Aster Wood series Box Set

by J B Cantwell

  “No,” I said. “No sign of him.”

  “So he had to have walked on the beach,” she said. “Unless—” her eyes drifted out over the choppy ocean waves.

  “No,” I said. “No, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do you know?” she asked. She was trying hard to keep it together, but her hands shook as much as her voice.

  “Because we can’t think that way right now,” I said. “Simple as that.”

  The golf ball sized pebbles that covered our portion of beach, smoothed from thousands of years of battering on the edge of where the sea met the land, stretched out for miles in both directions. It betrayed no footsteps.

  “You go in that direction, I’ll go this way,” I said. “If you don’t find him in an hour, turn back and meet me back here, ok?”

  “Ok,” she said, breathless as fear and courage battled for control of her mind.

  I didn’t wait for her. I didn’t know if she would be able to do what I was asking. To search, again, for her father. It seemed that soon, if not today, she would split from the strain of not finding the relief she sought from him.

  But I didn’t have time for that now. Almara was out there, somewhere, and I had to find him fast, before he slipped from between our fingers, lost to us and our cause forever.

  Chapter 13

  I ran. My feet crunched through the rocky shore like iron against bone as I bolted away.

  Ugh! Why couldn’t he just do what he was supposed to do? Why did this all have to be so difficult? An image flitted across my brain, a fantasy I had long had about forcing my father to take his medicine, forcing it down his throat with my pudgy five-year-old hands. That little boy in me was convinced that the pills he refused had, in fact, magic within them. And it was just his stubborn will that stood between him and I. Father and son.

  But this was different. Something about Almara’s affliction made me think it couldn’t be fixed by a trip to the pharmacy. It wasn’t that simple.

  None of this was simple.

  So I ran.

  I kept my speed contained. At top speed, the world around me would turn to a blur, and the details would get lost in the wind that tore tears from my eyes. But I was grateful for the speed I did have. I could get much farther than Jade in the same amount of time. I hoped she wasn’t wandering aimlessly along the beach. If she let despair crush her will, she didn’t hold any hope of finding him.

  Why hadn’t we heard him go? He was an uncoordinated, hunched old man. And yet he had left us without displacing a single pebble on the beach, without making a sound. Months of being on the run had made me a light sleeper, always waiting for attack, always listening.

  But I hadn’t been sleeping lightly, not today. I had woken up in a haze, with the tendrils of sickly sweet dreams hovering about me. And Jade, too. Hadn’t she said something about having had the nicest dream?

  The beach was empty. The knolls that rose up along the edge changed from rock to sand gradually across the miles, and no caves hid in the crevices. It was just the ocean, the rocks, and my flying boots. The landscape became almost dull; flat textures whizzing by. I found myself looking for abnormalities against this monotone sheet of beach instead of the man, himself.

  A scattering of driftwood brought me up short and I slowed. As I passed I took the time to check behind each piece large enough to hide a man, looking for his hiding body.

  And then I saw it. Fluttering in the breeze, a worn, brown strip of fabric had torn on a branch, stabbed onto a jagged piece of driftwood. The edges were frayed, rotten from centuries of wear. I stopped, ripping the linen from the wood.

  “Almara!” I shouted. Not even an echo of my own voice rewarded me. Only the steady beat of the waves answered my call.

  The place seemed empty, but I couldn’t figure out why. I had seen photos of beaches, far beyond the reaches of my city back home. In those images, people walked hand in hand on the sand. Seagulls strutted, owning their small piece of the world. The laughter of children, made silent by the snapping of just one instant in time, rang through my ears as I flipped through the pages of the old photo albums.

  Here was silence, too, behind the thrum of the ocean. Too much of it.

  I started running again, shouting his name out every minute or so, pausing to listen for a response.

  Then, suddenly, the rocky part of the beach ended, morphing into flat, gray sand. The tide had gone out here, and the sand was hard where the sea had weighted it with water. A most welcome sight met my eyes as my feet crossed over the threshold of stone beach.

  Footprints.

  I picked up speed.

  “Almara!”

  I let myself run all-out, trying like mad to reach him before some other unknown ill did. Chills were scurrying up and down my spine. The dream. The silence. The disappearance. Something was very wrong.

  The footsteps went on and on. I ran for miles, the tears from the wind mixing with tears of frustration, drying after only moments on my cheeks. I ran so fast that I ran right past the end of the footprint trail, only realizing after another quarter mile that the path was lost.

  I stopped, gasping, and turned to search the beach. It was empty, blank as an artist’s page.

  But up on the hillside along the edge of the beach, a strange, dark figure caught my attention. He sat at the corner of the precipice, his legs folded neatly beneath him, and looked out over the waves. His skin was the darkest I had ever seen on any man, black as if burned to charcoal, and his hair hung down heavily onto his shoulders in long, locked spirals. He wore no shirt, and his lean muscles shone sweaty in the heat of the day. It looked like he had sat in the blazing sun for a century, slowly baking to a crisp beneath its relentless heat.

  His stared out to the sea, his gaze a focused beam, his eyebrows furled in concentration.

  “Hey!” I yelled up at him, made uneasy by his intensity. “Hey, what are you doing?” I started walking slowly in his direction, momentarily distracted from my pursuit of Almara. But his eyes never wavered from the fixed point on the water below, his mouth turned down into a grimace.

  It was only when I wondered what it was he was staring at that my veins filled with ice. Dread weighted every inch of my insides as I turned, forcing myself to search the one place I had no hope of rescuing Almara from, to see what the stark black man up on the cliff saw.

  And there he was, far out, too far out, in the ocean. Only his head still remained above the water, his body inching ever deeper, closer and closer to a watery death.

  NO.

  Images of Jade’s tortured face flashed in my mind. Then the worried face of my mother. The dead fields of Earth. My father in the street in nothing but underwear, ranting at the top of his voice. All things lost with the loss of this one man’s life. It was all I could do to not fall down onto my knees. Oxygen seemed to stop making it to my limbs, and my chest clenched and burned with the horror of what I was witnessing. With every ounce of energy I could find, I shouted into the wind.

  “STOP!”

  I was running again, though I couldn’t remember starting to move. In a moment I was back at his footsteps, at the point where his shuffling gait had turned to meet the sea. I splashed into the water. Maybe I could make it to him. I was his height, and stronger. His nose was still above the waves.

  I trudged myself through the water, throwing myself recklessly into the cold, merciless arms of the ocean.

  “Stop!” I yelled again, this time I almost cried the word. “Don’t! You have to stop!”

  But he did not.

  A large wave knocked me backwards, and I found myself underwater despite the fact that my feet could still touch the bottom. I stood up again, choking. The top of Almara’s head still stuck up.

  I was frantic. I had to find a way to get to him, but if I kept pushing on, I would drown, myself. I flailed, searching all around for a clue, an idea, something to help me reach him. Something that would float. I didn’t have Jade’s power. I couldn’t call rock
s up from the sea floor to carry me to Almara. I needed a boat, but a more impossible wish I could never have made in this empty place.

  Wood. Boats are made of wood. Wood floats.

  The large branches of driftwood that littered the beach caught my eye, and I turned back, pushing through the water with every ounce of energy I had left.

  Choking and gasping, I ran over the wet sand. I picked up the first branch I saw that seemed large enough. Thick as my midsection and as light as Jade’s tiny body, I hoisted the log up and ran back, hoping I wasn’t too late.

  His head was gone, disappeared beneath the waves.

  As soon as the water was up to my thighs, I threw down the log, using it to steady my body as I fought my way out again. One by one the waves battered me, trying to knock me underneath the surface, but I didn’t let them. I couldn’t let them.

  You can do this. Just hang on.

  I concentrated hard, watching, calculating every movement of the water. Somehow I managed to stay upright. When my shoulders were beneath the surface, I lifted my toes from the sand and began kicking. If I hadn’t been so panicked about rescuing Almara, I would have felt relief, for the log did its job and kept me aloft. I hugged it close to my chest, unwilling to let it go, not at any cost. He had to be here somewhere. I took a deep breath and plunged my head beneath the waves.

  The salty water seared my eyes, but I kept the pried open as I searched through the murkiness for him. I pulled my head up, gasping for air, and then thrust it beneath again. Again and again I did this. He had to be here. I had just seen him. It had only been moments.

  Suddenly movement, the only movement I had seen under the surface, caught my eye. I kicked towards it, and he came into view. Still standing upright, taking small, purposeful steps deeper and deeper into the sea, Almara walked to his death. His robes and hair flew around him as if he were caught in a wild, swirling windstorm. I tried to call out, but my voice was inaudible here in the deep. Instead I sucked in a throat full of saltwater. Stunned, I instinctively fought for the surface, heaving out the water from my chest as soon as the air touched my face.

  Don’t quit. Don’t give up.

  When the coughing subsided, I took a huge breath of air and plunged again, this time stretching out both arms, one gripping the log, one reaching towards Almara. The edges of his robes tickled the tips of my fingers, and I grappled wildly with the fabric until I had a full fist of it in my hand. I pulled and pulled, but he was dead weight in the water and didn’t try to save himself. Little by little, I somehow managed to raise him a few inches off the sea bed. I grabbed his arm and heaved him upwards, my head breaching the surface again, shortly followed by his. I gasped and gagged on the water now swimming in my lungs, but I held him fast.

  He didn’t cough and sputter as I did, only stared blankly into space with clouded, white irises. My legs kicked under the waves as I tried to move our bodies to shore. Slowly, we inched closer and closer to the beach until my feet mercifully found the sand beneath us.

  I lifted my eyes to the cliff above, and as I did so the strange, dark man turned away.

  I wanted to call out to him, to force him to stop. He had done this to Almara, I was sure of it. There wasn’t much fight left in me, but in that moment I was willing to use what I had left to face him, to battle him, to make him pay for this thievery. The taking of the man who could lead us all to salvation.

  But as he walked away, and his head slowly bobbed out of sight, I knew that I was too late. And too weak.

  The hard knot of resolve that had begun growing when I had first seen Almara, the astonishingly damaged remains of what once had been a great man, grew another layer thicker. With every enemy we encountered, every sadistic ill we experienced, the knot grew, and I saw in my mind, like a broken record, all we had been deprived of.

  I would beat them. I would beat them all.

  The waves pushed us closer and closer in, threatening to knock me down as I all but carried him to the land. But while they battered at Almara, my feet held fast beneath me. When we made it to shore, we finally collapsed in a heap, the water still pushing up over our legs.

  “Urrrg,” Almara groaned, the first sign from him that he was still alive. I rolled him on his side and a stream of water gurgled up out of his mouth. Now, finally, he coughed, and soon the majority of the salty brine was free of him. His body settled as the racking hacks subsided, and he lay on his side, staring blankly into space, lifeless but for the rattling breaths that came in and out of his body automatically.

  I lay back, not caring that half of my body was still in the ocean, and stared at the sky above me, letting my frustration and anger and helplessness go for just long enough to appreciate the fact that I was still alive. Billowing clouds floated overhead, slowly bunching together, growing larger, darker. I breathed with them as they slowly joined one another, mixing together, a system of life.

  Almara shivered on the shore next to me, and the jolt of his body next to mine brought me out of my stupor. I rolled over and stared into his clouded eyes.

  “Are you in there?” I asked quietly, but he didn’t respond. His body shook again with a jerk, and soon the shaking began to increase with every moment that passed. What had happened to him?

  I hauled myself up onto my elbow, looking at the beach around us as my skin slowly began to dry into a sticky, tight sheath. My tongue was fat and dry against the roof of my mouth, but despite the great ocean at my feet, there was no drink for me here. As I rose, I pulled Almara up with me. At first his body resisted, limp and stubborn. But once I had him on his feet, he stayed up by his own power, swaying slightly as the task of balancing from foot to foot was undertaken. I took his arm in my hands, and slowly began guiding him back to our small campsite.

  I kept my eyes trained on the cliffs as we walked, searching for the dark man, willing him to come back. I dared him to come, to try again. I was a hunter guarding my prey, and I felt my face lift into a snarl so wild it would have shocked me if it weren’t for my resolve. Almara was mine, not to be taken from beneath us again. He was too important to too many, and I would protect him at all costs.

  His feet shuffled along beneath him, aimlessly following where they were led. His eyes remained unfocused, staring blankly into the distance, his mouth agape and silent.

  I had to get him to Jade. Maybe she would understand this strange trance that had come over her father. The knot in my stomach told me that this idea was false, that she would be just as baffled as I was. And worse, that she would be hurt by his actions. But I couldn’t deal with this alone. Not anymore. Almara’s attempt to take his own life, whether of his own accord or from falling to the will of the man on the cliff, meant that our situation was much more serious than she or I had thought.

  I hadn’t meant to speak to him, but I saw the journey ahead, much longer on the way back with him in tow, and I spoke anyways.

  “Did you know that when I met Jade she was being held as a prisoner?” His gait did not falter, he betrayed no sign of recognition, and I continued. “She was held in the dark, alone inside a mountain cave, for a long, long time. She was nearly mad when I found her.”

  I breathed in the sticky sea air as we walked, a sensation that was oddly familiar, though I had never felt it before on Earth.

  “It took me a while, but I broke her out of that place. When I did, when she was finally free of it, for a while it seemed almost as if she had never set foot beneath the mountain.”

  My feet sank into the wet sand as we walked, creating little pools every time I lifted them again. Behind me, the innocent licking of the low waves at the shore whisked the evidence of my passage away.

  “I’ve been thinking, though, for a while now, that maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t really free her at all.” The memory of Jade’s deep eyes shifting back and forth between pain and violence stopped me in my tracks. I turned to him. “I think she carries that mountain with her. I think she’s trapped under its weight, still waiting for
you to come for her.”

  I stooped a little, trying to make eye contact with his deadened gaze.

  “So it’s down to you now. They’re all out there, the Corentin and I don’t know who else, but they’re there, waiting to strike. We can’t do this without you. We can’t balance the Fold on our own; we don’t know how. So you need to come back. Wherever you are, whatever cave you’re in, whatever weight you’re carrying, you need to come back to us. For Jade. She deserves that.”

  Somewhere inside I had been hoping for a response, but eyelids didn’t flicker. His mouth didn’t try to form words. He just stood there, vacant and expressionless, a bag of bones with no life inside it. Suddenly, anger filled my heart, and I lashed out at him.

  “Fine,” I said sharply, pushing him roughly away from me. He stumbled backwards, nearly fell, but then his body righted itself with rigid automation.

  I pushed him again.

  “You want to abandon her again, do you?” I shouted into his empty face. “Fine, go ahead. But that makes you horrible. That makes you weak.” I pushed, and his feet splashed into the shallow waves. “You want to die, do you? Go ahead! The ocean is right there. Go ahead back in then. You’re going to rip her apart if she sees you like this, so just go.”

  Nothing. Not a flicker of light in his eyes. Not a quickening of breath in his throat.

  I pushed again. He stood in the ocean with the water up to his knees and stared at nothing.

  “I’m done with you.”

  I turned and walked away, left him standing there, partway in and partway out, of the ocean. Halfway between life and death. I headed back to Jade, seething with anger and frustration.

  It was a few moments before my ears could discern the sound of his splashing footsteps separately from the sloshing waves. But when I did, and I turned to see, to find out if it was really true, it was. Almara was following me.

  His face hadn’t changed. His eyes were still coated with the white of madness, or magic, or evil—whatever it was that had turned them foggy. But his feet followed mine.