The Timekeeper's Moon Read online

  Ariel’s favorite message from Nace, though, was only one symbol. They perfected it together, or left it in flower petals for the other to find. Sometimes in the evenings, Nace would trace it over and over into Ariel’s palm. It was a symbol from Scarl’s First Day note, the one that meant “love.” Though Nace’s fingertip never left any mark, it somehow balanced the scars left on Ariel’s skin by another hand’s unfriendly knife.

  As they traveled, she worked him into her song, sharing Sienna’s verse with him, too:

  Walk toward the morning sun,

  Guiding Sienna.

  New friends make travel fun

  Walk, talk, and laugh.

  Heart laughing, feet move fast.

  New friends meet old ones.

  Moon smiles silently.

  Sending is done.

  Scarl on one side of me,

  Nace on the other,

  Zeke waits to welcome us—

  Home, here we come.

  Ariel had another verse about Nace, but she was too shy to sing it aloud.

  The second time she and Scarl bid Skunk good-bye, Nace hugged his mother and accompanied them home. In the end, the invitation had come from the Finder. Having grown too afraid the boy would refuse, Ariel couldn’t bear to ask him herself. She needn’t have worried. Nace had already followed her to an edge of the world; a few more peaks and valleys could hardly have stopped him. Plus, his passion for learning made him almost as happy to see the Vault as Ariel was to find the abbey’s residents safe. The Kincaller would inhabit the Tree-Singers’ home and Ariel’s life for a long while to come. As Scarl had predicted, sparks would strike between Nace and Zeke Stone-Singer, but that tale has a bead of its own.

  Ariel would live that story and more before her wandering was through, but she never walked far enough to outpace certain echoes. A mute boy’s green-eyed gaze and the thrill of his kiss rang through any silence, reflecting Zeke’s voice and Scarl’s scent and the half-forgotten feel of her mother’s embrace. The circles and lines drawn on the mapstone had faded, but like the Farwalker symbol that directed Ariel’s feet, the mark of love had been etched not just onto her palm but indelibly into her heart.

  CODA

  I wish we still had one of those first thirteen telling darts,” Scarl said to Ariel somewhere between Electron and Skunk. “Perhaps the next time we travel northeast, I can find one. I’d love to see if the blank place for the sender’s mark now shows they were sent by a Farwalker.”

  “We can check the one we took from the mouth of the mountain,” she told him. The first thirteen darts had led to the one she spoke of now, and its sender’s mark had been absent, too. “It’s back home at the abbey.”

  “That wasn’t sent,” Scarl said. “That one was placed, and it sat waiting for you a long time. Someone must have stashed it at the start of the war, after hiding the Vault. Perhaps Noah himself.”

  Ariel gazed at the curl of moon sailing before them on the bright morning sky. It did not speak to her now and would never again, but it reminded her of the cycles of time.

  “You could be right,” Ariel said with a grin. “But maybe you’re not. Maybe I just haven’t put it there yet.”

  Also by Joni Sensel

  The Farwalker’s Quest

  Copyright © 2010 by Joni Sensel

  Published by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  Electronic edition published in October 2011

  www.bloomsburykids.com

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sensel, Joni.

  The timekeeper’s moon / by Joni Sensel.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: The Farwalker’s quest. Summary: Summoned by the moon to embark on a dangerous journey, thirteen-year-old Ariel Farwalker, knowing she must obey or risk destruction, sets out with her guardian, Scarl, to follow a mysterious map to an unknown entity called “Timekeeper.”

  ISBN: 978 1 59990 857 1 (ebook)

  [1. Fantasy. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S4784Tim 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009016690