Aster Wood and the Wizard King (Book 5)

by J B Cantwell

  Jade opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Her fear was clear on her face, but she didn’t argue again.

  “You just need to trust me,” I said. “Do you?”

  “Do you think we would have followed you this far if we didn’t?” Finian asked.

  I stared around at the group. There were no more arguments. I nodded, turning to begin the climb. Before long, a staircase appeared, rough steps cut directly into the rock. It went up and up and up, a relentless climb to the precipice above. Far ahead now, the giants kept their pace, unharmed. So far.

  I wanted to run. I felt sure that if I tried it here, it would be no more difficult than running on flat ground. But I couldn’t leave the group behind. My staff slipped back and forth inside my fist, and I quickened my pace.

  The climb was unforgiving, and I soon found that I was nearly as out of breath as my counterparts were. Several times we had to stop and rest, usually hiding behind a boulder or in a shadowy spot where anyone down below would have trouble seeing us. Though I didn’t see any movement there at all. Those who had assembled against us, the ones who had filled that battlefield below, had been either giants or children. There was one glider left, just one servant to the Corentin remaining if, in fact, the wolf was now free. My staff slipped again as I thought of all those we had overcome. Two gliders. The Coyle. The children. The giants. All that remained was the tiny sliver of black in my dad’s eyes. And in Jade’s.

  But that last glider. My fingers automatically touched the side of my forehead in the spot where his brother’s acidic slime had eaten away at my flesh. He was neither human nor animal, but I knew that he was pure evil. He was no innocent being, taken over by Corentin power.

  Just one more.

  I didn’t hear the cries of fury at first. My eyes were down at my feet, watching them as they made their slow, methodic pace up the side of the mountain. It wasn’t until a shower of stones fell down the steep slope from above that I looked up.

  And my heart fell.

  Giants were being tossed backwards, hitting boulders and sending a rain of rocks in our direction. The deep booming voices, some in pain, some in anger, echoed all around us the closer we got. I watched in terror as I realized that we were too far away to help. As we watched, a tiny glimpse of their attacker caught my eye.

  The last glider.

  Any attempt to curse it from here would probably result only in hitting one of our allies.

  I needed to think fast, and I needed to get there fast.

  Father. Father had been the one to … what had he done, exactly … to break through the defenses of the Coyle, to open him up so that our magic could meet their target on the other side.

  “I need you to run!” I cried, grabbing Father’s arm and lurching up the stairs.

  All I could do was desperately hope that some giants were still alive when we got there.

  Father stumbled up the steps as he tried to follow me. But my pace was too fast; he couldn’t keep up.

  “Keep running!” I shouted, and I dropped his arm and flew up the stairs alone.

  It seemed like forever before I reached the battle, though it had probably been only minutes. Bodies of giants were spread out all around a central point like water droplets from a hose. Some moved. Others didn’t.

  A jet of power flew by me, missing my left ear by mere inches. I couldn’t wait any longer. I raised my staff and, aiming carefully, hoped that the giants between us would get out of the way.

  The glider saw my attack coming, and it quickly ducked behind the bulk of the giants closest to it, using their enormous bodies as living shields. I couldn’t get a clear shot, and the monster took every opportunity to pop around from the side of a giant and strike. I found myself dodging bolts of power, now so distracted by the danger I was in, myself, I had forgotten to think about my own attack on the glider. Back and forth, like some sort of sickening dance, I avoided the jets of light intended to kill me. I was moving so fast that I didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to be scared. There was only evasion in my mind and nothing else.

  And then the world turned upside down. I hit the ground hard, cracking my head on the granite of the mountain. But that was nothing compared to the pain in my belly. I doubled over, clutching helplessly at it. Six inches wide in the center of my gut, the flesh burned. I shouted out in agony, unsure of how deep the wound went.

  Nobody came for me. Nobody helped. As the torturous moments passed, I felt sure that someone, Kiron, Jade, Father, would soon come to my aid. My stomach burned as if I had laid it across a hot stovetop. The sickening sounds of giants being blown back by the glider’s jolts seemed quiet, muffled.

  Then I heard the shouting.

  I looked up to find Father. He was twenty feet ahead of me, facing off on the glider all on his own.

  “Aster!” he cried, though I could barely make out the word.

  No more giants stood between us and the glider now. He had blown them all away from him. I wondered how many of them were dead.

  “Aster!” Father’s voice came again, more desperate this time.

  He turned away from me and held up his hands like he had done with the Coyle.

  And I understood.

  I wrenched my body over, clutching my belly with one hand and my staff with the other. Up ahead, the glider raised one arm, pointing a long, bony finger at Father. I knew what would happen next. I took aim and fired, just catching the bolt of power in time with the magic from my staff.

  Father spread his hands open as if he were pulling apart two heavy doors. The glider seemed to panic, releasing jet upon jet in our direction.

  But his magic was no match for the two of us together.

  I countered each blast easily, trying to breathe evenly despite the pain. Soon I found I was able to send a continuous blast of my own.

  The glider stepped back, shocked by the assault.

  “Do it now!” Father yelled through clenched teeth. His hair and face were sweaty with the effort of making an opening in the glider’s shield.

  I altered the trajectory of the staff just slightly, crouching to avoid the next blast that would leave me unprotected by my own power, and aimed right into the middle of the glider’s chest.

  It screamed, in pain or frustration, I couldn’t tell. Then came the explosion. A spray of acidic flesh, too far away to reach me, hit Father square in the face. He fell to the ground, clutching his eyes, and screamed.

  I held my own screams back, and instead curled up, whimpering in agony.

  I must have passed out, because hands were soon on my shoulder, rolling me over.

  “No!” I protested. The hands gripped my arms, pulling them away from my stomach, and I howled in pain.

  And then, an easing feeling. The pain was still there. But it was less now. I looked up and saw Jade working over my stomach, the tiny vial of healing potion expertly held in her hands.

  “I can’t heal it entirely,” she said, her face apologetic. “We need to save some.”

  “What about Father?” I asked, my voice cracked and dry.

  “We have already healed Father the best we could,” she said.

  “So he’s alive?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But his eyes … he lost both of his eyes, Aster.”

  I understood the words coming from her mouth, but the dull pain still coming from my stomach was joined by the a feeling of immense dread and guilt. We had both been wounded. Together. And now one of us was injured beyond repair. We were both forever hampered now by the blows of the Corentin.

  I rolled over to my knees, clutching my stomach with one hand again. I tried to stand up, but I found my legs too wobbly to hold my weight.

  “You should rest,” came Finian’s voice from somewhere I couldn’t see.

  “No,” I said. “We have to keep moving. If we give him any more time to prepare—”

  “Neither of you can fight in your condition,” he countered. “Give it a little while, at le
ast.”

  I couldn’t argue. The fact was that my legs refused to take the commands I tried to issue to them. I sat back against the boulder, and only then did I realize that I had hit my head on the way down, too. My hand went immediately to the wound, and it came away bloody. I stared at it, perplexed. Was I dying? There was so much blood.

  My head throbbed, but the pain of it was still quiet compared to my stomach. I steeled myself and looked down, not knowing what to expect.

  A gaping hole was burned into my shirt, the edges of it burned black. Beneath the wide circle of open fabric, a huge, round patch of bloody, burned tissue. The skin was lumpy where the bolt had hit me. And shiny, fresh.

  But better. It was better than it had been.

  In the distance I saw Kiron huddled over Father. Father looked dead from where I sat, though they had assured me he was still alive. I looked on with horror; his eye sockets had both been badly burned.

  Gradually, the giants who had survived the attack rose from the mountainside. They gathered around, towering over me like huge trees. I looked up into their faces and found Druce, and I sighed in relief. At least he was still alive, still here to lead his people in the fight that was to come.

  Nobody spoke. Only the whimpers of Father and the whistle of wind were audible.

  “Thank you,” I finally said.

  Druce’s face hardened.

  “There’s no need to thank us,” he said, his voice gruff. “The giants do not fight in service to you, a human child. What we do we do to protect the honor of our people. For millennia we have served one man as a god, one we thought was good. Misguided in his desire for gold, but good. Today we seek to right the wrongs we have supported for these many years.”

  I looked over and saw that Father was hobbling down the stairs, leaning heavily on Kiron, who looked more tired than I had ever seen him.

  If I had thought my belly was terrible to look at, it was nothing compared to Father’s face. My stomach turned at the sight of him.

  “Father,” I breathed.

  He came to my side, Kiron carefully settling him down next to me. Father groaned, but what was left of his face was soon set, determined.

  “We can’t rest long,” he said. “He will not stay so weak as he is now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You can’t come with us. You can’t be serious.”

  “I am quite serious,” he said. “I know him better than any of you. And without my power you will not be able to destroy him.”

  My mind reeled. Suddenly our plight seemed beyond hopeless.

  “We will go on ahead of you,” Druce said, looking between the men and women surrounding us, the remainder of his people. “Perhaps we can distract him from you. That is, if we are unable to finish him off ourselves.”

  Druce’s enormous hands were clenched into fists at his sides.

  “What will you do?” I asked. I wished so desperately for Erod to come, to still be among us, ready to wield his own powerful magic. The giants did not possess any of their own. Erod had been the only one among them to have the gift.

  “You underestimate us,” he said. “Men of power always underestimate us mere mortals, us powerless. But we have a power that you, you small men, cannot understand.” He raised one fist into the air, revealing a rippling, muscled arm the size of a tree trunk. He stared around at the others. “We need no rest. We need only to get ourselves to the fight. Let’s go.”

  The giants surrounding him all stamped one foot in agreement. Then they turned and began the rest of the climb up the long staircase above. I watched them go, daring to hope that he was right as the last of them passed the corner and out of sight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The sky began to lighten. Soon, dawn would break above us.

  I wanted to sleep so badly. My stomach and head throbbed painfully, and Father looked even worse than I felt.

  And the giants, sent into the battle without our support. It didn’t matter how strong they were; in the end they would need all the help they could get, even if it was just from the rest of our broken party.

  At the end of this day, one way or another, the fate of the Fold, and Earth, would be known.

  Jade stood beside Finian, where they kept watch over the valley on one side, the mountain on the other. I rolled over, trying to keep the groan of effort from my voice, trying and failing.

  “We need to move,” I said.

  We had been sitting for several minutes, recovering. Thinking. Breathing what we hoped would not be our last breaths. The time had come now, though. We had no choice but to face our fate head-on.

  I got to my feet, clutching my stomach uselessly. I felt like my insides were in danger of falling out and only the support of my hand was keeping them inside.

  “Do you have any more?” I asked Jade.

  She shook her head sadly.

  “No, we’ve used it all,” she said. “If there were jadestone here, I might be able to channel its power, but there is only granite.”

  I shook my head, disappointment flooding through me. So many times she had been able to use her magic to save us, to save herself. In the cave where I found her, her power over the jadestone had brought back the strength in her long unused limbs. On the ocean waves she called the stones up from the bottom of the sea to hold us afloat. And, of course, there was always her ability to use stones as weapons, protecting herself and anyone else in her charge.

  But without the jadestone …

  I craned my neck, trying to see if the castle at Riverstone was visible from where we stood. I saw nothing but mountains.

  “Jade,” I said. “Can you bring a stone to you that you can’t see?”

  “That I can’t see?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  “In the ocean,” I said. “You brought up the stones from the ocean floor, remember?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Well, what if you could bring stones to you from other places,” I pressed. “Riverstone isn’t far from here.” I pointed across the valley to the lower mountains on the other side. Riverstone was right behind them, I knew.

  She turned and followed my finger with her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose so, but why would I do that? There’s nothing—” She stopped short, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was.

  Within the castle lay treasure. Loads of it. It had been carried there by the giants when both they and she were still possessed by Corentin power. He’d had the stones delivered to her, not for her to use, but for her to destroy at his whim. As a way to torture her.

  “Is there a jadestone in the castle?” I asked.

  She turned now, holding out both hands, her fingers claw like.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember if it survived. It could be that he destroyed it after I left. Wait now. Don’t speak to me.”

  She closed her eyes tightly, and her face became a mask of concentration. Her fingers moved in the air as if she were caressing something soft. I trained my eyes on the mountains, looking for any sign of movement, but I saw nothing. For several minutes Jade focused her attention on the castle beyond the mountains. We all stood watching, anxiously hoping that she would succeed, all of our thoughts as focused as hers were.

  Then, our attention was wrenched from the mountains beyond to the mountain we were on. A great cracking noise rose up from the rock, and the entire mountain shook with earthquake. Those not already down on the rock fell to their knees. We all gripped onto the steps of the stone staircase so we wouldn’t be thrown over the side. I looked up the mountain, half expecting to see the Corentin on his way down to deliver the final blow, but nobody appeared.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted. Nobody had an answer, and terror stricken faces were all I could see.

  On and on it went. Had it been seconds? Minutes? Hours? I couldn’t tell. I tried to move closer to Jade, who had fallen to the ground, her focus broken, but I could hardly
keep myself on the mountain, much less move across it.

  A terrible wind rushed down from the sky, threatening our position even more. I clung to the rock with everything I had, desperate to stay on, to stay alive.

  My mind reeled. There was no escape for us here, not like this. We couldn’t jump away; none of our links worked in the circle of safety the Corentin had created for himself. And we could barely move; escape either up the mountain or down it seemed impossible. I began to think that the entire mountain would crack in half, that we would fall into its depths, never having had our chance to face off against this one last, and greatest, enemy.

  But it didn’t go on forever. As suddenly as the shaking began, it ceased. The wind didn’t stop, though. It continued, pounding into us relentlessly as we all crawled towards one another, not yet willing to trust our feet to keep us upright at this altitude. Relief flooded through me as we all met on our hands and knees, hair flying in all directions from the gale in the sky.

  Kiron hadn’t joined us, though. He had stayed in the spot where he had fallen, sitting dumbstruck, staring into the sky.

  And then I saw it.

  Looming far above our heads in the slowly lightening sky was something I never expected to see in a million years. Part of me hadn’t even believed it would be possible to move something so large, had thought that just maybe the stories about Jared and the Fold had been mistaken, embellished. But there was no denying this.

  Earth. Earth hung like an enormous second sun above us. There was no mistaking it. I recognized the geography of North America in an instant, brown from the ravages of drought. And it was unmistakably moving towards us.

  “We have to move!” I screamed. “Now!”

  I now understood what the cracking sound had been. The Corentin on top of the mountain, using his own rock power to draw Earth closer to us, to bend the fabric of space to bring it near. The force of his power must have been what had cracked the mountain. And the wind.

  The wind was from the great planet that careened closer to us with every passing second.

  I didn’t wait for the others. I stood and ran for the staircase. I couldn’t imagine what had transpired between the Corentin and the giants up above, but I knew that this would be our last chance, our last hope of defeating him.