The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  They headed up to Vithra’s Eye. Joshua seemed very worried about April. He walked hand in hand with Neptune, describing in great detail how to get to April’s house from the nearby falkrete circle.

  At Vithra’s Eye, Brian and Joshua stayed behind, an odd pairing—one of them awkwardly formal and the other awkwardly not, but both of them with furrowed, anxious brows. Mrs. Hapsteade crossed with Horace and the others. As they walked through the tunnels on the far side, their path lit by the collective purple light of their jithandras—blue, red, black, violet—Neptune and Mrs. Hapsteade quietly discussed the uncertainties of the coming trip.

  Six jumps. And with each jump, the side effects that always came with falkrete travel would increase. Horace was nervous. Not because of the side effects—a brief case of dreamy confusion—but because of the jumps themselves. The other night, leaving the riverbank, he’d secretly struggled to will himself through from the forest cloister to the home cloister. As he’d squatted there with the Fel’Daera pressed against the falkrete stone, he’d found it all too easy to be in both places at once. He suspected that perhaps his talents were the cause. After all, as Keeper of the Fel’Daera, it was his job to consider all paths, to imagine every possibility. But when traveling by falkrete, there could be only one possibility—forward.

  At last they arrived at the doorway that led up into San’ska, the home cloister. Mrs. Hapsteade gave Neptune a hug and Horace and Chloe a surprisingly warm look. “As you travel, remember why you are going—your friends need your help.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chloe said suddenly, surprising them all. “For . . . my mom.”

  Mrs. Hapsteade’s brow wrinkled in sadness. “I am sorry for her too,” she said softly, looking for a moment as young as the woman she must have been all those years ago. But then she straightened, and gave them a terse nod. “Fear is the stone we push. May yours be light.”

  “And yours,” they all murmured, and she turned to go. Horace hauled the doors open, and they emerged into the cloister.

  Mr. Meister was already there, of course. “Excellent,” he said crisply. “Let us begin. Neptune will go first. We’ll each follow separately, with thirty-second gaps between us so that our jumps remain unobserved. Neptune, if you will mark the trail for us, please?”

  “Can do,” Neptune said. She approached the falkrete circle and quickly found the stone she was looking for. “Here’s our start. In each cloister along the route, I’ll mark the correct falkrete stone with a marker of some kind—a pebble or a twig or something like that.”

  Chloe shook her head. “Uh . . . no. After just one jump the other night, I could barely find my own face. Let’s use something more attention getting.” She fished half a roll of wintergreen mints out of her pocket, used her thumbnail to count the mints that were left, and then popped one into her mouth. She handed the remainder of the roll to Neptune. “Here, use these instead. There are seven mints in there.”

  Neptune blinked down at the mints as if they were a memento of another time. Her face was sad but steely. The she plucked out a mint and laid it atop the falkrete stone. It shone there bright and obvious, a perfect marker. “Mints,” Neptune said, looking thoughtfully at the roll again. “I think I might have one.”

  Chloe smiled crookedly. “Sure. Fine. If you think you can handle it, tiger.”

  Neptune put a mint between her front teeth and squatted down beside the stone, her tourminda in hand. “Shirty seccunsh,” she said.

  Horace and the others slipped out of the cloister, out onto the sheltered sidewalk, leaving her alone. Horace counted. Chloe noisily chomped her mint. After seventeen seconds, Chloe produced a fresh roll and took another. She devoured the second mint even faster than the first. Once it was gone, Chloe backed against the cloister wall, her face comically grave. “Don’t forget to remember me,” she said. And then she too vanished.

  “You’ll go next, Horace,” said Mr. Meister. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

  Horace nodded, glad not to be going last. As they stood there waiting, he did the math. Four people, thirty seconds between them, six jumps in all . . . he estimated that they would arrive at April’s house—if the route was intact—in no more than three or four minutes. Incredible. It was now two minutes to eleven, which meant they might beat the Riven to April’s house after all.

  He should probably readjust the breach now. At the moment, it was set to a full day again; he had let it swing open wide after coming home from the riverbank, exhausted, and it had been there ever since. Where to put it now? Four seconds was out of the question, but then again, twenty-four hours wasn’t going to do him much good either. In fact, he wasn’t sure how much good he was going to be tonight at all.

  As if reading his mind, Mr. Meister reached into a pocket of his vest and pulled out a pale baton laced with black, as thick as a thumb and about seven inches long. “Here,” he said, handing it to Horace. “The phalanx.”

  Horace took it, gripping it firmly but cautiously. It was yellowish white and unpleasantly smooth—was it made of bone?—except for three separate zigzagging metal bands that ran down the length of it. “How do I use it?”

  “I’ll explain when we arrive. I’m only giving it to you now because we’ll be too far away for me to retrieve it later. Had I known Mrs. Hapsteade would not be joining us tonight, I would have taught you how to use it sooner.”

  “She’s staying because of Isabel, isn’t she?”

  Mr. Meister sighed. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “But as I assured her, while the spitestone burns, Isabel cannot hope to find her way into the Warren. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it has been thirty seconds?”

  “Thirty-four, actually,” Horace said. “But one more thing.” He looked the old man in the eye. “If you’d known then what you know now, would you have fused Isabel and my mother? Would you have turned them into Tuners?”

  Mr. Meister stiffened visibly. “No one can see twenty years into the future, Horace. Not even you.”

  “But if you could have?”

  Another sigh, weary and resigned and as thick as a novel, pulled deep from some dark pool Horace suddenly did not want to imagine. He lowered his eyes as the old man spoke. “Regret is a doubt that has found its way home, Horace. And when you’ve fathered as many doubts as I have, you cannot afford to give them all a place to stay.” Mr. Meister put a hand on Horace’s shoulder and pushed him firmly forward. “Go now. Help your friends. I will be with you.”

  Horace turned away. Numbly he reached up for the passkey and slipped through the cold brick of the cloister, remembering—rightly or wrongly—something Mr. Meister had said on the riverbank: “Let us hope for no new regrets.” That Horace could do. He approached the falkrete stone with the mint on top and hunkered down beside it. He unholstered the Fel’Daera, slipping the phalanx into the pouch in its place. Steeling himself, he took a deep breath and touched the box to the stone.

  The world divided in two. To his surprise, the new cloister that he opened into was familiar—quiet, with trees overhead, and a brown, blue-winged bird for a leestone. This was the cloister by the riverbank. He hovered for a moment, indecisive, half in the city and half in the forest. He scanned the falkrete circle in the forest and spotted the mint, halfway around, atop a stone that looked like a human tooth. He tried to push himself through, but as he feared, he got snagged, unable to escape the sensation that by choosing the path forward, he was abandoning another path altogether. A path that belonged to this Horace, here in the city.

  But seconds were passing. He focused on the mint in the forest cloister and tried to imagine himself approaching it. He would be there. He was there—and maybe after all this wasn’t so different from looking through the Fel’Daera. He had to be open-minded, yes, but he also had to commit. To believe. And he did believe. He was there.

  Suddenly, with a bone-squeezing spasm, he was through. The city lights and sounds vanished—or did they? Had they even been real? For that matter, how real was
this new place? Horace shook his head and hurried around to the next stone, box still in hand.

  Again and again he jumped to the next cloister, forcing himself forward. Another forest cloister, then another with loud highway traffic roaring outside. The mints helped; each time he crouched and felt his consciousness splitting in two, he could look into the new cloister and spot the bright mint indicating the next jump. He would focus on that mint, thinking of Chloe, and those thoughts led him to Neptune, and Gabriel, and April, and the whole reason for this mission in the first place.

  But even so, he grew more and more disoriented. It was like waking from a dream-filled sleep, except that the cobwebs of his dreams clung stickily, stubbornly, insiting that they were real. There was this Horace, yes, but also another who had gone a different way, was choosing a different path. And it was not always easy to tell which Horace was which. Still he kept pushing. Forward. This way, and not the others. The cloister walls stayed high around him, changing shape but never falling. Jump after jump. Mint after mint.

  Horace—this Horace—knelt before a stone shaped like a jagged sleeping bear. There was a leestone here, too—an orange bird with a gray head. He reached out for the falkrete stone with box in hand, trying to summon up a new round of belief, ready to commit to whatever this next stop would turn out to be—stop number four? Number twenty? But this time, the moment the Fel’Daera touched the stone, he was jolted hard, muscle and bone and nerve and neuron, as if a heavy slap of cold water had doused him from head to foot, yanking him violently into a new dream, heaving him into the deep dark of a wide-open space beneath a sunless sky. In his fractured mind’s eye, he watched himself—some version of himself—playing the role of Horace, walking a stark stage while a dozen other Horaces waited their turn. Stars littered the black.

  “Sorry about that. It was hard not to notice you, of course.”

  A girl—for a moment Horace thought he would try to redirect the dream away from her. But she kept talking.

  “You’ll be okay. Just give it a second. Chloe’s only just coming around herself.”

  “I’m around.” Chloe. This was her voice. “But god, that last one . . . my brain feels like a rubber ball on a chopping block.”

  In his dream, Horace understood that he’d been seen from the far side as he straddled the falkrete stone. Neptune had seen him, and her observation had yanked him through into the next cloister. And now Horace saw stars, stars he knew—not just the dreamish idea of stars but actual, chartable, knowable stars. Vega shone almost directly overhead, and off to its side, the bright smudgy sweep of the Milky Way, a deep flat plane of sun beyond sun, out to the tip of the galaxy. You couldn’t see that in the city, not a chance.

  Horace sat up. He was in a meadow, beside a dilapidated barn—here and nowhere else. As his eyes adjusted, he saw Chloe rubbing her temples, looking foul. Neptune was a silhouette hovering against the dim shine of the sky. “Like I said, sorry about that last one,” she said. “I saw you arrive, and that yanked you through.”

  “We’re here,” Horace said. “We made it.” He wasn’t quite sure yet what that meant, but it was good.

  “Yes. Welcome to Tharwen—or what’s left of it. But you’ll want to move aside, of course.”

  Horace saw at his feet a crude but purposeful arc of chunky stones, and farther on, a flat slab in the shape of a bird. “April,” he said. “We’re here for April.”

  “And Gabriel,” Chloe said. “Now you better move or you’re about to become part of a Meister smoothie.”

  Horace lurched to his feet and stumbled awkwardly away. Four seconds later, Mr. Meister appeared, crouched down in the grass, his hand atop the falkrete stone. He went rigid, grimacing, but didn’t topple over. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath.

  They waited in silence for thirty seconds. Slowly Horace began to feel like himself again. This process of recovery—minus the vomiting caused by the thrall-blight—reminded Horace of what happened whenever he defied the future revealed by the Fel’Daera. Committing to a new path took time, and action. Belief in the now.

  “Just so,” Mr. Meister said at last. He stood, slipping a small, unseen object into his vest. “We have arrived. Some of the forgotten paths still remain after all.” He looked around, searching. “But we are not quite there yet, it seems.”

  “No,” Neptune said, and then pointed. “According to Joshua, April’s house is about a half mile that way.”

  “Any sign of the Riven?” Mr. Meister asked.

  “Nothing in the meadow. I haven’t been farther than that. But I caught a whiff of brimstone earlier.”

  “Show us the way,” Mr. Meister said.

  Neptune turned and began to bound effortlessly over the meadow, leaving them to follow. Quickly Horace pulled the phalanx from the Fel’Daera’s pouch, tucking the box away tight in its place, and hurried to catch up to the others. They jogged after Neptune in the dark, insects buzzing and snapping all around them. Tall weeds whipped at Horace’s legs and arms, and he marveled at how easily Chloe, just in front and much shorter, moved through the grass. But then he realized—she’d gone thin. Must be nice.

  Mr. Meister kept pace with Horace, unassisted by Tanu but moving smoothly nonetheless, and breathing more easily than Horace himself. As they ran, Horace—clutching the phalanx but still having no idea how to use it—reached out for the breach. He closed it down with a firm squeeze. He was more confident now, learning its limits, and swiftly the breach shrank to below an hour. He kept closing it down, eventually getting it under five minutes before pinning it in place and releasing his hold on the silver sun. Four minutes and thirty-four seconds—better too wide than too narrow. He could always close it more if need be. He glanced over at Mr. Meister to see if he’d noticed anything, but the old man seemed unaware.

  They left the meadow, entering a thick stand of trees. The stink of brimstone was obvious now. At last Neptune slowed to a stop. Horace bent over, breathing hard. “We’re getting close,” said Neptune. “April’s house is maybe two hundred yards ahead, through the trees.”

  “Scout ahead for us,” Mr. Meister said, apparently not at all out of breath. “Be cautious.”

  Neptune nodded and launched herself into the dark trees. Horace thought he heard someone’s voice calling out far off in the distance, toward April’s house.

  Mr. Meister turned to Horace. “The time, please, Keeper?”

  “Eleven . . . oh four,” Horace said, puffing. A far-off dog began to bark furiously, but no sooner had the barking begun than it was cut off.

  “Let us hope we are not too late,” said Mr. Meister, and turned to Horace. “You have the phalanx. Good. I suspect it will be more helpful to you now than the Fel’Daera. I’ll spare you the detail, but the phalanx fires a bolt of energy that will temporarily immobilize any instrument it hits. And because the Riven are physically bound to their instruments—”

  “They can’t move.”

  “Just so.”

  “For how long?”

  “In your hands? A minute or two, perhaps longer. The power of the phalanx is proportional to your Tan’ji. In fact, you must draw on your instrument’s power to fire the phalanx.”

  Chloe, listening, piped up. “So explain to me why we aren’t using these things all the time?”

  “They are . . . hard to come by,” Mr. Meister replied. “And there is a downside. A phalanx works by funneling power away from its wielder’s Tan’ji.”

  “So wait—after Horace fires the phalanx, he won’t be able to use the box?”

  “Until the rift collapses and fades away, yes.”

  “Never mind, then.” Chloe flashed Horace a thumbs-up. “Better you than me.”

  “But how do I fire it?”

  “You must draw on the power of the Fel’Daera and then channel that energy into the phalanx. Touching the phalanx to the box isn’t necessary, but it might help you make the transfer. Releasing the energy is another act of will—hard to describ
e but easy enough to do. Again, a little flick of the phalanx might help you find the right state of mind.”

  “Sure sounds like a wand to me,” Chloe said.

  Just then the dog started to bark again, more savagely than ever. How strange to think that it must be April’s dog—Baron, that was his name. And now from the distant house, the furious cry of a raven reached them. That could only be Arthur, of course. April had to be there. Was Gabriel with her, protecting her?

  “What happened to Neptune?” Chloe said. “This is usually about the time she drops in with more bad news.”

  As if in answer, a shriek of surprise cut through the night, nearby and high in the air. Neptune. All three spun toward the sound. Branches snapped and leaves rustled violently—Neptune was falling. She dropped out of the canopy thirty feet up. They stood there, frozen, as she plummeted unchecked toward the ground, her cloak trailing like a plume of smoke.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Battlefield

  “WE MUST GET AWAY,” SAID GABRIEL. HE COCKED HIS HEAD sharply toward the woods behind April’s house, as if he heard something.

  Derek scoffed nervously. “What, because of a marble? Because the dog smells something out in the woods?”

  April squeezed the fading raven’s eye. She still couldn’t smell the brimstone, but to Baron’s nose, the smell seemed to be getting stronger. The Riven were coming closer. “What about inside? Maybe the leestone in the house will protect us.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I do not think so. The Riven knew where you lived before you had a leestone, and it takes time to rebury secrets that are already revealed. Plus, they are apparently aware that we’re here now.”

  “Is that my fault? Because I was using the vine?”

  “No, they came too quickly. They must have had some other reason for showing up here tonight.”

  Derek held up his hands. April could smell his fear. “Sorry,” said Derek, “but somebody needs to explain to me what’s going on. These bad guys you were talking about—these Riven—they’re here?”