The Farwalker's Quest Read online

  Zeke winced. “But … we can’t carry him.”

  “We can be crutches, and we’ve got to get out of here as soon as he can move. Please, Zeke. Don’t give up now.”

  Looking dazed, he drifted away. A soft sound in the dark, not singing but sobbing, wafted to Ariel’s ears. She willed herself not to hear it. If she thought of the dead, she’d be overcome, too. There were still more pressing tasks if the three of them were to survive.

  If Ariel had never heard the cursing of Fishers, her ears would have been burning the moment Scarl awoke. Instead she was relieved by the strength in his voice, even if it did come in gasps.

  His motions, on the other hand, struck at her heart. He shoved off her hands and rolled away from her onto his side.

  “You’ve done enough,” he muttered. “Let me be.”

  He wouldn’t take the water she offered. Instead, he breathed deeply, flexed his three good limbs, and gathered his strength. In slow portions he worked his way to a seated position, leaning against a rock with his eyes closed for a long time once he’d gotten that far. His face looked more ghostly than Ariel had ever seen Misha’s.

  Her stomach fluttery with concern, she tried to lead him back from the edge of the faint that threatened to reclaim him. The only lifeline she knew how to throw him, since he rejected her touch, was her voice. She described what had happened since she and Zeke had last seen him. His face gradually gained color and tension, but he made no response to her chatter. Ariel didn’t mind. She feared the answer to the only question she might have asked.

  Awkwardly trying to keep filling the silence, she paid too little attention to where her words led. She said, “It didn’t take you too long to find us.”

  “I didn’t come to find you,” he snarled. His tone surprised her even more than his words. “I came to find Mason’s thugs. Slitting their throats in their sleep seemed the best way to fulfill a promise I’d made.”

  “A promise?” Ariel couldn’t recall him ever using that word.

  “To somebody other than you. A last promise.”

  Warmth seemed to leak from her body and into the rock. Two small sounds leaked out with it. “To … who?”

  Ariel wished she could call those syllables back. With effort, Scarl raised his head to regard her. Even in the low light, she could see the pain swim in his eyes, overlaid with a dark sheen of fury.

  “Don’t play the child with me. You know who I’m talking about.”

  His hostility took her aback. Terribly afraid she deserved it, she twisted the fingers of one hand in the other.

  “Mirayna?” she whispered.

  Closing his eyes, he let his face drop back against the stone.

  Even the scorching anger he’d directed at her didn’t stop Ariel from feeling his grief. The last drop in a cup already full to the brim, it spilled over. Everywhere she went, she left a trail of death. Her mother, her Storian, and now the Allcraft who had been so kind to both her and Zeke. Ariel pressed her knuckles hard against her lips to keep her anguish from escaping. Silently it dribbled out down her cheeks instead.

  To her surprise, Scarl spoke again. This time his voice matched the flat, cold angles of stone all around them.

  “I found Gust and his jackals quickly enough, all right. But the shadows of wolves made them cautious. They never all slept at once. So I could never get close enough—until they finally got this close to you.” He snorted. “Dullards. I thought I was going to have to point you out to them. But the fire did it at last.”

  Ariel sat in a helpless silence that froze both her limbs and her heart. After wishing he’d speak, now she cringed at his voice. She was bound to hear anything he chose to say, but she dreaded the creeping awareness that Scarl might never forgive her deception. Not because the truth would have kept Mirayna in the world, but because his last hours with her must have been tainted by distress and distraction. And if Scarl wouldn’t forgive her, Ariel could never forgive herself—or her calling.

  He began rubbing his leg, but without reaching below the knee to the damage.

  “There was only one fault with you stealing away,” he told her. “She wouldn’t let me ignore or forget it. I had to go after you. She couldn’t bear the danger you’d put yourself in, even if I could.”

  Ariel ventured, “I thought Pres would help, so you could stay with her.”

  “Pres.” Groaning the name, he glanced up again. Though still rimmed with pain, now his eyes mostly looked weary. He ran a hand across them.

  “Get over here and help me stand up.”

  The order caught Ariel by surprise. She rolled to her feet and obeyed, crouching alongside him. Scarl gripped her shoulder too hard. She held still despite a spike of alarm.

  “When I refused to leave her,” he said, bracing his other hand on a boulder, “she proved who was stronger.” He drew his good leg beneath him, sucked in a breath, and gave Ariel a nod. She straightened and he pushed himself up. Fighting dizziness, Scarl leaned heavily on both her and the stone.

  “What do you mean, stronger?” she asked. Unable to bear his long pauses, she wanted him to deliver his painful words and be done.

  “I wouldn’t leave Hartwater. So she … she left instead.”

  “She left?” How far could a sick woman in a wheeled chair go?

  “Pres had given her foxglove.” Now the words rushed out. “In case a day came when Mirayna’s body would no longer obey her at all. Do you know foxglove flower, Ariel? What it’s good for?”

  She didn’t want to say it. “It’s poison.”

  “Yes. If I wouldn’t come after you while she was still breathing, she said, she could fix that. She didn’t tell me, of course, until the foxglove was inside her—”

  Though Ariel had guessed what was coming, her own moan surprised her. Scarl shot her a sharp glance.

  “Too late to argue,” he added. “Too late to do anything but hold her and watch her leave the world. And make—” His voice broke. “And make wretched promises to her about you.”

  He released Ariel’s shoulder. Any more abruptly, and she would have called it a push. He took a hobbling step. A yelp of pain stuck behind his lips, but he stayed upright. Fearful, she moved up alongside to steady him if needed.

  “Her time would have been short enough.” Looking askance at her, Scarl rubbed his face. “And mine seems too long.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. She didn’t say it from guilt, though a few pangs throbbed low in her belly. She said it from understanding.

  He gripped her shoulder again. He kept his eyes straight ahead. “Not half as sorry as I am.”

  They didn’t speak again for a time. Leaning on her, Scarl minced his way beyond the rockfall. Most of his movement amounted to hopping.

  “Where’s Zeke?” His eyes roved the chimneys and gaps overhead. Increasingly bright, they hinted at sunshine outside.

  “Looking for a way out.”

  “Call him. I don’t have the breath.”

  Ariel hesitated. Her tongue felt too large in her mouth.

  “Do you wish you’d let Elbert kill me?” There, the words had been loosed. Now that this barbed question was out from inside her, she thought she could hear whatever answer he gave.

  He gave her a long unblinking look. She could feel, like a vibration, the consideration behind his eyes. He was not concerned about her reaction, she saw. His debate was strictly over what to admit—not to her but to himself.

  By the time it came, the answer may have surprised them both.

  “No.” His hard hand on her shoulder neither clenched nor relaxed. “No. I don’t.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  The dismal look on Zeke’s face when he emerged from the darkness told Ariel he’d overheard a great deal of her conversation with Scarl. He could barely meet the man’s gaze. Sighing, Zeke only pointed into the black tunnel and said, “We’ll have to go that way”.

  He hefted Scarl’s pack. Ariel shrugged on their own. Despite a search, S
carl’s knife sheath remained empty, but Zeke did manage to pry Derr’s staff from the rockfall. Scarl took it to lean on and sent the boy to retrieve Derr’s pack, too.

  “We don’t really need it,” Zeke protested. “You’re hurt and—”

  “He was my grandfather, Zeke.” More threat than sentiment edged Scarl’s voice. “Bring it here.” Zeke obeyed, reluctantly lifting it onto Scarl’s back.

  With the staff supporting Scarl on one side and Zeke propping him on the other, they turned their backs on the shafts of sunlight and shuffled into the dark. Ariel led them, Zeke holding her collar to keep them together. In the absolute darkness inside the earth, they could not see their own limbs, let alone the stony debris they stumbled against.

  “Keep to the left,” Scarl said. “I don’t remember tripping so much there. Hit my head twice, but I’m taller.”

  A hop and lurch at a time, they progressed. The utter blackness seemed to ooze against Ariel, not only rendering her eyes useless but gnawing her face. She began wishing for light. Even the pale specter of a ghost, she thought pointedly, would be welcome. Misha, if he heard such thoughts, didn’t answer.

  Scarl did, though, it seemed. “Stupid!” Halting, he swung Derr’s pack down from his shoulder. “My grandfather often carries a candle for starting fires in the rain. I should have remembered sooner.” Carefully, he bent to dig after it.

  Feeling terribly alone in the dark, Ariel listened to the rustle of Scarl’s blind search. Her hand, clutching nervously at her throat, found the glass bead there. She gripped it and prayed with all her heart that he would find what he sought.

  They all cheered when he announced that his fingers had closed on a few flamesticks.

  “Light one,” Ariel urged.

  “No. I don’t want to waste it. It won’t help me see into the pack much anyway.” His rustling continued, growing rough and frustrated.

  “Ariel?” Zeke’s voice floated to her. She glanced toward him but couldn’t see his face well enough to know what he wanted. With a gasp she realized she was seeing at all.

  Scarl’s hands stopped. Ariel saw that, too—a pause in a gray flutter of motion.

  “There’s light here,” Scarl said. “Or is it just me who sees it?”

  It had sneaked up on them all. A sickly dim glow separated them from the dark.

  “It’s on Ariel,” Zeke said.

  Dumbfounded, she looked down at herself. The fingers clenching her bead relaxed open. The gold flakes at its heart twinkled through the green glass, casting a dim golden glow almost shocking after the blackness. Scarl grunted in surprise.

  “How are you doing that?” Zeke asked.

  “Finding, perhaps?” Scarl mused. “Without knowing it? What are you seeking?”

  “Light. That’s all I wanted.” She held her breath, afraid the glow would blink out if she so much as twitched.

  “You can’t find what doesn’t exist,” Scarl insisted. “Or my hands would be on a candle by now.”

  “Who cares,” Zeke said. “Make it brighter. We won’t need the candle.”

  “I don’t know how!” Ariel wailed.

  After a snort of amazement, Scarl lifted Derr’s bag once more. “I don’t know how you’re doing it at all, but let’s use it while we can. Keep wanting light. Maybe the Essence will keep winking at you.”

  Wanting came easy. The dim light revealed little more than shadows, but the contours of the rocks in their path rose before them. They made faster progress with far fewer bruises. Perhaps ten more minutes had passed when Ariel’s eyes picked out a brighter speck of sky far ahead.

  The glow from her bead abruptly went out.

  The daylight fortified their hearts, though, if not their strained eyes, so they soon reached the sinkhole.

  “I need to stop here a spell before we climb out.” Scarl lowered himself to the ground and eased his crushed foot, boot and all, into a pool of brackish rainwater. The muscles in his jaw jumped.

  A beam of sunlight streamed down from above. Testing, Zeke clambered partway up the lumpy stone wall toward its source. He jumped down again.

  “It might be hard for you to climb up there with only one leg,” he told Scarl.

  “Don’t have much choice, do I? You’re the one who decided I needed to live.” Closing his eyes, the Finder lay back on the rock while the icy water numbed his foot.

  Now that their escape seemed assured, the anxiety that had kept Ariel moving deserted her. In the silence, her ears seemed to fill with the roar of stone slabs collapsing. A lump rose into her throat as she breathed a silent good-bye through the darkness to Bellam and Derr, left forever behind. The shadows throbbed with the malice of other, evil men crushed by rocks. To banish the memories and horror, Ariel found her own pool of water, which looked a bit cleaner than Scarl’s. She filled her jar, sipped some, and filled it again. Dabbling her hands, she pressed her wet palms on the cave wall. Drips echoed musically off the walls.

  Zeke looked up from poking around the bones of a deer that had fallen into the sinkhole long ago. “Calling Misha?” he wondered.

  She shrugged. She would have liked for Misha’s handprints to appear alongside hers, but she doubted the ghost still kept company with them.

  “Better get moving, I guess.” Scarl pushed himself to his feet. He wavered, clutching the staff. “This is going to be hard.”

  Ariel thought he spoke mostly to cover his dizziness, but he went on. “Once we get out, take all you want from the packs—all the food. If I can make it back to Hartwater, I will. Return there when you’re ready, and I’ll try to find someone to take you back home, if you like. If I’m not there, I’ll be gone from the world, but tell Pres the truth and she’ll help in my place.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” Ariel asked, her heart picking up speed. “We can go slow, or wait a few days while you heal. But we still have to get to the mouth of the mountain.”

  He looked up at her wearily. “Why?”

  Ariel’s lips sputtered, empty. No response could have surprised her more.

  “I told you. The telling dart—there’s a message. The Vault …” At his expression, her voice trailed off.

  “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I promised to try to protect you from Gust. He can’t hurt you now—so I’m done. You go where you want. Clearly you can.”

  “But we need your help!”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Left out of the argument, Zeke looked on with dismay. “One of Gust’s gang is still out there,” he said. “I’m pretty sure there were three when we saw them with the wolves.”

  Scarl waved off the objection. “Washed away, if not drowned, in the flood. Didn’t you hear the shouting that night?” He picked up a pack and hopped with the staff toward their exit.

  Aghast, Ariel watched his back. Reality itself seemed to have slipped from beneath her: Scarl had given up.

  “You can’t!” She grabbed his elbow, nearly knocking him off his one-legged balance. “You started it,” she insisted. “You want to find it worse than I do. It can’t help Mirayna, not now, but you still—”

  Spinning to seize her arm, he snapped her up onto her toes. Ariel’s teeth cracked together painfully. She held back a whimper, sure she was in for a shaking. Zeke jerked protectively toward her.

  That motion broke the wave of Scarl’s anger. With a grimace, he splayed his fingers and released her.

  “I’m sorry,” Ariel whispered, not sure what for.

  “No. You don’t deserve that. If anyone is wrong, it is me. But hear me, Ariel ….” He tore a ragged breath, closed his eyes, and shook his head. When his eyes opened again, they stared over her head. “I know my own actions have caused what I feel. I didn’t try hard enough to stop a death delivered to you—your mother. I put what I wanted first. And now you have hastened a death delivered to me. Two, with my old grandpop.”

  Zeke groaned. “I did that! I didn’t mean to, but …”

  Scarl ignored Zeke and refused to
meet Ariel’s eyes. “It’s only justice, and I’ll take the punishment I deserve.” He turned away. “But that’s enough pain for us both. Let’s stop there.”

  The closed look on his face sank into her heart. The tearing sensation it left in Ariel’s chest felt in some ways worse than any before. When Zeke had told her that her mother was dead, there remained a faraway cottage where that death might not be real. This time, she couldn’t tell herself that the words might be wrong. Worse still, no matter how dead her mother might be, Luna had not chosen to die. Nothing between them had pushed her to leave Ariel intentionally.

  “You really won’t go with us?” Her voice trembled. “We could—”

  “No.”

  Her eyes filling with tears, Ariel’s gaze swung to Zeke. He looked stricken as well but had no help to offer.

  Ariel flung the last argument, the last hope, she had. “Coward.”

  He flinched but did not turn.

  “Call me what you will, Farwalker,” he said softly to the wall before him. “I’m not you.”

  In silence, Scarl boosted both Zeke and Ariel out of the cave. Gulping hot, racking sobs, Ariel climbed desperately, scraping her elbows and knees to avoid needing more of his help. She didn’t want him to touch her. Then Scarl tossed up the packs and his staff, along with a rope knotted under his armpits so Zeke could tug from above. With that help, he managed to ascend. He could not, however, stifle a few cries as he bumped or put weight on his foot.

  Ariel waited in the sunshine, looking elsewhere through water-blurred eyes. The whole morning’s grief spilled out in tears she didn’t bother to hide. Hearing pain echo out of the earth, she felt it reverberate through her heart.

  CHAPTER

  38

  “Come on, Zeke,” Ariel said, once all three of them were out of the hole. The tunnel’s course, a grassed hump, stretched clearly before them.

  Zeke turned troubled eyes on Scarl. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” he asked, low.

  “Good luck and good days.” No cheer lifted Scarl’s voice. “You may catch up to me after the farwalking is done.”