by J B Cantwell
The change was slow; we were still many miles away from the edge of the storm. But when we finally hit the outskirts of it, we all knew immediately the danger that we were facing. The wind, gusting at incredible speed, smacked our faces with tiny snowflakes, sharp as razors as they hit the exposed skin. I was warm enough, but immediately I was in pain. Everybody paused, unsure. But then Cait held out her hand again, leading the way.
And so we began the terrible journey towards Dursala’s pedestal.
We all faced the wind, our heads bowed in an attempt to keep the stinging crystals at bay. It didn’t take long before the wind had blasted through my heavy clothes, and soon all of us were shivering, our lips blue. We didn’t have much time. We wouldn’t be able to stay out here for long, even bundled as we were. We had to make it to the pedestal soon if we wanted to survive.
Of all of us, Cait was the warmest. Wrapped in Kiron’s blanket, only her cheeks were exposed to the misery of the storm. And her hand, which she thrust out relentlessly to point us in the right direction.
Minutes turned to hours and hours seemed like weeks. I felt sure that my cheeks were freezing right off my face, and I could no longer feel my fingers. I held one hand up to feel my numb skin and it came away bloody from where the ice crystals had cut into it.
We jumped again. But this time, Cait’s whispery voice rang out.
“Wait!” she called. “This is it!”
How she could see anything, even a magical trail, through the blinding wind was beyond me.
“We have to walk!” she shouted.
“Are we that close?” I called.
But she didn’t listen. Instead, she jumped down from Father’s arms, took his hand in her left, mine in her right, and led the way.
It didn’t take long. Within minutes the air cleared, and we found ourselves at the heart of the storm, in the very center of the great hurricane of snow that had tried to keep us away. The air here was perfectly still, even though the great circular storm raged on around us.
Every one of us collapsed to the ground. The snow wasn’t thick here, and just a few inches beneath us I found grass, miraculously still alive. It confirmed my suspicion that this was no ordinary storm, but one that had been set to ward off seekers of the pedestal. Us.
I looked at the swirling vortex of wind that encircled us, and I wondered what this place must have looked like before the Corentin had thought to defend it.
“He knows,” I croaked. “How does he know?”
Kiron shook his head.
“There isn’t time,” he said. “Not right now. We need to end this.”
I stumbled to my feet, the pouch of gold spheres already in my hand.
“We should all go down this time,” I said, staring around at the land suspiciously. “I don’t want to risk us getting separated again. If the storm changes course, or if I get trapped …”
“We’ll all go,” Kiron agreed.
The mark in the ground wasn’t hard to find. The snow had refused to collect here, as if the heat from the planet emanated right up into the stars and diamond of the symbol that marked the entrance to the chamber. I stood on the diamond, and in moments all of our shivering bodies were below ground.
The chamber was warm. I peeled off the cloth that covered my head and found it was caked with ice. Kiron and Finian both scraped at the ice that clung to the thick hairs of their beards. Father seemed the first to recover, ever calm, ever eager. Cait took him by the hand and led him to the pedestal.
“Come on,” she whispered to me, beckoning me over.
I stood, my limbs creaky and aching. But when I moved in her direction, Kiron grabbed me by the hand.
“Wait,” he croaked. “We need a plan for getting out of here before we give over the gold. Where are we going?”
We hadn’t yet made a link to take us from here to Aria, the next planet on our list. I knew it would be impossible to create a link down here in the brightness that would fill the chamber after Dursala was balanced, but I couldn’t imagine going back into the stark cold above.
“We’ll take the ten-mile link,” Finian rasped, pushing himself up to standing.
“But we don’t know where it’ll—” I started to argue.
“Exactly,” Finian said. “We’ll do as we did before. We’ll just keep jumping until we can find somewhere safe to rest. Hopefully it won’t take long.” He flexed his gloved fingers, staring down at them with concern. “We’ll need somewhere warm, too,” he said. “For all of us.”
“Ok,” I said. “Kiron get the link ready. It’ll be hard for us to find one another in the brightness. You should all stand there, back against the wall.”
“Oh, no,” Finian said, and I thought I detected a hint of adventure in his words. “I didn’t come all this way to hide in the corner while you leveled Dursala. I haven’t had a chance to be at a pedestal yet. I want to watch.”
His face then, incredibly, broke into a smile.
“Alright,” I said.
I got out the satchel and counted nine gold pieces, the most required by any of the planets, into Finian’s waiting palm.
Father had come to join us at the basin, too. His eyes followed the gold with an eagerness I didn’t expect. It made me feel suddenly at risk, and protective over the gold.
“Do one at a time,” I said to Finian, turning my back toward Father and pocketing the remaining gold. “And gently. Be careful with it. The first one exploded on us.”
This might have given anyone else pause, but Finian’s eyes lit up as he approached the bowl. Despite his clear excitement, he did as I had told him, carefully dropping one sphere at a time into the basin. With each addition, it grew brighter, spun faster. Soon I found myself backing up and already squinting my eyes, waiting for the onslaught of light.
With the last piece of gold, the room burst with the light of Dursala, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. The others shouted with pain from the brightness, but that was fine with me; it allowed me to find them more easily. Behind the curses and exclamations of the group, I heard the platform rising back up to the surface, none of us aboard it.
“Kiron. You still have the ten-mile link in your hand?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Everybody come together now,” I said.
We jostled each other as we struggled to find someone to hang on to.
“Does everybody have hold of someone?” I asked.
They all responded, affirming.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because once we’re out of here, you’ll be stuck if you don’t make it. This is the last jump anyone will ever take out of this place.”
“We’re sure, Aster,” Father said.
He hadn’t made a swipe for the gold as I had feared he might in that instant. He had just watched Finian, fascinated.
I realized then that, of everyone in the group, Father’s voice had been the only one to remain quiet. He hadn’t complained about the cold. Or the wind. Or the brightness.
“Kiron?” I asked.
Somewhere before us he must have held out his hand, because a moment later we were tumbling over each other as we landed high up on a mountain precipice. Wind whipped through our hair, and a new round of shivering took over my body.
“Again?” Kiron asked.
Everyone held on, hearts hammering.
But it didn’t take long. On just the third jump we landed in a mercifully sunny field. All of us collapsed to the ground. I curled into a ball, waiting for the shivering to stop.
The heat of the afternoon gradually, thankfully, started seeping into the skin on my face and hands. I moved my fingers and found them stiff and sore, but still in working order. In the heat, the blood on my face soon dried, taking away some of the sting. I took off my coat and boots, letting my bare skin warm in the sun. We all lay in similar positions, either curled up or spread out as we waited for the heat to do its work. Tall grass blew lazily around our heads, and in the sky above small songbirds flew by. Gra
dually my heart stopped pounding, and I realized how completely exhausted the snow had made me.
Cait was up, though, and she was not happy.
“We need to keep moving,” she demanded, her lips now barely pink from the blue they had been just minutes before. She grabbed onto my shirt, pulling me. “You said we would be going,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Cait,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I don’t think—”
“We can’t go yet,” Kiron said, forcing himself into a sitting position. “We have to rest.”
“You said—” Cait argued.
“Listen child,” Father said. “We won’t do your brother any good in this state. We all must rest, you included. Come over here and let your bones thaw.”
Cait stuck her lower lip out, and tears swelled in her eyes. But she walked toward Father’s outstretched hand and, taking it, sat down beside him.
Kiron looked around, inspecting the landscape more critically than I might have.
“We should get out of the open,” he said, groaning as he stood up. “I don’t trust it out here.”
“What do you mean, you don’t trust it?” I asked.
“That wasn’t a natural storm we just came through,” he said. “And we don’t know what he knows.”
I shuddered to think of what terrible fate might await us on Aerit, on Aria, if the Corentin was aware of our efforts. And suddenly I understood Kiron’s nervous glances.
“He’s right,” I said, hoisting myself up. “Where should we go?” I asked him. “We need somewhere to hide.”
“Yes,” he said. “We need to rest before moving on. We must prepare. But time is short now.”
I stared around. We were totally exposed out here in the open. In the distance, a scattered group of trees caught my attention.
“Let’s go,” I said, pointing.
Though we were all tired, we walked quickly to the cover of the trees. It was only as night finally began to fall that we let ourselves relax, wrapping back into our warmest clothes, and dozing against tree trunks. Before the sky had gone completely dark, Father and Finian removed several pieces of fruit from their bags. They divided the food between us, and we ate our dinner lazily, halfway between sleep and waking.
Cait sat for hours, her arms crossed stubbornly before her, her share of the food left untouched. But eventually she, too, could not resist the pull of sleep.
It was the cold sting of wind on my cheeks that awoke me the next day. One glance at Kiron and at the grassy plains beyond knotted my stomach into a writhing ball of worry.
Had he found us?
In the fields beyond there was no enemy visible, no huntsman seeking our demise.
But something felt off. Sick. The wind that blew across the fields had a stiff, acid quality to it. And it was getting stronger with each passing minute.
“He’s searching,” Kiron answered my question before I could even ask it.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I don’t,” he said, getting to his feet. “It’s just a feeling. We need to go. Now.”
I scrambled about, cleaning up everyone’s belongings and stuffing our packs, while Kiron prepared the link to Aerit. The storm crashed through the trees, not with snow this time, but with wind. In the short time between waking and finishing the link, the wind had grown so strong that now I found myself hanging onto the closest tree, one hand on the trunk, the other around Cait’s shoulders. It seemed to take ages before the link was finally completed and Kiron stumbled back to where we all waited. And in another moment, we were away from the danger, breathless from the chase, panicked by how close the storm had come to us so quickly.
It was true that when we jumped, we never knew what awaited us on the other end. But when I opened my eyes I had hoped to feel less terrified than I had felt facing that storm.
There was no comfort for me to see here, though, and my breath was taken away again, my heart pounding anew.
Far from the safety I had hoped for, we had landed high above the ground, farther up than I could ever remember being. And below us stretched out the most deadly looking range of mountains I had ever seen.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“The Shattered Mountains,” Kiron groaned. “Oh, why couldn’t we have landed in one of my fields?”
We clung to the rock. The precipice we had landed on was not large, and I would have been grateful that none of us had gone tumbling down if I hadn’t been so worried that I might still fall at any moment.
It reminded me of the mountains where Larissa made her home, though these were larger and blacker than I remembered those being. Their jagged edges looked deadly as knives, and as I lay splayed out, belly to rock, I immediately fretted over how we would descend.
I wanted to get down. Now.
But then I saw Cait’s face, and I was surprised to see that she looked elated, even joyful. She ran to the edge of the precipice and pointed downward, smiling widely in my direction.
“It’s there,” she said, her gaze alternating between me and the rocky depths of the mountain range.
“What’s there?” I asked.
“The pedestal,” she said, skipping over to me with a lightness in her step I hadn’t seen in many weeks. She reached out her hand and pulled on my arm. I relented, letting her drag me over to the edge of the peak.
Staring so far down made me dizzy, and I immediately sank to my knees and gripped the stone platform of rock. I backed away from the edge, suddenly panicked.
But Cait stayed right where she was, as if she stood no higher up than upon the seat of a chair.
Kiron carefully made his way over to the edge, obliging her by looking down. Then he, too, backed away, though he was somewhat more dignified about his retreat than I had been.
“How far is it?” he asked her.
“It’s straight down,” she said. “No time at all.”
“How will we get there?” I asked, my stomach still lurching. “How will we get down?”
“We can’t use a link,” Kiron said. “It might be a mile down into the depths of these mountains, but the shortest link we have would take us a mile away horizontally, not vertically. We could land on the edge of a precipice and fall over the side.”
“We’ll have to climb down,” Finian said. Father stood behind him, his face eager.
“But … how?” I asked, unable to imagine a path that would lead us down the sheer faces of rock.
“We will find a way,” Kiron said. He rummaged through his pack and took out his disk. “I wish Larissa were here,” he said.
I did, too. If we had had her flying ability with us, she could simply take us one by one down into the abyss below.
Now, it was on us. Live or die, we would have to make our way without her.
Wind caught my hair, and I looked up at the sky, suddenly even more concerned than before.
“I wonder if he knows we’re here,” I said. I imagined what a rainstorm might do to our company as we attempted a mad descent from these peaks.
“There’s no time to waste,” Kiron said. I noticed that Finian was also taking out his disk. “With these we can try to guard our path. Whether it works or not, our way down will not be easy. Finian, you lead. Keep your disk in sight of mine. We will do what we can.”
I secured my staff to my pack, and, terrified, joined the group.
Father went before Cait and me, and I braced myself for what was to come. Finian found a tiny sliver of rock for us to perch onto, and together we pressed our chests to the slab of stone before us and edged our way along the thin path.
Nobody fell. Nobody breathed. And then we made it across to the next tiny platform, all of us huddled and gasping.
“We have to find another way with the disks,” Finian said, breathless. “I can’t hold it and the rock at the same time.”
Kiron nodded, digging out a thin band of rope from his pocket. He split it into two with the edge of his disk, then approached Finian and tied his disk to his wrist
.
“This will have to do,” Kiron said, handing his strand of rope to Finian to tie.
I once again noticed the look on Father’s face. He seemed excited rather than terrified.
“What is with you?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows in question.
“Why do you seem so happy about being up on this mountain?” I pressed. “The rest of us are scared out of our wits.”
“Well,” he said, “it is exciting, isn’t it?” He looked out over the mountains. Their jagged peaks seemed to go on and on forever in the distance. “I’ve definitely been here before. I feel sure nothing bad will happen to us here.”
I glanced at the chasm below, which sent my head reeling again. I forced myself to look at him, to ignore the intense vertigo that kept blindsiding me.
“It seems to me that it’s likely something very bad will happen to us here,” I said.
He shrugged.
I guess we’ll find out.
Finian finished tying Kiron’s disk to his arm, and readjusted his pack to his back.
We set off again. We balanced our bodies against the sheer rock faces before us and slowly began making our way down the mountain.
We stopped frequently. To drink water. To rest. To breathe. Cait’s exuberance never faltered. And Father looked nothing short of exhilarated at the adventure we were having.
I just tried to keep from passing out.
All day we traveled in this manner. It was amazing that Finian was able to find the paths down, and I wondered if this was somehow what Father had been talking about. Despite the danger, none of us faltered, and we always seemed to be able to find the right path to take us to the next scrap of level rock for us to perch on. We had been safe the whole time.
Then, suddenly, I slipped.
I felt the air rushing past me as I grappled for the stone lip of the path. I caught it with just three fingers, screaming with fear. I tried to get my other hand up to hold me, but the weight of my backpack unbalanced my hold even further, and I couldn’t reach high enough. There was shouting above me, though the terror ringing in my ears kept me from understanding the words of my companions. Then, mercifully, I felt a pressure beneath my feet and along my shoulder blades, as if the air itself were righting me, lifting me back into position along the path. I stared, mouth open, as the force brought me back to the rock face, and I gripped the slippery rock with everything I had, gasping for breath, resting my face against the cool stone.
