Young Adult/New Adult Literary Fantasy
The Wysard (Waterspell #2)
WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard
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.
WATERSPELL Book 2: The Wysard
Prologue
The Path Between
The
heartbeat couldn’t be hers. She was dead.
Maddeningly,
however, the sound persisted—a strong, steady whump, whump in
Carin’s left ear.
Through the
blackness within her mind, half-formed impressions drifted like moonmist. They
teased her with sensations to which she struggled to attach meaning. Her body lay
sprawled across a surface that was hard enough to bruise her corpse. But her
head and one shoulder rested on matter more yielding. Had her drowned remains
come to rest on a rocky ledge in a supernatural ocean? Was this a pillow of seaweed
cushioning her skull?
No, a thought
whispered from a corner of her torpid brain. Seaweed and rock have no heart
beating in them.
The
rhythmic pounding in Carin’s ear hammered at her until a crack opened to admit
a sliver of comprehension:
She lived.
If the
heart-sounds were hers, then she wasn’t dead. If the heart beat in another’s
chest and she heard it, then she was not only alive, but also pressing very near
some other undead being.
Her eyes
jerked open. They beheld what might have been a rumpled snowdrift bathed in the
light of a blood-red sunset.
She stared.
Whump, whump in
her ear deepened the crack, penetrated to the core of her cold-shocked mind—
Lucidity
flashed through the breach, and abruptly Carin knew: the rumpled whiteness that
pressed against her face was Lord Verek’s linen shirt. The reddish tinge on it
was no natural light from a setting sun, but the glow from the walls of Verek’s
vault of sorcery. The wizard lay on the cavern’s floor of polished stone. Carin
lay atop him, her head pillowed on his chest, her ear to his heart, and her
slowly focusing eyes inventing wind-drifted snow from the wrinkles of his
shirt.
She gave a
violent start, put both hands to the floor, and heaved herself off Verek’s
unconscious body—so forcefully that she nearly toppled back into the
ensorcelled pool behind her. She teetered on the pool’s rim, waging a brief,
desperate struggle for life. To fall again into those glacial depths would kill
her. The intense cold had cast her faculties into an abyss that must have no
rival but death itself. Without the sorcerer to drag her up from that oblivion,
Carin stood no chance of surviving a second dunking.
And her
rescuer was in no condition now to extract her from the unnatural waters of his
wizards’ well. Verek lay like a corpse. Carin’s sudden movement hadn’t roused
him to consciousness. He appeared as lost in the abyss as she had been.
She kept
her balance. Carin stumbled to safety, treading between Verek’s body and the
enchanted pool that imperiled all living flesh, whether mortal or magian. She
reached the nearest of the four stone benches that ringed the wizards’ well.
Upon that seat carved with the symbol of a fish she collapsed, but she took
care to avoid the shape that was cut into the stone.
The symbol,
precisely centered and deeply carved, might be nothing but decoration. Like its
fellows on the other benches in the cave—the image of a key chiseled into the
seat across the pool from this one, a radiant sun on the bench to Carin’s left,
a crescent moon to her right—the fish might be only a token of magical art.
Maybe the four symbols were a wizard’s badge of office, as a king’s crown and
scepter were emblems of his royal authority.
Or, Carin thought, maybe
there’s magic in every line and curve. The events of her three weeks’
imprisonment in Lord Verek’s house had led her to suspect sorcery in all
elements of his domain. She distrusted the blighted woodland outside his manor
walls and the shape-shifting books in his library. But here in the cave below
the library rose the undoubted wellspring of magic. Power flowed in the waters
of the enchanted pool and in the lifeblood of the sorcerer who had submitted
himself to it.
©2011 Deborah J.
Lightfoot. All rights reserved.
WATERSPELL Book 1: The Warlock
Drawn into the schemes of an angry wizard, Carin glimpses
the place she once called home. It lies upon a shore that seems unreachable. To
learn where she belongs and how to get there, the teenage traveler must
decipher the words of an alien book, follow the clues in a bewitched poem,
conjure a dragon from a pool of magic—and tread carefully around a seductive
but volatile, emotionally scarred sorcerer who can’t seem to decide whether to
love her or kill her.
"Carin and Verek’s well-crafted relationship
balances in a tense power struggle … intriguing premise and original characters
… Fine fantasy." —KIRKUS
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Deborah J. Lightfoot Books
Amazon
Book 1: The Warlock $16.95
Book 2: The Wysard $17.95
Book 3: The Wisewoman $15.00
Barnes & Noble
Book 1: The Warlock $16.95
Book 2: The Wysard $17.95
Book 3: The Wisewoman $15.00
Deborah J. Lightfoot Books
Amazon
Book 1: The Warlock $16.95
Book 2: The Wysard $17.95
Book 3: The Wisewoman $15.00
Barnes & Noble
Book 1: The Warlock $16.95
Book 2: The Wysard $17.95
Book 3: The Wisewoman $15.00
Deborah J. Lightfoot
Castles in the cornfield provided the setting for Deborah J.
Lightfoot’s earliest flights of fancy. On her father’s farm in Texas, she grew
up reading tales of adventure and reenacting them behind ramparts of
sun-drenched grain. She left the farm to earn a degree in journalism and write
award-winning books of history and biography. High on her Bucket List was the
desire to try her hand at the genre she most admired. The result is WATERSPELL,
a multi-layered fantasy trilogy about a girl and the wizard who suspects her of
being so dangerous to his world, he believes he'll have to kill her ... which
troubles him, since he's fallen in love with her. Waterspell Book 1: The
Warlock; Book 2: The Wysard; and Book 3: The Wisewoman.
Thanks for hosting a stop on my blog tour! The books of the Waterspell trilogy are the beginning, middle, and end of a continuous story, so it is best to read them in order: (1) The Warlock, (2) The Wysard, and (3) The Wisewoman.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog!
Deborah
www.waterspell.net