The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  Marty saw it at the same instant Sam did.

  “Black pawn!” she shouted, and Sam nodded. Black pawn to checkmate the white king.

  Which move was right? Bishop or pawn?

  “‘Every citizen should be a soldier,’” Marty called out. Sam looked over at her, startled. “Thomas Jefferson said that,” she told him, her eyes meeting his over the oversized chess pieces. Over knights and bishops, kings and queens . . . and pawns.

  Sam grinned. Who’d won the American Revolution? Who’d checkmated King George III? Not another king or queen, not a bishop or a knight—an army of ordinary citizens who’d decided they wanted to rule themselves.

  The pawn was the right move!

  Sam jumped to the pawn. There was a groove in place at its base, and Sam put his shoulder to the piece and shoved with all his might. The black pawn shot easily along the groove, leaving Sam staggering. It smacked into the white king, and the tall chess piece, topped with a spiky crown, wobbled on its base and crashed to the floor, shattering into fragments.

  The next thing Sam knew, another wall collapsed with a crash like thunder.

  Sam ducked to the ground instinctively as clouds of dust billowed up. He’d been wrong! How could it have happened? He’d been so sure the black pawn was the right move. It had made so much sense. And now . . . had he killed them all? Sam covered his head and waited for the ceiling of the cave to come down, burying them in a tomb. Sorry, Marty. Sorry, Theo. Sorry, Abby. Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .

  He waited a few more seconds. No ceiling fell.

  Cautiously, Sam lifted his head, fanning dust away from his face. Theo was sitting up next to him, and he could hear the girls coughing and spluttering to his right, although he couldn’t see them yet. Shafts of bright sunlight shone through the clouds of dirt, and as the gray powder slowly settled, Sam realized that he hadn’t doomed them, after all.

  He’d made the right move.

  The wall that had fallen apart revealed a bright summer day outside. When the black pawn had checkmated the white king, it had opened up the way out.

  Abby and Marty, clinging to each other, made their way through the chessboard to Sam and Theo’s side. Coated from head to toe in dust, they looked like ghosts. Sam glanced down at himself. He looked the same.

  “Sam.” Abby let go of Marty, rubbed her eyes, and smiled at him. “That was—wow. You’re amazing. You got to that pawn just in time. You saved us all!” Her smile grew wider; her eyes glowed with admiration. Sam felt pleasure bubbling up to replace his ebbing terror. Now that he thought about it, choosing the black pawn had been a pretty slick move. And it was nice to get a little appreciation, for sure.

  Marty coughed, wiping dust and grit from her glasses. “Sure, all by himself,” she said with a sour look at both Abby and Sam. “Anyway, we’d better get out. This cave might not be too stable.”

  “Wait.” Theo crawled over to the shattered remains of the white king and pushed some of the broken pieces aside. “There’s something here . . .” He picked up a stone urn about six inches high.

  “Let’s look at it outside, okay?” Sam got up, and the four of them climbed over tumbled boulders and broken slabs of rock to reach the fresh air.

  Blinking in the light, Sam sat down on soft grass with a sigh. He used both hands to rub stone dust out of his hair. They were in a small meadow at the base of a tall cliff, a meadow that formed one end of a long, narrow valley. There was sunshine, there were flowers, there were even butterflies. Butterflies! Sam could hardly believe it. He felt as if he’d walked out of a horror movie and right into a commercial for fabric softener.

  The valley stretched for miles, with mountains on either side. It looked to Sam like there were only two ways to get to this meadow—by taking a very long and treacherous hike up that valley, or climbing through the cave system they’d just left.

  He flopped back on the grass, staring up at the blue sky. Well, mostly blue. Maybe half blue. Dark clouds were starting to pile up off to his left. But for the moment, the sun was warm on his face, birds were twittering away in the trees, and Marty and Theo were busy talking. Sam turned his head to one side to see what they were so worried about. They were bent over the urn that Theo had picked up from the broken pieces of the white king. Abby was looking over their shoulders.

  “The Founders’ symbol,” Theo was saying, pointing to something on the urn. “See? This must be the next clue.”

  “And it says ‘Josiah Hodge,’” Abby said, leaning in. “My ancestor! Do you think he left this inside that chess piece?”

  “There are some other words too,” Marty said. “Sam! Come and look at this.”

  Sam groaned. Nobody got to rest for two seconds, not while Marty was around. He heaved himself up off the nice comfortable ground and came over to look at the urn. Theo rubbed away dust that had settled on the smooth stone, and all of them read the inscription carved under the Founders’ symbol—a pyramid with the eye above and Jefferson’s quill inside.

  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

  Sam glanced up at Marty. “Thomas Jefferson again, I presume?” She nodded. “Kind of a creepy thing to say.”

  “He meant that we can’t take freedom for granted,” Marty said, giving Sam a stern look.

  “I guess. But this urn is kind of creepy looking too,” Sam pointed out. He could feel his puzzle-solving brain stirring into life. This urn was their next clue—but what was it telling them? To look for a tree? They were surrounded by millions of trees. There must be some other clue somewhere. “It looks kind of like the thing we got from the funeral parlor when my great-aunt Susan died,” he went on. “For her ashes.”

  “Sam, that’s just . . . ew.” Marty grimaced as Theo put one of his huge hands around the top of the urn and gave it a twist. The top came off.

  “Gross but accurate,” Theo said, peering into the urn. “He’s right.”

  “Ugh.” Sam leaned over to glance at the pile of pale dust that sat inside the urn. “Meet Josiah, everybody. Abby, I think that’s your ancestor in there.”

  Abby made a face. “Oh my—that’s—Theo, close it!” Theo did so, twisting the lid to seal it. The lid was strangely shaped, Sam noticed—all around its top edge was a jagged pattern of triangles, like a mountain range. It looked something like a key, if there were a lock somewhere that a circular key could fit into.

  “So we have ashes and a weird urn and a quote about blood and trees,” Sam said with a sigh. He brushed the rest of the dirt off his clothes and looked around. “Where do we go from here?”

  “We also have a storm blowing in,” Abby said, looking up at the sky as the sunlight vanished. The clouds Sam had noticed earlier had closed in even farther, blocking the light.

  “Remember the weather forecast back in Whitefish?” Marty asked.

  Sam groaned. He did remember. Storms, lightning, flash floods.

  “We’d better get under cover first,” Abby said. “And figure out what to do with that urn second.”

  Their initial thought was to shelter in the cave, but as they looked back in, an ominous rumble and a shower of rocks from the ceiling convinced them that wasn’t the best idea. Theo stowed Josiah’s urn in Sam’s backpack, and they quickly made their way down the valley as the sky darkened overhead and the air grew cooler by the minute. Soon they were under the cover of thick trees, walking over knobby roots and deep drifts of pine needles, scrambling up and across stony ledges. At last they stumbled onto a flat stretch of ground where the going was easier.

  “We could build a lean-to, maybe,” Abby said as she walked beside Sam, with Theo and Marty behind them. “Or find another cave.”

  “You really think a lean-to is going to keep us dry?” Sam asked, peering up at the bits of cloudy sky he could see through the thick branches overhead.

  “Better than nothing,” Abby pointed out. “Or . . . wait.” She looked around and started to smile.

  “W
hat?”

  “Or we could just keep going, because I think this is a road.”

  “A road?” Sam looked down at his feet, tromping over mud and scraggly grass. “Doesn’t look like one to me. And who’d build a road out here?”

  Abby’s smile grew wider. “Loggers, maybe. Or hunters. I know it doesn’t look like much, but see how straight it is?” She pointed ahead, where Sam could indeed see a narrow stretch of roughly flat ground, free of large trees. “Nothing in the wilderness goes in a straight line, not for long. If we follow this, it might lead us somewhere before the storm hits. It’s worth a try.”

  Sam nodded, and the four of them pressed on. Sam wasn’t quite convinced that Abby was right about the thing they were following being a road. It was rocky and overgrown, with brush crowding in from the side and the occasional sapling right in the middle.

  But then Abby kicked aside some fallen leaves to point out marks that had been scraped onto a flat stretch of stone. “Wheel marks, I bet.” Sam peered at the crisscrossing tracks, faint and narrow. He’d never have noticed if Abby hadn’t pointed them out. “Not tires—wooden wheels. From wagons, probably.”

  “So this really was a road,” Marty said, nodding. “A long time ago, at least.”

  “Better keep going,” Theo said. And they did, until suddenly Abby whooped in triumph.

  “Yes! Up ahead! Buildings!”

  “What kind of buildings?” Sam peered through the trees. “A ranger station? A Starbucks?”

  Behind Sam, Marty sighed. Now Sam could see what Abby meant—through the green, he glimpsed wooden walls and bits of mossy roof. They hurried on, and at last broke free of the trees and into . . .

  A town?

  Sam shook his head in wonder. He’d been hoping for a hunter’s cabin maybe, and what he got was a dozen buildings clustered together. They’d been built of logs, all except one no more than a single story high. Here and there half a chimney remained, poking up above a tumbledown wall. Trees had grown up under broken roofs; vines were doing their best to pull down entire structures.

  The tallest building seemed to be in the best condition. It had a peaked roof that was still mostly intact. A cross, made of two logs nailed together, loomed over the door, which was still propped in its frame.

  “A church,” Marty said, shaking her head in amazement. “This was a town once! People lived here. I wonder if the park even knows about it?”

  “I’ve never seen it on a map,” Abby said. “But not every old farm or settlement makes it onto the maps.”

  “Score one for Abby!” Sam gave her a high five, and she looked pleased. “Good call on following that old road.”

  “How old was that road?” Marty asked suddenly, her eyes narrowing as if a fresh idea had hit her.

  “I don’t know.” Abby shrugged. “Those wheel ruts weren’t made yesterday. A hundred years old, maybe? More?”

  “So it could have been a new road when that chess game was made? When Josiah’s ashes were hidden in the white king?”

  “I guess,” Abby answered, looking a little puzzled. But Sam wasn’t.

  “You think maybe we were supposed to follow that road?” he asked Marty. “We were supposed to end up here?”

  “To end up here with Josiah’s ashes.” Marty looked around with purpose in her gaze. “You noticed how the top of that urn looks kind of like a key, Sam?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe what it unlocks is here.”

  An hour later, they gathered together again in front of the ancient church. “Anything?” Sam asked hopefully. Then he looked at the faces of Marty, Abby, and Theo, and felt the hope drain from his own.

  Nobody had found a lock that a circular key could open. Nobody, it turned out, had found a lock at all.

  They’d split up to look all around the ghost town, and while Sam had found a lot of dirt, moss, mushrooms, and rotten logs, he’d found nothing else. When people had walked away from this town, they had not been planning on coming back. Nothing had been left behind but what they couldn’t move—the walls, roofs, doors, and empty windows of their abandoned houses.

  Everybody else, it seemed, had found the same thing. “I was so sure,” Marty said mournfully, shaking her head, as she looked up and down the single street. “The next clue—I really thought it would be here.”

  A cold, fat raindrop plopped down on Sam’s head, and on the horizon, there was a quick flash of light and a long, rumbling boom.

  “Better get under cover,” Theo said, nodding at the church. “We can hunt more in the morning.”

  They headed up the two stone stairs that led to the church’s door, which hung cockeyed from a single hinge. When Theo tried to lift the door and push it open, it simply fell over with a thud onto the floor inside.

  Following Marty in, Sam paused, noticing some deep scratches on the wooden doorframe above his head. He reached up but could not touch the splintery spots where wood had been gouged from the frame. “What did that?” he wondered out loud.

  “Bear,” Abby said from behind him. She’d pulled up her hood, and raindrops were splashing on it.

  “Bear?” Sam repeated in disbelief.

  She nodded, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Grizzly, to be up that high,” she told Sam. “They leave marks like that on trees too. Anything they can scratch or bite. Just kind of letting the world know they’ve been here. Come on, Sam; it’s getting wet out here.” She pushed past him into the church.

  Bears. It wasn’t enough that he had to face killer chess games and other delightful Founder pastimes; he also had to think about flash floods, mountain lions, and bears. Sam groaned to himself and shook his head as he followed her.

  The church wasn’t much bigger than Sam’s homeroom class. No pews or furniture were left, but the door must have kept out most of the animal life and maybe a bit of the weather, since the walls were still standing and only one corner of the roof had fallen in. They settled down as far away as they could get from the rain pelting in through the hole, huddled in the opposite corner on the damp, dirty floor. Marty pulled out her flashlight, which cast a circle of warm yellow light into the gloom.

  “Here,” she said, digging back into the pack. “Rain ponchos. We can spread them out and sit on them. Protein bars. Some trail mix. Water.”

  “Where are the s’mores?” Sam asked. Marty frowned at him, and Abby flashed him a quick smile, her teeth bright in the gloom. “Hot dogs?” Sam suggested. “Anybody know all the words to ‘Kumbaya’?”

  “What are you offering toward our survival, Sam?” Marty asked.

  Sam pulled open his own pack to see what he had. “First, we can’t leave out our friend Josiah.” He set Josiah’s ashes up alongside the wall and gave the urn a pat. “And . . . let’s see.” He dug into his pack. “Snickers. Kit Kats. And Oreos. Who wants what?” He touched something heavy and square at the bottom of his pack and pulled it out. It was Arnold’s satellite phone.

  He sat looking at it for a moment, with a shiver that wasn’t caused by the wind swirling through the broken roof and empty windows of the church. He had not exactly forgotten Gideon Arnold—once he’d met the guy, that wasn’t possible. But crossing dangerous bridges and getting stalked by mountain lions and playing deadly chess games in underground caverns did tend to concentrate his mind on what was at hand—solving the puzzles. Surviving.

  And once they’d solved all the puzzles . . . if they ever did . . . if they got out of this wilderness and found what they were looking for, what then? Sam remembered, with a sinking feeling, that he’d never come up with an answer to that question. Would they really just pick up the phone and give Gideon Arnold a call?

  Sam was tempted to stuff the phone back inside his pack. But it was too late—the others had seen it too. He set it down on the grimy wooden floor, rubbing his hands on his jeans as if the phone had contaminated him.

  “Should we . . .” Abby hesitated. “Call him? That Arnold guy?”

  “Wh
y?” Theo asked.

  “Just to . . . I guess . . . tell him we’re working on it. That we’ve found the cave and got Josiah’s ashes. So he knows we’re getting closer to finding it. To getting the Quill.”

  “If we find the Quill—when we find the Quill—we’ve got to keep it safe,” Theo answered. He was hunched over against the cold, his hood pulled up over his head. His voice seemed to be coming out of a puddle of shadow. “We’re not handing it over to Gideon Arnold.”

  “What are you talking about?” Abby’s shocked face went pale in the flashlight’s beam; her light hair looked close to white against the dark walls of the old church. “We’ve got to hand it over! You heard that guy. He’s going to kill my parents unless we give him the Quill!”

  “He’s going to kill your parents anyway,” Theo said. His voice was flat and cold and heavy. “And Evangeline. He probably already has.”

  The shock of Theo’s words hit Sam as hard as if the big guy had suddenly turned and punched him in the stomach. Marty sat up straight, drawing in a quick breath. Abby turned even paler and looked as if she were about to throw up.

  It seemed to take Sam a long time to suck in enough air to speak. “Theo,” he choked out finally. “Harsh, man. You don’t know that.”

  Theo’s head turned toward Sam quickly. “You’ve met Arnold, Sam. You know perfectly well what he’s capable of. What are we supposed to do, pretend? It doesn’t do us any good. Gideon Arnold is not going to let any prisoner go.”

  Sam was shaking his head. “We can’t just give up on them, Theo! This is Abby’s mom and dad we’re talking about.”

  “Would you say that if it was your parents he’d kidnapped?” Abby demanded, right on the heels of Sam’s words. “Would it be so easy to just let them . . .” She choked. “To let them . . .”

  “He probably did kidnap my mother,” Theo answered, any emotion he was feeling carefully controlled. “If he didn’t just kill her. She knew the risks. So did Evangeline. They promised to protect the Founders’ secret with their lives. I did too. That doesn’t include handing any one of the Founders’ artifacts over to Gideon Arnold.”