Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1)

by Cantwell, J. B.

Then the pain struck me. Searing like a dagger through my heart, my nerves radiated misery out from my chest into my arms and legs. My throat was closing, and I slumped over again, writhing in misery. Air. Air was the elixir I needed. Cool, beautiful air needed to fill my lungs, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t breathe.

  I shouldn’t have run, even just over to the trees. I know better than to run.

  Then I remembered what to do. I rolled onto my back, tilted my head slightly backwards, and repeated the mantra of my mother in my brain.

  Breathe slow. Breathe calm. Breathe slow. Breathe calm. Breathe slow. Breathe calm.

  But I was too late. Panic and exhaustion took over.

  As I stared up at the bright, starry sky, the world around me went black.

  I yelled out in my sleep, startling myself awake. I saw the white underside of the sheets of my bed. I was so warm, burrowed deep, and I closed my eyes again, peeking my face out for some cool air. I tucked my head back into the pillow, pulling the blankets up and settling in again. It had just been a dream.

  “Mom?” I called quietly. I felt a cool washcloth pat against my forehead. Comforted by her presence, I rolled over, bringing the blankets higher to cover my ears and head, only leaving enough space for my nose and eyes to stick out from my cocoon. I breathed deeply, relishing the delicious feeling of being so snug and safe. The nightmare was over.

  A snuffling noise circled around my head, and a warm breath blew against my face. A hot, wet something moved over my nose and forehead. This didn’t make sense. Was she using a different washcloth? I opened my eyes and an inch from my face was the open mouth and lolling tongue of a gigantic dog.

  We didn’t have a dog.

  A warm hand patted mine, and my head whipped around. An ancient, gray man was sitting on the other side of the bed. My eyes darted all across the room as I backed myself up against the headboard, away from the man and the dog. He stood up and peered down at me.

  “It’s alright, boy,” he said. “I expect you just got a hit on the head is all.” He walked around the bottom of the bed, the dog following at his heels.

  I hadn’t hit my head, but I may as well have considering the fact that this dream, or hallucination or whatever was happening to me, seemed to be continuing. I stared around the room, still so surprised that I was unable to speak. Large stones stacked precariously upon one another, making up the walls of the tiny space. Mounted to the walls were paintings; horses and flying creatures I did not recognize were represented in excruciating detail on the canvases.

  Across from the bed, a fire crackled in the grate, and over it hung a large, black cooking pot. The smells of a savory meal and burning wood drifted by my nose. On the other side of the room stood a long, wooden table piled high with leather bound books and several bowls. A couple of chairs were scattered about the place, with the largest positioned in front of the fire. Through the window beyond, tree branches swayed in bright daylight.

  I brought my knees up against my chest, wrapping my arms around them, and looked at the man.

  I met his gaze, steely blue eyes, and asked, “Where am I?”

  “What I’d like to know,” he said, “is who are you?”

  He was very, very old, but had a hardy, stout look about him. His hair was long and gray, tumbling past his shoulders, framing his face. His silver beard mirrored the hair on his head and grew so long that it almost rested in his lap where he sat. Two hands with knobby fingers and silver rings now scratched the dog under his chin. He wore gray woolen pants, suspenders and a long sleeved shirt, all stained brown by earth.

  “I came here…um…by some sort of magic, I think.” I couldn’t think of a better explanation, and I hoped he wouldn’t think I was crazy. “Where are we?”

  The old man cracked a smile, his eyes twinkling.

  “So you’re a traveler! I thought I heard your entry last night.” He poked the fire with a long, metal rod that had stood propped up next to the grate. He turned back and looked at me expectantly. “Where you headed?” The dog walked around the edge of the bed and, turning twice, settled himself into a heap, resting his head on his paws.

  “Headed?” I asked

  “Yes!” he boomed. “What is your destination? Your target? Where are you bound, as they say?” and he clapped his hands smartly and rubbed his palms together, waiting for my answer.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t really have a destination.”

  “Ah, just out on an adventure, are ya?” he said. “Good boy. You’re a young man, after all. That won’t last forever, you know, not forever!” He stood and walked across the room to the table, gathered an armful of apples and two mugs and strode back to the fire.

  “Well,” I stumbled, my mouth already watering at the sight of the apples. I was suddenly starving. “I wasn’t really trying to have an adventure. I mean, well, of course I wanted to have an adventure, but—” I paused, trying to make sense of my thoughts. “This sort of thing isn’t really normal where I come from.”

  He set down the mugs on the shelf in front of the fire. “Well, you’ve gotten yourself into quite a pickle then, haven’t you? Where did you say you were from?”

  “Well, normally I live in the city with my mom, but this summer—”

  “No, I mean what planet are you from?”

  What planet was I from?

  “Earth.” It was an answer, but it sounded like question coming out of my mouth.

  “Earth!” His eyebrows raised high on his forehead. “Well, that explains some things, don’t it?”

  Did it?

  “What planet did you think I was from?”

  “Well, you’re sittin’ on Aerit right now, so how do I know? Travelers come from all the planets around these parts. Don’t mean I know which ones just by lookin’ at ‘em.”

  “I’m on another planet?” Fear and amazement wrestled for attention in my brain.

  “’Course you are! Does this look like Earth to you?”

  “But that’s impossible!” I protested. “I can’t be on another planet.” But as I looked over at the man, his sparkling eyes poked a hole through my certainty.

  Was this really true?

  “But, how—I don’t understand—how did I get here?”

  “Whatcha mean?” he asked. “Obviously, you took a link.”

  We looked at each other, and I tried to work out what was going on. Now, with him telling me I wasn’t on Earth, I felt different, not quite as terrified as I had the night before. It was an explanation, if nothing else. As for the matter of how I had managed to get here, that I couldn’t comprehend at all.

  He took a big bite of one of the apples. I was distracted by his crunching despite my efforts to stay focused. My stomach rumbled loudly.

  “Um, sir?” I asked.

  “Sir?” he laughed. “Don’t call me sir! I have names! Call me Kiron. It’s just one my seven. Kiron’s always been my favorite. Better than Rupert, at least.”

  “Uh, ok then,” I said. “Kiron, can I have one? I haven’t really eaten since early yesterday and—”

  Before I could finish he picked up an apple and tossed it across the room to me. My hands whipped out and caught it with an ease that surprised me. But I was too hungry to question this temporary increase in my coordination. I greedily bit into it, the sweet juice running down my chin.

  “Hungry, eh?” he asked. I nodded. He took a bowl from the shelf and, drawing out a long ladle from the cooking pot, spooned some of the contents into it. He plunked a spoon into the bowl and set it on the small table next to the bed.

  “Thank you,” I said, between enormous bites of apple. My crunching had alerted the dog, and he now stood at the side of the bed, his long, pink tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. Tiny bits of drool dropped to the wood floor as he watched me eat with ferocious concentration.

  “You know my name now,” he said as I ate. “What might yours be?”

  “Aster,” I said. “Aster Wood.”

  His jaw d
ropped open, and it was a few long moments before he was able to close it again. I was too distracted by the delicious smell coming from the bowl to pay this much attention. I picked it up and started spooning a thick meat stew into my mouth.

  “Huh,” he said, as he leaned forward, tugging on his beard with his gnarled fingers. Then he stood up and started pacing around the small room.

  “Your say your name is ‘Aster Wood’?” he asked.

  I nodded again, mouth too full to speak.

  “Not ‘Brendan Wood’? You sure?”

  I stopped eating. “How do you know that name?” I asked. Grandma had told me about Brendan Wood just yesterday.

  He peered down at me with a look that indicated he couldn’t decide whether I was being earnest or playing a game.

  “It’s Brendan I’ve been waiting for all these years, must be a century or more,” he said.

  I gaped at him, my stew forgotten. “How old are you?”

  “HA!” he boomed. “Older than you can count, boy!” Then he stared into space as he thought. “You was supposed to be Brendan Wood. And now you’re finally here and you’re Aster Wood. Don’t make no sense.”

  “Brendan Wood was the name of my great, great grandfather,” I said.

  “But then, you know Brendan Wood?” he asked.

  “No,” I said slowly, wondering if maybe he was a bit mad. “He died way before I was ever born.”

  His face fell.

  “Brendan Wood is dead?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “He was ancient. I mean, he lived a really long time ago.” I considered this shaggy man, who was claiming to be well over a century old, and I wondered if a hundred years counted as a long time in this place.

  “And you are descended from Brendan Wood, you say,” he was mumbling more to himself than me now. “I got the wrong damn Wood.” He studied my face, peering into my eyes.

  “What do you know about Almara?” he said.

  “What’s…Almara?” I asked.

  He looked at me in shocked, almost offended, disbelief.

  “Why, he’s a great seer, ain’t he? How can you be a Wood and not know about Almara? Your own kin? Most powerful of the wizards that left for the Fire Mountains hundreds and hundreds of years back.”

  A wizard? My own kin?

  “Is he a…friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Naw, naw,” he said, waving his hand. “My folks knew him, though, when they were real young.”

  “And you think that I’m related to this Almara person?”

  “How do you not know this already?” he asked in return. “I thought there wasn’t another soul left alive that hadn’t heard the story of Almara. And here you are, descendant of Brendan Wood and all, and clearly you jumped here, and you’re telling me you don’t know any of it? Why, he’s a great—” he paused, studying me yet again. “You really don’t know?” he finally asked.

  “No,” I said, staring.

  His eyes slowly fell to the floor and he grimaced. It was a look I often saw on the faces of my classmates during difficult exams.

  “But how can you not know?” He spoke more to himself than to me and shook his head slowly from side to side. Finally, he looked up at me again, studying my face. “You’re not foolin’ me, are ya? This isn’t one of Larissa’s tricks? Cause if I find out that old bat sent you here, I swear I’ll—”

  I shook my head.

  His shoulders sagged as he gave in. He couldn’t find the lie he sought in my face.

  “Alright, let me think,” he started, and stared into space. “I take it you ain’t never traveled before, eh?”

  “Traveled?” I asked, thinking of the images of camp on the TV news. “No, not really.”

  “Alright. This place,” he gestured at the room around us, “this place where we’re sittin’ is a planet in the Maylin Fold, Aerit. Our closest neighbors here are Aeso and Aria. The three together are called the Triaden cause they’re so close, easy to travel between. How you hopped a link to Aerit all the way from Earth I ain’t got no idea. Earth is so far out, I ain’t heard of anyone traveling to or from there in a long, long time. Not since Brendan.”

  What?

  He continued. “Aerit and all the planets in our part of the universe are tied together like a string of pearls.”

  “Like a solar system?” I asked, grasping for a piece of knowledge I understood. I had known about solar systems since the first grade.

  “No,” he said. “It’s nothing like a solar system. Every planet in the Maylin Fold orbits around a different star.”

  I frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  “Here, lemme show you.” He stood up and snatched a piece of blank paper from the wood table, crumpling it into a tight ball as he returned to his seat by the fire. Then he took the metal fire skewer and stabbed through the center of the ball. When he removed the stick, he uncrumpled the paper and held it up for me to see. Several holes were pierced through the page in various locations.

  “This paper represents space, the holes, planets. To most minds, traveling from one area to the next means you go in a straight line from place to place.” His forefinger drew a line from a hole on one side of the page to a different hole on the other. “But travel like that takes a ton of energy, and more importantly, time. Time that none of us have, not even the most talented wizard.”

  He set the paper down at the foot of the bed and slowly began to crumple it back into a ball.

  “As luck would have it, space isn’t flat like the page of a book. It’s dented, crumpled, folded together in ways more complicated than you can imagine. But you see,” he squashed the wad of paper tightly in his gnarled fist, “now those holes are together again just as close as can be. That is the Fold.”

  “And you can travel between the planets as long as they’re in the Fold?” I asked.

  “Well, you should know since you just did it yourself. But yeah, you’re gettin’ it.”

  I picked up the ball of paper and opened it back into a square, amazed. “How many are there? In the Fold, I mean.”

  “Planets? Dunno. Least a thousand. But only fifty or so you or I could walk on.” He paused, twirling his beard around his fingers.

  “Now, here in the Triaden, a few hundred years back things were looking pretty bleak. The plants were all dyin’, people were hungry. The weather started doing some pretty strange things. We’d have hot sunny days during the winter months and snow during the summers. Right as the farmers would sit back to watch the baby sprouts start to raise up out of the ground, the snows would come and kill all the new growth. Some places had horrible droughts that lasted decades and drove the people from the lands. Some had torrential rains that turned the land to mush and drowned whole towns while they slept. People were scared.”

  I gulped and forced a large mouthful of stew down my throat. I had heard a story just like this before, but it was back in history class. That story, of course, had been about Earth.

  “But the problem went much deeper than just the weather,” he went on. “The sickness was affecting the people, too. Not all common folk know this, but the people were gettin’ as sick as the planets.”

  I stared at him, transfixed. The dog whined at my half-eaten bowl of stew.

  “Some died. Some of ‘em went mad. Some turned real nasty almost overnight. There was a sort of a shift in the feeling of the place. People went from being good neighbors to shuttering themselves inside every night. Ya just didn’t know what to expect.”

  “Did everyone get sick?” I breathed.

  “No, that was the thing. The sickness didn’t kill or change everyone, but everyone felt the effects of it just the same. That’s why Almara and the eight were so spooked. He was the high seer, ruled over the council of eight. They all kept court at Riverstone, the great castle in the far western lands on Aria. They were Sorcerers, all of ‘em, the biggest congregation of magical blood in a thousand years. But none of ‘em knew where to start. It wasn’t like they could just shout
up at the sky and make it stop snowing. Nobody even understood what was happening. That was their quest, to discover the truth about why everything had gone haywire. And then figure out how to fix it. After a time, word got back to my folks that they were heading for the Fire Mountains. But no word ever came again. A few years after that, things started changing. The snows stopped coming so often. The suns in the winter clouded over like they should. The fruit started falling from the trees again.”

  “What about the people?” I asked. “Did they get better, too?”

  “A bit, I suppose.” He sipped at his tea, thinking. “Nobody knows what happened to Almara and the eight. Some say they died. Some say they found the magic they were looking for and set everything right. And it’s true; things are better now. But they never returned.”

  “But of course they must have died,” I argued, “if they lived hundreds of years ago.”

  “Not likely,” he answered. “A man with power as great as Almara, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still trekkin’ about. A talented wizard can live hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”

  He set down his mug and prodded the fire with the metal stick. “It makes me wonder, though, why you’re chasing Almara. Especially since nobody’s trained you up. And all the way from Earth, too.”

  “I’m not chasing anyone. I found this, well, this map in my Grandmother’s house. And I looked at it and read it out loud. And next thing I knew I was lying in grass, which is odd because on Earth there isn’t—”

  He choked on a sip of tea and stood up abruptly from his chair, his eyes wide.

  “Boy!” he exclaimed. “You must have found Almara’s first link!”

  “What?”

  “The map!” he bellowed. “I figured you found some old link of Brendan’s or something, came here by accident, but what you’re describing ain’t no ordinary link, and it ain’t no ordinary map. It was one of Almara’s. So you really are meant to follow him!” His face broke into a wide, relieved smile. “I was beginning to think that the maps were lost forever.”

  “Wait, what’s a ‘link’?”

  “It’s the connection between planets. It’s how you got here. And before Almara set out, he made a set of links for his son Brendan to follow. But these weren’t just links, they were maps, too. Whoever used ‘em could jump from place to place and follow the quest. The maps didn’t have nothin’ on ‘em when Almara left, but as he traveled they filled themselves in, keeping a record of where he went. Not just anyone could get their hands on the first one, it’s locked by a powerful magic, but you did.”