“The mage will come for you,” the woodsprite replied with a certainty that discouraged argument. “There are, after all, only the two of us who can give him the answers he seeks. As you yourself remarked, Carin, among all the creatures of this land, both good and base, only the two of us—a thieving runaway and a nameless woodsprite—have the power to pass at will through the mage’s enchanted woods. We confound him, you and I. He desires to know our secrets. He can’t rely on me to reveal the mystery. He must, therefore, rely on you.
“He seeks you even now—of that, I’m sure. He’ll ride through the night to save you. The mage must have your help to solve the riddle that we pose him: the riddle of two lost travelers, maid and woodsprite, who are from elsewhere.”
With that, the sprite sparked away into the darkness and was gone. Alone and helpless in her tree, Carin was left to await her fate like an abandoned owlet too young to fly.
Chapter 6
The Mistake
She woke in the early dawn, stiff and trembling with the cold. She’d lashed herself to the oak with the tie-cord from her sack of food, then slept in snatches through the night, rousing often to chafe her chilled flesh and shift her position on the unyielding tree limb.
Now in the gray light of morning, Carin looked down through the branches of her refuge and studied the danger she’d barely glimpsed and narrowly escaped last night: a pack of thirty or more, ragged brutes, most of them larger than wolfhounds. They were filthy. Dried blood, mud, and dung encrusted the mongrels’ coats.
Some of the dogs sat with their backs to the tree, eyes and ears to the fore like sentries on watch for rivals that might try to take their prize. The rest of the pack lay curled beneath the oak, frequently growling and baring their fangs even in their sleep. Carin suspected that, should a dog be injured, its mates would tear it apart.
Try it and see? She fingered the knife at her belt. She could throw it into the pack and kill or maim one dog. But after the rest had devoured her victim, they would only settle again under her tree—perhaps hopeful that Carin might dispatch a few more of their number before she herself fell to them. To throw away her knife for a single dead dog would be foolish.
She touched the sling that was hidden under her shirt, but rejected it as even more useless than the knife. She couldn’t whirl the sling in the branches of the tree.
So numerous were the dogs, most of the mob could go to water and hunt for prey whenever thirst and hunger drove them to it, leaving a few of their mates to guard her tree. Her enemies need want for nothing while they waited for her to weaken and fall.
Carin undid the cord that anchored her. Stretching cold, protesting muscles, she kneaded them back to life. She turned her face to the rising sun and soaked up its feeble warmth, and was serenaded by a few hardy northern birds while she breakfasted on bread and dried fruit from her sack.
Such a meal needed water to wash it down, but she had none. She hadn’t taken a water skin from Verek’s manor. During her months of walking—until she stumbled into his woods—she’d never failed to locate a seep, spring, or stockpond when she needed water. In fact, she’d discovered that she had a knack for finding water in the most arid-seeming places. In any event, she’d expected to find abundant water in the north, once she’d gotten away from Verek’s cursed lands. To be chased up a tree by a pack of killer dogs—there to die slowly of thirst—was a possibility she hadn’t considered.
Her breakfast done, Carin tied up her leftovers. Slowly, taking care with her balance, she stood. At her movements, the pack came awake and yowled for blood. She didn’t look at the dogs, but clung to the oak’s trunk and examined the branches of her sanctuary. No nearby limbs provided what she needed.
She climbed higher. The dogs responded with furious baying and eager whines, as if hoping to distract her and cause the misstep that would send her to her death.
Well above the sturdy limb on which she’d slept, Carin found what she sought. Where the oak had lost a branch, perhaps broken off in a storm long ago, a circular wound had formed. Within the scar was a rotted-out hollow the size of a human head. She clambered higher until she could look directly down into the cavity. Her reflection stared back darkly.
Water. The cavity still held a measure of the last rain that had bathed the oak. Carin cupped a hand and tested it. “Ugh,” she muttered. It smelled and tasted musty, but it wasn’t undrinkable. She dipped until her thirst was satisfied.
From this high vantage point, much of the surrounding forest lay open to view. Carin probed the scene for any possible route of escape but found none. She could see no way to move squirrel-like through the treetops. Her sanctuary stood alone, spreading above a good-sized clearing that ringed the tree like an earthen moat. She couldn’t jump across the space to any neighboring oak or beech. And if she fell, of course, the dogs would gut her.
Whether by plan or accident, the woodsprite had guided her to a tree from which escape seemed impossible.
The dogs below had yapped and howled without pause since Carin began her early morning explorations. Now, abruptly, the pack voiced a different cry. A challenge sounded in their excited baying.
From her perch, Carin scanned the forest. Eastward, something glimmered—the briefest twinkle. Again, she saw it: a gleam, as of reflected sunlight. She stiffened, and stared intently. Something or someone was coming through the trees toward her.
On the ground below, the pack went into a frenzy. Every dog faced the risen sun, howling, growling, snapping at air. As the dogs’ jaws closed on nothing, the cracking sounds reached Carin high in her refuge. No doubt, a bite from those powerful jaws could sever a leg, even crush a skull.
But the pack seemed to have forgotten its treed quarry. Something else now held the dogs’ attention: a diversion that could work to her advantage?
Be ready, Carin ordered herself, though the danger she was in seemed to darken and deepen as the glints of movement through the trees drew nearer her sanctuary oak. The dogs, too, sensed what was coming, to judge by their agitated frothing at the mouth. The pack was keying up for battle.
If the curs go that way, hit the ground and head the other direction—fast.
As quickly as she dared, Carin climbed down to the forked bough where she’d left her provisions. She lashed the sack to her shoulders like a beggar’s bundle, reaching back to tuck and smooth its folds so that nothing would snag in the tree limbs. Then she dropped to a sturdy branch among the lower limbs and crouched there.
“Phew,” she breathed, wrinkling her nose at the stench that rose from the dogs. Her hands were shaking, and sweating, but she kept one hand on the knife at her belt in case a brute jumped at the limb where she waited.
But the dogs ignored her. Every eye was fixed on that which approached from the east. And with a suddenness so unnerving that Carin came near to losing her balance and her grip, the dogs sprang from beneath the tree, racing to the attack as one animal.
Carin squinted through the branches to see what had drawn the pack away. Framed by gnarled trees at the clearing’s edge, two bowmen on horseback met the dogs’ attack with a hail of arrows—but what extraordinary arrows! The shafts blazed with a light greater than the sun’s, streaking incandescent fire into the pack as the dogs sprinted, tightly bunched, across the clearing. Each time that an arrow found its mark—and Carin counted no misses—flashes like lightning shot out from the mongrel the arrow had pierced and consumed the dogs to either side. Four and five deep around each arrow’s victim, dogs burst instantly into flame.
It was over before she could fully comprehend the scene. In seconds, flesh became ash. The dogs scarcely had time to yelp their pain.
The blindingly bright arrow shafts had seared afterimages into Carin’s vision. Looking past the dancing streaks, past the naked branches that made a poor hiding place, she glimpsed the face of the lead archer. It was like seeing him for the first time. Really seeing him. Recognizing instead of resisting the truth about him. In the south it was said
that no sorcerers still lived. The priests claimed that every master of magic had been destroyed.
The priests were wrong.
A sorcerer was glaring at Carin from across the clearing, with enough distance between them that she shouldn’t have been able to make out his eyes. But she did see them, for they burned with the same hellfire that had incinerated the dogs.
For a moment she couldn’t drag her gaze away. Time stopped. Thought stopped. Nothing remained but sensation: her scalp crawled.
Then, out of her throat came a cry she’d never heard herself make before. It was high and wild, a frantic command to herself to “Move!” repeated at the top of her voice until her muscles finally obeyed. She dropped to the ground and raced across the clearing, heading toward its farther side, putting the oak between herself and her pursuer. This was a thin chance she was clutching at, the thinnest, that she could elude him in the trees beyond, since he’d done her the service of dispatching the dogs.
But she’d barely hit her stride when five wasteland dogs burst from those woods, making straight for her. Her mistake: they weren’t all destroyed.
A sorcerer spurring up behind her; ahead, five snarling dogs tearing toward her—
Carin dug in her heel and tried to cut left, glimpsing as she did the second bowman, who was waiting in the distance, at the clearing’s edge. But as Carin glanced his way, she slipped on the leaves that littered the clearing. Breaking her fall with a hand to the ground, she pivoted on her fingers and worked her legs, desperately trying to regain her footing.
“Stay down!” Verek shouted. A bow twanged. An arrow blazed over her head and impaled its target. A dog yelped—a short, clipped sound. There was a sharp crackle, then the hiss and pop of meat roasting. Waves of heat rolled over Carin. A sickening odor filled the air, of burned flesh and dog hair.
Scrambling to her feet, her eyes stinging from the smoke, Carin looked for other attackers. But where Verek’s single arrow had found the mob of five, nothing remained but ashes.
She spun around, wiping her eyes and gasping, and discovered the slayer of the dogs sitting on his horse, little more than a bow’s length from her. Silently he regarded her.
This encounter mirrored her first meeting with the Lord of Ruain: Carin on the ground, so knotted up inside that she couldn’t even swear at him; an armed and angry Verek deciding whether she would live or die. The moment felt dreamlike, as though she were fated to reenact the scene until Verek finally got enough. He let the silence stretch on, withering her with his gaze.
“Tell me,” he grated at last. “What is it that drives you toward death? Why have you scorned the living I offered you?”
Carin sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. Horse thieves were customarily hanged. Would this warlock respect tradition and kill her that way instead of burning her in his fires?
Or did he truly need her alive to help him solve some riddle, as the woodsprite had suggested last night? That, too, was a terrifying possibility.
She threw back her shoulders, and the best she could, met his gaze. What was there to say to him? “I’m a thief and I can’t be trusted”? “Go on and finish me; I know you want to”?
But instead, she answered him in a voice that didn’t shake, though every other part of her did: “Sir, you should let me go. You have no claim on me. My life is my own.”
“Your life is your own?” Verek echoed in a flat voice. His jaw was set and the fiends’-fire light burned up in his eyes. The fingers of his damaged left hand opened and closed on his bow. Did he imagine them closing around her neck? Or was he thinking of bowstringing her?—a form of execution more quickly carried out than a hanging.
Carin ached with a gut-shredding fear and with the strain of hiding it. She couldn’t swallow; her mouth was too dry.
The warlock spat his next words as if they tasted bad.
“Your life became mine, you little wretch, the moment you crossed the barrier and entered my world. My every instinct told me to destroy you.” He leaned toward her. “But instead, I took you into my home.
“And how have you fared in my service?” he snapped. “You’re made to sleep on featherbeds in the finest bedchamber in the house, to bathe in waters warmed by the world’s own fire, to eat bread fresh from the oven and fowl from my best flocks, and to do no work but arrange the books in my library—a task that would seem well suited to a thief. From those volumes you might take all my secrets, and the knowledge of other wysards besides. But the work doesn’t suit you: that, you’ve made clear. Nor do you approve of your lodgings.
“Mark me well, you young fool!” he exclaimed. “I’ll amend my treatment of you. From today, I’ll give you work and quarters better suited to your ungrateful nature.”
Carin’s knees nearly buckled. He was letting her live. He was taking her back.
Her relief lasted only seconds. Rising up in its place was a terrible new dread. What kinds of punishments could a sorcerer devise for a mortal who had spurned his charity?
Her captor shouldered his bow. Then he reached out a hand and demanded the return of Myra’s kitchen knife. Carin fumbled with it, holding the blade so as to present him the handle.
Verek demonstrated that sorcerers required no such courtesies. He snapped his fingers and the knife flew from her hand to his, nicking her forefinger as it winged away.
Carin stuck the cut in her mouth. She involuntarily took a step back.
Verek sheathed the knife and called for the bundle from Carin’s back. Then he dismounted and motioned her up. Before she was well seated he swung up behind her. His arms closed round her, hemming her in so closely against him that he must feel her shuddering.
Neither of them spoke as Verek reined the hunter around and urged it to a trot. Quickly they recrossed the clearing and left Carin’s sanctuary oak behind. The horse swerved to avoid the ashes of the dog pack that the warlock and his companion had destroyed.
The second archer still sat his horse at the edge of the clearing. As they neared him, Carin got her first good look at the warlock’s follower. He was a youth of about nineteen, slender of build and with long brown curls that were darker than her own mane but many shades lighter than Verek’s crow-black hair.
Was this Lanse, the stableboy? He stared back at Carin as the distance between them closed. The boy’s hazel eyes expressed a cold sort of curiosity but no sympathy.
Verek rode past him without a word. The hoofbeats of the second horse mingled with the hunter’s as the boy fell in behind. Verek allowed his mount to set the pace. The hunter trotted for some distance, then slowed to a walk. They rode on, so silent that Carin almost jumped at the occasional trill of a bird or the raspy bark of a startled squirrel.
The sun’s position in the eastern sky announced the time as late morning. Carin had eaten enough at dawn to take the edge from her hunger still, but she craved a drink of good water. The rainwater in the oak’s rotted cavity might have kept her alive if she’d been treed for days, but her one deep drink of it had left a bad taste in her mouth.
Though Verek’s water skin was easily within his reach, she did not ask him for it. Maybe at midday they’d stop to eat and she could swill away the lingering sourness.
But by the time the sun rose to its zenith, an unpleasant taste in her mouth was the least of Carin’s discomforts. Her belly ached, her head pounded, and only by constantly blinking could she keep her vision cleared. Did she dare tell Verek how sick she felt? He might leave her to suffer, or he might put her right with two pinches of his healing powders.
The powders. No need to beg for them. She still carried her stolen supply. Verek hadn’t taken her belt-pouch.
Moving stealthily to avoid drawing the attention of the warlock at her back, Carin felt for the tins. If only Verek would call a halt—to rest the horses if not the riders—she might dose herself and let the dusts cure her present ailment as speedily as they’d healed her knee.
An eager whinnying invaded Carin’s thoughts. The greeting
came from in front; the horse that nickered was not the gelding the stableboy rode behind.
Blinking her eyes clear, Carin spotted a small mare just ahead. The animal—black with a blaze and four stockings—whickered and pawed the ground as if barely able to contain its excitement. It was the same horse that had willingly taken her through Verek’s silent woods, only to refuse to cross a boundary that—so the woodsprite said—the mare could see but Carin could not. Even now, though the mare was neither tied nor hobbled, she would step no closer, but only bob her head and paw the leaves, waiting impatiently for the riders to come.
The woodsprite had talked of spells weaving through the trees. Were they here, between her and the mare, invisible to Carin but apparent to all other creatures? Rubbing her eyes, she watched for any movement of Verek’s hands, which lightly held the reins in front of her.
There—
He made the gesture she’d seen him use before: a small, quick motion with the thumb and fingers of his right hand, as though flicking something through the air. Then he urged the hunter to a trot … as if to carry them through some spectral gate before it slammed shut. Carin heard nothing—an absence that only confirmed her suspicion that they had reentered Verek’s cursed woodland.
Still whickering her pleasure, the mare now trotted to meet them. It wasn’t the other horses, her stablemates, that held the animal’s attention. She came straight to Carin, stretching her neck over the hunter’s withers and nudging Verek’s arm aside to thrust her face as near to Carin’s as she could.
Carin rubbed the mare’s forehead. “What are you doing here, horse?” she mumbled. “Waiting for me? You should have gone home, like I told you to. Except now I’m glad you didn’t.”
Verek dismounted and dropped his hunter’s reins, leaving the horses standing together with Carin still astride. He unshouldered his bow and his quiver of enchanted arrows. To the youth who followed he said, “We’ll rest here, Lanse. Only ground-tie the horses, so they may graze. Eat, if you’re hungry.”
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 8