Myra beamed with a sudden thought, the gist of it easily read in her eyes before she said it aloud. “But now you’re back, child, maybe you’ll trim it up and make it lovely again. Old Jerold would want you to have the charge of it. He grew fond of you in those few weeks we had you with us—though you might not have thought it, the way he growled and grumbled to catch you on the garden paths.”
Cheerfulness being the housekeeper’s natural state, Myra hung on to her smile as though determined to banish from her kitchen all cares and woes.
“Well now, dearie,” she declared briskly, rising from the bench. “Though you’ve come home with more meat on your bones than when you left—not like poor Lanse—I daresay you’ll be wanting your dinner. There’s a good bit of rabbit stew left from yesterday. It’s plain fare I’ve been eating, here by myself. But with my master’s bonny ally in the house again, I’ll be pleased as pepper to put a good meal on the table for you. So have your fill of the rabbit now, dearie, and let me be seeing what’s in the larder for something better tonight.”
With that, Myra went to work. She ladled up a great bowlful of stew and served it to Carin with a hunk of fresh bread, a crock of sweet butter, and a mug of small mead. Then she flew into the preparations for an evening meal that would be, by the look of the meats and vegetables she arrayed on the sideboard, a feast that a king and his entire court wouldn’t have risen from unsatisfied.
Only when the stew was in front of her did Carin realize that she was ravenously hungry.
Well, you should be, commented her composed inner observer, which seemed to find nothing bizarre in the notion that she had been away from Myra’s table for a year and a half. By rights you ought to be starved, considering that your last meal was a mug of tea and a handful of fruit, eaten nigh on a year ago by Ladrehdinian time.
As she wolfed down the leftover rabbit, Carin pondered the problem. How could a journey that had taken her to the western mountains in a single winter account for an absence from Ruain that Myra reckoned at eighteen months? Had she really been wandering around “out there,” roving through the void, for more than a year? Carin had no way to judge. All those seeming eternities that it had taken her to cross from one world to the next had estranged her from the flow of time. It meant nothing to her. She’d lost all feeling for it.
But what was “time,” if not change? Carin’s passage through the void had changed her. She only had to look at the new fullness of her body to know it.
Maturity was a thing of experience, however, as well as of time. Which of those had played the bigger part in her transformation, she couldn’t say.
Carin looked up from her bowl to find Myra studying her. The woman wasn’t much given to long, thoughtful pauses. But for a moment she stood silent, absentmindedly wiping her hands on a dishcloth and neglecting the feast that she had begun to prepare.
“Dearie, you were a waif when you left this house,” Myra said, her words mirroring what Carin had been thinking— “thin-whittled, wearing a boy’s clothes, and with your hair bobbed as short as a gillie’s. It does my heart good to see that great ruddy mane of yours spilling down the same as it did before my master bade me cut it.”
Myra hesitated, then added, “I’ve seen many an odd thing in this house, but I don’t know that I’ve been more wonder-struck than I am today. A slip of a girl you were when you left here, a kitling bound to my master and in his care. Now you’ve come back to his house making your own way, a woman whole. It’s odd …” Again Myra paused.
A moment later, she shook her head. “But what am I going on about? A girl ripening to womanhood is nothing to marvel at. ’Tis only the natural way of things. If there is one among my master’s young confederates who has dealt me a shock, I must say ’tis not yourself, but that headstrong Lanse.”
“Why?” Carin asked. “What did he do?”
The housekeeper sighed. “’Tis a great worry to me that the foolish cub did not stay here at home where he belongs. He was wasted away and near dead with weariness, yet the boy resaddled that great brute Brogar and rode off on his own, refusing to say where he was bound. He would only bid me tell his lord—should our master return in his absence—that he had taken the other horses, his gelding and your mare, to stable them at our neighbor Cian Ronnat’s. Though he would speak nothing to me of his schemes, I think Lanse went seeking his master. He will not give our Lord Verek up for dead, but intends to find him—or find death for himself, I fear, in trying. These six months, I’ve had no word of him.”
Lanse is looking for his master, Carin silently agreed. But maybe he’s also seeking the one his lord ordered him to kill.
She scraped her bowl clean, washed down her last bite of bread with her last swallow of mead, and rose from the table. “Thank you, Myra, for everything. For the food, for my clean clothes, and especially for still being here. I’d have sat down and cried if I’d come back and found you gone too.”
The housekeeper waved away the sentiment but rounded the table and gave Carin another breathtaking hug. Before Carin excused herself then from the kitchen, she asked again: had there really been no sign of Lord Verek within these walls?
“I’ve got my reasons,” she replied to Myra’s baffled look, “for believing that your moody master should have been home long before now. In fact, after he left me he would have had time to return here and say good-bye before Jerold died. Lord Verek intended to get back last spring and send Lanse help, right away. I’m trying to work out how Lanse could have come home alone so many months overdue, and how I got here even later—and why neither of us found Lord Verek here ahead of us. This shouldn’t have happened …
“Lanse can ride a horse into the ground looking for his master,” Carin added, “but I’ve got my own ideas about where to find him.”
“Oh my, dearie!” Myra exclaimed, wringing her dishcloth. “Don’t be reckless, child. If you take a notion to run off again, like Lanse did, I’ll be sorely vexed.”
Carin mumbled something noncommittal. Offering what she hoped was a reassuring smile, she took her leave of the housekeeper and hurried from the kitchen to the foyer. Hesitating there, she looked down the hallway toward Verek’s library.
But Carin chose the stairs instead and dashed up to her bedroom. From the clothes chest she fished out a clean pair of stockings, covered her bare feet, and put on the old, scuffed squaretoes that had stayed behind—her plain country boots that had been deemed unsuitable for mountain travel in wintertime.
At the dressing table, Carin ran a brush through her now dry hair. She cinched up her shirtwaist with the red sash that contrasted nicely with the gray of her trousers.
Drawing a deep, steadying breath, she stuck Verek’s dagger through her sash. She pocketed the crystal dolphin. Then she headed down the corridor to explore the suite of rooms that she had never seen, in the weeks of her first stay under Verek’s roof.
His upstairs sitting room held no great interest now. Carin had come to know it well enough during the woodsprite’s captivity in a potted tree at the room’s single, recessed window. Even so, she paused to study again the paintings that hung two by two on either side of the chimneypiece—the portraits, of the lovely Lady Alesia and a dark-haired, bright-eyed little boy of about five; and the landscapes, of lost lake and mountain pinnacle.
Carin narrowed her eyes at the latter. The painting, unless she was much mistaken, depicted the western mountains that Verek could have no great reason to love.
The man must have a taste for suffering, she thought. Why else would he display on his walls the faces of his dead wife and child, the scene of their deaths, and a view of their murderer’s stronghold?
Shaking her head at the wizard’s taste in art, Carin turned from the paintings and approached the doorway to the rest of his private apartment. It, like the hall door, was unlocked. She stepped through onto a small landing at the head of an ironwork spiral staircase. She glanced down the stairs but could see little of the room below.
; Off the landing, however, another door opened to a large but plainly furnished bedroom. It had a fireplace, with a table and a chair where the wizard must often have taken his meals when his brooding, secretive ways kept him from joining Carin and Myra in the kitchen. His bed was large, and raised on a platform under the room’s windows. Like the bed Carin had slept in at Deroucey, Verek’s had a canopy of wool curtains that could be closed for warmth or privacy. The bed was dressed simply, with a heavy, dark-blue blanket over plain white sheets. Beside the bed was a cushioned bench, convenient for sitting and pulling off boots.
At the far end of the room, light spilled through an arched opening in the thick stone wall. The light had a familiar quality—steady, unflickering, like sunlight through clouded crystal.
Carin crossed to the arch and discovered another private bathing room, its walls glowing with the same soft light that lit her own. Here, however, there was no pool. Instead, water cascaded from a slot high up the wall. The cascade fell into a wide, shallow floor-basin, and from there drained out of sight. The water-sculpted caverns that underlay this house, this age-old seat of the family of Verek, did not merely provide a footing for the edifice. Here and down the hall past Carin’s bedroom, the hot springs flowed into the house and had been channeled, by some ingenious past builder, into places for cleansing body—and soul?
On the bathing-room wall opposite the waterfall, a mirror hung. Under the mirror, a shelf of marble held only a hairbrush. Any other implements that might once have rested there—for grooming a cropped beard and narrow mustache, for instance—had gone with the wizard on his travels. At the inn in Deroucey and again at Welwyn’s cabin, but not at Morann’s enchanted brook, Verek had taken the time to use them. In between, he’d looked as scruffy as Carin.
She left the waterfall murmuring to itself, as it must have done for at least a millennium, and walked back through the bedroom to the staircase that spiraled to the ground floor. Carin descended into one large and startling room.
If the bedchamber above revealed almost nothing of its owner’s personality, here the wizard’s mark was everywhere. The section of the room nearest the stairs was obviously his herbalist’s workshop, where he mixed the salves and draughts and healing powders that cured all manner of infirmities with uncanny speed. There were boxes and bins of dried herbs, bottles and jars of oils and ointments, balances for weighing them, mortars and pestles for mixing them, and little pots to hold the finished compounds. The air was fragrant with laurel, lavender, and many other healing herbs, but most distinctive was the musky scent of calendula oil.
Strange how a whiff of the calendula got Carin’s heart racing. She stood for a moment breathing it in, feeling her face grow warm and her insides sort of soften.
A little deeper into the room, the herbal fragrances gave way to the acrid odors of metalworking. On a well-used bench were tools for shaping iron and wood, and beside them a frame made to hold a painting. The frame was only half finished, but elaborately carved and ornamented in gold and enamel inlay, decorated with a delicate tendril-and-blossom design. Carin appreciated the craftsmanship without a pang. The ornamentation did not remind her of the woodsprite so much as it summoned thoughts of Jerold, master of the garden and onetime sorcerer’s apprentice.
As Carin stood in Verek’s ground-floor workroom, taking in the proofs of his talents, she was also reminded of what Myra had told her on her first morning under the wizard’s roof: “Apothecary and alchemist he is, and herbalist, metalsmith, and worker in stone. There’s little in this world that my master cannot turn his hand to.”
The one section of the workroom that Carin had yet to explore occupied the best-lit spot, under a row of windows that stretched the length of the back wall. She walked to the windows, turned—and inhaled sharply.
“Myra, my talkative friend,” she whispered to the absent housekeeper, “you might also have mentioned that your master knows his way around a canvas.”
On an easel rested a nearly finished work—a portrait, in a style too similar to those hanging in the sitting room to leave any doubt about whose hand had produced them. The scene was of ocean waves lapping at a sandy beach, with a small, neat cottage in the background, an inviting cluster of boulders to the fore … and seated on the highest rock a girl, auburn-haired and exactly matching Myra’s long-ago lament: “She might be elves’ kin—all wide eyes and lanky limbs … so thin that a good wind could blow her away.”
In the girl’s hand rested a sea urchin redder than her flowing mane. She held the water devilkin fearlessly despite its poisonous spines. A wry smile quirked her lips as though she enjoyed some private joke. Her gaze was direct, locking large green eyes with the painter’s as he worked.
He caught me better than any mirror ever did, Carin marveled, staring at an image of herself that was so true to its time, she half expected the girl to step off the canvas, shrug one shoulder, and introduce herself as Carin’s left-behind younger life—because the girl in the painting was the very image of the starveling she had been when this quest began. But Carin was older now, and changed in ways that went beyond the flesh.
For one thing, offered that little interior voice which insisted on being unhelpful, you have killed. Not once, but twice. You have taken the life of an enemy and of a friend. And the friend may have been the truest you’ll ever know in this or any world.
Carin shook herself to silence the voice. Leaving the windows, she walked the length of the workroom and found the door that she expected to find at the end of the great space. This one, like the others to Verek’s private apartments, was unlocked and unguarded by any spellcraft.
It opened on the winding stairs that descended to the cave of the wizards’ waters. Carin glanced down at the reddish glow that emanated from deep underground.
“Soon,” she whispered. “Not yet.” She stepped onto the narrow landing, lifted the latch of the door that closed off the head of the stairs, and entered Verek’s library.
The room was exactly as she had last seen it. Her neat stacks of books still covered the floor, the work of a busy month spent bringing a semblance of order to the wizard’s collection. That old habits were hard to break was evident from the fire crackling on the hearth. No one had used the room for a year and a half, by Myra’s reckoning. Yet the housekeeper had dutifully made a fire, just as if she’d been expecting her master or his book-loving apprentice to be at work here, as was the habit of both.
Wait—had no one been here? The longsword lying on a bench at the fire disproved Carin’s first impression. It was the weapon that Verek had discarded beside the mountain trail, in favor of an ax when it became impossible to carry both. The spare trousers Carin had given for wrapping and protecting the steel were nowhere to be seen. Undoubtedly Lanse had not bothered bringing her garment home. That the boy had somehow lugged the weapon down the mountain, with no deer to help him haul any of the gear he required for his survival, earned him Carin’s grudging respect. She didn’t like Lanse and she’d never trust him, but his loyalty to his master was something she must honor.
From the paired benches at the fireplace, Carin stepped to the big oak desk under the windows and gazed at the Book of Archamon. Without hesitation she opened the ancient volume to its last two entries. Legary’s narratives covered facing pages at the back. Neither, now, wore a spell of concealment. The page Carin had worked so hard to decipher lay as open to her study as the final entry—the wizard’s deathbed narrative—always had.
Carin sat at the desk and pored over the left-hand page, nodding as all the intriguing words and phrases she had patiently teased from the once-bespelled writing fell into place. The account spoke of Legary’s anguish on the night he realized that the necromancer he had forced his ungifted son to marry had murdered Hugh, soon after giving birth to Legary’s adept but “tainted” grandson:
The evil in our midst has fled,
But not in time to save
The son I sacrificed
To arrogance.
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Only the issue survives—
The issue of a union corrupt,
And he with demon’s taint
Upon his gift.
How was I blinded?
How could I not see
The nature of the pestilence
I loosed upon this House?
“A tragic loss!” the mourners cried.
“But comfort shall you take
In the babe so gently held
In the grieving widow’s arms.”
Beseemly garbed in widow’s weeds,
She led the progress to the tomb
And wailed and keened, and played her role
In the grotesquerie she wove.
The heir she suckled at her breast
Was two parts innocence, one part fiend.
Damn my ambitions! Damn my pride!
—Created in my scheming;
Left to fester in her spleen.
Ten years’ corruption, ere I saw
The damage that was done.
Wickedness ill-used his reason;
Darkness flickered in those eyes.
I raged and ranted,
Threatened death
To the one who stained
This honored House.
“The choice was yours!” she sneered at me.
“Would you hear the voice of Power with one
Ungifted at your side? Or honor with
A worthy heir this ancient lineage of the adept?”
“Sorceress!” I screamed. “Prepare thyself for
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 40
