Milo and the Dragon Cross

by Robert Jesten Upton

  At sundown, Einter pulled the cart off the road to camp under the shelter of some gigantic cottonwood trees alongside a stream. Milo helped him unhitch and water Senster and Dexter as he had in the old days, while the two girls collected fire wood. Raster went on a prowl. “I hope he doesn’t bring back a bear,” Milo commented.

  “Takes after his pa in looks,” Einter noted. Milo was silent. Einter patted Milo’s shoulder. “Yeh haven’t told me yer story, but I can guess a bunch. That yer in trouble’s prutty clear, but that yer doin’ what yuh can do about it is just as clear. Maybe yuh’d best fill me in, so I know what we’re dealin’ with?”

  Milo sketched out the general details, getting more specific as he reached the relevant and most recent events. Einter nodded.

  “Yuh sure got a bad one, an’ no doubt about it,” he said when Milo had brought their escape from Kayn up to the point when they had run into Einter on the road. “So, where’re yeh plannin’ to get on to?”

  “Do you know about the Crane King and the Glass Tower?”

  Einter nodded. “Travelin’ as I do, I hear all sorts of stories. Yes, I know somethin’ about that. That where yer headed?”

  Milo nodded.

  “Know how to get there?”

  “I was there once.”

  “That’s good. Might make it easier the second time. Or not. I reckon I ought to take you there to be sure.”

  “You know how to get there?” Milo asked, surprised. By now, Milo realized that the Crane Castle and the Glass Tower were hidden, and considered by most to be mythical. That he had been there was an exceedingly unlikely event.

  “Yep. Lots of folks know the stories, but not too many can find the place, hidden as it is. So happens, I make semi-regular stops there. They always have a few pots for me to patch up. We can get there in, oh, say by Yule.”

  “I need to get there quicker than that.”

  “No, not really. Yule’s about right. Yuh won’t find it any sooner anyway, try as yuh might. Yule’s the time most likely to get in. That’s how it works. Timing. All about timing. Didn’t yer teacher there in the wood tell yeh that?”

  “Yes, he did,” Milo admitted.

  “Then stay with yer lessons.”

  While Einter was building the fire, Milo went through formal introductions. He realized that he hadn’t done it when they first met on the road.Then Einter took them out into the woods to collect the ingredients he wanted for dinner while the fire burned down to embers. He made supper over the coals in a big dutch oven, and the two women were clearly surprised at how good it was, complete with fresh biscuits.

  As they sat down with their plates of food, Milo noticed Analisa take something out of her pocket. A wooden spoon. He recognized it. It was the spoon he had whittled for her in the forest before he got to the Crane Castle. She glanced at him, and gave him a quick, shy smile.

  By the time they were finished with dinner, Milo had told them where they were going and that Einter would take them there. The two women were clearly unhappy with the timeframe, and Analisa told him so.

  “That’s because yer young. Young folks—the ones that have more time left than us older ones—they’re the ones always in a hurry. Milo, yuh tell ‘em what I told you about Yule an’ all.”

  Milo did that.

  “But...but we’ve got to get there as soon as possible!” Analisa insisted.

  “Then I’ll get yuh there. By Yule,” Einter said steadfastly, reminding Milo of his oxen.

  “The Crane Castle only opens for special visitors an’ special times, like fer Yule,” Einter went on, continuing his ponderous form of logic. “That would be you three and Raster. Try to get there any sooner an’ yuh won’t find it. I expect the same goes for yer wizard feller, Kayn. Maybe he’s a hotshot sorcerer an’ all, but he’s got to follow the same protocol like anybody else, an’ I expect he knows it. I expect he knows he’ll need you to get in, too. So he needs yuh more then ever.”

  Without explaining, he moved on with his knowing squint. “So yeh caught the Fish, didn’t yuh?”

  “What fish?” Analisa asked. Milo hadn’t told that part of the story, and he was surprised that Einter knew about it. “What’s fishing got to do with it? There’s got to be a way to get there, if that’s where we’ve got to go, before Kayn can either find us, or get there first!”

  “If yeh want to run off on yer own, I ‘m not stoppin’ yuh, an’ best to yuh,” Einter said good-naturedly, but with his heels dug in. “I’ll be goin’ that way anyway, so yuh can hook up with me at Yule in case yuh decide later that’s what yuh want to do.”

  Milo knew there was no point arguing with Einter, but Analisa went on for a time before she gave up in frustration, and stormed off in a huff. Unperturbed, Einter put away his things and rolled out his bedroll under the trees. That left Milo and Stigma to stare into the glow of the coals by themselves.

  “So...” Stigma spoke, opening conversation. “You’ve been there? To the Crane Castle?”

  Milo watched the tiny flame dancers inside the furnace of embers. “Yes. It’s how I found the Glass Tower. How did you do it, since that was the first clue?”

  “I didn’t. None of us did. We knew what the Glass Tower is supposed to be, but nobody knows how to actually go there. So we—I—used that to point us in the direction that would lead to the next clue.”

  “Really? That means I was so dumb that I thought I had to actually find it?”

  “Milo, you never cease to amaze. If you’re dumb, then it’s a new kind of sorcery. Nobody actually finds the Crane Castle except in stories and legends. And the Glass Tower is more like a signal than it is an actual place.”

  “Well, I was at Crane Castle—Bori and I—and I met the Crane King, his wife, Ayuthaya, and his daughter. I also met Blai, who weaves the rainbow. She’s Ayuthaya’s sister. Besides, Einter’s been there, too.”

  Stigma just shook her head. “The rest of us knew right away what the first clue was about, and each of us set out—not to go to the Glass Tower—but to look for leads that would tell us about how that first clue could point to the second. But then the Pilgrimage opened for the first time in—I don’t know, but a long, long time. It was obvious then. The second clue had to be about the Pilgrimage.”

  “Blai showed me that. She spun sun beams into thread and tossed a ball of colored yarn across the sky that turned into a rainbow.” Milo dug down to the bottom of his backpack and pulled out the ball of sun yarn Blai had given him. “When the butterflies appeared, she told me to follow them.”

  Stigma’s jaw dropped. It took her several wordless moments to recover. She took the ball of yarn and studied it, then handed it back with a bewildered shake of her head. “From now on, anything you say, I’ll just accept it without question. I admit, it was a real stretch for me when you said we had to go to the Crane Castle. I think—until what I just heard—that Analisa believed going to the Crane Castle made more sense than I did.”

  She shook her head again. “Anyway, we all set out to make the Pilgrimage, the way the lore dictated. And you showed up at the End of the Earth. By the way, nobody knew where that was, either. And you were with those three slinger players, and they fulfilled yet another prophecy.”

  “I just sort of happened to meet them, and we got to be friends,” Milo explained.

  “There’s more to it than that. That’s when I really started to watch you, Milo.”

  “What about back at the park in Kingdom of Odalese?” he asked. “You talked to me then, even if I couldn’t see you.”

  “That was different. I just thought you were cute. I wished you could see me, too.”

  “I would have been embarrassed if I’d actually seen you...well, you know how I mean. I was embarrassed when I figured out that you had to be wearing...something...to be seen at all.”

  She laughed. “I think you’re cute when you blush. Like now.”

  “That’s just the firelight,” he told her, but he felt his ears burning, and that was
n’t because of the fire.

  “Tell me this,” she said, serious again. “Why do we need to go back there? To the Crane Castle?”

  “It’s where this ends. It’s what I saw at the lake in the cavern.”

  “We all saw things in the cavern. You saw how this ends?”

  “No. I saw the Crane Castle and I knew that that’s where this leads.”

  “We all saw different things in the lake. We all saw what our own parts are. But it was you who put it all in play. Only when we all play our parts will the Hunt find its conclusion.”

  Milo thought for a moment, watching how the flame dancers had diminished as the fire died. “Is that why you said what you did about me and the Hunt?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t really understand what it meant when I met you on the way to Rykirk,” she added. “Now I think I do. You know, don’t you, that dealing with Kayn...well, I can’t imagine how it can be done. Now I realize that you’re really the only one of us who can. I don’t know why that is, but after all you’ve told me...” She finished by shrugging.

  “Do you think Kayn—he saw something in the lake, too—knows how all this works out? Which of us will succeed?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think that it’s determined. I think he believes, with all he knows, that he can win.”

  Milo didn’t—couldn’t—know. He wished that somehow he could believe, right down in his bones, that the good guy—with him being the good guy—would win. But he didn’t feel that way. All he felt was a huge hole full of anxieties. It was something he couldn’t really look into, or it would devour him. So he hung onto his determination to do whatever he had to do next, and not look beyond that. Secretly, he was glad that it would take so long to travel to the Crane Castle, and at the same time he hated the delay, wishing for all this to be over and done.

  Progress was slow. Senster and Dexter were not to be hurried, nor was Einter. “We’ll be there, and not a bit sooner,” was all Einter would say when asked how far they still had to go. Milo had to comfort himself with the fact that every night they camped in a place farther along than they had the night before. After all, he reminded himself, that was how he had made the pilgrimage: a day’s walk at a time.

  Analisa champed a lot more at the bit. She made herself a broom out of willow switches and used it to reconnoiter, presumably looking for any sign of where they were going and who they might meet on the way. Stigma resigned herself to the pace, but remained quietly alert, as if on guard all the time. Raster was on the great adventure of his life and Milo admired that, even though it made him feel old whenever he noticed that he was indulging the young cat’s exuberance.

  Sometimes it was Stigma who would go out to scout, leaving Analisa behind as the guard. Milo suspected that on those occasions, Stigma needed to get away to release tension and be alone for a while. He envied them both, since he was always under the eye of one or the other of them, without reprieve. Even Einter, from his nonchalant way of dealing with any and everything, always kept tabs on Milo. It was a slow simmer that never let up.

  One day, when Stigma was gone and it was Analisa’s turn to walk with him as the cart rumbled along, she opened a topic pointblank. “You like her, don’t you?”

  It was a question—another question—that Milo dreaded and tried not to think about. But the way Analisa asked it, with uncharacteristic gentleness, demanded that he address it as honestly as he could.

  So he did. “I...I can’t think about that. Of course I do. But...if I let myself think about how I feel, it’s too much. I thought about you a lot when I was with...when I was at the Barrow, but I couldn’t do anything about that, either.”

  “When you were with the Keeper?” she asked.

  The question set him aback. “The what?” he stammered.

  “The Keeper. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He did a quick mental check to equate the term with Culebrant, and found that it fit. “I didn’t know what had happened to you. All I could do was to hope you were okay.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You could have”—she stopped herself. “I’m sorry, Milo. I made it pretty clear that my business is my own. I guess if you’d come looking for me, I’d have bitten your head off. Besides, now I know what it was you were dealing with. That, and you wouldn’t have escaped the Stone Knights if you’d come looking for me.”

  By now they had outdistanced the ox cart. Analisa sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree to wait for Einter to catch up. She patted a place on the log beside her. “Sit down, Milo. It’s time we had a talk.”

  He sat, feeling very uncomfortable.

  “You see, Milo, I like you. I liked you right away, and that made me mad, because we were competitors. At least, I thought I had to beat you to win, and I believed I had to win. Things are different now. I found out some things I didn’t know back then: I didn’t know that Aulaires is my aunt, the sister of my father who I never really knew. I realize now that she’s actually been trying to help me, only I couldn’t see it. And the Hunt. I thought it was a winner/loser sort of thing, but I’ve learned that it isn’t like that at all. It’s like...what you get out of it. Not that you finish ahead of the others, or that you do it better than anyone else. You always tried to help and be friends, and I rejected that because I couldn’t trust you if I had to beat you. It shows that you had the right idea about the Hunt from the very beginning, and I’ve only just realized what it’s all about. We aren’t competing against each other at all. We’re competing together. If there was a single winner declared, you deserve to be it.”

  Milo didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He just watched Raster, who was poking through the weeds, looking for the sort of things that interest cats.

  “I think that the prize at the end of the Hunt isn’t really about being a better witch or wizard than the other contestants, it’s about how you do what you do,” she continued, looking off past the horizon as if she could read the meanings she needed from there. She plucked a dry grass stalk and twirled it in front of her face. “It’s about finding your own way, but that doesn’t mean that you have to beat others out in order to do it. Now, the way this Hunt is working out is pretty awful, because of Smith—Kayn, you call him. He’s just the opposite of what the Hunt is about, and he’s twisted it into something very ugly. First, he tricked us all into thinking he had a clue and off we went like a bunch of chickens. We went to the Valley of the Stone Knights to confront a terrible and unnecessary danger, and that should never have happened. We didn’t look for other clues. We just saw others going and followed in a rush not to be left behind. You’re the only one who took a different route. You, with no magical ability—I mean, you have it, but not the way the rest of us do, by training and being taught by a mentor—and you got to the Great Barrow following real clues instead of chasing the next contestant. You did it in your own way, relying on raw talent.

  “Before, I would have either looked down on you the same way Count Yeroen did, or I would have done exactly what I did. I kept thinking that you were very clever and were disguising your real ability as a way to fool the rest of us. Now I understand that you have something even more important. And Smith is trying to use that against you. That makes me really, really angry.”

  Raster had come near, and Analisa used the grass stalk to whip back and forth while he tried to catch it. Milo thought she might be finished—the cart was rolling up the hill and had almost reached them—and was about to reply in a sort of rebuttal, when she continued.

  “Stigma was the only one who understood,” she said. “She thinks you’re cute too, just like I do, but she saw who you were instead of what she expected you to be. Maybe that’s because she spent so long being invisible, ignored and unseen by others. Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is, if you care about her, she deserves it, and I don’t.”

  The tight line of her mouth told Milo how much this admission hurt her. “I don’t think it’s like that,” Milo said firmly. �
��I don’t think that you’re wrong and she’s right. I think each of us got caught up in this thing in our own ways. Each one of us has done the best we could, just like you say the Hunt is supposed to work. It’s not about where you are when you start, or where you go along the way. It’s about where you are at the end. Don’t you see? Analisa, I haven’t had any idea about what I was doing, all the way from the very first. I know you told me not to ever say that again, but you see now that it was the simple truth instead of a strategy to beat you or anyone else. What’s important to me is that I’ve got your help now, and you really can’t imagine how much that means. And from Stigma, and Einter, and all the others. But I also know that I’ve got to finish this before I think about anything else. I’ve got no guarantee that I can do it. I don’t want you, or Stigma, or anybody else to get hurt. It’s bad enough already...” he said, watching Raster snatch at Analisa’s grass stalk.

  Analisa looked into his eyes. “I think I understand. You still understand all this better than I do. Friends, then?”

  “Friends,” Milo said, and extended his hand for a shake.

  She took his hand and bent quickly forward, grabbed his head in her two hands, and gave him a kiss, full on the mouth. She jumped up and was catching up with the cart as it lumbered past before he could gasp in surprise.

  It was Yule Eve. The weather was cold. Thin, dry snow blew in skittering puffs to catch against the edges of older, rotted drifts that rimmed the roots of trees and bare rock. Milo had no idea where they were, or if they were any closer to the Crane Castle or the Glass Tower than they had been on the first day of the journey. The oxen steamed lazily in the damp, morning air and trudged along at their regular, imperturbable pace.

  Analisa had gone aloft to look for a trace of their goal, but had returned after only a short time. “Can’t see a thing,” she said through chattering teeth. She rubbed her wool-mitted hands together, and pulled the scarf she was wearing more closely around her neck. “The clouds are just too thick and too low.”