Aster Wood and the Wizard King (Book 5)

by J B Cantwell

  It was like fire and ice and wind and rain all at the same time. I howled with the pain of it, certain that my flesh was melting off my bones.

  “Jade!” I screamed. “Stop!”

  The pain continued, and her eyes seemed forever fixed on the looming planet above.

  I opened my mouth to scream again, but found that my voice was nothing but a howl of pain, unable to form sound into words.

  Her eyes flickered at my cries.

  I screamed some more, but without purpose any other than to protest the pain in my arms.

  Jade! Stop! You have to stop!

  Her eyes flickered again, but I shut mine then, too absorbed in misery to look at the world anymore. I had died once before, and come close several more times since. Is this what death would ultimately feel like? Would I go out in a blaze of pain and misery?

  The world fell away then. The mountain cracked, and the only thing keeping us upright was her power. But we fell just the same. The precipice crumbled into a pile of rubble as the enormous crack in the stone raced down the mountain. My eyes flew open despite the pain now. The sensation of falling swooped in my stomach, and I found us going down, down into the abyss of the chasm opening up beneath us. I forgot about my arms, the pain. I forgot about everything as I watched the great stones of Mt. Neri take us down into its depths.

  And then we hit. Were it not for Jade’s power, we would have been crushed against the jagged rocks that had once been the summit of the mountain. But when we were a half second away from breaking our bodies against the stone, we stopped in midair, and then floated the rest of the way down as if we were light as air.

  Her light extinguished, releasing my arms.

  And her power was gone.

  The great sucking air seemed to want to pull us to the top of what remained of the mountain, and our hair stood on end with the force of it.

  “Jade?” I croaked.

  My hands were still gripping her arms, which were too thin now. Was she alive? My arms burned with the contact I had just made as if I had laid them in a fire to roast. But I found them unblistered, unmarked by the trauma they had just endured. I dropped my hands, inspecting them. Then I reached out for her face.

  She lay as quietly as if she were sleeping, her body folded like a baby in utero. Beside us, our packs and the staff had fallen into the chasm with us.

  I ran one hand down her cheek, trying to rouse her, but she didn’t move.

  “Hey,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

  Around us the mountain was still coming down, boulder after boulder falling into the pit where we had landed.

  “Jade, wake up,” I said.

  When she didn’t move, for a moment I thought the worst had come to pass. Then, she drew one long shuddering breath and her eyelashes fluttered. She looked up at me, her face blank.

  I burst out laughing.

  She’s alive!

  “You did it,” I whispered. “You saved us.”

  Though our salvation might only last for a few more minutes before we were crushed beneath the remains of the mountain.

  The outer corners of her mouth upturned slightly, just for a moment. Then her face went slack again. Her eyes were wide, and I saw in them her exhaustion, her depletion.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said, coughing. “I don’t think those stones will stay part of this mountain forever.” I looked up nervously. “Can you get us out?”

  Her mouth moved, as if she were trying to form words, but no sound came. I leaned over her, putting my ear a centimeter away from her lips.

  “In my pack,” she said.

  I tried not to jostle her as I crawled over her towards the pack. I opened it to find nothing inside but the Kinstone. She had carried it, and nothing else, all this way.

  “Ok, then,” I said. “Use it. Get us out of here.”

  “No,” she mouthed.

  “Why?” I asked, confused. When I saw her struggling to speak, I leaned over her again.

  “You use it,” she said, “when I’m gone.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “The only way I can use the Kinstone is if you—if you—“

  “I’m dying, Aster,” she whispered. “The stone will follow you now. Use it to escape. Use it to take yourself home.”

  Dying?

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. You’re not going to die. You’ve had a shock. You’re just in bad shape. We can fix that.”

  She smiled.

  “You’ve always been a fool,” she said.

  “You’re the one being the fool here,” I countered.

  A boulder as big as me fell to the rubble behind us.

  “You use it,” I said. “Now. You take us out of here. I won’t wait for you to die.”

  “No,” she said, “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can, and you have to.”

  Another boulder fell, this time only a few feet away.

  “Jade,” I said, growing alarmed. “If you don’t use this right now, we’re both going to die. Now get us out of here.”

  Her face twisted, and for a moment I thought she might cry.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  “I know,” I said, putting the stone into her lifeless hands. “But all you have to do is speak the word. That’s all. The rest will be out of your hands. I promise. I will take care of you, and if you want to die then I can’t stop you. But you have to get us out.”

  I looked up at the sky beyond the mouth of the chasm. Earth was moving away, faster than the speed at which it had arrived. More boulders fell.

  “Jade,” I begged. “Please, just say the word. Any word.”

  She sobbed a helpless, tearless cry of pain, and nodded.

  Her mouth fought to speak the word, and I held tight to her wrists again, which no longer burned me. The pain I had felt was ebbing now, and I hoped desperately that she, too, might survive this.

  She tried to speak.

  “Come on,” I said. “Just one word. Take us anywhere. Anywhere you want to be that isn’t inside this mountain.”

  Her mouth moved again, her face a mask of pain. And then, at long last, as the mountain finally began to fall into itself around us, she said the word that would take us from this place.

  “Earth.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  It’s been a very long time since Jade brought us back to my home on that terrible day, a day that was part horror, part victory. Mom had done just what I had asked, waited for me at the farm, watching for my return. It was only a day or so before she came across us, both of us battered, and Jade nearly dead. She took care of us both, asking few questions in those first painful days home.

  I told our story to Mom and Grandma, but all the while Jade stayed silent. I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to relive it all again, and telling the story was hard for me, too. When I reached the part about Erod’s death, Jade had to leave the room, silent tears running down her face. For years I would try to reassure her, telling her again and again that his death was not her fault, but I’m not sure the message ever got through. Not really.

  When the tale was done, Grandma asked about little Cait. She had grown particularly attached to her, and both of them were relieved that she was back home and in good hands now.

  On the subject of my father, they didn’t pry. Mom’s eyes had gotten misty during the telling of his death, and she moved to sit beside me, hugging me close to her.

  I took in her smell, her warmth, and I cried, too. I would never know which part of him, Dad, Jared, Father, had thrown himself over that cliff to save us all. The hope that I had clung to that I would get Dad back had been extinguished. He was gone now, and forever this time.

  Like me, Jade’s power faded with each day she spent on Earth, and it was only a handful of days before it was gone completely. I had wished that I would be able to see her work with stone again, something nice, something beautiful, like the little tornadoes she
used to summon with a handful of pebbles and her open mind. But in those first days on Earth she was so ill that her body couldn’t summon the power. Or maybe she just didn’t want it anymore. One day, when we had been home for three or four days, she was sitting up in bed, an empty food tray on the bedside table beside her. Already the color was beginning to return to her cheeks, and I felt a palpable relief. It was strange to see her in Earth clothes, the cotton knit pajamas clinging to her frail frame. She pulled out four tiny beads from beneath her pillow, holding them out to me for inspection.

  “This is all that’s left,” she said. She dropped them one by one into my open palm. “You take them.”

  It was the remaining gold from the four larger stones I had given to her to push Earth back into alignment. Now they were each no bigger than the size of a pea, whittled down into these four tiny pieces by the force of the spell that had saved us. I took them in that moment, not because I wanted them, but because the look on her face was so pained. She didn’t want the reminder of that last day on Aria. But that year at Christmas, I returned them to her. I drilled tiny holes through each one and threaded them together into a necklace. And Jade, amazed and delighted with this strange holiday we celebrated, had accepted them. To us, Christmas had always been about family, about showing thanks and appreciation for each other. And now, Jade was family, too, to all of us.

  Together, we would rebuild in this place, and the things she found odd—tractors, electricity, television—I would eventually teach her about. I think she felt comforted in knowing that her brother, Brendan, had lived out his life here in this very house. That he had been happy. I dug out the diary I had found in the attic, giving it to her, and she read it again and again, soaking in the words and the photos that were so alien to her. It was all she had left of the brother she had held so dear, and she cherished it always.

  Gradually, as Earth moved farther away from the Fold, it started to regain some of the health that had made it such a wondrous place before I was ever born. The rains continued, but over time the acid slowly abated, and clear water eventually washed the land clean. It was not a perfect place. Farm life was hard, and it was difficult to get our government rations with any regularity. Still, we all worked the land, and eventually the sprouts that began to grow were allowed to mature and ripen, and we had fresh food right from the ground again for the first time since Mom had been a young child.

  Jade and I rarely spoke of the way that both of our fathers had died. She would never know if the last look she had had from Almara had been the look of her father, sane and rational. And I would never know the same about my dad. It was a tragedy that we shared, the deaths of our fathers, in both the pain and the means of their demises. Just another difficult memory of our time spent together.

  Jade lived out her life alongside me, my mother and grandmother. We worked, we laughed, we lived. She never married, never wanted to. It seemed that all that mattered to her was maintaining the sense of peace that came from living on the farm. Her life had been so torturous up until that point. But there was no magic on Earth. This place removed both a joy and a threat to her. Without her own magic, she was a little lost for a while. But the lack of magic on Earth ensured her safety.

  Jade died when she had been on Earth for forty seven years. Of course, her true age was somewhere around two hundred fifty, though we didn’t know for sure. Sometimes, when I think about her, it comforts me to know that her last years were happy ones.

  In her passing, something became mine that wasn’t before. The Kinstone. I tried to use it only once, soon after Mom’s death. Grandma had, of course, died years before, and now that I was alone on the farm it occurred to me that I might head back to the Fold, back to find another adventure.

  But the time and distance that had passed since our final days on Aria were too great for the stone to work. I imagined myself on Earth, it hurtling away from the Fold like a stone in a slingshot. Maybe there would never be another chance. Maybe the opportunity to go back had simply passed us by.

  Over the years that have passed since Jade left us, I have long pondered the events during those difficult years. I am still amazed by the power that I found in the Fold, one that was meant just for me and no other. The staff, of course, was lost in the rubble of Mount Neri, but I’ve long wondered what might have been had I managed to hold onto it for the crossing back to Earth. Probably nothing. Probably it would have been as dead of magic as the Kinstone had become.

  My heart did remain strong, though. The healing I had found on Aerit with Kiron had been enough to last all the way back to home, and I remain as healthy as I’ve ever been.

  Now, I live alone on the farm. I still work it, just enough to keep me fed and the house in order. Some people have come back to this area, and I have neighbors for the first time in this lost, lonely place. Sometimes I see children running in the fields north of the house, and I remember what it was like to feel so young. Mostly, though, childhood was lost on me. Mine had always been difficult, but I took joy in watching them enjoy what I never could.

  I have been alone here for a long time. The magic of Kiron’s brew, of Jade’s stones, of traveling through the Fold, itself, have hung on in more ways than I expected. Three weeks from now I will celebrate my one hundred and fifty sixth birthday. I don’t know for sure why I have lived this long, not really. I don’t know when I will die. Or if I will die.

  So I wait. Sometimes I sit up in the attic and stare through the tiny window, the only place where light makes it into that dark, creaking space. I can see the stars out that window, and, as my mother once did, now I am the one to watch for travelers. I don’t know if I will ever meet anyone from the Fold again. Perhaps they will land one day in my field. Perhaps not. But watching the stars out of that window reminds me of those vital days from my youth.

  So I don’t give up. I keep my eyes open and upon the Kinstone, watching it as closely as I watch the fields. Waiting to see if it, someday, will alight once more.

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