When her legs would support her, she stumbled to the bench of the fish. She gazed at the crystal dolphin that Verek had placed there. The charm did not rest directly on the stone. It nested in a coil of auburn hair—Carin’s hair, from the shearing that Myra had given her when this quest began.
Hardly knowing what she did, Carin dug into her pocket and pulled out the circlet of wysards’ hair. Carefully she reshaped the ring of interwoven black, auburn, and salt-and-pepper strands. She looped it over the crystal so that it, too, touched the coil of her hair. From the floor she picked up the dolphin that had accompanied her to distant worlds before bringing her safe to Ruain. She nested that crystal in the circle alongside its translucent twin.
Carin shrugged out of her pack and empty quiver and sank to the floor. She leaned against the bench that held the mated charms. Absently she rubbed her wrist, until she realized that the thorn-pricks and welts inflicted by the vines of Angwid had healed, leaving behind only a tracery of pale scars.
After a moment Carin reached for the golden-blond spindle that had also attended her travels. The wood was the stuff of Ladrehdin but it had no place here, not in the province of Ruain. The wood came from the far west of this world, from the giant trees that guarded Morann’s necropolis.
Call the woodsprite with it, whispered a little voice that Carin didn’t want to hear.
“The sprite is dead,” she rebuffed the thought aloud. Though she spoke softly, her voice filled the cave of magic. “If its kindred didn’t rip it to pieces for protecting me, then it shriveled up and died soon anyway. Weeds die in a season.”
Carin cradled the spindle in her hands. Then she stood up and stepped to the rim of the pool.
“It is the custom of those green things of Angwid to bury their dead properly,” she said, speaking formally now. “How should I settle these remains? This splinter of wood is not the sprite’s body, but the creature fashioned it for that purpose. And it served the sprite well, much as a body would have served it, for a time that I cannot reckon by the seasons of this world.”
The voice that answered her this time did not arise in Carin’s thoughts. It emanated from the waters of sorcery.
“Burn it,” chimed the tinkling, silvery, seashell song of the wizards’ well. “That is seemly.”
Carin nodded. Respectfully, gently, she laid the spindle at the edge of the pool. She stood over it with her head bowed. Fixing her gaze on the wood, she whispered the command: “Burn.”
The spindle blazed for the briefest instant. Then the fire died, and nothing remained on the pool’s rim but a film of white ash.
A wind breathed through the cave and swept the ash into the waters of the well. Droplets like diamonds formed around each particle, then slowly sank into the pool’s depths. Carin gazed after the diamonds until they vanished from sight.
Abruptly she stepped back from the rim and dropped to a crouch. She worked her fingers under her boot-top and pulled out the last magical charm: the one talisman—or entity—that she had failed to return to its proper place in the cosmos.
“Will you face the wysard and say that you have fallen short?” asked a voice that could have come from heart, soul, or sorcery, for all Carin was able to name it.
“No,” she answered. “Take me there.”
Her free hand swept a dolphin off the bench, disrupting her previous attempts at unification. Carin’s gaze pierced to the core of the water-lily pin.
The magic awakened, filling her, answering her as it had not answered on the cats’ world or on the woodsprite’s. This time, an image rose from the waters of enchantment.
The image showed Carin no alien landscape, but a place she knew. Framed in the vision was Verek’s upstairs sitting room, a fireplace of gold-veined marble in one long wall, the wall hung on either side of the chimneypiece with paintings—two portraits, two landscapes. One of those landscapes was of a lake of blue water and white lilies, in a woodland of sheltering oaks and bright flowers.
“Take me there,” Carin whispered again. She stepped over the rim of the wizards’ well into the image—
—And into Verek’s quarters. Before she had time to blink, she was standing in front of the painting of the lake where Verek’s wife Alesia and their child, Aidan, had drowned years ago.
Carin looked at the lily pin in her hand. It was unchanged. This charm was simply what it appeared to be: a lovely piece of jewelry.
In its beauty she found understanding. The charm had failed her twice on other worlds because the place it was linked to, here on Ladrehdin, no longer existed except in art and memory. Verek, mad with grief, had annihilated the lake of the lilies. Only the wizards’ waters of Ruain knew the place now, and that power could do nothing more than send Carin here to view a painting of the lost lake. The jewel in her hand was as much a relic of a bitterly remembered past as was the rendering that hung on Verek’s wall.
Carin placed the pin on the mantelshelf near the painting and stood contemplating it. Had the Lady Alesia once delighted in the bauble? Had Morann used the pin as a point of focus to manifest the black art that killed the lady and her son? Carin could readily imagine a vortex erupting from the lake, catching mother and child unawares, whirling them into the tangled, long-stemmed water lilies, there to drown.
“That was the first,” she whispered to the empty room. “The first whirlpool the witch made never left this world.”
Perhaps it was the success of that early attempt that had encouraged Morann to cast a wider net, beyond the void, to catch up other innocents. Some, like the white-furred cat and Carin herself, must have come from worlds that were not so very different from Ladrehdin. The talismans of tree bark and crystal dolphin were as unchanged as the lily pin, when they made the passage between the realms. Other amulets, however, took on an aspect in one world that was unrecognizable in the next—a honeywood wand that, in its native domain, had the power of flight; a black orb, smooth-skinned and featureless, that swelled in the heat of its desert world to become a bloated, fanged predator.
Somewhere between the extremes fell Angwid, choked by its unchecked profusion of plant life. Angwid’s talisman was identifiable on both sides of the void. Yet the woodsprite had no more recognized the vine brooch as the token of its homeworld than Carin had grasped the significance of the crystal dolphin that Verek had used her to retrieve.
“Used” her? Yes, as the wizard had used her to return all the talismans—living or inanimate—and thereby break the bridges between the worlds; as he had used her to consign the woodsprite to its death.
“I cannot send living flesh through the void.” Verek’s frank admission, spoken months ago in Deroucey, came back to Carin. “That is a power beyond my craft.” Had the wizard known, so long ago—or had he only hoped—that the mastery he lacked was not beyond the talents of his apprentice?
Carin spun around, suddenly unwilling to be discovered here in Verek’s private apartments. She breathed easier to find the door to his suite tight shut in the other long wall of the sitting room. When no sound reached her from beyond that threshold, she rushed to the exit, the wider door in the interior wall, which opened to the upper corridor of the wizard’s sprawling house. It yielded easily, not locked, nor bespelled to invisibility the way it had been when Carin last tested it. Hastily she left the wizard’s quarters and hurried down the hallway to her own.
Her bedroom was just as she’d left it, with one exception. At some point in her absence, a small chest had been installed at the foot of the bed. Carin lifted the chest’s lid, and smiled.
Folded within was her whole wardrobe, the clothes that Myra’s skillful needle had fashioned for Carin during her month’s stay under Verek’s roof. There was a linen shift, which could be sashed at the waist and worn alone or slipped under a well-made kirtle of red wool. Beneath those garments lay her favorite pair of soft, gray trousers.
The chest also held one of Verek’s shirts. It was made of pearl-white linen, sewn from the best fabric the no
bleman’s wealth could buy. The shirt had been cut down in sleeves and shoulders to fit Carin’s smaller frame. After Myra had “borrowed” it for her, that afternoon when everything else Carin owned was rain-soaked, the shirt had never found its way back to the wizard’s wardrobe. It had fallen under the housekeeper’s needle to become Carin’s own.
Carin tossed the crystal charm on her bed. She had taken the dolphin from its magical mate to ensure her safe return from the realm of the lily pin. But within the familiar walls of Verek’s home, she needed no such protection.
She slipped Verek’s dagger from her belt, pulled off her stained, travel-worn knee-boots, shed stockings and breeches that were so stiff with dirt and sweat they could stand on their own, and untied her makeshift bandeau. Through the folding doors into her private bathing room, Carin burst almost at a run and splashed into the pool’s warmth. Thrice she soaped from the ends of her hair to the tips of her toes. Then she sat, up to her chin, on the steps that descended into the tub and let the flow of the natural hot spring rinse away the last traces of alien worlds.
Carin studied the room’s walls of glowing rock—so like the enchanted cave deep under this house … and yet, so different. “One delights while the other daunts,” Verek had once remarked. Here in the bathing room off Carin’s bedchamber, nature’s forces expressed themselves in pleasing energies that eased taut nerves and calmed troubled thoughts. Below, however, in the cave, forces worked that were alive with age-old magic.
That cavern could be a place of peril for anyone who dared to venture there. Hadn’t she seen Verek almost drown in his own wizards’ waters? Hadn’t Carin come to grief there, twice suffering the agonies of that unearthly cold? And yet, the cave of magic did not terrify her now, not like it once did. The voice of the power that lingered in that place had spoken to her … and she, to it.
Carin splashed from the tub, squeezed the water from her hair, and toweled off. In a drawer of the mirrored dressing-table that stood beside her bed, she found a flask of a creamy hairdressing. A dollop smoothed the snarls from her wet mane. Combed out, Carin’s hair fell halfway down her back.
She drew on her gray trousers and white shirt. They were cut generously enough to accommodate her filled-out bust and hips. The fitted kirtle, alas, would be hopelessly small on her now.
In her bare feet, Carin padded onto the second-story landing. She hurried downstairs to the foyer and along the passageway that opened off it, and stepped into Myra’s kitchen.
The housekeeper was sitting at the table polishing the silver. She greeted Carin’s entrance with wide, startled eyes, a gaping mouth, and a tongue that—for the space of two heartbeats—had nothing to say. Then the torrent began, washing over Carin, as welcome as rain in the desert.
“Oh my, dearie!” Myra jumped up from her work with surprising agility for one so stout. “Oh, my! Drisha be thanked! Here you are, sound of life and limb, and I never heard you come in at all. And you to your bath already—that great, damp, ruddy mane gives you away.” The housekeeper rounded the table to catch Carin up in a hug that was a womanly version of Master Welwyn’s lung-collapsing embrace.
Those two would get on well, Carin thought, squeezing Myra with arms that couldn’t quite reach around the woman’s bulk. Do they know each other, I wonder?
Abruptly Myra held Carin off. She looked her up and down with a delighted but puzzled smile. Then she began poking and prodding her like a hairy hummer checking its quarry for meatiness.
“Why, dearie!” the woman exclaimed. “I wouldn’t have thought it likely, in this twelvemonth and six, that you could bloom from stripling girl to shapely woman. But here’s the proof, standing before me and rounding into those curves that I despaired of ever seeing on your bare-boned frame.”
This twelvemonth and six? A year and a half? Carin did a quick mental calculation and faltered over the answer. But she smiled as she greeted the housekeeper.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you.” Carin took the woman’s hand. “We’ve got so much to talk about. Do you remember, you once said you wanted to hear all about my adventures? Well, I’ve had lots of them, and I’ll tell you everything. But first, Myra, I have to know: Where is he? Where is your master, and how is he getting along on that ankle? I’m sorry I had to send him back to you so bruised and battered. But is he mending? Can I see him?”
Myra’s look of puzzlement deepened, and her smile vanished. She shook her head. Like a woman who suddenly felt old and tired, she lowered her bulk to a seat at the table.
“Oh my, dearie!” she cried. “Why do you ask me such things? How am I to know where my master is or how he fares?” She choked back tears. “I have not seen my lord since he rode away with you and the boy. And that, dearie—as you must know—was the winter before last.”
Chapter 22
Through Eternity
Carin collapsed onto the bench beside Myra, staring at the housekeeper as if the woman were delusional. Then she jumped up and dashed to the side door that opened to the courtyard. She flung it open and stood on the threshold, studying a remnant of Jerold’s magic garden.
Where well-ordered beds of gentians and daffodils had once bloomed between expanses of manicured lawn, she saw rank shrubbery and grass grown tall. But clearly she’d come back to Ruain in springtime. The air was warm and fresh. The wildflowers that peeked through the undergrowth were the early bloomers. And beyond the wall that enclosed the grounds, the tops of the trees in the woodland were showing green, putting on their new leaves.
Carin returned to the bench and settled again beside Myra, willing herself to a patient untangling of this mystery but hardly knowing where to begin.
“It’s been a long six months, I’ll grant you, Myra. But it can’t be more than that. The flowers are up and the trees are budding. Didn’t we ride out—your master, Lanse, and me—only last winter, two weeks before Mydrismas?”
“Dearie, I well remember your leaving,” Myra answered softly, but with a look that suggested Carin was the deluded one. “How I’d hoped to celebrate the festival here, with a great feast, all the old stories, and a young wencel again in the house to enjoy them. But nothing would suit my master save that you ride away, west toward the mountains, when the wise must count it folly to make such a journey in the dead season. It was bitterness to my heart to watch you go, for well sure I was that I’d nevermore see the three of you alive.” She sighed. “But my master bade me stay to my duties and keep the house open for no less than a year and a month—longer, as I chose—against the return of any or all of you.”
Myra brightened a bit. “And didn’t it happen, just as he foresaw, that one of you should come straggling home, nearly a full year after you’d left?”
Carin shook her head, bewildered. “Who, Myra? Who came back? Not your master?”
“No, dearie, not my master. ’Twas young Lanse who rode in late one afternoon last autumn, mounted on his lord’s great brute, leading his own horse and that coddled black mare that you had such a fondness for.”
“Lanse!” Carin exclaimed, rising from the bench and halfway to the door before caution settled her down again.
The master of that idiot commanded him to ‘Kill the girl,’ whispered her native wariness. I’d best keep clear of my assigned executioner.
“Is Lanse here now?” Carin asked. “And is Emrys in the stable, and Brogar too? We left the horses on the mountains’ lower slopes with a monkish friend of your master’s called Welwyn. Do you know him?”
Myra waved her to silence. “One thing at a time, dearie. Yes, Master Welwyn was known to this house from before the day that I came to service here, though he’s not darkened the doorstep in …” She paused, frowning with the effort to remember. “Why, dearie, it’s decades now since he’s been. He came to the marriage feast of my lord and his lady.” Myra sighed as if at a bittersweet memory.
“As for Lanse and the horses,” she continued then, “nay, they’ve been gone these six months. The boy rested
here only a fortnight, eating as much as I could feed him. He was bone-thin, pale and gaunt as a wraith. He would not tell me much of what had befallen, only that the three of you had crossed a canyon into a land where decent folk had no business to be. His lord took you off into the fog, and neither of you ever came back, he said.”
Carin nodded. “The path we had to follow took us far from Lanse.”
Myra frowned again, looking slightly accusatory. “The boy said he waited—close on a month, by his reckoning—and killed the last of Welwyn’s deer for meat to live on. When the fog lifted, he tried to find you both, but there were … things, he said … that would not let him pass beyond the edge of the forest into a meadow where he knew you’d been. He could see your coats and cloaks piled in a heap amidst the flowers—what he thought were flowers. But he saw them turn white and waxy, then they shriveled and blackened, and he knew they were not flowers, but those ghoulish herbs that grow on burial grounds. Corpse-beards, some call them, or ghost fingers. Whatever were you doing in such a place as that?”
“Lord Verek had, um, private business with somebody who dwelled past that ground,” Carin murmured, wincing a little to think that the field of “flowers” she’d sat in had actually been a boneyard, bespelled to be unrecognizable. “He took me to help him. Lanse had a hurt arm and couldn’t use a bow. I could—and I did, when I had to.”
Myra nodded. “Och, the poor lad’s arm was paining him still, when he struggled home all those months later. Loath he was to come back alone. But when he thought it certain that his lord and you were lost, he took what he could carry on his back and walked down the mountain. How he made it out alive, I cannot say. The boy was as tight-lipped as Jerold used to be—Drisha rest the old goat’s soul.”
“What?” Carin exclaimed, her chest constricting. “Jerold’s dead?”
“Aye, dearie.” The housekeeper gave another weary nod. “The old magician passed on in his sleep a year ago—about the time of the equinox last spring. His garden’s gone to seed without him. I haven’t had the heart to muck about in his flowerbeds. He never let anyone but himself touch his garden in life, and it strikes me as unseemly to be interfering with it now he’s gone. So ’tis run wild.”
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 39
