Carin gasped. She backed away with immoderate haste, tripped on an exposed root, and sat down hard, nearly landing in a thornbush. Horror reached for her like a bony hand. But she fought off its grip and forced herself to calmness as she extricated her clothing from the brambles and got to her feet.
The structure before her was without doubt the Verek family tomb, just as Carin had dreamed it—except these stones were hoary with age. The tomb of her nightmare had seemed newly built. Carin didn’t need to see past the iron-shackled door to know that the mortal remains of Lord Legary rested in the left-hand vault, and those of young Hugh to the right. Directly opposite the door was a double chamber, in one vault of which lay the Lady Alesia and her child—dead “by blackest art,” if Carin correctly interpreted the narrative from the Book of Archamon. The vault at the dead woman’s right hand was empty … gathering dust against the day when it would receive the corpse of the current Lord of Ruain.
With a shudder that traveled her from head to toe, Carin turned and rushed back the way she’d come, abandoning her search for the lost arrows. As quickly as she could, she made her way past the great hall and found the enormous oak that overpowered the outer wall of the grounds. There she picked up the remnant path from Jerold’s garden by which she’d first discovered the tree. The path took her to the edge of the elf’s domain. She put out her hand to part a way through a curtain of hanging vines, and then she froze.
Footsteps approached down the garden’s graveled walk. A familiar voice reached Carin. Verek was talking to a companion she couldn’t see through the greenery and didn’t dare try to glimpse. Any movement or sound from her, and the warlock would know that an eavesdropper lurked in the bushes not a stone’s throw from him.
“As Drisha is my witness,” Verek was saying, “I did not grasp the truth until I read my grandsire’s dying declaration in the book that curious fìleen discovered hidden on a dark shelf. Or have I deluded myself, Master Jerold?”
So—he’s gone to talk to the old one, Carin thought, glad that Verek hadn’t kept her guessing. Already growing uncomfortable in the cold and damp of her green-shadowed hiding place, she nonetheless thrilled at the prospect of gaining answers from both the warlock and his gardener without their realizing it.
“Have I known the truth these past twenty years,” Verek said, “while refusing in my heart of hearts to confess it? Many times I have asked the waters of the wysards for an account of that terrible day, but all that I am given to see is the image of their deaths. How can I impress upon you the horror of it? To view again and again that hideous scene … relentless … inescapable …”
As the warlock’s voice trailed off, Carin remembered his frenzy in the cave of magic on the night of his near-death in the wizards’ well. “You have shown only this brutal image in answer to my every plea!” Verek had cried to the spirit-being of the well. Though he begged for a glimpse of his wife and child as they had been in life, the mirror pool would show him nothing but their drowned, bloated bodies.
“Can it be, Master Jerold,” Verek went on quietly, “that the waters obey—not my commands, which I scream with what seems desperate earnestness—but rather, my most secret, silent wishes? Can it be that the all-knowing power descries my desire for self-delusion, deeply hidden though it is even to myself, and thus denies me the thing that I seem to demand of it? Perhaps I have known, deep in my soul, what evil drew my lady and the child to their deaths … but I could not admit such knowledge, for fear of the delirium of mind that would follow upon a recognition of such truth.”
What evil? Carin wondered, thinking of the neat copy of Legary’s poem that nestled in her pocket. What truth?
Any reply Jerold might have made was lost in a sudden, cold gust of wind that rustled through the leaves. Under cover of the breeze’s passage, Carin settled deeper into the vines and creepers—preparing for a wait of hours, if that’s what it would take to hear everything Verek had to say.
The warlock’s voice reached her again as the breeze died away. “But I swear to you, Jerold,” he was saying, “never did I suspect that my lord held himself to blame for summoning the evil that took my wife and son. It is painful to think on … that my grandfather’s declarations of joy at a child’s innocence would fly on wicked wings to the demon’s nest, and bring down on our heads the daeva’s envy.”
Joy flying on wicked wings. The imagery rose vivid in Carin’s mind. She could almost see the “black raven” of Legary’s narrative winging its way to some demon’s lair, carrying the old lord’s happy news of a child untouched by whatever scourge lay upon other members of this household.
“And by the oath of my House,” Verek went on, so quietly that Carin could hardly hear him, “I swear I did not know what price was paid to stop the curse born of my madness. Barely had I laid Alesia in the tomb, with our boy in her arms, when my sorrows were multiplied by the swift decline of my grandsire. I never knew, Jerold. For twenty years, I had thought my lord succumbed to the same unbearable grief that drove the reason from my brain. Never did I understand, until I read the final words from his hand, that my grandfather died halting the curse I had invoked upon his lands.”
Verek fell silent, and for a long moment no one said anything. Then Carin heard the dry rasp of the elf’s voice.
“Do not blame yourself, son,” Jerold said. “The death of my lord Legary can be laid to no single cause. ’Tis true, he felt deeply the loss of her ladyship and the child … the untouched heir. ’Tis true, the magic he wove against the blighting of Ruain took all his strength—and what little I could offer of my own slight powers. But know you this also, Theil: On his shoulders alone rests the blame for the harm that has been done to this household.”
Verek must have started to protest. The gardener’s voice harshened, as though the old man meant to tolerate no interruption.
“Aye—’tis true, son,” Jerold growled, then went on in a milder tone. “Though you loved him greatly and would forgive him any conduct, there’s no denying the wickedness of the deed he did—the deed that haunts this household still. He knew the sin he’d committed, and ’twas the guilt of it that put him in his grave, as much as did any other of these matters we discuss. I mean no disrespect to Legary’s memory, for I loved him as I would a father. I must say these things, Theil, so that you shan’t take upon yourself—as you are wont to do—the blame for the misdeeds of others.”
Carin marveled, not only at Jerold’s words but at the quantity of them. She hadn’t been sure the old elf could speak more than two sentences together. His words called sharply to her mind a line from Legary’s narrative that bore out this “gardener’s” accusation: My crimes are great, my penance vast, Legary had confessed.
“What’s done is done,” Jerold continued. “As you now know the true source of this garden’s magical life, I’ll press you to its service. My days are fewer in number than yours, Theil. I’ll not live to see a new age. Either an apprentice is found to learn the magic and take this duty from me, or this garden dies when I die. That knuckleheaded Lanse has neither the gift nor the temperament. What of the girl? She comes often to this garden, and she has a fondness for flowers. On a cold day of this week just past, I saw her sitting on the greensward studying a book of blossoms as though she meant to conjure living petals from the page.”
Verek laughed. The sound of it was so unfamiliar, Carin couldn’t put it to the picture she had built in her mind of the two wizards speaking together on the graveled walk. Verek laughing, or Verek as the doting father of a young son: either state seemed too normal, too ordinary for the moody warlock.
“You are deceived, Master Jerold,” he said, amusement brightening his voice. “I, too, saw our peculiar guest sitting on the grass with a book. In my puzzlement, I asked Myra why a fìleen who is possessed of some wit would take her reading outdoors on a chill autumn day and sit there shivering, when she might stay by the fireside in my library. And this was Myra’s reply: ‘Why, she means to charm Jerold! Th
e girl regrets provoking the old goat, and she knows—for I’ve told her so—that she may put things right with him, if she doth but speak to him of flowers!’”
“‘Old goat,’ my eye,” Jerold growled. “But why should the girl wish to ‘charm’ me? What does she wish of me?”
“I believe, Master Jerold,” Verek replied, “that she means to make you an ally against … What is it that she calls me? A fiend, she’s named me with conviction, and also a madman and a murderer.
“And do you know, Jerold,” Verek added, his voice losing any hint of mirth, “that I cannot in good conscience deny the truth of any charge that she has laid at my feet?”
Gravel crunched, and their voices faded as the two wizards walked on down the path, leaving Carin to mull over what she had heard. Evidently, the final entry in the Book of Archamon contained much information that was new to Verek. Carin felt oddly privileged to have read Legary’s narrative after only three weeks in this house, when Verek had waited twenty years to learn what his grandfather’s words could tell him.
She rose stealthily to her feet, backtracked along the remnant path, and returned to the great hall. Obviously she couldn’t follow her original plan to regain the house through the kitchen door. To step boldly from hiding into Jerold’s garden could land her in the hands of both wizards, who might still linger on the graveled ways, discussing an “apprentice” for the old elf.
Would they press her into such service? Carin doubted it. Verek seemed bent on another course for his “peculiar guest.”
From the great hall, Carin hurried along the wide “V” of the upstairs corridors to her room. She hid her copy of Legary’s poem, and the notes from her tedious deciphering of his preceding work, in a drawer of the dressing table. Then she brushed twigs from her hair, and changed into the kirtle and shift that Myra had restored to wearability after their drenching in the thunderstorm.
The return of the woman’s “good master” had Myra in high spirits, Carin discovered as she arrived in the kitchen to help with the evening meal. Apparently Verek had mentioned that it was Carin’s knock on his door which had roused him from his “meditations.” The housekeeper expressed her gratitude with such expansiveness that Carin had no need—or opportunity—to say a word.
When supper was on the table, however, and she took the seat across from an obviously hungry Verek to dine on a pigeon and bacon stew, her silence finally attracted Myra’s notice.
“What ails you, child?” the woman asked. “You haven’t said three words all evening. You’d not be catching a fever, would you?”
Carin shook her head. “I’m all right, Myra.” She aimed her next remark at the warlock opposite, but she didn’t look at him. “I’m just unhappy that I lost something this afternoon, out in the wild part of the garden behind the house. I’d made it myself, and I’m not pleased that it’s gone.”
“Oh my, dearie!” the housekeeper exclaimed, oblivious that Carin meant to get at Verek over a confiscated weapon. “Whatever were you doing out there? That tangle of brambles is fit for nothing. It’s Jerold’s fine garden that you’re wanting, child, when you’ve a mind to be out-of-doors. Forsake the unkempt green and take the sun in Jerold’s flowerbeds—that’s what I’m advising you.”
And be watched by every eye in this house? Carin thought, but said nothing.
Verek didn’t acknowledge her grievance against him. He went on deliberately spooning up the stew. Myra, finding her master too fixed on his plate to join the conversation, and her helper too glum, happily filled the rest of the hour with her own wide ramblings.
The warlock, when he’d eaten his fill, summoned Carin to the library to resume her second reading of the puzzle-book. She finished the eighth chapter, about the clumsy White Knight and his curious inventions. It was when she started to revisit Alice’s coronation and madcap dinner-party, in the ninth chapter, that Carin’s smoldering resentment at Verek flared into her thoughts and would not be suppressed.
He steals my bow, she fumed, and he doesn’t tell me why he did it or—Drisha forbid—apologize for taking what’s mine.
Knowing it was madness, but unable to stop herself, Carin lit into him with the most incendiary question she could think of. The subject of the stolen bow would have been far safer ground than the off-limits arena she chose to fight him in. She lowered the puzzle-book and abruptly demanded:
“Who—or what—is the spirit-being that I heard you talking to in the wizards’ well? The one you called ‘Amangêda’.”
Verek sprang to his feet. His eyes were wild. His hands stretched toward her, palms out, as if desperate to silence her before another syllable could pass her lips.
Carin had no time to enjoy her question’s striking effect on the warlock. The hidden door to the cave of magic burst open, and from the shadows that cloaked the library’s depths came a strong wind. It blew open the covers of her stacked books and riffled their pages noisily, like hosts of frogs jumping one after another—plop, plop, plop—into their ponds. It blew at Verek’s back, sweeping his hair into his face. The wind gusted with such stinging force directly at Carin that it brought tears to her eyes. Her hair streamed out behind her, over the back of the bench she occupied. And accompanying the wind was a bright, tinkling, musical sound, such as seashells make when they dangle on strings under house-eaves, chiming in the breeze.
Then the wind died; the music died. The tempest that welled up from the cave of magic ended as abruptly as it had erupted.
Verek put back his hair with both hands and stood gaping at Carin, his eyes agog, as if expecting her to either disappear or grow horns. But when nothing untoward befell her, he staggered to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a tall drink of the red dhera. He gulped it down, then held his empty glass up to Carin in a mock toast.
“I salute you,” he said, husky-voiced. “The last mortal to speak that name burst into flame upon the spot, and was nothing but ashes a heartbeat after committing the offense.”
Carin suddenly found breathing difficult, as though the warlock’s words had knocked the wind from her lungs. She watched him lower his glass, his hand trembling, and in that instant she understood three facts.
First: Verek was honestly shaken. Carin’s continued life and health not only astonished him, but filled him with a sort of horrified awe.
Second: she had uttered a forbidden name, a name sacrosanct.
And third: for her transgression, Carin should, by rights, be dead now.
When the meaning of what she’d done—and the potential consequences—fully sank in, Carin tasted horror like bile rising in her throat. How close she had come to an awful death was apparent from Verek’s reaction. But why hadn’t she provoked a similar—or deadlier—response before, when she’d spoken the forbidden name?
“I, um, hesitate to admit this,” she whispered, “but that’s not the first time I ever said the name aloud.” Carin thought back to the afternoon when the house was empty, Myra away, Verek missing … last seen dragging himself half-drowned from the wizards’ well.
The warlock threw himself onto the bench across from Carin’s, ran the fingers of both hands through his windblown hair, and softly demanded an explanation.
Carin told him how she’d murmured the name in Emrys’ ear as she walked the mare around the grounds, as if hoping the horse might know what manner of spirit-being haunted the mirror pool. Verek pressed her for details by which to know the hour of her deed, until he established that he had still lingered in the cave—battered, but still seeking answers in the wizards’ well—when Carin said the name to Emrys.
He shook his head. “So intent was I upon the well—and it upon me—that your first utterance went unheeded.” Sitting forward, he fixed Carin with a gaze that had the force of physical restraint. “Never speak the name again. Twice you have been spared. Do not tempt providence by a third repetition of such folly.”
Verek leaned back and rubbed his face vigorously with both hands, as though to rid himself of
something unreal. Then he laced his fingers together and slipped them behind his head, visibly relaxing after Carin’s brush with the supernatural.
“I find myself indebted to you,” he said crisply. “You have subjected yourself to a test that I would not—dared not—deal you … though I longed to know what would result, were you to speak aloud the name of power. I was confident that the outcome of such a test would tell me much.”
“And what has it told you?”
“That the well of the wysards regards you as other than mortal.”
Carin’s heart sank. Were they back to that?
“No!” she protested. “I thought that question had already been answered to your satisfaction. Other than not always falling under your spells the way you’d expect me to, I’m just as mortal as any other … scullery maid.” Carin had a moment’s hesitation before describing herself thusly, as other possible labels flashed through her mind: “alien misfit” and “accidental conjurer” among them.
The warlock shook his head. “Entirely mortal you might be, on that world which is your natural home. Here, in Ruain, you are otherwise. That you still live, having uttered aloud the name of power, is proof enough. But remember also that you have entered the cave of magic through a door bespelled to prevent such intrusion. The deed would not have been possible for a mortal of this world.”
It was Carin’s turn to shake her head. “You wouldn’t read too much into that if you’d seen how petrified I was, right after I opened that door. Scared? More than I can tell you. But you know what I’m saying: I did not escape the spell that made me a statue on the doorstep.”
Verek slipped his hands from behind his head and laced them around one knee. He eyed Carin speculatively. Did her argument echo thoughts that he’d mulled over in his own mind?
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock Page 31