The Tide of Ages (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 2)

by Robert J. Crane

  Bub nodded. “With my own hands. Yes.”

  “It’s very … sturdy,” Carson said, fishing for an appropriate compliment. Then he seemed to reconsider, eyebrows knitting. “It, uh … it is sturdy.” Half statement, half question, all prayer.

  “Of course it’s sturdy,” I said. It managed to cart an orc about across the oceans; for that reason alone, it had to be well made.

  Unless this was its maiden voyage.

  I told myself to shut up, and just in case, decided not to ask. What you don’t know, and all that, right?

  The night passed quickly. Both moons dipped out of sight, one then the other some twenty minutes later. Then the stars began to fade, and the sky started to brighten; very subtly at first, but soon I realized there were only half as many stars as there had been when we set out, and they were dusted across an expanse of navy blue instead of silky black.

  “Dawn comes early here,” I observed.

  “Earlier and earlier, yes,” said Bub. “Summer is approaching.”

  I tried to recall something I’d read about England; that due to its latitude (or longitude? I always forget which was which), during the summer the night was never truly dark, at least by whatever scale these things were measured, anyway. Maybe the same was true of wherever on this world we’d ended up.

  I opened my mouth to ask what it had been like when Bub had been exiled here, when—

  “We’ve arrived,” he said.

  Carson and I pivoted.

  There it was: rising from the ocean, and most magnificent of all, the final temple. Painted a greyish color like Bub through the waning night, I could only assume it was made of the same bottle-green stone as the others. Like a blocky pyramid, it reared skyward in layers, zigzagging up to a peak—and from that peak, supported by means I could not make out, blocks stacked in jags formed a great crown, fanning out like a pair of angel wings.

  Around the base, a wooden dock extended to greet us. Parked at its edge was Borrick’s enormous boat … and beside it, just like Bub had said, an awkwardly angled canoe—and inside, a streak of grey against the approaching dawn, was a person.

  Heidi.

  25

  Bub brought us in.

  The quiet between us grew tense.

  “Do you want me to talk to her?” Carson murmured.

  I shook my head. “No.” If anyone was going to bear the brunt of Heidi’s fury that we had followed her here, it would be me and me alone.

  The boat eased over to the dock. Bub settled it there, close enough for me to step out.

  I bypassed Carson, moving to the opening—

  He caught my wrist.

  “Be nice,” he warned.

  “When am I not?” I stepped off to an utter lack of reaction from him except for slightly widened eyes. The arse.

  “I’ll moor us,” said Bub.

  “I’ll help,” Carson offered. Anything to keep from elaborating on that little silent statement he’d made, I’d wager.

  That was all right with me, though. Keep them busy while I handled business.

  I stepped onto the dock. Although these past few hours I’d become used to the lurching motion with which Bub propelled us forward, stepping onto solid, unmoving ground again felt peculiar. It reminded me of swimming for hours, and then half feeling for the rest of the day as though I was still floating in water. At least I hadn’t needed to get involved in the actual rowing; feeling off-kilter was bad enough without my arms convinced they should be moving back and forth for hours.

  I wandered slowly down the dock. Heidi was not berthed far away; a dozen meters, give or take. Easily enough to know that we’d arrived.

  I braced myself as I approached for another round of vitriol …

  But when I laid eyes on her, met her gaze … none came.

  The Heidi looking back at me now, from the inside of this poor man’s canoe, still sprouting snapped-off branches on all sides, was tired. Broken. And very, very small.

  I hesitated.

  “Hey,” I said gently.

  Heidi cast her eyes down. “Hey.” Her voice was low. It held none of the fire from our last altercation.

  “Thought we’d find you here,” I said. “You made it okay, then.”

  She shrugged. “I got lost for a bit. But Borrick’s marachti lit torches, so I used those to get me back on track.”

  “Smart. You, err, rowed?” I said. Damn, I hadn’t been in a conversation this awkward since that time I’d told my parents I’d wanted to become a Seeker. At least thus far it lacked the fireworks that one had set off.

  Heidi nodded. “Broke down another tree trunk for a set of makeshift oars.” She lifted one—and unlike Bub’s, which were oversized but at least smoothed into a somewhat pleasing shape, hers were ugly things, much like the canoe. “Did the job,” she said, dropping it back at her feet.

  “Good.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  There was a long, long moment of quiet.

  Then, looking as though it took her great effort, Heidi leveled her gaze at me. “I’m surprised to see you here.” Those words sounded like they took a lot to say, too.

  She didn’t finish. But what was implied hung between us. After what I said.

  After what we said; I was guilty in this too.

  “Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “Couldn’t leave you to take Borrick down by yourself. We all want a piece of that glory.”

  She smirked. Then, softly, she conceded, “I don’t think I can win doing this solo. Not against the marachti. That’s why I’m … out here.”

  “You didn’t give him the orb, did you?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  Phew. “Psyching yourself up, then?”

  “Something like that.” Heidi bit her lip, hard. Glancing away, across the water, she said: “I’ve been … thinking. On my way out here. About … what I said. And …” She sucked in a breath. “And why I’m like this.”

  I didn’t speak. Not one word. Like earlier, by the fire, this was Heidi uncorking. The healthiest thing, the best thing, was to let her pour it all out without me derailing her.

  “You’ve got parent issues,” she said. “Well, Mira—I’ve got them too.” She sighed. “My mother. Five years ago, she just … she up and left our family, and headed back to China. Alone. The rest of us … we were just torn apart.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I didn’t see it coming. It was just … out of the blue, you know? I’ve spent so long looking back, poring over it all, trying to see if there were signs, and where I missed them … drove myself half-crazy.” Another heavy breath. “My dad didn’t see it coming either, I guess. It just—it ruined him. Still does. All this time later, he’s just … struggling, every day, to get by. To … not think about it, I suppose.”

  A pang of sorrow cut through me, for both of them; Heidi, losing her mum out of nowhere … and her father, losing the person he’d thought would be his partner for life. And then, having to carry on after that, to make a go of life every day, pretend things were normal, that the world hadn’t stopped turning when it patently had? That was heartbreaking.

  “It left a scar,” Heidi said. “A fear of abandonment, I guess. And so, to combat that, I just … overcorrected? Not exactly the psychologist’s term, but … I figured, if I kept my distance from others, then it could never happen to me again. No one could make me hurt like that anymore.”

  She turned her head down, masking it with her hands.

  A quaver rung in her voice when she spoke again.

  “And so I’m cruel. And short-tempered. And I say things I don’t mean—that I regret.” She looked up, and her face glistened in the starlight.

  “Heidi,” I whispered, and clambered into her canoe. There was so little room that Bub’s felt practically cavernous. I dropped to my knees. “Why didn’t you tell us this?”

  She shrugged. “Never been one for showing weakness, I guess.” Wiping a hand across her face, she rubbed her tears away�
�or turned them into a smear across her cheeks. She took a second, composed herself, got stern, and said, “You should go. I’m not worth the trouble.”

  I opened my mouth to respond—but before any words could tumble out, someone else responded for me.

  “Yes, you are!”

  Carson marched across the dock. He’d held back with Bub up to this point, stalling by the boat. But now he strode for us with fierce determination, back straight and chest out. His manbag bounced, not an anchor as it so often was but a hanger-on along for the ride.

  He stopped at the edge of the dock. “You are absolutely worth the trouble,” he said, voice hard. “And yes, you are trouble, sometimes. A lot of the time, recently. But you’re our friend—part of our family—and that means we stick together.”

  Heidi stared in teary bewilderment. For once, she had no words.

  “We’re all trouble sometimes,” I told her. “And we all lash out—because, well, that’s what hurt people do, right? But you know what we do after that?”

  Heidi asked, “What?”

  “We make up.” I took her hands in mine. “And we keep on fighting, all of us—as a team.”

  “But … but after all those things I said …”

  “I’ll forget about it if you will. Right, Carson?”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  Heidi’s eyebrows knitted. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because that’s what friends do.”

  She looked down at our hands. “Friends …”

  “Friends,” Carson confirmed from the dock.

  “Come on, Heidi,” I said. “We’ve beaten this prat before, and more than once. I can’t stomach the thought of him winning this round; not after the streak we’d built up. We can do it again—but it requires all of us … together.”

  She looked at me, as if for the first time seeing … what, I didn’t know. But there was light in her eyes; a ray of hope—and, like Carson, the first sparks of renewed determination.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Together.”

  26

  As four, we climbed the zigzagging steps up to the temple’s entry. This time, Heidi did not march ahead. Nor did she lag. We led together, side by side.

  “How deep does this thing go?” Carson murmured, peering over the edge. Little could be seen beyond the reflection of fading stars; no hint of the structure veering toward the seabed underfoot.

  “Deep enough,” said Heidi.

  The temple’s peak was triangular, a wide hole etched into it for entry. From it came a dim glow … and past a bend, leaking our way, were sounds. The soft scrabbling of feet as they shuffled along the stone floor. And voices, speaking sibilant words that were answered with more drifting murmurs.

  “They’re waiting inside,” said Heidi.

  “Time to go smash them then,” said Carson. “Right?” He looked to Bub for approval.

  “No smashing involved,” I promised. “Just swimming from here on out. Remember?”

  “Unless you get ghosted,” Heidi said. “Speaking of.” She retrieved the little speaker from her pocket, and extended a hand to Carson. “You better take this.”

  He eyeballed it warily, then turned his gaze to Heidi. “Why’re you giving me this?”

  “I’m not giving you anything. I’m lending you a get out of jail free card in the event that marachti creep up on you down there.”

  “But … Heidi, I’m not going. You are.”

  “Of course I’m not. You think I held my breath for a half-hour when I got myself locked in a stone hut back in the last temple? I used my spell, Carson. I’m sitting this one out.” A rueful note tinged her voice.

  Carson frittered in his manbag for a few long moments, bypassing the coil of elvish rope, one end poking out, and shoving aside some of the abandoned rappelling equipment we’d lumbered him with—and which, really, we could probably just up and chuck in the sea right here if we wanted—although better to be prepared for a future excursion in which it might be needed, I suppose. And it wasn’t like I was shy of storage space back at my hideout.

  Then, finding it, he pulled out and extended to Heidi—a stoppered glass flask. Round-bottomed, it swirled with a faint blue-silver color that was liquid at one moment, mist at another.

  “Take it,” he said.

  Heidi stared, confused. “Uh.”

  “I’m giving it to you,” said Carson.

  “I … I see … um.” Her eyes wrenched from it, to Carson. “Why?”

  “The Tide of Ages is your thing. Not mine. It’s only right that you’re the one who claims it.”

  Quiet, for long, long seconds. Even the sounds from the marachti and Borrick within the temple’s entryway seemed to have stopped. Or maybe they were simply tuned out, as I stood on the edges of this … this “moment” that Heidi and Carson were having, or might be having, or …

  Then, slowly … she took it. Gently. In a thumb and forefinger, around the small flask’s short neck, she accepted Carson’s gift.

  And she said, quietly, “Thank you.”

  She looked down at it in her hand. And though she bowed low, low enough that the height differential made much of her face invisible, I could still see one eye behind a jagged sweep of dark hair. It glazed, and she looked at the flask as though it were a great treasure.

  “Thanks.” She looked up. Cleared her throat—a distinctly Carson-like sound. Then she smiled; all lip, no teeth, and kind of forced. But not forced like she didn’t want to smile at all. Forced like she was doing her best to shine some tiny light through a dark cloud.

  Carson grinned back. “Not a problem. Anyway,” he added after a pause. “I drank something that looked like that once. Tasted really nasty.”

  Heidi loosed one breath of a laugh: short, there and gone in an instant.

  And suddenly she didn’t know where to look. Neither, apparently, did Carson. But they didn’t look at each other.

  I exchanged a glance with Bub. I couldn’t read orc expressions so well. Or maybe he, like me, was doing his best to tamp down on letting that shell-shockedness show. For all I knew, he was misting up and I just couldn’t see it.

  Borrick’s voice echoed to us. The words weren’t comprehensible, though they were clearly his, and they brought us back to the task at hand.

  “We’d better go,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to keep Borrick waiting for too long, would we?”

  “Maybe just for five minutes,” said Heidi. But she fell into step at my side, and the four of us stepped inside.

  At the first echo of our footsteps on the stone floor, the shuffling up ahead ceased.

  Ready and waiting.

  I placed one hand on my pocket, where Decidian’s Spear was stowed, shrunken to an umbrella. Borrick had made a point of wanting to be “fair” in this when he cast off shore outside the last temple. But his version of it was still stacked in his favor, and it wouldn’t surprise me to step out and have three marachti at my throat, ditto Heidi, ready to seize the first key from us.

  Around the corner, to the left … and then, almost immediately, we were deposited into a square chamber. A glowing bubble of light floated near the ceiling, and a handful of distracted marachti watched it bob gently up and down.

  The rest had given a wide berth to the door. Spread in a horseshoe around the chamber, they watched us, split in only one other location: where Borrick stood beside a door, two round holes etched into its surface.

  He looked pleased to see us. “So good of you to join me.”

  Heidi didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

  “No platitudes? No banter?” At our silence, Borrick shrugged, although he looked somewhat irked. “Fine. Right to the matter at hand then, I suppose. Oh, step right in, won’t you? Let your companions lurking in the corridor have some space.”

  “Last time we stepped into a key chamber with you, a gang of orcs grabbed us so you could confiscate our weapons,” I said.

  “Only to ensure a safe entrance to the final chamber.
You claimed them back.”

  “You’re forgetting the part where we had to fight them off,” Heidi said.

  Borrick pursed his lips. “All right, I might have been a little … incensed at that moment. Let my emotions get the better of me.” Inflating his chest, standing a mite taller, he said, “Regardless, I explained all on the beach this afternoon. I am acting fairly here, will be all the way through to the end. My marachti won’t touch you.”

  “Period?” I asked. “Or will they just lay off of us until the temple is opened?”

  Borrick didn’t say anything. It was answer enough.

  “Let’s get this show on the road then, shall we?” I said. “Go on, Heidi.”

  She fished in her pocket, where the bulbous lump that was the first orb protruded. Then, just before she tugged it out, she shook the Bluetooth speaker in her free hand, transforming it to Feruiduin’s Cutlass. Wise precaution.

  Then she tugged the orb free.

  On her palm, it glittered, icy interior reforming as crystals grew and shrank in its jagged core.

  Borrick’s eyes glittered too.

  “What’s the glamour?” he asked.

  “None of your business.”

  He retrieved his orb from an inside pocket, holding in his fingers. It was, I realized, the first time I’d seen it up close—and would, perhaps, be the only time. Like the orb of ice, it was clear around the edges with an ever-changing core. This one was filled with sand soft and brown in color, entirely unlike the near-white sand on these sun-baked beaches. It swirled in a helical vortex that turned over and over on itself.

  Then, with just a soft twitch of Borrick’s fingers, it became a tennis ball: lime-colored and fuzzy, imprinted with white lines.

  “Even the density changes to match,” Borrick marveled. “Isn’t that peculiar?” He asked this of me rather than Heidi—and the spark of curiosity in his eyes was pure, no rivalry present in it.

  “It’s weird,” I conceded. Borrick being civil was annoying, but more annoying was my defaulting to manners, as though the habits my parents had drilled into me were beyond my control now that he wasn’t actively threatening us. The cad.