Song of the Wanderer

by Bruce Coville

  The Wanderer made no response.

  At last, overwhelmed by loneliness, Cara decided to check on the others again. Clutching the pillow she had taken from her own room, she went downstairs, where she tucked it under her father’s head. Then she took a throw pillow from one of the chairs — smaller and less comfortable than those from the beds, but still better than the floor — and carried it to the kitchen, where she tucked it under Jacques’ head.

  The older man stirred as she moved him. “Cara?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured with a tone of gloom deeper than any she had ever heard from him, so deep it was almost painful to listen to. “So sorry.”

  “For what? You saved me. If you and Lightfoot hadn’t arrived when you did, Beloved would have taken me away with her.” Then she remembered something she had wondered about earlier. “How did you do that, anyway? Come through from Luster to Earth?”

  But he had drifted into unconsciousness again and could not answer her.

  She stroked his brow for a moment, then left the kitchen and climbed the stairs once again, so weary that she had to drag herself up them. They had come all this way to find her grandmother, and, though found, she was still as lost to them as ever.

  Returning to her own room, so familiar yet now so strange, Cara took the chair from her desk and carried it to her grandmother’s room. She placed it beside the bed and sat down to keep watch.

  She remembered how her grandmother used to do the same for her when she was ill — how she would sit beside the bed and sing to her. Reaching out, Cara put her hand on her grandmother’s forehead and began to sing herself. She did the old songs first, the comforting lullabies that had meant so much to her when she was little: “Toora Loora Lura” and “All the Pretty Little Horses” and “Angels Watching Over Me.”

  She ran through all the ones she could remember, sang them twice, and then a third time, pleased at how many of the words she still knew, oddly sorrowful at how many she had forgotten.

  Then, almost without thinking about it, she began another song.

  The “Song of the Wanderer.”

  Her voice high and clear, she sang:

  Across the gently rolling hills

  Beyond high mountain peaks,

  Along the shores of distant seas

  There’s something my heart seeks.

  But there’s no peace in wandering,

  The road’s not made for rest.

  And footsore fools will never know

  What home might suit them best.

  The song seemed to speak to her of her own life now, and her voice began to waver on the second verse as longing and sorrow choked her. Tears swam in her eyes, blurring her vision. So she didn’t see her grandmother’s lips begin to move.

  She did, however, feel M’Gama’s ring begin to burn on her finger.

  Looking down, she saw that it was glowing again, more intensely than ever before. The green grew brighter, brighter still, until it almost hurt her eyes.

  Then it pulled her in.

  23

  The Rainbow Prison

  Cara felt as if she were falling — felt, indeed, much as she had the moment after she had leaped from the tower of St. Christopher’s. Around her was nothing but green, green that swirled and shifted: the light green of spring grass; the deep green of pine needles; the greens of seawater, of apples in early summer, of sunbeams filtering through the forest.

  Beyond the green, or from somewhere within it, she could hear a voice, long loved, long lost, dearly familiar — the voice of her grandmother.

  My heart longs to rest,

  My feet yearn to roam.

  Shall I wander the world

  Or stay safe at home?

  Then, as had happened in M’Gama’s underground workroom, Cara heard the plaintive, heartbreaking cry: “Cara, is that you? Oh, come and get me, my child. Come and get me. I am wandering, wandering and so far from home.”

  “Where are you, Gramma? Where are you?”

  “Here.” The voice drifted to her from out of the swirling green. “Here, in the rainbow prison.”

  Cara had gone underground with M’Gama, and even deeper underground when they’d traveled with Grimwold. Now she felt as if she were descending yet again, into someplace stranger than she had yet experienced.

  The green still swirled around her, misty and insubstantial. Then she noticed a strand of it that looked more solid. Thick as a rope, it twisted and coiled away from her, into the green distance. Looking to see where it went in the other direction, Cara was startled to discover that it ended at her own hand, at M’Gama’s ring. She wondered, for an instant, whether it was flowing out of the ring, or coming from somewhere else and flowing into it.

  Suddenly she realized the strand was beginning to fray, green drifting into green. When she grabbed for it with her free hand, her fingers closed over it as if it were made of fog.

  “Cara!” called her grandmother’s pleading voice. “Cara!”

  She sounded more distant than ever.

  The ring was growing dim. Remembering the other times it had glowed unexpectedly, Cara began to sing.

  Instantly the ring’s glow intensified and the strand of green grew thicker again.

  “Sing, Gramma!” Cara called excitedly after she had finished the first verse. “Sing it with me!”

  Trying to send her own voice into the swirling green emptiness, pulling the words not from her mind but her heart, she continued:

  There’s no peace in wandering,

  The road’s not made for rest.

  And footsore fools will never know

  What home might suit them best.

  Her heart lifted when she heard her grandmother’s voice join her on the chorus:

  My heart seeks the hearth,

  My feet seek the road.

  A soul so divided

  Is a terrible load.

  My heart longs to rest,

  My feet yearn to roam.

  Shall I wander the world

  Or stay safe at home?

  On they sang, and on, until they reached the final verse:

  Oh where’s the thread that binds me,

  The voice that calls me back?

  Where’s the love that finds me —

  And what’s the root I lack?

  Now the green rope was strong and sturdy, and Cara pulled her way along it. As she did, her grandmother began the song again. Suddenly Cara realized she was no longer pulling herself along the rope. Instead, the rope was pulling her. Faster and faster she moved until the green around her blurred into a solid-seeming wall. And then she was there, beside her grandmother — her true grandmother, not merely the body she lived in.

  “I found you!” she cried, surprised to discover that she was weeping. “I’ve found you at last.” She flung herself toward her grandmother, which was the first time she realized that she, too, had left her body behind. She felt a flicker of fear, but it was lost in her joy at finding her grandmother. And though neither of them was wrapped in flesh, the embrace they shared was real and solid.

  “Cara,” whispered the old woman after a time. “My Cara. I knew you would come for me.”

  “But where are we?” asked Cara, not raising her head to look.

  “I don’t know.”

  It was not merely the words that Cara found terrifying, it was the tone of hopelessness in her grandmother’s voice. “How did you get here?” Cara asked, drawing away a little now.

  Ivy Morris looked uneasy. “An old enemy sent me,” she said at last.

  “Was it Beloved?”

  Cara’s grandmother looked surprised, and somewhat frightened. “I think you have a lot to tell me, granddaughter.”

  “That’s true for you, too,” replied Cara sharply. Then, though she had vowed not to, had promised herself she would hold her questions until this was all over,
the words forced themselves out in an angry burst. “Did you really steal me from my parents?”

  Ivy Morris flinched back, looking almost terrified. Then her face relaxed. “I should have realized that some of our past would come to light when I sent you to Luster. Yes, dearheart, I did just that.”

  “But why?”

  “I suspect you already know the answer.”

  “All right, I do. What I don’t know is why you didn’t tell me about it. Why did you lie to me all those years, let me think they had abandoned me?”

  Her grandmother sighed. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell you they were dead — though it might have been kinder if I had.”

  “But they weren’t dead!” exploded Cara. “That would still have been a lie. Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”

  Ivy Morris looked directly at her granddaughter. Her own eyes deep with sorrow, she whispered, “Because the truth was too heavy a burden to place on you.”

  Cara started to protest, but her grandmother raised her hands to stop her. “I don’t mean it would have been too painful for you to hear — though I think it would have been more painful than you might believe, especially when you were little. No, I mean that holding the truth is too painful.”

  Cara drew back from her grandmother, and in so doing noticed, for the first time, the world around them, which she had ignored in the rush and excitement of their reunion.

  It had more solid detail than she had expected.

  They stood at the edge of a forest, but a forest greener than any she had ever seen, a forest where not only the leaves but the trunks and branches of the trees were green — as were the rocks, the water, the ground below, the sky above. It reminded her of when she had seen her mother in Grimwold’s gem, and everything had been crimson and scarlet.

  Ivy Morris gestured to the bank of a stream. “Sit with me,” she said. Spectral though it was, her human form was startlingly clear against the green world that stretched around them.

  Cara settled beside her. She thrust one foot into the water but felt nothing. Nor, for that matter, could she feel the ground beneath her. Only her grandmother seemed real.

  “Secrets are a heavy burden,” said Ivy Morris quietly. “More of a burden than I wanted to place on a child. They want to be let out, struggle to be free, beat against the walls of your heart until you ache with the effort of holding them in. But some secrets are better left untold.”

  She turned her head away. When she spoke again her voice was soft and filled with pain. “Luster is a big secret to carry — so big that more than once I did try to share it when I was younger. But it also turned out to be too big for anyone to believe.”

  She turned back, looked directly into her granddaughter’s eyes. “I have not been close to many people in my life, Cara. Something in me — the same thing that made me a Wanderer, I suppose — makes that hard for me. But a few, a very few, I loved and tried to tell. Their disbelief was painful. Their fear for me, their sense that I had lost my mind, stung my heart. I was even put in a hospital for it once, and had to pretend not to believe the truest thing in my life until I could finally convince the doctors that they had ‘cured’ me.” She laughed ruefully. “I would have just fled to Luster and left them wondering how I had escaped, except that I had been taken without the amulet.” She paused, then said thoughtfully, “Or maybe I wouldn’t have. It wasn’t time for me to return yet. Anyway, given what I knew about trying to tell this secret, what would I have told you, my darling — and how would you have dealt with it?”

  Cara sat silent, uncertain how to answer. She remembered the playground teasing she had taken over things that, next to the reality of Luster, were like grains of sand compared to a boulder. “Why didn’t you just take me to Luster with you?” she asked at last.

  Her grandmother sighed. “And what would you have told your friends when we came back?”

  “I mean, why didn’t you take me there to live? I would have liked that.”

  Ivy Morris shook her head sadly. “I couldn’t do that until I was ready to return myself. You don’t know how I longed to tell you, Cara. I thought about it almost every day, trying to find the right way, the right time. Then that man began following us — ”

  “You don’t have to pretend. I know it was my father who chased us into St. Christopher’s.”

  Ivy Morris looked startled, then nodded in acceptance. “Then came the night when your father began following us. Suddenly there was no time left to tell you, and I had to send you off unprepared. For that, you have my deepest apologies, my darling.

  “After you jumped into Luster, I was left alone in the tower — alone, and lonely. That was a feeling I had not experienced for a long time.” She smiled, but it was a tight, painful smile. “Wanderers cannot afford to be lonely. Of course, I was not merely lonely. I was frantic with concern for you — and for the unicorns. What did it mean that your father had discovered us. What did it mean that he had followed you into Luster?

  “I should not have gone home after that. I should have moved on at once. I knew that. But there were things I did not want to leave. Foolish, foolish of me. Things tie you down, Cara, and I could not afford to be tied.” She sighed. “It wasn’t just things, though. I wanted to be there in case you returned. So I went home.” She drew a deep breath. “Beloved was there, waiting for me.”

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “A little. But when it became clear that I did not have the amulet and could not get it, she set my soul wandering free of my body — cast me into this green strangeness with little hope of ever finding my way back. I have roamed the greenness of this place, Cara, pressing at its edges, seeking a way out.”

  “I heard you calling once, I think,” said Cara. “I was in the cave of the Geomancer — ”

  “M’Gama,” whispered Ivy Morris, a strange note in her voice. “Yes, I’m not surprised if my voice reached you in that place. The magic is deep there, and unsettling things can happen. Did she help you find your way back to Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  The old woman chuckled dryly. “I’m sure she had mixed feelings about that!”

  Cara held up her hand to display the band of green on her finger. “It was her ring that brought me to you. It’s keyed to the song, I think. It pulled me in, somehow, when you responded to my singing. Oh, I can’t believe I found you, Gramma! I’ve been trying so hard to get back to Earth so I could bring you home to Luster. The Queen wants to see you, to say —”

  Cara stopped, the words catching in her throat. What the Queen wanted to say was good-bye. How would her grandmother would react to that news? Suddenly Cara began to understand how her grandmother had put off telling her painful truths for so long.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Ivy Morris’s whisper. “The Queen,” she said softly.

  The strands of emotion in her voice — the love and regret, the joy and sorrow, and most of all the longing — were too thick, and far too tangled, for Cara to sort out. “I took her your message, Gramma. I told her ‘The Wanderer is weary.’ ”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” said Ivy Morris ruefully.

  “She asked me to bring you back so . . .” Cara faltered a second time on the painful thought, then forced herself to go on. “She says she has to see you before she can rest.”

  Ivy Morris looked stricken. Her voice little more than a whisper, she asked, “Is she so close to fading, then?”

  Cara nodded. “I think she might have been gone already if she had not wanted to see you so much. She says there is an old wound she has to heal.”

  Ivy Morris’s hand stole toward her heart. “So many years,” she murmured. “And what about the succession? Is that settled? Do they know who will take her place?”

  “I’m not sure. Just a little while ago, when we were fighting with Beloved — ”

  Her grandmother’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about? What has happened?”

 
Cara sighed. “I have a million things to tell you. But we’ve got to get back.”

  “Ah, a jailbreak! Well, I’m all for that. Do you have any ideas?”

  24

  Flickerfoot

  Cara felt a twinge of uncertainty. “I was hoping the ring would carry us back.”

  Her grandmother smiled. “Maybe it will. I suppose the best thing we can do is try.”

  Joining hands, they began to sing. But though they went twice through “Song of the Wanderer,” the ring remained lifeless and dark.

  Cara felt a new twist of fear. Had she come so far to find her grandmother only to end up trapped herself?

  Then, on its own, the ring began to glow again.

  A moment later they saw a form running toward them out of the green distance.

  Cara cried out in joy.

  It was Arabella Skydancer, Queen of the Unicorns.

  Suddenly Cara felt fear begin to tangle with her joy. The Queen looked free and strong in a way she had not seen her before, and though it was beautiful to see, she wasn’t sure what it meant.

  “I heard you,” said the Queen when she reached them. “I heard you singing, your two voices calling me with your need.”

  “We hoped the song would take us back to our bodies,” said Cara. “I had no idea it would call you to us.” She reached toward the Queen, then drew her hand back. “Are you . . . are you all right?”

  “That is hard to say. As you know, my body is nearly used up. But that makes it all the easier for me to run free of it when I need to — makes it all the easier to enter the light that flows between the worlds.” She turned toward Cara’s grandmother. The two gazed at each other for a long time without speaking.

  It was the Queen who finally broke the silence. “Greetings, Wanderer. It has been a long time.”

  “Too long,” said Ivy Morris softly, joy and sorrow mingling in her voice. She gestured to Cara. “I see you have met my granddaughter.”