The Traveller's Stone

by S J Howland

  Ari laughed at that and showered Xander with the daisies. ‘That would be fun, but unfortunately not. I can lift things, but my feet need to remain firmly on the ground.’ A mischievous expression crossed her face, and suddenly Xander felt that odd sensation of weightlessness again. His eyes widened as he realised that he was floating several feet up in the air. ‘I can lift you up, however,’ Ari said, smiling at his surprise, and then lowering him gently back down again. Before Xander could say anything else, a voice floated down the garden.

  ‘Drinks, you two.’

  Mrs Stanton was standing on the stone terrace, holding up a large jug, and Ari got up from the grass. She held out a hand to haul Xander to his feet, with a quick grin.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got time for a glass of Thea’s famous lemonade before I need to head out again.’

  As they reached the terrace, Ollie came bursting out of the back door with a large folder tucked under one arm. ‘Just in time,’ he announced with satisfaction, as he spotted the big jug. He dumped the folder on the table and pulled a face at Xander’s curious look.

  ‘Apprenticeship options for next term,’ he explained, as he poured drinks. ‘Once you’re fourteen, you choose two each term, and spend a couple of afternoons a week on each option. You have to rotate through the various guilds and they won’t let you narrow it down until you’re sixteen,’ he grimaced, with a pointed stare at Mrs Stanton who was flipping through the folder, ‘which means that at some point I’ll be stuck over at the Textiles and Apparel Association learning about beading and buttonholes.’

  Mrs Stanton just shook her head with an unsympathetic smile. ‘I think you’ll learn rather more than that, and it’s good for you to broaden your mind. You never know what will spark your interest if you don’t experience it.’ Ollie looked sceptical, but Xander gazed rather wistfully at the battered folder as he accepted a brimming glass of lemonade; education on Haven sounded much more interesting than his own schooling. When he looked up, he met an amused expression on Ollie’s face.

  ‘You’ve got daisies in your hair,’ he said with a grin.

  Xander reached up and hastily brushed at his head, while Ari laughed. ‘I was giving Xander a quick demonstration of how orbs work,’ she explained.

  Mrs Stanton glanced up at that. ‘Speaking of which, Katie needs to get fitted for her training orb tomorrow. If you’re interested, Xander, you’re welcome to come along with us.’

  Xander nodded quickly. ‘That would be great, thanks,’ he said, with a wistful look at Ollie’s orb. It was unlikely that he would ever get a chance to try one but he needed to find answers in this strange place, and this seemed like a good way to start.

  *

  It was late afternoon before Flint appeared, shouting for Xander from the front hall. Ollie and Xander shot through from the kitchen in response to the terse bellow, while Len hung precariously over the banister from the first floor, looking curious. Flint was customarily taciturn and clearly in a hurry.

  ‘I’ve briefed the Wardens about what happened yesterday and they want to see you,’ he told Xander brusquely. ‘They don’t want to draw attention, so you’ll come over tomorrow night.’

  Xander stared at him, questions brimming up in his mind. ‘What are Wardens?’

  ‘Leaders,’ said Flint. ‘They’re the authority amongst the Travellers.’

  ‘Do they know why I’m here?’ asked Xander.

  ‘No,’ said Flint. ‘That’s what they want to find out.’

  That sounded rather ominous, but before Xander could ask any more questions, Flint began rooting in the capacious pockets of his sleeveless jacket and produced a metallic band. ‘This is for you,’ he said, holding it out. With a surge of excitement, Xander took it and examined the stone. It was just like the one Ollie wore around his wrist, a pale yellow crystal with faint silvery lines of coding glittering at its heart.

  ‘People would wonder if you don’t have one, and we don’t want you standing out or drawing any notice, particularly as Thea insists that you be allowed to prance around all over Haven,’ Flint’s tone made quite clear what he thought of that idea. ‘It’s been deactivated, of course. You’ve no idea how to use one and we don’t need any more explosions in this house.’ His disapproving gaze rested on Ollie, who grinned unrepentantly and shrugged.

  Xander ignored this by-play, disappointment smothering his anticipation of only a moment ago. He laid the orb across his wrist, thinking that Flint seemed determined to remove any possibility of fun from Xander’s experience in Haven. Flint himself shook his head ruefully at Ollie, as Xander fumbled with the strap.

  ‘At some point I really need to sit down with you and try to get to the bottom of –’

  He broke off mid-sentence in shock. Xander had succeeded in joining the two ends of the strap with a smooth click and, as soon as the band had closed around his wrist, beams of arcing light shot across the hallway, scorching the walls and ceilings. Len dropped flat to the floor just before a streak of crackling light sliced right through where she had been standing. Instantly, Flint grabbed Ollie’s arm and dragged him down.

  ‘Get it off,’ Flint snarled. ‘Get it off now.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ gasped Xander, struggling with the band with shaking fingers. Another huge beam exploded upwards, blowing a hole in the ceiling. Finally, Xander managed to detach the band and, panicking, threw it down the hallway. As soon as it was off his wrist, the streaks of destructive light stopped, but the stone itself continued to burn brighter and brighter, until it was too intense to see. There was an audible popping sound, and the blaze vanished. When Xander risked a look, the stone was wreathed in smoke.

  For a few seconds, the only sounds in the hallway were the gasping breaths of the three huddled on the ground, while Xander himself stood petrified, staring at the stone lying in the middle of a scorch-mark on the floor. Flint was the first to pull himself to his feet. His voice was quiet and stunned. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I –I didn’t,’ stammered Xander. ‘I swear, I didn’t do anything. I only put it on and it went berserk.’ His voice trailed away as he took in the blackened marks on the wall. He felt sick.

  Flint shook his head and cautiously approached the band lying, apparently quiescent, on the stone flags of the floor. He nudged it with the toe of his boot and, when there was no reaction, he bent and gingerly picked it up. Len and Ollie got to their feet, Len wincing as she saw the banister next to her neatly sliced through. Speechless, they stared at Xander.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ he blurted, feeling his cheeks burning. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

  Unexpectedly, Ollie’s face broke into an enormous grin as he turned around slowly, taking in the charred walls and the smoking hole blown through the ceiling.

  ‘Now this,’ he announced, ‘is what I call a proper explosion.’

  Len spluttered and even Xander’s face broke into a tentative smile.

  The front door opened, and Mrs Stanton walked in, a well-filled shopping basket on her arm. It crashed to the ground, sending vegetables and cheeses rolling in every direction. She stood open-mouthed, taking in the devastation, before her wide eyes shot to Ollie.

  ‘Oliver! What did you do?’

  Ollie grinned, delighted. ‘Would you believe that it actually wasn’t me this time? This is the work of a real expert.’

  ‘It wasn’t Ollie,’ said Xander, shamefaced. ‘I’m afraid it was me. I’m really sorry – I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘You, Xander? But how?’ asked Mrs Stanton, bewildered.

  ‘That is certainly the question,’ said Flint, holding out the orb to Mrs Stanton’s startled gaze. The band itself was charred and brittle-looking, and the stone was now grey, with black striations. The coding was completely burned out. ‘You didn’t try to re-activate it?’ he asked, with a penetrating look at Xander.

  ‘I wouldn’t even know how,’ Xander protested and Flint looked away with a frown.

  ‘In the meantime, wh
o’s going to fix this?’ demanded Mrs Stanton. ‘If I wanted an en-suite to my bedroom, it wouldn’t be the downstairs hallway.’

  *

  As it turned out, to Xander’s relief, Ollie’s mother was able to repair it all with relative ease. She had laughed when she had seen the destruction and affectionately ruffled her son’s hair. ‘Makes a nice change,’ she said, with an easy smile at Xander. ‘It’s quite refreshing to fix the damage someone else’s son has done.’

  Ollie contented himself with pulling a face at his mother, and then disappeared upstairs before his grandmother could find something useful for him to do, but Xander hung around. He still felt guilty about the damage, not to mention very curious how the diminutive woman was going to repair the large and heavy looking beams in the ceiling that had been blasted into smithereens. The hole was at least four feet wide and, to Xander’s eyes, looked fairly irreparable.

  Jenna Stanton smiled at him reassuringly.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘I know it looks bad but really it’s pretty straightforward. Do you want to help?’ Xander nodded and Jenna pushed open the front door. ‘Come on, then.’

  She led the way across the garden, veering to the left until they were walking under the eaves of the great forest that surrounded the house. After a moment she stopped and bent down to pick up a large branch lying on the ground in front of her. She tapped it with her fingers and nodded in satisfaction before turning to Xander.

  ‘We need about ten branches like this. These trees are hardwood, so they’ll work, but we need the branch to be long and with no rot. This one is perfect, but we need more like it.’

  Xander nodded and headed off under the trees, looking for likely wood. Within a short time, he had found several possibilities and carried them back to Jenna. Two were rejected, but the rest passed muster and Xander piled them with the ones Jenna had found.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘And now to work.’

  She walked back to the house, the branches tucked under her arm, and stood in the hallway gazing upwards. ‘The technique I’m going to use is a trade secret common to two of the great guilds, the Agricultural Association and the Constructionist Guild. We in the A.A. believe that we pioneered it with our grafts of living wood, while the Constructionists claim it was their invention to meld beams and mend holes.’ Her eyes twinkled at Xander. ‘Obviously we are correct and they’re not.’

  Five of the branches, all different shapes and of varying widths, floated into the air and positioned themselves across the large hole so that each branch touched the shattered ends of the damaged beams. It looked ridiculous and Xander smothered a small smile. Jenna glanced over with a quick understanding grin.

  ‘Now watch,’ she said and lifted her orb-hand, her fingers moving in a weaving pattern.

  Initially Xander’s attention was caught by the orb itself and he watched, intrigued, as the silver lines of coding began to glimmer in rapid, repetitive patterns inside the amber stone, their flickering lights making the orb appear to sparkle. It was captivating and strangely beautiful, and for a moment Xander was so absorbed that he did not notice what was happening with the wood.

  When he raised his eyes to look, his mouth dropped open. Each branch was changing, untwisting and straightening itself, and thickening to match the great beams on either side. They expanded in surges, with wood fibres sprouting along the branch and then weaving themselves together until they were as solid as the original wood. When each branch was as wide and straight as the beams they were adjoining, Jenna turned her attention to the ends, and sprouting filaments reached out to entwine with other fibres which extended from the original girders. To Xander, watching open—mouthed, it appeared that almost no time had elapsed until the additions were only discernible from the original wood by their paler colour. Jenna lowered her hand with a sigh of satisfaction and glanced over at Xander.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Pretty good, huh?’

  ‘It’s amazing,’ said Xander, awed. ‘It’s completely fixed.’

  ‘Almost,’ said Jenna. ‘It only needs a coat of plaster down here and I’ll need to fix the floorboards upstairs with the rest of this.’ She nudged the other branches with her toe. ‘I actually rather enjoy doing this – it’s quite relaxing, but don’t say that to Ollie. He doesn’t need any more encouragement to blow things up.’

  She smiled at Xander in a conspiratorial way and he laughed. Just at that moment a loud clanging noise erupted from the kitchen, and Xander heard two thuds from upstairs and the sound of pounding footsteps. Katie emerged through the kitchen door, swinging a large handbell with a gleeful expression, as Ollie and Len came racing down the stairs. Ollie was a shade behind and tried to catch up by swinging himself around the large stair post at the bottom, but only succeeded in tripping as he tried to avoid the large pile of branches.

  ‘Honestly, you two,’ said Jenna, exasperated. ‘You’re not five anymore, you know. And I think you might stop ringing that bell now, Katie, before we’re all deafened.’

  Her words were tart but her face lit into a sudden smile as she hunted them all into the kitchen. Xander shot into his seat at the table next to Ollie, laughing, while Katie squealed as her mother caught her before tickling her into her seat. As the rich savoury smell of the large pie which Mrs Stanton was serving filled the kitchen, Len passed Xander a dish piled high with buttered carrots and green beans while James Stanton put tall jugs of a clear sparkling drink on the table, and grinned at Xander and Ollie as he passed by them. Only a day ago, Xander had sat at this same table, exhausted, confused and feeling utterly out of place in this world. Now, as he filled his plate with food and handed on the platters, while Len pulled a face at him across the table, he felt unexpectedly the first tentative strands of belonging.

  Chapter Four

  After his disaster of the previous afternoon, Xander was fully prepared for Mrs Stanton to have changed her mind about taking him along to the orb fitting, but that thought did not seem to have occurred to her. She tapped at the boys’ bedroom door the next morning and then entered briskly, with an armful of clothes which she deposited on the table by his bed after a swift, disapproving stare around the room.

  ‘Here you are, Xander,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep re-wearing those clothes, so Jenna picked these up for you yesterday. Put yours in the washing basket, if you can find it in all this mess.’

  She fished a cushion out from under a pile of trousers on the floor and threw it with perfect aim at the top of Ollie’s head, buried under his covers.

  ‘Wha –?’ he grumbled, peering out with his hair on end. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘This tip,’ retorted his grandmother. ‘I expect to see it cleared up by tonight, and I will be checking. How you can live like this, I just don’t know. Goodness only knows what’s under this mess.’

  Tutting to herself, she left the room and Ollie sat up in bed, looking around him with an air of puzzlement.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said, after a full perusal. ‘You can still see quite a lot of the floor.’ He crossed to the door, hopping over various piles of belongings, and grinned at Xander. ‘Could be a lot worse.’

  After Ollie had shot off to the bathroom, Xander turned to examine the clothes Mrs Stanton had left for him. They were much like the ones he had seen Ollie wear, plain trousers in dark blue and green, and various shirts in neutral colours. A long, intricately woven belt curled on top of the pile, and there was also a collection of underwear and socks. Jenna had not provided any shoes but, after the ministrations of the brownies, his grey trainers looked better than they had since they were new. They had followed their emergency first aid in the kitchen with what had evidently been some in-depth work overnight, and the trainers were now neatly mended, clean and re-coloured. Xander shook his head in amazement as he examined them before getting dressed in his new clothes.

  ‘Looking good,’ said Ollie as he re-entered the room. ‘No-one will guess you’re an illegal
outlander now.’

  Xander laughed. ‘Not until I open my mouth and show my total ignorance of everything,’ he said.

  Ollie shrugged.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon get you up to speed and you’re just a kid – it’s not like people will be interrogating you.’

  Xander thought rather uneasily about the upcoming meeting with the Wardens; that had sounded uncomfortably close to an interrogation to him, but he decided to worry about it later. Breakfast followed, with Katie bouncing with excitement and anticipation about getting her first orb.

  ‘By supper time I’ll be able to clear the whole table by myself and lev everything to the sink,’ she declared to the room at large. ‘I’ll do it all for you every single day.’

  ‘Lev?’ queried Xander under his breath to Ollie.

  ‘Levitate,’ replied Ollie, before adding in a louder voice. ‘It’s not actually as easy as that, Katie.’

  His sister brushed aside his words of caution with an airy wave of her hand and Len rolled her eyes, but restrained from saying anything.

  A short time afterwards, Mrs Stanton and Xander were walking down the lane towards Wykeham as Katie danced along in front. It was another sunny morning with only a few wisps of clouds overhead, and the air was fresh and fragrant. Xander looked around with interest as they walked. The last time he had passed this way, he had been so tired and overwhelmed that it had almost seemed like a dream. This time, however, he could appreciate the countryside they walked through.

  The lane wound between hedges, interspersed with trees, while flowers starred the grass on either side; yellow narcissus and buttercups, white daisies, pink mallows, dog roses and tall, swaying foxgloves all blended their scents together. Heavy bees, humming gently, were busy about their work and many-coloured butterflies flitted from bloom to bloom, while Xander caught the occasional flash of white from a rabbit’s tail, doubtless startled by Katie’s energetic dance down the lane. As they began to enter the more populous part of the track, Xander heard the odd, ‘Good morning’ called out from a window or a front garden. Mrs Stanton replied cordially, but did not pause to chat, leaving Xander to twist his head to try to catch sight of the inhabitants of Haven. He was still rather expecting to see more creatures from fable and legend, but the glimpses he caught were of perfectly ordinary-looking people.