“I don’t know what our plans are exactly,” Flora glanced at the silent Kendel, then back at Megan. “But thank you again for taking care of him,” she gave a light hug to Megan, then sat back down with Kendel after the girl left.
“So what happens now? Are you taking me back to Miriam’s land? What are we going to do? How do we get there?” Flora asked. “Can you do something magical right here?”
“I think we have to go the cave where I came out,” Kendel answered.
“How soon do you want to go?” Flora asked. “I just assumed that once we were together, we’d be on our way.”
“We can go today, but you’re welcome to take a nap first, of you want,” Kendel offered, in response to Flora’s earlier report during breakfast that she had flown to New Orleans on a red-eye flight with a plane change in Dallas. “Then we could do some shopping on the way, so that we take some supplies back with us,” he suggested.
Flora yawned. “I didn’t get much sleep on the way out here,” she seemed to slightly slur her words. “If you don’t mind, I will catch a few zee’s.
“When will you get your vision back? You will be able to see again, won’t you?” she asked as she stood up and removed her blouse.
“Shaiss told me I’d be healed when the time was right,” Kendel answered. “I just hope the right time comes sooner than later.”
Flora led Kendel to the upholstered chair in the room, gave him a gentle kiss on the forehead, then slipped under the sheets of the bed, and quickly fell asleep, as Kendel listened to her breathing become slow and regular. He felt comfortable and safe and secure, because Flora was back in his life.
Chapter 29
“Where are we going again?” Flora asked as Kendel sat in the passenger seat of their rented car. They were in a parking lot in Baton Rouge, having just bought packs and supplies they expected to need with them as they returned to Miriam’s magical land.
“Wolf Rock Cave in Kisatchie National Forest,” Kendel answered.
“So, we drive to Leesville, drop off the rental car, then take an Uber to the cave, and we walk through the cave into Miriam’s world,” Flora repeated the plan they had made that morning.
“I think that’ll work,” Kendel agreed.
“It sounds so easy. Why aren’t there more people going back and forth?” Flora asked. She pressed the button to start the car and proceeded to pull out onto the highway.
They talked a great deal as they rode.
“Your funeral was huge,” Flora told Kendel at one point. “For Bedford it had to be the biggest turnout of the year. It was very touching. And the next day I spoke at the high school convocation.”
“How did that go?” Kendel asked, fascinated by the report of the honors bestowed on him.
“I think I got the best live audience reaction I’ve ever gotten,” Flora said.
“That’s sweet to hear,” Kendel said, touched by the news.
“I told them the story about you talking on the phone to Jamison when we were hiding from the press, out in Los Angeles,” Flora was grinning as she spoke. Though Kendel couldn’t see her face, he could hear the laughter in her voice. “I brought the house down when I did my imitation of you shouting at Jamison, ‘No, I am not shagging Flora Greene!’”
“Of all the stories, that’s the one you told?” Kendel was aghast. “You hurt my reputation, you know. They all were convinced that I had been, you know,” he left the statement unfinished.
“Well, we haven’t been, have we?” Flora was jousting.
“Not at the time, and so far, no,” Kendel replied.
Flora was silent, and Kendel felt suddenly nervous, wondering if he’d gone a step too far with him implied message. He’d thought about her a great deal – increasingly, and not just because he knew he needed her to travel with him in the magical land.
“At the time, and still, for now, no,” Flora carefully said after the long pause. “But if we talk about it, we’ll kill it, so don’t talk about it.” She left a door open.
“Okay,” Kendel quickly replied.
“What have you been doing since the funeral?” he asked to change the subject.
“Oh crap,” Flora answered. “I need to make a couple of calls. Would you sync my phone with the car?” she asked.
Together, she and Kendel connected the vehicle and the phone, then Flora began to make phone calls.
“Martin,” she called. “I had a wonderful night the other night, thank you. But I’ve decided to leave the city for a while and clear my head. I won’t be available to get together for a few weeks.”
“Work or pleasure?” the voice on the line asked.
“I need to clear my thoughts. It’s like you thought when we spoke, you saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself; I still think about the high school boy, Kendel, a lot. I need a retreat to clear my concentration,” she explained. Her hand reached over and patted Kendel’s thigh.
“You’re doing the right thing to take care of yourself,” the man consoled her. “You still have tears to shed and grief to release. And you’ll know when you’re ready to return to the world. We will all be waiting for you with love, and you can call me any time you need, my dear.”
“Thank you Martin, you are a wonderful friend,” Flora answered as the call ended.
“Jane insisted that I start dating,” Flora explained, three seconds after the call ended, “and she fixed me up with Martin.”
“I saw the movie he directed last summer. It was awesome,” Kendel answered.
“He’s a much nicer man than his movies would lead you to believe,” Flora explained, a reference Kendel understood. The movie had used more than copious amounts of fake blood throughout numerous violent scenes.
“He’s a little old for me, but most of the guys my age who Jane pushes at me just aren’t very mature, or it seems that way now. Maybe I’ve grown up some with all that we went through,” she reflected. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“You seem to me like you’ve got your act together Flora,” Kendel told her as he sat back in the car seat and relaxed more.
“Maybe I do a little more than I used to, but I look to Jane for guidance,” she modestly said.
“Okay, more calls,” she sighed, and she proceeded to work through her list of cancellations, postponements, and apologies, as the car traveled across the Louisiana countryside.
Kendel thought about the conversation with Martin, and he wondered if Flora had enjoyed herself with the director. She’d gone on a second date with him, so there must have been some pleasure in their first date. Had she kissed him, Kendel wondered, then stopped himself. Flora had been nothing but supportive of his relationship with Liza – if anything, Flora had actively promoted and encouraged it. While he thought the two of them had seemed to share some intimate spark together upon their reunion in the hotel room, he wondered if he was mistaken, reading too much into their kiss and some of the ambivalently suggestive things they had said to one another. He decided to not take anything for granted, and to focus more on their friendship than on their potential for a deeper relationship – at least until he felt or sensed something differently.
They dropped off the rental car, climbed in the Uber Flora summoned, and sat together as the car carried them into the national forest wilderness.
“Do you want to set a time for me to come back to pick you up?” the driver asked as they lifted their packs out of the car’s hatchback.
“We aren’t sure how many days we’ll be out here,” Kendel spoke up. “And we have no deadline,” he added.
“Have I seen you before?” the driver asked Flora. “You look familiar.”
“I’ve never been here before,” she denied. “But we all have that feeling about other folks from time to time, don’t we?”
A minute later the car was gone, and Flora was leading Kendel past a sign that pointed the way towards Wolf Rock Cave.
“Goodness Kendel, you have to promise you won’t abandon me!” F
lora panted after ten minutes of walking up a steep hillside path. “I’m more out of shape than I realized,” she laughed gently.
I’d be more likely to abandon myself than to abandon you,” Kendel told her. “You’ll be in shape pretty quickly,” he grinned. “We’ve got rough countryside to hike through to start our trip.
“What can you do with those magical powers? Can you create a flying carpet and let us just glide to, to, to where are we going exactly?” Flora asked as she stopped at a switchback in the trail.
Kendel caught his breath.
“You’re not out of shape really; this is just a steep trail,” he told her as he breathed heavily for a moment.
“You remember Agata and Lumen? Of course you do,” Kendel answered his own rhetorical question. “You and I have to go find Agata and Parker, and make them go back to Lumen’s estate,” he explained.
“You and I have to go meet Agata and Parker? Won’t that be cozy?” Flora asked sarcastically. “They’ll want to kill us!”
“I don’t know how to deal with that angle; I haven’t figured it out yet,” Kendel acknowledged. “But they don’t know what we look like; they won’t know it’s us, at least not right away.”
“Where exactly are they?” Flora asked. “How far do we have to go?”
“I don’t know,” Kendel hesitated before admitting.
“It’s kind of a big place Kendel,” Flora pointed out.
“Shaiss told me that Agata and Kendel are still trying to go to the wizard of Mount Cru Jolais. So, we just have to go straight towards the wizard’s place and meet them there,” he said. “It’s not impossible.”
“And Lumen wants her to come back,” Kendel began.
“Oh! Don’t I know that!” Flora whooped. “Those two are definitely hot for each other.”
“And Lumen is taking care of Agata’s father, the king,” Kendel pointed out. “That will be a motive for Agata to return.”
“You mentioned that you took the king and others from the palace to Lumen. Who were the others you took?” Flora asked.
“Beches had Elline imprisoned. He was going to execute the knight. And the three ladies of the court we met our first time, they were imprisoned too, because Beches thought they conspired to help us escape from the palace,” Kendel elaborated.
“The ladies of the court? I barely remember them; everything was so confusing those first few days the last time we were there. Hold on,” she interrupted herself, “Wasn’t one of them Parker’s girlfriend?”
“Yes, the Lady Grace,” Kendel studiously avoided adding anything about the kind girl who he had spent time with while fleeing from Sunob.
“We better get moving. I’ve got my breath back. You can tell me more later,” she proposed. She grabbed Kendel’s hand and started ascending the trail once more.
Minutes later they reached the mouth of the cave.
“What should I do with my cell phone?” Flora asked. “It’s not going to do me any good over there.”
“You could turn it off, wrap it in plastic, and then hide it somewhere around here. That way you’d have it ready to use when you came back,” Kendel suggested.
“You mean when ‘we’ come back, don’t you?” Flora asked. “You’re coming back too, right?” she asked suspiciously.
“I’m sure I will. I hadn’t thought about it. I didn’t mean to imply anything; it’s just your phone,” Kendel answered, but he spent a second wondering if he could or would return to the modern world. He was considered dead, which would make a return awkward, and he was intrigued by the way his adventure was unfolding in the magical world.
“Alright, let me look through your bag for some plastic wrap,” Flora suddenly unzipped a pouch on Kendel’s back and began to root around inside, then stopped. “Here’s a bag,” she pulled something out and rezipped his pack shut.
“I’m going to put it in a tree over here,” Flora reported, and Kendel heard her walk away, her boots crunching leaves on the forest floor.
Moments later, they entered the cave, and began going forward.
“How long will we be in here?” Flora asked.
“I’m not sure. It might be fifteen minutes, or it might be an hour,” Kendel ventured. “But there was a place,” he remembered for the first time, “where it seemed really hard to go on, and there was a flash of green light – even though I was blind. I think that must be the place where the two worlds come together.”
“That’ll be something to experience – changing worlds,” Flora mused as she kept going forward.
Minutes later she stopped. “I feel a little tired,” she commented. “Is this the place where it gets hard to go on?” she asked.
“Possibly. We just need to keep going,” Kendel answered, and they proceeded to move forward slowly, their steps growing shorter as each of them felt a dissuading energy present and growing in strength.
A minute later, Kendel spoke. “Maybe we should go back and try again tomorrow,” he suggested.
“How much deeper can this cave be?” Flora asked. “Can you make some light so I can see if there’s an end to it?” she asked, even though she knew that it wasn’t supposed to end.
And with their next small step, before Kendel could reply, he saw a green flash again, only it wasn’t just a flash, but a prolonged bath of brilliant green light in which he could see once more, and Flora disappeared – her hand no longer in his, while a dark figure that he could only make out in profile stood off at a little distance from him.
“You seek to return?” a woman’s voice spoke.
The voice triggered a flood of fearful memories in Kendel; it was the voice of the witch in the woods, the witch that had attacked him, and the witch from which he had inherited the powerful green energy within his soul that he struggled to fully control. He felt the energy heave into movement upon hearing the voice of the witch.
“Where’s Flora?” Kendel asked. He spoke at the same time he reached inside himself to find the blue energy and activate its protective powers. The gift from Miriam responded immediately, more strongly than it had while he’d been in New Orleans, as it felt the sustaining power it too received from arriving on the border of its land of origin.
“You seek to return?” the voice asked again, and the dark figure raised a hand.
“I am here to return, with Flora. Where is she?” Kendel spoke again. He had his grasp on the blue energy, and he felt prepared. Miriam’s power seemed self-aware, able to do things and make decisions on its own without input from him at times. He counted on it to help him.
“Kendel?” Flora’s voice was distant and tinny, as though she was at a great distance, even though she had been holding his hand just a second before.
The figure before him began to glow with a green light, a darker shade of green than the illuminating light, and Kendel jumped to the conclusion that there was a test – he would have to prove he was capable and deserved to return to Miriam’s land. He acted without hesitation, and unleashed his blue energy, letting it strike the green figure and wrap itself fully around the creature that blocked his return.
The creature seemed to shrink, then it expanded, then it shrank again, and grew dimmer, as Kendel’s constraint seemed to win the day.
Kendel felt a thrill of satisfaction for three seconds, when suddenly the other being erupted with green energy and exploded the blue shell off of itself, causing a shock wave that knocked Kendel backwards, making him stumble and windmill his arms before he caught his balance and righted himself.
As he put his feet under himself, two things happened: the green entity charged at him with astonishing speed, and the Sword of Justice materialized in his hand once more.
Kendel lifted the sword and had time only to extend it in front of himself before his charging opponent was upon him, and the force of the attacker’s momentum caused it to impale itself upon the sword in a violent collision that made Kendel step backwards once more.
Even in such close proximity Kendel co
uld see no features to the green entity. He studied it in astonishment and fear as it stood fixed upon the sword, then it let out a dreadful wail, and began to dissolve into mist.
“You may return, but you are not a true tanithear. You must learn to master your energy and solve the complications in your heart,” the dwindling voice said as the last shreds of the mist dissipated. Kendel thought for some reason about Heum’s priest in Shoreline, who had also talked with him about simplifying his heart. He thought of Flora and Liza, then he thought of Grace too, and he shook his head as if to shake off the potential complexity of facing up to the cross currents of affection that so easily came and went among his emotions. They were only a distraction at the moment.
“Kendel?” Flora’s voice was closer. “Kendel, where are you?” her voice sounded concerned.
Kendel stepped backwards one step, still holding the sword, and the green light flickered out of existence. And Flora bumped into him.
She gave a shriek. “Kendel?” she shouted.
“It’s me, Flora. It’s me!” he turned and faced toward her in the darkness holding the sword away from her, then wrapped his arms around her and clung to her tightly.
“Where did you go? Is everything okay? You’re shaking?” she clung to him with just as much force as he used to hold her.
“I was there, I was right on the border of Miriam’s land,” he answered. “There was a green light, and I could see. And there was a monster that tried to stop me; it fought with energy, but I killed it – I have the Sword again. Then suddenly I was with you again,” he said.
“Why wasn’t I with you? How did you go without me?” Flora asked.
“I think the monster was a challenge to prevent people from moving into the magical world. This is the door to get in, and maybe because I have some magical powers now, I could open the door,” he speculated. “I sort of passed the challenge,” he explained.
The Blinded Journey Page 19
