by Annie Cosby
“Come on!” Wyn called. He moved forward without me, his hands on the hillside guiding his hops along to the opening. Once there, he crouched and crawled and shimmied through, his hurt leg sticking out stiff like a tree branch.
“Wyn!” I shrieked. “Have you learned nothing? It’s dangerous!”
“Come on, Rube!” he called from inside. “Five minutes, no more. I promise.”
I trusted a Wyn promise above all others.
“Wyn …”
“Ruby, this isn’t the part that fell in. I promise I won’t go digging for diamonds.”
With a heaving sigh and then a steadying breath, I bent to all fours and crawled through. He held his hand out to help me up on the inside, but when I took it, he teetered and I grabbed the wall instead.
As soon as I turned around, my breath was stolen away.
We stood inside a tall cavern that glittered with half-buried gems. The space was strewn with wood and all sorts of tools, and the back wall was made entirely out of crumbled stone, suggesting that it had once been part of the mine. But in the very middle of it all was a giant boat, upside down and perched on a set of four tall rocks like a giant beetle.
“What the … What is it?” Wyn had never kept a secret from me. My tired, overwrought brain couldn’t understand it all.
He laughed easily. “It’s a boat!”
“I know that!” I breathed.
“I was building us a boat,” he explained. His eyebrows were pushed up and together like a kid presenting his original artwork to a grown-up for the very first time.
I stepped toward him, and my fingers found his without looking, intertwining as naturally as vines. “You built us a boat,” I said breathlessly.
“To go across the sea,” he said.
It was unlike any boat Oren had ever built. Nothing like the tiny skimmers townspeople used to fish, this boat’s hull was at least five times the size of any boat I had ever seen.
My boots clunked across the stone floor as I approached the smooth, wooden hull that stretched above my head. Still holding my hand, Wyn hopped along beside me. “You built us a boat,” I repeated.
“I’d like to call it a ship,” he said.
I laughed uncontrollably, then spun to face him, my hands on his shoulders. He grasped my waist as though we were about to dance. I probably would have danced a frenzied dash around the cavern, had he been able to move. “You built us a ship,” I whispered.
“I built you a ship,” he corrected.
I let out a mad laugh. Emotions I didn’t recognize taking over my being, I leaned against the boat and pressed my cheek to the sleek wood. How many hours had it taken him to sand that wood to the smooth, beautiful texture that glided under my fingers now? All those hours for me. All those times I’d wondered about his feelings, and he’d been doing this all along. For me.
“It wouldn’t fit out this hole,” he said proudly. “I was just keeping it here to hide from anybody that might go into the mine. Then when I was done, I planned on pulling it out the main entrance. But … not anymore, I guess …” He hobbled toward the back of the boat, one hand on the dusty, earthen wall, and shook his head. “It’s my own damned fault.”
I joined him and saw that what seemed like the back wall of the cavern was actually a rubble pile that had tumbled down on top of the very back end of the boat. Probably when Wyn had taken a pickaxe to the old diamond mine.
Boards that once made up part of my boat now littered the ground, and rocks were piled on top of the boat’s backside, splintering the boards there. I took his hand back up and squeezed it.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“But I’ve ruined it now,” he said miserably.
I shook my head and turned to him, resuming our dancing pose. “While you were sleeping away, giving us all a scare, I made a decision.”
“To scare me out of my concussed mind?” He laughed.
I grinned, but tried to keep the seriousness of the conversation. “No. Well, that too. But before that, I decided we should stay.
“What?” he said.
And then it all came rushing out. “I’ve been scared, Wyn. Before you got hurt. I don’t know why. I’ve always wanted to go on The Great and Mighty Voyage, but I don’t think I’m ready! And now, with your leg, I think we should stay here in Killybeg. Where you can heal, and if … if your leg doesn’t …”
“No,” he said, shaking his head violently. He ripped his hand out of mine. “No!” It was only the second time I’d heard him raise his voice, and both within the last two days.
“Wyn, we could have a great life here. I can work in the bakery and you could … well, I don’t know, but we’d find something. I’ll learn to sew and … well, I don’t know. Just all those things the other girls do. And –”
“Ruby, stop!” he yelled.
“We have to be reasonable,” I insisted.
“I am being reasonable!” he shouted. “I’ve waited my whole life to run away with you. With or without a left leg, we’re going. The both of us. We’re going to go and make our lives into whatever we want them to be, wherever we want them to be. We’re going to create our own adventure, our own excitement. I promise you we will not stay here. Our lives will be filled with excitement and grandeur. I promise, Ruby.”
Tears were unaccountably springing to my eyes, and I began to hang my head to hide them, but one bruised finger pushed my chin up to face him and his lips caught mine.
In that bottomless moment, I wasn’t Ruby. I was some celestial spirit that could see the whole, beautiful world when this boy’s lips touched mine. I was at once everything and nothing. As though I had ceased to be, except in this moment. Perpetually.
As he pulled away, that familiar grin on his lips, a splash of color amind the gray rubble at our feet caught my eye. A long piece of wood hung, still attached to the boat by one nail, stretching down to the floor near my dusty boots. I bent and picked it gingerly from the rocky debris, twisting it up so that it continued from its perch on the hull as though the collapsing mine hadn’t nearly snapped it in two.
The board had a name scribbled across it in red paint and loopy handwriting, upside down, as the boat was now. I twisted the board on its single nail until the handwriting, shaky as I knew Wyn’s cursive was, faced me. It read:
The Ruby Princess.
Chapter Eleven
Neither Maisie nor Sarah let the scolding rest when we got back to the cottage.
“Just disappeared into thin air, the pair of you!” Sarah squeaked bitterly. “What do you think we thought?” Happy tears poured down her face.
“Well you didn’t sound the alarm, so I guess you weren’t too worried,” Wyn said sarcastically. I helped him to the bed in the corner, where he sat down and sighed. I’d been so elated by The Ruby Princess that I’d forgotten what pain he must have been experiencing. He twisted around and lay back against the pillows. We’d closed Felix in the house when we went to the diamond mine, and he perched on the edge of the bed alone now, throwing indignant looks at his boy.
“These children will be the death of me!” shrieked Maisie.
Sarah moved hurriedly around Wyn, checking all his injuries as though she was a doctor, and I sat gently on the edge of the bed, carefully lifting Wyn’s hurt leg back onto the tower of pillows.
“No, no, no! You, up!” Maisie screeched. “You’re going to bed this instant!”
I grinned at Wyn. We wouldn’t share a kiss in front of the brooding mother hens, but I knew he wanted to as he took my hand and squeezed, his mahogany eyes twinkling, before Maisie ushered me out of the house.
I skipped into the house ahead of Maisie, eager not to let her ruin my wonderful mood with her moping. The sick little lamb was still curled in the corner by a fire now extinguished, and I picked him up and took him to my bed.
I pulled my hair out of its bun and climbed into bed, putting the lamb against my side, where he’d be warm. My quilts felt comfortable and warm compared to th
e night outside. But my heart was on fire.
I’d loved him all my life, and now I knew. For sure. He wanted me, and he wanted to go away with me so badly he’d built an entire ship. A ship named after me.
Despite the setbacks, I knew we’d go one day. We’d go away together, someplace where we could kiss all day, and I’d read more books than I’d ever seen, and maybe there would be mages across the sea that could tell me if I really had mage blood in me. Maybe the hummingbirds would come with us, flying along behind the boat …
I was awake before I even realized I’d been asleep.
The night outside my window was black as coal, but the moon cast a small yellow square on the trunk beside my bed. I looked around, unsure what had woken me. The little lamb wasn’t beside me anymore. As my mind adjusted to consciousness, I felt that familiar feeling.
The one of being watched.
That’s when I saw the little lamb, standing in the corner of the room, his little limbs shaking.
“Hey you –”
There was someone in the room.
The breathing I heard stepped out of the shadows to become a tall, dark figure at the foot of my bed.
I drew in a giant breath to scream, but a hand clamped over my mouth. Another figure was at the head of my bed.
I thrashed around, tearing my arms and legs about, kicking and punching and shaking my head, a bitter taste between my teeth. But there was more than one pair of hands.
I tried to scream into the airless chamber, but my words were caught by a leather, gloved hand cupped over my lips. A sickly vapor was filling my lungs as they fought for air. My muffled screams barely made it to my own ears; I could hear only the little lamb bleating lamely, and then a matching gloved hand covered my eyes.
The blackness seared at my lungs until there was nothing.
