Aster Wood series Box Set

by J B Cantwell

  Mom pushed me a little, and I took a few tentative steps forward. Red shadows from the white light remained over my sight, and I blinked, trying to readjust to the faint light in the cave.

  “Dad?” I asked. My voice had gone unusually quiet, and I cleared my throat, getting ready for the conversation that must come next.

  He stepped closer, and suddenly we were face to face, just a few feet away from each other. He raised up his arm, and I thought he was going to hit me. But it was the hand with the light in it, and he shined now on the wall, bouncing it, casting his face in a soft, dim glow.

  And all the air I had been holding in came pouring out of my lungs like a deflating balloon.

  We had been right. There was a man in this cave.

  But he was not my father.

  Chapter 12

  “Dad!” Sean said, launching towards his father, his adult pretense temporarily forgotten.

  The man staggered backwards, surprised by the sudden appearance of his son amidst a group of strangers.

  “Sean?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Sean broke apart from his father and looked up into his dirty face.

  “These folks came through town looking for the hermit,” he said. “I brought them down here to try to help out.” He paused, standing tall again, his maturity, still clearly new to him, returning. “We’ve been worried about you.”

  “Worried about me?” the man said. “Naw.”

  I stared around the cavern, searching for “the hermit.”

  “Is Jack here?” Mom asked, interrupting the reunion. “We went to the cabin, and no one has seen him in your village.”

  “Jack?” he asked. “Who, the crazy guy? No. He left a few weeks back.”

  I looked back at him, unbelieving.

  He had slipped through our fingers again.

  I took a couple steps to one side and leaned against the wall, defeated.

  My father wasn’t here.

  The man looked around at the group of us, taking time to inspect one face after another, his own looking perplexed.

  “What are you all doing this far out?” he asked. “It ain’t safe at this elevation, you know.”

  He was tall, much taller than he had appeared from afar. And big. Not fat, but wide and muscular, as though he had spent every day of his life working the earth. His skin was a deep brown, and his black hair hung down his back in a fat braid.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “We’re looking for Jack Wood,” Mom said, taking over. “He used to…live here.” She cast a nervous glance around the cavern, as if expecting him to jump out and frighten her at any moment.

  “He don’t no more,” he said. He had a short piece of wood in his mouth, and he chewed the tip of it as he talked, moving it back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Flipped out when I got here a few weeks back. Said I was a demon or somethin’. Then took off. You friends of his?”

  “Family,” Mom said.

  The man nodded, as if no further explanation was needed. We were the family of the crazy man, come to fetch him from his mountain asylum.

  “Do you know where we can find him?” she asked, her face visibly disappointed. No, irritated. It was just one more time she had to follow him along insanity’s trail.

  The man shrugged.

  “He was yabberin’ on about California before he left. Tried to taunt me, tellin’ me I’d never have the strength to make it that far. Threatened me, even, before he finally packed up his gear. I won’t lie. I’d been hoping to find company in these old mines, but I didn’t shed a tear when he moved along.”

  “How would he get to California?” I was surprised to hear my own voice asking this question. I had seen the prominent gold band encircling the spot in California. He must have seen it, too.

  “He told me he was going hunting in the mountains,” he said. “As to how he planned to make it there, you got me.”

  “Hunting?” I asked.

  “Hunting for gold, I expect,” he said. “Though there ain’t no one to sell to in California. The Rockies are the edge of civilization now. Nothin’ left out west. Still, I suppose, if you knew where to look, and you had a way to travel, a fella could make a living. Maybe better.” His eyes got a faraway look for a moment, as if he were considering the prospect of further riches if he were to do his hunting out west.

  “Make a living?” I asked. Who on Earth would care about gold anymore?

  “Sure,” he said, hoisting the sledgehammer over his shoulder. “There ain’t much left in this mountain, but if you work at it you can find enough to feed a family.” He smiled down at Sean and ruffled his short hair with one of his brawny hands. Then, turning back to me, he must have seen the surprised look on my face, because he continued. “What, you think cause the world’s gone to hell that there ain’t no market left for gold? Sure there is, especially seeing as most folks only care about city life nowadays. Ain’t nobody left who wants to get out here and really get their hands dirty. But there’ll always be a need for gold. Energy. Antibiotics. For some who can still afford it, jewelry. You find enough of it and you can make a nice little life for yourself.”

  “But who do you sell it to?” I asked. I tried to imagine finding other people way out here, where the Earth was so scorched it couldn’t have supported a population even if the rain wasn’t poisoned. A rock of gold would be as useless as any other at helping people to survive in a situation like this.

  “They come through every once in a while, the government vans. They trade us clothing and sugar, other supplies we can’t get on our own, for the gold we find. Of course, we get our rations just like everyone else, too. Though I think not for much longer. I think Uncle Sam might be getting tired of trekkin’ all the way out here to give us our mylar bags of stew.”

  I turned to Mom.

  “Do you think Dad is looking for gold to…make money?” The possibility seemed ridiculous, and yet suddenly plausible.

  “I doubt it,” Grandma said, stepping forward. “Jack’s never been interested in money. Never been able to hang onto it with his condition. And the way he looked at me the last time I saw him…” she shuddered. “Well, let’s just say it wasn’t greed I saw in his eyes.”

  “What does it matter?” Mom asked, exasperated. “Either way, he’s not here.” She folded her arms over her chest and leaned up against the wall of the cavern.

  “You’re tall.” I looked over to see Cait had stepped forward and now stood before the man, who must have seemed like a giant to her. Her fingers played with the hair on one side of her head, long and straggly. “I like your braid. I wish I had a braid like that.”

  The man looked down at her, his face expressionless, as if he could care less about such things as braids and little girls. Though, of course, Cait was no ordinary little girl.

  “Why don’t you get your ma to braid your hair, then?” he asked. It was an innocent question, but we all stiffened. Cait looked down at her feet.

  “She died,” she said. Then looked back up at him. “Maybe you could do it for me.”

  It wasn’t an outright request, exactly, but almost as if she were bargaining with him. He regarded her, but showed no sign of what he felt about the exchange.

  “I got work to do, kid,” he said, bringing his hammer back down to the ground and leaning on the thick wood handle.

  She looked up at him, confused.

  “Well, if you’re looking for gold, why are you looking here?” she asked. “There isn’t any in this wall.” She gestured to the spot in the rock where he had obviously excavated. At the base of the wall stood a small pile of rocks, hammered out of the mountain by this enormous man before us.

  The man turned to look at the wall, the divots made from his pickaxe cast into sharply contrasting shadows by his headlamp. Then he turned back, looked between Mom and Grandma, and then back down at Cait.

  “Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Where would you look?�
��

  Cait didn’t hesitate.

  “It’s over there,” she said, pointing her finger to a spot in the wall that sat untouched across the cavern lake.

  The man blew out a breath, which might have been a snort of laughter if he hadn’t been so stoic.

  “Of course it is,” he said, turning back to his pit in the floor. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing inside it. I had always thought gold could simply be cut away from the rock it was found in.

  “But it is,” Cait insisted, looking back at us. “Aster, tell him.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I took Mom’s flashlight from her hands and shined it across the lake at the wall on the other side. I didn’t see any hint of gold there. But I also didn’t totally discount her proclamation. I turned back to her.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed, took the flashlight, and shined it onto a specific part of the wall.

  “It’s right there,” she said, pointing again. Her finger made little swirls as she outlined what she must have thought was a vein of ore in the rock. Then, oddly, she stood there, almost as if in some sort of trance, her fingers making the same motion again and again.

  I squinted, trying to see what she saw. But the only thing visible to me was the dirty brown rock that lined the rest of the cavern. No gold.

  And yet I was intrigued. It had never occurred to me that Cait or Rhainn might have had powers of their own. Most people in the Fold were just ordinary folks as far as I knew. But maybe I had been wrong. Maybe little hints of magic were everywhere in the Triaden, and I had just been blind to them before now.

  I stared around the cavern, searching, stupidly, for some sort of boat. I had never been a good swimmer, had, in fact, never gone into the water before that cold night I had spent on the sea, floating on a raft of Jade’s rocks. And that time I had sunk like a stone before Erod had pulled me to the surface. There was no chance I could make it across this lake. I turned to Cait.

  “Hey,” I said. She ignored me, her fingers still swirling in the air. “Cait,” I said, giving her shoulder a little shake. She shook her head, as if breaking a physical bond that had been holding her fast, and looked at me.

  “Can you swim?”

  She looked at me, raised her eyebrows and nodded.

  “What?” Mom said, intervening. “No way. There is no way I’m about to let a little girl jump into a freezing lake in the middle of a mountain with nothing more than a gut feeling that she might find treasure on the other side.”

  Cait scowled, putting her hands on her hips in defiance.

  “I can swim real good,” she said. “Rhainn-y taught me when I was tiny. Besides, I know it’s there. I can see things. The magic’s in my blood. That’s what Mama always said.”

  I looked back and forth between them. Two women, one mature, one small, were staring daggers at each other.

  “Mom, I think we should take a look over there,” I said, coming to Cait’s defense.

  She wheeled on me.

  “What?”

  “Just hear me out,” I said. “Back in the Fold, there’s magic everywhere. People can do things that wouldn’t make sense to people on Earth. My best friend can move rocks with her mind.” My heart gave a tight, miserable squeeze at the mention of Jade. She had been my best friend, at least. “I know someone else who can fly. Another who can brew potions to heal the sick. Me, for example.” I looked down at Cait, who still wore her scowl. “I think we should at least take a look.”

  She glanced up at me, and when our eyes connected she understood that I was on her side. She moved to stand beside me, slipping her hand into mine.

  “You really think you can swim all that way on your own?” I asked.

  She looked out over the lake, sizing up the length from where we stood to the little beach on the other side, then nodded.

  “Ugh!” Mom groaned.

  She started kicking off her shoes.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I am not letting a little girl I barely know swim out into what could be a poisonous lake who-knows-how-deep to see if her x-ray gold vision is accurate.”

  “It’s not poison.” It was the man again. “I been drinking it for weeks. It’s chock-full of minerals, but it won’t kill you.

  Mom glared at him.

  “Give me that,” she commanded, pointing to his pickaxe.

  He looked over at the ax leaning up against the wall, considering for a moment. Then he nodded at Sean, who immediately went to retrieve the ax.

  Mom stripped down to her underwear and t-shirt, picked up the ax and stepped over to the water. She put one toe tentatively into it and shivered.

  “You owe me,” she said, glaring at me.

  I just shrugged.

  Then, with one fluid movement, she stepped into the water and turned onto her back, holding the ax with both hands over her chest. She kicked off with her legs and began skimming across the surface towards the far wall.

  “It’s freezing!” she called when she was halfway. Her voice was intended to be angry, I was sure, but instead it had a sort of desperate sound to it, a surprise at the coldness of the water she couldn’t mask with her irritation.

  Finally, after what seemed like an hour, her head bumped gently against the rock on the other side. She flung the ax over her head, and it clattered onto the shore. Then, dragging herself out of the water, she lay facedown on the beach, her breath heaving.

  But she must have been too cold to stay still for long. A moment later she was up on her feet, gripping the ax with an angry intensity.

  “A little light, please!” she yelled from the other side.

  We had all been standing, awestruck, watching. Now the flashlight and the man’s headlamp shined across the cavern as we tried to light her way.

  “Where is it?” she called.

  “Over there!” Cait yelled. “To the left!”

  Mom took a few steps to the side and raised the axe.

  “No!” Cait called. “Lower!”

  She readjusted her aim, and brought the ax down hard into the rock. Bits of dust and pebbles flew out with each thwack of the iron. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to find the gold or prove me wrong, or just to warm her body with the effort, but she attacked that wall with a strength I didn’t expect.

  “Lower!” Cait called when Mom had yet to find anything.

  I was glad to be on this side of the lake when the sound of her grumbling made it across the distance.

  But then, suddenly, both her swings at the rock and her grumbling stopped. She knelt down, moving her head away so that more light could make it to the wall, and ran her hands along it in a similar swirling shape to what Cait had outlined in the air.

  Then, she turned, and her voice was loud and surprised.

  “I found it!” she yelled.

  She turned back to the wall and continued to hack at it. Minutes passed, and soon the axe was dropped to her feet. She picked up a chunk of stone the size of a soccer ball and held it above her head, her face bright with triumph.

  I looked down at Cait, who had her arms crossed, a happy smirk on her face.

  “I tried to tell her,” she said, shrugging.

  I smiled down at her, and felt like a huge weight had been lifted. And in that moment I decided; I would still seek my father, try to bring him back to the Fold, try to save him. But with or without him, we now had a way to find the gold we needed.

  Chapter 13

  We arranged with the man, whose name turned out to be Carl, that we would work together to get the gold from the other side, then split the resulting riches. For a moment I considered whether this was a good idea or not. He seemed massive compared to the rest of us, and Sean was at least as big as Mom already. I guessed that they could probably defeat us all at once if it came down to a fight over the gold. But something in Carl’s dark eyes calmed my fears. I trusted him. It was gut
instinct.

  He was quite a swimmer, himself, though he had let Mom be the one to take the initial risk. But his big size and strength meant that he could be the one to swim back and forth across the lake with the stones as she broke them free from the mountain. Within each, paper-thin veins of gold cut through the rock. He piled them one by one on our side of the shore, stopping to show me the pit he had dug into the rock where we had found him pounding the sledgehammer.

  “You gotta grind it all up,” he explained, showing me how to use the weight of the hammer to help put more force into bashing the rocks. “Then, you can fish the gold out.”

  He explained the basics of gold mining when done without the heavy machinery of modern times. First, the rock needed to be crushed into near dust. Then, using a pan and a bucket of water, one could gradually sift through the remaining tiny granules, the gold eventually settling onto the bottom and the rock particles floated out of the pan. It was intriguing to me that riches such as gold could be found amongst stones that showed little evidence of the gold within. But I balked at the weight of the sledgehammer.

  “Can’t you just melt it out or something?” I asked. I hadn’t exactly been looking for such a physically demanding task.

  “Nope,” he said, turning to walk away.

  And that was it.

  I set to work, trying to attack my task with the same ferocity that Mom was bashing at that wall on the other side of the cavern. But after a half hour of pounding the sledgehammer into the ground, my fingers throbbed and my arms ached from the effort and the constant impact of the hammer against the rock.

  Sean had set to work a few feet away from me, and I stood up now to see how our accomplishments stacked up against each other. There was no comparison. He had ground easily twice as much ore as I had in the same amount of time, and he had barely broken a sweat doing it. He smirked in my direction, an arrogant, superior air about him. I scowled.