A Sorcerer’s Treason Read online

  A

  Sorcerer’s

  Treason

  by Sarah Zettel

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Ida Lewis,

  Who kept the light at Lime Rock,

  Rhode Island, 1879–1911.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  As ever, the author gratefully acknowledges the Untitled Writers Group for their help and patience. She would also like to thank the Bayfield Historical Society and the rangers at the Sand Island light for their help with her research, as well as the folks at Groenke’s First Street Inn, who were there when she needed them.

  Additional thanks to Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, authors of Women Who Kept the Lights, which was partly responsible for starting this book, and Lee Murdock, whose rendition of “Keeper of the Light” also had a lot to do with it.

  I have gone into the open land …

  I have drawn a transparent line around me,

  and I have cried out in a great voice.

  (From A RUSSIAN PROTECTIVE CHARM)

  Chapter One

  Lighthouse Point, Sand Island, Wisconsin

  At midnight between November first and November second of the year 1899, Bridget Lederle’s eyes snapped open of their own accord, bringing her instantly awake. For a moment, she lay and listened to the gale outside her window shaking the shutters and rattling the frame in the sash. The faintest breath of the November wind crept through the cracks, brushing past her cheek. The fixed beam from the lighthouse shined steadily, warning anyone unlucky enough to be out on Lake Superior that they sailed near Sand Island’s rocky shore.

  There was a boat out there. That warning had not been sufficient for some poor soul. Bridget’s inner eye saw it clearly. It was a klinker-built vessel with a single mast. The storm drove it toward the rocky shelf that protruded into the lake under the lighthouse beam. The single sailor aboard struggled helplessly with a sail in tatters and a broken tiller. He seemed to be trying to reach her tiny jetty and boathouse, but he wasn’t going to make it.

  Bridget saw it all, and her heart pounded hard at the sight.

  She did not waste any time on panic or think to question the vision. Her visions had been coming to her ever since she was a child, and she was years past wondering whether they were true. Without hesitation, she swung herself out from under the quilts, planting bare feet against the frigid floorboards.

  Outside, the wind whistled under the eaves. Vicious drafts curled around Bridget’s ankles as she minced her way across the floor to the clothes pegs.

  She had to hurry. There was a boat out there.

  As was her custom, she’d left her thickest skirt and sweater hanging on the pegs. Her woolen stockings lay on the dresser. Her oilskin and boots waited downstairs by the front door, along with the covered lantern and kitchen matches.

  She moved with assurance, even though the room was lit only by the reflection of the golden beam of the lighthouse lamp. From its tower overhead, it cut through the gale, warning the ships from the rocks and shoals that surrounded the island, and helping to keep sailors safe from Lake Superior and its grasping, grey waters.

  But, soon, Lake Superior would throw a small, painted boat up onto the rocks, smashing its hull and swamping its single sailor.

  I will save him. Determination pressed Bridget’s mouth into a thin line and she threw open the white painted fire door that led to the tower’s spiral staircase, the only stairs the house possessed. She ran down to the first floor, each footfall clanging against the filigreed iron steps. The lake does not get anyone tonight.

  Bridget did not even take the time to rouse her housekeeper, Mrs. Hansen, or Mrs. Hansen’s big son Samuel. She just shrugged into her father’s old oilskins and stuffed her feet into cracked Wellington boots.

  Wrapped against the weather as well as one could be, Bridget lit her lantern. With the tiny light clutched in one hand, she unlatched the door and stepped out into the gale.

  The wind slammed against her as if it meant to lay her flat. It grabbed at her skirts, pulling them tight around her legs. Despite the ferocious wind, the night remained clear, and Bridget could see the light from Devil’s Island beaming as brightly as any of the stars overhead. But the wind carried the smell of ice, and Bridget shivered involuntarily against its onslaught. This was not the worst Lake Superior could do, but it was bad enough.

  As quickly as she could, Bridget made her way down the steep wooden stairs to the boathouse at the lake’s edge. The lake boiled black beneath the night sky and the steady light from the house shined on the steep curl of white-capped waves. Icy spray lashed her from head to toe, blurring her vision and making it hard to breathe. It stung her cheeks with cold and dribbled down her collar, making her skin twitch into goose pimples.

  Bridget suppressed another shiver, as if she did not want the lake to see how she feared its moods. She pulled the hood of her thick mens’ coat further down and lifted her lantern high. Spray hissed against the tin housing and Bridget strained to separate the shadows from each other.

  There. The thin, guttering beam of her lantern touched the painted, battered prow jutting out of the water at the ugly angle where it had been smashed on the edge of the sandstone shelf. The single mast still stood, but the tattered sail flapped wet and useless in the wind.

  Bridget planted her boots carefully on slick, uneven stone and made her way forward with a cautious, rocking gait. Waves surged around her ankles, soaking her hems and tugging at each step. All around, the late-autumn wind howled high and sharp, angry at its failure to drive her back indoors. Each wave of the lake roared back its response that it would have her yet.

  In front of her, the broken boat swayed, half in, half out of the water. The lake pulled at it, trying to suck the traveler down to where it could swaddle him in its cold. Bridget gripped her drenched skirt in one hand and slogged ahead, until at last she stood grasping the soaking gunwale. A jagged outcropping had impaled the boat. Ropes, casks, nets, all the paraphernalia of a small fishing craft floated in a tangle at the stern.

  The man lay facedown in the bilge. Bridget hung the lantern carefully on the end of a splintered spar and heaved the man onto his back. She could see just enough to gain the impression of dark skin, black hair and a black coat. Without hesitation, she pried his mouth open and swept her finger around inside, to make sure he had inhaled nothing but water. Even as she did so, he began to cough. She turned him onto his side, letting him vomit up gouts of fresh water into the bilge. The boat rocked unsteadily with each motion, rattling the flotsam, and it seemed to Bridget that the lake chuckled as it pulled at the broken stern.

  The man’s chest heaved against her hand, and Bridget shoved him into a sitting position. He gasped, dragging great breaths of air and spray into his tortured lungs.

  “Can you stand?” shouted Bridget in his ear to be heard over the wind and the lake. “We must get you inside!”

  He lifted his head and Bridget saw that his eyes were as dark as th
e night-blackened lake, but behind them, there was light. That light seeped through her skin even as the cold did, and touched her blood and heart.

  She started then, and would have let him go had he not clamped one death-cold hand on her wrist. He strained to lift himself out of the sloshing, rattling stew that filled his ruined boat. Bridget got her arm under his shoulders and helped him balance on the wreckage. It was then she realized he did not wear normal fisherman’s clothes. His coat was a heavy, woolen thing with many buttons and a high collar. The lantern light glinted on a metal clasp at the throat.

  Bridget shoved this oddity aside. The lake threw all kinds onto shore. What was important right now was to get this man into the warmth.

  She reclaimed the lantern and they forced their way back through the relentless waves to the boathouse and dry land, with Bridget at times half-dragging the stranger. But she was no petite miss, and he was determined. He always found his footing again, no matter how badly he slipped. At last, they came to the foot of the boathouse stairs and he staggered, catching himself against the railing, just in time to keep Bridget from completely dropping him. His wide black eyes traced the length of the stairs, and Bridget thought for a moment he was going to tell her he could not make it. But then, he caught sight of the lighthouse beam. He gazed up at the light, and then at her, and he smiled a smile so sweet that Bridget felt her throat tighten.

  From somewhere, he found the strength to help haul himself up the stairs and to stand on his own as Bridget opened the door to the summer kitchen. They staggered inside together. Buckets’ worth of water sluiced off them both, making rivers and lakes on the flagstones.

  As soon as the man crossed the threshold, he sank to his knees in the middle of the frigid water. He would have fallen onto his face, had Bridget not dropped to her own knees and grasped his shoulders. He smelled of lake water, cold and wet wool. There was nowhere about him the trace of any human warmth.

  “Mrs. Hansen!” Bridget called. “Mrs. Hansen! Samuel!”

  The Norwegian widow and her son were used to being roused at all hours by Bridget’s shout, and both appeared within moments — Mrs. Hansen wrapping her shawl around her nightdress, and Samuel just standing there like a great bullock with his nightshirt over his red flannels.

  “Get him to the spare bedroom, Samuel,” Bridget ordered as she shucked her coat and boots. “Mrs. Hansen …”

  “Hot-water bottles,” finished Mrs. Hansen. “I’ll get the stove going.” Mrs. Hansen knew what was needed as well as Bridget did, having kept the house for Bridget’s father as well as for Bridget. She gathered up the hem of her nightdress and hurried up the three steps into the winter kitchen, where a fire waited banked in the stove. Samuel lumbered forward and, without so much as a grunt of effort, lifted the stranger in both arms to carry him up the stairs to the small bedroom that waited down the short hallway from Bridget’s own.

  Bridget followed him, stopping at the closet for an armload of quilts. They were all old, patched and water-stained, but, nonetheless, warm enough. She also pocketed a cup and the square bottle of strong brandy that she kept there.

  When Bridget reached the spare room, Samuel had the stranger laid out on the metal-framed bed and had already stripped off his boots and stockings. The strange, wide-skirted coat hung on one of the clothes pegs, dripping its allotment of Lake Superior onto the floorboards. Bridget deposited the quilts at the foot of the bed and the brandy on the dresser beside the wash jug and basin. The gale still rattled the window and the shutters, but it was losing force. It seemed to consider that it had already done enough for one night and all that remained was to remind Bridget that it would be back, and next time it would bring the snow.

  Bridget lit the hurricane lantern as Samuel fumbled to remove the man’s trousers. She moved to help him without a blush or second thought. After eight years of pulling sailors out of Lake Superior, the sight of a naked man held no terror for her.

  She at once saw the source of Samuel’s difficulty. The man wore a worked leather belt. Samuel’s big fingers struggled with its ornate buckle, which seemed to be woven of bands of pure gold. Bridget’s smaller hands found the trick of it and snapped the buckle open. She laid the belt and its ornament on the sill, where the stranger would be sure to see it when he woke.

  The pants were not the canvas trousers she expected. They were leather pantaloons of some kind, with laces where she would have expected buttons. Underneath them he wore woolen hose, with linen hose underneath those. He also wore a woolen tunic over a linen shirt with tails almost as long as Samuel’s nightshirt. They stripped him of those too. His well-muscled chest was an expanse of rich tan skin marred, Bridget saw, by two old scars — one long slash on his belly and one short, puckered scoring far too near his heart.

  A lumpy cloth bag hung on a leather thong around his neck. Bridget left that where it was.

  Bridget and Samuel layered the quilts over him just as Mrs. Hansen came through the door carrying the chipped basin filled with a half-dozen hot-water bottles. Bridget laid four of them at the man’s icy feet and two on his chest.

  The man did not move. Fear and disappointment touched Bridget’s mind.

  “Hold his head, Mrs. Hansen. I’ll try to get some brandy into him.”

  Mrs. Hansen lifted the man’s dark head while Bridget unstoppered the bottle. She tipped a measure of the sharp-smelling liquid into the cup and held it to his lips. He did not respond. Mrs. Hansen gently opened his mouth so Bridget could dribble a little brandy down his throat. He coughed once, then swallowed. Bridget gave him the rest of the dose, and he drank it easily.

  His eyes opened again. They remained dark, almost black, even in the lamplight, and nothing of that light she had seen in them before waited there. His whole face registered deep confusion. Bridget laid her hand on his brow, pushing back the damp curls that had plastered themselves to his forehead. To her relief, she felt his skin warming, but not to the point of fever.

  “You are quite safe,” Bridget told him as she straightened up. “You are in the lighthouse on Sand Island. I am Bridget Lederle, keeper of the light.”

  He spoke, his voice still rattling from the water he had breathed, but Bridget understood nothing of the language he used. Its lilt made it sound a bit like Norwegian, although its hard consonants sounded like German, but it was not either.

  Russian? she wondered to herself. It was possible. There had been a Russian man down in the village once, a sailor, and he was dark like this, but his clothes and his eyes …

  She shook herself. Those were thoughts for the morning, not for a storm-tossed night.

  The man did not seem to see her in comprehension. He fumbled for his bag on its thong, still muttering.

  “Rest,” she told him, hoping he understood her tone, if not her words. “You will feel better in the morning.”

  She patted his shoulder, and all at once, he caught her hand in a strong grip. Mrs. Hansen gave a little shriek. Bridget, startled, froze for a bare instant. In that instant, the stranger wrapped a braid of cloth around her wrist and pinned her eyes with his own gaze, all that strange light shining inside him. She felt it burn through her then, and it forced open her mind’s eye and she saw …

  She saw a girl dressed in the golden robes of a queen and knew the girl was afraid.

  She saw a dark man looking out over sea cliffs, his face set in a frown of worry and suspicion. He hunted the man who lay in her bed.

  She saw herself, standing in front of a golden cage that held a bird made entirely of flame. The cage was weakening and the bird inside would soon be free.

  The next thing she knew, Samuel had grabbed the man’s hand and pulled it away from her. The braid around her wrist loosened and the light blinked out of the stranger, and out of her. A tremor ran through Bridget. She lifted her water-roughened hand and slammed it hard against the stranger’s ear.

  “Never again, sir!” she ordered. “Or I swear by God I’ll give you back to the lake!”
<
br />   “Forgive me,” he whispered, but Bridget did not miss the smile that played around his lips. “I wished only to speak with you.”

  “Then from now on you will use your tongue.” She squared her shoulders and tried to pull her ragged composure back together.

  “I will.” He nodded, his craggy face as solemn as could be now. “Forgive me.”

  “Mrs. Hansen, Samuel, let’s go.” Bridget turned on her heel and left the room. Outside the door, her knees trembled so that she had to stop and lean against the wall.

  “Miss Bridget?” Mrs. Hansen hurried to her side. “Are you all right? What did he do? Should Samuel stay to watch him?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Hansen,” Bridget said. It was only partly a lie. Bridget pushed herself away from the wall. “And I think you and Samuel may return to bed.” She frowned and reached inside herself, searching for some hint of immediate danger. She almost wished she’d find something, so she would have an excuse to remove the stranger from her house. But there was no warning, only a nameless sensation of change that felt neither distinctly good, nor distinctly bad.

  “He is just a foreigner. He will not trouble us further.” At least, not tonight. “I was only startled.”

  “If you’re certain,” said Mrs. Hansen uneasily. Bridget nodded, and Mrs. Hansen accepted her affirmation in silence, but Bridget also knew the housekeeper would be tying an amulet against the evil eye around Samuel’s neck before she went to sleep. For once, Bridget could not chide the old woman for this precaution.

  “Good night, Mrs. Hansen,” was all Bridget said.

  “Good night, Miss Bridget.”

  Bridget did not watch them descend the stairs. She just returned to her own room and shut the door behind her. Her wet dress dragged heavily at her tired body, sending shivers up and down her clammy skin. She wanted badly to retreat to the warmth of her bed, but duty had its own call, especially on nights like this. It was vital that she be certain of the light. So, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering, she changed out of her wet things into her nightdress and, wrapping her knitted shawl around herself, returned to the hallway.