by Peter Plasse
Now, however, nothing seemed to be happening. He knew that the stone was vital to so many things. He knew he was running out of time. First, there was the issue of rescuing Jacqueline. He could only imagine her terror at being trapped all alone in the Agden Woods, at the mercy of the Wolves, if she was still alive. He needed to find Ryan and Gracie as well, and soon, and finally, he needed to reunite them all with their parents whose plight remained ill-defined. And the key to all of this was unlocking the mystery of the stone. So much to do, and so little time in which to do it.
“Come on, come on,” he pleaded with the stone as if it were a living, intelligent being. He continued to turn it over and over in his large hands. “Help me. Please.” He knew he had to speak words, but what words? Whereas the last time the words had come to him, right now he had no idea what to say.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when Orie asked, “Help you what?”
“Oh,” he managed. “It’s you. Thank the Old One. I thought for a moment that our ‘friends’ had somehow managed to enter our sacred place, and we were doomed. Come, sit down.” He placed the rock on the small table between them.
Orie moved over to a spare chair and sat with his hands folded in front of him. He looked around the room and whistled softly. “Wow,” he said. “It looks like this place was chiseled out of solid rock.”
“Well,” said Forrester, “I’m sure it was. Looks like the work of the Dwarves. They do the best stonework, although I’m sure they had some help from the Elves. See how the rock is melted in many places. That’s the work of the Elves.”
He glanced towards the portal that at the moment was a dazzling display of shifting, swirling lights, in an ever-changing mosaic of chiffon-like, kaleidoscope-like effects.
Orie’s gaze followed his, and he noticed the stonework around the entrance to the enchanted gateway. Encircling it were beautiful, polished carvings that gleamed in the flashes and swirls of light that emanated from the portal, along with intermittent faint pops, buzzes, and clicks.
Orie nodded at the portal. “What’s that?”
“That,” said Forrester, “is a way to get wherever we want to go. It is the reason we journeyed here. It’s called a portal. It too is charmed.”
“Kind of like an intraplanetary subway,” said Orie. “Cool.”
He nodded at the tell-all. “By ‘too’,” he continued, “I take it you are referring to this?”
“I am,” he said. “If you think of the portal as an enchanted tunnel, then this, this tell-all, is the key to it. Cirrhus always called it her ‘looking-stone’.”
“Hmmm,” said Orie. “And now you can’t get it to work.”
“Correct.”
“But you have used it before.”
“Correct again.”
“More than once, yes?”
“Yes, but only once on my own. Last night while you were asleep.”
Orie now knew without asking that this was the way his great friend was
able to instantaneously disappear and reappear.
“Then what’s the holdup? Whatever you did before, you do again. What did you do last night? Don’t we want to get to the Agden Woods? Isn’t that our first stop?”
“It is,” said Forrester. “There’s no question about that, but we’re going to need some help with getting there, not to mention getting back, and I was hoping we could get it from the stone.”
“Well, what’s the problem with the stone? I take it that it has some kind of magic to it? You said it’s spelled.”
“Correct.”
“Well how do you call up the magic?” he asked. “There has to be a way. You’ve done it a zillion times before.”
“As I said, I have only used it once before on my own. Cirrhus had always helped me before that.”
“Well you must be leaving something out,” said Orie. “If it worked once, and you do exactly the same thing a second time, it should work again. It has too.”
Forrester scratched his head in thought. “One would think … ” he mused.
“My dad always says, ‘Focus on the solution, not on the problem,’” said Orie. “He got the expression from some guy named Goodkind. I think his first name is Terry. He writes about problem solving, and other stuff. My dad says he’s the best writer he’s ever read, and my dad reads a lot.
“Dad says people tend to spend too much time defining the problem. They get lost. He says you should spend just enough time defining the problem, in clear enough terms, until the solution becomes self-evident. Then, you simply focus on the solution.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I say we do whatever it is that you did yesterday to get the stone to work, and see if we can get it to work again.”
“All right,” said Forrester.
He sat and cleared his mind. He held the stone up in front of him as he had done before and looked for any signs of life coming from within. There were none. He tried again, even harder. Nothing. Orie watched him, a look of calm on his face.
Forrester set the stone down in front of them, looking dejected.
“Question,” said Orie.
“Go ahead,” sighed Forrester.
“Where were you when you first used the stone?”
“I was here.”
“Here, here?” asked Orie.
“You mean here in this room?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. As I said, I first used it here last night.”
“So you had been in this room before?” Orie asked.
“No.”
“Then how did you know about this place?” he asked. “You know, that the portal thing was here and all?”
“The stone told me.”
Forrester’s face lit up. “Come on,” he cried, jumping to his feet. “Follow me.”
They ran back to the farmhouse and up the stairs to Cirrhus’s room. Forrester sat down on her tiny bed, which groaned in protest. He held the stone up in front of him. Right away the face of Cirrhus filled it, wearing the same smile.
“That’s it!” he yelped. “You were right.”
“Focus on the solution, not on the problem.”
Ryan and Gracie said their final goodbyes to the family that had sheltered them while Ryan recovered enough to travel. They had decided that they would head northwest to try and join up with Mr. and Mrs. Strong.
Grace had made good use of the time, learning as much as she could from Matthew about self-reliance in the woods. She could now make a snare to catch small game and start a smokeless fire over which to cook it, using a flint-and-steel and a rare wood called Burnfast. She knew how to whittle a homemade fishhook and how to identify the tree that would provide them with the fine strings for braiding lines and, if braided further, ropes. And she knew how to find and dig from the soil several different kinds of edible roots, tubers, and the like which, when cooked, were tasty, nourishing travel fare. It had been a crash course to be sure, but she now felt much more confident than she had when they had first arrived on this backwards planet that they might be able to survive on their own in the wilderness. She had developed some fighting skills, and was now fairly competent with a bow and arrow.
So they waved goodbye, calling out their last thanks, and were on their way. It all went smoothly enough for the first few miles. Then the horses began to rebel. Subtle at first, their reticence to continue on their present course first manifested itself by Fury doing little sidesteps and rearing up. The other two began to do the same, and despite the repeated “whoa boys” and “easy nows” spoken by both Gracie and Ryan in their attempts to control their mounts, and hold their seats, the horses not only persisted in declaring their obvious reluctance to keep going the way they were going, they rebelled more. The defining moment came when the trail split. One fork continued on in the same direction that Gracie and Ryan had decided they wanted to go, to the northwest. The other branched off hard to the right, doubling back on itself, in roughly the same direction as they had come. Fury took th
e lead. He broke into a quick gallop for a few steps, causing Ryan to nearly fall off. Then he came to an abrupt halt. Thunder and Lightning followed, and they found themselves pointed southeast, and no amount of coaxing or prodding could persuade the horses to turn about. Gracie dismounted and slapped Lightning hard on the neck. He looked at her with an expression that said, “Now what did you want to go and do that for?”
“What do you think?” asked Ryan.
“I think they know something we don’t,” said Gracie.
“Like what?”
“Impossible to say. But they’re telling us the way we should go. I think we should listen to them. The last time we did, it saved a lot of lives.”
Ryan dismounted and got out the maps. The dots of Mr. and Mrs. Strong were slightly to the west of where they had been a couple of hours before, indicating that they were on the move again. That of Stephanie was in the same place, and Jacqueline’s was a little closer to the border between the Agden Woods and the southernmost border of Ravenwild. Those of Orie and Forrester were still missing.
“I don’t get it,” said Ryan. “This way does nothing for us that I can see. It takes us farther away from everyone except Jacqueline, and we’ll never get to her in less than three weeks, maybe a month. And Forrester said that we couldn’t go in those woods anyway. He said they’re spelled, remember? We need to head northwest. Come on, Gracie. You know horses. Make them turn.”
Gracie stared at Lightning and said, “Come on, now. We need to get to Mr. and Mrs. Strong. They may need us to rescue them. Come on, now.”
She took the reins, passed them over his head, and pulled hard on them. He dug in just as hard, leaning back. Were their situation not so serious, Ryan would have laughed out loud at the sight.
“It ain’t gonna happen,” said Gracie. “They know something. I’m telling you.”
“All right then,” said Ryan. “We go south.”
They rode for the rest of the day, stopping in time for the two of them to catch several fat trout, which they roasted over some of the Burnfast that had been graciously donated to their cause. The evening air was chilly, causing Ryan to remark, “We need to think about bagging a couple of deer; one at least. We’re going to need some warmer clothes with winter coming.”
“Hmmm,” said Gracie. The thought of killing a deer was not something she relished, but if it meant the difference between saving and losing fingers or toes to frostbite, it was something she was prepared to do.
The next morning when they woke up, Ryan began to get a fire going. Gracie went to check on the horses. Thunder and Lightning were gone!
Their tracks indicated that they had moved off on the same trail towards the south. “Maybe we’ll catch up to them,” said Ryan, trying to sound hopeful.
Gracie nodded, thinking, “I don’t think so. They’re up to something.”
They rode double on Fury. The trail made by the two horses was easy to spot for their entire journey south along the eastern border of Ravenwild, leading them on four days of hard riding in the hilly terrain. By now they each wore mittens, leggings, and a cloak made of fresh deerskin thanks to the bow skills of Ryan, the newly acquired skinning and fleshing talents of Gracie, and the patience of both to render the pelts usable by firelight at day’s end. One stitched while the other prepared the evening meal. What they lacked in talents as individuals they more than made up for in teamwork. They now also had a week’s worth of dried, smoked meat, and ground tubers. So, without having to stop and hunt, and fish, and trap every day, they made steady progress.
The trail they were following ended up leading directly to the eastern bank of the Slova River. Each had more or less known that this would be the case from their study of the maps, which also indicated that it continued on the same side of the river. This would allow them to stay in Ravenwild. Neither had any intention of venturing into Slova again. Once had been enough.
They studied the tracks left by Thunder and Lightning. They led straight to the river’s edge, disappearing into it.
“What do we do now?” Ryan asked.
“Well,” she said, looking skyward, “we have a few hours of daylight left. We need to check up and down-river to see if the horses came out on this side. They’re very smart. They might have wanted to make it look like they had crossed, you know, if they thought that maybe somebody besides us was following them. I fish. You track.”
“Are you sure we should split up?”
She laughed. “RyeRye, I haven’t been sure about anything since we got here. Except that I don’t want to be here. But go. I’ll be okay. You’ll be on foot, and I’ll have Fury. I’ll yell if there’s trouble. I’m sick of deer meat. Go.”
Ryan set off, going downriver. It made more sense to him to try that way first. The maps indicated that the land upriver was basically a vast tract of nothingness, whereas at least to the south there was a town. Named Salem, even.
As the sun was giving its final salute to the day with the dazzling colors of sunset, Ryan returned to their campsite. He could smell the fish cooking from about forty yards out and was ravenous when he finally arrived.
“Good news,” he said. “I found their tracks about a mile downstream. They came out in a place on our side, obviously, and they definitely continued south, the same direction we’re going. Looks like they stayed way off the trail we’re on. I worked my way back out to it, and their tracks don’t reappear on it again. At least as far as I followed it.” He worked a piece of hot trout off of its hanging stick and blew on it, then popped it into his mouth.
“Would you please pass the salt?” he asked with a smile.
Gracie passed him the bag of salt that had been generously donated by Sarah.
“Don’t use a lot,” she said, “We need it to salt pelts.
“I knew they were up to something,” she continued. “Now we know they were trying to make it look like they crossed the river. That can only mean one thing: they expect us to be followed.”
“Or they already know that we are,” he said, working on his second piece of fish.
“Well,” he said, “in the morning it seems to me like we should do the same thing they did. To make whoever might be following us think that we crossed over too.”
“It’s going to be a cold swim in the morning,” she said.
After they had finished eating, while Ryan tidied the camp, Gracie brushed out Fury and checked his hooves. “Let us know if you see or hear anything strange,” she said.
He looked her in the eye and seemed to nod slightly.
She kissed him on the nose and said, “Thanks.”
In the morning, as they floated in the freezing cold water of the Slova River, hanging on tight to Fury, each fought hard to not hold their breath. Thankfully, with the river’s swift current, it took but a few minutes to get to the spot where Ryan remembered having found the tracks of Lightning and Thunder. It was none too soon. Each shivered violently on the riverbank. Ryan got a small fire going while Gracie rubbed Fury down. In about an hour they put on their now nearly dry outer garments and crawled their way back to the main trail, Ryan being careful to cover their tracks behind them.
They hiked the rest of the afternoon and stopped to make camp for the night.
“I don’t think we should make a fire tonight,” said Ryan.
“Oh no,” said Gracie. “Not cold deer meat again.”
“Sorry about that,” said Ryan, with a small smile.
“I also think we should camp way off the trail,” he said. “We should be getting close to Salem tomorrow, and the closer we get, the higher the odds that we might run into trouble.”
So they left the main trail and worked themselves into a dense thicket about a quarter mile from the trail’s edge.
“You sleep,” Ryan said, as the darkness descended. “I’ll take first watch. I’ll wake you up.”
Gracie offered no argument and was asleep in seconds.
It was shortly after midnight when Ryan heard it, t
he distinct popping of a small branch. He remembered something Orie had whispered to him back home when they had heard the same sound while they shared a deer stand. “That’s either a deer, a big dog, or a man.”
“Or a Gnome, or a Troll, or a horse,” he thought. He listened intently, but heard nothing else untoward.
He woke Gracie in about an hour and told her about the noise. Her watch remained uneventful, however, and when they returned to the trail in the morning, they saw the Gnome footprints that spoke clearly to the cause. They counted at least a dozen sets.
“What are they doing headed north?” he asked softly. “Won’t they freeze to death? I thought for sure that Forrester said we wouldn’t be seeing any more Gnomes by now because they all had to get back to Vultura before winter came.”
Gracie shrugged. She didn’t care as long as they were gone and no longer a threat. What she did care about was getting to wherever it was that they were meant to go. But what vexed her most was that they still had no idea where that was, or why they were going there in the first place. They had, after all, only come this way because it was the only way that the horses would allow, and now two of them were gone. It was all very confusing.
“Hey,” said Ryan. “Are you good?”
“I suppose,” said Gracie. “Not really. I just want to go home. But we can’t. Sometimes I feel like we’ll never get home. We go from this to that, to this to that, and from this to that, and we’re always running for our lives, and now we have, like, no idea why we’re going wherever it is that we’re going, or for that matter, where that is. I’m sick of being dirty all of the time, and eating cold, half-raw, deer meat, and basically being afraid all the time. I want to wake up from this awful nightmare.”
