The Uncharted Series Omnibus

by Keely Brooke Keith

  Her eyes cleared. She looked up at him and tugged his hand an inch closer. “How long did it take?”

  “Hm?”

  “After they attacked your family… and your mother died…” She looked at his hand then back at his face. “How long did it take until you felt safe again?”

  Speaking of her pain did not bother him, but he was not prepared to speak of his own. He shifted in the chair but made sure not to pull his hand away. “That’s probably a better question for my sisters. I think girls are affected differently from boys.”

  Her eyes widened a degree. “Did my question offend you?”

  “No.” He thought of her question again. “I don’t remember feeling unsafe after the attack, only angry. I was twelve years old—too young to lose a mother, but old enough to know what should’ve happened. And I wasn’t injured—physically—as you were.”

  “It must have been painful nonetheless.” Her finely arched brows pulled together and she looked like she was deep in thought. “I just want to know how long this nightmare will last.”

  “I can’t answer that, Mandy. I’m sorry—I wish I could. I want you to feel safe. More than that, I want to keep you safe. But as long as Felix and Harvey are alive, you just have to trust we are doing everything we can to protect you. I’m here and you are safe now.”

  The unreadable expression returned to her face and she stared at their hands. Relieved her questions about his experience appeared to be over, he relaxed again. He watched her eyes as she gazed at their joined hands. Even if there was nothing more between them, he was honored to have her trust.

  After a moment, her lips curved at some thought and she looked up at him. “Do you remember when we were children and my tabby cat had kittens… and Lydia took the little orange one home?”

  He instantly recalled his least favorite of Lydia’s many childhood pets. He raised an eyebrow. “I hated that cat.”

  “I believe the feeling was mutual.” Mandy grinned and the light hit her eyes.

  He nodded. “It would jump on my shoulders when I walked into the barn and scare me to death.” He remembered the cat’s needle-sharp claws. “And it only felt the need to attack me—never Father or the girls.”

  “Lydia and I were so amused by that.” Mandy turned his hand over while she spoke. He held it open and watched her. With one finger she traced the scar on his palm. Her thin finger was not as wide as the thick scar. “Then one day that poor cat went missing.” She looked him in the eye.

  “I have no idea what happened to that cat.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.” Levi gave a deadpan expression that matched his tone, but all he could think of was the sensation of her touch along the scar.

  Roseanna walked into the room, snapping his attention away from Mandy. “Dinner is ready,” she announced as she glanced at their joined hands. Levi let go and Roseanna smiled as she walked back to the kitchen, humming.

  * * *

  After completing the prescribed weeklong bed rest, Mandy was anxious to get out of the house. But with the looming possibility of her attackers returning, her father had ordered her to go no farther than the barn. He agreed if she locked the door—and went to and from the barn only with an escort—she could spend her days in her workshop without guard. And so for four straight weeks, Mandy spent every day alone in her workshop.

  The days began to blur from one into another. The weather was the same every day: warm but not stifling. Somehow she looked away from her tools and the wood and glanced out the window at the same time every day. The clouds seemed to take the same shapes every day, making her believe the clouds that passed the day before were passing by again. She often forgot the day of the week and what she had eaten for breakfast.

  Mandy walked into her workshop determined this day would be different. “It’s Tuesday,” she said aloud as she slid the bolt of the lock just as Levi had taught her when he installed it weeks before. After setting her dinner pail on a shelf near the door, she looped her hair in a tight swirl behind her head and impaled the bun with the piece of sharpened dowel she kept on her workbench.

  A generous flow of creative energy fueled her efforts throughout the day. Time escaped her notice—save for a swath of sunlight near the window that moved across the floor as the day elapsed. After carving out the front piece of a violin body, she gouged and shaped the wood, continually checking its grain and tone. Late in the afternoon, she completed the center strip and the back of the instrument body. Then she took the pieces to the loft window and laid them on the wide ledge to dry. The sun was low and the wood required more time in the sunlight before she would work with it again, so she took a dustpan and straw hand broom and cleaned the scattered chips and shavings from the surface of her workbench.

  Dusk changed the light in the workshop and the crickets began their song. Before the attack, a hollow lonely feeling would overtake her as soon as the sun set. But now her emptiness had neither a distinct daily beginning nor a sure fix. Her fear was now so constant it had become a companion in itself, yet her boredom had driven her away from her family’s home and out to her workshop. She wished she could walk into the village, not for intrigue but for companionship. The desire to forgo the shame of having her secret exposed kept her resigned to a life alone. She could not sit in the house all day, nor walk to the village alone, nor marry and have a family of her own. It was work or sleep—but always alone.

  The fading light now simply meant it was time to clean up and wait for her brother or father to come up to the loft and knock on her door. One of them would walk her to the house as they did every night. If it was her father, he would nervously shift his eyes from side to side, in fear Felix or Harvey might appear as he hurried his daughter to the house; if it was her brother, he would strut—not with pride but with fury—in hope the attackers would return on his watch so he could unleash his revenge on them.

  She sighed at the thought and turned to clap the full dustpan out the window. The wood shavings swirled and floated on the wind as they scattered across the pasture below. The freshly carved instrument pieces on the window ledge caught her eye. They made her think of the empty space she intentionally created for the inside of each instrument. The shaping of the wood created resonance and determined the instrument’s timbre. No matter how beautiful the surface, without emptiness there would be no quality to the instrument’s tone. It made her want to play a song. She walked through her workshop and opened the cracked leather case of her favorite violin. A family heirloom, it was the only surviving instrument brought to the Land by the founders seven generations before her. The old violin did not possess the clarity and brilliance of the new wood instruments, but it was the sound of her musical heritage.

  She plucked each string and adjusted the tuning, then she set the violin beneath her chin and raised the bow. Her fingers danced effortlessly on the fingerboard as she drew the bow across the strings. The notes flowed freely from the darkness of the instrument’s hollow body; as she thought of the empty space inside the violin, she felt the music resonate in the cavern of her heart.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the notes pouring from the sound holes, which were cut precisely to ensure the right volume of air was retained in the instrument to create the resonance. There was an aching hollow inside her heart too, and her past efforts to fill it had left no room for resonance. Maybe that was the purpose of her emptiness: resonance—but not quality of sound but quality of spirit.

  She let the last note ring out. Levi had been right—she was healing. But there was more to her heartache than the nightmare she had gone through. The healing she needed would not simply close the wound but would shape her to pour out the life she was created for.

  Mandy returned the instrument to its case and carefully latched it closed. She thought of her grandfather every time she played the old instrument. When the antique violin had cracked and needed repairs, her grandfather had been determined to build her a new one. Together they had
spent every afternoon for an entire winter in his woodshop dissecting the decrepit instrument and replicating its parts. They made a new violin, but it lacked timbre. Though she cherished the old violin out of sentiment, she had tried again and again to make a violin with a sound close to the heirloom instrument. Finally—mere days after her grandfather’s death—she had discovered the unparalleled sound of the gray leaf tree’s wood.

  In keeping with the tradition of the Land, her grandfather had written notes of his instrument repair procedures in the same way all knowledge was printed and preserved for future generations. Mandy realized that even though her new wood instruments were celebrated throughout the Land, she had yet to document her work as a luthier. With a fresh sense of mortality, she decided it was time to detail the secrets of her instrument making.

  She walked to a shelf and pulled out a dust-covered stack of paper, then she carried it to her workbench. Resigned to the notion that she would not have children of her own, she began drafting instructions for whomever would one day take interest in her craft. She started by sketching the shape of the individually carved pieces and began to make notes of dimension and wood treatment and a special note detailing the purpose of emptiness.

  “Mandy?” Everett knocked twice when he called her name from the other side of the door. She grinned at the familiar voice and laid her pencil on the paper. She went to the door and slid the lock out of the frame.

  Her brother’s hair was greased back with a day’s worth of sweat, and he smelled like the fields. She appreciated that he spent his days happily working the farm he would one day inherit and understood his love for the animals was comparable to her love for the instruments. Still, she crinkled her nose at him as she stepped back to the workbench to gather her papers.

  Everett reached an arm around her and plucked the top paper from her hand. “Nice sketch. You’re a bit young to journal your life’s work, aren’t you?”

  “Age has little to do with it. Lydia writes every detail of her work, and she often suggests I begin documenting mine.” Mandy snatched the paper and for a moment felt like she and her brother were children again. “Shouldn’t you be writing about sheep breeding and whatnot?” She smiled but Everett did not smile back.

  He leaned a palm on the corner of the workbench and hovered over her. He stared at the sketch for a moment and spoke with a low voice. “You thought you were going to die, didn’t you?”

  “Why would you ask that?” She noticed his serious demeanor and realized she had misjudged her brother’s playfulness. She glanced through the window at the pasture beyond as she remembered the attack. “Yes… I did… I still do.”

  “Is that why you are writing this?” He motioned to the pages. “Do you think they will come back and kill you?”

  “We will all die one day—some sooner than others.” She pointed to the lock on her workshop door. “I believe you all have made it clear that my day is probably soon.”

  “It’s possible Felix and Harvey will come back, but we are determined to protect you.” Everett sighed and put his hand on her shoulder. “I want you to feel safe.”

  “Levi said the same thing. You all want me to feel safe but to live like I am in danger.” She turned to the workbench and gathered the papers. After tapping them to straighten the stack, she looked up at him. The changes in his maturity and manner left nothing of the little brother she knew from childhood. His set jaw was covered in dark stubble; the whiskers diminished his last traces of youth and added to his new ferocity. Through the ordeal, Everett had earned her respect and her dependence. “I appreciate your effort, but this constant guarding doesn’t make me feel safe—it just reminds me of the horror I lived through and the possibility it may occur again. And yet, despite what happened, I want to carry on. I just don’t know how. I spend my days achingly alone and yet when you all hover about to guard me, I feel as trapped as I did in that wagon. I have been home for over a month. My body has healed but—in my mind—it’s not over. I’m still trapped and it’s only because of these restrictions. I just want this to end. It’s not natural for me to be fearful, and I hate it. And I know it won’t end until I can walk outside my door without a guard. If you all won’t let me move on, I will have to do it myself.”

  Everett’s brow creased in the center. “It may not be normal for you to live in fear, but since the danger is real, the fear is necessary—it will help us keep you safe. As far as what you endured—you can’t skip the healing process just because you’re a strong-willed person. The medicine from the gray leaf tree may speed an injury’s healing, but you were injured in a deeper sense. You can’t rush that kind of healing.”

  “I don’t feel like I’m rushing anything. I don’t like to dwell on painful things—I like to get over them. I know parts of this will always be with me and there were parts of me that needed to change, but I understand those things now and I’m ready to heal and move on. I just don’t know how I’ll live if I’m not even allowed to go outside on my own.”

  Everett stepped to the door. His expression lightened and he raised a finger. “Then perhaps you need to linger in the healing process but don’t dwell on the hurt. That—I’m told—will only lead to bitterness. But you must submit to our protection.”

  Exasperated, she chuckled at her brother. “You no longer talk like a nineteen-year-old. How did you become so wise?”

  “I spent nineteen years listening to you.”

  “Flattering words, but I hardly agree.”

  Everett smirked and instantly seemed young again. He opened the door. “Very well then—how would you advise me if I were hurt and the possibility remained that I could be hurt again, but I wanted to—needed to—carry on?”

  Mandy stood at the threshold of the door to her workshop and thought of the hollow feeling inside her heart and the resonant space inside her instruments. “I suppose I would tell you to linger in the healing process but don’t dwell on the hurt.” She smiled at Everett then stepped out the door. “But I cannot promise I’ll remain under lock and guard much longer.”

  Chapter Nine

  Levi turned a handle, decreasing the shower’s flow until it stopped dripping. He stepped over the tub’s edge and toweled off. As he dressed, he looked back at the perforated metal spout above the bathtub in his nearly completed home. Connor had been right—the controlled release of water from an elevated rain tank made an excellent alternative to filling a bathtub, though it would be far less pleasant in winter unless Levi lit a fire beneath the tank outside. He began to contemplate the idea of heating the tank and imagined what he could build to make that possible.

  The silence of his empty house was broken by the muffled sound of voices outside—then a knock at his door. He wiped the towel over his wet face as he left the bathroom and walked to the front door.

  Everett was standing with his toes at the threshold, grinning. “Would you like company while you work in your house today?”

  Levi saw movement at the bottom of the porch steps and tilted his head to look past Everett. Mandy was standing by the bottom step with her arms crossed firmly in front of her. She wore a pale blue dress that made the color of her hair look like fire.

  “Father and I have to ride out to the western pastures today, and Mandy has grown weary of remaining locked away.” Everett glanced at his sister then looked back at Levi. “Her wandering from the house to the barn makes our mother nervous, so our father told me to bring her here.”

  Levi sympathized with a grown woman frustrated by constant supervision, but the threat of danger that loomed made him not only understand her father’s caution but also ready to enforce the limits that had been placed on her life. He stepped back and held the door open as he looked at her. “Of course. Come in.”

  Everett turned to Mandy and motioned with his hand for her to go inside. “Enjoy your day, sister.”

  She rolled her eyes as she passed Everett and walked into the unfinished house. Their behavior reminded Levi of the siblings’
childhood squabbles. Everett jumped down from the porch and was already halfway to the road when Levi closed the door.

  She stepped into the front room then turned to him. “I apologize for the disruption to your day. I know you’ve been working hard to finish your house. I promise not to get in the way. Personally, I believe this constant chaperoning is unnecessary, but Father insists on keeping me under guard. I welcomed it at first, but some days I can’t bear the thought of being indoors another moment.”

  He was more than willing to have her with him—he was delighted—but he kept that to himself. “Your father’s right. You can’t allow a few weeks of peace to lull you into forgetting about the possibility that Felix and—”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten! Believe me, fear has become my constant companion. Everett was right though: I have started going out by myself, and it’s making my parents afraid. I miss my freedom.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  She looked out the window. “I miss walking to the village whenever I wanted and visiting people and spending Saturdays at the market. Even when I do see anyone besides my family, they act like I’m a leper… as if tragedy is contagious.” She looked back at him. “Except you.”

  He remembered how people acted around him the first few months after his mother was killed. He understood what she was going through—at least in that regard—but he did not know how to tell her. A drop of water rolled down his face from his wet hair, and he dabbed at it with the towel. “You are welcome here any time.”

  “Thank you.” She grinned slightly then walked to the fireplace and touched the stone mantel. As she wandered around the empty front room examining his work, her hand trailed over the chair rail along the wall. “This is beautiful. You aren’t just building a house here, you’re crafting something special.”