WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “Good evening, Lord Verek,” Carin said in her politest way as she approached the pair. She gave the stableboy no notice—not a word or a look.

  Verek returned her courtesy but, mercifully, paid her no further attention. Turning back to Lanse, he said, “We’ll resume the lesson on the morrow. Tonight, give thought to what I told you. To starve yourself profits no one.”

  Carin made to slip past the pair, keen to avoid them both. But as she crossed the threshold and stepped into the yard, and into an evening rapidly growing chilly, Verek fell into step beside her.

  Two horses—Lanse’s gelding and the warlock’s hunter—stood in the yard, sleepily awaiting the stableboy’s attentions. As Carin and Verek walked by, Brogar nickered and stretched to nuzzle the warlock’s shoulder. He paused to scratch the horse’s forehead, then rejoined Carin and walked with her toward the kitchen door.

  “I had almost forgotten how much simpler the world looks,” Verek said, “when one is sighting down the shaft of an arrow from the back of a good horse. Things come into focus.

  “I will need you again this evening,” he added as they reached the door and he pushed it open for her. “You must join me in the library, to read again from the looking-glass book. I was too gone with dhera this morning to keep up with the story. Tedious though you may find it, I will require you to reread the events that follow the footsteps thumping through the ‘garden of live flowers.’ I remember nothing of the tale beyond the meeting of the girl Alice with the bantam queen who had grown half a head taller than Alice herself.”

  Carin mumbled assent, but her words were lost in Myra’s cheery greeting.

  “Here you are, my lord!” the housekeeper exclaimed. “And my fair helper too, whose hands are quick with every task I set them. Make ready now, I pray you both, and in a twinkling the meal will be before you.”

  Verek unshouldered his bow and leaned it against the wall. He shed his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and crossed to the kitchen’s hand-pump to scrub at the basin. Carin followed his example rather than climb the stairs to her bathing room. Meat, broth, and salad were on the table, as Myra had promised, by the time both had washed the horse off their hands.

  In her weariless way, the housekeeper supplied most of the dinner-table conversation. From Verek’s few comments, however, Carin gathered that the warlock—after rousing from his somewhat intoxicated stupor—had spent the afternoon testing Lanse’s bow arm. While the boy’s technique was sound, in stamina he was lacking; hence Verek’s parting admonition about Lanse’s unwise effort to starve himself.

  “Oh my! The foolish boy!” Myra exclaimed at this news. “So he’ll go hungry, will he, before he’ll come again to this table for his meals? We’ll see about that, we will!” Falling atypically silent, the woman heaped chunks of chicken and veal into a bowl and drowned them with broth. On a serving dish she piled a generous helping of salad. So forgetting herself that she failed to ask her master’s leave, Myra marched to the side door, a dish in each hand, and disappeared into the dusk.

  “Good,” Verek muttered, more to himself than to Carin. “The cub’s not been born who can defy that mother bear.”

  After Myra’s departure, the two ate in silence. Verek devoted his attention to his plate like a man who had slept through his midday meal. Carin, finishing first, sat quietly and watched him.

  Myra hadn’t yet returned when the warlock, with a satisfied sigh, pushed away from the table. He stood, and motioned for Carin to join him. Down the dark passageway and hall she followed him to the firelit library. Sometime that afternoon, while Verek was coaching Lanse and Carin was scheming with the woodsprite, the capable Myra had kindled a fire in the room.

  Few words passed between Carin and her captor for the rest of the evening, except those of the looking-glass book as she resumed her reading, by the sorcerer’s conjured witchlight. Two chapters later, and two verses into the long rhyme called “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Verek stopped her, declaring her evening’s effort satisfactory and himself better able to appreciate poetry after a night’s sleep. Leaving her to her own devices, he disappeared into the library’s perpetual shadows.

  Carin wandered back to the kitchen to find the dishes cleared and Myra sitting by the hearth. A needle flashed as the housekeeper mended a tear in a faded pair of pants—Lanse’s, to judge by the slimness of the long legs.

  Let’s not talk about him, Carin thought. Let’s talk about something interesting—like Jerold and his enchanted garden.

  “Myra,” she began, “when I saw Jerold today I asked him what keeps his garden green all fall and winter. He told me it’s the ‘magic of life.’ And he said it would die with him.”

  Carin leaned forward. “That reminded me of something you mentioned when you were first telling me about the garden. You said there’s magic in it ‘still.’ So I’ve been wondering about the seeds of enchantment, how and when they were planted in Jerold’s garden. What does he mean by the ‘magic of life’? And about the garden dying when he does? —Which won’t be anytime soon, I hope. But Myra, does Jerold really give the garden its life? Does he have that kind of power, to stop it from dying in the winter? I’m beginning to think Jerold may work magic that’s as strong as Lord Verek’s.”

  The housekeeper let her mending rest idly in her lap. She stared into the flickering fire with eyes that looked backward in time, as though she saw an almost forgotten past. For a time she was silent. But then Myra turned to Carin and spoke, with an air of gravity that seemed misplaced in one who was generally lighthearted.

  “Nay, dearie,” she murmured. “Jerold’s skill in the art magik is to my good master’s as a fine mist to a driving rain. He has a gift but slight. Though both learned at the knee of the same teacher, they were years and leagues apart. Jerold as a young man had got all he could of the craft, before my good master had begun his studies while yet a boy.

  “You know, don’t you, dearie,” Myra added, “that Jerold is of an age to be my master’s father? Aye. He was born in the same year as my master’s sire. Jerold came to this household as a lad apprenticed in wizardry to old Lord Legary.”

  Leg-a-ree. Carin rolled the unfamiliar name around in her thoughts. “Excuse me if I sound foolish,” she said. “But coming from southward, I don’t know about the noble families who own the land in the north. Who is Lord Legary?”

  “To be sure, dearie,” Myra replied, “you wouldn’t know of him. The old lord was my master’s grandsire. He taught young Jerold all the magic an artless lad could learn. And after Jerold, he schooled my clever master in the craft for a score of years, from infancy to manhood—and glad the old lord was, I tell you, child, to have a pupil as quick as my master proved to be.”

  Myra picked up her needle and resumed her work, as though unwilling to add the crime of idleness to her weakness for talk.

  “Now there was a wizard beyond compare!” she murmured. “Lord Legary could make the snow to fall and the fog to creep over the land so deep ’twould bury mountains. He conjured visions and told the meanings of dreams, and cured ills grievous and mortal. On the battlefield he could raise a mist, and in it make one man seem like a hundred. He could enchant the trees and stones so that they became a host and routed his enemies.”

  A master wizard—absolutely! Carin thought. Could this be the master magician who awed Verek?

  “Where’s Lord Legary now?” she asked. “Is he still in Ruain?”

  “Nay, dearie.” Myra shook her head sadly. “The old lord has been dead these twenty years. He died on an autumn night as chill as this, not six months after my master’s lady and their dear little son drowned in the lake. Though he was past eighty, still he was a vigorous and powerful man. Wizards live long. Eighty is the prime of life, the very pinnacle of strength for those who are filled with the art magik. We never had a thought that his time had come.” Myra sighed heavily. “But ’tis not in the natural way of things for a man to outlive his children. Already he had lost a son. Then to see
the bodies of his grandson’s young wife and his great-grandbaby laid on the funeral bier … ’twas more than his brave heart could stand.”

  For a time both were silent, the housekeeper intent on her needlework and Carin giving careful consideration to her next question. This household’s history was tragic enough to make even Myra dole out the details charily. The picture that was emerging, however, discouraged Carin from pinning much hope on Jerold. The old elf’s “life magic”—his seeming ability to ward off death—did not appear to extend beyond garden plants.

  She thought it through. Lord Legary could not be the “master wizard” who made the whirls that had brought Carin and the woodsprite to Ladrehdin. He had died years ago, soon after the drownings, apparently overcome with grief. The drownings had driven a maddened Verek to lay a curse on the woodland, so Myra had told her earlier. The “life magic” must have been in Jerold’s garden then, to save it from the desolation that blighted the woods.

  But magic that could keep plants alive was evidently not enough to save a family of wizards, since all of them—except the one—were dead now.

  “Myra,” Carin said gently, “I’m glad you told me about Lord Verek’s grandfather. It helps me understand Verek better, I think, knowing about his family … especially what you said about how deeply he loved his little boy. But I’m wondering how Lord Verek lost his father too. What happened? Can you tell me that?”

  Myra nodded, and again she let her hands fall idle as she stared into the fire.

  “I’ll tell you all I know, child, for it’s a tale that can be told in a twinkling. The lad’s name was Hugh. He married at eighteen, fathered my good master at nineteen, and was dead within the year. It fell to Lord Legary to be both grandfather and father to my master. A babe not yet seven months old could hardly be remembering a sire who was nothing to him but a name—a name writ in black on a leaf of the holy Drishanna where they write the births and deaths and marriages of all the family. Aye, dearie. The old lord, though he be grandfather, was all the father my good master ever knew.”

  But what about Verek’s mother? Carin wondered. Did he have one? Try as she might, she couldn’t picture the lean-faced warlock as an infant in his crib or suckling at the breast of a young mother. But Myra had mentioned a marriage, so there must have been a bride.

  “That’s sad about Hugh dying so young,” Carin said. “He must have left a young widow. It was hard on her, I’m sure, to lose her husband and have to raise their baby alone. Well, not completely alone, if she had the grandfather, Legary, to help her. But still, she couldn’t have had it easy.”

  Myra put aside her mending and rose from her seat at the fire.

  “I can’t say, dearie,” she muttered, and busied herself with setting the table for tomorrow’s breakfast. “I hadn’t come to service in this household then, when my good master was but a babe. ’Twas not to be until the boy’s tenth year that I took the post of housekeeper to Lord Legary. And by that time, my master’s father was dust in the tomb, and the widow no longer lived under this roof. What became of her was a mystery then, and ’tis a mystery still. I never asked. ’Twas enough for me to do the old lord’s bidding and watch the young master grow into the fine man that he’s become—a wise man and a healer, so like his noble grandsire.”

  Carin saw, with an uneasy feeling, that Myra’s eyes refused to meet hers. The housekeeper paused, empty serving-platter in hand, to stare past Carin into the fire. Then she plunked the platter down and turned for the door to her bedroom.

  “’Tis late, child,” she said, still avoiding Carin’s gaze. “It’s time I took these old bones to bed. You be up with the sun, or you’ll hear me tapping at your door. There’s work enough to be done in this house that we needn’t go back two-score years to find aught to occupy ourselves.”

  The door to Myra’s room shut solidly, leaving Carin in no doubt that their conversation was equally closed.

  She sighed. Again she had gained two new questions for every one answered. Now she understood more clearly Jerold’s place in Verek’s household. Both were sorcerers. The powerful younger wizard showed his weaker elder a polite respect—as much in deference to Jerold’s age and long affiliation with the family, Carin guessed, as out of regard for his presumably slight mastery of magic.

  But now, Carin found herself acutely concerned with Lord Verek’s parentage—a subject that had in no way interested her before tonight’s talk with Myra. Who was Verek’s mother? Where was the lady now? Was she still living, or was she in the tomb with every other member of the warlock’s star-crossed family? Not one of them had made it to a ripe old age—not by wizardly standards, anyway. According to Myra, Verek’s grandfather had died in his prime. His father had perished before reaching his majority. Verek’s wife and son had also died young. Carin shuddered at the memory of their macabre images, sculpted from the waters of the magic pool, floating like dead fish over the warlock’s head.

  Why was Myra so reluctant to talk about her master’s missing dam? That the housekeeper knew more than she was telling, Carin didn’t doubt. On such an open countenance as Myra’s, the struggle to hide a secret was plainly written. What was there about Verek’s mother that Myra thought Carin shouldn’t know?

  Shaking her head in frustration, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. When she had shut the door behind her, Carin eyed the room’s furnishings, looking for some way to block the door against the murder-minded Verek. She wrestled the small table into place, wedging it under the latch, and loaded it with unlit lamps from Myra’s multitude. Any attempt to force the door would send the lamps crashing, and wake Carin from the soundest sleep.

  Lying in bed with her eyes shut, she tried not to think of the many deaths—past and future—that were linked to this household. But they haunted her.

  As she drifted off, Carin’s dreams brought an image of a windowless stone tomb. She seemed to stand in its arched doorway. On the keystone above her head was chiseled the name “Verek.”

  Looking first to the left, Carin saw a crypt inscribed “Legary.” On the wall-crypt to her right was the name “Hugh.”

  Directly in front of her was a double chamber. It was adorned with the deeply carved images of a crescent moon and a radiant sun. One of the paired vaults bore the name “Alesia.” Overlapping that vault and the other was a tablet of white bronze. Upon the tablet was inscribed the name “Aidan” and the joined sun-moon symbol that Carin had seen at her captor’s throat on the day he found her in his woodland. Into the stone of the vault touching Alesia’s was cut the name “Theil.”

  Even asleep—if, in fact, she was asleep—Carin could recognize the family tomb of the House of Verek. Did she see it as it was now, with the current lord’s grandfather, father, wife and child buried within, and only the warlock’s own vault empty … awaiting the corpse for which it had been prepared? Or did she see it as it would be in the future, when all the crypts had received their eternal occupants?

  A roar sounded behind her. Carin turned with the slowness of a flower unfurling its petals. In her dream state, time crawled. When at last her back was to the tomb and she faced the direction from which the roar had come, she saw the dragon of the puzzle-book ripping apart a woman’s body.

  Blood dripped from the monster’s talons and fangs. The woman’s mutilated limbs disappeared down the dragon’s maw … first an arm twisted violently from the shoulder socket, then a leg sliced off as easily as if it had been the succulent root of a paelgra bush.

  Carin’s scream put the vision to flight. But even as she sat bolt upright in bed, pushing away the sweat-soaked linens and panting for breath, she knew hope for her own survival. The woman in her nightmare, the woman the dragon tore apart, had not been auburn-haired like Carin. The victim’s hair was long, straight, and crow-black—in both texture and color, quite like Theil Verek’s.

  * * *

  Morning came, and the warlock’s promise held. He did not ask her again to summon the dragon to the wizards’ well.
In fact, Carin hardly saw Lord Verek for the rest of that week and most of the next one, except in the evenings when he had her read to him from the puzzle-book.

  Carin’s days took on a pattern that began to feel almost comfortable in its familiarity. Each morning she assaulted the chaos in the sorcerer’s library, slowly bringing order to the jumbled books. At midday, Myra called her to an always excellent meal. Mostly they ate alone, though occasionally the master of the house joined them at the table. Never did Jerold or Lanse make an appearance. Whatever Myra or Verek had said to the stableboy, it hadn’t persuaded him to drop his self-defeating hunger protest against his rival.

  Afternoons began with exercising the mare, always within the confines of the manor’s encircling stone wall. While prowling the grounds, Carin realized that the urge which had kept her walking over miles of grassland and high into Verek’s woods had entirely left her. Verek’s statement that “You’ve come as far north as you can” had wormed its way in, supplanting Megella’s long-ago injunction to “Go north, girl.” Had Carin won her freedom now, she would not know which direction to turn.

  Even so, she searched for ways over or through the wall. But she found none.

  When her daily session with Emrys was done, she stole away to the abandoned great hall to work on her new weapon. Guided by the archery book and using a hand adze “borrowed” from Jerold’s woods-tools, Carin shaped a serviceable bowstave from the yew limb that the woodsprite had helped her get. She strung it with catgut stolen from Myra’s mending chest. She made a half-dozen crude arrows from straight, sharpened stems of hazel, and fletched them with the pinion feathers of a goose that had given its all to one of Myra’s finest meals. From a scrap of leather, she fashioned a guard to protect her wrist against the slap of the bowstring.