WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Carin acted before she thought: she picked it up. The sheet was no heavier than a like-sized windowpane of thinly split, polished horn would have been. It had horn’s toughness and pliability. But as she studied the long, teardrop shape and picked out a tracery of veins radiating through the sheet, Carin suddenly knew the thing in her hands for what it was: the flexible, transparent wing of a creature like a dragonfly. And it was as long as she was tall.

  * * *

  When she woke again, the sun had climbed to midmorning. Carin hadn’t got back to bed until nearly dawn. Mercifully, no tap on her door had roused her at the usual early hour. Myra must have learned before cockcrow of the night’s events, and pitied her enough to let her sleep.

  That woman may know more about your affairs than you think she does, Carin silently addressed the secretive Verek. Then: Since I’m late already, why hurry? She decided to take time for a bath even though it would further delay her getting to work in the library.

  No one reprimanded Carin, however, when she finally descended for a late breakfast. Verek was nowhere to be seen, and Myra bubbled with too much news to bother chiding her slugabed helper.

  “Oh my, dearie!” the woman exclaimed as Carin entered the warm, richly scented kitchen. “What a fuss there’s been this morning. My good master took a notion, all on a sudden, to sally forth with his bow on his shoulder and bread and meat enough in his saddlebags to keep a company of men on the road. ‘’Tis high time, woman,’ he said to me, ‘that I bestirred myself from this house and got out among the freeholders and my tenants. It’s to the far ends of Ruain that I’m riding. You needn’t look for my return before the month is out.’”

  Carin’s hand paused in the act of spooning porridge to her mouth.

  “Lord Verek will be gone that long?” she asked as casually as she could.

  “Aye, dearie. I’d hardly kindled a fire this morning before my master came stumping down the hall in his heaviest boots, dressed for the ride and carrying his warmest cloak. A man fit and eager for travel, he was. We’ll not be seeing him for a good two weeks—unless I’ve grown too old and blind to know a man who’s making for the road, when he’s come to the table for the last home-cooked meal that he’ll likely see in a fortnight.”

  Two possibilities sprang at once to Carin’s mind. The first was that Verek rode out, immediately after last night’s storm of magic, to discover whether the vermin they had seen in the image now infested his own lands.

  Why should he think the creatures were here? Carin buttered a piece of bread while she thought it through. Last night, the wizards’ well had burst its bounds when the whirlpool drew so near to Ladrehdin, Verek said, that the mirror pool could no longer hold the image of the vortex. From that idea, it was a short leap to suppose that the vortex had actually, physically reached Ladrehdin, the same way the whirlpool of Carin’s own passage had reached the millpond on the southern plains. And just as that other vortex had discharged its cargo—her—maybe the whirlpool they saw last night had delivered two huge, venomous monsters to terrorize Ruain.

  Was that what had drawn Verek straight from the cave of magic into the saddle and through the manor’s gates? By Myra’s account, the warlock had barely had time to don his riding leathers and call for his horse. He couldn’t have gotten even a half-hour’s sleep. The sun had been poised just below the horizon when Carin left him puzzling over the translucent wing that had washed up in the magic pool.

  Another artifact which, years before, had come like flotsam to the pool’s rim was the honey-colored wand that interested the woodsprite. Verek’s absence raised the second part of Carin’s deliberations over breakfast: whether to take the woodsprite into the library to see the relic. What better time for such a risky venture, with the warlock away?

  It would be best to avoid drawing notice to her plans, she decided. Carin kept to her usual routine. She spent what was left of the morning at work in the library, enjoying the warmth of a fire on the hearth and the glow of her own anticipation. She stole time from her duties to investigate the liquor cabinet behind which Verek kept the wand. But as it had for nearly two weeks, the cabinet defied Carin’s attempts to open its slat-wood back. The sprite would have to be content with whatever the creature could learn of the wand through the thin wooden wall that concealed it.

  After lunch, she walked Emrys around the grounds. The mare was impatient for exercise. Carin had neglected the horse for the past three days, in the disruption that finding the Book of Archamon and losing her homemade bow had inflicted on her routine.

  When she stabled the mare and returned to the house, Carin peeked in at Myra, confirming that the woman napped in her room off the kitchen. The way was clear to smuggle the woodsprite into the library. Quickly she passed through empty corridors to the great hall at the far end of the building.

  “Carin!” the sprite greeted her excitedly. “How I hoped you would come! The mage must be leagues away by now. I saw him ride out at first light—and well-equipped he was for a journey of many days. I followed for a time, to be certain that he would keep to his course and not circle back to surprise us in our intrigues. For this is the day—isn’t it, my friend?—that you’ll take me up in a seedling and bear me within the mage’s house to see the wood that might be—could be—must be a part of my homeworld!”

  “Take it easy, sprite,” Carin said, laughing while she tried to calm the creature that sparked in the rowan at the servants’ entrance. “Yes, my strange friend, I will take you as close to the wand as I can. But you may be disappointed. We can’t be sure the stick has anything to do with the world you come from. Everything about it might feel wrong to you.

  “I also need to warn you,” she added, “that I’ve tried several times but I can’t find a way into the wand’s hiding-hole. Verek made it look easy to open, but I haven’t discovered the secret. So, I can take you only as far as the liquor cabinet. If that’s not close enough, tell me now. I’m still worried about taking you indoors. It’s dangerous, and we shouldn’t do it if there’s no point in it.”

  “The cabinet will be near enough, Carin,” the sprite said. “Though the trees in which I dwell must be of living wood, I may press myself for stretches of time into lumber that’s dry and seasoned. Take me as close as you’ve said, and leave all else to me. Follow me now to the twig that will be my vessel for this voyage.”

  The sprite led her to a hazel seedling. Carin pulled it up by the roots, taking care not to shake off the damp dirt that clung to them. The roots must be kept moist, the sprite warned. Else, the seedling would wither and become perilously unsuitable as a dwelling-tree for a woodsprite.

  When the creature had leaped within, Carin rushed it into the great hall and along the connecting passageways to her quarters. At the washbasin in her bathing room, she rinsed and filled an empty cider-mug and plunged the seedling’s roots in it. The woodsprite nearly wriggled with delight at the sensation of warm water and saturated soil enveloping what it called its feet.

  Carin took the potted sprite downstairs. No sound came from the kitchen. Myra would probably enjoy a long nap after the morning’s madhouse of getting her master fed and provisioned for his journey.

  In the library, on a roomy shelf next to the liquor cabinet, Carin set the sprite’s cider-mug. She wanted both hands free to snap open the cabinet’s doors and empty it of glass flagon and goblets. One fumble while juggling mug and glassware could send the whole lot crashing to the stone tiles, with disastrous consequences for the sprite and for Verek’s expensive crystal.

  But as she placed the goblets with the sprite’s mug, a single small object on the otherwise empty shelf caught Carin’s eye. It was a round, polished piece of red quartz.

  That it hadn’t been there yesterday, she was certain. She had used that very shelf to hold books she was sorting for the “B” section of Verek’s collection.

  But whether the rock had been there this morning, Carin couldn’t say. So intent had she been on probing the wand�
�s hiding place for some secret fastener or fingerhold, a coiled snake on the shelf might well have escaped her notice. A rock as small as this almost certainly would have gone unseen.

  Suspicions prickled like hackles on her neck. Carin picked up the quartz. It exuded an unpleasant sort of moist heat. As soon as her fingers closed upon it, the stone began to glow with an eerie inner light—much as the warlock’s dark eyes glowed when they saw things no mortal could glimpse.

  Carin had a sudden and powerful urge to fling the thing as far as she could throw it.

  A seer’s stone! She doubted it could be anything else. She had read in one of Verek’s books that sorcerers used such devices to watch from afar. And she knew, from the moment her hand touched the thing, that she had borne her trusting woodland friend into a trap.

  “Drisha’s mercy!” Carin swore through clenched teeth. She grabbed the sprite’s cider-mug. Wasting no breath on explanations, she made to flee.

  But she’d hardly cleared the room’s paired benches when the library’s door opened. Over the threshold stepped Verek, wearing his riding leathers but unarmed except for the dagger at his belt.

  “You—!” At the sight of him, Carin almost lost her footing. She swerved toward the desk and skidded to a stop behind it. She stood there glaring at the fiend, gulping increasingly shallow breaths as the muscles in her throat knotted up.

  “I thank you for not disappointing me,” Verek said acidly as the door closed behind him. He did not move farther into the room. “As the hours passed and I saw by the ’scrying crystal that you had not fetched the sprite here, I began to believe that my plan had failed. Without a doubt, I had thought, you would have told the creature of the wand, and no less certainly it would beg a look.

  “‘Will the girl not bring her weirdling friend,’ I asked myself, ‘to storm the wall that hides their prize, the moment they believe themselves safe in their venture?’ It pleases me to know that I did not take the mismeasure of the one or the other of you. And now, I’ll claim my prize: the irksome creature that has so long eluded me.”

  Verek advanced toward the desk. From the mug in Carin’s hand, the sprite gave a shriek of terror.

  Carin thrust the seedling behind her back. She drew herself up to her full height—which brought her brow even with the warlock’s chin—and shook her head.

  “No,” she snarled, eyeing Verek with what she hoped was determination. “You’re not going to get the sprite this way. I’d die before I’d let you hurt my friend.”

  Whirling, Carin raised the mug as high as her shoulder and started to heave it through the window over the desk. The mug would shatter, as would the windowpane. But if she could hurl the sprite in its seedling through the glass, the creature could leap to the safety of a tree in Jerold’s garden.

  Barely had her arm begun its upward thrust, however, when Carin’s body hardened to a rigid, compact mass. She could not move.

  The spell of stone! screamed panic inside her head.

  She banished terror before it could rout the last of her wits. Carin filled her mind instead with imagining that her body was rising from a pool of watery mud. In her mind’s eye, the mud on her skin looked like a thin honey and brown-sugar glaze. She conjured a hot desert wind to blow the glaze dry, and called down a shower of pebbles to crumble it to powder.

  The imagery was swift and powerful. Shattered utterly, the spell released her. Carin’s arm heaved the sprite’s cider-mug toward the window. Her fingers opened to cast it through the glass—

  —And Verek’s hand closed around it, snatching the mug in flight. Though the spell of stone had held her for not more than two seconds, it had given Verek the time he needed to reach the desk and stretch an arm between Carin and the window.

  “No!” she screamed, and grabbed for the mug.

  But already it was beyond her reach. Verek’s long strides had carried him to the fireplace. He gripped the seedling and let the mug slip away and crash to the floor. The mug broke with a wet, fleshy sound, like a pumpkin rupturing, and covered the hearth in mud and pottery shards.

  The sprite shrieked, then whimpered like a frightened child.

  “Hold!” Verek ordered as Carin took a step toward him. “Would you provoke me further and see the creature die? Begone—or I’ll toss your cowardly friend in the fire.” As he uttered the threat, the warlock passed the seedling’s bare roots through the flames. The sprite screamed—whether in pain or terror, Carin could not tell.

  She threw up her hand, silently imploring the blackheart to stop torturing his captive. She edged to the hall door. With her hand on the latch, Carin tried, through hot tears, to look daggers at the warlock, but she knew the look she gave him was more wretched than menacing.

  In a voice choked with passionate hatred, she flung at Verek the words he had screamed to protest the cruelty of the wizards’ well: “You are a monster!” Then Carin pulled open the door and passed through to the hallway, abandoning her one true friend to its fate.

  Chapter 22

  One Dolphin

  When the door had thudded shut behind her, Carin slid down it, to collapse in a defeated heap on the floor. For a long time she stared down the hallway, seeing nothing, feeling nothing except the tears that trickled over her cheeks. The trickle grew to a torrent: Carin cried as she had not cried since the first year of her life in the wheelwright’s household, when she’d lain awake nights, sobbing in terror and confusion, filled with a deep, aching loneliness.

  Gradually the deluge slowed, then stopped. Carin wiped her eyes with the tail of her shirt, which had caught enough of her tears to be hardly less wet than her face. She was wearing the oldest garment in her sparse wardrobe, the once ivory-colored shirt in which she had walked from the wheelwright’s service into Verek’s.

  If I’d never come to this cursed land, Carin raged inwardly, the sprite never would have fallen into the hands of the blackheart who rules it. I’ve brought the creature to its death. She winced, remembering her brave words: “I’d die before I’d let you hurt my friend,” she had told Verek. Yet here she cowered at the door—too frightened, too much in awe of him to do anything to save the creature.

  What could she do? How could she challenge a wizard whose power would overwhelm her the way a lightning bolt outshone a candle? What weapon did she have that could prevail against Verek?

  The Jabberwock. She had the Jabberwock.

  Objections crowded into Carin’s mind as quickly as the thought took shape. Her own chances of dying in the dragon’s jaws far exceeded Verek’s. He wanted the monster turned loose against an enemy of Ladrehdin. He wouldn’t be the dragon’s victim in his opponent’s stead.

  But supposing, for the sake of argument, that Carin dared to summon the monster against him: then the problem became how. The puzzle-book dragon seemed inextricably tied to the enchanted waters that gave it form. Verek would be vulnerable to the monster’s talons only when he stood in the cavern of the wizards’ well. And to conjure the beast, Carin must recite the whole of the incantation, including the lines that called the dragon’s heralds: the “toves,” “borogoves,” and “raths” of the opening stanza. At the sight of those creatures rising from the mists of the magic pool, Verek would know at once that Carin sought to call the dragon against him. Speak the incantation as fast as she could, and still the sorcerer would have time to dive for the safety of the stairwell, where Carin had seen that the dragon’s claws could not reach him.

  And what about the sprite? If the fay was still alive, and Verek held it prisoner in the cave, then Carin’s summoning the Jabberwock might prove deadlier to the woodsprite than to the warlock.

  No, she could not use the dragon against Verek—not until she was sure he couldn’t escape it, and the woodsprite could. To know those things beyond a doubt, Carin would have to be in the cave—to conjure the dragon at the precise moment that would see the warlock fatally trapped and the sprite safe.

  She stood and shoved open the door against which she’d h
uddled—for how long? To judge by the waning sun through the library’s windows, she had sat for at least two hours, by turns vacant, numb, and sick with despair.

  The fear crawling up Carin’s spine was a strength-sapping parasite that she must pluck out lest it cripple her. If she had found Verek in the room when she flung open the door, she might have lost the battle before it was joined. The library, however, was empty. And in the time it took to search the hearth for the burnt remains of the woodsprite’s seedling, Carin wrested her courage from terror’s grasp. The ashes in the fireplace revealed nothing recognizable as a charred hazel twig—providing no proof that the sprite was alive, but offering a glimmer of hope that it hadn’t died in the flames within seconds of her abandoning it.

  Carin strode into the perpetual shadows opposite the windows and made for the hidden portal to the cave of magic. She spat on the door’s creaky hinges, then eased it open.

  All was silence. If Verek waited in the cavern below, he would not hear Carin approach, at least. By how many other senses, magian and mortal, he might detect her presence, she couldn’t guess.

  She wound her way down the steps. From the foot of them, she peered into the vault. It was empty.

  Carin ground her teeth in frustration. Having made up her mind to conjure the Jabberwock against Verek, she counted the time all too long until her chance to act might come.

  She started to put a foot on the cave’s floor, to make her way across it to the concealed doorway beyond the pool. But Carin’s foot dangled in midair as caution whispered a warning: Will you risk offending the power of this place, and by your recklessness lose all hope of saving the woodsprite?

  Verek’s words came to her: “The well of wysards thinks it prudent to turn you to stone when I am not in the chamber to govern you.” Maybe Carin wouldn’t break free of the well’s enchantment as easily she had Verek’s spellcraft.