The Timekeeper's Moon Read online

  CHAPTER 20

  Dog Moon, First Quarter Spilled

  Ariel lay blinking at eight knobby brown legs weaving slowly through the dew-covered grass. Only gradually did sleep evaporate from her, leaving the awareness that she was watching one too many grazing horses.

  Alarmed, she sat up. The usual flower blossoms scattered around her, unnoticed.

  “Shh. Don’t spook him.” Scarl’s whisper stopped the cry in her throat. Sienna was still sleeping nearby, but beyond their fire’s dead ashes, the Finder lay propped on one elbow in the gray predawn light.

  He added, “You see him, then, yes?”

  Ariel looked back and recognized the second horse, smaller and darker than ham-boned old Willow. They hadn’t seen Orion for more than a year, not since he’d run off from a poor hitching near Tree-Singer Abbey. Scarl still spoke fondly of his first horse now and again, and as the previous winter had approached he’d repeatedly tried to find him. He’d concluded that Orion either was long gone or had fallen prey to a mountain lion. Now here he was, munching grass and snuffling, muzzle to muzzle, with Willow.

  “He found us?” she breathed. “After all this time?”

  “I’m not… sure about that,” Scarl said, his whisper contorted.

  Soon Ariel saw why. At first, Orion looked as sturdy and sleek as she remembered. But as the light rose and the horses strayed farther apart, Orion dulled and became indistinct, his legs lost in waving grass stems, as if he might only be a trick of morning mist.

  “Is he a ghost?” she asked. The idea that Misha may have taken a mount seemed preferable to other conclusions, but it couldn’t prevent her from stealing a quick glance at her arm. No blood.

  “One way to find out, I guess.” Scarl stood. “Orion.”

  Both horses threw up their heads at his voice. Orion’s nostrils flared, and he snorted, uncertain. The breeze lifted his mane. He nickered and stepped toward Scarl. The sound or motion broke some spell. Between one footfall and the next, he was gone.

  Scarl exclaimed, glanced to Ariel for confirmation, and hurried toward the remaining horse.

  Ariel rose to follow. “Be careful!” She feared one or both of them might cross a misty threshold and disappear, too.

  They found no such passage, only Willow, who rubbed his face against Scarl in greeting.

  “Like my cap,” Scarl said. “Here one moment, and the next just a memory again.”

  “Your cap’s gone now, too?”

  “Has been for a couple of days.”

  Ariel checked for hoofprints, but the soft earth was so pocked it was impossible to tell if one horse or two had marked it. When she looked up, Scarl was striding back toward their beds.

  “Good morning,” said Sienna, emerging from her blanket. “What’s going on?”

  To Ariel’s delight, Scarl ignored and stepped past her.

  “Horse stuff,” Ariel told Sienna. “Aren’t you going to build a fire for breakfast?”

  Sienna’s tentative smile slipped. “Of course.”

  Scarl lifted a bridle from the tree branch where he’d draped it last night. He inspected it. By the time Ariel reached him, he’d replaced it and folded his arms to await her.

  She fingered the leather. It looked an awful lot like a bridle she’d once been tied up with.

  “I hope I can make that fit Willow,” Scarl growled. “Since Willow’s is no longer here.”

  “It can’t be Orion’s!”

  “You tell me, then! Whose is it? It’s too small for Willow’s great lunking head!”

  Startled by his tone, she met his eyes.

  He looked away. “Forgive me. It’s easier for me to be angry than… the alternatives. If Misha’s pulling pranks, I wish you’d get him to stop. It’s too uncanny for me.”

  “I don’t think it’s Misha.” Ariel rubbed the scar on her arm. “It’s more like we’re crossing our own path, somehow finding old tracks.” That such tracks could be objects and creatures, however, particularly since they’d never come this way before, was almost too frightening to consider. What if their old enemy, Elbert, appeared next?

  Scarl exhaled at length. “Leave it to you, Farwalker. Can I take another look at your map?”

  She obliged him, and he sat with it next to the fire that Sienna already had dancing.

  Sienna welcomed him, and him alone, with a smile and an empty cup. “Here, I’ll have tea for you shortly,” she said. “I’m boiling oats with dried berries. Sound good?”

  Absently Scarl agreed.

  Ariel leaned in to regard the map with him, recognizing something they shared that Sienna could not. Their postures recalled her dream in which she’d peeked over his shoulder, not at the map but into his glass and the flame licking there. She’d never mentioned that particular nightmare to Scarl.

  “I don’t see how we could be going backward or over ground we’ve trodden before,” he said. “It’s crazy to even consider. But there are plenty of lines here that curl back on themselves. I wish I understood this thing. It vexes me more every day.”

  Ariel rubbed the heel of one hand against the other, wrestling with an idea that made her nervous and yet tantalized her because it, too, would exclude Sienna. “What if we looked into your Finder’s glass together?”

  “Together?”

  “Why not? Maybe the sparks that appear inside when you use it would—I don’t know—show us a picture or something to help us.”

  “Never tried anything like that.” He shrugged. “But I’m willing.” He asked Sienna how long they had until breakfast.

  “Twenty minutes,” she said, stirring her oats. “Don’t be so impatient, Scarl, dear. I just started.”

  Ariel flinched at the endearment. Scarl drummed his fingers on his leg. The tiny sign of annoyance rewarmed Ariel’s heart.

  “We might as well,” he told Ariel. “I don’t expect much, but that should be plenty of time to find out.”

  He retrieved his glass from his gear, tumbled it in his palm, and then offered it to her.

  “It’s yours,” she protested. “You hold it.”

  “No.” He folded her fingers around it. “This was your idea. You hold it and I’ll… I’ll try to help you.”

  She cupped the cool disk in both hands like a splash of water. Scarl sat opposite her on the ground. Uncertainly, he reached one palm to cradle her knuckles as if her hands were his glass. Sienna watched with interest from the fire.

  “Ready?” Ariel asked.

  He snorted. “I guess so.”

  His hesitancy gave her unexpected confidence. “Think of where the map leads,” she said. “Or when. The map’s end point, whatever it is—the darts’ sender, some fail-safe thing, treasure… the moon…”

  They both gazed into the glass. At first Ariel felt nothing, just as she had the one time he’d helped her try finding. Reminding herself that her initial attempt had partly succeeded, she redoubled her focus. She waited to see sparks in the glass as before.

  Instead, she experienced a small, internal jolt, like a door bolt in her head sliding back.

  “Our destination,” she breathed. “Show us.”

  Scarl sucked a breath through his teeth. His free hand rose to press his fingertips between his eyes. Ariel thought he must also have felt that internal click.

  Not letting her stare into the glass waver, she whispered, “Are you all right?”

  “Keep going,” he muttered. “There’s something there.”

  Encouraged, she bent her will upon the glass, pouring herself into the lens in her hands. Scarl, the fire, and breakfast all faded. A fine thread of light shot through the glass and through her. The unbolted door had cracked open.

  She pushed the door open farther.

  A brilliant flare pulsed from the glass. Briefly blinded, Ariel heard Sienna gasp.

  When the light softened and the spots cleared from her vision, she no longer saw a glass in her hands. Its cool weight on her palm and Scarl’s warm fingers both had fallen away, and
she found herself somewhere else altogether. The spray of a thunderous waterfall misted her skin. Standing at its base, she tipped her face toward the top and saw only white water. A surge in the flow high above curled out like spindrift from the sea. Unable to move, Ariel watched it shimmer and spiral outward, then down. Too late, she realized it would collapse over her, and it wasn’t so delicate, either. Water slammed into her and battered Ariel to the ground.

  Choking, she forced herself upright and pried her eyes open. No river was falling at her. She hadn’t moved from her spot in the dirt, but the glass in her hands had split exactly in half. Scarl remained seated before her, fingertips still pressed to his forehead. Pain cramped his face.

  “Scarl?” She coughed.

  He didn’t answer. Sienna called both their names and advanced.

  “Stay there,” Ariel ordered over her shoulder. She repeated Scarl’s name, her voice hitching higher.

  “I’m all right,” he mumbled, moving nothing, his eyelids still clenched. Her ears barely caught his tight voice. “Are you?”

  “Yes.” Her head hurt, but not as much as Scarl’s must have. Her face was wet, though. Drawing her fingers from his, she dropped the broken glass to wipe her cheeks. The moisture might have been waterfall spray. She guessed it was more likely tears.

  She added, “But we broke your glass.”

  He didn’t react for a frightening moment, but at last he inhaled more deeply and cracked open his eyes. His pupils were so dilated Ariel couldn’t see the brown iris around them.

  “That was… not what I expected.” His voice remained low. “I don’t think we’d better do it again. Did we learn anything?”

  “There’s a waterfall,” she said. “A big one. I don’t know how far, but I’ve got to get there as quick as we can.” It was all she could do not to jump up and run toward it. “It’s a good thing my feet want to walk to it, since you can’t find it with your glass ruined. Sorry.” She poked at the shards.

  Scarl rubbed both hands over his face. “I can get along without it,” he said. “If my head will stop roaring.”

  Ariel touched his wrist. “Your eyes look funny. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “No, I’m not sure. I’m just hoping it will be worth it.”

  Maybe it was some hidden instinct from her Healtouch mother, but touching him reassured Ariel that he would be fine.

  “It will be worth it,” she replied. “Now I’ll recognize it. I—” As if the knowledge had trickled in through a crack, she knew the waterfall’s name. A shiver ran through her, a muddle of excitement and dread. “Oh, Scarl. The waterfall is Timekeeper.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Timekeeper! When Vi said I already had one, I didn’t get it. But remember my telling dart? The summons said, ‘Come take up this challenge no later than Beltane. Timekeeper is counting.’ That Timekeeper! I never knew what it meant. It’s the falls!”

  He winced as her volume increased. “I… I can’t think right now, Ariel. Give me a few minutes, will you?”

  “Please tell me you’re both all right!” Sienna crossed to them.

  With an impatient nod, Ariel scooped up the broken Finder’s glass and curled against the base of a tree. Keeping one eye on Scarl, she pondered what they might find at the falls—assuming they arrived there in time.

  After she’d found the Vault, she’d given the message on her dart no further thought. Beltane, the first day of May, had just passed and the deadline seemed no longer needed. So the date had receded back into the year as nothing more than the mark for spring planting. But both the deadline on the dart and the moon’s insistence on speed now made more sense if the Vault truly did have a fail-safe. May first might have been important not because it mattered when she located the Vault, but because she still had to discover the mapstone and begin following it. She had a limited time to prove that the opening of the Vault had been no mistake.

  Ariel tried not to swoon. The search for the Vault had nearly killed her, Scarl, and Zeke, too. If this trip turned out to be half so dreadful, she wasn’t sure she could bear it. Yet whatever remained to be done as proof that people deserved the Vault’s contents might very well be even worse.

  Resistance surged through her, squelching her dire thoughts. Perhaps people weren’t ready or clever enough for the contents of the Vault, but, if so, it would not be because Ariel Farwalker got too scared to try. Grimly, she gazed at the sky and wished for a glimpse of the moon or even the chime of its voice. She wanted to check just how far it had waxed. Not much more than a week could be left, though, before the full Dog Moon marked on her map. If she hadn’t reached Timekeeper by then, she might welcome madness. It would be better than learning that her discovery of the Vault had been in vain or, more awful still, that people she cared about at the abbey had left the world because of her failure. But surely the trees would give warning if the land were to heave violently enough to bury the Vault!

  It took Ariel a moment to remember that the threat from the moon hanging over her own head if she failed was not madness but death. And since he traveled with her, perhaps she’d put Scarl at risk, too.

  For the first time, she rejoiced that Zeke had not joined them. She trusted his stones to protect him, wherever he was, more than she trusted herself. Wistfully she fitted the two halves of Scarl’s glass together and hoped she had the strength for what lay ahead.

  It was closer to lunchtime than breakfast before the trio started walking that day. Scarl felt better after two hours’ rest with his feet up. It took another hour to adjust the horse bridle so Willow could wear it. Until that was done, Sienna hovered over Scarl like a vulture. Ariel found a few painkilling plants, which Sienna yanked from her hands to infuse into smelly teas she insisted on serving the Finder herself. Ariel sat fuming and studying the map, trying to spot a waterfall on it. The wave of small dots looked like water to her, but she and Scarl had already decided those were the months of the moon.

  As Ariel stole baleful looks at Sienna, however, the driving impulse to get to the waterfall waned. She dreamed instead of stumbling on cottages, cows at pasture, or a fishing hole crowded with boys. For as much as Ariel wanted to reach Timekeeper, the journey would seem easier without a certain rock in her boot. She longed to encounter a village and get rid of Sienna while she still could.

  CHAPTER 21

  Dog Moon, Waxing Bright

  I can’t fix it. I’m sorry.” Sienna had asked to see the broken halves of the Finder’s glass not long after they finally left camp. Now she handed them back. “I could fuse it easily enough back home, but not here.”

  The trees had given way to a high plateau where tall grass whipped their legs. Its baked summertime scent swirled around them. They had room to walk abreast, and at first Ariel had taken the middle. But Sienna kept slipping into the center herself. Ariel figured the broken glass was just one more excuse.

  “No matter,” Scarl said, dropping the pieces back into his pocket. “Perhaps when we get where we’re going.”

  “What happened to break it?” Sienna asked tentatively. “I mean, I saw the flash, but what were you trying to do?”

  “I’m not sure.” He looked past Sienna to Ariel. “Tell me what you experienced with the glass, if you would. From the start.”

  The hot wind lashed at Ariel as she recalled the strange impressions and feelings. Sometimes struggling to find the right words, she relayed everything she could remember from the click of the door bolt to the water on her cheeks at the end.

  “Was it like that for you?” she wondered.

  “Nothing like that,” Scarl said. “Hmm. How can I… Well, finding a person or object over a great distance—like I found you and your telling dart last year, for instance—always puts me in mind of a ladder. I often can’t say where the thing is, but I know where to find the next rung and the next. I feel closer. So I simply move up one rung at a time until I’m near enough to reach for the thing itself.”

  “That’s what it felt
like to you?” Ariel asked. “Climbing a ladder?”

  “No. This was more like descending the ladder. Toward … I don’t know. Darkness. Except I knew you were on the ladder above me and I was trying to hold it steady for you. I think what you felt as a click to me felt like being jostled or… as if you had stepped on my fingers on a rung. And when I perhaps foolishly told you to keep going, you came down so fast you knocked me all the way to the ground. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay conscious.”

  Ariel winced. She could feel Sienna’s reproachful eyes on her, but she knew Scarl would reject any apology offered. She only murmured, “I’m glad I had a door instead.”

  “It felt like your doorway went through my head. I just can’t imagine where it took you, or how. I’ll be interested in seeing this waterfall—Timekeeper, you say?—myself. If we come upon it.”

  “Is there a waterfall on your map?” Sienna asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ariel grumbled.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Scarl said. “Is your map in your pocket?”

  “My pack.”

  “Never mind, then, we don’t need to stop. Look.” He plucked a dry grass stem, broke it into three bits, and arranged them on his palm: . His bent thumb kept them from being snatched by the breeze. “One of the arrows on the map ends like this.”

  “The one that goes through the August full moon,” Ariel said.

  “It’s a symbol with a number of meanings, depending on what is around it,” Scarl told her. “The most common are related to power and movement. But it can also mean waterfall.”

  Ariel crowed and flashed Sienna a victorious smile.

  “I’ve peeked at your map, though, over your shoulders,” said the Flame-Mage. “I don’t remember the mark you’re talking about, but we started going southeast. Today we’re mostly going south. None of the lines go south, do they?”

  With effort, Ariel stopped herself from checking the position of the sun. “Shut up, Sienna. What do you know about it?”