The Farwalker's Quest Read online

  “That was only seven or eight weeks ago. How do you know?”

  Zeke gestured to the tree.

  Jealousy hummed along Ariel’s arms. She told herself they were just getting tired of gripping branches. Yet she hesitated to climb down. Once they were back on the ground, some magic spell might wear off and their discovery prove to be only a twig.

  “Let me see it a minute.”

  To her surprise, Zeke handed her the dart without argument. “Let’s go down, though,” he said. “We can look at it better out of the wind.”

  Agreeing, she considered her pockets. None seemed deep or trustworthy enough, so she slid the dart, tail first, into her boot. It rested snug against her anklebone.

  Ariel led their descent, which proved harder than the trip up. The handholds and footholds seemed farther apart. Gusts shook the branches.

  Halfway to the ground, she heard a scrape overhead—the sound of a boot missing its mark. Instinctively she hugged the trunk. Zeke’s arms and legs, in a tangle, fell past. Ariel screeched as his flailing limbs struck one branch and slid off another.

  Before her eyes, the tree reached to catch him—or tried to. Ariel never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen it herself. Not even Tree-Singers claimed that trees could move, except with the wind. Yet as Zeke hurtled toward the earth, a long branch near the ground swept around toward him.

  It was wood, though, not an arm. It couldn’t bend far enough. The branch tangled with one of Zeke’s legs without catching before springing back straight. An instant later, Zeke hit the earth.

  His cry of shock and pain felt like a spike through Ariel’s skin. As loud as it was, his yelp didn’t cover the crack that accompanied it.

  “Zeke!” Throwing caution aside, she scrambled down, calling his name and praying his head had not broken like an egg on a rock.

  Her feet hit the ground. He was breathing, at least: sobbing gasps rose and fell. Nothing oozed from his head.

  “Are you okay?” She jumped the last distance. Pain stabbed in both of her knees. She ignored them and rushed to her friend. He hadn’t tried to sit up. “Say something!”

  “She tried to catch me. Did you see that?” Zeke’s face was screwed tight against pain. Tears leaked from his eyes despite his sturdiest blinking, but Ariel recognized what was meant as a smile.

  “Yes! But the branch didn’t reach. Does anything hurt?” Her eyes scoured his body. No blood soaked his clothes.

  “It slowed me down.” He wheezed. “I still hurt my arm, though. Kinda landed on it.” He clutched his right forearm tight to his ribs. A root humped nearby from the dirt. Ariel guessed he’d landed atop it, his bone snapping over the root like kindling across a bent knee.

  “I bet you broke it.” She resisted the itch to touch his hurt arm. “Can you move it?”

  He puffed. “Don’t want to find out.”

  “Okay. Just catch your breath.” She thought rapidly. Ariel knew how to help broken bones, but most of the things Zeke needed weren’t here in the woods. Unable to keep her helpless hands off him, she carefully petted his shoulder. His ragged breathing relaxed.

  “I can run and get help while you wait,” she said, “or I can help you walk back.”

  Though every motion made him wince, he insisted on walking. Ariel tucked herself under his good shoulder. Together they stood, Zeke sucking air between gritted teeth. That evidence of his pain made Ariel’s stomach lurch.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked. “It might be better if—”

  “I’m okay.”

  They made their slow way down the path toward the village. To Ariel’s relief, the tension she could feel in Zeke’s shoulder and ribs eased soon after they’d started.

  “It’s kinda gone numb,” he explained.

  As they entered the meadow, he halted. “Wait. You didn’t drop it, did you?”

  “Oh!” Her fingers poked into her boot, where the forgotten metal dart had grown warm until she could hardly feel it. “I’ve got it.” She eyed her friend hunched in pain. A generous impulse moved her mouth. “You want it? It was in your tree.”

  No fair! insisted a more selfish voice in her head.

  “No,” Zeke said. “You found it. And I got what I wanted.”

  “A broken arm?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on.” He shuffled on without her aid.

  Ashamed of her relief, Ariel caught up. “Was it hurting your tree? Is that why she stopped talking to you?”

  Zeke shook his head. “I think she … Well, I don’t understand everything she tells me. But the dart is for you. You’ll take better care of it, or something like that. And, Ariel …” He gave her an odd sideways look. Maybe it was just shock and pain, but she had never seen him so somber.

  He said, “My tree thinks whatever that dart has to say is important.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Zeke insisted he could walk by himself, so Ariel retrieved the pollywogs on their way back to the village. When she lifted the bucket, the creatures’ frantic swirling seemed to echo both her stomach and the increasing wind.

  Even before they reached the first stone cottage, the storm bell began clanging. Gusts swept dirt into the air and sent chickens fluttering into roosts. Fishing boats crowded the mouth of the harbor, flocking home early. Under the darkening sky, villagers bustled to gather damp laundry and fasten shutters over a few precious glass windows. Advance scouts from an army of rain splattered on the cobbled lanes.

  Ariel spotted some of their classmates rounding up siblings and pets to bring them safely inside. Apparently class had been released early so the students could help prepare for the storm. Any punishment she and Zeke might face for shirking their lessons would wait.

  Ariel burst ahead of her friend into her mother’s cottage. Luna was filling the peat bin for what looked to be a blustery night.

  “Zeke broke his arm!” Ariel announced, dropping the bucket of pollywogs.

  “I wondered where you were,” said Luna. “Finding trouble, as usual.” She took one look at Zeke’s posture and turned back to her daughter.

  “I’ll save my questions for later. Run to Zeke’s mother and let her know I’ll be along with him shortly. On your way back, stop by the Flame-Mage and get another coal. It was so fair this morning, I let ours burn out.”

  “Can’t I stay and watch?” Ariel had hoped to help splint her friend’s bone.

  “Go, before Zeke’s mother gets worried.” With one arm, Luna drew him into her workroom. With the other, she pushed Ariel back out the door.

  With a frustrated huff, Ariel hurried off down the lane. The brass rod in her boot knocked against her ankle. If she ran, perhaps when she got back there’d be time for them to examine it more closely.

  She swiftly dispatched her errand at Zeke’s house and raced on to the Flame-Mage’s workshop. After collecting a tender of hot coals there, she returned to the bluster.

  She noticed the Windmaster, Leed, on the wharf, his gray hair tangling in the wind. He held his windpipe in his hand but not raised to his lips. Perhaps the weather was howling too loud to hear the notes, much less obey them.

  “Will it last long, Leed?” Ariel shouted. She had once dreamed of becoming his apprentice, charmed by the way a fresh wind washed the thoughts from her head, mussing her hair and caressing the grass with the same invisible touch. The wind and rain never listened to her, though. Last summer she had tried to learn the windpipe under Leed’s amused eye. He had finally pointed out, gently, what they both already knew: she did not have the gift.

  Her question now seemed to startle him.

  “Ariel,” he said gruffly, without his usual toothless grin. He tucked his pipe into his coat. “It’s a bad wind, child. I can’t tell how long it will blow. I can tell this, though: something ill drives it, or arrives on it. It will bear away things we all value. Get inside.”

  Ariel nearly dropped her coal tender. She’d never heard Leed talk so ominously. Too stunned to disobey
or delay, she lifted her feet to run. The wind hissed and snarled in her ears as she went.

  By the time she reached home, Zeke’s fingers poked out from the end of a two-piece wooden splint. With his other hand, he wiped away tears. Ariel pretended not to see them, shamed by the knowledge that she sometimes cried over banged shins and splinters.

  “It’s not so bad,” Luna told her, knotting the bandage that held the splint halves in place. “He’ll heal. Do you want to get him his sling?”

  Ariel jumped at the chance. Her mother took the coals to restart their fire.

  While Ariel folded Zeke’s sling and tied it gently in place, the two whispered.

  “Want to look at it before you go home?” Ariel asked.

  Zeke’s eyes shifted to the workroom doorway, looking for Luna. “Later. Let’s keep it a secret.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just because.”

  Ariel studied the furrow in his brow. She didn’t understand it, but there were plenty of things, both in class and in village life, that he grasped better than she did, so she trusted Zeke’s judgment.

  Luna walked Zeke home. With the wind lifting and banging the loose slates on the roof, she had insisted that Ariel stay in. Once her mother was gone, Ariel pulled her stool near the fire, drew out the dart, and took a close look.

  The firelight glinted from the shaft. Where it had entered the tree, the once-sharp tip had snapped off. Nearest that end were four rows of symbols, spaced equally around the barrel:

  Ariel recognized those—one mark representing each of the twelve trades. A scored line separated those marks from the rest. More lines near the dart’s tail fenced a symbol alone like a zigzag of lightning:

  Ariel puzzled over this crooked mark, which looked to her like the arrow of a Tree-Singer mixed with the triangular mark of a Flame-Mage. Perhaps it stood for a person who was both Flame-Mage and Tree-Singer—a tree-burner, even. Ariel snickered, despite the horror of that idea. Everyone gathered kindling from wood that had already fallen, but the idea of a whole, living tree engulfed in flames gave her a shiver.

  The squiggles and dashes carved at the dart’s middle were stranger. They must have been some kind of writing, but Ariel knew nothing of that. Only the village Storian, to whom the children recited their lessons, might recognize those marks. Remembering things was his job, after all, even things nobody used anymore.

  The brass shaft should open, but Ariel couldn’t tell how. She twisted and pulled. Nothing moved. She shook it. Nothing rattled inside. Part of the message ought to be in there, she was sure. That helped keep the whole message private. Perhaps it opened only for the person to whom it had been sent. Ariel wondered who that might be. It had to be someone she knew, because the next coastal village was more than a whole day away. The dart couldn’t possibly have gone that far astray.

  She jumped at the click of the door latch. Stuffing the dart in a pocket, Ariel pretended to stir up her pollywogs.

  Her mother had returned just in time to stay dry; rain and thunder joined the wind beating their house. Her lips tight, Luna heated their supper in silence. Ariel’s father, a Fisher, had been drowned in a terrible storm. It had happened so long ago that she barely remembered him, but her mother still grew tense when the weather turned rough.

  To fill the silence, Ariel chattered about pollywogs and Zeke’s arm. Her mother scolded her for climbing a tree. Ariel nodded humbly, but her secret wouldn’t stay behind her lips.

  “Guess what Zeke and I found, though.” She presented the dart with a flourish. Firelight glanced off it.

  “My goodness.” Luna set aside her chowder spoon. “Where’d you find that?”

  “It was stuck in Zeke’s tree.” Ariel grinned and they ogled the brass shaft together.

  “Did you know that your great-great-great-grandmother Mim got so many darts, she had to put up a dartboard to keep them from splintering the door?” Luna asked. Ariel clicked her tongue in awe, and her mother smiled. “She was a Healtouch, too. People for miles around would dart her when someone fell sick. Then she’d borrow a bike and go visit.”

  “A bike?” Ariel cried. She pictured a wheelbarrow, but with two wheels instead of one. Somehow, she knew, the person riding could make it go without someone else having to push. Such a thing was even more magical than a telling dart.

  “Yes indeed. Some of the old things were still working back then.” Luna winked. “Boys sent darts to girls with love tokens inside. Girls sent back locks of hair.”

  Ariel giggled. “Did you ever get one?”

  “Oh no, they were gone by the time I cared about boys. That’s just something my grandmother told me.”

  “Do you know what these marks mean?” Ariel asked. “The ones that aren’t trade marks?”

  Her mother studied the symbols. She sighed. “We’ve forgotten so much. The only one I know is this.” She pointed: . “It used to be painted on that old metal tree near the wharf.”

  Ariel and her friends sometimes dared each other to swing on the contraption her mother described. Serving no purpose anyone could remember except to provide scrap metal for boat keels and garden tools, the tower of linked metal strips would soon collapse in a jumble.

  “What’s it mean?” Ariel asked. “Metal tree?”

  “No. It also was used to mark poisonous plants. It’s a sign that means danger.”

  Ariel’s bones tingled.

  “Storian might be able to figure it out,” Luna added. “Will you take your dart to class tomorrow?”

  Ariel shrugged. “I don’t know. Zeke wants to keep it a secret.”

  “Perhaps he’s afraid you won’t get to keep it. By rights, it belongs to the Storian.”

  “Storian? Is that who it was sent to?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know, but that’s not the point,” Luna replied. “It’s his job to keep old things.”

  “Stories,” Ariel argued. “Not old junk.”

  “Both.”

  Ariel’s face slumped.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Luna continued. “I have an idea for you.” Rummaging in her sewing basket, she found two large knitting needles. One had been snapped off short.

  “Your father made me this pair from whalebone before you were born.” Luna ran her fingers along the smooth rods, smiling sadly. “The one has been broken for years, but I couldn’t bear to throw them away.”

  She handed both needles to Ariel. Each was much lighter than brass, too long but nearly the same thickness as the dart.

  “If you used a sharp pin, you might be able to copy the symbols from the dart to each needle,” Luna said. “One for you, one for Zeke. A nice memory of your adventure.”

  Ariel wrinkled her nose at the age-yellowed ivory. Her mother’s suggestion sounded like hard work.

  “It’s the best treasure I ever found,” she complained. “You really think Storian will take it?”

  “Probably.” Luna nodded. “I know for certain, however, that you will offer it to him. I’ll give you a few days to copy it first.”

  Feeling new kinship with the tumult outside, Ariel blew her own windstorm into her bangs and hunted for a sharp sewing pin.

  She stayed awake late, scratching symbols into the broken knitting needle long after her mother fell asleep. The bone was not as hard as she feared, and she quickly discovered that her scratches didn’t have to be deep. When a slip of the pin pricked her thumb, a dot of blood smeared on the bone, lining a groove so one crimson symbol stood out from the rest. Ariel licked her finger and wiped the spot clean. But the idea took hold, and soot from the hearth rubbed into the scratches as well. Soon even shallow marks stood out sharply against the white bone.

  She’d nearly completed the copy when sleepiness overtook her. Unable to hold her hands steady enough for the finishing touches, she tucked everything into a clean sock and stashed it at the foot of her bed. Then she crawled under the covers herself.

  Despite her drowsiness, Ariel slept restlessly, troubled by ni
ghtmares of strange symbols dripping with blood.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Dawn arrived in a sickly green gray. The rain and bluster had eased, but the heavens looked more like a waterlogged blanket than a friendly spring sky.

  “Go ahead to your classes,” Luna told Ariel. “Don’t be surprised if the Storian sends you home again, though. The tail of the storm is still coming.”

  Once in the classroom, Ariel struggled to keep her eyes open. Today’s lesson should have been exciting, too: Bellam Storian was finally letting his class talk about Namingfest. Every month had its festival, but for a person of Ariel’s age, April Namingfest was the best.

  “So who will we lose from class this year?” the Storian began. He surveyed the two dozen students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the story-room. Gray hair kinked from his eyebrows, his jaw, and even his ears. It seemed to have gotten lost on the way to his nearly bald scalp. He stroked the hair at his chin. “Who do we have turning thirteen?”

  Zeke raised his splinted arm proudly. Excitement clearing some of the fog in her head, Ariel shot her hand up, too. Another girl, Madeleine, wiggled her fingers shyly near one ear.

  “Good,” Storian said. “What happens day after tomorrow at Namingfest, then? Ariel?”

  She sat up stiff. It sounded like a trick question. “We get our last names,” she replied. “Like Healtouch.”

  “Or Fool,” someone teased from the back of the class. “You’re lazy enough, and a goof, too, but I bet you can’t dance.” Ariel whirled to fire a scowl.

  “That’s enough.” Storian shifted his gaze to Madeleine. “Yes, the naming, of course, but before that?”

  “There’s a test.” Madeleine gulped.

  “Yes. The trade test.” Storian looked pointedly at Ariel. She rolled her eyes to show him she knew that, for heaven’s sake. Frowning, he added, “What sort of—”

  Thud. All eyes zipped toward the door. The knock repeated twice, sounding sturdy enough to cave the door in.

  “Excuse me, class,” the Storian growled. He stalked to the door. It had better be good, Ariel thought. He didn’t like interruptions. She didn’t suppose Storian would make an adult stand and recite the entire calendar, as she’d done a few times, but his scolding could be punishment enough.