The Farwalker's Quest Page 6

  Tears rose in her throat. She was stuck. If she went back and confessed she’d had help, they would thank her for being honest, but she would fail nonetheless. If she stayed mum, but he talked, people would believe him because cheaters had something to hide. She would fail either way.

  Her only hope was that she was wrong. She could say nothing and pray that he did the same. But even if no one ever found out, her Healtouch name would always feel like a cheat.

  In a daze, Ariel got herself moving again. Her heart felt as though it hung near her knees. Dragging her feet, which were heavier from the weight of her heart, she plucked a few strands of foolsbane. She kicked at a swarth fungus where it sprouted low on the side of a tree. Snatching it, she would have rather stomped it to pulp. She’d never wanted so badly to run away.

  Ariel haunted the forest until the spring air grew chill. As she returned across the meadow, she remembered the chamomile. She picked a single flower before continuing on to the square.

  Zeke had returned, probably long ago. His face glowed. That was all Ariel needed to know he’d passed his test. Madeleine was nowhere to be seen, but she still had an hour or two. More time couldn’t help Ariel now.

  The crowd welcomed her back. Unable to match their smiles, she trudged to the sycamore. Zeke’s father, the Storian, and Luna came together from conversations they’d been holding with friends. Seeing her daughter’s downcast look, Luna tipped her head inquiringly. Ariel pressed a stiff smile to her face and laid her pickings at Jeshua’s feet.

  “Needlework?” he asked.

  “Oh!” She drew the balled handkerchief from her pocket. She could still add better stitching, but it no longer seemed to matter. She handed it over.

  Inspecting it, the adults looked disappointed. “It’s a start,” Storian said. “And for the last part of your test … ?”

  Jeshua called out the names one by one. For each, Ariel held up the plant. Luna raised her eyebrows at the lone chamomile flower.

  As “swarth” fell from Jeshua’s lips, Ariel’s ears buzzed. She saw his lips move but couldn’t hear it. She was too busy waiting for a cry of “Cheat!” from the crowd.

  Jeshua twitched his hand and repeated the word. Hardly believing the silence, Ariel grabbed her last plant. Her heart soared. She raised the fungus to Jeshua—and froze.

  “Ariel!” Her mother gasped.

  Ariel saw it plainly at last. Somehow she’d done exactly what Scarl had warned her against: picked a fungus that looked much like swarth. But this one was deadly.

  Jeshua’s face collapsed into wrinkles. A small groan rippled among those near enough to see. The fungus tumbled from Ariel’s hand.

  “It’s not swarth,” she said, too late. The idea Scarl had planted had sprouted in the fear he’d sown with it. She’d simply been too distracted to notice its bloom until now.

  Her heart thudded and ached as if she had actually poisoned someone. The adults in charge whispered together. Luna bowed her head and shook it slowly once: no.

  Jeshua looked at Ariel gravely, his eyes sad.

  “I’m sorry, Ariel.” He said more words, like “taking more time” and “next year” and “partial.” None of them mattered but “sorry.”

  “Something scared me. I got confused,” she whispered into the fog around “sorry.” She didn’t expect her explanation to change things. It didn’t.

  Tears flooding her eyes, Ariel let Luna lead her home through the whispers. A few young voices taunted, “April Fool!” Those were hastily hushed by parents. She didn’t look up from her feet until she thought she’d passed every face in the crowd. When she finally raised her eyes, she discovered she still had a few more faces to pass. One belonged to Scarl. She gazed back at him dully, not caring if his eyes glinted in pleasure or triumph.

  Neither appeared on his face. If anything, he looked ill. One hand kneaded his temple as if his head hurt.

  The other gripped the hilt of his knife.

  CHAPTER

  8

  “It was a hard test,” Luna said. She sat by the hearth and scooped her daughter into her lap. Like a toddler, Ariel hid her face against her mother’s collar. “But I thought you’d do fine. I know you’ve learned your plants better than that.”

  She awaited some explanation. Ariel’s tongue felt too wooden to give it. Words couldn’t turn back Jeshua’s “sorry.”

  “I know it feels awful now,” Luna added, accepting the silence. She patted Ariel’s back. “But you won’t die of it.”

  In the hours that followed, three people told Ariel they were partly to blame. The quickest to say so was Zeke. The first time he knocked on the door, Luna took one look at Ariel’s face, bent to whisper to him, and sent him away. When he came back just before bedtime, she let him come in.

  By then Ariel’s stomach, unaware she considered her life over, had rumbled angrily awake. Zeke sat beside her while she nibbled cheese and leftover bread.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her.

  “Don’t say that. I hate that word.” She would never hear “sorry” again without reliving this day.

  Zeke studied his hands before trying again. “It’s kinda my fault. My dad didn’t want anyone saying he’d been easy on me because I was his last son. And then I think he felt he had to make all the other tests hard, too.”

  Ariel looked up from her bread crust. “Did Madeleine fail, too?”

  Not sure what she wanted to hear, Zeke gnawed his lip. “No. She came back just before dark. She spent all day looking and calling. I even saw her trying to talk to the horse to figure out where he’d gone. She captured only two birds, but another flew by itself to her coop.”

  Ariel gazed at him sadly, trying to imagine Madeleine’s day. It was tempting to want company in failure, but she would never wish her own roiling shame on somebody else, least of all gentle Madeleine. Ariel managed a shallow smile.

  “She’s lucky,” she said. “I think her test was the hardest. It’s not your fault, though, Zeke. I just—” She shuddered. She couldn’t bear to revisit it yet again. “I goofed up something awful,” she said instead. “I guess this is the second bad thing that was going to happen.”

  Zeke sighed. “I’m not too sure about that.”

  Unable to imagine anything worse, Ariel just blinked at him and let blankness fill her head. It was so much easier than thinking about what he’d just said.

  “What was buried under the tree, anyway?” she asked, changing the subject.

  Zeke shared the high points of his test. He hadn’t bothered trying to catch the sycamore’s attention. Instead he’d walked to his maple, sung her a few songs he thought she would like, and asked if she could help him. Although even trees have enemies and allegiances, they rarely hold secrets from one another. After an hour or so, the maple gave him an answer. He returned to tell his father that the thing in the ground was a spoon with a bootlace tied around it. Jeshua dug it up. That was that.

  He made it sound easy. Ariel knew that it wasn’t. Having already done well enough to be a Tree-Singer himself, Zeke would now start as his father’s apprentice. She hugged him and cried. In the part of her that still could feel at all, she was honestly pleased. Yet his success also lit up her failure.

  The second person to shoulder some of Ariel’s pain, the next morning, was Bellam Storian. He didn’t use the word “sorry.” He just came by to ask how she was.

  “I feel somewhat responsible for what happened yesterday,” he added. “All that fuss about the telling dart was quite a distraction. I should never have mentioned that two of my students had found it.”

  “Why did you, then?” Ariel grumbled.

  “Ariel, what manners!” Her mother clicked her tongue.

  Ariel shrugged one shoulder. She thought she had nothing left to lose. Why be polite?

  “That’s all right.” Storian whisked his hands together slowly. He gave Ariel a lopsided look—part amusement, part chagrin. “You haven’t had much experience with Finders, have you? N
o one but them understands how they work. But those who eat regularly have to be very good at their trade.” He paused, letting Ariel decide that a Finder as big as Elbert must be skilled indeed.

  He cleared his throat, stared out the window, and continued. “You heard them say what they sought—not the dart, but its receiver. They would have found out sooner or later. I thought sooner was better. I thought then they’d just leave. It never occurred to me—” He faltered. “Well, I guess I was wrong.”

  “Nonsense,” said Luna. “You told the truth and should make no apology for that. I can’t see how it changed yesterday. Some things just don’t turn out as we’d like.”

  Ariel choked on a protest. When she’d first opened her eyes that morning, her waking brain had forgotten, just for an instant, that she was a Fool. Memory had crashed down upon her like a wave crushing a seashell.

  She and Storian now swapped a look of regret. “I’ll try to make the next year of classes as interesting for you as I can,” he said. His eyes dodged away, and he added, “Once we start again, of course.”

  It wasn’t until after Storian had departed that Ariel decided he might deserve just a teaspoon of blame—not for giving her away to the Finders, but for letting Scarl release Madeleine’s birds. If he’d stayed in the square, she might be Ariel Healtouch now.

  That wistful notion made Ariel’s third apologetic visitor doubly surprising. She and her mother had just eaten lunch when a tap came at the door. By then, as much as she hurt, Ariel was starting to imagine that life could go on. She might even comb the tide pools that afternoon.

  “Why don’t you answer that, love?” Luna didn’t add that it was probably another well-wisher anyway.

  But when Ariel opened the door, Elbert stood on the threshold. A cluster of pink heartthrob flowers trembled in his fist.

  “Supposed to help a broken heart,” he said, extending them toward her. “Although a Healtouch probably knows better than I do.”

  If Ariel’s teeth hadn’t been well attached, they would have dropped from her mouth. He grinned at her expression. It was the first honest smile she’d seen on his face.

  “These are for you,” he said. “But I also would speak with your mother, if I may.”

  Ariel stumbled backward. Luna came to the door. After a blink of surprise, she swept her hand back.

  “Would you like to come in?”

  Elbert rested his bouquet on the table. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious of these,” he told Ariel. “I know we have frightened you, being strangers and all. Too intense in our interest, perhaps. We were only excited by the end of our quest, and surprised where it led us.”

  Feeling defenseless after yesterday’s havoc, Ariel tucked herself behind her mother’s left hip.

  “No harm done,” Luna said. “What can I do for you, Elbert?”

  He clasped his hands over his belly. “We’re preparing to leave, Scarl and I.”

  Trumpets rejoiced in an unbroken corner of Ariel’s heart.

  “I wonder,” he continued, “if you’ve thought of that reward we discussed.”

  Luna smiled down at her folded hands. “If you could turn back the days, I’m sure Ariel would choose that. Since I doubt even you can find a way to do that, then no. There’s really no need.”

  He chuckled and scratched at his whiskers. “I’ve hunted for ‘do overs’ myself more than once. I haven’t found any. Yet. But since you haven’t thought of a suitable reward, I’m happy to say that I have. If you’ll hear me.”

  “Go on,” Luna said doubtfully.

  He reached one hand into a pocket. When his chunky fingers emerged, the telling dart rested between them. Ariel edged out a bit from her mother.

  “We’re going to Libros to take this back to the man that I told you about.” His eyes flicked between Luna and Ariel. “We have a few more to find, but our orders are to return with each singly. We’ll be back for another, not far from here, soon. That being the case …” He pressed his lips together, choosing words. He focused on Luna, but the hand holding the dart drifted toward Ariel. “Ariel could deliver this dart herself.”

  Ariel wasn’t certain her ears had worked right. Elbert hurried to explain before he heard “no.”

  “It would be worth a great deal for him to meet her personally, be able to talk to her, get some idea, perhaps, why the dart came to her. That’s nothing I’m skilled at, as you could probably tell. We have the horse; she could ride. And we’d deliver her back here in a fortnight and a half. Or certainly not more than a month.”

  He had to stop for a breath, and then, before anyone else spoke, he added the clincher. “By then everyone might have forgotten Namingfest Day.”

  “Oh, I really don’t think …” Luna’s voice faded.

  To escape from Foolery for as much as a month! The idea was too tempting for Ariel to resist. Images spun through her head. She’d never been out of Canberra Docks. The tales Storian told about other places, however, were always exciting. Buildings with towers. Hills of salt. Houses in trees. Once, a Fisher blown lost by a storm had sailed home months later with patterns drawn on his back and a musical instrument made from hundreds of tiny gold bells.

  Elbert might have been hearing her thoughts. “Libros is quite different from here,” he was saying, “a grand adventure for someone her age. There’s a market where people trade sweets and a whole building filled with relics to look at. One little telling dart would be lost there.”

  Ariel could not imagine seeing anything from the old days more mystical than her telling dart—and then she could. Libros might have a bike.

  Elbert let his words sink in, and then he looked squarely at Ariel. “I’d understand if she was too scared to go. Nobody travels much anymore, least of all someone young. A few Finders and the odd Tree-Singer, that’s about it—them that aren’t fearful of losing the way. Not many others are bold enough.”

  Sparks flew inside Ariel at the suggestion that she might be too scared. The whole proposal was terrifying, of course. It would have been scary with someone like Jeshua, whom she trusted completely. With Elbert and Scarl—! She felt faint. But the thought of treading distant hillsides awoke a yearning inside her, a fire in her gut under the fright. She wanted to go.

  “And it wouldn’t be easy,” he continued. “Even with the horse, there’s rain and rough country and bugs.” He grinned, shifting his gaze again to Ariel’s mother. “But I can assure you she wouldn’t get lost.”

  “Goodness.” Uncertainty wavered in Luna’s normally firm features.

  Holding her breath, Ariel watched her mother’s face. Consent would mean entrusting herself to strangers who had given her nightmares. Yet denial would be worse, if only because it meant that nothing would change. She’d remain a girl with no talent and no future, a failure. Stung by that truth, Ariel’s heart clamored to prove that she had a worth, even if it was only a willingness to step into the unknown. If she could not be a success, she could still be a rebel, breaking the unspoken rule that chained others to places they already knew.

  “Let me,” she whispered. And then she told the biggest lie of her life, and the only one she’d told more than once. “I’m not scared.”

  Surprised, Luna smoothed her apron. “There’s really no need to consider,” she told Elbert. “Whatever I thought, there’s no way she could be ready to leave with you today.”

  “Hmm.” Elbert scratched at his beard again. Ariel wondered if lice lived there, and whether she’d still want to go if they did. “We could wait until morning, easy enough,” he said. “It is late to be starting today.”

  He added, “I confess, it would be more a favor to us than a reward. Maybe a little of both.” His mouth remained poised to keep rolling. He stopped it with visible effort.

  Ariel wanted to beg, “Mama, please?” like a toddler. She pressed the words back. Her eyes strayed to the dart in Elbert’s hand, and a memory flashed in her mind. Zeke had told her the dart would fall into her keeping again. This mu
st be how.

  Thoughts of Zeke begot an idea. She tugged gently at her mother’s arm and murmured, “Could we ask Jeshua?”

  “Could you give us a little time to discuss it?” Luna asked Elbert.

  “Of course, of course. I should have said that myself.” He started to put the telling dart back in his pocket. He paused.

  “Tell you what.” He dangled the dart before Ariel. “So you know that I mean it, you keep this until you decide. If the answer is yes, you’ll already have it to carry”.

  She drew the brass gingerly from his fingers before he moved to the door.

  “I’ll be about, trading for provisions,” he said. “Or Scarl’s just there across the lane. When you’ve reached a decision, let one of us know.”

  Once he was gone, Luna turned to her daughter. A dozen arguments flicked over her face. She voiced only two. “They’re practically strangers, Ariel. I’m not sure I can trust them. And I don’t know if I can bear to be without you that long.”

  Ariel dragged her palms along her thighs. She had no idea how it felt to be away from her mother. She didn’t want to imagine. It would confuse her too much.

  “If I was going to apprentice with somebody else,” she said slowly, “I’d be away, too.”

  “Not nearly so far. Not out of Canberra Docks.”

  “It’s just a few weeks, though,” Ariel said.

  “Well, I have a mind about it,” Luna said, “but I can tell that you do as well. Let me wash up our lunch dishes and we’ll see if Zeke’s father can guide us.”

  Word of the Finders’ offer skipped from one neighbor to the next before Ariel and Luna even reached Jeshua’s house. Two people they met along the way remarked on the reward, simply assuming that she would accept.

  “Heavens, you can be a Healtouch next year,” said one, “but you might never get another chance like this.”

  Another neighbor observed, “It’s lucky for the rest of us, too, since it means the Finders will be back in a few weeks—more trading then!”

  “We haven’t decided yet,” Luna told them, plucking uneasily at one elbow. “It depends on what Jeshua and the sycamore say.” But Ariel could see the opinions of others nibbling at her mother’s misgivings.