The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  Welwyn’s smile slipped noticeably. “Nay, my lady. You won’t beguile me into telling you all I know of his lordship’s affairs of clan. If it’s his family you’re aflame to understand, then it’s him—the last man of it, don’t you know—that you need to be asking. I’ll tell you only this: the wysards’ circle isn’t so large on Ladrehdin these days that we can’t all be acquainted with one another.”

  The monk looked at the mountain above them. “Of course I knew Lord Legary and Master Hugh.” He sighed. “Not only that, I danced at Theil Verek’s wedding—and I pray to Drisha that I won’t mourn at his funeral.”

  With a little shake that jiggled down from his head and spread through the rest of him, Welwyn returned his attention to Carin. He grinned at her again.

  “Betweentimes, we of the power have our little ways of delivering tidings, one to another. You’d learn our secrets soon enough, if you would but end your doubts and acknowledge the rare gift that’s been given you.” He tilted his head at Carin. “It’s a good sign at any rate, young lady, that you made your way up from the south to find sanctuary with Theil Verek. Were the urge not strong within you to claim your blood-gift, you never would have made the journey alive—you nor that wandering woodsprite, either.”

  Carin gaped at the monk. All she could do was splutter “Woodsprite?” and hope Welwyn would keep talking.

  He did. But first he gave a hearty laugh and shook his finger at her. “Yes, my lady. That temperish sorcerer who is a torment to you has told me about the sprite and the bargain you struck weeks ago in Ruain—the creature’s life, for your obedience.” Welwyn could hardly speak for chuckling. “It seems to me that you’ve gotten the better of our dread Lord Verek, for now the creature’s free and you’re as unruly as ever.

  “I little doubt that the wight is lurking around us now”—Carin as well as the monk squinted at the nearest trees—“wishing that I would go away so it could speak in private with its benefactress. And so I will leave, soon, to discover what’s become of said Verek and his second. Those two have been on the mountain with the deer since daybreak. Before I go, however, I must teach you to turn around, or you’ll never get back to the cabin!”

  With more easy bantering, Welwyn showed Carin how to lift and turn her bearpaws one after the other, with her feet apart so the edge of one wouldn’t pin down the tail of the other. Slowly she stepped around until the toes of her snowshoes pointed back the way she’d come.

  More exhilarating was the fast about-face that Welwyn taught her next—leaning on her pole for balance, kicking up, and spinning in place.

  “Good,” he praised Carin’s efforts. “All you need now is practice, my lady. Do a few more turns here on this packed snow, then try it in the powder. If you’re of a mind to test your legs, then tramp off into the trees as far as you dare. Just remember, my dear, that the winter sun sets early behind these mountains. I beg you not be late getting back, or don’t you know it’s his fiery lordship who’s apt to be out looking for you.” Welwyn’s smile was not entirely innocent.

  The monk shuffled off. Carin watched him until the pines at the glen’s western edge swallowed him up. Then she kick-turned to face the cluster of bare-limbed oaks behind the shed.

  “Sprite!” she called, not quite shouting. But neither did she whisper. The creature’s presence was no longer a secret needing to be kept.

  A spark shinnied to the top of the tallest oak, leaped across to another, then flitted down toward the ground—the sprite’s unmistakable signal that it would meet her in the grove.

  With a balanced, rhythmic stride that hardly resembled her first bumbling steps of the morning, Carin left the packed snow at the front of the shed. Behind it, she swished through the loose powder that blanketed the glen. It was tiring work. By the time she reached the grove, she was panting. She threw open her cloak and unbuttoned her coat to the fresh, cold air.

  “My friend!” the sprite greeted her. “No happier sight than you have I ever seen. In this great expanse of white, the green of your eyes and the pink of your cheeks are all the more fetching.”

  “Good grief, sprite!” Carin exclaimed. She laughed as easily as she had with the monk. “You’re quite sparkly today yourself.” She meant the compliment literally. Even against the radiance of sky and snow, the creature flickered luminously. “What’s with you?”

  “I have been treated to a most amusing—and highly edifying—exhibition,” the sprite piped, its voice gleeful. “Midst the trees above, I have seen that the mage’s craven horseboy is none the worse for the bump on the head which I gave him. The knave is aslope in the mountains with his master. The pair of them are floundering through the snow, yelling at five deer in harness.” The sprite trilled, the closest it could come to human-sounding laughter. “Would that you had witnessed the spectacle with me! I watched, hidden in the trees, for a long time too bemused to drag myself away. When at last they seemed to have their team in hand, I began to guess the purpose of such strange business.”

  “What is it?” Carin leaned on her pole and listened intently. “What are they doing?”

  “The deer,” the sprite said, “move over the snow on their four splayed hooves more easily than you two-footed creatures do, even with those baskets you’re walking on.” The spark, with a quick slide down the tree, indicated Carin’s snowshoes. Then it flitted back up, level with her eyes. “I think the mage means to leave your horses here and continue the journey with the deer hauling your food and packs. The heavy beasts that you’ve ridden for leagues cannot travel in snow so easily as the little deer do.

  “And that, my friend, accounts for my lightness of spirit today,” the sprite said. “If the mage means to take you into these mountains, driving deer before him while you tramp over the snow wearing baskets on your feet, then I shall be at leisure to idle away half of every day. Hard-pressed though I was to keep up with the horses, in trees such as cover these slopes I’m more than a match for those who go afoot.”

  The sprite’s news flattened Carin’s mood like a jeweler’s hammer beat gold into leaf. The oak in which the creature was lodged nearly got a hard whack from her pole. She resisted the urge, but only just.

  “Sweet mother of Drisha, sprite!” she swore at it. “Slogging through the snow up these mountains is the last thing in Ladrehdin that I want to do. Unh!” Carin glanced up at the peaks and groaned. “I wouldn’t mind spending the winter down here in Brother Welwyn’s cabin. It’d be cramped, but at least I’d stay warm.” She frowned at the sprite. “But you’d rather see me stuck in the snowdrifts. While I’m dragging myself up a mountain, you’ll be flitting along, taking it easy. Every day will be worse for me, but better for you.”

  Carin would have kicked the tree trunk then, except the snowshoes on her feet stopped her. “You go ahead and enjoy yourself while you can. Maybe you’ll feel differently when I’ve frozen to death in a blizzard up there.” She jabbed her finger at the slopes. “Verek may last longer than I do, him being a sorcerer and all. You’ll have the blackheart and that dimwit Lanse for company—until they’re both dead and buried under an avalanche. After that, I guess you’ll have to mope your way back down here, at your ‘leisure,’ and take up with Brother Welwyn.”

  The sprite sputtered and squeaked. But the mouth that worked in the bark of the oak could form no intelligible words beyond: “My dear girl … never … you mistake … Oh, my!”

  Carin gave the creature no chance to recover itself.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” she snapped. “Verek knows you’re here. He knows you followed us, and he’s furious about you dropping that branch on Lanse’s head. If he had the power to punish you, he would—severely. But he can’t lay his hands on you. So he’s threatening me with unspeakable things if you don’t leave Lanse and him alone.”

  When the woodsprite did not immediately reply, Carin leaned toward the creature’s tree, as close as her snowshoes would let her. “Do you get what I’m saying, sprite? If you make h
im angry, he’ll take it out on me. And we both know what he’s capable of. If you don’t want him ripping my tongue out, or worse, then keep away from him. Stay clear of Lanse, too.”

  She put her hand on the tree trunk. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” she muttered, calming down a little. “If you hadn’t clubbed Lanse, he would have shot me dead. He might try again—we’ll have to watch out. But in the meantime, please don’t go annoying him or Verek. That warlock said he would hurt me if you even ‘flutter a leaf’ their way.”

  For a time, the glen was silent. Carin, having said quite enough, quit talking. She waited for the sprite to answer her, but the creature only flickered like a wind-whipped candle flame. No sound came down from the mountain above—no shouting at fractious deer, no belly-laughs from Welwyn.

  Finally the sprite stammered out, “That—that—coward. How dare he threaten you to get at me!”

  Carin eyed the spark. “Like he’s never done it before? Like he didn’t threaten your life to make me do what he wanted? Now he’s switched us around. You’re the one he wants to control, and I’m the hostage he’ll use to get power over you.”

  “I won’t have it!” the sprite shrilled with uncharacteristic ferocity. “I haven’t followed all this way to see my presence bring harm to you. That fiend may deal with me as he thinks himself able. But while there’s a spark of life within me, he won’t visit my punishments upon your fair head.”

  Carin—surprised into speechlessness—stared after it as the creature flitted away through the trees, heading up the mountain … to do what? Confront Verek? Attack him or the boy?

  The woodsprite of old—the sprite that had whimpered like a terrified child when the sorcerer captured it in his library—would have quailed at Verek’s warning. The creature rushing up the mountainside—for all the world like an outraged gentleman who had gone to fight a duel—was some new being whom Carin did not know.

  With the sprite’s departure, the silence in Welwyn’s glen took on a texture almost ominous. Not a breath of wind sighed through the treetops. No sounds came up from the valley or from the walled city that commanded all approaches to it. Sheep and goats didn’t bleat; snow didn’t crunch under feet or hooves. For a moment, Carin found herself mentally back in Verek’s ensorcelled woodland, smothering in the profound silence which haunted that edge of his property.

  But then, off the sloped roof of the shed behind her, a slab of snow slid to the ground with a whoosh. It broke the trance.

  Carin, startled, tried to whirl but found herself anchored. She’d stood in one spot for such a long time, talking with the sprite, the cold had iced her bearpaws to the snow.

  Leaning on her pole for support, she popped her snowshoes free. Then she scanned Welwyn’s glen for some likely-looking destination. The monk bade her practice … and if the sprite guessed correctly that Verek intended going into these mountains on foot, then she would need all the stamina that hard exercise could build.

  She chose a stand of balsams at the glen’s western edge, a little north of where the monk had gone into the trees. Resolutely she made for it, keeping the upturned tips of her bearpaws high, out of the powdery snow. Every few steps, she paused to rest. Though five months of walking from the southern plains up to Verek’s highlands had left Carin wiry and fit, her more recent weeks on horseback were hardly the way to prepare for a wintertime mountain hike. When she finally reached the edge of the glen, she was leaning on her pole for support and breathing heavily.

  In the trees, the glitter of sun on snow lost its blinding intensity. Carin could stop squinting. As her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light under the boughs, she made out a dark and lumpy shape that was half hidden behind a tree. The snow all around was trampled and cut up, its pristine whiteness marred by spots and smears of … blood?

  Warily she peered through the trees, studying what little could be seen of the slope above. Nothing disturbed the quietness but her own quick breaths.

  Stepping cautiously, Carin approached the dark lump. She was closer than she wanted to get before she finally realized what the misshapen mass was: a heap of bones, hooves, hair, and violet antlers—the frozen remains of a Trosdan deer. Whatever had killed and eaten the animal had wasted little of the carcass.

  A shiver jostled her. Carin buttoned her coat to her throat and wrapped up tight in her cloak. Slowly she edged around the site of the kill, searching in the snow for tracks.

  What she found made her doubt the seeing. But when she crouched beside the pawprint and held her outstretched hand over it, she knew her eyes did not play tricks. The track in the snow was of a cat’s forepaw, its round footpads clearly visible; the claws that had brought down the deer had been retracted when the creature padded away from its kill. A mountain lion of the normal sort, however, this cat could not be. This cat was huge. Carin’s outspread hand fit inside the track without danger of brushing a fingertip to any edge of it.

  Chapter 11

  Desires

  The sun was dipping behind the mountains when a ruckus rose from the direction of the shed. Carin stepped from the cabin onto the porch to listen.

  Mingled in the general commotion was the huffing and snorting of deer, with a buck’s occasional sharp bark. Above the noises made by his deer, Welwyn’s rich laughter rumbled, punctuated by a string of oaths from Verek—fair warning that the men were off the mountain.

  Carin donned coat and cloak, lashed on her bearpaws, grabbed her hiking stick and a lighted lantern, and shuffled out to meet them. Following the track that Welwyn had laid down for her earlier, she covered the distance speedily.

  “Good evening to you, my dear!” the monk greeted her cheerfully. “One might think you had the best teacher in the land, to see how well you’re progressing. But where there was a smile on your face when I left you to your practice at midday, I now see a frown. What’s fretting your ladyship?”

  Carin stopped at a prudent distance from the monk and his deer herd. The beasts weren’t all penned; she had no wish to spook the stragglers back up the mountain.

  But the deer ignored her. Their bright eyes were fixed—not on Verek, Lanse, or the small team that the two were now unharnessing—but on a winking glow in the trees beyond.

  Carin stared. The sprite’s secret was well out. Even the deer knew of the creature’s presence—and they were fascinated.

  Welwyn coaxed the last of the herd under shelter. Then he scuffed over to stand beside Carin.

  “A marvelous bellwether is your woodsprite.” He chuckled. “If ever you tire of the creature, lend it to me. The last time the deer came off the slopes so docilely, it was with a corpse-candle in the lead. The beasts do fancy a light in the dusk. Brainless as moths, one might think them.”

  The monk was right. Now the deer turned their curious gazes on the lantern in Carin’s hand.

  She set the lantern on the packed snow. Standing within the circle it lit, she used the tip of her hiking stick to draw a ring in the snow the size of the pawprint under the balsams.

  “Mas—er, Brother Welwyn, are you missing a deer? I found what was left of one, there.” Carin pointed to the trees in the distance. “I also found a cat track, and I swear it’s this big.” She tapped the circle she’d drawn. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. Sweet mercy! Just how big do your lions get up here?”

  The look on Welwyn’s face was probably the closest the man could come to a frown. He shook his head.

  “The biggest cat that’s native to these peaks has a paw not half so large as you’ve traced there, Lady Carin. But I’ve heard rumors, don’t you know. Pray lead the way, and all shall follow. Can you show us, though evening closes in, where lies the carcass you found?”

  She nodded and picked up the lantern. The deer watched her movements as if entranced.

  As she stepped past their shed, Carin got her first good look at the fairy-beasts of Ladrehdinian legend. In the flesh, they were not extraordinary. About the size of roe deer but
stockier in build, the Trosdans had long, thick hair. Most were tawny in color; others, grayish with white underneath. All had short, forked antlers of a shiny purple hue. Their muscular legs ended in oval hooves like miniature versions of man-made snowshoes. Born to the mountains they truly were, with warm hair coats to protect them from the snow and splayed feet to carry them over it.

  Carin’s own path through the snow, where she’d earlier worked her way to the balsams, was clear even in the half-light of dusk. Welwyn didn’t immediately join her on it, but stopped to collect Verek and Lanse.

  “I send my best pupil off to find her snow legs,” the monk told them, “and what does she stumble upon? The very evidence I had hoped to show you—and to see for myself, to prove that I’m no doddering old fool who’ll repeat anything I hear. Come along, you unbelievers, and let’s see what her ladyship has discovered.”

  Welwyn followed Carin then, down the track, over snow that was hard-packed by her earlier walk to and from the edge of the glen. Behind him came Verek, trailed by a plainly unenthusiastic Lanse.

  Setting its own course through the trees was the sprite. It sparked away into the night, as bold as a beacon. Carin watched its confident leaps, and wondered. Had the creature won a victory over the warlock? Or had it merely angered Verek—sufficiently to bring the sorcerer’s wrath down upon her?

  She waited only for Welwyn to catch up, then led him to the stand of balsams as quickly as her new skills allowed. Carin showed him the dead deer and the pawprint, handed him the lantern, and shuffled aside onto soft, unmarked snow to let him examine the evidence for himself.

  Verek and Lanse were not long in joining him. Both, ignoring Carin, fastened on the cat’s kill and the tell-tale track it had left behind.

  “My apologies, Welwyn,” the wizard muttered. “I should not have doubted you. But a mountain cat so monstrous as you described seemed beyond belief. When did you say the beast was first seen up here?”