Myra sat blubbering at the kitchen table. Carin patted the housekeeper’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. She hadn’t meant for her questions to call up such painful memories. In awkward silence, Carin set about getting her own breakfast of porridge and bacon. By the time she’d fixed her meal and joined Myra at the table, the housekeeper’s tears were drying. Without further prodding, Myra returned to the tragedy.
“The master’s grief was terrible to see,” she whispered. “He raged against the very powers of creation. He cursed the lake, and the lilies withered, and the stench of rotting fish rose from the water as he drove away the life. He neither ate nor slept, but sorrowed night and day for the loss of his lady and their dear child.
“I feared the master would go mad,” Myra confided. “Aye, indeed … I think he did go mad when he cried out a punishment upon the woods that his wife had loved so well. He could not help what he did, for the place had betrayed his lady’s trust and his own. And from that day to this, the woods have been as empty as the master’s own heart. Didn’t you remark the unnatural silence, dearie? ’Tis the master’s grief that drives out the life, even now.”
Carin stared at the woman. What to make of this tale? Myra clearly believed that Verek had placed a curse on the woods. Was that even possible? The priests of Drisha taught that all those blackhearts who had had the power to lay curses had been destroyed long ago. The evils of sorcery and witchcraft were things of the past—and good riddance to them, the priests said.
In preoccupied silence, Carin stacked her breakfast dishes and started to work the hand-pump. But Myra shooed her from the kitchen.
“Go on with you now. I was drawing water and washing dishes in this house before you were born, and the day’s not yet come that I’ll sit idly by and watch another do my work. And there’s this about it too, dearie,” Myra said, tapping her finger on the table. “The master has set you a task of your own, so he told me. I’m to watch and see that you stay to your chore in the library. Best be getting to it. The sun’s showing in the east. Come midday, I’ll bring you in a bite to eat. So you just go on now, child, and fill your head with all that’s in those musty old books.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll try.”
Carin hurried down the hall to the library. Though Verek’s absence was an invitation to explore the rest of the house, right now she was intent upon a different kind of quest: finding some logical explanation for the woodland’s desolation. She’d felt such hope when she’d first stepped off the grassland and climbed through drifts of autumn leaves. The silence of the woods had seemed full of promise, as if the trees held their collective breath, preparing to welcome Carin to the end of her journey. But deeper in, that silence had turned ominous. What was wrong under those oaks? Why did the place both attract and repel her?
Before the library’s door had fully closed behind her, Carin was prowling the shelves, seeking volumes on the natural elements. Leafing through scores of books, she put the most promising on Verek’s desk, which occupied the best-lit spot in the room, under the windows; even with the morning sun slanting in through them, the depths of the library remained gloomy. To make a pretense of sorting books as Verek had instructed, she stacked on the floor any volumes that she examined but found unhelpful.
When the floor piles were noticeably higher and more numerous than they had been yesterday evening—offering evidence of work done—Carin settled at the desk with the half-dozen books she had chosen to study. The first, titled Fyr & Waeter, Erthe & Aer, dealt with the four substances of which everything was made. In the essences might lie an explanation for the woods’ lifelessness—something sensible to pit against Myra’s notion of a “curse.”
But no satisfactory answers presented themselves, nothing to do with patterns of rainfall or eroded soils or anything so prosaic. Carin had skimmed halfway through her third volume when the clatter of the doorlatch interrupted her reading. She shoved back from the desk and whirled to face the intruder, her hands reaching for the nearest stack of books, pretending to be busy with them.
But her visitor was only the housekeeper, who pushed past the door with a tray bearing bread, cheese, plums, and a mug of small mead. Myra had recovered her good humor, her tears of the morning apparently forgotten.
“Here now … I’ve brought you a morsel to eat, just as I promised. Shift that pile, won’t you, and clear a space so I may set this down.”
As Carin moved books out of the way, Myra rattled on:
“Bless me, if you haven’t made as much of a muddle as the master does when he’s poking about in here, piling books everywhere. ’Tis a wonder that poor desk, sturdy as it is, holds together with all the books you’ve heaped on it. Two of a kind you are, you and my good master. You’ve no sense in your heads when it comes to these musty old books—hardly a one among ’em that wasn’t writ long ago by somebody dead these many years. But you pile them up around you, like a child with her dollies. With your nose in a book, you’d forget to eat—just like my master—if ’twasn’t for your old faithful Myra bringing you in a bite. You’re a pair, dearie, you and my master.”
A pair! Carin stared at the woman, partly shocked and fairly insulted. She’d never met anyone she felt less affinity for than that grim man with the balefire eyes.
The housekeeper’s errand done, Myra bustled to the door, where she stopped to deliver an afterthought. “If you need me for anything else, I’ll be napping in my little room off the kitchen. We’ve had such a stir of late, what with a young person in the house again—and such a bright kitling, too, who can read the master’s puzzle-book and take pleasure in his library. Surely, ’tis a change for the better, but I’m worn out from the commotion of it. With the master abroad today, methinks I’ll lay me down for a little nap. But you come tap on my door, dearie, if there’s aught else you need.”
Myra went on her way. Carin returned to her book and propped it open beside the tray to read as she ate her lunch.
Midway through a dry chapter on the elemental nature of water, she stopped mid-chew as it hit her: already her chance had come. Lord Verek and the stableboy were gone. Myra slept in her room. Who would stop her leaving? The only other human Carin had heard spoken of in that household was an old gardener.
“This is it,” she whispered. “Go. Now.”
She tugged open the door, flitted down the hall and up the stairs, got her sling from hiding, and strapped on her belt-pouch. Carin was halfway out the bedroom door again when her gaze found the dressing table. Its embroidered kerchiefs would make wrappers for food and bindings for wounds, among other possible applications that she could improvise.
Verek called you a thief, and you wanted to deny it … The thought didn’t stop her from yanking open the top drawer and grabbing a handful of the kerchiefs.
Downstairs in the foyer Carin turned toward the kitchen, then hesitated. She’d abandoned a tray of half-eaten food in the library.
Leave it! Why risk this chance just to save an old woman the trouble of clearing up? But on tiptoe Carin sprinted back to the library, shaking her head in disbelief at her own actions.
With the tray filling her hands as she exited the room this time, she had to put her back against the door’s mass to ease it closed. The weight, not of the door but of the collection behind it, bore down on her. This chance for flight had come too soon. It felt hasty, disturbing. She had just about settled to the idea of working in the library for weeks, or even through the winter months. By leaving so soon, she gave up any chance to discover the library’s secrets. She gave up her shot at reading the puzzle-book.
This is not your place, Carin’s uneasiness argued. Remember what the wisewoman said. And Verek, too. He called you a trespasser, an intruder. Listen to them and get on your way.
For another long moment Carin remained where she was, unable to step either forward or back. When finally she broke away from the library and hurried to the kitchen, she wasn’t acting upon a decision so much as escaping her indeci
sion. With sharp, quick movements Carin sacked up bread and cheese, handfuls of raisins, and strips of dried meat, and slipped one of Myra’s broad-bladed kitchen knives into her belt.
Next she inspected the pots and jars on the shelves. Most held dried herbs and spices. A short shelf over the door, however, yielded what she sought: two flat tins containing perhaps a cupful each of the bronze and green powders that had healed her knee overnight.
Provisioned, she tied up her sack and stepped outside. Nothing moved in the courtyard, nor at the stable beyond it. Carin studied the stable. On a “borrowed” horse, she could put more distance between herself and the swordsman.
Leaving the slight concealment of the kitchen doorway, she slipped along the wall to peer around the front corner of the house. “Blind me!” Carin swore under her breath at the sight that met her eyes. Lord Verek’s manor house was huge. The kitchen, its connecting passageway, and the foyer that gave access to the library and her second-floor bedroom were in a minor wing of the house. Down the wall from Carin, this wing joined the imposing main building at an angle.
In the wide “V” between the two parts of the house grew something more startling than the house itself: a well-kept garden. Trees and bushes flourished between graveled paths, and flowers bloomed in neat beds despite the lateness of the season. Their perfumes filled the air. Clearly, whatever afflicted Verek’s woodland did not stunt the garden at his home.
No groundsman was at work among the flowers, only the bees. Carin slipped back past the kitchen door and edged around to peek at the rear of the building. But behind the house, nothing green appeared, only a great slab of rock. In fact, the back of the house seemed to melt into the face of a cliff.
I’ve gone swimming inside that rock, Carin realized as she studied the union of house and cliff. Her upstairs bathing cave had been carved from the mass of stone. That accounted for the lack of windows.
It did not explain the glowing walls.
She pressed her forehead to the smoothly chiseled cornerstone and forced the questions from her mind. Now was not the time to ponder mysteries. The longer she delayed, the poorer her chance of escape.
Praying that the grounds were as deserted as they seemed, she sprinted across to the stable. Beyond it, a hedgerow grew against the high outer wall. Carin picked out a gap in the hedge and, half hidden in the greenery, a plank door. It was closed and barred with a thick timber but not locked.
She dropped her sack, put the strength of her back into one good shove, and dislodged the timber. Slowly, wary of squeaky iron hinges, Carin pulled the door open and looked out into the barren woods just beyond. The oaks, as stark as the garden was lush, bumped right up to the wall.
After a brief, listening pause that brought to Carin’s ears only the quick and nervous sounds of her breathing, she turned back and slipped inside the stable. It smelled of hay and horses, though the nearest stalls were disappointingly dark and empty. But as her eyes adjusted, her heart rose. A larger enclosure down the center held a black mare marked with white stockings and a blaze that gleamed in the light from one unshuttered window.
Carin approached slowly, speaking in a low voice. “Easy now. That’s right.”
The mare, alert to the presence of a stranger, pricked her ears and whickered but did not take fright. The animal was small. This black wouldn’t have the stamina of the rawboned dun that Carin had taken from the wheelwright. But the mare was as tame as a cart horse, readily accepting a bit and bridle.
Unchallenged, Carin led the animal outside and through the hedgerow gap. “Good girl,” she breathed into the mare’s ear. “You’re a sweetheart.” She retrieved her dropped bag of food, pulled the plank door shut, then sprang onto the mare’s bare back.
She’d barely found her seat before the animal took off at a trot, which quickened in a few steps to a gallop. Carin clung to the mare’s mane and bent low to avoid the slaps of tree limbs that threatened to snatch away her sack of provisions.
There was no guiding the animal. The black tilted full-speed through the woods, and Carin could do nothing but hold on, the wind rushing in her ears. Whatever direction they were going, even if it was wrong, the mare was setting a pace that would leave Verek’s manor far behind.
After a very long way for such a small horse, the black slowed and settled to a brisk walk. Carin straightened gingerly—her insides felt shaken to a pulp—and looked around. After such an abrupt departure, she needed a moment to get her bearings. The sun, dimmed by autumn haze, was far enough along its daily arc to signal the way west. The mare was heading generally with the sun. Carin reined her in the desired direction: north.
“Well, little horse,” she said, “you’re one for taking the bit in your teeth, aren’t you? But thank you for the speedy escape.” And maybe it hadn’t been a bad thing, Carin reflected, for the mare to take her well to the west instead of heading directly for higher latitudes. Lord Verek—if he chose to pursue—might assume that her route had been due north. This far off course, he might never trail her.
Around Carin the woods were deserted and dismal. Nothing moved, not a sigh, not the faintest breath. Over the landscape hung a silence so heavy, Carin felt it like a weight on her skin. She rubbed her arms and found herself listening, in vain, for murmurs of the curse and echoes of the madness that Myra had ascribed to this place.
“I’m only passing through,” she whispered to nothing in particular.
Nothing here, nothing to see … nothing to do but check the sun and keep the mare headed properly. Into the emptiness, her questions crowded.
What chased the life from this woodland? What had drawn Carin here? Why had Verek insisted that his borders were clearly marked, when signs or warnings were obviously absent?
Where had the puzzle-book come from? For that matter, where had she come from, and why couldn’t she remember further back than five years?
Sighing, Carin felt for the flat tins in her pouch, glad of their nearness. Facing the rigors of winter in the north, she might need miracle cures.
A shiver traveled her length. The sun was dropping toward the horizon now, and the night promised to be cold. Already she was paying a price for her spur-of-the-moment flight. She’d neglected to steal a blanket.
“Good work,” she muttered. “You really thought this through, didn’t you?”
Carin began to scan the ground ahead, searching for a fallen tree, an exposed labyrinth of roots, a pit or a hollow that might shelter her for the night. As she leaned over the mare’s shoulder, the animal snorted and sidestepped. It threw up its head as if trying to scent the thing that had alarmed it.
“Whoa!” Carin exclaimed. Unbalanced, she almost lost her seat. “Steady now!”
As she regained control she whipped her gaze around. Still there was nothing to see but the webs of shadow that the sun’s low angle cast through the trees.
Maybe the mare saw only shadows. Carin stroked the animal’s neck and spoke reassurances. “Easy … easy, girl.”
But the black refused to step forward. Carin tapped with her heels—gently at first, then harder—and struck the balky horse on the rump. The mare shifted her feet and tossed her head but would not proceed.
“The horse does well to refuse, maid,” said a reedy voice out of nowhere. “You would be wise to turn back.”
Chapter 5
The Riddle
Carin dizzied herself trying to look everywhere at once. Her temples throbbed with the sudden rush of blood from her pounding heart. The mare, however, had settled down and took no new alarm at the voice that seemed to come from empty air.
“Where are you?” Carin demanded. “Who are you? What do you want with me?”
“I’m here before you, in this tree,” the voice replied. “I only want to speak with you and to entreat you to go no farther. As to who I am: I might ask the same of you—meaning no discourtesy, I’m sure.”
“I can’t see you,” Carin protested. “Why won’t you show yourself?”
“I cannot show myself more plainly,” the voice said. “Look before you at the trunk of the big oak. See? I blink my eyes and wiggle my nose. Can you make me out?”
A wedge of the tree trunk moved. It did indeed look like two eyes blinking and a nose wrinkling. Carin stared, astonished. The rapid movements ceased, to be replaced by a slit like a mouth forming words.
“Ah,” said the mouth. “You’ve found me. Now we may have a proper conversation. In these lonesome woods, it isn’t easy to have proper conversations, you know.”
She gaped. A talking tree? Could such a thing exist, anywhere but in a fable?
“Who are you?” she asked again. “What are you?”
“The mage calls me a woodsprite,” the tree said. “That’s merely his opinion, you know. But I’ve heard from no one else on the subject, so I can hardly argue the point. Perhaps you’ll give me your thoughts on my nature—when you know me better.”
Do I want to know you? Carin wondered. She gripped the reins so tightly that the horse backed a step.
Through the trees, she caught sight of the sun hanging barely the height of a fist above the horizon. Twilight would soon fall, and she didn’t relish the thought of spending the night near a talking tree. Though it seemed friendly enough, this woodsprite was another unnatural aspect of a highly abnormal woodland. She wanted out of this place. If the mare refused to take her on north, now was the time to free the animal and continue afoot.
“Um, excuse me,” Carin said as she slipped from the mare’s back. “I can’t stay to talk. I have to keep moving.”
“Ah yes, traveler. You’ve reminded me of my reason for hailing you,” the tree said pleasantly. “Until you drew so near that I could guess your purpose, I hadn’t planned to speak. The woodcutters from the villages take it badly amiss, you know, when I address them. Such screaming and carrying on—you would think it was I wielding the ax at them. But you are not so easily frightened, which gives me hope that I may yet call you my friend. Did you tell me your name?”
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 6