Aster Wood series Box Set

by J B Cantwell

  “It was just a feeling,” he finally said, breaking the silence between us all. “I don’t know where it came from.” He shrugged his shoulders slightly, then rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.

  Cait stepped forward, gripping onto his other hand fiercely, and rounded on me with accusing eyes.

  Cait had been Father’s defender from the first time we met. She could see what truly lay inside him more clearly than I ever could. It was the gift of her vision, bestowed upon her from her homeland in the Elysian Hills, that made my argument moot. She knew the truth.

  I did not.

  I sighed, my shoulders hunching, defeated, and sat down in the now-muted green grass. Cait looked up at Father, and he smiled down at her. Then, as if releasing a cherished toy, she let his hand go and walked a few paces away.

  All of us stared at the horizon. All of us pondered what that darker color meant. Was it a storm? A simple haze?

  We rested for a time, silent in our thoughts, before finally coming together once more to jump again. I didn’t know what Father felt, but I could see the hunger in Cait’s eyes as she stared into the gray that lay before us. I was reminded that we were on the same side, she and I. We wanted the same things. To see our friends, our families, safe. That darker patch in the sky seemed that it must be along the path toward finding those who were important to us again.

  It was only Father who seemed ambivalent.

  We jumped again, tirelessly leaping until morning became afternoon. As we moved through the vibrant grassland, the trees began to thin, then disappeared from the landscape entirely. By the time we were tiring, the landscape had become completely dull and flat. Soon we were leaping through thick gray blades of grass that stuck up from the ground like knives, threatening where they had once been so soft and inviting. Here, all the color in the world was stripped away.

  Then, all at once, we were there.

  And it was upon us.

  It was a storm, had been one all along. But it was a storm unlike any I had ever known.

  Wind whipped through our hair, making it stand on end, Cait’s swirling around her head in a vortex of power. Had there been structures, or even trees, we would surely have been killed by the flying debris the wind would have caused. But around us stretched out only grass, and it was only the blades, made sharp now by their speed, that threatened us. They whipped across our skin, stinging our faces, threatening our eyes.

  Part of me thought to turn back, to go back the way we had come. We had no idea if this wind would continue the farther we went toward it. What if it got worse? But we had to try, had to push on to find out what was on the other side. If there was an other side.

  Father squinted his eyes, bracing himself against the gale with his legs spread wide. I gripped Cait’s hand and jumped again. Five times, thirty, we continued, and the gale only increased the farther in we went. The blades of grass were cutting us now, and I saw several sharp red lines on Cait’s cheeks and hands. I had to get her out of this. We wouldn’t last much longer. In a split second, I weighed our options. Continue onward, take the risk that the storm would only worsen the farther we went into it. Or turn back, try another route, find another way to get our bearings on this strange planet.

  I gauged how many more jumps we could handle before we must turn back, how many more before our very lives were in too much danger to continue, how much longer we could stand.

  Fifteen.

  It was an arbitrary number, I knew, but I had to set a limit.

  We jumped, and I barely bothered to open my eyes now. I pointed my face towards the ground where, between the thin slits of my eyelids, I could see that what grass remained in the landscape was flattened against the earth beneath it. As we hit eleven, twelve, thirteen jumps, with only an increase in the velocity of the wind, my heart sank into my stomach.

  This was no natural storm.

  And it was getting worse.

  We would have to turn back. Fourteen. Fifteen jumps. I was at my limit. I only had a moment now to choose, to make the final choice between our lives and our mission. I turned my face upward, barely daring to open my eyes.

  And what I saw made my heart leap in my chest.

  Above us, just visible behind the thick haze of dead grass swirling above our heads, a vast, jagged mountain range sprang upwards from the land.

  I gripped Cait harder, and it was only three more jumps before the deadly, searing wind had become no more than a stiff breeze across our battered bodies.

  We had found the Hidden Mountains.

  Cait came to life instantly. Her eyes, streaming tears of pain just a moment before, now were wide with disbelief and, clearly, relief.

  “I see it,” she murmured. Then more urgently, “I see it!”

  She gripped my hand and swung it back and forth, laughing. I might have laughed, too, if I hadn’t been so distracted by the stinging cuts on my face. Father seemed to be of the same mind, and he tenderly prodded at his left cheek, which had taken a greater beating than his right.

  My own relief came on more slowly, and I tentatively came out of the haze brought on by so many hundreds of jumps in quick succession.

  We were here. Aeso. We had landed on the right planet after all.

  I let out a deep, slow breath, only then realizing how big the burden I’d been carrying had been. All these days I had worried that I had made a mistake, that my own clumsiness with the magic of this place had resulted in a link that had taken us not to Aeso, but to some foreign world where we would never escape.

  But the mountains looming above us were as certain as the sun in the sky. Stark, gray, jagged, their peaks jutted up into the fading afternoon. Somewhere within that vast range, my friends awaited. Or did they? Were the remaining inhabitants of Stonemore still alive, still safely hidden somewhere within the reaches of those mountains? Looking at the thick spires of stone from where we stood, I wondered how we would ever find Kiron and the others. The mountain range where we had found the Book of Leveling had been significant, sure. And the peaks that surrounded Riverstone had been foreboding in their own right. But these mountains, the Hidden Mountains, seemed to go on and on, and every direction I looked I could not see past them. Suddenly, I worried that, if we were to proceed, we’d be entering a snare we might never escape.

  Father sat heavily in the dirt, lying back, not bothering to hide his exhaustion. Cait, unable to restrain her excitement, released my hand and bounced forward twenty or so paces, peering at the rock looming above us as though it were a vast playground she couldn’t wait to enter and enjoy.

  I sat down, too, the remaining energy I had held in my chest finally draining away. I stared after her, and I could tell without her having to say it that she wanted nothing more than to continue, right now, on the journey. As if on cue, she turned and bounded back towards me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. “Let’s go!”

  I shook my head, unsure of whether to laugh or moan.

  “I’m—we’re exhausted, Cait. We’ll have to wait.” I eyed the mountains, unsure of how to even begin the trek into their hidden places.

  “But I can see it, Aster,” she said. Then, when I didn’t respond, she folded her arms over her chest. “I know you want to go.”

  I smiled.

  “I do want to go,” I said. “But not today.”

  She turned and gazed, lost in her own thoughts.

  “Where does it go?” I asked. “The path you see?”

  “It’s easy,” she said. “Nearly straight through.”

  A thought I had been chewing on, worried about, suddenly came to the surface.

  “I’m surprised you can see it so clearly,” I said. “I was worried that the fact that they were in this particular range was the reason you weren’t able to see the trail.”

  The Hidden Mountains carried the name because of their precise ability to hide those who didn’t wish to be found. Theoretically, those remaining from Stonemore could spend years in the range, a
nd no one who wanted to harm them would ever be able to stumble across their encampment.

  Cait shrugged.

  “I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before,” she finally said. “But it’s clear now.”

  The wind, still stiff from the storm behind us, slapped across my aching cheeks, stinging despite the fact that the onslaught was over. I turned back to face the horrible gale we had just surfaced from.

  “But you couldn’t see through that,” I said, gesturing.

  She looked up, and the same lost look I had seen on her face so often in recent days came over her again. Like she had suddenly gone completely, inexplicably, blind. Fear instantly clouded her features. Then she turned her back to the storm, stubbornly refusing to look at it any further.

  “I want to go,” she said, a hint of desperation making her voice thick.

  Whatever she saw in the storm, or didn’t see, frightened her. It frightened me, too, if I was being honest. But I knew we couldn’t jump for too much longer. Not today.

  “Father,” I said. “Let’s move on. Just a little bit farther.”

  A low groan came from his otherwise still form. I crawled in his direction, and Cait joined us on the ground. Without his permission, I don’t even know if he realized what I was doing, we all gripped hands and jumped again.

  Just four more jumps got us from the edge of the storm to the low foothills surrounding the range. Stark and gray, they were nothing but smaller renditions of the enormous peaks above. I could see a chasm in the side of a particularly large chunk of rock, and I forced Father to his feet, dragging him toward it.

  “I want to keep going,” Cait whined, anticipation clear in her voice.

  “That’s far enough for now,” I said. As much as I wanted to find Kiron and the others, I could feel the cuts on my face and neck swelling, and already the lids of my eyes were thicker than they had been just a few minutes before. I put one finger to the eyebrow above my right eye, and it came away with a thin sheen of blood on the tip. “We need to rest,” I said firmly. “We’ll head off again in the morning.”

  As anxious as she was for us to be on our way, I could tell her skin was bothering her, too. She looked down at her left arm, sucking in her breath as her fingertips prodded it gently. Stubborn tears welled up in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall onto her cheeks.

  “But we’ll go tomorrow?” she asked. “You promise?”

  I nodded down at her.

  “I promise.”

  Chapter 3

  I shouldn’t have promised.

  When I awoke the next morning, I stretched out my stiff, cold limbs and groaned in agony. With no vegetation on this side of the storm, and nothing but sheer rock faces above, we had found nothing with which to start a fire. Cait had snuggled beside me in the night, and her warmth combined with that of Kiron’s blanket had provided some measure of comfort. But the floor of the cave was solid rock, cold and unforgiving, and now I felt as if the surface’s iciness had leached out of it and into my bones.

  I sat up, quickly finding that the cold was only one of many problems I was facing this morning. The skin on my arms, face and neck cracked like dry tissue paper with my movements, and soon it was oozing with thin, stinging pus. Only the cold in my arms and legs kept me from falling back to the ground, unwilling to continue until I was healed. I was frozen and hurt, and I stood up and stepped out into the morning sun, eager to shake off the cold. I lifted my face, and it had the combined effect of warming my body and drying my skin.

  Cait was already up, standing a few feet away from the mouth of the cave, staring out at the storm that still raged below. I stepped up beside her. We were both silent for several long moments.

  “What is it?” I finally asked. From this perspective, a few miles away from the storm’s edge and higher up than yesterday, it looked like an enormous stream of dirty air. I realized that we had jumped no less than forty times to get through it, which meant it was at least forty miles across. The grasses and dirt that the vicious gale tore from the land gave the invisible wind structure, and the path of the storm was clear. It wrapped around the mountains like a protective ring, and from this vantage point I could see neither the beginning, nor the end.Cait’s eyes didn’t move from the storm as she answered.

  “I’ve been staring at it,” she said. “Trying to figure it out. It’s like a wall. I can’t see anything through it.”

  She seemed less disturbed than yesterday, maybe because she felt now that the worst was over, that we would not be reentering that dead, dangerous place.

  “It’s weird that we can’t see the other side,” I said. I would have thought that, this high up, we would have gotten some glimpse of the rolling fields we had traveled through for the last several days. Some glint of the weirdly neon grass and trees. But all I could see was the dirty haze kicked up by the chaos below.

  “It’s an enchantment.”

  I started at the voice of Father right behind me. I hadn’t heard him as he had approached.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  I couldn’t argue that it was a good theory. I had seen weather manipulated before. Was this storm the doing of Kiron, trying to protect the remaining people of Stonemore from the wrath of the Corentin?

  Somehow I doubted it.

  “I can’t tell you why I know it’s an enchantment,” he said, and I saw that his eyes were black as coal. “I just know. Something deep inside me knows.”

  I turned back to stare out over the storm.

  “Well, whatever it is, I’m happy to be on the other side of it,” I said, turning back to Cait. “You ready?”

  She beamed up at me in answer.

  We gathered our things and stood facing the mountains. She pointed in a direction, and my hand followed hers, holding out Kiron’s link.

  We jumped. Instantly, the storm was wiped from view as we found ourselves surrounded on all sides by jagged cliff faces that jutted up into the sky. It was cold, even without the wind, and I got the impression there were many places within these mountains where the sun never touched. I shivered.

  Cait adjusted her aim, pointing. We jumped again.

  It didn’t take long for us to reach what we thought was our destination. Only a half hour or so in, Cait suddenly stopped, spinning to face me, her face confused.

  “But…where…?” she asked, looking lost.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly alarmed. If she had lost the trail again, I didn’t know how we would ever find the others, or even our way back out of this maze. The panic of the last several days threatened at the edge of my mind.

  “I don’t see it,” she said.

  My heart fell into my stomach. I quickly tried to come up with a logical explanation.

  “Maybe we just went too far,” I said.

  She turned around and around, searching.

  “But I should be able to see it,” she said. “Even if we went too far.” Her eyes were growing wide with alarm now, and I could tell that the same fear I had been feeling in recent days had been torturing her mind, too.

  “Okay,” I said, squeezing her on the shoulder. “Maybe you just need a break. Maybe you’re just, I don’t know, tired or something.”

  As she stared up at me, Father approached her from behind.

  “It’s alright, child,” he said, putting a hand on her other shoulder. “Aster’s right. You should rest.” He glanced up at me, clearly concerned for her.

  “But I don’t want to rest,” she complained. “We just got started.” She broke away from the both of us, stomping her little feet towards an opening in the rock. She stared up at the peaks above, then outstretched her hands and pushed on the stone, like she was willing it to share its secret.

  I glanced at Father. I was at a loss, and fighting back my own anxiety as well.

  He followed after her, dropping his pack as he walked.

  “Hello?” he yelled, his shout echoing off the rock walls again and again. There was no answer,
and he turned back to me, confused.

  “You said you left your friends here?” he asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” I said.

  “No, I mean you’re sure that these are, in fact, the same mountains?”

  “Of course they are.” I was flailing a bit now. It hadn’t occurred to me, after seeing a range of mountains that seemed just like the ones we had left a month ago, that we could be in the wrong place. I had let that fear go as soon as we had come through the storm.

  But what if he was right?

  “They have to be,” I said quietly, fighting to keep the spark of hope in my chest alight. I had no plans for what to do if we really were in the wrong place. If we really were as lost as I had feared.

  “Let’s keep going,” he suggested, looking back and forth between Cait and me.

  “But where?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Onward?”

  “No!” Cait argued. “No, it’s no farther than this. I’m sure of it.”

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked gently, trying to give her back command of the situation. It was her we needed to follow, after all.

  She turned, breathing hard, and I could tell she was searching desperately for any kind of sign, any hint of the direction we should take. Finally, she looked up at me, and she had tears in her eyes.

  “Hey, hey, Kiddo,” I said, opening my arms for a hug. “It’s going to be okay.”

  She walked forward into my arms, several small sobs escaping her chest. I melted at the sight, and instantly I felt my own fear ebb away. I couldn’t allow myself to be so frightened when I had her to take care of. I didn’t trust Father to take care of me or her, so that just left the two of us. One of us had to stay strong. I broke her grip from around my middle and knelt down in front of her.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s try to figure this out. How about we go back the way we came.” She began to object to this, but I stopped her. “Just a minute,” I went on. “We’ll only go one jump back. If we don’t find anything, then we’ll turn south and try going that way. Just for one jump. They’ve got to be around here somewhere.”