The Spirit Rose

by Renee Duke

  “There has to be someone around,” Paige replied, stuffing her shawl and the boys’ vests into her basket. “We wouldn’t have been brought here unless there was a kid with a Keeper Piece somewhere in the vicinity. We should start walking. Any idea which direction we should try, Jack?”

  He looked around in careful consideration. Finally, he shook his head. “Nothing’s coming to me.” He took a step forward, startling the marmot. “Perhaps we should just follow him,” he said as it darted off toward the creek.

  “Okay. But watch where you’re going. It’s swampy here.”

  Well before they got to the creek, the marmot disappeared into a burrow.

  “So much for that,” said Paige. “Think we should try to cross the creek and go up into the hills? We were all climbing a ridge in our dreams, and there are hills and ridges aplenty on the other side of the creek.”

  The creek was low, another indicator of summer, and a reminder of how unnatural it was for it to be flooding at that time of year back home. Untouched by the diking and channelization to which their era would subject it, it was also much wider than in their day, but they waded across it easily. They then walked toward the hills, not stopping for a rest until the ground started to slope noticeably upward.

  “It’s hard to tell through the trees, but none of the ridges up there look like the one in my dream,” Paige commented, studying them.

  “Or mine,” said Dane, “but they might once we’re closer.”

  Before they could start up the first incline, Dane stumbled over some sort of root and fell flat on his face.

  “Have a good trip?” Paige inquired.

  “Very funny.” He rose as far as his knees and started to gently pat the ground around him. “One of my contacts fell out, and that isn’t funny. We’ve got to find it. The way Mum is about money right now, losing one when I haven’t even had them a week wouldn’t go over well. It wouldn’t have before, either, but it really wouldn’t now.”

  The other two dropped to their knees as well and began searching diligently through the grass. Raising her head for a moment, Paige caught sight of a dark brown animal at the edge of a small wooded area above them. At first she thought it was a bear cub, but then took in the broad, flat head, shaggy coat, and short legs.

  “Don’t move,” she whispered to the boys. “Freeze. Keep absolutely still.”

  They moved only enough to follow her gaze, which caused Dane to draw his breath in sharply. The largest member of the weasel family sniffed around the outer trees for a good five minutes before finally heading into the thick of the forest.

  “What was that?” Jack asked, after it had disappeared.

  “A wolverine,” Dane replied. “I sure wasn’t expecting to come across one of those around here. Lucky he didn’t catch our scent. The wind must have been in the wrong direction.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Put it this way—a forty-pound wolverine can take down a fifteen-hundred pound moose.”

  “And they don’t belong in this area?”

  “Not in our day, but in this one, who knows?”

  They returned to looking for the contact lens, which Jack found moments later.

  Dane gave a sigh of relief. “Thanks. It would have been hard to explain to Mum and Dad that I lost it at the Father Pandosy Mission a few thousand years ago.”

  “And it is a few thousand years ago,” Paige mused as Dane took his contact container from his pocket and rinsed the lens off in the solution before putting it back in his eye. “We’ve gone past even Varteni’s day. She was only two thousand or so years back from our time. This is more. A lot more. I just know it is, but how can that be?”

  “Beats me.” Dane frowned in concentration. Then it came to him. “Wait a minute. It was in the story. Remember how the youth threw the Keeper Pieces into some kind of stream? It was probably a stream connected to Time. Most of them went forward from his time, but one he threw back. The one that was more powerful than the others.”

  “The ‘hidden one’ in Aurea-Rose’s rhyme,” said Paige, her voice rising with excitement. The ‘long sought treasure’. The one no one’s ever found. The—”

  “—the Arcanus Piece,” Dane and Jack said together.

  “He called it the Preserver,” Dane recalled. “How did that bit go again, Jack?”

  It took Jack but a moment to repeat it verbatim. “‘Fly, O Preserver, to a land yet unknown, that the rose tree may blossom and join with its own.’ It was supposed to be an aegis, a shield, or safeguard. A protection for if things ever went wrong.”

  “Which they have,” said Paige.

  Dane nodded. “The Arcanus Piece must have the power to make things right. That’s why it’s never been found before. It was never in circulation like the other Pieces were. It was hidden so it could only be found by those with ‘travails deep’.”

  “So you guys think that, in this time, we’re not supposed to be helping anyone?” said Paige. “You think we’re just supposed to find the Arcanus Piece so it can help us?” She frowned. “You could be right, but if all the youth wanted to do was hide it, it might not be with a kid, like the other Pieces were. It could literally be hidden. Maybe we should go back and check that rodent’s burrow.”

  Her brother disagreed. “No. The girl has it. She wouldn’t have been in our dreams otherwise. I think…I think she’s the Keeper’s Keeper.”

  “She is,” Jack said decisively. “And she does have the Arcanus Piece. In my dream, something gold flashed in the sun while I was looking up at her. It was on her head. Some sort of crown or tiara. Or perhaps just a headband.”

  “Yeah? Well, okay, I guess I can go along with that.” Paige stood up. “Come on. Now we know what we’re looking for as well as who, we’d best get going.”

  The boys got up too, but before they could start up the hill, something started down it.

  “It’s back,” Jack gasped.

  “And it’s seen us,” said Dane. “Keep still, so it won’t feel threatened.”

  Slowly, deliberately, the wolverine made its way down to them, radiating animosity. As it came closer, Dane tried speaking softly to it, assuring it they weren’t out to harm it. Unfortunately, its behaviour made it clear it was out to harm them. It inched toward them, snarling, a look of pure hatred shooting from its eyes. Something in his memory stirred, but before it came to him, a mighty roar came from somewhere to the side, and a huge grizzly bear thundered past them, headed for the wolverine.

  It stopped just short of it, emitting savage growls, daring the other animal to proceed. The wolverine took only a single step back, its eyes still focussed on the children.

  Its eyes! This time the memory flashed clear, followed by another. Even as Dane reached for Paige and Jack, they were reaching for him, the intenseness of their grips telling him that, they, too, had suddenly recognized those eyes.

  As he shouted the connecting rhyme, the wolverine twisted sharply to one side, launched itself past the bear, and made straight for its prey.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Instantly, the bear turned and lunged. Seizing the wolverine by its hindquarters, it managed to drag it back from the mist billowing around the young time travellers. From within it, they could see the two creatures locked in combat.

  Materializing back behind the carriage shed, a trembling Dane put a hand on it to steady himself. Or perhaps to assure himself it was really there. Equally shaken, his sister and cousin did the same.

  “Well, that little scene sure wasn’t in my dream last night,” Paige declared, when she became capable of speaking. “If it had, it would have qualified as a nightmare.”

  “Those eyes,” gulped Dane. “They were just like the eyes of Rosalina’s wicked sorcerer. It was him! Somehow, that wolverine was him.”

  “And not just the wolverine,” said Jack, his voice unsteady.

  “Are you all right?” a voice inquired.

  Turning they saw Cousin Ophelia standing at the corner of
the shed, a look of concern on her face.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again. “You all look very pale.”

  “Uh, yeah, we’re okay,” said Dane. “Just a bit of jet lag catching up.”

  Cousin Ophelia nodded and withdrew, allowing them to return to their conversation.

  “He wasn’t just the wolverine,” Jack restated. “The sorcerer. He wasn’t just that wolverine.”

  “No, we’ve seen him as a person as well,” Dane agreed. “One of the princes’ would-be assassins had eyes like that. So did that sadistic seaman on the ship. Now that I think about it, the assassin and the seaman looked a lot like each other. How come we didn’t notice that at the time? Or that they both looked like the guy in Rosalina’s drawing?”

  “Maybe because they were trying to kill us,” said Paige. “That tends to be of more immediate concern than comparing people’s facial features. And when we looked at the drawing, we just saw him as the wicked sorcerer. Someone from Varteni’s time. We had no reason to connect him to people in other eras, or connect them with each other.”

  “Well, we do now.” Dane looked troubled. “He really can come forward from his time, just like I said. He’s after us, and if it hadn’t been for that bear, he’d have got us. If it was a bear. I’m not sure it was, not a real one. The native peoples believe friendly spirits can take the form of animals if they want to help or protect you, and Mr. Creeley said the bear was the best protector.”

  “For us, anyway,” said Paige. “And I guess unfriendly spirits—and unfriendly sorcerers—can take the form of animals if they want to harm you. Or maybe just take possession of them. But real, spirit, or whatever, I’d like to think that bear finished the guy off so we wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. I don’t expect it did, though. He could have used magic to get away from it.”

  “But not to get here,” Jack mused. “To our time, I mean. I’m sure if he could get to us here, in our own time, he would. But for some reason, he can’t. In this time he can only manage interference, like the reality distortions.”

  “Which we can’t fix unless we find the girl with the Arcanus Piece. And she’s in another time, a time he can get to.” Paige grimaced. “Not the most cheerful thought to have on our next trip, but maybe the bear will keep watching our backs. Can’t say I feel like trying again today, though.”

  The boys didn’t either. They spent the rest of their time at the mission in pseudo-pioneer pursuits. Mr. and Mrs. Marchand were out when Cousin Ophelia took them home just after three o’clock. A note on the table indicated they’d be back before supper and said Cousin Ophelia didn’t have to stay. Paige was old enough to look after the boys.

  Once she’d gone, the children changed into everyday clothes and went down to the family room, where Paige turned on the home computer. Back before the present-day distortions, she and Dane had each had one of their own, but this was no longer so.

  “We’re not supposed to go online without Mum or Dad around,” Dane reminded her, as Google appeared on the large screen. “Even if the number of computers in the house has changed, the rules won’t have.”

  “This is important.” A few minutes later she turned toward the boys looking relieved. “I found Cora on Facebook. See? Cora Weston. No proper profile picture, but using a dragon one tells me it’s her. She exists. She’s okay.”

  “That’s good,” said Dane. “Maybe you could Friend her.”

  “Doubt it. Her parents wouldn’t let her accept a request from someone she didn’t know any more than ours would. And since she apparently lives in Ontario now, she isn’t likely to know me.”

  “Brendan probably doesn’t know me either. I wonder if he’s still in Kelowna.”

  “I’ll look.”

  Paige couldn’t find him on Facebook, which didn’t surprise Dane, since neither he nor Brendan were into that, but by using both his name and ‘Kelowna’, she found a picture of him skiing with his father at the Big White Resort.

  Dane sighed. “I’m glad he’s in town, but even if he is, he won’t have Cupcake. I wonder who does. Do you think she’s got a good home somewhere? And Abraham, and Pearl, and Elmer? I’d hate to think they didn’t.”

  “I expect they do,” Paige said comfortingly, then had a far from comforting thought. “But if we aren’t supposed to know Brendan and Cora, and we are supposed to know those other kids Mum was on about, well, that could mean the places we’re supposed to know them from—school, and whatever other things we’re involved in—aren’t the same as before. They’re different, like this house is different. Everywhere we go, we’ll be dealing with strangers. Strangers who’ll expect us to call them by name, and know things we don’t know, and …” She stopped, appalled.

  “Guess we’ll have to deal with that if it happens,” Dane said after a moment.

  Since he looked equally upset, Jack decided to change the subject. “You know, since we have the house to ourselves, we really should Skype England about all these new developments. It’s getting on for midnight there, but that’s just early evening to Granddad.” He paused. “It might be better to try Uncle Edmond first, though. He’s a night owl, too, and he might not go as far over the top about our taking another time trip.”

  This attempt to postpone the inevitable failed. When Uncle Edmond responded to their call, both Granddad and Grantie Etta came onscreen with him.

  “You two are visiting late,” Paige commented.

  Their elders exchanged a flicker of a look she thought bordered on uneasiness.

  “Things to discuss,” said Uncle Edmond. “We gather you do, too.”

  Paige took a deep breath, and told them everything. Their dreams, their decision to act upon them, and what had happened when they did.

  As expected, Granddad did not take it well.

  “You promised you wouldn’t use the medallion,” he exploded. “All that new information malarkey is nothing more than a loophole you’ve dreamed up.”

  “Calm down, Avery,” said Grantie Etta. “You’re pretty good at loopholes yourself. And this one was, quite literally, provided by dreams. Dreams they couldn’t, and can’t, dismiss. They have to follow up on them. They have to find that Indian girl.”

  “No, they don’t! They can’t. If they go back to try, that fiend of a sorcerer will be waiting for them.”

  “Not waiting. Once his attack was foiled, he would have returned to his own time. I think, in the girl’s time, he has to find them, just as they have to find her.”

  “And that might not be as dangerous a prospect as you think,” put in Uncle Edmond. “Our nemesis definitely wants to harm them, but he hasn’t managed to yet, and I don’t think he can. Each set of travellers gets closer to Varteni, and there have now been enough of us for each new set to be coming too close for comfort as far as the villain of the piece is concerned. Even so, he can probably only frighten them at this stage. According to Aurea-Rose’s lengthy rhyme, it’s only the final seekers who stand in real peril, and we’ve already determined that that’s not them. It probably should have been, but once one of the requisite five generations failed to ‘the pledge renew’, as Rosalina later put it, the pattern of help was disrupted.”

  This last statement nudged something in Paige’s memory, but she lost track of the thought when Dane spoke.

  “Uncle Edmond’s right,” he said. “That sorcerer guy’s just trying to scare us. Did a good job, too, with that wolverine thing. And there are safeguards in place for those who aren’t the final seekers. That long rhyme said most travellers would find ‘but little threat’ in helping the kids they connected to.”

  “‘Most’, not all,” Granddad replied, unconvinced. “And Aurea-Rose’s definition of ‘threat’ differs vastly from mine. If her ‘others bound by mystic power’ aren’t supposed to be able to do anything until the final seekers take to the field, how did one of them get past that restriction, and start causing trouble in her great-niece, Rosalina’s, time?”

  “Rosalina someho
w started that off herself, by writing down her dream,” said Dane.

  “Perhaps, but once she did, things changed, and the ‘cannot move until the hour’ claim no longer holds. Someone is moving. Against us.”

  “So he might be, but that doesn’t mean he’s capable of doing serious harm to anyone but the final seekers,” Uncle Edmond argued. “Thus far, he’s been thwarted every time he’s tried to do anything to our three.”

  “The bear stopped him this time,” Dane confirmed. “It came to protect us, just like Mr. Creeley said.”

  “Mr. Creeley?” Granddad queried.

  Dane told him about their bear carvings, and the artist who’d made them.

  “There you are, Avery; it sounds like they’ve got a formidable ally,” said Uncle Edmond. “Possibly more than one. Native lore encompasses much we don’t understand. If the girl in Dane’s version of the dream was standing near some animals, she’s probably got some sort of kinship with them. A kinship they can call upon whilst trying to find her.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said Grantie Etta.

  Granddad merely glared.

  Uncle Edmond patted his brother’s shoulder and nodded to the children onscreen. “Don’t worry. We’ll work on him.”

  “Good, because we really do have to go back, Granddad. Even though the pledge to Varteni didn’t get renewed by your kids, we’ve renewed it, and we have to see our turns through.” Something about that still nagged at Paige but, as before, she couldn’t determine what. “We’ll be careful and—” She broke off as the sound of a door opening upstairs came down to them. “Mum and Dad are home. We have to sign off.”

  She quickly did so. She then shut down the computer before following the boys up the basement stairs, where they had stopped just before the turn, a wall still hiding them from the view of anyone above. Responding with a nod to Dane’s sudden motion to keep quiet, she realized her father was talking on his cell phone and was unaware they were within hearing.

  “We have to tell him,” Mr. Marchand was saying to whoever his listener was. “But just about Gareth, not any of the other. Things are going to get ugly now they’ve gone to the media. They’re trying to come across as naïve young students, students tricked into surrendering their new-born to a pair of unscrupulous history professors who used their position of authority to coerce them into a deeply regretted decision. What a crock! Gus and Gareth did everything right—lawyers, counselling, family meetings, all of it. They’re just working the sympathy angle. That bit about being afraid the court will favour the adoptive parents because of their affluence and higher social standing was a real nice touch. The public’s lapping it up. Someone’s even started a fund to help them out financially. But the kids are probably around here somewhere, so I’ll talk to you later, Neil.”