Aster Wood and the Wizard King (Book 5)

by J B Cantwell

  “But I’m not,” she cried. “I can’t do this without you. What if he—”

  “The Corentin will not be able to reach you,” he said. “Not entirely. He will try, but he will fail. Only a sliver of him still remains inside of you, and he has other matters to attend to.”

  Erod looked around at the rest of us with a groan of pain. Now, not only was his glow gone, but the pink color of his skin was beginning to fade.

  “They will help you,” he said. “And look at you. Already you are yourself, and all on your own. Perhaps I waited too long to finally release you, to trust that you could make your way without my power to keep you safe from him. My magic fades and has already lost its grip on you. And yet you remain.” He raised one hand, cupping her cheek. “Remember—” Something sickening gurgled in his throat, and I realized with panic and dread that it was his own blood. “Remember what I have told you all along. Do not quit. Do not wish for it to be all done. Use your power and walk through this pain. You will succeed.”

  He turned his head to me, then, and I moved over to him, grasping his outstretched hand.

  “And you,” he said. “You have the chance of a millennium. Do not waste it.”

  As I stared into his face, the face of my friend who had saved my life more than once, his eyes faded until the light had completely left them. His arm became heavy, slumping to the ground beneath my childish grasp.

  Erod was dead.

  We didn’t have long. Now that we were aware of just how many were seeking us, and just how dangerous they were, we didn’t even have time to dig Erod a proper grave.

  At first Jade sat beside him, crying softly as the realization of her loss crept into her. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were not unlike Father’s; bright with their original color, green, and only rimmed with a black circle, indicating that the Corentin had not released her. Not yet.

  She put her hands over her face and wept, falling into my chest. I put my arms around her, my lost sister, and I wept, too. Losing another member of our party seemed too much to bear. Chapman. Donnally. Elidor. And now Erod. Gone at the hands of the monster we now sought. I gritted my teeth at the thought of him and pushed her away from me, my hands on her shoulders.

  “Are you yourself?” I asked, staring into her eyes. “Does he have you?”

  She sat back, seeming to take inventory of her body. She closed her eyes for several long moments.

  “No,” she said. “I am all but myself. Though he tries around the edges of my mind to take hold, I can handle it. For now.”

  With sudden realization, she placed one hand a few inches off the ground. Pebbles flew to her palm, a magic she had not controlled for many months. Despite her sorrow, a smile spread across her face.

  With Erod dead, his power extinguished, her talent, her weapon, had returned. Jade’s power over rock was not unlike Jared’s had been, not unlike the Corentin’s was now.

  And so it was with that power that Jade placed the boulders around Erod’s body, stacking them one by one until a great mound of granite stood over where he lay.

  My mind buzzed with questions. There were so many of them, evil beasts that followed the Corentin’s command. How many more of them would we meet before we finally made our way to him?

  We moved on, away from the scene of the attack. Only Jade remained, saying her last goodbyes to the friend who had rescued her from the grip of a terrible possession.

  I waited, just at the end of the group, for her to let go.

  And she did, finally joining me as we walked towards the inevitable fight that was yet to come.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I found myself, after a time, walking beside Father. He had been, as he often was, quiet as we pressed onward. I looked at the large welts across his arms and face. He had been the last to use the potion to heal his wounds. The marks looked as if he had been burned in a terrible fire, and they still shone with the moisture of fresh wounds.

  He didn’t complain, though. Just walked on.

  “He really is terrible, isn’t he?” he asked after a time.

  Jade and I had been holding hands since leaving Erod’s body, and it was she who answered.

  “He is,” she said. “Though I like hearing about him when he was good.”

  Father lowered his head, his eyes on his feet as he walked.

  “I don’t know how good he really was,” he said, his voice forlorn. “It seems to me that he was always arrogant. At least once he became a man. He always felt that he was above the others around him.”

  “Well, he’s helping us now,” I said. “There must have been some part in him that at least considered doing the right thing.”

  “I hate him,” Jade said. She squeezed my hand so tightly it hurt, and I noticed that the other one was clenched into a fist at her side. “Jared, the Corentin; they’re just different versions of the same man, aren’t they? The same corrupted child that turned himself into a beast as time and riches and power took him over.”

  Father looked up at her, pain clear in his eyes.

  “What does that make me then?” he asked.

  The question hung in the air between the three of us. None of us knew how to answer it.

  “It makes you a guide,” Finian said. He had been walking ahead of us, and I guess he had been listening, too. “You said it before, Aster. He’s a vessel. Through him we learn about the people who inhabit his body. He shares their mind. Sometimes their actions.”

  Kiron turned from the front of the group.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “When I first met you I was as suspicious as any of us were. But since the Shattered Mountains, that trick you pulled with the fall, I understand better now.”

  “But it was Jared who created me,” he argued, his voice forlorn. “And the Corentin emerged from Jared. I must have that same evil within me.”

  I thought back to my first meeting with Father, deep in the gold mines of the wasteland of California. I had experienced a kind of evil on that day, the kind that arises when a father seeks to murder his own son.

  “Maybe you do,” I said. “But have you ever actually done anything evil? Or even wrong? You know that it was my dad who attacked me through you all those times. And aside from that, what have you done? Nothing.”

  “The only thing any of us need worry about right now is finding the Corentin and taking his power away,” Finian said. “Does it really matter if Jared had the seed of evil within him, even when he acted with respect to the lands and people of this place? Everyone has the potential for evil. But there is always a choice.”

  “Just focus on getting us the information that we need,” Kiron said. “You’ve been to these places before. Tell us where to go and how to find the last pedestal. That is what your purpose is now.”

  All at once, Finian dropped to the ground. He shot one hand out as he did so and dragged Kiron down with him. Then the rest of us, looking around in panic, saw why.

  Through the trees, far off on the horizon floated a lone, terrible glider. It made its way lazily across the land, searching.

  Did it know that we had defeated its brother?

  We didn’t wait to find out. Kiron brandished his disk and then turned to us.

  “Whatever you do, don’t use magic,” he warned. “And you,” he directed his gaze at me. “Don’t even think about magic. Not even for a second. You must hide your powers at all costs.”

  Hide my powers? I could barely imagine how to even use my powers, much less hide them. But I nodded in assent, gripping the staff tightly in one hand.

  We moved as quickly as the underbrush would allow, no longer caring much about the noise we made. That glider was still far away. We were banking on the possibility that it was still too far to sense our presence or hear our flight.

  We came to the end of the wood. Up ahead, across a painfully exposed expanse of grass, were the spattered outcropping of rocks that made up the beginning of the Neri Mountain range. Somewhere farther
up along this path our tormentor awaited us. I felt sure that he knew we were here by now. Maybe he had sensed our presence, just as the first glider had. Or maybe he knew that that same glider, one of his most powerful weapons, had already been lost in the battle.

  “You all ready?” Kiron said, indicating the rocks on the other side of the field.

  “Are you mad?” Jade gasped. “We’ll be caught for sure!”

  “We can’t hide here,” Finian said.

  “We can’t hide anywhere,” Kiron grumbled. “But I think we’d be best off continuing to move. I hope you’re all well rested. I don’t think sleep will be a possibility anytime soon.” He directed his hard gaze once again at the rocks.

  “Finian?” he asked. “You’ll be ready?”

  Finian nodded curtly, raising up his disk, but not yet igniting it with his power.

  “You,” he said to me. “You go first. Don’t stop running, but don’t go so fast that we can’t find you on the other side. Search for a place to hide once you’re there. We’ll follow you. Remember, regular pace. He might be able to sense your magic if you sprint.”

  I nodded, my heart thudding in my chest. I felt blood coursing through me, in my throat, in my ears. I didn’t wait. I gripped the staff and took off running as fast as I dared.

  It was difficult to keep a steady pace, to not give in to the desire to run full-out, away from the danger that seemed to be lurking around me on all sides. But as I ran, I searched for a threat, turning my head back several times to check that I wasn’t being pursued. All I saw when I did this was Kiron’s anxious face poking through the trees.

  And then I was across. The rocks on the other side were just tall enough for me to hide between, a crevice nearly hidden from most points of view.

  Jade came next, and though she didn’t have magic in her gait, she was surprisingly fast. It seemed only moments before she had made it across and joined me behind the rocks.

  Kiron and Finian came next. Kiron seemed winded from the effort, but the steely resolve in his eyes was as resolute as ever.

  Then, just as Father was stepping out into the light, I saw something that made my heart stop beating in my chest.

  Another glider.

  And this time, it had something curious hunting with him. From this distance it looked like a dog. A big one. They weren’t close. But then, it seemed that proximity wouldn’t matter much to their hunting abilities. Could they see us? Smell us? Was the magic we carried within us enough to give them a trail to follow?

  As the glider turned its head in the opposite direction, I stepped out into the open, flagging Father down and pointing to the glider. He got the message at once, retreating back into the relative safety of the trees, and I slunk back behind the rocks.

  The glider scanned the area, and the dog sniffed the air around them as they patrolled. They reminded me of a radar machine, sweeping the ground with a signal, looking for discrepancies. But somehow they did not see us. Or, if they did, they did not follow.

  When the two hunters had turned their backs, Father dashed across the expanse. I could tell that running did not come naturally to him; his steps were awkward and almost wobbly. But he made it to us soon enough.

  “We must act now,” Kiron whispered, scanning the meadow and then fixing his eyes on the glider’s receding back. “While he is not expecting us. We can’t be caught off guard again. We can’t afford it.”

  He stepped out from behind the rock and brandished his disk, aiming it squarely at the glider’s back. It wasn’t a gentlemanly thing to do, to attack from behind, but it was life or death now. Kiron’s bolt of lightning burst from his disk, and Finian’s soon followed. The two together hit the glider squarely in the back, and it jumped from the surprise attack. Just as it was turning to launch its own attack, my beam joined the other two, and it was obliterated just as its brother had been.

  Beside the remnants of what had been its master, the dog howled, the sound ringing through the valley, clear and shrill. Then, unmistakably, it turned its eyes toward us.

  We dove for cover behind the rocks. The space between them was snug, but we all managed to pile in.

  The others wore smiles of triumph at the destruction of the glider, but I had been struck by another, quite different, feeling.

  Dread.

  Because I recognized that howl, and I knew in that moment that the Corentin had left no stone unturned in his attempts to destroy us. To destroy me. It was the giant wolf from the snow planet I had landed on long ago, the friend who had helped me run from the monsters of that place, and who had protected me to the last.

  The terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach combined with a sort of electricity in the rest of my body. With each passing moment, our danger grew greater than before. I tried not to think about how close, with every step, we all were to death. I tried not to think about Erod. I fought the urge to run far away from this place, to somehow retreat back to Earth and bury my head in the sand for the rest of my days.

  But I was much too far along this journey to quit now. I would have to channel that energy, that urge to flee, into focused, resolved attack.

  We all stood silently for a time until everyone had caught their breath. Then, it was Kiron who spoke.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said. His voice was taking on a hoarse quality I hadn’t heard from him before, and his eyes were tired, his movements sluggish.

  “Let’s just stay until we’re rested up a bit,” Finian said, eyeing him. Though he clearly had the survival of the group on his mind, he, too was beginning to look physically exhausted.

  My blood was still pumping with the terror of the night. Like Kiron, I didn’t want to stay, either. And I didn’t think it was a good idea to rest now. I was starting to look forward to this final … what would it be? Meeting? Battle? The tension was getting to me, not even knowing if we would make it far enough to have the opportunity to face off against the Corentin.

  “No,” I said. “I think we should go. It’s not far now. Let’s just do this.”

  Everyone stared at me, though I couldn’t quite figure out why. Beside me, Jade took my hand in hers, gripping it firmly. I looked down to find her face hard and determined.

  I was ready. Ready to end this, one way or another.

  “So, what’s the plan then?” Finian asked, looking at me.

  “We keep moving,” I said. “Disks and staff out. After what we’ve seen tonight, I’m sure we’ll have to fight our way to him.”

  “It worries me.” This time it was Father who spoke. “Moving along this way. He will figure it out.”

  “Well, he hasn’t figured it out yet,” I said.

  Or, he hasn’t found us yet.

  “We’ll stand and fight if he does,” I continued.

  “The pedestal,” he said. “We won’t get to it until the last. It is at the very top of the mountain, and I feel sure that is where he awaits us.”

  Then to the top of the mountain we would go.

  Father continued to look wary, but he didn’t argue as I took the first steps toward the small opening in the rock. But when I looked up, the two shining black eyes of the wolf stared back at me. A low growl came from its throat, and immediately I realized that it must have caught our scent when it had passed by with the glider.

  I stumbled back against my companions, frozen with sudden fear.

  The beast snarled, a low, terrifying sound. Standing as tall as me, its fur rippling on its raised back, so real, though I had known him to be stone as well as flesh. He was so convincingly alive that my yelp of recognition died in my throat.

  If the wolf had helped me the first time we had met, shielded me from the echoes of the dogs on the hunt, it was clear that he would not do so now.

  His lips raised over his shining teeth, and he clucked his tongue as if getting ready to devour us all. I felt sure that he could do so, that he would make short work of tearing us to pieces. But when Kiron raised his disk behind me, I found myself layi
ng a hand on his arm, not willing to let this beautiful animal give any more of himself to me. Not willing to be the final reason behind his death.

  We backed into the corner of the rock as one.

  “What are you doing?” Finian hissed in my ear. “We have to attack!”

  My brain seemed to jam with panic. I searched around us, trying to see anything we might use to defend ourselves that wasn’t deadly magic. I tried to think, but I found myself only searching for a way out, for a way to escape this impossibly tight place I had stranded us all in.

  He moved as we did, taking step after step with his enormous paws. They thudded against the ground, heavy with the weight of the great stone animal. We were getting tighter and tighter, hopelessly trapped between the rock wall and those glistening teeth.

  I put one hand on my chest, trying to slow down my breathing, but it was no use. I backed further and further away. My hands gripped my chest harder.

  I felt certain in that moment that I had lead us all to our deaths, and it would only be a matter of time before the Corentin rose to total power again, before he stole back all the gold we had replaced.

  I felt something hard in my hand and squeezed it. It seemed that it was my own heart, now solid and outside my body, as hard as rock.

  With a start I realized what I was gripping onto, and suddenly I knew what I needed to do. And though it might be the opposite of staying hidden, I couldn’t see that we had any other choice.

  It would be unpredictable. I didn’t know where we would end up. Somewhere out of sight, safe? Or somewhere visible and exposed, fighting for our lives?

  The wolf struggled to squeeze its enormous body between the rocks, snarling and snapping its teeth. My heart gave a pang as I recognized that the Corentin had turned this animal, who I had known as a good and pure beast, into just another one of his slaves.

  I ripped the link from around my neck.

  “Hold on!” I called over the growling monster.

  And we jumped, blind, into the unknown.