Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2) (27 page)

We had survived. Somehow, we had made it through. I pulled out the water skein and trickled water down the backs of my arms. The relief was immediate, if temporary.
 

I got to my feet. Reaching down, I found Jade’s arms in the darkness. I slid my hands down to hers and gripped them, pulling her up.
 

“We need to go,” I said quietly into the black cave. She didn’t answer, but a sniffle escaped from her, and I felt her tiny form crash into me.
 

I held onto her. Her face was drenched with tears, but she did not sob.
 

“I’m sorry,” I said to the top of her head.
 

She stood still, her body rigid. If she felt comforted, I couldn’t tell.
 

The entire midsection of my body was in pain. Not the stinging, burning pain of my arms, but the aching pain of the truth, of realization, of loss. It felt as if I would never feel light again.

But in the deep, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware of the danger we were still in. In the deep, I was still fighting.

“We need light,” I said. “Can you? You know, with the rock? Jade?”

She stayed silent, but a moment later a dim blue light lit the space between us. Behind where the rock hovered I saw her face. It was hard and smooth and chalk white. Her tiny hand brushed her nose, and as her eyes dried, they stared ahead, cold and lifeless.

I moved her back into the tunnel and stared down into it until the light faded away and only black remained. Somewhere down there was our last piece of hope. I moved towards it. She followed.
 

We walked for a long time in silence. Every once in a while I would reach out for her hand, just in case she needed the support of knowing that I was there with her. But she refused to grasp it back. Her fingers hung limply in my own, lifeless and without response.
 

“Let’s take a break,” I said after an hour. Even the subtle movements of walking chafed my arms, and I ached to rest. She moved her body mechanically and turned to face me.
 
She didn’t respond. I passed her the water skein. She drank. Then I motioned for her to sit. She sat.

I did, too, and rested my back up against the uneven stone.
 

Her voice pierced through my haze, small and unexpected.

“Did you see?” she said.

“See what?”

“The way he looked at me? Like he—” She didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence.

“Like he remembered you,” I said.
 

For the first time since Almara’s leap her eyes met mine.
 

“Do you really think he did?”

I hesitated. I didn’t know the answer. But I did know that there was only one answer for her now.
 

“Yes,” I said.

Her eyes searched mine, and instantly grew hard.
 

“You’re lying,” she hissed. I pushed away from her, suddenly alarmed.

“I’m not lying,” I said. She started to get to her feet again and moved away from me. I scrambled up after her. “Look, I’m not trying to lie, it’s just that I don’t know.”
 

She turned and walked away, so quickly and with such finality that it surprised me. Where did she think she was going? I stood watching her, unsure of what to do as her orb of light vanished around the corner ahead of her.

I jogged to catch up.
 

“I’m sorry,” I said when I got close enough behind her. “But, you know, he was crazy. And I—”

She turned and slapped me hard across the face.
 

“Hey!” I spluttered.

“He wasn’t crazy,” she said coldly. “He was tortured. Do you think I’m crazy because of what Cadoc did to me?”

“No, of course not, I just—”

Her eyes narrowed, pure hatred clear in the hollows around them.

“I’m going to get my hands on that book. And when I do, when we get out of this place, I’m going to make a link and send you back. You don’t belong here.”

“But Jade—”

“I don’t want you here.” She seethed with anger. And she said the next words slowly, so that there would be no mistake, no misunderstanding. “I want you
gone
.”

Her wish struck me like a two by four, much more forceful than her slap. I stepped backwards, as if she had actually struck me.

“Jade, I lost him, too,” I said. “This whole thing, this whole journey, is lost without him, and so am I.”

“It’s not about the
journey
,” she yelled, stomping her tiny foot on the stone path. Around us the walls of the mountain shook with her power. “This isn’t some game. This is my family. Don’t you understand?” She lowered her head and looked up at me from beneath her brows. Chills ran down my spine. Her voice was low and dangerous. “My
family
is gone.” The rock all around us buckled, pushed away from her as a magnet repels against its brother. Stones the size of watermelons fell to the floor, ripped free from the cave ceiling.

I took several steps backwards. “What about me?” My voice sounded frail, weak, even to my own ears.

She stood up tall, taller than usual, and the bitterness behind her tirade slammed down on me, more forceful than any physical display of power.
 

“You are
not
my family. You are a child who came here by horrible accident, nothing more. And when you return to your planet, you will be a child still. You have no power.” Her stony glare gave no hint of a lie. She lifted her face to the air, emanating superiority. “You are nothing.”

I dropped my eyes, shamed despite my anger. No one had ever said it outright to me before, but I had felt this way so many times in the past that I didn’t doubt her. I was incapable. Unworthy. Abandoned. In my core, I knew that her words were true. They must be true, because I could feel their validity in my swirling stomach.
 

And as I studied the granite floor of the mountain, I barely noticed when she walked away, taking her light with her.
 

I stood for a time, watching nothing, in the darkness. For what felt like hours, I was alone in the black. I didn’t think. I barely moved. Not unlike my time spent among the cosmos after Cadoc had finally stopped my heart, I simply existed, though here no stars twinkled to keep my eyes alight.
 

Then, slowly, a strange thing began to happen. A sound, faint and thin, penetrated through the dark and reached my ears. Maybe it was a dragon’s cry from far off down the tunnel. Maybe it was an echo of the torrent of water that fell down the slick cavern wall. I didn’t know, and I never found out, but the jolt from that tiny vibration through the air awakened me. A cascade of thought began to spark in my mind, and a cascade of steady beats began to thump in my chest. And one thought, more than any of the others, floated up to the surface from the depths of my soul.

Jade is wrong.
 

I pushed off the wall and began following her through the pitch black tunnel, absently stumbling along in the miserable wake she had left behind. The path was narrow, and if I held my arms out wide I could feel the stone beneath my fingertips, guiding me along.

Back in Stonemore I had become lost in the alleyways that snaked between the buildings. I had panicked then, passed out, even. But I didn’t panic now. I wasn’t lost.
 

She doesn’t know me.

I was different now. When I got lost in Stonemore so many months ago, I was so frightened that my fear had completely overtaken me. Now, having just witnessed some of the most horrifying things of my life, I was somehow able to keep the fear at bay. Beneath the skin on my chest my heart thudded a steady, even rhythm.
 

Hadn’t the doctors always told me that I was too ill to do anything? That my heart would give out, that I should fear that moment when it came, and that I should focus all of my efforts on protecting myself?
 

And I’m not nothing. Not by a long shot.

Well, they had been wrong. My heart was healed now, stronger than the doctors or I could have ever imagined possible.
 

They were all wrong about me. All of them.

She had just stood there, spewing the hateful words born from her pain, trying to convince me that I was worthless, trying to tell me that everything I had ever feared was true.
 

But I wasn’t worthless. I knew I wasn’t. And the reason I knew was pounding harder and harder in my chest right now.
 

She could try to deny me my rights to be part of this family. She could take out all of her misery on me, blame me for everything. But no matter how harshly she criticized me, demeaned me, she wasn’t right. I
was
part of this family, whether she liked it or not, and there was no denying it. She could accuse me of being powerless, and it was a feeling I knew well. So many years of my life I had been powerless, I really had been.
 

But I wasn’t anymore. I didn’t know if I would be able to take the book, if I would ever learn the magical ways of this land beyond my unexplained health and speed. But I wasn’t powerless.
 

My pace quickened, and soon I felt my feet begin to pound hard on the stone floor. I ran as fast as I dared after Jade, after the book, after the life that I and everyone deserved. I was going to beat this thing, beat the Corentin, and there was nothing Jade or anyone else could do to stop me.
 

And once I did, once the dust had settled and everyone was able to think clearly again, I was going to set things right with Jade. If that day came and went, and she still believed the words she had just slung at me, then I would return home, alone, and she could keep this fold in the universe all to herself.
 

But she couldn’t take away what my time in the Fold had given me. She couldn’t take away who I was, who I would become, or the hope that slowly inflated my chest now as I ran after her.

Nobody would ever take that hope from me again.

When I crossed the threshold into the room at the end of the tunnel, filled to the top with exhilaration and determination, I hadn’t expected to find Jade as I did. She was sprawled out on the floor, leaning on one elbow, rubbing the back of her head with her other hand. I looked around the room, trying to figure out what had happened.
 

And my bubble of hope deflated with an almost audible pop.
 

This place was familiar, very familiar. Books lined up along the cut stone walls, and a pedestal in one corner held propped up upon it the largest of them. The leather tome stood on the platform, and cut deeply into the cover was the mark I had come to know, the mark that said we had succeeded.
 

But joy did not flood me as I had expected at finding the prize. No feeling of satisfaction permeated my chest, and instead I almost fell to my knees. This was the room from my dream. No good could come from this place. All of that effort, the climb, the bodies, Almara lost, Jade’s hope destroyed, and this was to be our reward.
 

Gasping, I searched around for the goblin who had haunted me the other night, reeling from the lingering threat of his long, sharp teeth. The attack would come from…where? Above?

Within?

But no other being joined us in the room. And my insides seemed intact. I cautiously knelt down to where Jade lay, my eyes darting from wall to wall, waiting for the attack to come.

“Are you ok?” I breathed. She shoved me away and rolled over to her other side.

“I’m fine,” she grunted. “I don’t need your help.”

“But what happened?” She didn’t speak. I searched around the room for the answer she wouldn’t give.

I stood up, transfixed. What did this mean? When I had dreamed of Cadoc so many months ago, a lot of what I had dreamt had come true. Was this what was happening now? Was I somehow able to see the future? I shook my head to clear it, but the questions only multiplied in my mind.
 

“What happened to you?” I asked again, harder this time. She stared away from me at the rock wall, heaving with emotion or effort, I didn’t know. She stayed resolutely silent.

I slowly approached the pedestal. Reaching the ancient volume, I reached out to feel the tattered, crumbling leather. A sizzling sound filled the tiny space, and I snatched my hand back from the book. The sizzling stopped, and I inspected my hand, expecting to find a burn I hadn’t yet felt. But it was unchanged, not injured in any way. I reached out again. The sizzling echoed again and I heard Jade gasp behind me, but this time I didn’t pull back my hand. Instead. I grasped the book with both hands and removed it easily from its throne.
 

I turned to Jade and found her eyes wide, staring at me as if I had just pulled the sun from the sky with my bare hands. Then her face changed, a shadow falling over her features, and her eyes became as hard as the stone she was named for.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she growled.
 

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking from her to the book and back again.
 

“It doesn’t change anything,” she continued. “It’s nothing more than a trick. Cooked up by Cadoc or the Corentin or you, even.” She got to her feet and smoothed out her clothes with shaking, pale hands.
 

She tried to take it
, I thought.
 

Tried and failed. That was why I had found her on the ground when I had entered.
 

Then how did I do it?

I stroked the leather of the book absently as I studied its cover, trying to solve the puzzle of how the book had come to rest in my hands. Was it true, then? Did I possess some magic I didn’t know of?
 

The jolt that rocked through the mountain came so hard and fast that I almost lost my footing. Jade did, and was launched against the doorway. Another one came, cracking through the rock, and this time I hit the ground. When I looked up to see if Jade was alright, she had fled the tiny room.