WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Had he, however, been using the word in a way she didn’t fully understand? Carin wondered. His was the language of sorcery, after all.

  And one language Verek doesn’t know, Carin reminded herself, is written in the puzzle-book. How could he have put even two words of that language into a false illusion, if that sign in the child’s bedroom was a fiction he’d invented?

  “But you’ll keep digging, won’t you, Carin?” the sprite pleaded. “You’ll attempt to learn what the mage knows?”

  She nodded. “Maybe when Verek gets back—his horse and Lanse’s are not in the stable, so they must be out riding—maybe this evening, if I see Verek, I’ll get a chance to find out more.”

  “The mage does not ride today,” the sprite said. “From a tree outside the wall, I watched as the boy and a plump, graying woman drove a wagon and team through the main gate and headed off to the east, early this morning. The wagon was empty except for bundles of sacks and canvas. And tied to the back were both the mage’s great horse and the boy’s saddle steed. The mage himself was not to be seen …

  “I confess, my friend,” the sprite added, “that I have often lingered in the trees outside these walls, hoping to see the wizard emerge in such a mood that would permit at least a brief conversation. For until we met, Carin, I had no one else with whom to speak. I never addressed the boy or the woman—

  “Is the plump woman your friend Myra?” the sprite interrupted itself. “The mage’s housekeeper who made your new clothes?”

  Carin nodded. “That’s her.”

  “Then I must do something kind for the lady … perhaps shoo a flock of songbirds through her window,” the creature mused, half talking to itself and forgetting its tale of the wagon.

  Impatiently, Carin drummed her fingers on the oak’s trunk.

  The sprite sparked under her hand, roused from its meditations. “But I digress. What was I saying?”

  “That you never talk to Lanse or Myra when they go outside the walls.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. I never speak to them, you know, for fear of sending them into fits of screaming and carrying on, like the paroxysms of the village woodcutters. But several times I have watched the boy and the woman—this Myra—take the wagon out empty early of a morning and bring it home loaded just before sundown. I suspect they travel to some town or market to buy goods. Why the boy sometimes ties saddle horses to the wagon’s tailboard, I can’t say. I’ve never followed them, preferring always to wait at the gate on the chance the mage would come forth and speak a civil word before bidding me begone. Do I sound quite pitiful, to be spending my days hoping for only a kind word or two?”

  “No, you don’t,” Carin said. “I often wished I could hear a few kind words when I was walking up from the south. But I never talked to people either. It was too dangerous. Someone might suspect I was a runaway.” She paused, remembering how it had felt to be a fugitive, keeping to herself and trusting no one. “I know what you mean about wanting company. When I woke up this morning and couldn’t find anybody, I decided I wouldn’t mind ever again about Myra talking my ear off—

  “Sprite,” Carin added, suddenly inspired, “if you want conversation, then get to know Myra. I don’t believe that a ‘talking tree’ would upset her in the least. After all, she keeps house for a sorcerer. I’ll bet Myra has seen things weirder than you. Be polite and flatter her, and you’ll make a friend for life.”

  At this, the creature excitedly piped its thanks. But Carin’s thoughts were moving back over the sprite’s story about the wagon. She returned to a passing mention that troubled her. Tied to the tailboard were the mage’s horse and the boy’s saddle steed. The mage himself was not to be seen.

  If Lanse and Myra had taken the horses this morning, and Verek was not with them … where was he? If not out riding Brogar, then where? Verek often disappeared for hours at a stretch, but his and Carin’s paths usually crossed at least once a day—if not in the kitchen for meals, then over a book in the library.

  Carin’s throat tightened as she pictured the warlock where she’d last seen him: lying half-drowned beside a pool of magic. Maybe she had misjudged the reason for his daylong absence.

  She stood. “Sprite, there’s a book in the library I want to finish while I’ve still got the sun to read it by. But first I’m going to explore this end of the house. I’d like to find some way to come and go that doesn’t take me through the kitchen. Everyone’s eye is on me there. If I can slip out sometimes through the rowan door, I’ll be able to get away easier to meet you.”

  Carin touched the sprite’s tree in parting, received its farewell, then returned to the servants’ entrance of the great hall and eased open the weatherworn door. She walked the length of the room, crunching bird droppings under her boots, and stepped up on the platform of the high table. The room had been thoroughly stripped. No shred of a woven tapestry hung on its walls. Not a single trencher or spoon had been left behind, nothing to hint of extravagant feasts in years gone by.

  Down from the platform, she scuffed through debris to the foot of the stone steps. They led up to a balcony that ran the length of a wall which was pocked with nooks and crannies.

  Carin searched along the wall for a means of admittance to the main wing of the house. She found wide double doors filling the third alcove. The doors’ shared latch was rusty, but it yielded to her determined, two-handed shove. One door’s hinges seemed fused into solid metal chunks, so firmly did they resist movement. But the other door, squalling like an injured cat, gave just enough to let her squeeze through.

  She stood at the end of a long, dusty corridor. Sunlight filtered through high windows of the same design as those in the upper-story hallway that Carin had traveled last night. Doors lined the corridor, spaced well apart, leading to guest quarters perhaps. She tried each as she passed, but all were either locked or firmly stuck.

  Another set of double doors closed the facing end of the corridor. Their latch was in better repair than the one Carin had just forced. It lifted easily.

  Through those doors was the landing she knew from last night. The darkly paneled stairwell descended from it to the cave of magic. The hallway continued past it, heading for her bedroom at an angle. The two upper corridors met in the point of the wide “V” that was formed by the master and minor wings of the house.

  Stepping through to the occupied part, Carin turned to shut the doors behind her—and froze, her gaze on the dust motes that danced in the corridor. Her passage had stirred up a cloud of particles that twinkled preternaturally, catching the sun like tiny crystals. For a moment she saw, not the dust of disuse, but the glittering droplets that had fallen from Verek’s hair when he broke the surface of the enchanted pool, gasping for his life’s breath.

  Hastily she shut and latched the doors. Then she stepped to the head of the stairs and peered down the stairwell.

  “Are you there, warlock?” Carin whispered. “Are you dead? Maybe if I’d stood and watched you a little longer, I would have seen you stop breathing. Or maybe you’re still alive down there, but barely—and wishing that somebody would come help you. But who’s brave enough to open that door? I’m not. I won’t—not after last night.

  “But maybe,” she added more audibly, “there is one person around here who will risk it. If Myra can’t vouch for your whereabouts, warlock, then I’ll tell her what I saw last night. I’ll tell her my suspicions and ask her to send Jerold down to help you. He has power. Maybe he can hold off the magic of the mirror pool with a spell of his own and not turn into a statue the way I did.”

  “Do you strew riddles upon the stairs?” snapped a familiar voice at her back. “Pray face me and speak plainly.”

  Chapter 13

  A Susceptibility

  Carin whirled, and had to grab the handrail to keep from tumbling backwards down the stairs. Verek stood with his arms folded and his feet apart, eyeing her crossly. His long black hair, normally smoothed back from his forehead, hung around his face in
disarray like a Drishannic monk’s. His bloodshot eyes were sunk in shadows. The beard that edged his jawline was untrimmed. The tear in one rolled-up sleeve identified the rumpled garment as the same shirt he had worn last night during the “delving.” He looked altogether like a man in need of, first his bed, then his barber.

  “Good afternoon, Lord Verek.” Carin addressed him formally, struggling to appear calm. “Are you well?”

  “Well enough,” he growled. He gestured at the stairs behind her. “What business have you here? What has Myra to do with my whereabouts, or Jerold with anything but his garden? What are these ‘suspicions’ you’re muttering about? And in what fashion have you become a statue? You seem lively enough, if eyes may judge.”

  Carin gripped the handrail tightly, her thoughts racing. How could she answer him without revealing where she had been and what she’d seen last night? Would his fury have limits if he learned what she had witnessed—the ghostly drownings and his torments?

  Trying desperately to concoct a plausible story in a span of seconds, Carin stammered out: “It’s only that … that the house has seemed so empty all day, s-sir. Myra isn’t here. I started to … to worry when I didn’t see her … or you … from the time I got to work in the library this morning until I went to the kitchen to eat. I—”

  “Let us adjourn to the kitchen now,” he interrupted. “I’ve eaten nothing today—your mention of a meal interests me almost as much as this tale you’re weaving. Come.” He turned to the hallway and waved her to his side with a quick, peremptory jerk of his hand.

  “Speak truthfully,” Verek demanded as they strode toward her bedroom, “and dispense with the effort of crafting a story that will topple like a wall raised on sand. Already you’ve laid a weak foundation with this talk of an empty house. If you have noted Myra’s absence as well as my own, then why do you not try me with questions as to that one’s whereabouts?”

  He answered for her. “No. Your worries are not for Myra. You speak as though she were expected momentarily, and I not at all.

  “Tell me,” he continued, dismantling Carin’s powers of invention as he attacked her story from another angle: “In these roles you give us, as though to make of us mere players on a stage, why do you cast Myra as the warden, yourself as herald, and Jerold in the hero’s part? Pray cease your attempts to compose a motley drama, and tell me plainly what you mean with your talk of suspicions and spells and statues.”

  They’d reached the landing fronting her bedroom. Verek paused at the head of the stairs. He gestured for Carin to precede him down them, sweeping his arm theatrically as might a speaker who steps forward from the chorus to introduce the play’s next act.

  She bristled at him mocking her.

  “You’re right, sir,” she snapped. “I’m not a good liar. I can’t make up a story on the fly. So I’ll tell you the truth, since that’s what you say you want. You won’t like it, though, when you hear it.”

  Her mind on the events she was about to relate, Carin hardly noticed when they reached the kitchen and she flipped back the cloth that covered bread, cheese, and fruit. She cut wedges of cheese and slapped them onto a trencher with a hunk of bread and the ripest of the remaining apples; she and Emrys had polished off the best pieces earlier. She plunked the trencher down in front of Verek, poured him a tankard of ale, then seated herself opposite, nearer to the cold fireplace than to him.

  Verek said nothing, only pared and ate his apple slice by slice and watched her expectantly from across the table.

  “All right then,” Carin began, her tone declaring her reluctance to recite the tale. “Last night, after you walked me to my room, I went straight to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I got this feeling that something was wrong. I didn’t know where the feeling was coming from. But it was strong, and sad, and heavy, like something weighed me down. And it called to me. I couldn’t ignore it.” Carin frowned, remembering the power of that summons.

  “So I got up,” she said, “and went where the feeling told me to go. It led me downstairs to the cave of the mirror pool. I felt around for the door in the paneling and found the latch and pushed it open a crack, and I heard you talking to … well, it seemed like you were talking to the water in the pool. You were asking it to show you … some good memories. But it wouldn’t. I heard you getting furious at it. I wanted to see what was happening, so I opened the door wider, just far enough to stick my head in.”

  Carin paused, feeling like a swimmer who was rapidly getting out of her depth.

  Verek stared at her with eyes that were unnaturally luminous. His lunch lay untouched in front of him. Presently, he took a sip of ale. Then: “Go on,” he breathed, his voice barely above a whisper. “A story so boldly begun must be told to its finish.”

  Carin took a deep, shaky breath.

  “I don’t know how to tell you what I saw,” she murmured. “The pictures are hard to put into words. It took me a second to figure out that I was seeing the stalks of plants growing up out of the pool. I almost felt like I was in the water, like I was a fish in a pond that was choked with water-lily stems. The stalks reached up toward the cave’s ceiling … and two bodies were caught in them, tangled up, over where you were standing.

  “I watched you knock the whole thing apart,” she said. “When you hit the stalks, the pictures collapsed. I could see then that they’d been made of water. The water poured back into the pool and took you with it. That’s when I got turned into a statue. I couldn’t move or do anything except stare at the pool and wonder if you’d been drowned. I thought you must be dead, and I figured I wouldn’t get out of there alive either.

  “But then you surfaced. I could hear you breathing so hard, I knew you must be hurting. The thing is, though, I could move again. The second you came up, I wasn’t paralyzed anymore. So I didn’t stick around to be sure you would live. You were out, you were breathing, and I wanted to leave.

  “Even if I could have done something to help you,” Carin added softly, “I figured you wouldn’t have been happy to know I was standing in the doorway. I don’t understand why I was brought there to see what I saw. I doubt that you would willingly have shown me those things.”

  Avoiding Verek’s gleaming eyes, Carin hurriedly concluded. “When you heard me talking to myself, I was making up my mind to tell Myra what had happened. She could have sent Jerold to help you, maybe. Jerold can do magic—I’ve seen him petrify a horse. He was the only one I knew of who might have been able to go down and get you. Maybe it wasn’t much of a plan. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

  The silence that followed was profound. Carin didn’t dare look at Verek, for fear of the rage she might see in his face. She heard him rise from across the table and saw, out of the corner of one eye, that he walked toward the fireplace where she was sitting.

  She half stood, but found nowhere to run. Verek could easily cut her off if she tried to flee through either the side door to the courtyard or the passageway to the foyer. There was only the door to Myra’s bedroom at her back, and no certainty that she could reach it before the warlock caught her, or that such a retreat would gain her more than a few seconds of safety.

  Carin forced her gaze to the sorcerer and found him staring at the banked coals that, in Myra’s absence, hadn’t been fanned to a fire on the hearth. The face that could express consuming rage, but more often wore an unreadable cast, lay fully open to her examination. Emotions moved over it as plainly as clouds scudding across a stormy sky. Each temper threw its own distinct shadow over Verek’s countenance—each, for an instant, identifiable before giving way to the next.

  Anger was there, certainly, but it yielded by turns to shock, distress, doubt and wonder, and a moment that Carin took for pure revelation. Once, Verek’s lips writhed back from his teeth in a grimace that might have been a prelude to the violent rage Carin expected. One glance, however, at his now-subdued eyes told her it was pain that contorted the warlock’s face, not fury.

  What finally settled
over him was an attitude of resolve tinged with resignation. When Verek turned his face to Carin’s, he had the look of a man who had reached a decision he found distasteful but necessary.

  “Tell me more,” he said firmly, in a voice that betrayed no inner turmoil, “of this ‘feeling’ that drew you from your bed to descry my private concerns. Did it take the form, perchance, of voices in your head?”

  “No, sir,” Carin protested as she retook her seat. “It wasn’t anything crazy like that. It was just a feeling, and as hard to explain as any other feeling that suddenly comes over a person.” She struggled to give him a good example. “Have you ever come to a fork in the road and decided, on impulse, to go left instead of right? Have you ever felt the urge to look over your shoulder? Do you look? Maybe you don’t listen to your feelings, but I listen to mine.

  “When I was walking up from the south,” Carin added, “I learned to trust my instincts. I always paid attention when something whispered to me that I should take one path and not another, or I should keep walking and not settle for the night in some haystack that seemed as safe as a temple. Trusting my gut is how I stayed alive and free.” She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what came over me last night, but I can tell you that it was the strongest feeling I’ve ever had about anything. I had to listen to it. I had to go where it told me to.”

  Verek was looking at her with a sort of preoccupied skepticism. Abruptly he left his spot by the fireplace. He sat down directly opposite her, reached across, and rested his right hand, palm up, on the table between them.

  “Give me the hand that found and opened the hidden door to the cave of the wysards,” he demanded.

  Reluctantly, Carin eased her right hand onto the table to rest near his; she couldn’t bring herself to lay it in his open palm. For a moment then, he examined her hand with only his eyes.