Waterspell book 4, p.1
Waterspell Book 4, page 1
Waterspell Book 4:
The Witch
Deborah J. Lightfoot
Seven Rivers
Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by Deborah J. Lightfoot
(aka Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore)
All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any portion thereof may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, or used in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner.
Seven Rivers Publishing
P.O. Box 682
Crowley, Texas 76036
www.waterspell.net
Cover design: Tatiana Vila, viladesign.net
First Electronic Edition: February 2022
First Paperback Edition: February 2022
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Waterspell Book 4: The Witch
A Fantasy by Deborah J. Lightfoot
Summary: In the House of Verek, it’s five years later. The waters are troubled. Memories are darkening. If the story is to end “happily ever after” for Carin and Verek, old demons must be laid to rest.
Readers of the Waterspell fantasy series will welcome this long-awaited fourth book for the answers it provides to questions raised in volumes 1 through 3: Does the wysard Verek regain his powers, and will Carin make her way back to him? Have Carin’s parents survived the plague that devastated their world, and will she ever see them again? Did Lanse survive the attack by Carin’s defender? Is Lord Legary really dead? And not least: Did the necromancer die in the jaws of Carin’s conjured dragon? Remember: there was no blood in the water. These questions and more are answered in Waterspell Book 4: The Witch, which picks up the story of the lovers, Carin and Verek, half a decade after readers saw the pair separated in the closing chapters of the original trilogy.
By the blood of Abraxas, it’s about time we learned what happened next.
ISBN 978-1-7377173-0-0 (Ebook)
ISBN 978-0-9728768-9-6 (Paperback)
Boxed sets containing this title:
ISBN 978-1-7377173-2-4 (Ebook: Waterspell, The Complete Series)
ISBN 978-1-7377173-1-7 (Audiobook: Waterspell, The Complete Series)
The WATERSPELL series:
Book 1: The Warlock
Book 2: The Wysard
Book 3: The Wisewoman
Book 4: The Witch
Electronic Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your preferred bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
For Crystal,
who taught me the meaning
of persistence and what it is
to show grace under pressure.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue. Vengeance
Chapter 1. Remembrance
Chapter 2. Restoration
Chapter 3. Message In a Bottle
Chapter 4. Blood Ties
Chapter 5. Forbidden Sorcery
Chapter 6. The Arts of Death
Chapter 7. Dead Things
Chapter 8. Spellwork
Chapter 9. Patterns
Chapter 10. Master Magicians
Chapter 11. Plans
Chapter 12. Fire and Water
Chapter 13. Wellsprings
Chapter 14. The Beach
Chapter 15. Fragments
Chapter 16. The Restless Sea
Chapter 17. The Fate of Wysards
Chapter 18. Future’s Hope
Chapter 19. A World Apart
Chapter 20. The Book of the Two Kareninas
Chapter 21. Old Griefs
Chapter 22. In the Fullness of Time
Epilogue
Author’s Note
“There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”
“The Lobster-Quadrille”
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
(Lewis Carroll)
Prologue
Vengeance
“She’s still out there,” Verek murmured. “As I feared.”
Carin slipped within the reassuring circle of his arms and for a moment said nothing, too shaken by his words to reply.
She had been reading in the manor’s library when the pool of the wysards exploded with such violent agitation that the noise like a foundation-shattering flood reached her at the big desk under the windows. Verek had been in his ground-floor workroom. Both of them raced to the stairs that plunged downward through bedrock to the enchanted wellspring, Verek a few steps in the lead. Bursting into the cavern, together they witnessed a maelstrom.
Waves billowed above the pool, their crests halfway to the ceiling of the enormous cave. As each wave collapsed, frothing and roiling, it sent the waters of the wizards’ well fountaining up to crash against the cave’s walls. Carin and Verek were forced back to shelter within the stairwell, their hands clapped over their ears, the thunder of the waves beating at them and ringing from the cavern’s walls with a note like a deep bass bell.
The maelstrom died within seconds. Silence returned. The waters of the enchanted pool flowed back into the perfectly circular basin and grew still, the pool’s surface regaining its flawless mirror sheen.
For minutes, neither Carin nor Verek spoke. Her head throbbed from the deafening noise, and the assault on her ears had left them feeling stuffed with cotton wool.
Verek stood a little in front of Carin, his hands still at his ears as if he had forgotten them. Then he flung out his right arm and held up his hand in a gesture of warding, his fingers stiff and pointing at the ceiling. His gaze remained locked on the waters of the wizards’ well.
“What do you see?” Carin questioned him in a whisper.
He did not immediately reply. Quietly, to avoid breaking his concentration, Carin stepped nearer, standing close at Verek’s side and peering at the surface of the enchanted pool. It showed her nothing except a red-tinged reflection of the cave’s rough ceiling, high above them. But her husband had always seen more deeply than she into the pool’s depths. He was following something there, something that held his gaze for long enough that the ringing in Carin’s ears had largely subsided by the time he turned to her and took her into his arms.
“She’s out there,” he said quietly. “And she’s attempting to recross the void.”
Carin had no need to ask who “she” was. Only one woman of Ladrehdin could possibly be “out there,” beyond the void, now that Carin had returned from that mind-bending place after destroying the crystals which had complicated her own world-spanning travels. Only one woman of Ladrehdin could possibly work the magic required to cross the void and return here, to exact her revenge on the pair who had exiled her.
“You don’t think she died in the jaws of the dragon?” Carin asked the wysard who held her close.
Verek shook his head. “I saw no blood in the water that day. The lack has troubled me.” He paused, then added, “Would that your dragon had ripped her open and devoured her entrails as we watched. Then would my soul be eased.”
Chapter 1
Remembrance
Master Welwyn returned to Ruain in the early summer of the year in which the daughter of Carin and Verek turned five, and the couple’s son reached his fourth birthday. As the brown-robed “monk” observed the youngsters at their roughhousing in the courtyard of the manor house, Carin only had to cast the spell of stone once—to stop Galen from setting fire to a garden planter-box.
Both children had been delightful until the age of two. Then, each had turned into a barely manageable hellion. Impulsive, stubborn, and possessing intuitive gifts for magic, both could work it before learning the first thing about controlling it. Red-headed Galen would have made a firedrake proud, the way the boy sparked flames with scarcely a thought. His raven-haired sister Nina had her own untamed talents, hers lying in the opposite element: water. The nymph raised small but mighty floods that toppled statuary and cut muddy channels through Weyrrock’s flowerbeds.
In near-desperation to control the children, Carin had thought of the ’scrying stone that Verek had once employed to trap the woodsprite in his library. She’d also remembered, with distaste, the shackle of sorcery she had worn—the chalse Verek had clamped on her ankle to keep her from deserting their quest into the mountains to face a necromancer. Reading about both devices now, however, when she had a few rare moments in which to read, convinced her that the things were borderline black magic. Wysards who followed the teachings of Archamon frowned on their use.
It was evidence of Verek’s own desperation that year, that he had been driven to such extremities in his early dealings with the mistrustful “accidental conjurer” who held the key to summoning an otherworldly dragon. So urgently had Verek desired Carin’s help in overpowering the sorceress Morann, he had resorted to behaviors he would condemn in any other circumstance.
As she reshelved the books that described those questionable devices, Carin also put away any thought of using them to monitor or restrain her children. Slightly ashamed of herself for even considering such methods, she heaved a sigh of resignation and thought, I’ll just never sleep again or have a moment to myself, until the hellions grow up and leave home.
Oh, she shouldn’t say she never slept. When exhaustion drove her to it, Carin dosed the children with Aunt Megella’s sleep-for-now powder. The wisewoman kept her supplied with that concoction, which had proved to be a sanity-saver. Carin used it liberally to keep the children in their beds at night and out of mischief.
She also had the spell of stone at her command, but she employed it sparingly. Petrification was the first spell learned by any novice magician, and it was as easily broken as cast. Carin used it on the children as little as possible, to maintain its effectiveness for as long as possible. No doubt both Nina and Galen would soon figure out how to free themselves from the spell’s control, discovering the trick on their own, needing no word of instruction from their parents.
This afternoon, after Verek had picked up Galen’s small, rock-hard body and swung the boy away from the planter he’d started to burn, Carin lifted the spell and listened as her husband explained to his now-fidgety son why burning garden decor was unacceptable. Verek redirected the boy’s attention to a wood-filled fire-pit, well away from Nina’s muddy floods, where Galen could practice his flame-throwing.
Master Welwyn, standing in his monkish robes at Carin’s side, watched all of this, and chuckled. When Verek rejoined Carin, Welwyn turned to them both and declared:
“My lady, m’lord, you make handsome children, the pair of them as gifted as they are beautiful. But these offshoots of yours need taking in hand, don’t you know. Leave them to me. From this moment, I am their governor and tutor.”
Carin tried to pretend she was insulted by Welwyn’s seeming to cast aspersions on her parenting abilities. She rounded on the monk, spluttering a little, and managed to assert in a tone that was faintly indignant, “They’re happy and healthy!”
Verek, however, made no effort whatsoever to feign any response except relief. “Good,” he snapped, and turned to his housekeeper, who sat beside the kitchen doorway enjoying the sun as she snapped beans into a pot.
“If I recall aright, Myra,” he addressed her, standing with his hands on his hips, “in the main wing of the house there is a suite of rooms spacious enough to house Welwyn comfortably, and alongside him our two hellions … securely. We will move the children into a nursery there, where their new governor may exercise his oversight of them as they merit.”
The relocation was swiftly accomplished, as neither child had ever shown an inclination to stay much indoors or to accumulate possessions. Karenina—she they called Nina—wanted only her favorite toy, the pincushion that Carin had transformed into a huggable sea urchin bristling with soft “spines.” Galen happily left behind his box of playthings, demanding only his wooden rocking horse, a miniature likeness of Brogar that Verek had made for the boy, complete with a tooled leather saddle and bridle.
As Welwyn picked up his saddlebags and started to follow the children to their newly assigned apartments, the monk paused and laid his fingers on Carin’s arm. The round little man gazed up at her with a sympathetic eye, then raised himself on his boot-toes to kiss Carin’s cheek.
“Give them into my hands,” he murmured, “and go pour yourself a stiff drink, my dear. You’ve earned it.”
Carin did exactly that. Joined by Verek, she downed a glass of dhera in the library, almost gulping the tart liquor. As she and Verek sat together drinking, not talking, Carin tried to feel guilty about the heady sense of liberation she was experiencing at having Welwyn arrive, just as she neared a breaking point, only one more fire or flood away from screaming insanely at her potentially destructive offspring. She could summon no guilt, however, only intense gratitude.
After drinks came supper, and after that, bedtime. When all three—Welwyn and his charges—were comfortably settled in their suite of rooms, no sound but their laughter drifted down the long upper-story hallway of the house’s master wing. For a time that evening, Carin and Verek stood listening in the doorway of their own nearby apartment. Not once was Welwyn’s voice raised loudly enough to reach their ears. Shrieks aplenty came from the children, but these were sounds of glee, not alarm or protest. As the night darkened, all noises ceased.
Even so, Carin and Verek left their hall door open when they went to bed. Both had learned to sleep lightly, alert to any patter of bare feet that might be passing by on the way to burning down the house.
Very soon after Galen was walking, on a night when all the household slept, the child had paid a stealthy visit to Myra’s kitchen. On the cooking hearth he had sparked a conflagration so enormous that flames were shooting up the chimney—and out into the room, threatening the trestle table—before Myra could awaken and sound the alarm.
Carin and Verek had found the boy sitting so close to the inferno, his bright-red hair was in danger of catching fire. But Galen only giggled and clapped his hands in delight at what he had made—his gestures sending the flames higher and hotter with each clap.
Nina was there too, at the sink basin, working the hand-pump so vigorously that she’d flooded the kitchen floor three inches deep—but not, evidently, with any thought of dousing the fire. As her parents rushed in, slipping on the wet floor, barely avoiding broken necks—Carin sidestepping a drowned mouse—Nina came sloshing to them, laughing, stomping her bare feet. With a summoning gesture the girl sent the water up the walls, to drip from the ceiling and steam in the fire. Which only made Galen giggle harder.
After that episode, Verek went around the house placing spells of suppression on every unused fireplace in all the then-vacant rooms in the manor’s main wing. And he secured the kitchen hearth with a spell of confinement so restrictive, Myra complained that her cooking fires would hardly boil an egg.
Maybe that will keep Galen from burning us all alive, but it still leaves us the Nina problem, Carin thought, mulling her daughter’s love of water and what might happen—the uncontainable magic that might flow forth—if the budding wysard got into the blue bedroom and conjured with the potently pristine springwater pool adjoining it. Unsettled by the prospect, Carin suggested unbreakable locks on that bedroom’s door. Verek, alive at once to the danger, his face a study in fatherly pride mixed with alarm, rushed off to secure the chamber with both spellwork and metalwork. Laboring late that night in his downstairs workroom, he forged iron door-locks that neither a tidal wave nor dragon-fire could have breached.
So it was that both parents listened closely and slept lightly for several nights after Welwyn took the children under his tutelage.
On one of those evenings, Carin sat gazing into the fire in the bedchamber she and Verek had taken in the master wing, a few doors down from the sprawling apartments where Welwyn lodged with his pupils. Carin was remembering her first meeting with the monkish wysard—or trying to remember it. Her memories seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Images and episodes flashed through her thoughts, vivid but oddly random. Many of them, Carin couldn’t assign to specific places or times.
She looked up and smiled as Verek came in through the open bedroom door. He left it ajar behind him, the better to hear any uproar that might arise from the hellions down the hall.
With a contented sigh, Theil settled beside her on the thickly cushioned couch.
“By the Powers,” he said, “it is a fine thing to apprentice those two adepts to the only wysard of Ladrehdin fit to take them under his wing. Welwyn is a matchless teacher, and we are fortunate that he is willing to accept the task.”
