WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  She turned and raced back up the steps. The pool of magic, if it was aware of her now as it had been before, might already have informed its servant that Carin sought him.

  Through the library she ran, and down the hallway to the stair foyer. On sudden impulse Carin continued along the passageway to the kitchen, thinking of a particularly sharp, narrow-bladed knife that she had used for boning meat.

  “Oh my, dearie!” Myra greeted her arrival in the kitchen. “’Tis an odd turn this day has taken. My good master rides away at sunrise, as ready for the road as any man I ever did see and promising a fortnight’s absence as surely as a day’s. But what do my eyes behold as I’m throwing out the washing-water from noontime’s dishes? None but my own master, hurrying back like a man with urgent business who daren’t delay a moment. ‘Ask me no questions, woman!’ he bids me as he passes, and I hold my tongue, though fair I am to bursting with them.

  “But dearie!” the housekeeper exclaimed, now catching sight of her helper’s face. “Whatever is the matter? You’ve been crying—in a fair way to cry your eyes out, by the look of it. What ails you, lass?”

  Carin shook her head, loath to waste time on the woman’s chatter. “Something has been taken from me,” she snapped as her hand closed on the hilt of the boning knife. “It’s something important, and I mean to get it back. Don’t try to stop me, Myra.”

  Then she was back down the passageway and at the foot of the bedroom stairs. Two at a time Carin took them until she reached the landing that fronted her door. Without slowing, she turned along the corridor that hid the upper entrance to Verek’s rooms.

  And as she took a step down that hallway, a section of its stone wall melted. The stonework reshaped itself into a door of braced timbers. The door opened inward, and out stepped the warlock. He no longer wore his riding gear, but had changed into his usual garb of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a vest. This one was gentian blue.

  Carin raised her knife and rushed him.

  Verek stood relaxed in his doorway. He watched her come at him with neither surprise nor anger on his face. He didn’t bespell the knife and send it flying from Carin’s grasp. Nor did he make a statue of her. He only waited until she had closed the distance between them. Then his left hand flew up, caught her wrist, and wrung it, hard.

  The knife fell from fingers made nerveless. He kicked the weapon aside.

  Carin jerked her wrist from his grasp and backed away, nursing bruises to her knife-hand and to her pride. Her attack, foolhardy, had been less to the warlock than a fleabite. But why hadn’t he wielded magic against her and saved himself the trouble of physically disarming her?

  As he so often did, Verek seemed to know what Carin was thinking.

  “Small use casting the spell of stone upon you,” he said. “I have seen you break it with the speed and skill of a practiced magician. But would you expect to prevail against me with a kitchen knife? There aren’t many alive in this world who would be so bold as to challenge me with any weapon so slight.”

  Go down to the cave, you fiend, Carin thought, seething, and you’ll see a more terrifying weapon.

  Aloud, she answered him in a voice dripping malice. “There aren’t many people in this world that I would like to kill with my own hands. In fact, you’re it—you evil warlock. I hate you so much that I would willingly put a knife in your heart. To feel your blood on my hands—oh! I would enjoy that.”

  The sorcerer’s face darkened. “Your words are empty. You know nothing of such matters. Until you have killed, you have no right to speak of taking pleasure in spilling another’s blood.”

  “And did you have a pleasant time murdering the woodsprite?” Carin retorted. “Or was the juice in its veins too thin, too much like water, to satisfy your taste for blood?”

  Verek sighed. “Such would be the weight of all the bloodguilt that you lay to my account, that did I truly bear it, by no effort could I lift my head higher than the grasshopper’s knee.” He pushed open the still-visible door at his right hand, then jerked his head to indicate the room beyond. “Your friend is here, unharmed and disposed to talk. Go to it, and satisfy yourself that whatever sap the creature uses for blood has not left its veins.”

  The woodsprite was alive? Or was Verek setting another trap?

  Carin approached the open door as if it were the web of a spider that had invited her into its parlor. The warlock stood motionless, holding the door and watching her as she brushed past him.

  Verek allowed her to pass untouched. Wordlessly, he closed the door behind him as he ushered her into the antechamber of his secret apartments.

  The room, gallery-like, was longer than it was wide. The hall door through which Carin had entered claimed a good part of one short wall. Opposite it was a tall window, deeply recessed into the thick exterior wall of Verek’s house. The window reached to the floor, giving the narrow space ample light and an airy feel. Draping either side of it were curtains of a rich crimson silk, thrown open to the late-day sun. The window, Carin knew without crossing to it, looked out over Jerold’s enchanted garden.

  Both long walls of the room were covered in a silky, silver-tinted fabric that created expanses of paleness. Brightening them were thin, sweeping brushstrokes laid on randomly in the same crimson hue as the curtains.

  In the wall to Carin’s right was a closed door—leading, she supposed, to other rooms of Verek’s private suite. Beside that door was a low sofa covered in crimson silk. Next to the sofa stood a round table that was formed entirely of gold-threaded marble. The same marble made up the mantelpiece of a gracefully proportioned fireplace in the long wall opposite the sofa wall.

  That expanse was otherwise blank except for four paintings in richly carved frames. They hung, two by two, on either side of the mantelpiece. The first pair were landscapes: one with snow-capped mountain pinnacles; the other with a calm blue lake ringed by flowers in a sheltered oak woodland. The second pair, to the right of the fireplace, were portraits.

  Carin stared. One was the face of a beautiful young woman whom she recognized at once, from the macabre image that had floated above the mirror pool, as the dead Alesia. The other portrait was of a bright-eyed, dark-haired little boy of about five—the drowned “child of shining spirit,” he had to be.

  Verek, following Carin into the room, dropped onto the sofa. He heaved a weary sigh.

  Carin tore her gaze from the portraits and walked to the window, watching a leafy tree that grew in a stone tub in front of it. The sunlight that touched the tree through the open-curtained window picked up the faintest motion of its leaves, like the trembling of an aspen’s.

  “My friend!” cried the woodsprite at Carin’s approach. Its reedy voice sounded nervously subdued. “Words fail me. I am more pleased to see you than I can say.”

  She reached her hand through the tree’s middle branches and gripped the trunk. For a long moment, Carin couldn’t speak. She was choking on the tears that spilled down her face and dripped onto the leaves. She stood clinging to the tree trunk, offering up silent gratitude to whatever gods watched over defenseless woodsprites.

  “Don’t cry!” the creature begged, its distress evident in its thin voice. “I am quite undamaged. And though your tears touch me deeply, I must beg you not to drop them on the soil under this shrub. Salt water, you know—it’s bad for the roots. If I’m to dwell in this potted plant, then I’d best keep my host healthy!”

  “Sorry,” Carin mumbled. She released the trunk, backed away half a step, and wiped at her face. “I’m just so happy to find you alive and talking. When that motherless sneak put your ‘feet’ in the fire, I was sure he’d kill you.” Verek, sitting on the couch not half the length of the room behind her, could hardly help hearing what she called him. Carin didn’t care.

  “As was I, friend!” the sprite exclaimed. “As was I! But the seedling’s roots were wet enough, or had enough soil still clinging, to protect them from the flames. I was terrified but little harmed. Yelping as I d
id was cowardly. You were so brave in my defense, it makes me all the more ashamed of myself.”

  Carin shook her head. “I ran and left you in the fiend’s hands. I’m the coward, not you.”

  “Do not reproach yourself. If you had disobeyed him, the mage might well have thrown me on the fire. I confess I thought you sometimes stretched a point in our talks together, Carin, when you told me how the magician made you fear for your life. I was free to have my doubts as long as I leapt unhindered through the trees. But now that I’m in his power, I see what you mean. This wizard can set one’s leaves to fluttering.”

  “Yes, he can,” Carin muttered under her breath, reluctant to let the warlock at her back hear them so freely confess the terror that he inspired in both his captives. “But tell me, sprite,” she added, louder. “What happened after I left you alone with the fiend? What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing so very terrible,” the sprite replied, beginning to sound more like its usual, affable self. “Once I had mustered wits enough to know that I was not roasting, I told the mage I fared poorly in withered wood. I asked for dirt and water to shore up my seedling. He filled a crystal goblet with the wet soil from my broken mug and set my roots down in it. I thanked him then—as I do now, sir,” the always-courteous creature called over Carin’s shoulder to the warlock behind her.

  “And then,” the sprite added, “the mage drew from its hiding place the wand that I have longed to see.”

  The bait that Verek knew would draw two fools into his trap, Carin thought, biting the inside of her mouth to keep from interrupting the sprite.

  “Eagerly I gazed at the wand,” the creature went on. “When I asked him to, the mage pressed the staff to my seedling so that I could force myself into the wand’s pores and fibers. But just as you had warned me, Carin, I could feel nothing of my homeworld in the beautiful thing. Inside the wand were only emptiness and silence. I have felt more kinship with the sun-dried lumber of this world than I sensed in that featureless stick.”

  For a moment the sprite was quiet. Carin fingered a leaf of its prison-tree, knowing she had no words that could soften the creature’s disappointment.

  “But hope was not all lost,” the sprite went on, with a forced cheerfulness in its voice. “The mage then took me deep into the ground—deeper, it must be, than any tree ever thrust a root—to the pool like a perfect mirror of which you have told me, Carin. My excitement was high when the mage proposed delving into my buried memories, the way he has looked into yours.

  “‘By all means!’ I cried, eager to see in the pool’s magic mists a world I cannot remember but long to know. Again, however, I was frustrated. Though I filled my thoughts with everything I could recall of my first days on this world called Ladrehdin, no image rose from the pool. Its surface never rippled.

  “‘Your mind is too alien,’ the mage told me. ‘The waters of the wysards can make nothing of your memories. The way your mind works—the way it weaves its thoughts—is so strange, the waters cannot join with it. For all her otherworldliness, the girl reasons and comprehends with a mind that is much like any the wellspring would find in Ladrehdin. With her thoughts, interplay is possible. But your mind is too outlandish—too peculiar for even the power of this place to penetrate.’

  “Am I giving a fair account of your words, Lord Mage?” the sprite called over Carin’s shoulder.

  The woodsprite’s efforts to include Verek in their conversation thwarted Carin’s attempts to treat the warlock like house-dust. She suppressed a sigh at the creature’s misplaced courtesy, and turned to see how Verek would respond.

  He only nodded and gave a brief, listless wave of his hand, as if indifferently sanctioning the sprite to continue.

  Carin intervened, however, before the creature could say more.

  “That’s it, then,” she snapped at Verek. “This whole thing is a mistake, and you’ve admitted it. You don’t need to keep the sprite locked up. You can’t learn anything from the creature. Your sorcery doesn’t work on it.” She sniffed contemptuously. “You didn’t even need to lay a trap to catch the sprite. All you had to do was show it the wand, and invite it to go with you down to the wizard’s well. The creature would have told you everything it knows and done anything you’d asked. It wants you to help it find its way home.”

  She sneered at Verek. “All that trouble to get your hands on the woodsprite, all that effort to trick and threaten both of us—it would have been easier to just ask.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Carin demanded, slinging her words at Verek, giving him no chance to answer. “I’ll tell you what you should do. It’s what a ‘noble lord’ who deserves the title would do. Turn the sprite loose. The creature isn’t useful to you.” Carin pointed at the window and the fading daylight outside. “Right now, before the sun goes down, act like you’ve got a streak of decency in you, and set the creature free. The sprite will excuse the wrongs you’ve done it. It knows you can’t help your black heart. It doesn’t even seem to hate you. Whether Drisha—or whatever dark god you pray to—will pardon you, though, I can’t guess.”

  “But you assuredly will not forgive me!” Verek exclaimed, breaking his silence. He sat forward on the sofa. “Isn’t that the meaning you wish me to find in your witless words? Perhaps you will pardon me, however—you presumptuous wench!—if I confess myself untroubled by your censure. It’s not your good opinion that I require.”

  Shaking his head—whether at her insolence or his tolerating it, Carin couldn’t say—Verek sat back and resettled himself. Then he fixed her with a look so black that even the sprite in its prison-tree beside her felt the force of the warlock’s gaze. Carin heard a thin, whistling gasp from her fellow captive.

  She steeled herself, knowing from three weeks’ acquaintance with the sorcerer that such a look boded ill.

  “What I require of you,” Verek said in a voice like flint, “is that you complete a certain task which I am sure you will wish to refuse. Though I might threaten, imprison, starve or shackle you, still you would resist. Weeks would be lost—months, perhaps—as you defied me.

  “Weeks and months cannot be spared. The time to act is now. The task of which I speak cannot await your pleasure. It cannot await my winning your trust—a thing I begin to think impossible, given your vast and fantastic suspicions of me. The task cannot await my subduing—by force, persuasion, or enchantment—the obstinacy within you that retreats to guardedness when what is needed is a sworn covenant between us.

  “Therefore, I mean to use the sprite to compel your obedience. Do as I command, difficult though you may find the task, and the creature goes free. Refuse me, and the sprite dies. My terms are simply those.”

  He wants me to walk into the jaws of the Jabberwock. The conviction rose firm in Carin’s heart, and made a cold sweat pop on her forehead. That is the price of my friend’s life. Verek wants me to admit that I don’t belong in this world, I should not be here—I’ve no right to be here. To remove the threat I pose to Ladrehdin, I am to throw myself—like a sin offering to Drisha—into the dragon’s mouth. With me dead, the Jabberwock can never again be summoned to this world. All here will be safe from any harm I might do. And the woodsprite will live. But refuse my own destruction, and the sprite will die.

  Maybe … maybe, came a whisper from a corner of Carin’s mind where fear did not rule, there’s another possible outcome. Verek would be with her in the cave of magic when she conjured the dragon. He would want to see Carin sacrifice herself with his own dark, accursed eyes. Could she trick him? Could she be the one sheltering in the stairwell, safely out of reach, while the dragon ripped the warlock apart?

  Find a way, whispered a cold little voice. The Jabberwock is your only weapon against this sorcerer. Use it.

  Struggling to keep her thoughts off her face, Carin bent her gaze past Verek’s shoulder—there was no looking into those glinting eyes—and nodded assent.

  “I will do what you tell me to. Just don’t hurt the
woodsprite. And as soon as I’ve done what you want, you’ve got to set the creature free like you promised. Do we have a bargain?”

  “We have,” Verek said shortly. He rose from his couch and walked to the door, to pull it open and stand waiting for her.

  “Carin!” cried the woodsprite from its prison at her side. “I do not like this bargain that’s been struck. Promise me that you won’t put yourself in danger for my sake. My gratitude would be boundless if you could do some arduous but innocent chore and thereby gain my release. I’d forever be your devoted servant. But in your eyes and in the mage’s dark looks I see hints of things that are not only arduous, but perilous. Promise me, Carin! Swear that you will not endanger yourself in my behalf. Were harm to befall you in this, I could never forgive myself. Throw myself onto the plains, I would. There to perish with no twig for shelter.”

  “Hush, sprite.” Carin reproved the creature gently, stroking a leaf. “Don’t talk like that. I’ll be fine, and so will you. Whatever the warlock needs me to do, I’ll do, to get you out of here.” She tried to smile. “When this is over and you’re free, I’ll meet you in the back garden. All right?”

  Not for the first time, Carin wished she were a more accomplished liar. She sounded unconvincing, even to herself. In a last attempt to reassure the sprite, she gave the tree a squeeze.

  Then she joined Verek in the doorway, leaving the creature spluttering: “But I—you— My friend!”

  Just before the warlock shut the door behind them, Carin called into the room, cutting across the creature’s stammer: “Stand up to him, sprite! Tell the son-of-a-hag if you need more sun or water.”

  The object of her aspersion reached past her to pull the door closed in Carin’s face. And as Verek’s hand left the latch, the cross-braced timbers dissolved. Stonework indistinguishable from the rest of the corridor took the door’s place. The upper portal to the warlock’s private haunts had disappeared.