WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  A soft whickering greeted her. It came not from the nearest stalls, where the warlock’s Brogar and Lanse’s gelding dozed, but from farther down the gallery. Those two horses eyed her sleepily as Carin passed, showing no more interest in her than she had in them.

  But the soft whickering changed to excited neighs as she approached Emrys’ stall. The mare danced on four feet and bobbed her head with such vigor that she threatened to dash out her brains on the crossbeams above.

  “Easy, girl!” Carin soothed her. “Quiet down, before you hurt yourself.”

  At the sound of her voice, the neighs hushed and the dance stilled, but the mare’s head continued its eager down-and-up as Carin stroked the graceful black neck.

  “I can’t take you for another run today,” she murmured, “but we can go out in the sun. Your dark master gives us leave to walk the grounds.”

  Which wasn’t precisely true. Verek merely bade her visit the horse, while forbidding her any wanderings beyond the walls. But taken together and viewed in the right light, his instructions could be stretched to accommodate her wishes.

  She looped a soft rope around the mare’s neck and led Emrys outside. Across the yard, in the garden that grew where the two wings of the house met at an angle, brightly colored flowers waved their heads. The mare made straight for the garden, her ears pricked and her eyes on the flowers. Carin’s stride lengthened to match the mare’s, and they were across the yard in no more time than a bee could have flown the distance.

  At the edge of the flower patch, a graveled path wound between beds of yellow daffodils and blue gentians. As they set foot on it, the gravel crunched under Carin’s boots and the mare’s hooves with the noise of a small rockslide—an unmistakable announcement of their presence in the manicured grounds.

  At once, a bony face appeared above a cluster of pink roses. Startlingly blue eyes scowled from under wispy white hair and bushy eyebrows.

  If this wasn’t an elf—Carin’s first impression, which she quickly dismissed—then it had to be Jerold, the old gardener Myra had mentioned. Carin addressed the scowling face with a pleasant “Good afternoon.” It made no reply.

  Not wishing to linger unwelcomed, Carin was at the point of walking on, twitching Emrys’ rope, when a thought came to her. This aged being, whether it was Jerold or it was an elf that lived in the garden—and why not an elf, she reconsidered, in a warlock’s world?—this being might know of a way to call the woodsprite. Carin had unfinished business with that traitor. It ought to hear of the trouble its betrayal had brought down on her.

  So instead of walking on, she again addressed the frowning face.

  “My name’s Carin.”

  One bushy white eyebrow lifted slightly, which did nothing to soften the face’s look of displeasure.

  “Are you Mister Jerold?”

  A curt nod of his head satisfied her on that point: this was in fact the gardener and not some uncanny being.

  But did the old man not have a voice? Carin pressed on: “I wonder, sir, if you know the woodsprite.”

  Though the look of displeasure deepened on the gardener’s cadaverous face, this proved to be the right question to loosen his tongue.

  “If you mean the fay that lives in the woods—yes,” Jerold replied in a voice raspy with age.

  Gratified, Carin questioned further. “Have you talked to the sprite recently?”

  Jerold shook his head. He started to walk away.

  Exasperation rose in her, but Carin managed to keep it from her voice. “Sir, may I ask if you expect to see the woodsprite again?”

  This stopped the gardener in his tracks.

  “No, I do not, missy,” he snapped. “I sent the creature packing, after it wore me out with its chatter—and its silly questions.” Jerold eyed her sharply. “I can’t abide a talker. And that hobthrust headless fetch-life is a talker.”

  Carin toyed with the coiled rope in her hands, not sure how to continue. Another word from her, and Jerold might banish her from his garden too. But she needed to know.

  “Excuse me, sir. Just one more question. I can’t go look for the sprite. Lord Verek has ordered me to stay inside the walls. Do you know of any way I can get a message to the woodsprite to tell it where I am and ask it to come?”

  With grave severity, the old man scowled his displeasure.

  “The wight’s not welcome here—not in my garden,” he rasped. “I can’t abide it. If I see it here, I’ll ax the tree it’s in. The last tree that hid the creature bears the mark yet. One good chopping blow from me and the fay lit out like the cowardly thing it is. Don’t try to call it back, missy. I won’t have it.”

  He shuffled off and began pruning a myrtle tree that grew near the rose bushes. Their unsatisfactory conversation was clearly at an end.

  “What a grouch!” Carin whispered to Emrys.

  The horse blew softly through the nostrils, as if in agreement.

  Continuing her walk, Carin led Emrys down the graveled path, winding through the fragrant garden for some distance. The path ended in a curve that turned away from the large main wing of the house. There, the trail became rougher and less distinct, as though this section hadn’t been used in years. The shrubs and flowers strayed from their beds and overgrew the path, and vines draped the tree limbs, forming a curtain dense enough to block the way.

  If Carin meant to explore the garden past this point, Emrys must stay behind. Small and agile though the mare was, the undergrowth here was too tangled to permit a horse’s passage.

  “Emrys,” she addressed the mare in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m going to see what’s up this way. You wait for me here. I won’t leave you alone long. I don’t want either of us coming to grief. Your dark master might not like me roaming around back here. This place looks like a jungle, and he told me to stay in the garden.

  “As for you, horse: you’ll be in trouble with Jerold if he catches you eating his flowers. Stop that!” Carin tugged at the rope to bring the mare’s head out of the hyacinths that Emrys had begun to nibble. “Just graze the grass while I’m gone, and stay put. If anybody sees you’re on the loose again, I could end up back in that fragging dungeon.” Carin’s heart convulsed at the thought.

  She looped the rope over a low-growing bush, gave the mare a final pat, and pushed past a screen of vines into an untamed profusion of greenery. A few steps beyond a long-abandoned bed of asters, Jerold’s garden became a wilderness. There was no sign here of a human hand at work. Flowering vines festooned the trees. Ferns and creepers vied to cover the ground. Saplings fought for space and light.

  Making headway through the tangle would have been impossible if not for the vestiges of a grass-grown track that meandered away from the house, leading deeper into the garden gone wild. In places the remnant path was detectable only as a patch of ground too firm for the rampant plant life to invade.

  Carin picked her way along the barely visible trace, following it for some minutes before the jungle began to open up. The undergrowth thinned enough that she could see more than an arm’s length ahead. Through the greenery, a stone wall appeared.

  The path led up to the wall, and thence along it. Carin paused, resting a hand on the stonework’s mossy surface. Should she return to the mare and save further exploration for another day?

  Two minutes, she bargained with herself. Just two minutes along the wall to see where it leads. To a door? A stile? Then back to Emrys.

  At the end of her allotted time, what came into view was nothing formed by human hands, but the bole of an oak so massive it dwarfed the tree that had saved Carin from the dogs. The oak grew so close to the wall that its roots had undermined the stone foundation and its thick limbs breached the wall halfway up. The damage, however, left no weakness in the fortifications surrounding Verek’s manor house. The massive oak plugged the holes it had made as effectively as stone and mortar.

  Drawn to the tree as to a temple, Carin approached almost reverently. She put her hand on the bark. He
r widespread arms couldn’t reach a sixth of the way around the bole, but on impulse she hugged her body to the great oak and stretched to embrace as much of its roughness as she could.

  “My friend, words fail me,” came a reedy voice in her ear. “I’m more pleased to see you than I can say.”

  Chapter 10

  The Mirror Pool

  As Carin jumped away from the oak, a feeling of relief mixed with annoyance replaced her momentary shock.

  “So you’re here, you traitor,” she snapped at the tree. “A little while ago I was begging the gardener to help me get a message to you. After the way you betrayed me to Verek, I thought it might amuse you to find out he didn’t kill me. But now you’re here, you can see for yourself that Verek kept his prisoner alive, and I’m still more or less in one piece.

  “Tell me something, you faithless creature!” she demanded, not giving the oak a chance to speak, although a shape that looked like a mouth worked helplessly in the bark. “When the dogs attacked, was it only by chance that you led me to a tree that stood all by itself, like an island? Or did you trap me there on purpose, knowing I couldn’t escape, so you could be sure Verek would find me exactly where you left me? Was that all part of your plan to betray me?”

  “My friend.” The mouth in the bark drooped at its corners. “It is as I feared: I’m to feel your anger for leading the mage to you. Can you not see that I had no choice? Without his help, you would have perished. The dogs would not have given up the siege until you fell to them—or you died aloft and your body wedged in the tree, there to shed the flesh that tempted them. Whatever you may think of me now, I served you well in bringing the mage to you. He had gone miles astray before I found him, bound north when your sanctuary oak was to the west—

  “To answer you on the question of that tree,” the woodsprite interrupted itself, “as to whether it was luck or foresight that made me lead you to it: good fortune alone must get our thanks. That ancient oak waited in its clearing as if the passage of centuries had prepared it for one purpose only—to take you up and protect you from the beasts. You could have reached no other tree in time. Among the ancient’s neighbors, no other oak let down its lower limbs near enough to the ground to accept your leap, but not so low that the dogs could follow. No— Thank luck, fate, or whatever gods you pray to, but don’t thank me for putting such a sanctuary in your path. I had no part in that good fortune, save to guide you to it.

  “But I digress. The mage, as I say, was riding well to the north when I located him. So anxious was he for your safety that he greeted me with none of his usual malice, but as a soldier meeting an ally in the field.

  “‘The maid lives!’ I told him. ‘The dogs came for her, but she escaped up a tree and waits there now, helpless but defiant.’

  “‘She’s unharmed?’ the mage demanded to know. ‘She suffered no bite from those jaws? Such a wound festers quickly.’

  “‘She’s unharmed,’ I assured him. ‘Our traveler flung herself up an oak so fast that dogs’ jaws closed on air alone.’

  “‘Your traveler is my runaway, and I mean to have her back!’ the mage bellowed at me, his old manner returning with the knowledge that you were safe. ‘Lead me to her.’

  “‘I will,’ I told him. ‘But first, I require a promise from you.’

  “‘You require a promise of me?’ he shouted. He was furious by this time, Carin, as you may imagine. ‘By the powers,’ he swore, ‘if I catch you in a twig I’ll use it for tinder and laugh as you burn. What is this promise you want before you’ll lead me to the girl?’

  “‘Only that you won’t stop her speaking with me, once you have returned her to safety,’ I told him. ‘She’s the only friend I’ve found in all my travels. She doesn’t scream and run, or threaten me. She talks to me. I’ll wish to visit her when she’s back with you. Give me your word, magician, that you’ll do nothing to prevent it.

  “‘And promise me also,’ I added as the thought occurred to me, ‘that you’ll speak to the gardener who tends the grounds, to dissuade him from attacking with his ax the trees in which I rest!’”

  The sprite’s more scared of Jerold than of Verek. Surprised, and sensing a chance to learn something useful, Carin tipped her head and listened well as the creature rushed on:

  “The mage did not waste time arguing, but assented readily to my first demand. ‘If I don’t scrag that thieving chit’—small chance of it, Carin, when he so desperately craves your help—‘then I won’t stop her speaking to you,’ the mage assured me.

  “But in reply to my second request, he said only this: ‘As for Jerold—he answers to no master but himself. Deal with him as best you can. His methods may prevail against you better than mine.’

  “With that, we were away—I leaping through the trees with all the flashing and sparking I could manage; the mage and his boy following. I led them to your refuge and watched the rescue from a distance. Though the mage’s spells cannot touch me, if his fire-arrows had set the forest ablaze, I could have been in mortal danger. When I saw the mage carry you clear of the smoke and ash, I knew my task was done. As the sun warmed the forest, I found a quiet tree and took my rest.”

  A few moments of silence followed the woodsprite’s narrative as Carin mulled over the creature’s words. Its story would merit careful reflection, when she could think it through. But for now, there were details of her recapture for which the sprite had yet to account.

  “You didn’t follow us afterward, then, back through Verek’s woods to this house?” Her question was half accusation.

  “No, Carin, I did not follow. After the night’s exertions, I was content to drowse away the day and rely on the mage to convey you safely home. You and he had no mishaps, I trust?”

  “Mishaps?” she echoed. “No, I was battered, buried alive, and nearly brained, but otherwise that warlock didn’t lay a hand on me—as you can see.” She pushed up her sleeves to reveal the bruises from Verek’s iron grip.

  A mouth as round as a full moon in the oak’s bark told Carin she’d struck home. While the creature gaped, she related the events of her forced return to the manor, dwelling particularly on Verek’s violence over the stolen kerchiefs, his entombing her in the cellar, and the head wound she’d suffered there. By the time her tale was done, the woodsprite was sputtering with indignation.

  “That—that—snake,” the sprite managed to hiss after several moments of shaping words which found no voice. “My friend! I never thought he’d deal with you so harshly. You are right to be angry with me. In the forest, when you warned of what would happen if I let the mage have you back, I thought you were overwrought—your fears exaggerated by the circumstances. But now I see that your brief acquaintance with the mage has given you a better understanding of his nature than I have gained in all my time dwelling within his woods.

  “Forgive me, Carin!” The sprite’s voice rose until it resembled the highest notes of a reed flute. “I have betrayed you. I’ve handed you to a serpent. I do not deserve your friendship.”

  The mouth in the bark emitted cries so misery-filled, they would have broken a heart of stone. Carin stroked the tree trunk—her hand on the bole was a barnacle on a leviathan—and tried to take it all back.

  “Hush, sprite,” she whispered. “I don’t blame you for what happened … not really. I know you meant to do the right thing. And you did. If you hadn’t fetched Verek, I would have died just the way you said—torn apart or starved to a skeleton. Woodsprite, we’re still friends. You ignored what I said I wanted, and gave me instead what I needed. I know it takes the best kind of friend to do that.”

  At this, the creature gave a hopeful-sounding little hiccup, and Carin went on.

  “Honestly”—while she was at it, she might as well confess what else she knew—“it’s me I’m mad at, not you. I messed up my best chance of getting away. Verek won’t be that careless again.” Carin looked over her shoulder, perpetually on alert for the warlock. “When I’m around him, I feel li
ke a tongue-tied dormouse.” She rubbed her sore arms. “There’s lots I’d like to say to him, but I’m too paralyzed to get it all out. Instead, I jump down your throat. I’ll try not to do it again, all right?”

  The woodsprite’s reply was lost in a sudden commotion that came from the direction of Jerold’s garden. First there was a shout, then the sound of a large, four-footed body crashing through shrubbery.

  “Jerold’s found Emrys!” Carin exclaimed, wondering briefly if the sprite had the least idea of what she meant. “I have to go. Meet me back here tomorrow. If I can, I’ll be here at the same time.”

  Carin sprinted down the trail as fast as she could without losing the nearly invisible trace. In minutes, she was back on the graveled walk beside the main wing of the house. Emrys wasn’t there.

  A startled horse would head for its stall.

  But almost as quickly as the thought sent Carin running down the path toward the stableyard, she stopped short, sending gravel flying. There stood Emrys, on an expanse of lawn between beds of primroses and violets. The mare wasn’t browsing. She stood frozen in place, her muscles corded, her head flung up, eyes white-rimmed. Facing Emrys was Jerold, his right hand tracing patterns in the air.

  The scene was distinctly unnatural. A horse so obviously frightened should race away, not stand rooted to the spot. A hand drawing pictures in thin air should not leave behind a tracery that—for the briefest instant—glowed before fading to invisibility.

  Carin’s brain resisted the evidence of her eyes. Gardener, he was. Elf, he might be. But sorcerer? Jerold—a warlock? Another one?

  She shook herself from awed stillness and sprinted down the path. “Mister Jerold!” she called. “I’m really sorry. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let the mare wander off. I hope she didn’t eat too many flowers. Or trample them. If you’ll excuse us, I’ll take her to the stable now.”