Carin couldn’t think of a reply that wouldn’t add to Verek’s irritation, so she only nodded. Then she turned away and resumed the endless job of sorting and stacking.
But while she worked, she cast frequent sidelong glances at Verek as he sat at the desk, bent over his book. Twenty minutes of observing the warlock’s absorption in the volume made Carin wish for the chance to study it herself. Full of the wisdom of wizards, Verek had said it was. Maybe that book named the master blackheart and explained the magic that had spirited Carin and the woodsprite from their natural homes to this …
She didn’t finish the thought. The groan that escaped Verek’s lips arrested her utterly. It seemed to come less from his body than from a fissure in his soul. The sound of it stopped her breath, it conveyed such a depth of sorrow.
Carin dropped the books she was sorting and took a step toward the warlock. Verek’s forehead rested on the desk on one arm. His other arm fell across the back of his skull as if to ward off a blow from behind. His shoulders shook with the force of his emotion.
Confronted by such an extremity of distress, Carin hesitated. What could she say to Verek? How could she presume to comfort him, when she had no idea what had brought on his sudden anguish?
And why are you feeling sympathetic toward your captor anyway? wondered the voice of cool reason as it checked her first impulse of concern for the man across from her.
Verek jerked his head up and shoved back from the desk. He lunged to his feet and made for the room’s shadowed recesses. As he stumbled past her, Carin glimpsed his face. She didn’t think it could have expressed a deeper pain if he’d been lying disemboweled on some mad priest’s sacrificial altar.
He disappeared into the shadows. The hidden door creaked sharply on its hinges and thudded shut.
Stunned by the intensity of Verek’s grief and the speed of its onslaught, for a moment Carin could only stand and stare after him. Then she walked to the desk and looked down at the oversized, iron-wrapped Book of Archamon. What had Verek read in its bespelled pages to cause him such torment?
With a start, Carin realized that the right-hand page—of the two facing leaves to which the book lay open—held words she could read. The left-hand leaf was a riot of marks without meaning. But whatever enchantment shielded it from her view did not lie upon the right-hand page.
Carin fingered a corner of that page, tensing to jerk her hand away if the book reformed itself into a nest of vipers. A book, however, it remained.
She thumbed through its few remaining leaves. All were blank. The legible page was the last entry.
From a drawer of the desk, Carin took two sheets of Verek’s fine linen writing-paper. With these she covered the unreadable left-hand page. Deciphering the spidery handwriting that slanted across the facing leaf would be hard enough without the added distraction in the corner of her eye of the weirdly uneasy letters that seemed to shiver across the opposite page.
Carin settled into the chair that was still warm from Verek having occupied it. She studied the thin, infirm handwriting. The date on the page was twenty years past. The signature alongside the date read “Legary.”
What had Myra said? “The old lord has been dead these twenty years.” Judging by the state of the handwriting, Legary had been on his deathbed when he made this final entry in the Book of Archamon. It seemed to be a lay—a narrative poem something like the verses in the puzzle-book, although lacking their rhythmic, rhyming qualities.
Barely had Carin made out the date and the authorship when the name “Alesia” jumped out at her from the text, as boldly as if written in blood. Alesia. It was a name from her nightmare—a name on a vault in the family tomb of House Verek.
“First I dream about it, and then I find it in a book of magic?” Carin whispered, the hairs rising on her arms. “How’s that possible? What’s happening to me in this wizards’ lair?”
Suppressing a shudder, Carin made herself ignore the implications and bent to the task of deciphering the unsteady hand. On a third sheet of paper from the desk, she carefully copied each line as she puzzled out the archaic language:
“The evil toucheth not this child!”
I rejoiced in the knowledge of it.
I cried it from the turrets,
I declared it from the treetops.
The blood of my son’s blood is clean!
The evil that slew the first
And tainted the second
Hath no power over the third.
The raven heard my shouts of joy;
The black raven carried my news abroad.
Of my happiness, the enchantress did learn;
All my joy, the sorceress did blight.
From weak seed, and flawed,
Sprang innocent youth.
From the womb of guiltless Alesia
Came the child of shining spirit.
To the lake of the lilies walked mother and child;
From waters ensorcelled came never they home.
Dead was the first by guileful craft;
Dead was the third by blackest art.
The second—the troubled, the tainted seed—
Vented wild rage upon the living wood.
Dead and barren, as his heart within,
Left he the woodland with fury spent.
“Stop him!” shrieked the man of the green.
“Wilt thou suffer the spread of his venom
O’er all the Land of Ruain, and the blighting
Of all bright flowers within thy vast domain?”
“Stop him!” I cried to the four winds.
“Halt this furious plague.
Stem the life-force’s ebbing;
Let not the curse prevail!”
The winds took heed:
An edge was made.
Within these walls and past the wood
The poison floweth not.
But I have paid the dearest price
To invoke the forces primal;
They draw me now into the tomb,
Where lie the first son and the third.
My crimes are great, my penance vast;
What punishment can harm me now?
The lad is slain, the infant drowned;
The tainted seed is future’s hope.
By the oath of my House, I command thee:
Touch him not, Morann!
Carin’s hand faltered over the final line. She guessed that Lord Legary’s pen must have shook badly as he reached the end of his narrative; the script of the last ink-blotched stanzas was as jagged as saw teeth. He had trembled from exhaustion, but also from heartsickness, she thought. Given what she knew of this family’s past, Carin could imagine the sorrow that had attended the dying wizard’s penning of the poem.
Rereading the copy she’d made in her own clear hand, Carin felt a firm—if dismaying—conviction that she understood most of its lines. What “evil” Legary alluded to in the opening stanzas, she didn’t know. But clearly the gist of the narrative dealt with the deaths in the family that Myra had told her about.
“‘The evil that slew the first …’” Carin muttered.
If “the first” meant Hugh—the first son of this house to be laid in the tomb—then the line made the ominous suggestion that Legary’s nineteen-year-old heir had died by violence. And if “the first” was Hugh, then the “tainted second” was the present Lord Verek. “The third” must be Verek’s young son: “The blood of my son’s blood,” as great-grandfather Legary had called the child. This was the little boy who drowned … and the child was untouched by “the evil that tainted the second.”
The tainted second. The phrase hinted darkly that Carin’s misgivings about the warlock were fully justified.
“You can defend him till you’re blue in the face, Myra,” Carin whispered to the absent housekeeper, “but now I know what Verek’s own grandfather said about him.”
Studying the poem further, Carin decided that nothing in what Myra had told her of the family’s history would
serve to explain the “enchantress” or “sorceress” of the third stanza. Nor could she guess the meaning of “weak seed, and flawed” in the fourth. But the references to Alesia, her “child of shining spirit,” and the lake of the lilies spoke clearly of Theil Verek’s wife and son and the waters in which they had died.
“‘From waters ensorcelled came never they home.’” Carin read the line in a whisper. Had the lake been hexed? Had the pair drowned not by accident, but through sorcery?
“‘Dead was the first’”—Hugh, if she were right—“‘by guileful craft.’” Could this mean the cunning craft of a sorcerer? But not Verek’s spellcraft, Carin thought, because he was just a baby when his father died.
“‘Dead was the third’”—Verek’s young son, if she correctly read the clues—“‘by blackest art.’” This certainly was a reference to black magic. Again, however, Carin discounted the possibility that the warlock Verek was the blackheart responsible. Half mad he might be—mad enough to enjoy the spectacle of an alien dragon snacking on the local poultry—but surely he wasn’t evil enough to cause the drowning deaths of his wife and only child.
Indeed, the next four stanzas of Legary’s narrative seemed to confirm Myra’s account of a bereft and grieving Verek, so unhinged by his family’s death that he had cursed the woodland—leaving it the desolate place Carin had stumbled across three weeks ago.
The “man of the green,” who had begged Legary to use his magic to keep Verek’s curse from devastating all of Ruain, had to be Jerold, Carin thought. And the “edge” that was made to halt the spread of Verek’s venom must be the boundary where enchantments twined through the trees … the boundary she could not see … the borderland built of spells that were potent enough to consume her, the woodsprite had said, and yet powerless to touch her. Carin shivered despite the warmth of the late-morning sun through the windows.
Here also, she realized, continuing down the page, was the answer to the riddle of Jerold’s enchanted garden. Within these walls and past the wood / The poison floweth not. The “edge” that confined Verek’s curse to the woodland must also bar it from the garden inside the manor’s walls.
“So Jerold didn’t make the ‘magic of life,’” Carin muttered. “It’s the work of his master, Lord Legary. I wonder if Jerold realized, when he begged his master to make the magic, that it would end up killing Legary?”
For that was the clear implication of the tenth stanza. In calling on “forces primal” to stem the ebbing of life from his domain, Legary had sacrificed his own life. Had it been a trade of sorts? The great wizard’s potent life-force in exchange for the vitality of the land itself? And was Jerold’s life also a part of whatever unearthly bargain had been struck? “When I die, the magic dies with me,” the old elf had said.
Carin gazed long at the poem’s final lines: The lad is slain, the infant drowned; / The tainted seed is future’s hope. With his son and his great-grandson both dead, the only heir left to Lord Legary—his only hope for the future of House Verek—was “the tainted seed”: his grandson Theil.
That’s a sorry basket to have all of your eggs in, Carin thought, convinced now that she wasn’t the only one to have a low opinion of the current Lord of Ruain. Why else would Legary have hidden the Book of Archamon so that his heir and pupil hadn’t come across it in twenty years? Verek’s failure to locate the volume was not for want of trying, Carin suspected.
But what should she make of Legary’s parting behest on his grandson’s behalf? Touch him not, Morann! Who was Morann? Did this person still live, or was the name an echo of the past, as dead as Hugh and Alesia and Legary himself? At the time of the narrative’s writing, maybe this Morann had posed a threat to the present Lord of Ruain—and, by extension, to the future of his noble house. But did the threat of Morann still hang over Verek’s head?
With a frazzled sigh—More questions, she thought; always more questions—Carin folded the fair copy she’d made of Legary’s narrative and slipped it deep into a pocket of her breeches. Preparing to close the Book of Archamon, she removed the two sheets of paper she’d used to cover the enchanted page that faced the unmasked final entry. And as the concealing sheets came away, Carin clearly saw, for the briefest instant, a date and a name at the bottom of that page.
The work, again, was signed “Legary.” But the author had written his name boldly. His signature was hardly recognizable as belonging to the same hand as on the facing page.
The date gave the reason for the firmness of the leftmost signature. It had been penned fourteen years earlier than on the right-hand page. Legary would have been in his sixties—the springtime of life for a wizard, apparently. And young Master Verek, Carin determined with a quick mental calculation, would have been ten years old.
Ten. Myra had said that Verek was in his tenth year when she took the post of housekeeper to Lord Legary. What else had the woman said? Verek’s father “was dust in the tomb, and the widow no longer lived under this roof.”
What had Legary written on the page that preceded his narrative of evil? Had he named the evil that put his son in the tomb and “tainted” his grandson? Had he mentioned his grandson’s absent mother? Whatever Legary’s subject had been, he’d taken care to conceal it. Carin had barely glimpsed the signature and the date when all the characters on the page jumbled themselves and resumed their uneasy gyrations.
Hoping to read more of the bespelled writing, she re-covered it. Then she looked up into the sunlight over the desk and counted to five. As quickly as she could drop her gaze back to the book, she snatched away the two sheets of paper.
The trick worked, but very briefly. In the split second before the page again became indecipherable, Carin tingled with excitement as the phrase “wife of Hugh” rose to her eyes. Legary had indeed written of his grandson’s mother—recording, perhaps, her name and possibly her fate. Was it written, on that page, why she had left the household? Had Legary penned his daughter-in-law’s obituary? Or had something other than her death taken the widowed lady from her ten-year-old boy?
Carin had re-covered the ensorcelled page and was about to repeat the trick when the library door opened, and in came Myra.
“Here you are, dearie!” the woman exclaimed, a slight frown creasing her brow. “And how is it with you, child? Have you your wits about you again? Are you seeing serpents still, or did my good master banish those frightful visions?”
“I’m all right, Myra,” Carin said. “Lord Verek broke the spell I was under.”
“And where is my master?” Myra asked, looking around the room. “Is he not here with you? The meal’s on the table, and I would call you both to eat it before it grows cold.”
Carin took a moment to think before she answered. How much of the morning’s events should she tell the housekeeper? Verek’s warning from days ago jumped to her mind: “That simple woman is not so privy to my affairs as you may suppose … If you care for her, hold your tongue.”
Deciding to err, if error it was, on the side of caution, Carin replied casually: “Lord Verek left me after he looked at this old book I found.” She closed the Book of Archamon and walked to Myra. “I’m not sure where he went. Just off to be by himself, I suppose.”
Myra stared past Carin at the bespelled volume.
“Is that the book,” she softly asked, “that had you struck out of your wits, thinking you were seeing serpents?” When Carin nodded, a tremor seemed to shake the housekeeper. “Then I’ll be wanting nothing to do with that musty old book. And if you’ll take my advice, dearie, you’ll not touch it again. Such things are not for you and me to meddle with.”
Hurrying from the library, Myra led the way to the kitchen. During lunch, the housekeeper was uncommonly subdued. Before she sat down to her plate, she tried to take a tray to Verek in his rooms. But there was no reply, she told Carin with a worried air, when she rapped at her “good master’s” door.
Myra’s unusual silence, under other circumstances, might have prompted Carin
to ask more questions about the nameless widow who’d disappeared from this house. But Carin resolved to seek her answers now in Legary’s ensorcelled account. Maybe if she worked patiently with her two sheets of paper and a quick eye and hand, she could eventually make out the concealed text.
Her trick of hiding, then revealing, the enchanted page had its limitations, however, as Carin soon discovered. The text refused to be deciphered in an orderly way, beginning—as she thought reasonable—with the first word Legary had put to paper and continuing line by line. Instead, Carin found her eyes drawn randomly to words and phrases that were scattered over the page. Whatever popped out at her, she noted down on a sheet of Verek’s writing paper, in approximately the place it had seemed to appear on the ensorcelled page. But she could not be certain of any word’s location within the text, so quickly did the spell of concealment reassert itself and throw the characters into disarray, twitching them across the page like agitated ants.
After two tedious hours, Carin had on paper a tantalizing collection of words and phrases that, for all their disjointedness, piqued her curiosity almost beyond bearing. Among the terms that had bobbed up like corks from murky water were a worthy heir, the adept, and ungifted. Also rising to view was the enigmatic name “Morann,” but nothing to say how it might be related to any of the uncovered terms.
Maybe her eyes grew tired, or her method of extracting legible words began to fail. In any case, as the afternoon wore on, Carin found it increasingly difficult to make headway against Legary’s spell. After another half-hour of struggle, she softly swore “Drisha take it!” and gave it up for the day. But before she abandoned the library and slipped away for a session with her bow, Carin shut the Book of Archamon against the sunlight that spilled through the windows. Sun could fade the inks in which ordinary books were written. She didn’t like to think what Verek’s reaction would be, if such damage befell this ancient treasury of wizards’ lore.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 29