by J B Cantwell
“Oh,” she went on, “forgive me. I forget that the land dwellers are used to a little more light.”
She rose from the table and went to the window, a small deep hole around which the branches grew, as if someone had placed a square frame there once, preventing them from expanding into the space.
She turned back, raising her eyebrows.
“Drink,” she said. It wasn’t a command, but a suggestion, as if she were surprised I hadn’t already picked up my cup.
I looked down at it, half full of a clear liquid that looked like water. I wrapped my fingers around it and held it to my lips.
She turned away again, pursed her lips together and whistled. Almost immediately, a large, winged insect came to her outstretched hand, fluttering gracefully down until it perched there. She smiled at it, and I was relieved to see that there was no malice in her face.
I took a sip of the liquid in the cup and was instantly transported. It seemed that every wonderful thing I had ever tasted was contained within it. I felt simultaneously the warmth and comfort of hot chocolate in my mother’s room in the city and the strength and invigoration that had come from the abandoned stew in the forest. I quickly drained it, and found myself searching the bottom of the cup, wondering if its secret was contained beneath the leaves that wove together at the base. Gradually, the throbbing in my head abated.
The woman turned and brought the winged creature to the table, setting it carefully in the center of the stone. Then, blowing gently, she blanketed the animal with her breath and it came to life, slowly pulsating with soothing, orange light.
“Now then,” she said, her voice calm and dreamy. She stretched out her hand and ran the backs of her fingers down my cheek. “You are Aster.” Her eyes held mine, shining silver in the dim light.
I nodded. The fact that she knew my name didn’t surprise me, though I couldn’t figure out why.
She sat back and picked up her own cup, taking a delicate sip from the tip of the rim. For a flash I felt jealousy that she still had an entire cup full of the stuff. But then I realized that my stomach, which had felt hollow for days, now was comfortable and warm, as if I had just finished a satisfying meal.
“So he has brought you to me at long last,” she said, moving back to her side of the table.
“Who?” I asked.
“The White Brother,” she said, sitting. The branches beneath her creaked in the way that floorboards in an old house squeak. “You may know him as the Guard. Or the Great Cat. In some stories he is called Pahana.”
“So it is true,” I said.
“Some things are true,” she replied, tilting her head slightly. Behind her the wall was dotted with large, pink blossoms, their petals seemed to breathe in time with the glowing ember the insect had become.
“Who are you?” I asked. She seemed neither old nor young. Awful nor beautiful. Human nor alien. But she dazzled me.
“I am the Watcher,” she said, almost lazily.
“Oh,” I said. “What do you…watch?”
She smiled.
“I watch the worlds,” she said, “as they cycle around each other. I watch the men as they war. I keep the record. I hold the past. And I scout the path of the future.”
Her hair floated about her shoulders, almost as if she were underwater. Only the thin ringlet of vines perched on her head remained still.
“You are here to determine what will become of the next age.”
“The next age?” I asked.
“There is one whose efforts it is time to quell. One who disrupts the balance. Do you know of whom I speak?”
“The Corentin,” I said, sitting back against the ferns.
“Yes,” she breathed. “He was once a man. But as the imbalance grows, so too does his power. As you have seen, he uses it not for good, but instead for mayhem.” She stood from the table, gliding back over to the window, her long, sage robe billowing behind her. “There are some,” she went on, her gaze focusing on something in the distance, “who have the power to stop him. You are one. Your sister, another.”
“She’s not my sister,” I blurted.
“Not in blood, no,” she said. “But in soul, she is nothing other. Chance has a role in all that transpires in every corner of the universe. And by chance, you and Jade met and bonded.”
I stared at the table. She didn’t know then, didn’t understand.
“I see your eyes,” she went on, her back still turned to me. “You feel hope is lost for your sister. But you are here because, and only because, hope has been found. The connection you made cannot be broken. Not by war, or death, or Corentin. You two, together, have the best chance of any at achieving the balance once again.He has her in his grip, not for the first time.” She turned to face me. “But did you not see it when you were with her? Did you not see the flashes?” She raised her hand, gesturing at her face.
“I did see flashes,” I said. I hadn’t thought much about it, but pieces of Jade, the real Jade, had flickered across her face back in Riverstone, even when she had attacked me. “What does that mean?”
She sat across from me, stretched out her arm and began stroking the glowing insect. It shuddered with pleasure.
“It means that what you had hoped for is, in fact, true. Inside the shell that the Corentin controls, Jade remains.”
“But how can I help her now?” I asked. “I don’t know how. Nothing I’ve tried has worked.”
“Did she ever help you?” she asked.
“Help me?” I said, meeting her gaze. “Well, yeah.”
“In what way?”
I paused, thinking. Jade had helped me again and again, in more ways than I could even count. I went with the basics.
“She saved my life,” I said. Then added, “Twice.”
Her eyebrows raised high on her forehead.
“Well, then,” she said, “don’t you think it’s your turn to do the same?”
I sighed, frustrated.
“I keep trying to help her,” I said, trying not to whine. “But every time I do, she attacks me or does something crazy. What am I supposed to do?”
“Interesting question,” she said. She stood from the table and began pacing the room, her bare feet squishing into the mud floor with every step. “What is it, precisely, that needs to be done?”
I picked absently at the bits of vegetation growing from the cracks in the table.
“Well, obviously she needs to get rid of the Corentin’s hold on her. She needs to be released. But I already told you, I can’t do that. I’m no match for the Corentin. He’s just using her to try to get to me.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “The Corentin is awfully powerful.” She ran the tips of her fingers up the smooth moss that blanketed the walls. “If only there were some way to wrest his power from him.” She glanced back, looking as if she thought she were sly. But suddenly I was fuming.
“Yes,” I spat, standing up. “If only there was some way that I, a kid, could take on the most powerful sorcerer ever and set everything right.”
“Oh, child,” she said, gazing out the window again. “There are ways, you know, to weaken an opponent without facing him on the battlefield.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What do you suppose would happen if, someday, the Fold were to be leveled? What might happen if you were to succeed in Almara’s original quest?”
What would happen? I hadn’t ever really thought about how the change would come about.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess things would get better.”
“What sorts of things?”
I paused, thinking.
“Everything,” I finally said.
The lands would heal. The people would become normal again. The terror would stop. That was the theory, at least.
“But it won’t affect the Corentin,” I argued. “He’s too powerful. Yeah, the crops might grow on Earth again, and the wars might stop in the Triaden. But he would still have his hold on Jade
. He wouldn’t change.”
“Wouldn’t he?” she asked. “Is he not held, himself, by the same power that holds all of his victims?”
I sat back down in my chair, confused.
“Are you talking about saving the Corentin?”
She didn’t speak for a long moment.
“I do not know if there is any shred of humanity left in the man who became the Corentin,” she said. “Perhaps. But he was human once. And everyone, everyone is affected by the imbalance that has come to these lands. It could be that if you level the Fold, your young friend might slip through his fingers. Just as you have done.”
I had never considered coming at the problem in this way. Here, I had been focused on simply taking Jade, forcing her to come with me and then beating my message into her brain until he finally released her. But if the watcher was right, if I was able to weaken the Corentin, maybe no force would be necessary. Maybe the pieces of his empire would simply fall.
But as soon as I had the thought, my mind squashed it flat. I had no way of leveling the Fold. Not without Jade. Not without her gold.
“She has the gold,” I said. “In the castle. Along with tons of other stones, things he’s used to keep her. Things she wants.”
“Really?” she asked. “She has all of the gold?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“All in the entire Fold? The entire universe? Every flake of the stuff is in her possession now?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Obviously not the entire universe, but—”
“Can you think of nowhere you could go to get the gold you need?” she continued. “Is the Triaden truly the only place you have ever seen the substance?”
“No,” I said. “Where I come from, gold is easier to get than here.” I had seen gold before. On Earth. It wasn’t common, but some people still wore it. My fingers tangled together as I remembered the last time I had seen real gold, in a snarl of necklaces back in Grandma’s attic. “But I can’t get to it,” I concluded.
“Can’t you?” she said.
“It’s on Earth,” I said.
“Ah, Earth.” She gently rubbed the sides of her face with her fingertips. “Yes, Earth is full of gold, if the legends are true.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get to Earth.” It was an automatic response, and something I had come to believe. I had been trying for the better part of a year now to get back home. But no matter what I had done, it had remained an unattainable goal. In fact, aside from the time I had used one of Almara’s maps, I had never made it outside the Triaden. I had gotten used to the idea that home was a place I would probably never see again.
But I had learned how to make a link.
“And can you think of no friend, no enemy, from whom you might get the gold you need for the journey?”
Her words seemed to echo in my mind, punctuating through the fog that surrounded my thoughts. Slowly, her meaning emerged within me. We had been searching for gold, for the book, for Almara, but all this time I had seen getting home as the ultimate goal. It had never occurred to me that I could go home, and then return.
The solution hit me, hard.
There wasn’t enough gold in the Triaden to level the planets, not without Jade’s help. But there might be enough to send me back to Earth. Kiron had said it himself, that there might be enough for one link.
“It seems to me,” she said at long last, “that the missing pieces to this puzzle you are trapped in are lying all around you. You simply have not seen them until now.” She stood up from the table, gripping the staff, my staff, as she did so. It glimmered beneath her touch. “I think it might be time for us to open your eyes.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The staff hovered in midair before me. I was excited, buzzing like the insects that called this place home. The thought of making it back to my mother, to my own planet, had me bouncing like a five-year-old at a carnival. I tried to remember that I would be returning here, that coming back to fight was the whole point. But when I had that thought, my stomach twisted and gurgled.
I focused, instead, on my escape.
Because what I knew, and didn’t say, was that I could leave it all. I could leave all the war, the magic, the Corentin, and not look back. If I wanted to. If I decided to stay on Earth.
The Watcher held the bright, fluttering bug in the palm of her hand, gently blowing on its shell once more. Slowly, the glowing light within it went dim, and its wings sprang to life. She raised her hand up into the air and it flew away, as good as it ever was before meeting her. As if it had never been altered at all.
She watched it go, buzzing through the trees towards home.
“Touch the staff,” she said dreamily.
I looked at the staff, and where before I had been frightened of it, that it would possess me, control me, now my fear drained away. I grasped it.
But what I felt now, I didn’t expect.
My thoughts were jumbled, and instead of feeling the power coursing through me as I had before, I only felt confusion. Images flashed. Grandma’s farm, with the dead fields stretching for miles in every direction. Kiron and the men from Stonemore, sitting together in a group around a fire, plotting their battles. Jade, her face stretching and contorting, flickering between the face I knew and the twisted monster she had become.
“There,” said the Watcher from somewhere I couldn’t see. “Keep your mind there.”
But I didn’t want to. My mind moved on, switching from one scene to the next like a television set that only showed awful things. I saw Owyn stretched upon the floor, rubble all around. Erod, glowing bright, watching his village fall, the men turned to slaves. My father’s face, frightened and lost.
“Find her,” the Watcher whispered from nowhere.
I was becoming frightened. I could feel my palms beginning to sweat, and I wanted to release the staff, but it felt glued to my palm.
Then, suddenly, there she was. Standing outside the ravine in her long, rotten nightgown, twirling a fistful of rocks in the air with a simple look from those deep green eyes. The rocks rose up in a gentle spiral above her hand, and her long, white hair fluttered against her back in the morning breeze. Her face was held up toward the sky, and the sun blanketed her cheeks with the first warmth she had felt in two hundred years. She smiled, and it seemed that all the nightmares she had survived melted away.
Everything else vanished, fell away like bits of paper blowing in the breeze. She approached me, little and fragile and powerful all at once.
I felt the staff drop from my fingertips, easily, as if it had never been a struggle for me to let it go. The world around me materialized again, and I was back in the swamp.
The Watcher stood ten feet away, and turned towards me when the wood hit the mud.
“There, all along, has been the source of your power,” she said. She took several silent steps in my direction.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Jade is the source of my power?”
She smiled, shaking her head.
“When your mind went to the other scenes, the horrible things that you have experienced or thought of or wondered about, what did you feel?” she asked.
I was still reeling, the fear caused by seeing the things that I dreaded mixing with the moment of happiness at seeing Jade’s face, free and clear of possession. Then, as I thought of her master’s power, snaking through her body and mind and holding her fast, the moment of joy I had seen in her and felt within myself instantly vanished. I was cold.
“I felt helpless,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
“And yet, you were still able to grip the staff, could possibly wield it,” she said.
“I couldn’t let go of it,” I said. “It was like that before. At first I didn’t want to let go. But then, once I started seeing those things, I couldn’t.”
She nodded dreamily.
“The power had you,” she said.
The wood lay innocently in the mud, now lifeless without my
touch.
“I can’t control it,” I said quietly. “It wants to control me.”
“The power wants nothing,” she said, resuming her quiet pacing. “It is only what you have within you, latching onto the bits of dust these worlds are made of, swirling together with your being to create your particular shade of magic. The power is you. And the part of you that fears and hates and loathes, that part wants to grasp it, to never let it go, that part wants to fight.”
“But it feels wrong,” I argued. “If that’s what having magic is, then I don’t want it. I don’t want to be obsessed with those horrible things. I want those things to go away and never be true again.” I stepped away from the staff, suddenly frightened of it again.
“And why are you frightened?” she asked, reading my thoughts out loud.
I wanted to hide, to go back into that tiny cottage and disappear.
“I don’t want it to control me,” I said. “To do what it’s done to everybody else.”
“But there was a moment when it did not,” she said. “A moment when releasing the wood was as easy as taking a breath. What did you feel in that moment?”
I had seen Jade as I had known her before, a little girl. Despite the torture she had just come from, despite the centuries of pain she had endured, she still had that little flash of joy. She was still fighting,
“Hope,” the Watcher answered for me. She walked slowly around me in a wide circle, concentrating on her earth-covered feet as they stepped carefully through the mud. “Power comes to each in different ways. Some find it in the manipulation of the elements. Some, in the brewing of potions and medicines. Others are filled with it as a glass is filled with water. As Pahana. As the Blackburn. But few find it in the way that you do, with such purity. You could walk from here with that staff and use it, no matter your mind or focus. It has powers innate to it that most could harness, even if in the most basic way.”
She bent over and picked up the staff. Instantly, it came to life in her hands, sparking and vibrating.
“That is something most anyone could do. But when you bring your hope to the staff, when you pour your wish and intention into it, you can wield a power that is much greater than another could.”