Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1)

by Cantwell, J. B.

  “How long have you lived in this house, Grandma?” I asked an hour later, between mouthfuls of sticky spaghetti. She looked up at me and then her eyes focused on a point beyond me as she thought of the answer.

  “Hmmm, let’s see,” she said, “I moved here with your grandfather right after we were married. We moved in with his parents, which is what most young couples did back then. So that’s about sixty-five, no, sixty-seven years.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s a long time. When was this place built?”

  “Oh,” she said, “your grandfather’s grandparents built it, so you do the math.”

  I twirled my spaghetti around and around my fork. That had to be almost two hundred years back. And it sounded like the place had been in the family that whole time. I eyed her, trying to decide if I should ask my next question.

  “Did anyone in the family ever do anything… strange?” I asked.

  She snorted and said, “What do you mean strange? We’re just farmers, Aster, not magicians. At least, we used to be farmers.” She smiled at me lovingly. “Though you with that blond hair, you might have a little magic in your blood.”

  I snorted. It was true: everyone in my family had brown hair except for me. In the old baby pictures I had seen, most people on my dad’s side had white blond hair as kids that then darkened as they got older, and Mom’s side of the family was almost entirely brunette. But I had always had a light blond mop on my head, a “toe-head” as some people called it, and it had barely darkened at all since I was little.

  “Hair aside,” I said, “was anybody in the family not a farmer? You know, before? Like did anybody travel a lot or disappear or do anything strange?”

  “Disappear?” she asked. She thought for a moment. “Well, your grandfather once traveled to New York City,” she said, “but that’s not that unusual, is it? I really wanted to go on that trip with him. I was so excited about seeing the Empire State Building. But your father was just a baby and I couldn’t leave him alone here with my parents; they were getting on in their years and wouldn’t have been able to manage an infant on their own.” She paused. Finally she said, “I’ve barely made it out of this town.”

  I stared down at my plate. My father. His mother had cared so much for him and the people around her to not leave them when they needed her most, a trait he apparently did not inherit.

  “Do you ever see him?” I asked, eyes still on my marinara.

  “Who, Jack? No, not for a few years now,” she said quietly. “He sent me a letter a while back. Said he was getting married. Don’t expect I’ll ever meet her.”

  We both sat in silence, the weight of the conversation hanging around us.

  “Your ma doesn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see why I would need to burden her with something like that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything to you, either.”

  So he really had moved on for good. I stayed silent, fuming with anger at the man I hadn’t seen in seven long years.

  “Aster,” she finally said, “I’m so sorry…about everything.”

  When I looked up from my plate she had tears in her eyes. My eyes fell back to the faded tablecloth. I had set down my fork, and now my fingernails were tearing the woven fabric to shreds on the edge of where my plate sat. After a couple minutes I raised my head. She was watching me, and quickly wiped a tear from her cheek.

  “You know, your ma…you know she had to go, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “I know this place isn’t where most kids your age would want to be for the summer, but you know she’s trying as hard as she can. You know that.”

  I nodded. I picked up my fork and poked at what was left of my dinner. We ate in silence for a while but with much less gusto than before. Finally, I pushed back from the table.

  “Maybe you should take a trip somewhere,” I said, standing. “Somewhere you’ve always wanted to go.”

  “What, you mean like New York?” She smiled at me, shaking her head. “Hon, all I really want to do these days is nap and enjoy what time I have left. Besides, I doubt that the New York I wanted to see is still there.” Her eyes became serious. “Things are a lot different now, you know.” She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I don’t need to travel all around creation at this stage of life. Not to see that. I’ve done my living.”

  In spite of myself, I felt sorry for her. She’d spent her whole life working here on the farm, never going anywhere, and then had watched her home slowly being ripped apart by the elements as the planet’s systems had become unpredictable. And what did she have to show for her efforts? An embarrassment of a son and a falling-down house.

  I looked around the old-fashioned kitchen, at the family heirlooms hung on the walls, and thought about what her life must be like now. She was all alone out here, scraping by, surrounded on all sides by ruined earth. City life was a bit drab, but it was reliable. We knew we would eat. We knew we were safe. A framed photograph of a young family sitting outdoors at a family gathering, surrounded by brilliant green grass, caught my eye. The people around the table smiled as if they were laughing at a joke somebody just told. It was a type of life I had never known.

  The photo brought me up short, and the pity I felt for her swirled uncomfortably in my chest with a different emotion. The eyes in the photo shined with something I had rarely seen in my life in the city. Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe Grandma’s reasons for staying so far out were more inspired than I realized. The people at the table, they looked so…happy. But it was more than that. They looked like they knew where they belonged.

  “What were you doing up there in the attic all day anyhow?” she asked, snapping me back from my thoughts. I turned and brought my plate to the sink.

  “Oh,” I said, over my shoulder, “I’m just digging around. There’s a lot of interesting stuff up there.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Some strange treasures are up there if memory serves. Just about anything from hundreds of years ago can look so foreign to people now. You know, your great great grandfather was a cartographer. Do you know what that is?”

  I shook my head as I turned on the tap.

  “A cartographer,” she went on, “is somebody who makes maps. Brendan Wood was his name. He used to travel all around this area, come to think of it. People would hire him to map out their plots of land for them. Most of Adams County is probably up there in that attic.”

  I kept quiet and scrubbed my plate with the gray, ragged sponge. I wondered if Brendan had carved that symbol into the attic floor himself, or if, in the long years that had passed since he had built this place, it had been one of his descendants to take the knife to the wood.

  The rain continued, so I spent my days exploring the attic. With each new search I found more to keep me wanting to return, and I soon forgot my irritation at having been dumped on the farm. The place was full of a century’s worth of discarded treasures, and I soon realized that I could have spent a year up there digging and still not have discovered everything worth discovering. This realization came on unconsciously, but within a short space of days I started burrowing like a madman, trying to solve a riddle that didn’t exist. I had a strange, tight sensation in the center of my chest, one that was unrelated to my medical condition. My brain buzzed furiously all day, and thoughts of treasure teased me all night. Something needed finding in that attic, I was sure of it.

  To say the attic was a magical place would not be quite the right description. The grimy collection of prizes did not seem to go together. Curious things were mixed right in with the ordinary. A broken compass folded in with a box of old clothes. A tiny, and curiously bright, white stuffed bird perched on top of a stack of books. A perfectly round, smooth ball of some kind of stone I had never seen. An old jewelry box with an assortment of broken gold necklaces snarled into an impossible knot the size of my fist. The place was on my mind twenty-four hours a day, and I always wanted to be up there. As the days passed I forgot about th
e possibility of leaving the house at all. Mom would have been downright proud of my lack of adventure.

  On my fourth day in the attic, I was looking through the items on the shelf next to the one that had fallen down. A pile of old papers was stacked up along one side, and propped up behind them like a plate on a wall was a large framed picture of a ship. When I moved it down from the shelf to take a closer look, a squiggly painted line emerged on the wall behind it. It was the width of my finger and ran up and down right behind where the painting had been.

  The old papers, a box of used clothing and several poster tubes came down and made a pile at my feet. The more I unloaded, the more of the drawing I could see. After half an hour of relocating stacks and stacks of ancient junk, I could see the entire wall.

  It was a map.

  But it was a map of no place I had ever seen. It looked vaguely like a squashed combination of North America and Australia, but there were no words to clue me in about what location it showed, only lines. I knew my geography pretty well; all those hours after school and lunches on my own in the library had resulted in brainiac grades in all my subjects. But this was an outline I had never studied before.

  In several places on the map, golden rings were painted within the black borders. The paint the mapmaker used was some sort of metallic, because the rings had a strange flicker to them. They reminded me of sun reflecting on water. I looked around the room, trying to figure out if maybe something shiny was reflecting a sunbeam onto the wall. But then I realized it was still raining outside.

  “Ouch!”

  As I backed away from the wall, my hand struck the corner of a sharp piece of wood. I cradled it to my chest and spun around, looking for the offending piece of junk I had knocked into. It was the big wooden box that had fallen on my first day up here, still in the place it had landed when the old shelf had given way. I bent over, grabbed the sides of the box and heaved it upright.

  I slapped my hands together and a cloud of dust filled the stale air. Poking out from between two slats of wood in the back of the box was a small corner of parchment. I hadn’t seen this before; after the box fell I hadn’t bothered to investigate it further.

  I knelt down and gently tugged on the paper. It took a little bit of back and forth, but after a minute it gave way and I was holding an old, crumpled envelope. There was no writing, but on the backside it had a deep red wax seal, like the kinds I’d seen illustrated in history books about the middle ages. Pressed into the wax was a design, and I gulped as I recognized the now familiar oval and diamond shape, the same one that was carved into the wood beneath my feet. The seal on this envelope had never been broken. Could that be right? If so, then that meant that nobody but the person who wrote this letter had ever seen what was inside of it. Nobody.

  I looked around the attic. I was a little nervous about being the first person to open it; it didn’t belong to me, after all. But curiosity got the better of me, and I carefully slid my thumb under the seal. It gave way with a surprising little pop. I opened the flap of the envelope, and read the writing on its underside:

  Dare free what lies within

  And see where we have been

  Huh, I thought. The writing was mysterious enough, but the ink had a strange flickery glow about it. Just like the golden rings on the wall behind me, the words on the page shimmered brightly, though this part of the attic was quite dark. What did it mean? Was some ill fate awaiting me if I opened what was inside?

  I decided that I would simply have to open it. It was just an old letter, anyhow, I told myself. My heart did not hear my brain’s logic, and it pounded in my chest with excitement. I slipped the parchment from the envelope and unfolded it, taking care not to tear the ancient document. I opened it along each crease, spreading it out on the floor in front of me.

  It was blank.

  I stared, feeling a little cheated. What was the point of going to all the trouble of saving a blank piece of paper for what looked like hundreds of years? I smoothed the parchment and knelt closely over it, looking for clues to its secret. Old and discolored, its edges ripped, it matched the paper that made the envelope. I pressed my nose close to every inch of the page, looking for any marking or indentation. Nothing. I sat back on my heels and blew out a long sigh of frustration.

  Then I saw it. Writing was appearing on the page, as if from an invisible hand. I watched, my jaw dropping open, as the same gold ink traced the outline of the first oval.

  I grabbed the paper off the floor and raced across the room, holding it up in the hazy, overcast daylight coming through the high window.

  My chest slowly unclenched beneath my shirt as my shock turned to wonder. The second oval and the diamond were completed now, and the invisible pen drew the tiny stars on the top and bottom of the symbol. I stared, unblinking, at the paper, as the next set of lines appeared, letters in ornate script.

  GO

  The writing stopped.

  “Go,” I began, “What on earth does…”

  But I was cut short.

  A light as bright as the sun burst from the page, and I put one hand up to shield my eyes. Around me the contents of the attic moved inward. And then with a deafening BOOM they exploded away from me.

  All was brightness. All was light. I spun in space. Where had the floor gone? My insides were stretched and then squashed and then stretched again. I closed my eyes to keep from getting sick.

  And then, blackness. Under my cheek I felt cool, wet earth.

  I was lying, face down, on grass.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My chest felt tight.

  I opened my eyes.

  My left cheek was pressed into damp ground. Little bits of silver and white twinkled in front of my face in the dim moonlight; water droplets hung off each strand of grass. I put my hands next to my shoulders and pushed myself upright, the parchment still clutched in my fist. Sitting back, I gaped at my surroundings, wiping the water vigorously from my cheek with the back of my sleeve.

  Where was I?

  In front of me swayed an ocean of deep green grass. The blades moved back and forth with the frigid breeze that blew against my back. I was surrounded on three sides by hills that rolled away into the distance. Behind me a dark grove of trees stretched out. And above, the night sky was brighter with stars than I had ever seen, even in books.

  Panic filled my stomach and spread through my body, clenching every muscle it touched, until even my throat began to close up in protest.

  Ninety seconds ago I had been in the dusty attic. Now… My breathing started coming in short, panting breaths and saliva filled my mouth. I didn’t want to vomit, but the panic was rising, pushing itself against my tightened throat. I turned over and rested on my hands and knees just in case I blew.

  This was not good. Not not not good. I closed my eyes and shook my head back and forth, but when I opened them again the dark earth was still right there between my outstretched fingers.

  It had been early afternoon in the attic.

  The grass swirled as my stomach bucked. Everything around me seemed to be swimming. I immediately wanted to be bored again, back in the guest bedroom watching the house slowly crumble around me. Was I hallucinating? Maybe I had fallen down and hit my head or something and this was some sort of dream.

  I turned around once more to scan the area. Was there some clue out there? Something I had missed? But the land was completely solitary, empty.

  And alive.

  I didn’t know grass still grew like this. I had seen grass, of course, but only the short, coarse kind that grew in the park in the center of the city. This grass was wild and tall, humming with vibrance.

  I stood up and ran over to the trees, immediately winded by the effort.

  “Hello?” I wailed out into the forest. No answer.

  I ran back into the grass, searching in the darkness, willing my eyes to find…anything.

  There was nothing out there.

  My skin broke out in a cold sweat an
d I began to shake. I fell back down to my knees and then slumped to the ground, pressing my cheek to the cool dirt, trying not to pass out. I waited for my breathing to slow.

  Wake up, wake up, wake up.

  It was cold. Much colder than back on the farm. My body was wet with the sweat of panic, and my clothes clung to my body. I shivered.

  What is going on?

  While my body lay there in shock my brain operated behind the scenes. I couldn’t stay here, no matter where here was. Out in this wind I would freeze. And who knew what lived in those trees? I had to get moving and try to figure this out.

  I must have hit my head.

  But I couldn’t remember falling.

  I needed to decide what to do next, but I didn’t know what to do. I was used to doing what the grown-ups told me. There were no grown-ups here. There wasn’t anyone here.

  Grandma hadn’t been into the attic, so she didn’t see. Had I disappeared?

  Half-formed plans and panicked thoughts fought for attention in my mind. Minutes, or maybe hours, passed as I faded in and out of conscious thought. Eventually, I heaved my shaking body back up to sitting. My hand slowly unclenched around the parchment.

  Parchment that was now covered with writing.

  I thrust it up in front of my face. It was the same, ripped sheet I had held back in the attic, but now every inch of the thing was covered in lines and notations.

  How is this happening?

  It was a map. I ran my finger along the dark ink, just visible in the moonlight. Large letters blazed across the center: Aerit Range. Landmarks dotted the page. A grove of trees, an open plain, and what looked like foothills leading to a mountain range. In the center of the paper was a small, square outline of what was unmistakably a house. And in the center of that square a golden ring was painted in the now familiar glittering golden ink.