Aster Wood and the Wizard King (Book 5)

by J B Cantwell

  “Cait, I’m so sorry,” I said. “If we had come sooner, maybe then we could’ve—”

  She hugged me then, cutting off my apologies. Surprised, I wrapped my arms around her, too. As she gripped me around my middle, I found that I felt like crying. But a burning sensation in the back of my throat was all that came.

  “I wish we could’ve come sooner. I didn’t know this would happen.”

  She released me from the hug, looking up at me with her huge blue eyes and, to my surprise, smiled.

  “He’s back,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  Then she moved over to sit beside her brother. Her tortured, damaged brother. She turned her smile to him, then. And he looked down at her, not friendly, but not afraid, either.

  “We’ll get him well again,” Larissa said. “Now Kiron’s back, he can make one of his brews to bring him back to us.”

  Something in my brain gave a little pop at these words, and I remembered that we still carried just such a potion. I sprang to my feet and ran for Kiron. Without explanation, I dug into the pack that was still strapped to his back.

  “What’re you doing, boy?” he asked.

  But he didn’t stop me. Instead, he shrugged off the pack so that I could lay it on the ground. I found the vial quickly and, without explanation, disappeared again, back to Rhainn’s side.

  The boy looked confused, but when Cait saw the vial, she recognized it and beamed up at me.

  “This will help you,” she said to Rhainn. “It helped me when I couldn’t speak. I was dying, and it made the hurt go away.”

  “Drink it,” I said, holding it out to him.

  He reached for the vial, nervously taking it. Then, with shaking hands, he emptied the contents into his mouth and swallowed thickly. The taste must have been horrible, because he grimaced, disgusted. Then, he sat back against the stone of the cave.

  We watched him, waiting for the magic to take hold, to heal him so we could get answers to the many questions we had. But nothing happened. No recognition came into his eyes. No words fell from his lips.

  I tried not to panic. I had been hoping that by offering him the healing medicine that had helped Cait, and had helped me long ago, that I might’ve been freed from the guilt I had carried after losing Rhainn.

  But it took a while for it to help Cait. Hours. Days before she was really better.

  I clung to these thoughts, hoping desperately that they would hold as true for him as they had for Cait and me.

  I stoppered the small vial and headed back to Kiron.

  “We’ll need more of this,” I said, handing him the empty vial. “I hope you saved some ingredients from Dursala.”

  He peered down at me, then nodded.

  I turned back to face the people who had been left behind, some by me, some by the quest, and readied myself for their questions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The tea that night was made slightly thicker by the addition of the remaining fruits and nuts we had saved from Dursala, magically adding their nutrients to the mixture. Having been regularly fed of late, I found it lacked something in terms of the satisfaction I might normally have felt after a meal. But everyone from the town seemed full and happy. Some even lay backward, patting their near-empty, emaciated bellies as if they had just finished a feast.

  We would need to complete our task soon. It wouldn’t be long before the villagers began dying of starvation. I felt guilty enough for even having drunk my share of the concoction. Tomorrow I would resist it, save it for someone else who needed the sustenance more than I did.

  Kiron stood and made his way to the center of the group.

  “We need to know,” he said, addressing Larissa, “what happened to Donnally. I don’t see him among you.”

  The look of misery on Larissa’s face grew darker, and Tristan gave an audible hiss from his place around the fire.

  “He did not survive,” Larissa said.

  It was her answer, but it was not enough. She looked as if every word she uttered caused her some kind of physical pain.

  “You must tell us what happened,” he pressed. Then, when she gave no reply, “Lissa. We need to know.”

  Slowly she raised her gaze from where she had it trained on the ground.

  “I found him quickly enough,” she said. “They took him back to their hive immediately. It was a help to me that they didn’t see me coming. They were too wrapped up in the fight.”

  “Fight?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It turns out that Donnally was not such a coward as he seemed. They had brought him into the interior of the hive, and they must have attacked him. By the time I was nearing, bright flashes of power were overtaking the hive from within, and I knew he must be fighting for his life. I sped as quickly as I could to aid him, but I was too late.”

  “They killed him?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “At the height of battle, his magic ripped apart their hive. I was still too far to reach him in time.” She wiped a tear from her eye with the back of her hand. “He fell. Too far for me to catch him in time.”

  Nobody spoke then. It seemed everyone was taken with the grief of the story, and it was too much for Larissa. She stood and left the group, making her way back to where Cait and Rhainn sat reacquainting themselves with each other.

  We sat around the tiny fire, lost in thought. Father sat away from us, taken there by Finian. Finian glanced nervously back at Erod as he positioned Father, far enough away to prevent a relapse of the violent man we had seen the last time the two were in the same vicinity together. Jade padded silently up to the large rock I was sitting on and sat down beside me. She handed me a cloth with some sort of salve on it.

  “For your face,” she said.

  I lifted the cloth to my cheek and instantly a cooling sensation spread out beneath my burning skin.

  “Ahh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Zacharias came to the group and stood by the fire.

  “Those who have returned from their journey have asked me to tell a tale,” he began. “The tale I thought was a myth before tonight. It is the story of Jared, the great wizard who fell to the magic call of gold.”

  Fifteen feet away, in the dim light of the fire, I saw Father’s face wore the same look of concentration as mine must have. He may have been channeling Jared, but clearly there were still many things he longed to know.

  “Five thousand years ago,” Zacharias began, “Jared was born to the king and queen of Riverstone. He was the firstborn, and as such he stood to inherit the kingdom, which ruled all of Aria. He had beneath him five brothers, and while his family was royalty, there was no magic among them.

  “So it was with great surprise that Jared in his youth discovered that he had abilities the others in his family did not. He could make a fire spark to life with amazing speed, where regular men might require several minutes of coaxing before a flame emerged. When he held a branch of wood out before him, he found that he was able to not only coax a fire, but produce the sparks required to set wood ablaze. But, most importantly, it was with common, ordinary rocks that his talent revealed itself. He could control rocks of all sizes from the time he was a young man, and his power frightened the others in his family.

  “Jared lived in a time before magic, a time before people understood that magic did not always mean danger. There may have been others in Jared’s time who possessed such gifts, but their stories were not known in the kingdom. What we do know is that in his own kingdom, and in his own family, Jared was feared.

  “They rejected him and would not allow him to participate in the family in a normal way. He was sent to his own wing of the castle, to be taught and tended by butlers and nurses. And so he grew up alone, without the love of his parents, and with the taunting of his younger siblings. In the heart of the boy, there was goodness. But with year after year of torment and rejection, that goodness turned to loathing. They had never accepted him, and for what? There was no reason good enough that he c
ould imagine. He was treated like an outcast, a freak, and all the while he was terrified of what was happening to him. To be a child and have such powers manifest, and to then be cast aside because of them … well, it was more pressure than any tender heart can manage.

  “And so, with no one in his life to turn to to confide his fears, he instead turned to the very thing that set him apart.

  “Magic.

  “To entertain himself from the dullness of his life, Jared played with his power during the long hours he spent alone. At first he simply moved the stones around, a combination of his mind and fingers working in unison to create strength and movement where before there had been none. Then, as time slipped by, he found he was able to lift rocks, boulders even, fully into the air with nothing more than a passing thought and a flick of his hand. Eventually, Jared realized that the more precious the stone, the greater power it contained. Just holding a rare stone amplified his power by huge amounts.

  “Then, one night as he crept through the castle alone, he saw a glimmer of something in his father’s study. Beneath a drawer in a chest a small treasure was hidden, and without a second thought, he took it for his own. At first he meant only to inspect it, but soon he realized that this stone was much, much more powerful than any other he had ever touched. It is said that, upon Jared’s first meeting with gold, he lifted every rock in the valley below the castle at one time, slamming them back down to the earth in unison, shaking the land with the violence of the act. And with that act, a section of the gold in his fist dissolved away, its power spent.

  “Of course, Jared didn’t view such an action as violence. But the power he held over stone had fangs, and they bit deep into his heart and mind. He kept the tiny rock of gold on his person at all times, for years as he came of age, so that if there were ever a need to defend himself, he would have more than just a simple stone to do the job.

  “When he was seventeen, his father insisted that he marry, and as heir to the throne he had little choice but to obey. The bride chosen for him was younger than he, and by all accounts she detested him as much as the rest of his family did.

  “With the temptation of the gold so close to him, and the rejection of his family still so raw, he soon found himself hungry for more. More power. More of the feeling that he was something better than his family. And with that feeling, an appetite for destruction grew, as did his anger about his circumstance. He wanted to prove that his brothers had misjudged his slight frame and cautious eyes, that they had been wrong to assume that he was something less than themselves. He wanted to prove to his young bride that she, too, had judged him wrongly, and that he was more a man than any could hope to find in the entire kingdom.

  “And so the tiny seed of malice, the one that is planted in every man’s heart, began to sprout and bloom. It did not take long for him to decide to leave his family. Soon he left his young wife and the small son they had been obligated to produce together. And he left the king and queen and brothers who had never believed in him.

  “And, perhaps more important than anything else, he also left his right to the throne.

  “By now he understood that his power was much more than a hobby he might toy with on occasion. It had grown into a snarling resource of revenge, and had allowed him the glory of recognition that he so craved. He had grown bitter and tired of those who did not share his gifts, thus turning the tables on all who had hurt him.

  “He made his way through the towns of Aria, hiding his true identity so he could freely wander. During his first years in the towns, when Jared’s understanding of his abilities was still young, he used the stones to create elixirs for the townsfolk. He never used the gold, of course, for that was intended for only his own use and entertainment. Any ordinary stone would do for the village potions, though, for stone carries within it the lifeblood of a place, power deep to the core just waiting to be released. If a villager had a troubled back, a fractured mind, an injured heart, Jared’s vials of potion could set things right once again, and soon he became famous.

  “Many years passed, and he found that death was the greatest revenge he would ever need against the family who had underestimated him so badly. He didn’t even need to kill them, himself. He needed only to live on, to outlast them, to see their bodies buried before he, too, succumbed to death’s embrace.

  “And pass away they did, one by one. The kingdom fell to that lost son to rule over when year after year of searching produced no sign of Jared, for he had left his kingdom behind to pursue other, more powerful heights. But even, eventually, the son he had created fell to death as all mortals must.

  “Jared, however, did not die. He had long had bigger goals than to simply rule a kingdom.

  “The elixirs kept him entertained for that first lifetime of years, but it was not the brewing that had taken over his mind and given him purpose. It was the payment that the people made for the cures to anything that ailed them. Of course, after a time he became quite rich, which suited him, as he was used to the finest accommodations. But most of his money he saved so that he might purchase more of the greatest and rarest of stones, the stones that would allow him to wield great power over entire valleys, entire populations, maybe entire planets.

  “Gold.

  “He had long since known of the gold hidden within the heart of each planet. When he first quested on Aria, he used the existing gold in his stores to search for its hiding places. He discovered what he was looking for quickly with the aid of the gold he carried, and soon he found his way to the hidden places where the planets held their treasure. He forced the rock beneath his feet to open and allow him entry into the chambers. And he took all that he found there.

  “Over the many years that followed, Jared determined how to live longer than any other man had done before him. During that time he sought out more and more gold. He learned the art of link-making, which before had never allowed one to travel farther than a few miles in any direction. But with the addition of gold he was able to go to places that men had only dreamed of. To different planets altogether. And upon each new planet, the power of the gold in his pockets led him to the hiding places of the gold at the heart of each. He became obsessed with the great symbols he, himself, left on the ground at the entrances to each cavern, and drew them in all of his notebooks. When he came close to exhausting his search on the planets he knew, he retreated to the mountains beside where Riverstone now stands. In those caves, which have been protected by the giants since those first days, Jared obsessed upon the symbol. He meditated on it, carved it into the walls, slowly driven mad by his unchecked desire for more of that most powerful stone.

  “Finally on Dursala, the last planet he traveled to, he found a great store of gold. Nine pieces were placed within the bowl, and he was then, by any measure, rich beyond most men’s dreams.

  “But Jared saw in the gold not riches, but the ability to unleash such magic as the Fold has never known. Earth was, at the time, unknown to him, though Jared searched for it nonetheless. He did not know which planet he sought, but he dreamed of a place where gold was plentiful, and at every opportunity sought for the knowledge of how to bring it closer. For his greed had overtaken him, and his hunger for more consumed his every thought. Then, one day, he discovered that Earth was slowly moving toward Aria. His intense desire fueled by the gold he had stolen had slowly shifted the planet’s trajectory, and now it was aligned with, though very far away from, the other planets in the Fold. It crawled toward Aria, and he could see that someday it would be within his reach.

  “But this was not fast enough for Jared.

  “Earth lay along the outskirts of the planet Grallero, so it was visible in the frame he used to plot his links. But, as it was not within the Fold proper, he was unable to create a link directly to it.

  “The only way he would be able to reach Earth was to draw it into the Fold itself. While it was true that he had unconsciously begun this process already, he believed it was time to put all of his will to the
task.

  “And so it was upon Mount Neri that he readied himself for the event. In his hands he held every piece of gold still remaining to him, perhaps every piece left on any planet within the Fold. And with the great power that emanated from so much treasure, he cast his magic up into the night air, in search of Earth.

  “At first the spell worked just as he had planned. He had long since learned to use gold to create pathways toward more, and though his eyes couldn’t see the path to Earth, his skin, muscles, and very bones felt it within him. Within minutes he found the small, blue planet, and had begun to draw it closer.

  “The gold in his hands began to dissolve, just as he knew it would. But Earth would not come so easily farther into the Fold. It bucked and stuck in its cosmic fabric, pulled back into the place in space it had inhabited for so long. It was much more difficult than he had expected, as he had, of course, seen himself as all powerful from his years of thievery and success. As the gold in his fists dissolved away, it is said that the force of the spell dissolved Jared away, too, that the power he thrust out into the cosmos stuck to him, running up first his hands and arms, and eventually ripping his body apart with the force.

  “So Jared did not know at the time of his death what he had succeeded in doing. For Earth, stubborn as it was, had been ripped from its rightful place and then caught in the outer reaches of the Fold, just as Jared had intended.

  “In the end, Earth settled into the Fold, just like every other planet. Its location was far, much farther away than any of the eight others Jared had visited in his quest. Now it might be possible for a wizard of great power to fashion a link to the unknown planet.

  “But the gold was gone. Jared was gone. And the power to reach Earth had been forever lost.

  “Or so I thought.”

  Zacharias turned to Father.

  “It seems,” he said, “that there is more to be learned of Jared’s plight. More to the myth than what I was taught so many years ago. You, sir,” his eyes fixed on Father. “I believe it is your turn to talk.”