“It is what it is,” Gruffy said.
That seemed like a very poor answer, but top priority was to get Urath some shade, so I gave Azure City one long look, then turned and followed them. I’d come back here.
We got scared looks from everyone we passed. People scurried out of our way, slammed their doors. The enormous golden gates at the city’s outer wall were open. The guards on top of the wall scrambled to the edge and gaped down from their perch. They didn’t know what to do about Urath. If a grimrock had been trying to enter the city from outside, I was sure they’d have closed the gates, but since he was already inside—and apparently leaving—they just stood there and let him walk out.
Outside the city lay a desert. Sort of. The sand only stretched for about a hundred feet before changing to a lush, grassy pasture speckled with trees.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, jogging the length of the sandy stretch. There was actually a line between the desert and the pasture. I stopped, one foot on sand, one on grass. On one side, it was hot and bright. On the other, cool and moist. I could feel each half on each side of my face.
“The desert just ends,” I said.
“Yes,” Gruffy replied.
“How can it do that?”
“It has always been this way.”
“Always? You live here?”
“No, Doolivanti. We arrived earlier today for the first time, looking for the princess.”
I screwed up my lips to keep from laughing. “So it has always been this way as of a few hours ago?”
Gruffy looked at me like he didn’t understand the question.
“Always,” I tried to clarify. “You said always. But you’ve only been here a few hours. How is that always?”
“I feel you are somehow disappointed, Doolivanti,” Gruffy said.
“I just want to know why there’s a line in the sand here. Literally!”
“Because it has always been this way.”
“Always? How do you know?”
“It was that way ever since we have been here,” he said.
I opened my mouth to retort, but I stopped. I couldn’t really make him know something he didn’t. And I obviously couldn’t make him curious about it.
“Never mind,” I said.
“Follow me. Follow me.” Pip flapped overhead. “Squeak knows a ravine that will work for Urath. Will work for Urath.”
We started walking, and I moved over to Ripple, who seemed to enjoy the pasture and forest much more than the desert. I had some questions for her, too.
She looked up at me with that calm expression. “Milady Lorelei.”
“I caught you looking at me,” I said.
“Milady?” she asked.
“When I came back. You saw me, but you didn’t say anything. Then when I walked out into the open, you exclaimed my name as though you were surprised.”
She paused, then said. “Indeed, milady. Twas that not what you wished?”
“What I wished?”
“Didst thou not wish to give surprise to the Ink King? Prithee, I didst as I thought thou wouldst wish. Thy return was my most fervent desire, and I didst quell mine own excitement ’til all had viewed thee, lest I give away thy presence to our foe.”
I frowned. I was a little disappointed that that actually made sense. But …
“So you were trying to keep me hidden until I chose to show myself?”
“Of course, milady.”
“Um, okay.” I could have sworn she had looked at me as if to say: there she is, right on time. But maybe I was wrong. It had all been very fast. I changed the subject.
“So does the Ink King live in Azure City?” I asked.
“I think not,” Ripple said.
“Likely the fiend resides in the Eternal Sea,” Gruffy interjected, swooping down and landing next to us. Squeak rode on top of the griffon’s head. Pip had ranged far in front of the group, perhaps looking for the ravine.
“Our fine griffon dost speak truth. He shall not easily give up the Eternal Sea.”
“And that’s where we’re going,” I said. “If my family is in Veloran, they’ll be where the Ink King is. Right?”
“Of course,” Gruffy said. “We take Urath to a safe place, then to the Eternal Sea.”
“All right then,” I said.
We walked until the sun began setting, and I marveled at the landscape. Lush grass and bright sun. It was warm like the best days of summer. The pretty little trees looked like they had been made just to make you feel happy, and the path curved toward the horizon like a smile.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Greenleave,” Gruffy said.
“It’s so different than Azure City.”
“Twas made by the Leaf Laugher.”
Another Doolivanti, I thought. “And he made all this?”
“She did. Yes, of course.”
“She. Sorry. Okay,” I said. “And I can do this, too?” I rubbed my chest in memory of the burning. I wondered if other Doolivantis had similar pain when they used their powers.
“Not this,” Gruffy said.
“What? Why not this?”
Gruffy looked at me as though he didn’t understand. “Well, because you are not the Leaf Laugher, of course.”
More mental notes: Doolivantis expressed in different ways. “So the Sand Spinner couldn’t make Greenleave?” I asked.
“He would not want to. He is the master of sand.”
“Right. But if he wanted to, he could.”
“He would not.”
“But he could.”
“How could one do that which one would not do?” Gruffy said, looking at me with a frown.
“I…” When he said it like that, it did sound confusing. “Never mind,” I said.
“Here we are. Here we are,” Pip squawked.
Before us stretched a deep, gray ravine. The granite shone with moisture and the bottom was so deep it disappeared into darkness.
Urath slammed his fists happily on the ground and, without a word to any of us, ran down into the growing shadows without a backward glance.
“Hey!” I called after him, then turned to Gruffy. “He didn’t even say good-bye.”
“You got a grimrock to not squash us. Not squash us. Be glad. Be glad,” Pip answered.
“Well, I sure hope there’s a lot of food down there,” I said. “He’s going to go through it in a hurry.”
Pip chuckled, which sounded like pieces of chalk clinking together.
My stomach grumbled, and I thought it sure would be great to have one of my grimrock-devoured peanut butter and jelly sandwiches right about now.
We found a place to sleep a short distance away by a gurgling brook. Gruffy was pretty good at picking a campsite, I had to admit. And he collected firewood faster than anyone I’d ever met. He was really good at spotting it. His eyes were amazing. Pip found a whole tree of walnuts, and that’s what we had for dinner.
The grass was so soft that I was looking forward to spending the night out under the stars. Pip found a lone tree and landed on one of its branches. He inspected it thoroughly, as though there might be too many knots or something, then settled down. Ripple went to the brook. She gurgled back to it as she put her toes in, breathed a long sigh, then laid down underneath the water. Her living hair sparkled with little stars.
I watched that for a minute. She didn’t come up for a breath. So cool.
I walked away from the fire into the dark and looked up at the strange night sky. Long white streaks stretched in parallel lines from one side of the sky to the other. They weren’t soft and cloudy like the Milky Way; they were more like the trails of a jet plane. Except enormous. And glowing. At night. There was nothing else up there. No moon, no stars, nothing except those streaks.
No, wait. I squinted at a section close to the treetops and I thought I could see something round behind the streaks. It was a moon, maybe, but it was hard to be sure. I got tired of squinting and looked away. My eyes we
re then drawn to the only other thing in the sky: a burning red line that hung just above the horizon. It was ragged and angry, like someone had ripped open the sky. I shivered.
“Psst.”
I spun around. Behind me, shielded from the firelight by a tall boulder, stood a boy my own age. His red hair was shaved close on the sides, with a tangled twist on top. Prominent freckles spotted his face.
“You scared me!” I said. He looked familiar. I’d seen him somewhere before.
“Come here,” he whispered.
I looked back toward Gruffy, far away. He wasn’t looking this way—
“Don’t do that,” the boy commanded, shaking his head. He motioned me behind the boulder, away from the light.
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“’Course you do. Come here.”
“Why?”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “’Cause you don’t know what you’re doing, and I can help you.”
“Who are you?”
“Do you know where you are?” He answered my question with a question.
“Um,” I said. “Veloran.”
He shook his head. “That’s what the animals call it. This is the Wishing World.”
“The Wishing World?” That’s what Mr. Schmindly had called it, back at my house. I wondered if all Doolivantis called it the Wishing World.
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I put my hands on my hips. “So?” Where had I seen this kid? He wasn’t in my class at my old school or in my new one near Auntie Carrie and Uncle Jone’s house.
“So you gotta do certain things first.” He paused, motioned me into the shadows again. “Come here and I’ll tell you how it works.”
I hesitated a moment, then joined him behind the boulder, just at the edge of the light.
“You think you’re in a dream?” he asked, his voice quieter.
“Pretty sure I’m not,” I said.
“Well, you aren’t. This is a different place, as real as Earth. More real, even.”
“Okay.”
“You can die here, you know,” he said darkly.
I glanced over my shoulder. My friends were far away, and none of them were watching me. Gruffy poked at the fire with a stick clutched in his talon. Pip’s head was tucked under his wing. Squeak had laid down on a rock near the fire and looked asleep. Ripple was still beneath the water. I couldn’t even see her from here.
“Tell me who you are,” I said.
“I’m Jimmy.”
It came to me then. He had been at my school, my old school. I’d seen him at that horrible spelling bee where I’d botched the word “leviathan” in front of everyone. When I had walked back from the line of contestants at the front of the gymnasium, this boy had been last in the line. He had grinned as though my humiliation was his success.
“You were at that spelling bee where I lost.”
He paused. “Right,” he said in a monotone. “The spelling bee where you lost.”
I didn’t much like him then. And I didn’t much like him now. “Gruffy says this is Veloran,” I said.
“The griffon,” he said, his voice flat, “doesn’t know anything.”
I frowned, and he continued. “Seriously. He’s a paper cutout. A video game character. The griffon doesn’t have a soul. He doesn’t care who you are, where you are. Ask him, you’ll see. Or the bird or the mouse.” He paused, pressed his lips together. “Or the princess. They don’t matter.”
I didn’t say anything.
He sighed. “Don’t you get it? The Wishing World gives you whatever you want.”
“Like a dream.”
“Better than a dream. What dream gives you everything you want?”
“Okay.” I closed my eyes and concentrated. “I just wished for what I wanted. And nothing happened.”
His face went stony. “Don’t make fun of me.”
“I just think you’re lying.”
“I’m not. You can have what you want, but you have to see it first.”
“See it?” I asked.
“Do you want your parents or don’t you?”
Cold shivered up my back and I stepped away from him. “How do you know I’m looking for my parents?”
“Because…” He paused, let out a frustrated growl. “Because of course you are. Aren’t you? You’re the girl who lost her parents. On the news, right?”
I paused. “Okay, yes.”
“Okay, then. You want to find them?”
“I think the Ink King has them,” I said.
He paused. “Then you so need my help. The Ink King is the most powerful Doolivanti in the Wishing World.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted anything from this boy, but he did seem to know a lot.
“Okay then,” I said.
“So you want your parents. That’s your wish, right? So go to the Starfield. Everyone sees their wish there. You look down into it, and it shows you what you want and how to get it. That’s the way the Wishing World knows what to do for you, and it’ll help you get to the Ink King if that’s who has your parents. And it’ll show you how to beat him.”
“Starfield? Where is it?”
“Over there.” He pointed.
I looked, but couldn’t see anything except the white streaks overhead and the red rip in the sky. I looked back at Jimmy. “You’re telling me that the one place I need is right next to where we camped?”
“That’s the way the Wishing World works.” He smiled smugly.
“So, you went to the Starfield?”
He was silent a moment, then said, “Of course.”
“What did you want?”
He backed into the shadows behind the boulder. All I could see was his freckled nose. “Look, I’m just trying to help you, but you don’t seem to care. I’m not going to waste any more time on you. If you want the Wishing World to work for you, you’ll go to the Starfield.”
Then he was gone.
I thought about chasing him, but didn’t. Instead, I went back to the fire. Gruffy was preening, running long feathers through his beak.
Jimmy was from Earth, like me. How many Earth children were in Veloran?
“Gruffy,” I said.
He stopped and looked up at me.
“How many others like me are in Veloran?” I asked. “Other Doolivantis? Are there a lot?”
“Doolivantis are rare.”
“How many?”
“Am I to know?”
I let out a little breath and looked up at the sky, then I tried a different question. “What are the white stripes in front of the moon?”
“The sky,” Gruffy said simply. “They are always there, though the moons are ever changing.”
“Moons?”
“Indeed. Sometimes there is only one moon. Sometimes there are many.”
“How many?”
“Sometimes four. Sometimes they are red. Or white. Sometimes green or yellow. The blue moon has been here for several days.”
I could barely see the moon behind the white streaks, but it could be blue. Gruffy certainly had better eyes than I did. “How is that possible?”
He looked at me again like he had when I’d asked about the Azure City’s aqueducts and where the water came from. “Am I to know?”
“What about that red rip in the sky?” I asked.
He looked up at the red line. “That is new.”
“New? Aren’t you curious where it came from?”
“Am I to know?” He continued his feather work. I remembered Jimmy’s comment on my friends. Gruffy didn’t care, didn’t want to think about the reasons behind things.
“I suppose not,” I said.
I got up and walked to the edge of the clearing, back toward the boulder where I had met Jimmy, then farther in the direction he had pointed.
The grass gave way to a lake of black glass. Underneath the surface, stars winked. I touched it with the toe of my purple running shoe. It was hard as rock. The Starfield.
I stepped onto it an
d didn’t fall in. Wow!
I started walking, looking down. Some of the stars were large and others tiny, as though far away, deep beneath the surface. I kept going until I was in the middle and looked at the stars all around me. Under my feet!
I looked up at the white-striped sky, and then back down. Was this where the Wishing World kept its stars?
“Gruffy!” I called. “Look at this!”
Gruffy’s head came up. He was really far away now. I had been so fascinated by the Starfield I hadn’t even realized how far.
“Doolivanti?” he called.
“Did you see this? It’s like black glass with all the universe inside. It’s—”
I took a step toward him, but the ground beneath me leapt upward. A pillar of the starry black glass separated from the lake and shot straight up, taking me with it. The force pushed me flat on my belly. I struggled to my hands and knees. Above me, the flowing white lines of the sky came closer. I was moving as fast as a speeding car!
“Doolivanti!” Gruffy yelled from far below. He flapped fiercely toward me, but he shrank as the pillar rushed upward faster.
I sucked in a breath. The white streaks were almost upon me. The pillar was going to shove me into space!
“No!” I yelled. “Stop!”
The rising column of black stuttered, as though it had heard me, but continued upward.
I scratched a single word on the starry glass of the platform.
Stop.
The burn in my chest flared, so hot I gasped.
“I said stop!” I breathed. The column gave a whimper, then stopped just at the edge of the shimmering white streaks.
Wincing, I massaged my breastbone, stood and looked up. The white streaks were so close. I reached up and brushed a finger across them. Sparkles fizzed around my hand, tickling. I stepped to the edge of the column and looked down. The ground was so far away it made me dizzy.
“Doolivanti!” Gruffy called from a great distance below. He was just a speck. I was higher in the air than I’d ever been, even in an airplane.
“I’m okay!” I yelled, stepping back from the edge. “I’m okay!” I think.
The pillar shuddered again, as though it wanted to keep going up. “No!” I said. It gave another whimper, but didn’t do anything.
I looked up into the blackness of space, past the white streaks, which were like lines of snow blown over a mountain ridge. I could see the stars now, and they were shockingly close. I didn’t know how I could even breathe. Somehow, though, I knew that if I slipped past the barrier of the white streaks, that would be it for me.
The Wishing World Page 6