by GARY DARBY
“Helmar and Amil,” she answers, “search for food. Phigby and Cara seek water.”
She comes closer, her eyes clearly concerned. She sniffs at my shoulder and her head jerks back as if she’s breathed in the smell of a week-old goat carcass that’s been left out to rot in the sun and is full of maggots.
A low growl rumbles from her throat. “Hooper, you’ve got to get up, find Phigby.”
I wave a hand at her. “Go away, I’m not going anywhere. If Phigby wants to find me, he knows where I am.”
I drift off to sleep. My nightmare comes again. I’m running, stumbling through the forest. The woodsman’s hut is a heap of shattered, smoking ruins that I’m trying to escape.
I stumble through the trees only to fall a last time, exhausted from my effort and the pain. I hear a noise and lift my head, only it’s not three dragons that come for me, it’s Vay.
She glides across the ground, her claws outstretched, and this time, I know that no green dragon is going to save me.
“Hooper!” the blast of sound jerks me awake. I open groggy eyes and peer upward. The golden is still standing over me. “Hooper,” she says desperately, “listen to me. When Phigby returns, you’ve got to say to him,
Foul worms there be, both land and sea
That claim the mind and to it bind
Away life’s spark, forever in the dark
Until the light shall end the blight.
I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Go away,” I demand, “and leave me alone. Can’t you see that I’m sick?”
I shiver one moment, and then I want to throw off my tunic the next as I feel as if I’m on fire. I writhe in pain, the agony coursing down my arm and through my shoulder as if Malo is piercing me with a dozen Proga lances.
Waves of darkness pass through my mind, but I fight them off, not wanting to face Vay again, even if it’s but a dream.
I hear voices. It’s Vay, she’s coming for me. Somehow, I rise to my feet. I try to run but all my legs can manage is a staggering, stumbling gait. Vay’s behind me, coming closer. I can hear her footsteps crunching leaves under her clawed feet.
I can’t move fast enough; I can’t get away. All around me is darkness, closing in, pulling at me as if to suck me into the blackness.
Then Vay’s claws are on me. I try to fight but I can’t. She spins me around to face her, and I know it’s the end. Here, in this place far from Draconstead, I die.
“Hooper!” I struggle against her grasp. “Hooper!” I try to push away, but I’m caught fast.
“Phigby! Come quick, he’s delirious!”
“Hooper,” the voice is gentle, soft, definitely not Vay’s harsh cackle. “Hooper, open your eyes, look at me.”
I keep my eyes closed. It’s a trick. Vay has turned herself into appearing as Cara. If I open my eyes, she’ll have me. “Let’s get him back to bed,” another, deeper voice says.
A moment later, I’m back on my leafy bed, twisting, turning in my torment. A gentle hand presses on my face. “Oh, Phigby,” Cara murmurs, “he’s burning with fever.”
Phigby is kneeling beside me. His hand is rough on my face. I reach up to push his hand away. “G’way,” I mumble, “leave me alone.” I much prefer Cara’s smooth, tender touch.
I retch, sending another painful round of Proga lances coursing through me. “Hooper, look at me,” Phigby demands. Cara has a wet rag on my cheeks, my neck. The coolness feels good, but only where she touches, the rest of my body burns as if I were walking across a fire pit.
I barely open my eyes against the light. I can see the golden standing, peering over Phigby’s shoulder. Her eyes are imploring, fearful. I can tell she’s not going to leave me alone unless I repeat her silly ditty.
I wet my lips, trying to remember what she said. “Worms,” I mumble.
Phigby leans closer, his eyes big and round. “What did you say, Hooper?”
“Something about worms,” I repeat, trying to recall the golden’s lyrics. If I can just remember, they’ll all go away and leave me alone.
Abruptly, I can see the words, glowing gold and bright in my mind. Another wave of darkness starts to close in on me before Phigby’s rough shaking brings me back to the light.
“Hooper, what’s that about worms?” He’s practically yelling at me. I get mad. He shouldn’t be bellowing at me, I don’t deserve to be shouted at, and I’m sick and tired of it; especially the sick part.
With lips and jaws set tight, I grind out,
Foul worms there be, on land and sea
That claim the mind and to it bind
Away life’s spark, forever in the dark
Until the light shall end the blight.
Phigby’s intake of breath is so loud that it makes me open my eyes a bit wider to stare at him in surprise. “Phigby,” Cara demands, “what is it?”
“I’m a fool!” he bawls. “A complete utter, doddering fool. Get more wood,” he orders. “I need a fire, now.”
I close my eyes tight as the sunlight is now too much to bear, but I hear the fear in Cara. “Phigby, what’s wrong, what are you going to do?”
“Something,” Phigby replies, “that I haven’t done in quite a long time. But if I’m successful — ”
“Successful at what, Phigby? What’s happening to Hooper?”
Phigby’s voice is worried, anxious. “Hooper’s dying. His body holds a Wraith Worm. If I don’t remove the vile thing in time, he’ll turn into a wraith and become a slave of Vay.”
That opens my eyes.
Chapter 21
“I need water and wood for a fire,” Phigby snaps at Cara. “Leave the one leatheren with me that still has some water in it and get the others filled. Now!”
Without another word, Cara snatches up the water flasks and heads off at a dead run. I raise a weak hand to Phigby. My voice gurgles from the foam that forms on lips and tongue. I don’t know if it’s the spittle or my natural inability to speak clearly, but out of my mouth comes, “Wraaath wrrrm?”
Phigby eyes me, and takes a cloth and quickly wipes my mouth. He shakes his head in answer to my question and holds my head up for me to drink from his flask.
My throat feels as if I’ve a dirt clod stuck in it, and I choke and sputter, but somehow I get some of the liquid down. The rest just drools off to one side of my mouth.
Phigby sets the flask down and begins pulling objects out of his bag. I try to raise my head to see what he’s doing, but then the darkness comes at me again. I know what will happen if I succumb so I fight back.
I’m not sure how I know that if I give in, I will no longer be Hooper, puny and low as I may be, but something — someone else entirely and under Vay’s dominion.
I’ll become Vay’s slave, and she’ll grind me under her feet until I’m less than the maggots that burrow into rotted, stinking meat.
I grab leaves, dirt, anything I can lay my hands on to give me a feeling of something real, something firm to hold onto. I thrust my feet into the ground and with what little strength I have left, try to push myself away from Vay’s dark world.
But it’s no use, the darkness starts to close about me, swallowing me up in its infernal ebony curtain.
Somehow, I reach out to Phigby, clawing at him. Phigby jerks around, takes one look at me and places his hands on my shoulder. His face looms close. I can see his mouth moving, but the words are faint, distant. “Hooper, hang on, don’t give in . . . ”
Through blurry sight, I see Cara running up to dump her firewood. She takes one look at me, her mouth sags and her eyes go wide as if she’s seen Vay.
She throws the wood together for burning and this time, Phigby doesn’t toss anything into the kindling for it to catch fire. His hand makes a chopping motion, I hear, “Blazen!” and the arm-sized branches burst into flames.
Then Cara and he are tearing at my tunic. They practically rip it off, but at this point, I don’t care, I just want the pain, the anguish to stop. It’s stronger than I am, it’s bea
ting me down until I have nothing left, no willpower to fight back.
I wish I were stronger and had Helmar’s or Amil’s, or even Cara’s strength. But I don’t.
I — can’t — do — this. I can’t save myself.
If entering the bliss of Vay’s shadows is the answer, then that’s what I want. I stop squirming, stop fighting and lay my head back to let the darkness, let Vay claim me so that I can be forever rid of the pain.
Cara’s slap across my face is every bit as rude and hurtful as Malo’s swift kicks to my backside back in the barn. My eyes pop open, and Cara’s angelic nose is practically touching mine.
An angry angel, nevertheless, a saving angel to me. “Hooper!” she yells. “Don’t you dare leave us!”
That I heard, loud and very, very, clearly.
I think to myself, “Don’t you dare leave us,” is nice, it means that Cara believes that I belong in our company. “Don’t you dare leave me,” however, would have been so much better.
It means I belong to her. But still, “don’t you dare leave us,” must mean that she cares, right? And if Cara cares even a little, then that’s important.
A quiet voice, sounding remarkably similar to the golden’s, interrupts my thoughts; If you won’t fight for yourself, then fight for Cara.
The darkness pushes at me again, stronger, harder. I feel myself slipping back into the blackness. I’m standing on the brink of a swirling, ebony whirlpool.
One more step and I’ll drop into the void and be lost. Whatever and whoever I am will be forever gone, swallowed by Vay’s dark will.
I hear Phigby’s voice — it’s powerful, forceful, calling me back from the edge. With every bit of self-will I can muster, I slowly turn from the spinning blackness. Parting the churning black clouds is a sliver of light, it grows, changing into a shining arch; a rainbow arch.
Striding through the colorful bow are Phigby and Golden Wind. Phigby’s dark robe is gone, replaced by a brilliant silvery mantle that billows as if from a breeze. In one hand he holds a gleaming staff with a knobby end that he holds out as if to push away the roiling, dark curtain.
The golden’s eyes are on me, they hold me so I can’t move, keeping me from toppling over into the black pit of doom. Phigby reaches out, and his voice is like thunder and lightning combined, Summonis, abjurate, Hooper — to me!
His free hand touches my tunic right on my arrow wound. For an instant, I feel as if a lightning bolt had pierced through my body and I jerk upright. I suck in breath after breath as if all the air had been forced from my body.
It takes a moment before my eyes clear and then I see Phigby, standing over me, but what he holds causes my heart to almost stop beating.
He’s holding long, blackened, smoking tongs as far away from his body as he possibly can. Caught in the pincers is a writhing, tiny wormlike creature. I watch wide-eyed as Phigby turns and strides a few steps out into the open meadow.
From the tree line, Cara appears, holding dripping wet water flasks. She stops to gape at Phigby for an instant before she starts to take another step.
Phigby’s voice booms in the glade, seeming to echo off the swaying trees. “I told you to stay away!”
He swings his arm at her as if he would push Cara out of the glen. Then he commands, “Get back, for this brings the living death.”
A shaft of morning sunlight breaks through the overhanging tree limbs to form a bright beam in the meadow’s center. Phigby paces to the brilliant ray of sunlight and holding the tongs in one hand, reaches up with his other hand as if he were trying to touch the sun.
Then he cups his hand between the squirming wormlike thing and the sun and holds it there for a moment. Ljos Hata Mykyr! he exclaims in a loud, penetrating voice.
Either my eyes deceive me, or I see a beam of light shoot from the sky into Phigby’s open palm. Then, as if his hand were channeling the light, the ray bursts out of his fingers with such brilliance that I have to jerk my head away.
As the light dissipates, I turn back to see that all that’s left of the wormlike creature is a small, dark, wispy column of smoke that rises into the air until it entirely disappears.
When I look back, Phigby has lowered his pincers and is slumped over as if the exertion had drained him of every bit of energy in his body.
Cara hurries over and asks anxiously, “Phigby, are you all right?”
He straightens, and glowers at her. “I told you to stay away. Someday your curiosity will be the death of you, girl.”
“I’m sorry, Phigby,” she replies meekly and holds the water flask up. “I thought that maybe you or Hooper needed more water.”
“Humph!” he answers before his face softens and he directs her towards me. “Go to Hooper, he needs to drink deeply.”
Cara hesitates for a moment before she hurries over, kneels, and holds the water skin for me to drink. I practically down its contents in one swallow.
“Here,” she says, “let’s get your top back on. After what you’ve been through, the last thing we want is for you to catch the shivers.” With her help, I slip my tunic over my scrawny ribs and lie back.
“How’s the shoulder?” she asks.
“Much better, thanks,” I reply.
She reaches out to lightly touch my wounded shoulder. “That’s amazing,” she murmurs. “Hooper, I saw your wound.” She makes a face as if she’s just stepped on a squishy bug. “It was ghastly, like a big black spider with yellow pus, and — ”
“I get it,” I quickly answer, my stomach rolling at her description. “When Phigby was getting that thing out, did you see — ”
No,” she instantly replies. “He shooed me away. Told me in no uncertain words to stay in the woods until — well, his exact words were, until the day had come and gone or he was come and gone.
“And then he said, no matter what I heard, even if was the most forlorn pleading or begging that I’ve ever heard, not to come back into the glade until he called for me.”
She took in a deep breath. “He whispered that my very life depended on my heeding his words.”
“What do you mean?” I stammer.
She bites on her lip. “I think,” she begins softly, “that whatever he was dealing with was so deadly that he either succeeded or the two of you died.”
My head spins and I feel a little woozy. Cara reaches out to me. “Hooper, you’re not going to faint on me are you?”
In a moment, the world stops spinning and just after, Phigby joins us. He holds the tongs up and peers at them with lowered eyebrows. Whatever Phigby did, the pincer ends are now fused and blackened together.
“I admit,” he says with a sigh, “it’s been a while since I had to do anything like that. I don’t remember it being quite so hard before.”
He tosses the charred nippers aside and goes to one knee next to Cara. Great drops of sweat run down his forehead and onto his cheeks to disappear into his beard. He’s breathing heavily, his face drawn and his expression is one of exhaustion, but his eyes tell me that the victory was his.
I hear anxious chittering coming from nearby, and Scamper breaks through some tangling under limbs of a nearby bush and spurts to my side.
Cara quickly reaches out to stop him before he can jump on me. She holds him firmly with one hand and arm wrapped around his chest while her expression turns from deep anxiety to relief as she studies my face.
I reach out and knuckle Scamper as Cara eases him onto my lap. He raises his head to peer intently at my face. Arrriiiite? he asks.
I swallow, take another deep breath, and murmur, “I think so, Scamp.”
He bumps his nose against mine, and then satisfied that I’m indeed all right, darts away, only to return a moment later with what looks like an acorn between his teeth. He stops to put an end of the husk on one side of his mouth, trying to use his heavier back teeth to break open the shell.
“Hey,” I say and reach out with my good arm. “Wouldn’t want to share with us would you? We haven’t e
aten in a while, and even a piece of an acorn sounds good.”
He peers at me, breaks the shell, and spits it out. His little paws push the kernel into his mouth and before I can take another breath, he’s eaten all of the nut’s meat. He tosses the remainder of the shell off to one side, grooms his face with a paw, and then waddles off.
“That would be a definite no,” Cara states. “And it appears that he’s off to find more acorns not to share with us.”
I stare at the shell remnants and then to where Scamper disappeared into the thick underbrush. “You know, if he can find acorns to eat, so can we. Maybe a whole hoard of nuts for the finding?”
Cara looks at me with a skeptical expression. “Really? You think Scamper wouldn’t have found such a treasure trove by now?”
“Never mind about acorns and such,” Phigby grumps. “Hooper, your wound, the shoulder, how does it feel?” He leans close to whisper, “And inside your head?”
I take stock of my shoulder, the rest of my body, and most importantly, my mind before I whisper, “The blackness — it’s gone. She’s gone.”
“She?” Cara asks. She gives Phigby a concerned look. “Who’s she?”
I glance over at the golden who’s watching with both gentle and relieved eyes. I bring my gaze back to Phigby. His eyes are impassive, but he doesn’t answer, just returns my stare and gives me the tiniest of shakes with his head.
I lick dry lips and mutter, “No one, Cara. I was just having dark dreams, that’s all. Talking out of my head with the fever, you know. It can do that to you.”
She gives me a small smile of understanding and then holds the water flask up for me to drink again. This time, I do empty the water skin in one swallow.
“Phigby,” Cara asks, “what was that you had in those tongs of yours? Was that thing in Hooper?”
Phigby scratches at his cheek for a moment before saying somberly, “That was a Wraith Worm, my dear.” He lays a gentle hand on my hurt shoulder. “And yes, I removed it from Hooper, but he should be fine, now.”
Cara gazes at me with an uneasy expression before she asks Phigby, “A Wraith Worm? What’s that?’
