Dark descent to formless void and endless night.
In farsinchia shall we meet again—
Two perverters of the age-old light.”
Quick as arrowflight, she was gone,
Back to craggy heights beyond
The river wild and canyon deep.
But on the wind came words to burn like fire:
“‘Wife of Hugh,’ you named me.
For pride of House, you threw him to me.
How unworthy was that weakling pup,
Of one who wields the Power potent!
“With disdain I felled the firstling.
But with his seed was made the one
Who shall rule in his place.
And mark me well, Fool Legary:
The boy is his mother’s son!”
By the oath of my House,
And in these pages
Bathed in the light of the wisdom
Of Archamon, I swear:
The boy shall not fall to darkness.
As long as there be breath in this body,
I will guide him on the bright path,
And Morann shall touch him not!
“He did not fall, Lord Legary,” Carin whispered to the empty library. “You did not fail. The darkness didn’t take him. But you were never sure, were you? Though you raised him as your own and trained him in the bright ways, you were never sure of him. You always wondered: was Theil Verek his mother’s son? Was he a fiend, a blackheart, a dark wizard who could turn the ‘gift’ to evil? You doubted him, and he couldn’t help but know it.”
Carin laid her finger on the right-hand page, as though the long-dead wizard she addressed could see the gesture. “Then came that terrible day, fourteen years after Morann fled, when she sent the vortex to kill Theil’s wife and the little boy who bore no trace of the taint. Theil went mad. He cursed the woodland and the lake with a kind of evil that could only come from the worst perversion of the power.
“You were sure, then, that you had failed. You were certain—weren’t you, Legary?—that Theil was forever lost in the darkness and could never find the bright path again. And so you killed yourself stopping the madness, saving Ruain—saving, maybe, the better part of Ladrehdin. Who knew how far the curse could reach, how much destruction it could do? You stopped it before it spread to the plains and the seas and all around this world. You gave your life to stop it, but before you went to your grave you confessed your part in all the wickedness, you confessed your guilt. And then you hid the Book of Archamon for fear of the evil that your grandson might work with the vastness of the knowledge it contains.”
Carin tapped her finger on the final three lines of the book, lines written more than twenty years ago by the dying Legary. She looked up, speaking to thin air.
“And yet, you still hoped. You wanted to believe that Theil would carry on as your heir, as master of the House of Verek. Maybe he’d marry again, and father another innocent child to follow him as lord or lady of Ruain. You hoped that he could make for himself and for your ‘ancient lineage of the adept’ a future that was worthy of his inheritance.”
Carin glanced again at the right-hand page and reread the lines she knew by heart:
“The evil toucheth not this child!”
I rejoiced in the knowledge of it.
I cried it from the turrets,
I declared it from the treetops.
The blood of my son’s blood is clean!
The evil that slew the first
And tainted the second
Hath no power over the third.
The raven heard my shouts of joy;
The black raven carried my news abroad.
Of my happiness, the enchantress did learn;
All my joy, the sorceress did blight.
From weak seed, and flawed,
Sprang innocent youth.
From the womb of guiltless Alesia
Came the child of shining spirit.
To the lake of the lilies walked mother and child;
From waters ensorcelled came never they home.
Dead was the first by guileful craft;
Dead was the third by blackest art.
The second—the troubled, the tainted seed—
Vented wild rage upon the living wood.
Dead and barren, as his heart within,
Left he the woodland with fury spent.
“Stop him!” shrieked the man of the green.
“Wilt thou suffer the spread of his venom
O’er all the Land of Ruain, and the blighting
Of all bright flowers within thy vast domain?”
“Stop him!” I cried to the four winds.
“Halt this furious plague.
Stem the life-force’s ebbing;
Let not the curse prevail!”
The winds took heed:
An edge was made.
Within these walls and past the wood
The poison floweth not.
But I have paid the dearest price
To invoke the forces primal;
They draw me now into the tomb,
Where lie the first son and the third.
My crimes are great, my penance vast;
What punishment can harm me now?
The lad is slain, the infant drowned;
The tainted seed is future’s hope.
By the oath of my House, I command thee:
Touch him not, Morann!
“She didn’t touch him, Legary, not in any way that mattered. She didn’t corrupt him. And now, sir, I’m going to fetch him home.”
Carin shut the book and pushed back from the desk. She strode across the library, returning to the door that opened on the stairwell. Down the stairs she plunged, deeper and deeper under the house, bursting at last into the cave of magic with a bolder step than she had ever before dared.
At the rim of the wizards’ well Carin skidded to a stop, pulled the crystal dolphin from her pocket, and glanced at its mate. The other dolphin rested like a tiny anchor on the bench of the fish. She raised her crystal to her eyes and conjured an image from the enchanted pool—the image of the child’s bedroom, colorfully decorated with paper fish, waiting on the world that was her natural home but could never be the abode of her heart.
“Take me there,” she commanded.
The journey was one easy step from the pool’s rim onto the floor of the child’s bedroom. And a moment’s study of the pleasant room, with its window that looked out upon the sea, revealed what had upset Carin’s plans for Verek’s prompt return to his own ancestral home.
On the child-sized desk, under the shelves that held books and stuffed animals, lay a slip of paper. Carin picked it up.
It was only a brief note of instructions for taking a medicinal draught that Verek the apothecary-wizard had once prepared for her. “C—Drink the liquid. Leave the dregs.—V,” it read. Simplicity itself except for the large, flowing capital letters, written in an elegant hand, decorated with a pattern of tendrils and dots that brought to mind a grape-laden vine.
“Oh! I forgot,” Carin murmured, though in fact she remembered the writing perfectly.
After the wizard’s note to her had served its original purpose, she’d used it for a bookmark. And in that capacity—Carin having forgotten ever to remove it from the pages—the paper had mistakenly journeyed to this world, tucked out of sight between the red and gold covers of the Looking-Glass book. No wonder Carin had managed, at the edge of Morann’s ensorcelled waters with horrors creeping toward them, to conjure up—not the crystal in Ruain that would have built Verek a bridge home—but this very personal specimen of the wizard’s singular … one might say spellbinding … penmanship.
On the desk, the puzzle-book lay atop its companion volume, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carin fingered the book. She knew the “Jabberwocky’s” source, Through the Looking-Glass, almost by heart, she’d studied it so thoroughly with a deeply interested and attentive wizard. But she could not remember ever hav
ing read the other book, though surely she must have, if this bedroom had been hers in a forgotten childhood.
“Later,” she whispered. “I can read it to him later—after I’ve found him.”
Carin stepped through the bedroom door into a hallway, and went looking for her misplaced magician.
She found him at the living-room fireplace. He was crouched over a pot of something that smelled vaguely fishy, and he stirred it unenthusiastically.
Verek was barefoot and wearing the garb of this world—blue denims that fit him admirably, and a white knit shirt that was a little tight. His long, clean, shiny hair was pulled back and tied at the nape of his neck. His hair fell far enough down his back to partially obscure what was written on his shirt, but Carin would have had to be blind to not instantly recognize the opening stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” done up in old-fashioned black-letter.
“Beggar it all, my lord,” she swore serenely from the entryway. “I seem to have erred in sending you through the wrong door, by way of the wrong bridge, to the wrong planet.”
With a clatter, Verek’s stirring spoon hit the firedogs. In one smooth, fluid motion he whirled and stood. His movements gave no hint of cracked ribs or broken ankle. Gone also were his beard and mustache, shaved off. Without them he looked maybe twenty-five.
“Great merciful powers!” he swore, staring as if Carin were a phantom. “I’ve gone mad.”
Carin shrugged. “How would you know the difference? You’ve seemed half crazy since the day we met. But I wouldn’t say you were any worse demented than I’ve come to believe is normal for you.”
A smile pulled at the corners of Verek’s lips. It did not fully succeed in lifting them, but from his eyes it shone unreserved.
“By Drisha!” he thundered. “It is you.”
Disdaining to go around the wickerwork chair that stood between them, he vaulted it, providing positive proof that his fractures had healed. Carin barely had time to take one long step to meet him. Then she was in his arms, having the breath crushed out of her for the second time that day.
Verek didn’t release her as quickly as Myra had. But when he did finally hold Carin off, to look her up and down, he seemed again to doubt his own senses.
“I perceive, fìleen,” he muttered softly, his eyes drinking her in, “that Myra has at last managed to put some curves on that lathy frame of yours. As I recall, she was much given to bemoaning your lack of them.”
Carin shook her head. “I’ve eaten only one meal with Myra since I returned from the ‘errand’ you sent me on. It’s not your housekeeper’s cooking that gets the credit. I’ve traveled the void, and out there everything’s different. Time is meaningless. In some ways it passes quickly, and in other ways it doesn’t pass at all. Out there, time just seems to go its own way.”
She paused, wanting better words to describe for him her indescribable journey through eternity. But all Carin could think of was how long it had been since she’d last looked into his eyes. “I’ve been away from you for a time that I don’t know how to measure,” she murmured. “But Myra says it’s two winters. Did you think I’d never come?”
Verek tilted his head. “Two winters? Not here. By this sea I have waited for you, and the days have been hot, summer days.” He studied Carin’s face with an intensity that was as unsettling as ever, but she felt no compulsion to pull away.
“It’s done?” he asked then, but so absorbed in his inspection of her that Carin hesitated to reply for fear of distracting him. Slowly, she nodded. When that didn’t break the spell, she reached up and gently brushed back a few strands of his hair that had worked loose from his ponytail.
“Yes, it’s done,” she murmured, still teasing the wayward strands off his lean, strong face. “Things are back where they belong. Now there’s nothing in this world—or any other—to keep us from making up for lost time.”
The smile won out. Verek looked at Carin without a trace of his usual cool reserve.
“Breath and blood!” he swore. “I thought it would never be, but at last you are—”
His actions finished the thought. He slipped his hand behind Carin’s head, his fingers twining in her freshly washed hair. He pulled her face to his, meeting her parted lips with his. The kiss was long, deep, and passionate enough to earn a place in Ladra’s bewitchments—though the magic of Ladra had nothing to do with it.
When they finally broke apart, Carin took her wizard by the hand. “Sweet mercy!” she murmured. “Come on—let’s go home.”
“Soon, fìleen.” Verek squeezed Carin’s fingers. “Very soon.”
Something unsettled had come into his look. Not a frown—at this particular moment, he seemed incapable of expressing a frown. But he also seemed torn—like a man who was fiercely inclined toward one direction, but felt the pull of an iron hand in another.
He tipped his head to indicate the room where they stood.
“Before we go, walk with me through your former home, and tell me what you can of this place. Let us see if we can discover who you are.”
END of BOOK TWO of WATERSPELL
About the Author
Deborah J. Lightfoot got attached to history through her grandfather, a High Plains cowboy. From her mother, an artist and avid reader, came her love of books and all things mysterious and magical. Deborah has had a fondness for dark horsemen since Richard Boone’s Paladin rode through TV landscapes wielding a six-shooter instead of a sword. Six-shooters figure in her award-winning books about the American Southwest: Trail Fever (William Morrow) and The LH7 Ranch (University of North Texas Press). Swords and sorcery provide the thrills in WATERSPELL, an intricate fantasy trilogy with medieval overtones and a few nods to history. A journalism graduate of Texas A&M University and an Authors Guild member, Deborah is in educational publishing as a freelancer for a national nonprofit organization. Besides writing, editing, and ingesting books, her pleasures include traveling abroad and hiking the Yorkshire moors, Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park, and while living in Mexico part-time, that country’s La Primavera Bosque. On the Web: djlightfoot.blogspot.com
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The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 41
