The Stair Of Time (Book 2)

by William Woodward

  Sarilla grabbed his sleeve and brought him to a halt. “In order to save Mandie, you must wait with Gramps for Andaris and Gaven to return. Do you understand? As anxious as you are, you must wait.”

  Eli frowned but nodded.

  “The truth of who you are and what you say lay in that wagon. Gramps has seen her before, in Rogar, and remembers Jade talking about you in her sleep. By the time Andaris returns, he will know what to do. It might be a long wait. You must prepare yourself for that. You may grow old and Mandie may even die.”

  Eli’s eyebrows rose in alarm.

  “But do not lose heart,” she quickly added, “for once the…“Savior” returns, for lack of a better title, all will be set right. Should be, anyway. There are no guarantees, and yet we must believe. What other choice have we? All I can do is provide you with the necessary tools to give you the best chance of success. I wish I could do more. I truly do. I would if I could, you know? Do you believe me? Do you trust what I am telling you? It is paramount that you do.”

  Calmed by her words, Eli nodded solemnly and took her hand in his own. “I trust. And I don’t begrudge you, Lady. Our best is all that any of us can do. Thank you.”

  Sarilla nodded back, feeling her cheeks warmed by his touch. “Do come visit again,” she said. “As I alluded before, I find your company…refreshing.”

  “I will,” he promised, giving her hand one final squeeze before turning and walking towards the wagon.

  “Gramps won’t be able to see or hear you until you emerge from the tree line,” she called after him. “Try not to startle him too much if you can keep from it. He’s a grizzled old porcupine and would likely fill you full of quills off his back before having a chance to hear you out.” She smiled. “I think, however, once you get past the awkward introductions, you two will get along famously. After all, you both have stone heads and iron spines. What else is there?”

  Once Eli had determined that Mandie was indeed all right—as all right as she could be, that is—he jumped into the driver’s seat, released the brake, and yelled, “Hoa, Bo! Let’s get a move on!” Bo responded with his usual gaminess, lurching forward like a horse five years his junior and fresh outta the gate.

  “I’ll do all I can from here,” Sarilla called. “Take care of yourself, Eli Johansen. There are many things we have yet to discuss!”

  Just before they passed beyond the tree line, he glanced over his shoulder and waved, surprised to discover that Sarilla no longer looked anything like his grandmother. She was now a woman in her mid-to late thirties with a full mane of golden hair that cascaded just so over a sparkling red gown, the bawdy cut of which left little of her now-striking figure, i.e. her voluptuous hips and blooming breasts, to the imagination.

  Sarilla beamed back at him, eyes wide with merriment and, perhaps even a hint of embarrassment. “Why, Eli!” she exclaimed, peering down at herself. “I’m…flattered!” And of course, even though she was now many yards away, he heard her perfectly.

  Me, Myself, and I

  Upon hearing his name spoken with such feeling, Andaris forgot all about the dream he’d just had, the cavalry, and even Bernard’s impish grin. He didn’t know how it was possible for Trilla to be here—only that she was. His heart soared with sudden joy. He was no longer alone in the wilderness! His friend was here with him!

  But what about the wife bit? that other part of his mind whispered. What do you make of that?

  Too excited to listen, Andaris took hold of the door handle and turned, making ready to leap from the coach and take Trilla into his arms.

  At that precise moment, the most curious thing began to happen. The world began to…bend, and then to swirl, becoming altogether insubstantial, colors and shapes moving in a clockwise circle. The door and handle were now gone, replaced by something akin to a child’s finger paints, except it was his fingers in the paint. Part of an old nursery rhyme came to mind: We can do no more than wait and see, what The Watcher’s will paints for thee….

  As if to make up for his lack of action, his heart leapt into the back of his throat, beating fast and hard, threatening to choke him. Despite what his eyes told him, he could still feel the door handle cool and smooth beneath his palm. He could still hear the people outside. It was all still there. He just couldn’t see it.

  “Are you feelin’ okay?” asked Bernard, not doing a very good job of masking his concern. “Why, you’ve turned white as a sheet, Your Highness!”

  Andaris tried to respond, but found his mouth no longer worked. Then everything just sort of drained away, colors cascading like rain against a windowpane before his eyes.

  There’s something behind the color, he thought. Another world!

  When the last of the facade was gone, he realized that he recognized where he was. His head swam violently, vision listing back and forth, making him see double. This went on for several seconds. Then there was a loud, “POP!” and the two halves became one. He thought sure he would vomit. His stomach quivered with indecision, heaved twice, and then apparently thought better of it and settled back down.

  Andaris was standing in a hallway with his hand wrapped around the handle to his alter ego’s chamber door, The Symbol inches from his face, radiating heat. His first thought was to let go the handle and run away as fast and as far as his legs would take him.

  But then something happened that had gotten him into trouble many times before. In other words, his righteous indignation flared, rising to arms with terrible, lightning force. What right did his future self have to yank him about like this? Jerking him here…and then there…like a puppet on a string?

  No, he would not run. No indeed! Rather, he would bring this charade to an end—right now!

  Enjoying the momentary fearlessness that one experiences when one’s blood is up, Andaris pushed the door wide, making ready to give himself some very choice words. The room was quite different from the way it had been in the dream. First of all, there was no fire blazing in the hearth. Secondly, there was an inch of dust covering everything—the bed, the table, and even his future self. The room was gray, cold, and lifeless, a mere shadow of its past opulence.

  Most disturbing of all was the way in which his future self had met his end. Not even standing in defense of himself, but sitting idly in his chair as he was stabbed through the heart, and then abandoned like so much refuse. To find oneself killed in such a manner was loathsome indeed, and yet Andaris saw no sign of remorse for the act.

  He determined then and there that one should never be made to look upon one’s own dust-covered skeleton. It was entirely too demoralizing. I mean, there was his future self, sitting in one of the two high-backed chairs, sword protruding from between bare ribs, amulet glinting at his breast, skull hanging in final defeat, jaw agape in a caricature of eternal agony.

  How utterly depressing and… ridiculous. He knew he should be horrified, but just couldn’t manage it. In fact, just now he found himself fighting the urge to burst out laughing.

  Must be going into shock, he thought. And why not? Even after everything he’d been through, this was just too much to be believed.

  Thinking to free the sword from its “scabbard,” from an eternity of purgatory in his alter ego’s chest, to raise it to the heavens in triumph and shout a challenge to Rodan, Andaris boldly stepped forward, the corners of his mouth twitching dangerously. Before he could take a second step, however, he promptly passed out….

  And awoke atop a goose feather mattress, traditional white rather than blood red, the sort that’s three feet thick with no room for a pea. The sort that’s fit for a princess…or even a queen.

  Andaris felt exceptionally groggy, almost drugged. He didn’t know what had woken him. No doubt some instinct or another. Pesky things. Not preservation, for a change. He sensed no danger. But there was something. Which meant he couldn’t do what he most wanted—namely, go back to sleep.

  First order of business, he thought, is to find out where I am. He rubbed his eyes
and yawned, trying to focus. It was at that stage of the arduous climb from deep slumber to consciousness that he realized two things. One, he was not alone. Two, he was wearing blue-striped flannel pajamas.

  As intriguing as he typically found blue-striped flannel pajamas, he opted to bring the white hot tip of his vast intellect to bear on his first realization, at which point he ascertained that it was a woman curled up behind him—pale, slender arms holding him tight. He moved her arms carefully aside and slipped away. She moaned, grabbed his pillow, and once again went silent.

  Andaris got to his feet, waited for his equilibrium to catch up, then turned to face her. So, he thought with relief, heart filling with love, it wasn’t a dream, not the good part anyway.

  Although her golden hair had turned mostly gray at the temples, and her face, even in the watery moonlight that slanted through the window, was no longer unlined and blushing with youth, she was still her, she was still Trilla, and thus to him was beautiful.

  He found the room in which he stood surprisingly small accommodations for a queen, fine yet simple furnishings conspiring to reflect a life that was altogether too full of duty and sacrifice. She was meant for better things, he had once thought. Sunshine and laughter, not tears. And it was true.

  “Dear, sweet Trilla,” he whispered, climbing back into bed, “braving all those long years alone, standing against The Lost One and his foul armies, always hoping that one day I’d return.”

  She opened her eyes halfway and smiled, not entirely awake. “I knew you would,” she said, reaching for him, raising the blanket to invite him in. “I never lost hope.”

  Gladly accepting the invitation, Andaris took her hand in his own and lay back down, once again having the impression that they were pieces of the same puzzle, brought together by providence. Remembering the night they’d shared in that cabin so long ago, he sighed in contentment and caressed the back of her hand.

  She returned his sigh and wrapped him tighter in her arms. “Sleep well, my love,” she whispered.

  “You, too.”

  She smiled and rubbed his flannelled chest. “I have the feeling I’m going to have my first good night’s sleep in over fifteen years.”

  Synchronicity

  The bed in which Andaris awoke was far different from the bed in which he’d fallen asleep. He shot bolt upright and gasped, peering about the room in alarm.

  Startled awake by his gasp, Mandie sat up beside him and said, “What is it, honey? What’s the matter?”

  For a moment, Andaris just stared at her, too discombobulated to respond. When he finally found his voice, a weak raspy thing that had to be prodded from his mouth like a mule from a stall, he said, “I…I was just…somewhere else. I was in a castle and….”

  Mandie patted his hand, eyes shining with love. “It’s just another bad dream,” she told him. “Nothing to worry about. It’ll fade like always. You know, you really should pay more attention to your wife. I keep telling you not to drink so much peppermint tea before bed, but you never listen….”

  With these words, Andaris experienced a moment of Deja vu so strong that it made his head swim. He had been in this exact place, at this exact moment, hearing these exact words, many, many times before. The world seemed to hold its breath. He saw everything in startling detail, everything all at once.

  He was in one of the cottage’s three bedrooms, walls and floor constructed of freshly cut planks—pine by the smell. It was springtime. The tree outside was in full bloom, branches laden with pink blossoms and blue jays, the latter whistling happily in the crisp dawn air.

  Sunlight streamed through the window, casting golden rectangles against the floor. A green and white quilt covered the bed, each square boasting a different geometric pattern. On the quilt’s bottom right corner, just beneath a circle within a circle bisected by a vertical line, it read: Stitched with love by Mandie.

  Something odd about that one square, he thought. Something about that symbol that always gives me the willies. Aside from the bed, the furniture in the room consisted of a dresser, a simple wooden chair, and a roll top trunk stuffed with extra blankets for winter.

  And then the Deja vu passed, and his focus snapped back to normal. His memory, however, did not follow suit, deciding instead to do something entirely heretical, something that any discriminating observer would deem abnormal. He no longer questioned, for instance, why he had awoken in this place instead of in the castle. Indeed, he now remembered almost nothing of his adventures beyond Fairhaven. Trilla, Gaven, Ashel, Shamilla, and even Jade were gone, cast from his memory as if they’d never been. Only Mandie remained….

  Andaris had a simple life, and that’s how he liked it. “You’ve finally grown some sense!” his grandfather had proclaimed during their last visit, gracing Andaris with one of his signature guffaws. “You’re finally a man!”

  Some people would call it too mundane, too provincial—even boring. Fortunately, Andaris didn’t care what most people thought. He was content, his family was content, and that’s all that mattered. Let other people go live lives of adventure. Things were complicated enough between his own ears without him going and making it worse.

  Andaris lived in a small cottage he’d built with his own two hands. It was simple, stout, and comfortable. It was all they needed. It had taken him most of last spring and summer, but he’d finished, as promised, before the fall snow.

  Mandie and he had been friends for as long as he could remember, inseparable, joined at the hip, as some folks say. They had gone to the same school, a single room affair with eight rows of benches, one for each grade. Played the same games during recess, Andaris’ favorite being hikers and hobgoblins, Mandie’s being hide and seek.

  After they finished school, they did the most natural thing imaginable. They got married and started having children. Hanna was their first, now a precocious five with a head full of mischief. Benjamin was their second, three and a half, or haph, as he put it, and as sweet as his sister was precocious.

  Their third child lay wrapped within Mandie’s womb, waiting another couple of months, according to Doc Hannigan, before joining them in the outside world. If it was a she, they would name her Trilla. If it was a he, they would name him Gaven. Either way, it would be a great relief to have the pregnancy over and done, to see what sort of child The Watcher, in all his otherworldly wisdom, had chosen to bless them with.

  Thankfully, Andaris had gotten over his adolescent restlessness, as well as the angst and grandiose ideas that are ever its boon companions. He had his head out of the clouds and his feet planted firmly on the ground. Security, permanence, stability—these were the things that mattered most to him now.

  And so he had become a farmer, just like his father, and his father before him. It was a good life—simple, real, honest. With farming, unlike with people, what you saw was what you got. It wasn’t glamorous, but like his father always said: “It was better than being lost alone in an uncharted forest full of monsters that wanted to have you for breakfast.” An odd thing for his father to say, now that he thought about it. But no matter. He supposed even he was subject to the occasional bout of eccentricity.

  His parents had been so pleased. I mean, to find out that your son is going to follow in his father’s footsteps on the same day that your grandchild is born. Well, it was almost more than they could believe. His mother had started crying immediately, tears of joy of course, and didn’t stop smiling for a week after.

  And they had gone on being pleased. Andaris had built the cottage less than a mile away so they could be near their grandchildren. Every Friday was family night. Mid-to-late afternoon his parents would dress in their Sunday finest, load up their wagon with food and gifts, and come rolling down the gravel path that connected his place to theirs. Sometimes they even brought Grandfather Rocaren along. The men would walk through Andaris’ fields, talkin’ shop, while the women saw to the children and dinner. Andaris had offered to switch off with them, to play guest instead
of host, but they wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ve got enough on your plate as it is,” his mother would say. And she was right.

  This year, Andaris’ father recommended planting corn and soybeans. “Everyone likes corn,” he’d said with a look of sage wisdom, looping his thumbs over the top of his belt, “and soybeans are packed with nutrients, good for what ails ya when times get hard, as they do for all folk now and again.” Yes, the past couple of years had been like something out of a dream. He had been truly happy. Perhaps for the first time in his life.

  Unfortunately, for some men, true happiness brings with it a particularly nasty brand of paranoia, a disease that has no known cure. No amount of admonishment, from themselves or others, can draw the poison fully from their minds. Andaris would sometimes catch himself worrying that he would wake one morning to find everything he so cherished gone, yanked beyond reach by some petty thief of a god.

  Mandie believed this paranoia to be the cause of his recent headaches and nightmares. “If you could just accept your good fortune and stop looking for trouble around every bend,” she had chided, “you’d be fine.” And now, like usual, she was probably right.

  As Andaris’ head cleared, he became aware of Mandie staring at him with concern, holding his hand in her own. He turned to face her, flashing his most disarming grin.

  “There you are! Thank Kolera. I was getting worried. You were having another one of your episodes, but this one was worse than usual. Your eyes were glazed over and…you wouldn’t answer me. I really wish you’d go see Doctor Hannigan, or maybe even Sarilla. This is really starting to frighten me, Andaris.”

  He kissed her brow and said, “I will if it happens again. I promise.”

  She frowned and sighed. “That’s what you said last time.”

  He flashed her another grin. “I know, but this time I mean it. I’ll try Doc. Hannigan first, though. The thought of entering one of Sarilla’s bubbles…. Well, suffice it to say, it doesn’t much appeal to me.”