Ravenwild: Book 01 - Ravenwild (64 page)

He concentrated on what he could remember of how he had used it the night before, when he had transported himself via the spelled portal to the castle in Ghasten for his brief encounter with Leopold Malance Venomisis. It had been so simple. First, an image of Cirrhus had appeared to him, smiling. As he sat there, the remembrance of her smiling face nearly broke his heart, he was so grief-stricken at her passing. He remembered he had been sitting in her bedroom, staring at it. Suddenly, an image of the outbuilding under which he now sat had materialized. He had gone directly there, and under it he had found the enchanted portal. He had known instantly what to do. He had concentrated on the castle in Ghasten, forming in his mind a clear image of the very bedchamber of the Emperor to which he had been led many years ago when he had been sentenced to a life of servitude in the cesspits under the castle. This same image had formed in the stone once he had spoken the right words, and he had instinctively known that this meant the go-ahead to step into the portal. He had not given a second thought as to how he would transport himself back when his short-lived meeting with Malance Venomisis was concluded. Yet all he had had to do was speak the words, and he had found himself immediately back in the portal.

Now, however, nothing seemed to be happening. He knew that the stone was vital to so many things. He knew he was running out of time. First, there was the issue of rescuing Jacqueline. He could only imagine her terror at being trapped all alone in the Agden Woods, at the mercy of the Wolves, if she was still alive. He needed to find Ryan and Gracie as well, and soon, and finally, he needed to reunite them all with their parents whose plight remained ill-defined. And the key to all of this was unlocking the mystery of the stone. So much to do, and so little time in which to do it.

“Come on, come on,” he pleaded with the stone as if it were a living, intelligent being. He continued to turn it over and over in his large hands. “Help me. Please.” He knew he had to speak words, but what words? Whereas the last time the words had come to him, right now he had no idea what to say.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Orie asked, “Help you what?”

“Oh,” he managed. “It’s you. Thank the Old One. I thought for a moment that our ‘friends’ had somehow managed to enter our sacred place, and we were doomed. Come, sit down.” He placed the rock on the small table between them.

Orie moved over to a spare chair and sat with his hands folded in front of him. He looked around the room and whistled softly. “Wow,” he said. “It looks like this place was chiseled out of solid rock.”

“Well,” said Forrester, “I’m sure it was. Looks like the work of the Dwarves. They do the best stonework, although I’m sure they had some help from the Elves. See how the rock is melted in many places. That’s the work of the Elves.”

He glanced towards the portal that at the moment was a dazzling display of shifting, swirling lights, in an ever-changing mosaic of chiffon-like, kaleidoscope-like effects.

Orie’s gaze followed his, and he noticed the stonework around the entrance to the enchanted gateway. Encircling it were beautiful, polished carvings that gleamed in the flashes and swirls of light that emanated from the portal, along with intermittent faint pops, buzzes, and clicks.

Orie nodded at the portal. “What’s that?”

“That,” said Forrester, “is a way to get wherever we want to go. It is the reason we journeyed here. It’s called a portal. It too is charmed.”

“Kind of like an intraplanetary subway,” said Orie. “Cool.”

He nodded at the tell-all. “By ‘too’,” he continued, “I take it you are referring to this?”

“I am,” he said. “If you think of the portal as an enchanted tunnel, then
this,
this tell-all, is the key to it. Cirrhus always called it her ‘looking-stone’.”

“Hmmm,” said Orie. “And now you can’t get it to work.”

“Correct.”

“But you
have
used it before.”

“Correct again.”

“More than once, yes?”

“Yes, but only once on my own. Last night while you were asleep.”

Orie now knew without asking that this was the way his great friend was

able to instantaneously disappear and reappear.

“Then what’s the holdup? Whatever you did before, you do again. What did you do last night? Don’t we want to get to the Agden Woods? Isn’t that our first stop?”

“It is,” said Forrester. “There’s no question about that, but we’re going to need some help with getting there, not to mention getting back, and I was hoping we could get it from the stone.”

“Well, what’s the problem with the stone? I take it that it has some kind of magic to it? You said it’s spelled.”

“Correct.”

“Well how do you call up the magic?” he asked. “There has to be a way. You’ve done it a zillion times before.”

“As I said, I have only used it once before on my own. Cirrhus had always helped me before that.”

“Well you must be leaving something out,” said Orie. “If it worked once, and you do exactly the same thing a second time, it should work again. It
has
too.”

Forrester scratched his head in thought. “One would think … ” he mused.

“My dad always says, ‘Focus on the solution, not on the problem,’” said Orie. “He got the expression from some guy named Goodkind. I think his first name is Terry. He writes about problem solving, and other stuff. My dad says he’s the best writer he’s ever read, and my dad reads a lot.

“Dad says people tend to spend too much time defining the problem. They get lost. He says you should spend just enough time defining the problem, in clear enough terms, until the solution becomes self-evident. Then, you simply focus on the solution.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I say we do whatever it is that you did yesterday to get the stone to work, and see if we can get it to work again.”

“All right,” said Forrester.

He sat and cleared his mind. He held the stone up in front of him as he had done before and looked for any signs of life coming from within. There were none. He tried again, even harder. Nothing. Orie watched him, a look of calm on his face.

Forrester set the stone down in front of them, looking dejected.

“Question,” said Orie.

“Go ahead,” sighed Forrester.

“Where were you when you first used the stone?”

“I was here.”

“Here,
here?” asked Orie.

“You mean here in this room?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. As I said, I first used it here last night.”

“So you had been in this room before?” Orie asked.

“No.”

“Then how did you know about this place?” he asked. “You know, that the portal thing was here and all?”

“The stone told me.”

Forrester’s face lit up. “Come on,” he cried, jumping to his feet. “Follow me.”

They ran back to the farmhouse and up the stairs to Cirrhus’s room. Forrester sat down on her tiny bed, which groaned in protest. He held the stone up in front of him. Right away the face of Cirrhus filled it, wearing the same smile.

“That’s it!” he yelped. “You were right.”

“Focus on the solution, not on the problem.”

Ryan and Gracie said their final goodbyes to the family that had sheltered them while Ryan recovered enough to travel. They had decided that they would head northwest to try and join up with Mr. and Mrs. Strong.

Grace had made good use of the time, learning as much as she could from Matthew about self-reliance in the woods. She could now make a snare to catch small game and start a smokeless fire over which to cook it, using a flint-and-steel and a rare wood called Burnfast. She knew how to whittle a homemade fishhook and how to identify the tree that would provide them with the fine strings for braiding lines and, if braided further, ropes. And she knew how to find and dig from the soil several different kinds of edible roots, tubers, and the like which, when cooked, were tasty, nourishing travel fare. It had been a crash course to be sure, but she now felt much more confident than she had when they had first arrived on this backwards planet that they might be able to survive on their own in the wilderness. She had developed some fighting skills, and was now fairly competent with a bow and arrow.

So they waved goodbye, calling out their last thanks, and were on their way. It all went smoothly enough for the first few miles. Then the horses began to rebel. Subtle at first, their reticence to continue on their present course first manifested itself by Fury doing little sidesteps and rearing up. The other two began to do the same, and despite the repeated “whoa boys” and “easy nows” spoken by both Gracie and Ryan in their attempts to control their mounts, and hold their seats, the horses not only persisted in declaring their obvious reluctance to keep going the way they were going, they rebelled more. The defining moment came when the trail split. One fork continued on in the same direction that Gracie and Ryan had decided they wanted to go, to the northwest. The other branched off hard to the right, doubling back on itself, in roughly the same direction as they had come. Fury took the lead. He broke into a quick gallop for a few steps, causing Ryan to nearly fall off. Then he came to an abrupt halt. Thunder and Lightning followed, and they found themselves pointed southeast, and no amount of coaxing or prodding could persuade the horses to turn about. Gracie dismounted and slapped Lightning hard on the neck. He looked at her with an expression that said, “Now what did you want to go and do that for?”

“What do you think?” asked Ryan.

“I think they know something we don’t,” said Gracie.

“Like what?”

“Impossible to say. But they’re telling us the way we should go. I think we should listen to them. The last time we did, it saved a lot of lives.”

Ryan dismounted and got out the maps. The dots of Mr. and Mrs. Strong were slightly to the west of where they had been a couple of hours before, indicating that they were on the move again. That of Stephanie was in the same place, and Jacqueline’s was a little closer to the border between the Agden Woods and the southernmost border of Ravenwild. Those of Orie and Forrester were still missing.

“I don’t get it,” said Ryan. “This way does nothing for us that I can see. It takes us farther away from everyone except Jacqueline, and we’ll never get to her in less than three weeks, maybe a month. And Forrester said that we couldn’t go in those woods anyway. He said they’re spelled, remember? We need to head northwest. Come on, Gracie. You know horses. Make them turn.”

Gracie stared at Lightning and said, “Come on, now. We need to get to Mr. and Mrs. Strong. They may need us to rescue them. Come on, now.”

She took the reins, passed them over his head, and pulled hard on them. He dug in just as hard, leaning back. Were their situation not so serious, Ryan would have laughed out loud at the sight.

“It ain’t gonna happen,” said Gracie. “They know something. I’m telling you.”

“All right then,” said Ryan. “We go south.”

They rode for the rest of the day, stopping in time for the two of them to catch several fat trout, which they roasted over some of the Burnfast that had been graciously donated to their cause. The evening air was chilly, causing Ryan to remark, “We need to think about bagging a couple of deer; one at least. We’re going to need some warmer clothes with winter coming.”

“Hmmm,” said Gracie. The thought of killing a deer was not something she relished, but if it meant the difference between saving and losing fingers or toes to frostbite, it was something she was prepared to do.

The next morning when they woke up, Ryan began to get a fire going. Gracie went to check on the horses. Thunder and Lightning were gone!

Their tracks indicated that they had moved off on the same trail towards the south. “Maybe we’ll catch up to them,” said Ryan, trying to sound hopeful.

Gracie nodded, thinking, “I don’t think so. They’re up to something.”

They rode double on Fury. The trail made by the two horses was easy to spot for their entire journey south along the eastern border of Ravenwild, leading them on four days of hard riding in the hilly terrain. By now they each wore mittens, leggings, and a cloak made of fresh deerskin thanks to the bow skills of Ryan, the newly acquired skinning and fleshing talents of Gracie, and the patience of both to render the pelts usable by firelight at day’s end. One stitched while the other prepared the evening meal. What they lacked in talents as individuals they more than made up for in teamwork. They now also had a week’s worth of dried, smoked meat, and ground tubers. So, without having to stop and hunt, and fish, and trap every day, they made steady progress.