by J B Cantwell
But as we skirted the edges of the forest, I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten. I still had no idea why Jade had come to Ossenland before going to Riverstone. Maybe she wanted to see it again. Maybe plot some new, horrible deed for the future. But something about the strange detour didn’t sit right with me.
“We need to do something before we jump,” I said, stopping and turning to Larissa. “I need to find out why Jade came here before returning to Riverstone.”
She stopped, her breath heaving. I guess I had been walking faster than I’d realized.
“What? Now?” she asked. “Why?”
“She must have had a reason not to go straight home. And it must have been a good one. Jade was obsessed with making it back to Riverstone and staying there. Why didn’t she go straight back?”
Larissa looked around nervously, searching for pursuers.
“I don’t know, kid,” she said, exasperated. “Can’t we deal with this later? Seems to me the thing she’s obsessed with now is killin’ you.”
I thought about her words, and something I hadn’t considered before popped into my head.
Jade didn’t want to kill me.
That wasn’t her purpose at all. Maybe, after a while and a lot more effort on his part, the Corentin would be able to force her to do it. But it wasn’t in her nature to kill, especially not me. I remembered the shocked, horrified look on her face when she had struck Owyn down.
But she left you there, hanging on that ledge.
Yes, that was true. But in those moments she was more possessed than I had seen her before or since.
What would happen to her if she murdered me now? Her friend? Her brother?
I shook my head.
“She doesn’t want to kill me,” I said. “He does, but she won’t do it. Not yet. She wants me for something else, but I don’t know what. What I do know is that there was a reason she stopped, and it was a good one. We need to know why.”
Larissa barely looked at me as I spoke, still scanning every inch of ground she could see from our hiding spot in the trees.
“You should go on without me,” she said. She looked up with a familiar, condescending glint in her eye, one that I had seen many times from both her and her brother. She clenched her fists and put them on her hips. “You’ll just mess it up, ya know,” she went on. Acting superior seemed to bolster her courage. “I’ll stay. I’ll find out.”
“No,” I said. “How will you get to me after? What if they catch you? What if—”
“We can’t risk losin’ the both of us, and there’s too much that needs doin’. You go. I’ll stay and dig up the reasons. If there’s anyone left alive in that town to tell me.”
I weighed the options. If I went now, I might be able to head off the army before it reached Stonemore. With the attack from the Solitaries on Ossenland, I had a feeling that the men I had seen gathered in the field would be on the move by now. But if I weren’t able to meet up with Larissa again, if she found out the secrets behind Jade’s travels, and then she was discovered by the enemy, we would lose out on what could be critical information.
Rhainn’s face suddenly burst before me. On the boy’s face I saw the hurt, streaks of blood and mud mingled on his hollow cheeks. And standing with him, with that huge army of vicious men, were hundreds, maybe thousands of other children just like him.
“Alright,” I said at last. “Where will we meet?”
“I’ll head for Stonemore,” she said, changing direction. Crane walked beside her, tripping her up as she stumbled through the undergrowth.
“And what about him?” I asked, pointing to the dog.
She looked down at the mutt’s big, square head, and sighed. Then, I was surprised to see tears spring up in her eyes.
“I wish he’d never brought ya,” she said quietly to the dog. Crane whined and licked his lips, dancing back and forth on his front paws. Then she bent down and grabbed a large stone from the forest floor. She had already raised it above her head before I realized what she was about to do.
“Stop!” I shouted. “What are you doing? You can’t kill Crane!” I covered the distance between us in an instant and put my body between the rock and the dog. She lowered it, but did not let it go.
“They’ll kill him,” she said simply, misery outlining her face. “Only they’ll do it slow and painful, just for the pleasure of the thing.” One of the tears had broken free from her lid and slid down her dirty, wrinkled cheek.
“No, they won’t,” I choked. “Maybe…maybe they like dogs.”
It was a lie.
“You get outta my way now,” she said, trying to shove me aside with her elbows. “There ain’t no other way. A dog will call too much attention. We got bigger problems to deal with right now, and he’ll give us away if we take him along.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, struggling against her. Finally, the rock became too heavy for her to hold, and she dropped it among the fallen pine needles. She shoved me backward with both her hands now, angry now and crying in earnest.
“You are a fool,” she said, pushing me so hard that I flew backwards into a tree. Bark broken loose from the impact fell down at my feet. She moved back again, over towards the rock. But then she didn’t pick it up. Instead she sat and put her face in her hands. Crane whined, snuffling around the edges of her fingers, trying to pry them loose with the concerned lapping of his tongue.
She raised her head and let the dog do as he pleased. His entire back end wagged as he bathed her whole face in sloppy kisses.
“You don’t understand,” she said quietly, holding Crane’s face in front of her own, stopping his onslaught. “There are sacrifices, things that all of us will need to let go of, to give up, to get through this.” She bowed her head again.
“Not this time,” I said. “Not like this. The only way we’re going to get through this is if we stand together now. If they, if she, finds him, we’ll deal with it then. But it’s no trouble to take him along. We have to look out for our own.”
“He’s just a dog,” she said, almost pleading. Tears ran freely down her cheeks now. I knew she didn’t believe the words a single bit.
“I’ll take Crane with me,” I said, walking over to her and extending my hand. “You just find out what we need to know. Okay?”
She stared at my hand, miserable. I waved it in her face, mimicking her own impatience hours before. Finally, she reached out and took it.
An hour later, Crane and I were still skirting around the edges of the forest. Larissa had showed me how to get the dog to follow, though I had still had to hold him by the scruff of the neck to keep him from following her back to the town. He had whined and barked furiously, and at one point I though he might even try to bite me, but after fifteen minutes or so he settled down. When I gave him the command to come, he looked up at me miserably. But his stubbornness didn’t last. After a few tense moments when I thought he might take off after her, he relented and followed me in the other direction.
Now, the farther we walked, the more quiet he became. With every few steps he would pause, pricking his ears as though certain a predator was nearby. Watching him made me uneasy. I had little experience with dogs on Earth. Since the drought began, few people could afford to keep one, and most were too concerned with their own survival to waste energy on a pet. But I knew that dogs could hear and smell things that people couldn’t, and he was acting like he knew something, something I needed to know, myself.
I held the chaser firmly in my fist, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the constant contact with my skin, or if we were getting closer, but it had grown much hotter than it had been at the outset. I felt sure now that my guess had been right, and I was glad we wouldn’t have to stumble around for too long searching for the spot where Owyn and I had landed a few days ago. It had never really occurred to me that I would be making the trip back on my own, and with Owyn gone, I only had myself as a guide.
Crane suddenly stopped dead in h
is tracks, staring into the trees. The chaser suddenly burned hot in my grasp, and I almost dropped it in surprise. I looked out onto the hillside, and there was the spot, the scorch marked ground where Owyn and I had landed.
Crane gave a loud warning bark, and an arrow whizzed by my earlobe.
I didn’t wait. The crashing that came through the undergrowth surrounded us as we burst from the trees towards the site. I reached it in just a few seconds. As I turned to locate Crane, a mass of giant men burst through the trees.
Thirty Solitaries stepped in near unison out into the clearing. They raised axes, bows, spears, and the smaller of them who stood at the center opened his mouth to give the command.
“Aster Wood!” Druce shouted across the field. “Surrender now! There ain’t nowhere for you to go.”
He didn’t know, then, that I held the chaser. Hadn’t Owyn told Jade how he had found her?
Crane finally caught up, barking madly and snarling at the men. I grasped his scruff, just barely getting a grip with the staff sliding back and forth in the base of my palm, and raised my other fist in the air.
The arrows flew.
I shouted the command and we were shot through space, tumbling onto the mountaintop next to the burned out church, launched between one point and another.
Crane immediately stood, turning around in frantic circles, searching for our attackers, barking at nobody.
My heart was pounding. If they found Larissa, our plan would be destroyed. I could go back. I could wait a while and then return, find her.
Don’t be stupid. She can fly.
Yes. Unless she wanted to be found, she would either remain invisible or take flight.
I lay back onto the mountain, not trying to stop Crane’s loud protests, and tried to steady my breathing. After a few minutes, he settled down and started sniffing everything within arms reach of me, but he seemed unwilling to stray more than a couple feet away from where I lay, still gasping. When he got to the church door, he growled angrily.
I sat up, groaning, eyeing the doorway. It looked as dead inside as it had been every other time I had seen it.
“Come here, you dumb dog,” I said, extending my hand. He looked back and forth between me and the church, his feet firmly planted. “Come on,” I pressed. He bowed his head slightly and gave his tail a tentative wag, walking up to me and stuffing his forehead under my palm.
We didn’t have much time, but I didn’t feel in a hurry to leave. This place seemed to require that I move more slowly, respectfully. It had been the site of so much misery and horror, now hallowed ground. The people who had lived and died here deserved more respect than a quick flight would have given them.
I stood up slowly and walked to the door of the church, stepping inside out of the bright sunlight that shone down on the mountain, grateful for the silence after the attack. It was nearly black inside except for a few thin shafts of light that pierced through cracks in the stone walls. It felt cold, and I shivered, kneeling down into the dust that remained of the villagers. I outstretched my hand and picked up a small handful of the ash, letting it fall through my fist back to the floor.
Crane stood at the door, unwilling to enter. His nose worked furiously through the air, still smokey as if a campfire had been extinguished just recently. I cringed as I imagined whose ashes he was inhaling.
My heart hurt, but the staff remained slippery in my grip. Though the burned out church seemed like a place impossible for hope to permeate, somewhere hiding within me it must still exist. I sat for a while, unfocused and somber, just letting myself exist in that space where so many had died. I had run from this place before, but now there was something grounding about it, something here that didn’t want to be forgotten. And, I realized, this might be my last chance to be here and soak that knowledge in, to be the one to remember.
I closed my eyes, laying the staff across my knees. But instead of my mind wandering to the villagers who had taken their last breaths where I sat, a different scene started to appear.
I imagined myself outside of the church, looking down on it as though a bird in flight. Surrounding the range of orange rock, great valleys stretched out, drenched in the afternoon sun, vibrant with life. It was a life I had never seen before jumping to the Triaden from Earth, where the scorched ground and towering cities were all that I had ever experienced. But here the colors were vivid and wild, and I took them in with great relief.
I left the church, left Crane behind, staring at my body still on the dusty floor, and I flew. At first I floated dreamily across the land, but then the hunger to push myself, to move faster took over, and I sprinted faster than any olympian ever could. Through the air at speeds nobody could touch, I found I was moving faster than even I could normally run, the wind on my cheeks tearing tears from my eyes. I looked down, saw my feet moving, but I was already far off the ground, shooting through the air like a bullet over forests, valleys, plains. As I got higher, the details of the ground below faded, growing smaller and smaller until the trees in the distance blended into one solid mass, the plains into vast patches of deep yellow. The edges around my vision began to blur, until I was moving so fast I could barely see at all.
And then, all at once, the speed eased and I was floating downward. I hadn’t thought to; I had wanted to fly like this forever. But my feet touched down gently, and I stood perfectly still on solid ground again, the roar of the wind in my ears silenced in an instant.
Before me stood a large, dark tent, the canvas flaps of the opening waving in a stiff wind.
My breath caught. I had seen this tent before.
I looked around for some indication about where I was, but the field I stood in was deserted. I looked back towards the tent, tentative, and saw something so strange it nearly knocked me backwards. It wasn’t smoke, but it moved in the same way. It reminded me of what happened beneath Larissa’s feet when she prepared to take flight, only it moved much more slowly. It stuck to the edges of my vision, difficult to see when I tried to look right at it. It was atmosphere, rippling air whirling around the edges of the tent in slow, large spirals, like looking at the air above burning black pavement on a hot summer day.
Power.
The word popped into my brain automatically, and I immediately knew it was true. Something inside that tent had power, and a lot of it. Something was in there, something I needed to see, but I didn’t want to go in. I took a step backwards, then another. But every step I took put no distance between myself and that open doorway. I considered running, trying to break away from the strength of the swirling mist, but along with the realization that I probably wouldn’t be able to came something else.
Curiosity.
I held my breath and stepped through the entrance.
Twenty or more young children filled the space, each seated in a neat, even row. This time, low lanterns flickered in the corners of the space. They all faced someone presiding over them at the far end of the room. A man, I thought, though I couldn’t see him clearly. The heat spirals were the most powerful where he sat, enveloping him with a thick, boiling shroud. My heart thumped wildly. Was it the skeleton? I walked between the children, taking care not to tread on their little fingers, not to jostle or frighten them.
But then I saw their faces.
The dirt of weeks of labor was smeared on each cherubic cheek, curtained by matted clumps of fine baby hair. They stared blindly ahead at the figure, their eyes black and dazed.
I dropped to the ground beside one of the children and gripped him by the shoulders, the strange man forgotten.
“Hey,” I said quietly, nearly a croak. Then I heard my voice rising in panic. “Hey, kid!” I shook him, trying to get his attention, to get him to listen. His head bobbed back and forth as if the muscles in his neck were gone. I felt hot tears on my cheeks in my panic. “Kid! You gotta wake up!”
He looked at me then, his black eyes staring blankly back. He opened his mouth and I saw rows and rows of jagged teeth. He hissed and
snapped his jaws, trying to bite at the exposed flesh of my arms. I let his shoulders go and jumped backwards, knocking into another child, who hit the floor and then hissed as the other had.
Suddenly, Rhainn burst through the opening to the tent.
“Aster, get out of this place!” he shouted as he blew past me. But he didn’t follow his own advice. He ran down the aisle towards a little girl at the front, not more than five or six years old, her brown hair snarled and stinking. His arms stretched out for her, as if his desperation would be enough to elongate them enough to grasp her, to free her. She turned to him, opened her mouth showing him her own rows of deadly fangs.
The figure at the front needed only to raise a finger.
And Rhainn was suddenly no longer. Like the pieces of Grandma’s farmhouse in my dream, the tiny bits of him that remained floated down on top of the other children. They lifted their heads, opening their mouths wide, sucking in the air as the remnants reached them.
A wave of freezing air moved over my skin, but I was surprised that terror wasn’t the only emotion I felt. Mixing with it now was something new.
Outrage.
I ran for him, put all I had into reaching him. I would rip him to shreds. My bare hands seemed like the perfect tool for doing so. But just as I hadn’t been able to move away from the tent as I had stood outside, now I wasn’t able to make any ground towards him. I moved my legs faster, but my feet couldn’t find traction, and I barely moved an inch.
Then, he slowly raised one finger and pointed it in my direction.
No.
It wasn’t possible. I wasn’t going to lose this fight, I was determined about that. I curled my fingers up as they were blown to ash, trying to grip onto them, to keep them in one piece. And then I fell, just like Rhainn, in a million tiny pieces to the wide open mouths below.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I never saw his face.
And when the vision was over and I came back to consciousness, my hands gripped nothing but the fine dust on the floor of the church. The ashes slipped through the cracks between my fingers, impossible to ever put back together again. It only took me a moment to realize it hadn’t been real, that it had only been a vision in my head and I was still in one piece. I was in no danger here.
