than they already are,” Carin murmured to the solitary vine beside her. “But I suppose I am taking up space. And they don’t appear to have any to spare.”
“No, indeed,” the sprite muttered. “I confess myself quite surprised by such a profusion.”
“But you recognize this place? We have found your home?” Carin eyed the sprite, secretly satisfying herself that its current accommodation was not the same as the spiky length of vine that had been the talisman of this world. The sprite’s vine was smooth-stemmed, and noticeably more spindly than the erstwhile “brooch.” She glanced around for the talisman that had pricked droplets of blood from her wrist with its sharp little spines. But that particular specimen seemed to be gone, disappeared into the general glut of plants.
The sprite’s vine bobbed as if nodding. “So much has come back to me, Carin, like a flood in my mind. Being here now, twined around this boulder, rooting into its crevices … I do know this place. Or I knew it, once. All these weeds …” the sprite muttered. It shook itself drearily, the way a man who felt helpless might shake his head. “Where are the groves like temples? Where are the noble trees reaching for the sky?” The vine twisted away for a moment, as if scanning the horizon, then slithered up to Carin again.
“Well,” she murmured, rubbing her throat and fingering the welts the vines had raised there and on her wrist, “you were away for a long time. Things change.”
“Indeed,” the sprite replied, sounding far more subdued than Carin would have expected from a traveler who had longed for home and finally reached it. “But what a great change has been wrought in this world! I find much of what surrounds me at this moment to be quite unrecognizable.” The sprite shivered again.
Both were briefly silent, Carin casting about for something to say. She had never let her thoughts dwell on what would happen if the woodsprite actually succeeded in returning to its homeworld. The prospect of saying good-bye, of parting permanently from the creature, had always belonged to the far future—a circumstance to confront only when she must. Even so, she had imagined a deliriously happy woodsprite, not a stringy vine with drooping, quaking leaves.
The damp breeze that played over Carin’s bare skin sent another shiver through her. “I would, uh, like to get my shirt back,” she murmured as she hugged her body. “Do you know what the plants did with it?”
The sprite lifted its leaves, a gesture of apology.
“It’s gone, Carin. Your garment was fashioned of linen. They took it away to give it a proper burial, as they honor the remains of any dead thing that once was living wood or herb. That custom, at least, does not appear to have changed during my absence.”
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 37
