“This delay that you have enjoyed,” Verek said, continuing with his train of thought and apparently oblivious, for once, to what Carin was thinking, “will hold us here only one night more. A careless fool of a stableboy—drunk last night, with all the town—let the packhorse into the oat bin. The foundered beast is at the knacker’s now, and Lanse bargains for a nag to take its place.”
“Is Emrys all right?” Carin asked, safe now in letting her worry show. “And Brogar?” The wizard’s hunter was every inch its master’s steed, but the horse had let Carin on its back when she was too sick or injured to walk, and would stand patiently when Verek ordered her up. Though it was not a friend like her Emrys, in whose ears Carin could whisper secrets, Brogar was nevertheless a stalwart companion she wouldn’t want to lose.
“The three from my own stables are unharmed,” Verek answered, as if to remind Carin that the mare was his, not hers. “The loss of one from among their number would be grievous. I regret less the ruin of the pack animal than the time wasted in securing its replacement.
“Still,” Verek added, “man and beast can do with a rest. I don’t doubt that the survivors among the horses will be as pleased to remain another night in the stables of Deroucey as you will be to sleep again in your stately quarters.”
Carin ducked her head to hide her smile. He doesn’t know the half of it, she gloated. For not only would she enjoy another night of comfort, in her privacy she could also have another talk with the woodsprite.
Her smile faded as her gaze found the anklet that ringed her bandage. Her pain was gone, but Carin’s dried blood coated the iron. She brought her foot up, rested it on the bench, and began chipping at the blood, flaking it off with her thumbnail.
“Please.” Carin looked up at Verek. “Take this ankle iron off me. I give you my word that I won’t try to get away.”
Verek laced his fingers together, the full count of his right hand covering for the missing little finger of his left. He slipped his hands behind his head and leaned back. For a moment he studied her in silence. Then he replied coolly, “What good is your word to me?”
Carin stiffened, and returned her benched foot to the floor. She tried to look equal parts insulted and bewildered.
“When have I given you a reason to doubt it?” she demanded. “Haven’t I answered your questions and kept my promises?”
Darting into Carin’s thoughts were all the times she’d given Verek the truth—about the wisewoman who had sent her northward from the plains, about the blank in her mind that her childhood memories should fill, about the “puzzle-book” in the alien tongue that she could read. Had the wizard forgotten how Carin had confessed to spying on him and seeing him almost drown in his own magic? Did it also mean nothing to him that she had shared a confidence? She’d told Verek, probably unwisely, that she and the woodsprite were of two minds about returning to the worlds from which they had come.
When Verek replied, however, he made it clear that he was remembering other episodes from their six weeks’ acquaintance.
“You hadn’t been two days under my roof when you gave me cause to mistrust you,” he snapped, eyeing Carin with an unsettling directness. “Didn’t you thank me prettily when I set you the task of sorting out my library? Didn’t you say you would do the work, and do it gladly? And had the sun gone down on another dusk before you were fled, leading me on a cold, hard chase through the night?
“What of your pledge to travel where I sent you, across the waters of the wysards?” Verek continued, jumping to the exact matter that Carin hadn’t yet discussed with the woodsprite. “Didn’t you stand on the brink of those waters and refuse the second journey that was yours to make?”
Carin hesitated to answer. If she admitted now that she had deceived Verek that second night, he’d never trust her enough to unshackle her.
She countered with an accusation of her own. “You weren’t honest with me,” she said, “about the sorcery that brought me to Ladrehdin. Kidnapping someone from another world—that’s just way beyond your abilities, right? Only a ‘master wizard’ could conjure up that kind of magic. And the name of this master magician has to stay secret. I can never know it.”
Carin scoffed, and returned the wizard’s gaze as levelly as she could. “But it’s easy enough to guess, isn’t it? You sent me back to the bedroom that used to be mine in some other life—out there.” She pointed off into space. “So I know you’ve been lying. You’ve shown me that you have the power of passage between the worlds. You can do it—you have done it.”
Verek stared at her. Slowly he took his hands from behind his head and sat up from his slouch on the bed. The face that seldom betrayed his thoughts showed surprise and sudden comprehension, as though Carin had just cleared up some mystery for him.
“I am flattered that you think me capable of such magic,” he growled. “But you are mistaken.”
He shook his head. “Let us drop the pretense. We’re now far enough from the waters of the wysards that honesty cannot alter our course. Enlighten me, won’t you, and spare me further conjecture about your failure to summon from those waters an image of the woodsprite’s world. Was it truly your ‘failure’? Or your refusal, as I have suspected since that night?”
Carin sighed. Hiding a subterfuge from Verek was never easy. She counted it a feat to have kept him guessing this long. But did she dare admit that his suspicions were correct? That she’d stood on the rim of his wizards’ well and tricked him? Would such an admission rouse that punishing temper of his?
“Come,” Verek said, as though he’d clearly heard every question that darted through Carin’s mind. “If I did not—in my grave dissatisfaction—thrash you that night, am I more likely to beat you now for telling me what I need to know?”
Carin returned her foot to the bench and resumed scraping the blood from her anklet. It gave her hands something to do while her thoughts ordered themselves. Finally she looked up at the dark eyes watching her, and told Verek the truth.
“I couldn’t do it. When you took me down to the cave of magic that second night, I couldn’t do what you wanted. That stick you handed me … the woodsprite is—was—convinced that it’s a piece of the creature’s world. But when you told me to use the wizards’ well to find out if that’s where the stick really came from … no, I didn’t even try to do it.”
Verek tilted his head. “Why? Why did you not try?”
Carin shrugged. “If I’d gotten it right—if I’d conjured up a picture of the woodsprite’s world, made it rise from the pool of magic—what would you have done?” She held Verek’s gaze. “You would have made me go there, wouldn’t you? You would have sent me across to that world, just like you’d sent me into the child’s bedroom the night before.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t go through that again. I couldn’t risk falling into the wizards’ well. Sweet mercy!” Carin swore with quiet urgency. “It’s horrible. The water in that pool doesn’t feel anything like water. It’s black as death down in that well—and so cold—a cold that bites to the bone.” The memory made her flinch. “No, sir. I wasn’t going to risk drowning. What if you weren’t able to get me out in time?”
Carin narrowed her eyes at the wizard. “That’s assuming, of course, that you would have been willing to dive in, like you did the first night. Maybe you wouldn’t come after me a second time. You might just leave me to suffocate in that ocean of nothingness.”
Verek lifted his chin. “Your fear of wysards’ waters? That was your sole reason for refusing to summon an image of the woodsprite’s world?”
“No,” Carin said, still eyeing the wizard critically. “I was afraid you’d abandon me in that other place. If I had actually managed to call up the sprite’s world, you might have left me there. If you weren’t planning to send me on more journeys across the pool of magic, why bother bringing me back to Ladrehdin?
“Besides, I owed the woodsprite,” Carin added. “You might have made me ditch the wand out there,
like you had me leave the puzzle-book in the child’s bedroom. I think the wand is—was—the sprite’s way home. But if I’d conjured up the creature’s world and then dumped the wand there—while you had the sprite locked in your rooms—I would have doomed it to the fate that it feared more than anything. The sprite never would have seen its natural home again.”
I’m talking too much, whispered the voice in the back of Carin’s head. But having revealed some of her thinking, she might as well confess a bit more, while she had the wizard’s full attention. Verek was studying her with such interest, he was making her self-conscious.
“So now you know,” Carin muttered. She dropped her gaze and pinned it on the blood-encrusted anklet that she scraped with her thumbnail. “When you ordered me to ‘see’ whatever glimpse of the sprite’s world the wand could show me, I pictured instead … nothing. I made my mind a blank. I wasn’t sure I’d get away with it—you might figure out what I was doing. But when the pool of magic stayed still, when nothing rippled its surface and no images appeared, I thought I’d pulled it off.
“Later, though,” Carin added, and tentatively met the wizard’s eyes again, “I thought of another possibility. Didn’t the sprite say it couldn’t feel anything in the wand? The sprite desperately wanted to find traces of its old home in that stick, but it got no results either.” Carin shrugged. “Maybe I didn’t actually blank out any images. Maybe the wand is just a stick, with nothing to show and no bridges to build to other worlds. That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“You little artificer!” Verek snapped. Carin still had his complete attention, only now he was looking at her angrily. “Of course it’s possible. That is precisely the question I sought to answer when I bade you summon an image from the wand: did the fault lie with the relic or with the sprite? Would a mind more open than the sprite’s perceive more in the wand? I left the cavern of wysards that night thinking the wand must retain no trace of the world whence it came. But there was, in your long looks and silences, something that made me wonder: had you played me for a fool?”
The wizard glowered at Carin a moment longer. Then, with an air of resignation, he settled against the wall at his back.
“Your deception has robbed us both of knowledge that might have proved a boon before this journey’s done. For the questions remain unanswered: Is there any part of the sprite’s natural home in the wand? Does there yet linger in the stick some bond with that other world? Heed me, you witless sprat, when I say to you that the time may come when you will go in search of those answers—and you’ll be wishing then that I still stood, a safe anchor, at your back!”
Carin only stared at Verek. She had no idea how to reply to such an assertion.
The wizard seemed to expect no answer. He got off his bed and crossed the room to stand looking out the window. The sunlight through it gleamed off Verek’s black hair almost as brightly as from the silver band that circled his brow. The light made the streaks of gray at his temples as silver as the metal.
Turning away from the window and back to Carin, Verek resumed their conversation—the longest between them since his party of three had left Ruain.
“You accuse me of a lie,” he said, “when I claim for myself no such extraordinary powers as you have witnessed in the waters of the wysards—no such supreme mastery of magic as that which whirls living flesh through the void between the worlds. But I swear by the oath of my House that I do not deceive you in this. It lies within my power to convey only lifeless objects through the void—like the looking-glass book that I sent back with you to the child’s bedchamber, and the crystal amulet I bade you bring me from that place. You yourself, I could not—and did not—send through the void.
“Do you not remember,” Verek asked quietly, “the words I spoke to you that night? Didn’t I tell you that only an intangible part of yourself would walk on that other world? That your essence—your life’s breath, I think I called it—would remain with me in the cavern of the wysards? I cannot explain the matter more clearly. It is not a thing that lends itself to words.
“But you may believe me when I tell you: I cannot send living flesh through the void. The power that brought to Ladrehdin the living spark we call a woodsprite—and that plucked a young girl from a comfortable home to deliver her, stripped of childhood memories, into a mud-banked millpond—is a power beyond my craft and almost beyond my ken.”
The wizard rested his hands on the windowsill behind him and half sat on the ledge, his lean legs stretched out before him. He did not take his eyes from Carin’s.
“I am not so dull, however,” Verek continued briskly, “that I cannot imagine the possibilities which would open to a master wysard who wields such ability. Tell me: have you given much thought to the significance of the second whirlpool that you witnessed in the cavern of enchantment? The vortex that carried vermin and another bit of debris from a storm of magic—debris that seemed more exotic than a book or a driftwood wand?”
Carin shook her head. “No, I haven’t thought about it at all. I’m more interested in my own two trips across the void. All I know about the first passage is what the wizards’ well showed me—that first magical whirlpool slinging me to the millpond when I was a child. I still can’t remember a thing about that journey.”
She rubbed her bandaged ankle. It was starting to itch—a sign of healing.
“But I’ve given a lot of thought,” Carin added, “to the ‘errand’ that you sent me on not a month ago, to return the puzzle-book and steal a trinket. I keep wondering: What’s so special about a little crystal dolphin that you’d nearly kill us both to get your hands on it?”
Verek lifted one hand from the windowsill, stroked his close-trimmed beard, and eyed her sharply.
“Do your thoughts still follow their narrow tracks and miss the broader path ahead? Tell me this, then: Last night in the room behind that door”—the wizard lifted a finger from his chin to point at the closed door to Carin’s private quarters—“did you open the window to the winter night? Or did you keep it shuttered against the inrush of such elements as might do you harm?”
Chapter 4
The Fiends of Night
He knows! Carin fought to keep her panic from showing. He knows the woodsprite came to my window last night, and he thinks he’ll make me betray the creature a second time.
Their eyes locked. For a skin-prickling instant, Carin felt her mind laid open to the wizard’s scrutiny as nakedly as her ankle had been.
From the stairs came a sudden commotion. A small army was advancing on them, to judge by the din of voices and footsteps.
Verek’s gaze shifted from Carin’s with such dizzying abruptness that she had a sense of falling backward as his eyes released her.
“Cover your ankle,” the wizard snapped. He swooped from his window perch to scoop Carin’s bloodied stocking off the floor and thrust it at her. “Remember who you are meant to be. If you have managed, in the space of one short night, to give your bedchamber the look of a lady’s bower, then remedy that error now—and be quick about it, or find yourself the object of much petty gossip before we are gone from this place.”
Carin whirled to go, but a firm hand on her arm arrested her.
“Refrain,” the wizard breathed into her face, “on peril of your life, from revealing to these people anything of your true identity—or mine. Don’t think to seek sanctuary in this village. These simple souls cannot help you.”
With a rough shove then, Verek rushed her in the direction of the bedroom where her washing hung. Carin yanked her still-damp clothes off the room’s furniture and stuffed them into her satchel. She pulled her bloodstained stocking over her bare foot and over the instrument of torture that Verek had refused to remove.
She had barely buckled on her boots when a call of “Enter!” rang out from the other room, an edge of long-accustomed authority in the wizard’s voice. An army of servants erupted through the door from the stairs as though Verek’s summons were a battle cry.
>
Carin began to clear the hearth, to make that the “footboy’s” reason for being in “his master’s” bedroom. She was shoveling up ashes when the door between the two rooms opened to admit a chambermaid.
“Don’t you be troublin’ yourself with that, young sir,” the girl said cheerfully. “I’ll make up th’ fire soon’s I change th’ bed-linens and tidy up a bit.”
As Carin stood awkwardly at hearthside, the scoop in her hand, not knowing what to say or whether she should speak at all, the smile on the maid’s face turned to a look of dismay.
“Arrah!” she exclaimed. “You poor lad! That awful master of yours has been beatin’ you, ’asn’t he? The tracks are plain on your face where th’ tears have trickled down, and if that’s not a smear of blood there”—the girl touched her own cheek to indicate the spot on Carin’s face—“then I’m blinder than a blencathar. Is that your blood, young sir, on th’ table and th’ floor in t’other room?”
Carin nodded.
“Poor lad!” the maid exclaimed again. “I wonder you’re not flat on your face after such a flayin’. The skin must be plumb off your back.” She stepped a little closer and lowered her voice. “Get away from that villain, soon’s you can, and come back to Deroucey. My mother’ll put you up and find you work.”
Carin gave the girl a weak smile. If only it were that simple. She turned to look out the window, leaving the maid to get on with straightening up.
The “poor lad” tried to sort out a pack of conflicting emotions. Should she, despite the wizard’s warning, reveal everything to this girl—Verek’s secret as well as Carin’s own—and hope that such a revelation would rouse the townsfolk against the sorcerer in their midst? But how dearly might such an uprising cost the people of Deroucey? For all of Verek’s denials that he was a great master of magic, Carin had seen the desolation the wizard could wreak upon a landscape.
The Wysard (Waterspell 2) Page 7