The Wysard (Waterspell 2)

by Deborah J. Lightfoot

  “I don’t know that anyone’s actually laid eyes on the monster,” Welwyn corrected him. “The first report I had of something odd skulking around the flocks was a fortnight ago. A shepherd from the valley did me the kindness of tramping up here with a warning: something was killing his stock, not only lambs and kids, but mature rams and billies. Rumor had it that a pawprint had been found in the mud of a creekbank—the track of a cat, but bigger than the hoof of a dray horse. You needn’t apologize to me, Theil Verek. I thought the tale far-fetched, myself—until now.”

  The monk looked across to Carin. “Well done, my lady. It’s a felicitous find, this. Puts us all on our toes.”

  “Was the deer one of yours, Brother Welwyn?” she asked.

  “Aye. I missed the beast only this morning. To see its carcass now, not a bowshot from the shed, makes me anxious for the others. Not only huge is this cat, but audacious too. Methinks I’ll sleep with the deer tonight.”

  Lanse rose from his study of the print in the snow. He turned to his host. “By your leave, Master Welwyn, I should like to take the watch. A monster this size could slaughter a horse. I pledge my word that nothing will trouble either your animals or my master’s, if I am permitted to stay with them tonight.”

  Welwyn grinned. “You needn’t ask twice, my boy. I’ll take a warm bed over a shakedown in the straw any time it’s offered. The job’s yours. Let’s hie to the cabin and get a hot supper down you, and scare up all the extra blankets we can find. You’ll need them, don’t you know.”

  Chuckling loudly, the monk headed back on the now well-broken trail, Lanse behind him. The lantern went with them.

  The two who lingered did not miss it. Reflected off the snowy landscape, the half-light of dusk was as bright as a first-quarter moon. It showed Verek’s unquiet eyes fixed on his “footboy.” This was the first time today that their paths had crossed. If the sprite’s behavior had provoked the wizard’s ire, Carin might now learn, to her grief, what retribution would be exacted.

  She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat and addressed her captor civilly—if awkwardly, given that they had been standing together without speaking for more than a minute. “Good evening, my lord.”

  Verek returned the courtesy, giving her a nod that was not as curt as he was capable of. Then all was silence. Neither moved to take the path to the cabin.

  Oh, just ask him! Carin snapped at herself. Hours of waiting and wondering would be unbearable. She had to know: Had the sprite’s defiance earned her a dose of hell’s own strap oil?

  “I, uh, delivered your message to the woodsprite, sir,” Carin began, carefully. “The creature didn’t listen to me. It had flashed up the mountainside before I could stop it. I’ve never seen it that angry. If it had been a human, I think it would have thrown down the gauntlet and challenged you to a fight.”

  Verek nodded. “Indeed,” he grumbled. “Such was the creature’s temper when it faced me on the slopes. You, I’ll wager, will learn all from the sprite itself. From me, you need hear only this: the wood-goblin and I have reached an agreement. It will not ambush Lanse or myself, so long as you are not mistreated.” Verek put a gloved hand on the tree trunk beside him while he widened his stance. Then he stood with his arms folded. “You, therefore, have nothing to fear from either of us. I will refrain from the diabolical brutality of which I’m often guilty.”

  What moved across Verek’s face at this was an expression Carin found unreadable in the light of stars on snow.

  “Lanse,” he added with emphasis, “has pledged to make no further attempts on your life. Much impressed was that youth when the sprite came charging into our midst, flinging tree limbs about, on the prod like an enraged bull. What Welwyn and I could not convince him of, Lanse now believes: it was the sprite, not you, who brought that branch down on his head. The boy still knows you for a sneak—a listener at keyholes and windows. But the sprite has forced him to at least consider the possibility that you’re not altogether a malevolent witch.”

  Carin struck the snow with her hiking stick. The sound of it was too muffled to vent her anger. She took a second whack at a nearby tree, knocked down a cloud of powder, and felt better.

  “How many times do I have to say it?” she grated. “I’m not any kind of a witch. If I have a slight tendency in that direction, I don’t consider it to be a ‘gift’ the way you and Welwyn do. I pray to Drisha to lose whatever it is that let me hear the voice of your wizards’ well in Ruain. I don’t want to hear it ever again. I don’t want to bring forth sea urchins—or summon dragons.” Many weeks had passed since Carin had last said the incantation that called the Jabberwock dragon. She still knew the words of the rhyme, though, and she always would.

  Verek shifted slightly; his snowshoes creaked. Sounds cut distinctly through the cold, starlit evening. Carin heard the restraint in his voice as he softly replied, “We can’t always have what we want.”

  She waited for him to break up this meeting. But the warlock made no move toward the cabin. He seemed calmer and more approachable than usual—like someone she could actually talk to.

  “What’s Lanse’s problem with me?” Carin blurted. She jabbed her thumb toward the cabin where the boy had gone with Welwyn. “So what if I did manage to pull off a few tricks while I was out cold that night of the ice storm? I don’t get why he’s scared of a little magic.” She sniffed. “It’s ridiculous. He’s the servant of a sorcerer. He’s seen all sorts of things, and he isn’t bothered when you work magic.”

  She cited some instances of Verek’s spellcraft that Lanse had witnessed. “He didn’t faint away when you used wizardry to destroy that pack of wasteland dogs. He didn’t mind you casting the spell of stone over those men on the plain of Imlen. And obviously he’s not afraid of Master Welwyn, though your monk friend is a wizard too.”

  Carin tilted her head. “So why am I so threatening to him? Why did Lanse get spooked by my accidentally working a little magic in my sleep? I’m sure it couldn’t have amounted to much.” She sniffed again, and desperately hoped that whatever sorcerous ability she had displayed that night had been small and clumsy.

  Verek unfolded his arms and put his hands on his hips. “The talent you possess is not slight.” He clipped his words. “Nor is your wielding of it inept when you give it full rein, as you did, unconsciously, that night.” He dropped his right hand to his side and spread his fingers for an instant, as if he felt the magic flowing.

  “Your questions, however,” he continued in a tight voice, “deal not with your own dread of the power, but with Lanse’s fear of you. And to answer you on that point, I must tell you something of the boy’s history. When his parents died, I took him in—for mercy’s sake, in part. But also, I knew that there was, far back in his family’s past, a trace of the gift.” The wizard hesitated. His eyes glittered in the shadows of the balsams. “Do you take my meaning? Or shall I speak more plainly?”

  Carin shifted her weight onto one shoe and scuffed at the snow with the other. At the risk of rekindling Verek’s anger against his housekeeper, she confessed what she knew.

  “I heard about Lanse trying to study magic with you. Myra told me he couldn’t learn it. He was hopeless at it.

  “Myra also said that your grandfather had Mister Jerold as his apprentice,” Carin added, touching on a subject—Lord Legary—that Verek had warned her to avoid. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Myra said Jerold turned out to be an average sort of wizard, not a brilliant one like your grandfather was wanting.” And not a satisfactory replacement, surely, for Legary’s dead son. How could a run-of-the-mill apprentice ever take the place of a child of the blood?

  “Feh!” Verek sounded insulted but not riled. “I tell you distinctly: Myra is talking rubbish. There was a time, long years ago, when Jerold would have been celebrated as a masterful wysard. Eager apprentices would have flocked to him for the getting of wisdom.”

  The warlock paused again, and a melancholy sigh escaped him. Then he went on: �
��But apprentices are few now in Ladrehdin. Lanse was the last to apply to the House of Verek for training in the wysard’s art. In that circumstance you may, perhaps, begin to see into the heart of the boy’s aversion to you … and to your displays of power.”

  A wind gusted through the treetops. Carin, startled, jerked her head back to look up at the branches bending above. The disturbance in the air lasted only a moment. She dropped her gaze and found Verek studying her face as though he could see it clearly in the twilight.

  He chafed his arms through the sleeves of his coat. The single gust had deepened the cold, but still he lingered with her under the balsams.

  “Resentment, envy … ” he muttered, more inwardly than to Carin. “Treading close behind such rancor is fear. Fear is a powerful goad, but it clouds the mind. The boy sees you first as a rival, then as a more serious threat. He believes that I do not know you for the danger that you are, and he begins to think me enthralled. Wouldn’t I be as wary as he is, save that I have fallen under your spell?”

  Carin said nothing. The wizard seemed truly enthralled, to be going on at such length. She wouldn’t risk spoiling the moment.

  Verek pressed his palms to his eyes. “Something of the sort was in Lanse’s mind,” he said almost absently, “when he raised his weapon to you. The boy thought me so thoroughly in your power that he was compelled to act in defiance of my commands, to save his master as well as himself. His … misreading … of the situation has been corrected. I do not say that you need look for tenderness from him, but neither must you watch your back.”

  The wizard gestured at the trail that was visible as a gray ribbon through the snow. “Come. Let’s not stand talking all night. It’s too cold and I am too hungry. Handling sled-deer builds an appetite like a woodcutter’s.”

  When Verek motioned for her to precede him, Carin stepped into the track. She moved along briskly with a snowshoer’s shuffling stride, glad to stretch muscles that cold and underuse had made tight. However, as she passed the oak grove behind the shed, a thought brought her up short. She halted so suddenly that Verek nearly ran over her.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled as both caught their balance. “But it just occurred to me to ask: When you made your deal with the woodsprite—that it won’t hurt you, and you won’t hurt me—did you agree to take my ankle iron off? That should have been part of the bargain, because I hate the thing.”

  A corner of Verek’s mouth quirked. He shook his head. “No mention was made of the chalse. And I think you will find that neither the sprite nor myself is willing to reopen the negotiations to make an amendment in your favor. The creature, I’ll wager, would be no happier to have you go missing than I would. In the goblin is all the zeal, so noticeably lacking in yourself, for seeing this venture through to its end.”

  The wizard put his hand on Carin’s shoulder, and she felt again the little tingle that was not fear, not revulsion, but something that nevertheless made her heart beat faster.

  “So bold has the creature become, I expect we won’t often be free of its presence in the days ahead,” Verek muttered. “Therefore, I take this moment to speak in confidence. My gravest mistake of the past two months was to not kill the sprite when I had the chance. It was a fool’s blunder, to honor my pledge to you to spare the creature’s life.”

  He squeezed her shoulder tightly; Carin did not draw away. “And you, fìleen … you may yet discover that, in trusting the fetch-life, you have made an error of your own.”

  * * *

  Their second full day as guests of the monk Welwyn began much as the first had, with snowshoeing practice for Carin and sled-deer maneuvering for Verek and Lanse. Echoing down from the slopes came their cries of “Dey!” and “Doy!”—for “left” and “right,” she learned from Welwyn, who didn’t leave her side all morning.

  “I’ll not see my best pupil become a meal for a horse-sized mountain cat,” the monk teased her. “Besides, I’ve only these few hours to teach you to walk uphill and down—and Drisha knows you’ll be doing plenty of both in days to come.”

  So it was true. Vanished was Carin’s small hope that the woodsprite’s conjecture had been wrong. The warlock meant to go on with this madness. He meant to climb into the mountains. She might have cried, if Welwyn hadn’t kept her too busy to dwell on what lay ahead.

  “Attend, my dear,” he admonished, directing Carin’s attention to a steep ascent, at the base of which they stood. “To climb such as this, turn your toes out. You’ll look a bit like a duck waddling, but you’ll get up it.” The monk demonstrated by pointing the toes of his bearpaws outward and using the inside edges of the frames to bite into the snow. Carin did likewise, but well to the side of Welwyn’s path up the slope, in case the fat fellow lost his footing and slid back to the beginning. Both of them made it up, however, to a ledge that was barely wide enough to turn around on.

  “Now I’ll show you the preferred way of getting down,” Welwyn said, and grinned impishly. “You could always fall off the mountain—that’s quickest, don’t you know. But I don’t recommend it. Learn the proper descent and live to climb another day.”

  He handed Carin cords to tie to the upturned tips of her bearpaws. Holding on to the loose ends, she started down, leaning back and pulling up on each cord in turn to keep the tips of her snowshoes from digging in and throwing her. It was rather like grappling with two clumsy pups on leashes, but Carin managed the technique without once toppling over.

  Till midday she climbed and descended, practiced her turns and ’shoed round the glen, until at last Welwyn called a halt. While Carin shuffled wearily to the cabin to put a pot of leftover stew on the fire, the monk went higher up the slopes to fetch down the two deer drivers.

  When they were all gathered at the table in Welwyn’s kitchen, the energetic little man served them, then swallowed his own lunch before Carin had her bread well buttered. Excusing himself then, he trundled across to the back room that was his alone now, with Lanse spending nights in the shed.

  From the room, Welwyn hauled out armful after armful of winter gear until the couch, armchair, and unused half of the long table were buried. There were wool blankets, fur sleeping bags and woven rabbit-skin robes, deerskin mittens lined in wool, hoods with ruffs, and knee-boots of tanned deerhide with braided tops to seal out snow. Also piled up were an ax with a leather-sheathed blade, tent poles, pots and pans, two snow shovels, an ice chisel, two candle lanterns, and a bag of tapers.

  Carin’s apprehensiveness eased a little with every new item the monk brought out. Foolhardy though this winter expedition was, they would continue it as well-prepared as this seasoned mountain man could make them.

  Welwyn stood over his treasures, beaming like a boy with a roomful of toys. “Finish your stew, my worthies, and then we’ll be about strapping all this to the sled. It’ll take a bit of doing, but you’ll not be wanting to leave any of it behind.”

  Loading the sled took most of the daylight hours that were left to them. Though Welwyn’s deer sleigh wasn’t much more than a long, narrow board on runners, it held an astonishing lot when expertly packed. Onto it, tied up in a tent-tarp, went all the gear except the clothing that Welwyn had laid out in the cabin. The sled also had room for the quantities of food that he brought up from his cellar: not only jerked beef and sacks of meal, but also frozen bricks of stewed meat, slabs of a heavy raisin cake, salt in a bag, sun-dried apples, pears and plums, and a cask of tea. They would eat better in the mountains than they had on the journey to Welwyn’s glen.

  Carin, leaving the men to ready the camp gear, retired to her borrowed bedroom to get her own things in order. Her instructions were strict: Take only one extra shirt and trousers, Welwyn said, but every pair of wool stockings that she had. For the next—how many weeks?—she must travel light but with enough clothes to keep warm and dry in ever-deepening snow.

  Her packing was quickly done, her few items fitting into one sack that would be carried by a stout Trosdan deer and not on Carin’s
own shoulders. She set the pack beside her closed bedroom door. Then Carin stood fingering the folded papers that she’d stolen from Verek’s library in Ruain.

  Not since Deroucey had she had a chance to work at deciphering Lord Legary’s ensorcelled narrative. And not again, after tonight, was she likely to have even an hour’s privacy to devote to the task. In the mountains, Carin and her “escorts”—as Welwyn chose to call them—would probably be sleeping three to a tent.

  She drew the papers from her pocket and sat on the bed. Again she used a pillowcase to cover the jumble of Legary’s bespelled writing. Each time Carin snatched the linen away, a very few words appeared legibly, but only for an instant before sinking back into the prevailing chaos. She unearthed the phrases to the tomb, his gift, and this House.

  The words still hidden, however, far outnumbered the handful that Carin had wrested from the narrative. At this rate, she would be years reading Legary’s narrative. And she strongly suspected that, were the dead magician’s words not deciphered before this journey ended, she needn’t bother reading them at all.

  Think, she ordered herself. Verek and Welwyn insist that you can do magic. Can’t you work a little of it on this piece of paper? Why don’t you mutter a spell or recite a charm and make the words come clear?

  The problem was, she didn’t know what to say. In none of the books that Carin had read in Verek’s library were wizards’ spells written down. Few of the volumes she’d perused had done more than mention sorcery, except for that weird text of Archamon. And it was so shrouded in spellcraft that no page of it, other than Legary’s deathbed “confession,” had lain open to Carin’s scrutiny.

  Despite her months in the company of wizards, she realized, she had only one charm to her credit. She had learned it, not from a sorcerer, but from the wisewoman who wove charms and kept chickens near the village where Carin had lived with the wheelwright’s family. That same woman’s whispered advice had sent her north to claim, as Welwyn put it, her “blood-gift.”