The Timekeeper's Moon Read online

  “And I assumed mice and rabbits were raiding my herbs,” added Ash. “I knew you’d been restless, but I didn’t know it troubled you every night.”

  Ariel shrugged, miserable. The voice had seemed proof of madness, or at least a failing she’d been loath to admit. As proud as Ariel was of her trade, which had been wholly lost until she had revived it, her skills clearly had limits. She could find her way from one place to another in a world where almost no one strayed out of the villages in which they’d been born. She could soothe wary men not accustomed to strangers and recall messages without tangling their details. But Ariel could not satisfy the insistent moon. It spoke to her as “walker,” so it must want something to do with her trade. Yet she couldn’t imagine where the moon meant her to go, or what to do, or why she needed to hurry. If a trip to the moon had been possible, she would have set off with plea sure. But not even a Farwalker could walk to the moon.

  Unfortunately, ignoring her madness had only freed it to grow. She did not share this part with her friends, but tossing in her bed, with her eyelids squeezed tight against the stabbing moonlight, sometimes she’d opened them not on her familiar stone room but on the rafters of her family’s cottage back in Canberra Docks. More than once Ariel had joyfully embraced her mother, who was not dead after all, and regaled her with an incredible dream filled with Finders, kidnapping, and murder. Then Ariel had skipped to the front door of the cottage, only to fall over the threshold and land with a painful jolt on her bed in the abbey. These flashes of a home that was lost were not merely dreams, she was certain. On the contrary, it was Ariel’s life at the abbey that began to feel unreal. Her dreams and her life—the past and the present—became tangled, each blurring the other until she’d nearly lost track of the boundary.

  She’d nearly lost her senses completely. Sitting in the dirt now outside the abbey with Scarl, Ariel eyed the stone well and shuddered. A jump to the well from the roof would have silenced more than the moon. If she hadn’t broken her skull on the rim, undoubtedly she would have drowned.

  She squirmed to escape a rattling chill. “Can we go back inside now? I don’t like Old Moonface staring down while it hisses at me.”

  Scarl cocked his head and gazed up. “Do you hear it even now?”

  “Yes. Nagging.” Ariel rose, putting weight gingerly on her feet. Her raw soles complained, but she could hobble.

  Scarl stood carefully, too, and followed her and Zeke toward the door. He turned to Ash, who trailed them all with concern on his face. “This moon song,” Scarl said. “Is it something Tree-Singers understand?”

  Ash shook his gray head. “Coyotes and wolves are the only creatures I know that speak with the moon.”

  Scarl cast Ariel a thoughtful glance. “They’re not the only ones touched by its tides, though.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve gone moon-loony,” said Zeke. He winced at Scarl’s look of warning.

  Ariel moaned. “I know.”

  “Nonsense.” Scarl held the door as they entered the abbey. “Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean we should let superstition defeat us.”

  Their footsteps echoed in the gloom of the hall, reminding Ariel of an echo she had not heard but glimpsed. She’d recognized something in that jiggling flash of moon as she’d fallen. An insight of panic, perhaps, or a glimmer of life’s mystical Essence as she flirted with death, it struck her as a hint—a key to whatever the moon had been trying, for so many nights now, to tell her.

  Ariel kept her voice low, not wanting to wake those still abed. “I think it must be some Farwalker thing I’m just not getting.” It was not easy to be an apprentice with no master to learn from. Ariel sometimes envied other young people, who all had help honing their skills.

  She added, “Were you ever confused, Scarl, when you were first learning to find?”

  “Confused, yes,” he replied. “Tormented, no. This doesn’t sound like a budding instinct to me. Especially since you’ve led us well each time you’ve tried. Your farwalking talents are already sound.”

  “Yeah, but …” She struggled to pull her hunch into words. “My moon trouble has something to do with the map.”

  “What map?” Scarl frowned.

  “The one you don’t believe is a map.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That.”

  A year had passed since they’d found it, yet the flash of intuition during Ariel’s fall tonight had thrust the map into her mind. Its importance hovered just beyond her understanding, elusive as the night shadows in the abbey’s silent hall.

  “I want to go look at it,” she told Scarl. “Come with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “If you’ll be puzzling a while, I’ll fetch you some tea,” Ash said, pausing at a corner. “Chamomile, in the hope that you’ll sleep yet tonight.” He waved aside their thanks but regarded Ariel gravely. “If you don’t mind, Ariel, I may also consult the cherry tree in the courtyard. Perhaps she will offer an insight.”

  Ariel gulped, uncomfortable about causing a fuss and apprehensive about what Ash might learn. The trees did not bother with trivial matters.

  “Please, Ash,” Scarl said in her silence.

  His robe swishing, the old Tree-Singer disappeared into the gloom. Ariel hurried on toward the mapstone, trying to outpace the silvery voice that could only be drowned by her footsteps.

  CHAPTER 3

  Thunder Moon, Full on the Map

  Ariel’s heart rose when she spied the formidable door that had long hidden the Vault. It reminded her that even things that were frightening were not always what they appeared. Though this door had initially scared her, a treasure had awaited behind its dark face.

  If that had not been proof enough, she could never forget how terrified she’d once been of Scarl. She’d first met him last spring, far away in the village where she was born. Ariel had found a remarkable prize in a tree: a telling dart, one left over, it seemed, from a time that had passed. At first, she and Zeke had marveled over the dart without understanding that it carried a message for her. Nobody knew where it had come from, who had sent it, or why. Then two threatening Finders, Elbert and Scarl, had arrived at her home in Canberra Docks. Ariel, who had never seen strangers before, feared them more when she realized they’d come for her dart. They stole not just the dart but Ariel, too, kidnapping her and dragging her far from her home.

  Only after great trials did she learn that the dart had been intended for her all along, that it called her to discover her lost farwalking trade and the Vault. Others had received darts, thirteen in all, one person from each of the trades. But powerful men had conspired to hide the darts’ message and to kill any Farwalker that her dart might reveal. When the edge of a knife pressed to Ariel’s throat, one of her kidnappers surprised her by leaping to her defense. Acknowledging his true purpose—to locate the Vault—Scarl had helped her defeat those who wanted her dead. It had taken a while for Ariel to trust him, and they both had lost people they loved in the fight. But together, with Zeke’s aid, they’d obeyed the dart’s summons to discover the source of a legend.

  The Vault lay concealed in the abbey, on the underside of the Tree-Singers’ largest stone floor. The reverse of each flagstone was painted with stories and drawings from a time long ago, before the great plague of blindness, when writing was common and everyone knew the meanings of symbols. The stones had hidden this treasure through a time of great darkness, keeping it safe. Recovered at last, it offered lost knowledge and hope that the world sorely needed.

  Although she didn’t understand most of the symbols herself, Ariel had known at once that the design on one of the stones was a map. She and Zeke had been crouching near Scarl beneath the Great Room’s vast windows that day. The air buzzed with spring light and the thrill of their find.

  While the Finder struggled to overturn an unusually stubborn flagstone, another not much larger than a robin’s nest had drawn Ariel’s eye. Pleased to spot one she could manage alone, she’d curled her f
ingertips around it and flipped it.

  “Look, Scarl,” she’d called. “This one’s different from the rest. It’s a map.”

  He abandoned his work to peer closer. “It can’t be.”

  “Sure it is,” she replied, surprised he couldn’t see it. Though overlapped in confusion, the lines and circles painted on the rock’s belly spoke to the Farwalker as if she had seen them before. She thought they looked like wandering paths.

  She tapped the design’s largest part, a double hoop with marks at the points of the wind. “Isn’t this north, south, east, west?”

  Scarl shook his head, his curls catching the sun. “I know that’s what it looks like, but none of the lines start from any fixed points. There aren’t any landmarks—no mountains, no rivers—and the arrows point in all different directions. It can’t be a map if you can’t find yourself on it.”

  He turned to Zeke, who’d been examining other newly flipped stones. “Will you try, Zeke?”

  Zeke approached. “It looks like tangled sailboat rigging to me,” he said. But the Stone-Singer ran his hands over the flat, gritty surface. A few notes of a guttural song fell from his lips. Ariel held her breath, trying to imagine the stone’s voice grating in her mind, as it did in Zeke’s.

  “She’s right,” Zeke agreed after a moment. “It is a map.”

  “Told you so.” Ariel poked Scarl.

  “But a map of what?” Scarl protested. “To and from where?”

  “The stone said, ‘The map speaks for itself,’” Zeke replied.

  “Not very well,” grumbled the Finder. “Nothing on it makes sense. How is anyone supposed to follow it?”

  Swiping blond hair out of his eyes, Zeke tried again before he shrugged and gave up.

  “The stone just keeps repeating that it’s out of time,” he told them. “‘You began in the middle. You should leave.’ That’s all it will say.”

  Ariel huffed. “Leave? We just got here.” Not all of the stones were giving Zeke useful clues about the drawings they bore, but none of the rest had been rude. “And like a rock has something better to do? Sorry we’re bothering it.”

  “I don’t know what it means,” Zeke added. “I’m just telling you what it said.”

  Scarl thanked him for trying and turned to Ariel. “You knew it was a map. Think it’s some Farwalker tool?”

  “It might be.” At that point, her Farwalker trade was still so new, she’d had little idea what it entailed. “But so far, I haven’t needed a map. My feet find the way by themselves to wherever I want to go.”

  “Does it make you want to walk?”

  “Nope,” she said brightly. “It makes me want to eat.” The map’s largest circle reminded her of a pie, fresh and ready for slicing, and she’d seen a Tree-Singer baking that morning.

  With a chuckle, Scarl had set the mapstone aside in the sunshine. “Go fatten up a bit, then. If we ever figure out where it leads, you may need it.”

  Since then, Ariel had eaten all the pie she could want, but she was no closer to being too stout. Throughout the previous summer and fall, she’d walked hundreds of miles, spreading the news that the Vault had been found. She’d discovered, to her delight, what her revived trade entailed: connecting villages that had become isolated, bearing goodwill and gifts, and guiding bold travelers to places they needed to go. During the long mountain winter, Storians who had returned with Ariel to the abbey slowly deciphered the marks on the flagstones. They didn’t understand everything yet, but their work was gradually unveiling forgotten secrets and tools.

  Only the strange map remained completely baffling. The Storians had set it aside in defeat. Scarl still mulled it over occasionally, but Ariel had nearly forgotten about it—until now.

  Reaching to push open the Vault’s imposing door, she summoned a weak smile for Scarl and Zeke. Her body still ached from her fall off the roof, and with the moon muttering to her of things only half done, the last thing she needed was another enigma. But her friends had helped her solve difficult puzzles before.

  She led them through the Great Room’s long shadows and hush. Moonlight spilled in through the windows, gleaming on the new floor that Scarl had helped the Tree-Singers place. The original flagstones were now spread on tables, where their symbols could be copied to linen. Swaths of fabric were easier to carry and share.

  One stone, of course, sat apart from the rest. Ariel spied the mapstone on an unused back table. Moonlight glinted off its white and red markings. She traced the arcs and lines with a finger. The cool, gritty surface tingled her skin.

  “So … is it just the roundness that makes you connect this to the moon?” Scarl asked. “Or this little crescent down here?”

  “No.” Ariel tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. Scarl was trying hard not to patronize her, she could tell, but his doubt leaked through. “It’s not that simple,” she added. She knew the strange patterns somehow charted a journey. But one to the moon? Even she doubted that.

  Her fingertips found something her eyes had missed until now. Her hand froze over the stone.

  “Oh! Look here.” She traced a Farwalker sign, , that lurked in the design. It was lopsided, true, but once she’d recognized her trade mark, she couldn’t unsee it again.

  Scarl grunted and bent closer. “How could I not have noticed that before?”

  “Maybe the moonlight is helping,” Zeke offered.

  Ariel spied something else. She drew Scarl’s attention to the tail end of the Farwalker’s mark. Seen alone, that part of the drawing looked like the brass dart that had drawn them together and eventually brought them here.

  “Think that’s a telling dart?” Ariel asked with a shiver of both excitement and dread. The dart that had found her last spring had known Ariel’s trade before she did. It had prompted both wondrous and terrible events. A second dart she’d discovered had led to the Vault. The mere likeness of a third felt like one ominous message too many.

  “Hmm.” Scarl sounded uncertain. “Drawings and symbols and map all in one?”

  “Tell me to shut up if you want,” said Zeke, “but, Ariel, are you sure you’re not finding those patterns because you want to see them? Like faces in clouds or designs in the stars?”

  “Perhaps,” Scarl agreed. He rubbed his stubbled jaw. “Perhaps not.”

  “More like voices from moons,” Ariel said. Feeling a new kinship with the stone, she lifted it into her arms. A quiver ran through her legs. They wanted to walk. But to where?

  As she’d done once with her telling dart, she simply gazed at the marks she did not understand and then asked her feet where they meant her to go.

  Hither …

  This time, the urging wasn’t a voice but a tangible impulse tugging her feet toward the door and, beyond that, the southeast. Ariel smiled. This sensation she knew. It resembled the itch that had plagued her for months, but, at last, it came with a direction.

  “I need to make a cloth copy,” she said, hugging the mapstone. “Scarl, can we leave in the morning?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Where are we going?”

  “Farwalking. Southeast.” A thought struck her. “Toward tonight’s moonrise.”

  “There’s a small matter of bloody feet.” He pointed. Dark footprints had followed behind her.

  “Oh.” Ariel turned up one sole. The sting of her cuts, forgotten, awoke.

  “I don’t think my hands are going to work for a few days, anyway.” Zeke raised swollen fingers. His skin shone tight and white in the moonlight, dark bruises creeping out from his joints.

  “Oh, Zeke! I’m so sorry!” Ariel’s eyes stung with remorse. But a colder pressure throbbed from the stone at her chest. Now, now, it urged her, its weight and rough edges insistent. And the moon, which had briefly been silent, whined again in her ears. Haste, walker, haste. Halves lost, whole lost, halves, whole, heed, haste.

  She groaned and dumped the stone on a table as if it had bitten her. “I need to leave right away, though! Something bad is
going to happen if—”

  The door swung open. Ash entered, a bowl in his hands.

  “Calm down,” Scarl told Ariel. “Let’s tend a few wounds, and then we can talk about what to do next. Ash, we probably need bandages more than the tea.”

  “The water’s not hot yet.” Ash set down his bowl. “I brought bruise-bane compresses for Zeke.” He began winding Zeke’s left hand with a damp linen strip. The boy gritted his teeth.

  Ariel forced her uneasy legs forward so she could help bind Zeke’s other hand.

  “I’m afraid I also bring a message,” Ash added. “The trees seem to be in cahoots with your moon.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Thunder Moon Midnight

  Ariel stood frozen while Ash hurried to explain his upsetting remark.

  “The cherry cannot, or will not, advise you on this matter,” he told her. “‘Trees have helped too much already,’ she said. It’s not like her to give such an evasive or callous answer. When I pleaded for clarification, she said this: ‘A circle of ancients expects her. They perform a vast favor, but they can’t wait much longer, or all she has done will be undone. Send her now.’ ”

  Ariel spun to Scarl. “See? I have to leave. There’s nothing to talk about, unless you won’t go with me this time.”

  The Finder’s jaw tensed. He stared at the floor and then reached to Ash’s bowl for another wet cloth.

  “We’re halfway to morning already,” he told Ariel. “Leave Zeke to Ash. Either sit on a table so I can clean up your feet, or I will put you atop one myself.”

  She obeyed. The bruise-bane stung her cuts, but it helped her ignore the moon’s silver whisper.

  As he bound her soles, Scarl said, “You’ll probably be sore, but the wounds aren’t so bad. We’ll take another look and decide what to do in the morning.”

  “Leaving is what we have to do in the morning.”

  His grip on her right heel tightened.