The Timekeeper's Moon

by Joni Sensel

  She’d just passed the well when another insult echoed behind her.

  “Foolish girl! Where would you go?”

  As if Scarl had reached from the past to clout her, Ariel skidded to a halt. When he’d actually snarled those words, long ago, she’d been his and Elbert’s prisoner and she’d tried to escape. He’d slapped her then, too. Her cheek burned at the memory, and her heart chafed with old resentment she hadn’t known she still carried. Its bitterness flowed toward the forces that blocked her escape now.

  She whirled. “I’m not foolish!”

  “Prove it.” Though she recognized that voice from Skunk, she wondered if some of the gurgles from the well were not random at all.

  She stalked back to its rim with an impulse to throw something in. A splash would end the rude echoes, at least for a moment, as well as defy the evil picture she’d seen there. Without so much garble in her ears, she could think more calmly and perhaps figure out why she’d been led here. Otherwise, the well’s taunts would be true. The Farwalker would become a Fool.

  Casting about, she found only barren ground. The rocks of the well were too firmly fixed to break loose. Although she considered snapping the end of a tree branch, she quickly rejected that option. For all she knew, these trees might snap her bones in return.

  As she stood fuming, trying to ignore the voices and toying with whether to simply slap at the water, another phrase came through clearly.

  “It’s disrespectful to climb trees!”

  “Oh, Zeke.” She dropped her face into her hands, doubting she’d ever see him again. The words and the day when he’d said them sat fresh in her mind, recalled more than once by her nightmare. Perhaps she should simply lie down and await its return. Her heart knew that if she dreamed it again, especially with no one to wake her, it would be the last dream she ever had. Yet even that might be better than drowning herself in the well.

  “It’s disrespectful to climb trees… to climb trees… to climb trees….” The words pushed through other jumbled echoes of her past.

  “I got it,” she grumbled. “You can go on to something else now.”

  “Climb treessclimb treeeesss.” The voice grew more sibilant, no longer Zeke’s at all. It sounded, in fact, like a watery swish. Ariel jumped when a splash flew over the rim of the well. She didn’t dare approach to see what had stirred it.

  “Cli’treesss. Cl’tree—”

  “Oh!” She regarded the trees. “That’s not advice, is it?”

  The rattle of branches drowned out the well’s voice.

  Ariel approached the skeletal trees slowly. “But … it’s disrespectful. Isn’t it?” The idea of climbing one of these bony husks, putting herself in its clutches, chilled her.

  The rustling dwindled until only one tree still trembled. Ariel laid her hand flat on its bark. Its vibration passed through her, too, before stopping.

  She raised her arm to pull gently against the lowest branch, testing. Even if they were not strictly dead, the dry branches might break. And a fall from one of these trees might be as deadly as the fall in her dream.

  But she had to do something, and she was out of ideas of her own.

  When her Farwalker’s feet lifted her onto her toes, she said, “All right. If that’s what you want.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Moon Out of Time

  Ariel took off her boots. It seemed less rude that way and, besides, she’d need to cling with her toes. The wrinkles in the tree’s bark were too fine to serve as footholds or grips.

  For a moment she wasn’t sure she’d be able to climb it at all. The lowest branch arched over her head. Finally she wrapped her hands around it from both sides, let herself hang to make sure it would hold her, and then swung and scrambled her feet up the trunk until she could wrap her legs, too, around the same branch. From there, she squirmed and levered herself until at last she twisted atop the branch and upright.

  “Oh!” she said to the tree. “You’re not helping much, are you?” Panting, she peered up. The next branches were distant, a confusion of pale bark and slashing moon shadows. She couldn’t see so much as a dead leaf trapped in a fork, so she wasn’t sure what she was meant to accomplish—unless the idea was to fall.

  A moonlit glint to her left caught her eye. A telling dart lay atop the nearest standing stone.

  Ariel stared, not trusting what she saw. Brass gleamed from the top of each stone. If she’d been taller, she might have spied the darts from the ground, or at least from the rim of the well.

  “Thank you,” she sighed. Then she frowned. The tops of the stones all rose over her reach, and they’d already refused to be toppled. A friend to boost her—that’s all she needed—but the trees stood too far away. She couldn’t contemplate breaking a branch. Ariel fingered her necklace, racking her brain. A dragon could reach them, or a bridge, but neither helped here. She had nothing but the clothes on her back.

  So she slid out of the tree and out of her shirt and pants, too.

  “Like the selkie in the story slid out of its fur,” she decided. She tied a sleeve to one pant leg and flopped the length over the stone like a lasso. She pulled. The clothes dropped. The dart remained out of sight. Repeat attempts also failed. While she could hear the dart rattle, her clothes could not drag it off—or at least, she had too little patience to manage it once, let alone with every stone in the circle.

  “Fine.” She yanked her clothes back on and glanced up at the moon. “Here I come again.” With her arms outstretched, she could just embrace the stone’s expanse, so she gripped both corners and hoisted herself up. Unlike the stones of the abbey, this one offered no cracks for her fingers. She simply clamped it between her hands and feet and pressed her body to its cold surface, clinging through sheer strength and friction and squirming up like a bear cub shimmying up a tree. Fortunately, the stone wasn’t terribly tall. Still, by the time she pulled herself atop, her skin stung with scrapes and her muscles groaned.

  The dart that awaited appeared to be blank, but she didn’t examine it carefully now. Instead Ariel clenched it in her fist and stood unsteadily, shaking the strain from her legs and eyeing the next stone on the circle. She would have liked more than one stride to launch from, but she thought this was a leap she could make.

  Ariel glanced down. By contrast, the next stone looked close. She jumped.

  Ariel stumbled twice on the route, both times cracking her knees and nearly tumbling before catching herself, but soon she was sitting atop the last stone, a bundle of darts in her fist. Rolling onto her belly, she eased her legs over the edge. She was too tired to even attempt to climb down, but with her legs dangling, the drop was less than six feet. She pushed off.

  The stupidity of letting go occurred to her too late.

  Ariel fell. The earth did not meet her. She flailed, spun, and tumbled, empty space whistling past her ears. Leafy branches brushed at her legs, at her face. A scream trailed from her throat. She heard Zeke cry her name.

  When the ground slammed against her at last, the pain came as a relief. At least it was solid. A broken cry burst from her lips, but she was still glad the falling was over. Her body too shocked to inhale, Ariel wallowed in the earth and the scent of decomposed leaves before slipping into yet greater darkness.

  The blackness spat her back out. Voices murmured nearby. Alarm arced through her body and her eyes opened. She lay flat on her back with the full moon ogling her from above. Ariel squinted, only slowly connecting what she saw. She was not in the woods near Zeke’s maple. She lay instead near the base of the stone she’d abandoned. The voices spoke from the well. Ariel groaned.

  Before her next breath, the moon swirled, as its reflection had done when she’d asked for her future. She blinked, supposing tears caused the blur. It spun faster. With a wince, she realized why. She was not dangling upside down, strictly speaking, but she was staring into a well in the sky. The stones in her peripheral vision formed a rim, framing the moon. Stars glittered around it as if on th
e surface of water.

  “You’ve already shown me one death,” she whispered. “I’m not certain I’m not a ghost now. How many more deaths can I have?”

  She regretted the question. The twisting moon slowed to form the face of a corpse. Though pallid and disfigured, it was a face she knew well: Scarl’s.

  “No!” Her eyelids clamped shut. She cringed and rolled away before she’d even known she could move. She couldn’t trust anything here. Yet her traitorous heart whispered a truth: sooner or later, the Finder would pass from the world. Even if she remained trapped out of time, Scarl’s death would eventually come.

  A sob of dismay pulled her upright, awakening bruises and aches. Yet the thought of her guardian renewed her will. She’d face his loss when it came, since she hadn’t a choice. But despair could only speed its arrival. She had to escape this place somehow, or all of her friends would be dead to her now.

  Telling darts lay scattered around her. Wondering how long she’d lain senseless, she pulled on her boots and gathered the darts. To be sure she missed none in the fog, she counted the stones: thirteen, the same number as moons on the map. The same number as—

  Tiny glints flickered between her fingers precisely as the realization struck her. Ariel’s eyes darted quickly enough to catch the last of the symbols still forming on the darts in her hand. They were no longer blank. A different trade mark appeared on each dart, showing who was supposed to receive it. The other marks on the stems were the same between darts, and familiar.

  A bolt of understanding hit Ariel so hard it sickened her stomach. She had received one of these darts. Not one like them—one of the very darts in her fist. They’d come not from her world but from a place out of time, a place where the moon froze and night reigned and her only future was death. The darts had no mark on them identifying the sender. She supposed that was because they had not yet been sent, but the mapstone had led her to the sender after all: Ariel herself was the sender.

  With that, she knew what she must do here, and why. She had to send out those darts. They had to be launched into time, upstream from the Timekeeper where she’d stepped out. If she didn’t, she’d never find a dart near Canberra Docks or take up her path as a Farwalker. She’d merely fall to her death on a fateful day in Zeke’s tree. That day was the crossroads, and the strange echoes that had bled through from her past all depended on it. If she erred now, her life would already be over.

  Fighting to hold on to her courage, Ariel paced. Her only chance was to send out the darts. Yet she faced a problem: while she knew how to open a telling dart and close it again, she’d never learned how to send one.

  Maybe it was as simple as wanting it so. Certainly the darts had known, almost before she did, who they should go to and what they must say. Consciously, at least, she had not guided them. Sending them might be the same. What had Vi told her? Something about having a purposeful thought. Ariel opened her hand wide and wished the darts gone.

  The darts did not move from her palm.

  “Fly,” she said. “Send. Go. Go away. Um… be off. Carry the message. Deliver?” She ran out of words. Desperately seeking an insight, she tried to block out the mutters still bubbling up from the well.

  Wait—perhaps those echoes might help her again. “How do I do it?” she called into the water. “How do I send the darts? Anyone? Please tell me.”

  The sounds from the well rose and fell, now a giggle, now wailing. Her ear caught a reference to scorpions and snatches of stories. The words did not string together into anything that could be done with a dart.

  Of course, she’d heard of darts that could be thrown in a game, not only the kind that bore messages. Grimly, Ariel set her burden on the ground to take up just one, starting with the dart for the Fool. If any were to be lost, that was her choice. Meeting Gustav Fool last year in the desert, suffering his threats and abuse, had been vile. She preferred not to invite him again. In fact, she would have left that dart unsent intentionally, if she hadn’t been afraid of meddling with events that had already happened. Moving to the edge of the circle of trees and wishing they didn’t watch her so closely, she pumped her hand near her ear to work up her nerve. She aimed into the dark, drew a taut breath, and threw the dart as hard as she could.

  Her eyes lost its track, but she heard a dull thunk from quite close.

  Turning her head, she spied the telling dart stuck in a tree, quite an odd angle away from the direction she’d thrown.

  She tried again. Soon she’d proven only that no strength or steady hand could fling the darts past the trees, even if she stepped beyond them to throw. She saw no tree move, but somehow they drew in the darts and caught them.

  Befuddled, Ariel collected the thrown darts once more. A dozen she held in her left hand; the Farwalker’s dart she gripped in her right. She closed her eyes and moved her awareness into her feet, asking them to find her path. One slow step at a time, they carried her back to the well and its maddening garble.

  The well. She pondered the bead in her necklace, the gold one, whose story had featured a well. The name of that story had been “Golden Seeds.”

  Ariel shuffled the darts in both hands, uncertain. But thinking would not make a difference, not here. She reached over the rim, took a deep breath, and splayed her fingers. The darts dropped into the water with nary a splash.

  Expecting them to shoot like arrows back into the sky, Ariel leaned away from the rim. She listened to silence and the wild beating of her heart for several long moments before she realized the voices had stopped. Yet the darts did not fly up and out.

  Praying that the water might be gone now, she peeked over the edge. Her hope sank. The moon stared back from the water’s surface as before. Ariel looked away fast, still stinging from the scene of her death that reflection had shown her.

  If she’d lingered, she might have glimpsed her own future again, the view entirely changed by her release of the darts. But Ariel moved too quickly for the moonlight to reveal it.

  “I hope that was right,” she mumbled. “If not, it’s too late.” Weary beyond measure of feeling too late, Ariel rolled her head on her neck. It occurred to her that even if her instincts were sound, she had ensured only that the Vault would be found. Her own path might still end here and now.

  A thunderous crash sounded behind her. She whirled. A standing stone had toppled onto its back. Another dropped, shaking the ground, while she watched. Ariel cringed against the well as a third and a fourth, two at once, and then the whole circle fell.

  The soil alongside them first trembled, then heaved. Spidery roots sprang from the earth, squirming up the sides of the stones. Larger roots followed to swarm over and bind them, growing with the speed of flames rising. Ariel gulped and glanced at her feet. The ground where she stood was still solid, but perhaps not for long. Roots crawled toward the well. She raced between stones toward the trees.

  No sooner had she passed beyond the circle of stones than, with a terrible groan, the ground split and the roots dragged them into the earth. Dirt flew. Fisted tight, the roots yanked and wrestled. Ariel wanted to cling to a tree trunk, but she was afraid of the trees, too, for she knew where the tangled roots came from. Her common sense urged her to run, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from the burial.

  First one fallen stone and then another was sucked down completely. When only churned dirt was left, the roots pulled the well in on itself. The rimstones fell in with a splash. Soon nothing remained on the hilltop but Ariel and the circle of trees. The earth between them rippled languidly, smoothing itself, like swells on a mild summer sea.

  Hence, walker. Whole.

  She looked up, surprised by the voice.

  Well, all well. Time, trees, twisted … tired.

  Ariel eyed the circle of trees and remembered what Ash had said before her trip started: trees had done people a vast favor already. Somehow transcending time, they’d helped tend the failsafe. She hoped she could see their compassion both earned and repaid.
r />   Leave, lead, heed. Hence.

  “Thank you,” Ariel told the trees. “I’ll go now, if that’s all right.” Wary for a root coiling over her feet, she edged past the circle. The trees let her go.

  Engulfed swiftly in fog, Ariel skidded down the steep hill, trusting her feet to avoid unseen hazards. The clammy silence of mist weighed upon her, deadening the sound of her boots. The farther she descended, the thicker the fog grew, until even her own body faded from view. As she lost sight, she began calling Scarl and Nace. She didn’t really expect any answer. She only did it to prevent herself from vanishing altogether. When her voice became hoarse and she’d stumped downhill for what seemed to her sore knees like days, she whispered her Farwalker’s song under her breath. Her head and eyelids both drooped, but the words kept her going.

  Her shuffle had grown hitched and painful by the time she heard anything beyond her own whisper. Sharp voices barely roused her. As blind as if the fog had seeped into her eyes, she whimpered and shrank. Despite the moon’s final whispers, Ariel feared she was only imagining others, ghostly guides to ease her travel the remaining way out of the world.

  She jerked at a touch. Arms lifted her, solid and too strong to resist. Only the familiar and welcome smell of his sweat told Ariel the arms had to be Scarl’s. She buried her face against him and let the fog claim her, never more grateful that he was a Finder.

  CHAPTER 40

  Dog Moon, Waning

  When Ariel’s eyes opened a few hours later, they darted in confusion. Dead tree bones loomed all around. No moon stared back when she turned her face up, and for that she was grateful. But despite the hammering sun and heartfelt embraces from Scarl and Nace, who were resting beside her, the ghostly white forest gave her a chill.