WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock
Page 36
Sunlight? In Ruain at this hour, long after the evening meal, it was nighttime.
Carin rushed to the window. Immediately below it, ocean waves lapped at the wall. There was not so much as a footpath between the sea and the child’s bedroom.
She gazed far out across the waves and glimpsed the vault of magic. Standing within it, hardly bigger than a seagull in the distance, was Verek. He seemed to gesture to her but Carin couldn’t be sure what he signaled, he was so far away.
From that distance, his voice couldn’t possibly reach her. But it did somehow. “Hurry!” came the faint cry. “Return to me this instant, you young fool!”
If she hadn’t already crossed water once, Carin would have counted it quite unthinkable to heed the warlock’s summons. But with the woodsprite’s life depending on her, and all of Verek’s warnings ringing in her ears—“You must not lose yourself in that other world” … “Your life’s breath remains with me”—what choice did she have? She must trust to an untrustworthy sorcerer and his enchanted pool, and whatever magic had taken her on this journey.
Carin climbed through the open window and crouched on the sill. As she flexed her right wrist, she noticed that it didn’t hurt from when Verek had twisted it. Maybe the warlock wasn’t tricking her. He had said that only an intangible part of her would walk on this world. Maybe her true being—the part that could be bruised and feel pain—was, in fact, waiting with him in Verek’s cave of magic. The idea was just comforting enough that Carin could bring herself to make the blind leap into the ocean below—
—Where her boots found solid footing in the water, though waves brushed her calves like tall grass rippling in a meadow on a breezy day.
You are in a meadow, Carin told herself, and fixed her mind on that illusion as the salvation of her senses. To admit otherwise, to admit that she walked on the sea, to acknowledge that she crossed … what? The unnatural waters of the wizards’ well, grown from a pool to an ocean? Or the vast, unbounded void between the worlds themselves? To admit such possibilities would be to lose her grip on reality. This realm … this ocean … this infinite void was a thing far beyond her grasp. Only in her imaginary meadow could Carin subdue the substance of her terror, and leave just its shadows to occupy the shuddering corners of her mind.
Nearer she drew to Verek. But her progress was slow. Though she “walked” through the ocean waves as easily as through a tall-grass prairie, the distance between Carin and the warlock seemed immense. She would be a year reaching him, at this rate.
But in an instant—she missed both the means and the moment of it—Verek was there in front of her, not a stone’s throw away. His long, lank hair was plastered to his skull. Sweat ran down his face and neck. His stripped-off woolen vest lay crumpled at his feet, and his shirt clung to him, soaked through. His face was ashen. The strain of his more-than-mortal effort showed in its taut, distorted lines.
And Carin knew: her easy striding through ocean waves was entirely the warlock’s doing. She did not buoy herself up. She did not close the distance between them on her own two feet. It was Verek who conducted her along this return journey, drawing her back to the cave from … wherever she had been. And the struggle to reclaim her was crushing him.
“Throw me the crystal!” he cried. Pain hoarsened his voice. “Quickly! I cannot withstand its pull upon you!”
Its pull?
Carin yanked the necklace over her head. With a few quick turns, she wrapped the chain tight around the dolphin pendant, making a ball that she lobbed to the warlock’s waiting hands.
His fingers closing over the crystal were the last things Carin saw. Under her feet, there was suddenly—nothing. She plunged into a frigid liquid, down into a blackness without form.
The shock of it drove every thought from her mind, except for one glimmer: He only wanted the crystal. And now that I’ve brought it to him, he’s done with me.
Carin drifted through a thick, achingly cold, ebony ocean. She was going to drown. When her lungs filled with this liquid that was more glass than water, she would die in the glacial nothingness of this supernatural void, where all was silence … and stillness … and …
Betrayal, was the last clear idea in her mind before existence ended.
END of BOOK ONE of WATERSPELL
The Story Continues
The story continues in WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard, available at most online bookstores.
WATERSPELL Book 2:
The Wysard
by
Deborah J. Lightfoot
Summary
After blundering into the last stronghold of magic, Carin discovers that she is right to fear the wizard Verek. He is using her to seal the ruptures in the void, and she may be nothing more to him than an expendable weapon. What will he do with her—or to her—when his world is again secure? Or has he erred in believing that the last bridge has been broken? The quest may not, in fact, be over … and Lord Verek may find himself not quite as willing to dispose of his fiery water-sylph, Carin, as he once believed himself to be.
ISBN 978-0-9728768-5-8 (E-book)
ISBN 978-0-9728768-6-5 (Paperback)
About the Author
Deborah J. Lightfoot got attached to history through her grandfather, a High Plains cowboy. From her mother, an artist and avid reader, came her love of books and all things mysterious and magical. Deborah has had a fondness for dark horsemen since Richard Boone’s Paladin rode through TV landscapes wielding a six-shooter instead of a sword. Six-shooters figure in her award-winning books about the American Southwest: Trail Fever (William Morrow) and The LH7 Ranch (University of North Texas Press). Swords and sorcery provide the thrills in WATERSPELL, an intricate fantasy trilogy with medieval overtones and a few nods to history. A journalism graduate (summa cum laude) of Texas A&M University and an Authors Guild member, Deborah is in educational publishing as a freelancer for a national nonprofit organization. Besides writing, editing, and ingesting books, her pleasures include traveling abroad and hiking the Yorkshire moors, Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park, and while living in Mexico part-time, that country’s La Primavera Bosque. On the Web: djlightfoot.blogspot.com
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Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue The Path Ahead
Chapter 1 The Swordsman
Chapter 2 The Puzzle-Book
Chapter 3 Secrets
Chapter 4 Questions
Chapter 5 The Riddle
Chapter 6 The Mistake
Chapter 7 Darkness
Chapter 8 Two Horrors
Chapter 9 The Note
Chapter 10 The Mirror Pool
Chapter 11 Oblivion
Chapter 12 Suspicions
Chapter 13 A Susceptibility
Chapter 14 A Dragon
Chapter 15 A Test
Chapter 16 Promises
Chapter 17 The Magic of Life
Chapter 18 Visions
Chapter 19 The Book of Archamon
Chapter 20 The Truth
Chapter 21 The Trap
Chapter 22 One Dolphin
About the Author