The Farwalker's Quest (36 page)

She had no idea. “Um … as deep as you are tall, maybe?”

He pinned her with his eyes. “Twice that, by my reckoning. So if we can't lower the water a lot, I don't think you can get down there, put your hands on whatever it is, and still come back up.”

“I can hold my breath a long time—watch.” She demonstrated. Scarl counted.

“Okay,” he said, when she finally released her pent breath. “I have an idea how soon to yank you back up, anyway. It'll go faster when you're struggling and cold.”

She bent to stick her hand in the water. She yanked it out again hastily.

“You can still change your mind.”

At her impatient gesture, Scarl added, “Well, I'll change it for you if Zeke's dam doesn't work.”

Zeke had located a spot along the creek where the surrounding floor dipped and the water might be encouraged to veer out of its channel. The three of them stuffed into their packs what spare clothing they had and all the brush they could scavenge from outside. Zeke braved the stink to snatch Liam's pack, too. Scarl lashed three packs together, leaving the fourth and his coat for stopping up chinks.

The boy eyed the corpse wistfully. “We could use him, too, flop him right in the creek. Except I don't want to touch him.”

Scarl nixed that idea, worried about contaminating water that Ariel might gulp. But he did find a tightly rolled grain sack among the things Zeke had dumped from Liam's pack.

“He must have hoped to carry home treasures,” he said. Shaking it open, he discovered that the burlap had been lined with thin animal skin. By carefully splitting it along a seam, they created a tarp. Scarl and Zeke plotted how best to use it.

When Zeke stood ready, Scarl tied the rope under Ariel's armpits. Her feet were bare and she'd removed her trousers, too, to reduce the drag of the water.

“That's so tight I can hardly breathe,” she complained.

“It won't slip off, then.” He tugged the rope. “Jerk it twice, like this, if you're ready to come up before I make you.”

He planted himself where he could brace his good leg against the wall. Wrapping himself with the rope, he took up the slack, leaving her little more than a dozen feet to dive with.

“I'm going to holler at Zeke,” Scarl said. “Don't go until the water drops and I tell you. Then, unless the dam works even better than we hope, I'll count to forty. No more.”

Determined, she steeled herself against the icy water. “I'll get it.”

The instant Ariel hit the water, she was squeezed by the heart-stopping cold and dragged by the immense undertow. Her legs and elbows banged against the sides of the pool. Her eyes flew open. Zeke's dam had worked well enough that she could see a wavering torchlight through the water swirling over her head. She couldn't see a thing in any other direction. Panic spiked through her. Bracing her palms against the nearest stone surface, she recovered her grip on her thoughts. She didn't need to see, she reminded herself. She needed to feel. She closed her eyes again to shut out the blindness.

Letting the water pull her down, she scoured the rock with her hands, forearms, and feet, searching for a crack or a hollow. She felt only water and slippery stone. Her chest grew heavier each second. Her toes wanted to stray farther right and still deeper, so she squirmed to orient herself head down to reach with her arms. Although she moved with the current, not against it, the effort used up most of the air in her lungs.

She clamped down tight against the burning urge to breathe. Back and forth, up and down coursed her hands. It was here somewhere. If only she could breathe. The current felt weaker than when she'd jumped in, but water still rushed past and against her.

One of her fingers jammed painfully. Sweeping back again, her hand crossed something not stone: an eyelet of metal. She scrabbled her fingers around it. It wasn't a hole or niche as she'd expected, but a length of thin chain. Her hand slid down it and struck something larger.

Ariel clutched it. Her air-starved brain couldn't identify it. Only concepts flashed in her mind: round, hard, smooth, breathe oh breathe. She'd found what she'd sought, but the chain didn't want to let go. She had to get out. Scarl had to pull now, because she must change the air in her lungs. But she couldn't bring herself to relinquish the prize. Trying to find an angle where the chain could slip free, she twisted herself all around it, tugging feebly.

A sharp wrench on the rope nearly knocked out her held breath, but it didn't pull her away from the eyelet. The rope's pressure grew. Pain swelled through her chest and flowed through her arms.

A fuzzy darkness crept over the pain. Just before Ariel gave in to the command to breathe, water or no, she felt another
fierce jerk. She flew through the water, scraping on rock. Her legs kicked, bashing her toes. The water broke over her head. She gasped. Air and water both rushed down her throat. She choked, not wanting to inhale again but unable to stop herself. More water caught in her windpipe. Coughs racked her.

Scarl dragged her clear of the water. Spluttering, Ariel landed in a painful heap on the edge of the pool. A smack between the shoulder blades startled her into an instant of stillness. The next round of coughing cleared her throat better. Air found its way in.

“Are you hurt? What was stuck? Is anything—” Scarl's hands roved her limbs, searching for damage. They stopped at the thing locked in her arms.

“Well, bloody no wonder! I thought I wasn't going to get you back up! You just about did us both in, wrapping yourself around that!”

Ariel focused on her prize: a milky jar with a clamped lid. Corroded metal sealed the lid and formed a few links of kinked chain—including the rusted link that had finally broken. It was entwined with her lifeline where it tied at her chest. Her arms alone never would have kept the jar against Scarl's strength, but the entangled rope had held on to it for her.

Zeke raced up, soaked and squelching and demanding to know if she was all right.

“She's better than I am.” Scarl exhaled hard. His hands shook as he removed the rope from them both. “That scared the life out of me.” He ignored the information from Zeke that his half-healed back was bleeding again.

Ariel cleared her sore throat and wiped rivulets from her face. Water lay everywhere—puddled all over the ground, dripping from Zeke, and rushing alongside them. Though Zeke had done well for a moment, the whirlpool swirled high again.

“I got it, though.” Her fingers tapped the heavy white glass in her lap. She couldn't suppress a victorious smirk. “Just like I said.”

A grin split the lingering strain on Scarl's face. “You sure did, spitfire. Let's see what it is.”

Ariel shook the white jar. Something rattled inside. Excitement sizzled through her. But the metal clamp on the lid had corroded solid. It could not be undone by any of them.

“Break the jar,” Zeke suggested. “I'll do it.”

They took it out into the light. Zeke rapped the lid against a stone, gingerly first, then with more strength. The jar's contents clattered with each strike.

“Don't smash whatever's inside,” Ariel said.

At last the glass shattered. Amid the white shards rested another brass telling dart.

Zeke groaned. “If this is just like the first one, I'm going to bash my head on a rock.”

“It's not.” Ariel drew it from the pile of glass. The brass was smooth and nearly blank, its sharp tip unbroken. Suddenly terrified that she would somehow ruin it, she thrust it at Scarl.

He turned it so all eyes could see. Only two symbols marked the outside. Ariel recognized both.

“Farwalker,” she said, pointing. Her heart swelled into her throat. “And Tree-Singer. The message must be inside?”

“Should be.” He passed the telling dart back to her. “Only you or a Tree-Singer can open it, though.”

“I don't know how.”

“Press on those blades with one hand and twist with the other.” He demonstrated. “Gently. It should pop apart in your fingers.”

Zeke cupped his palms beneath hers. “In case it holds jewels,” he explained.

Sure she would accidentally break it, Ariel pressed and twisted. Some hidden catch clicked. The dart seemed to come alive in her hands, the shaft splitting lengthwise and springing into a curved strip of brass. Gray dust showered into Zeke's palms. He gasped.

Ariel slid a fingertip along the concave strip, leaving a smooth trail through the dust. The inner surface was unmarked.

“It's blank!” She checked again. Her eyes shot to Scarl for explanation or help. “Oh—what day is it? Mayfest?” She counted on her fingers. “The day after? The first dart said ‘no later than Beltane.' We might be too late!”

Scarl, too, inspected the strip. “From what the Storians told you, I got the impression you had to get started by Beltane, not finished,” he said. “But I could be wrong.” He reached to pinch the gray powder in Zeke's hands.

“It's not shiny enough to be silver,” Zeke said.

“It's nothing but dust,” Ariel wailed. “Isn't it?”

“I think,” Scarl said, sniffing his fingertips, “it's actually ashes.”

“Ashes? All that for ashes?” Zeke started to tip the ashes into the wind.

Scarl grabbed his wrist. “Maybe it has some significance we're not seeing,” he said. “Get one of our water jars, Ariel. Dry it out. We can save this and—”

“And what? Toss it into the air and make wishes? Cast it onto the sea so a mermaid will rise? Forget it.” Ariel slumped. “Whatever it was, it burned itself up yesterday. We can't make it unburned. So we might as well let the wind have it.”

Scarl gnawed his lip but found no argument. Silently, he released Zeke's wrist. Zeke parted his hands and let the ashes trickle away in the breeze.

“The Vault is in ashes,” Zeke murmured. “‘Sunlight and leaf pass to firelight and ashes.'”

Ariel moaned. “It's a horrible joke.”

“Way too much trouble for that,” Scarl said. “And I'm not convinced it contained anything different yesterday or last week.”

“What else, then? What could it mean?”

Scarl studied the mouth of the cave without answering.

Ariel nudged him. “You know.”

“I might.” At her exasperated look, he continued. “I don't know why the other darts weren't sent until now. This one has been in that pool a good while, and clearly human hands placed it. But maybe the contents of the Vault burned long ago. Maybe that is the message a Farwalker needs to spread. So people like me will stop wasting energy looking for it.”

“You can't find what doesn't exist,” Ariel muttered.

“Mmm.” Scarl closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. His voice thickened. “You can spend your time more wisely, perhaps.”

Ariel's face crumpled by degrees. She carefully set down the sprung dart and drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around tight. She hid her face in her lap, and she wept. All the grief on the twisted path from Canberra Docks to the
mouth of the mountain caught up with her, and she gave herself over to sobs.

Zeke and Scarl exchanged a pained look. Zeke helplessly patted Ariel's shin. More practiced with grief, Scarl did a bit better. He reached an uncertain arm around her shuddering shoulders.

Ariel turned her face to his chest and threw both arms around him. His embrace tightening, he rocked her. His chest muffled her wails.

Some corner of Ariel's mind may have known even then what the latest message truly meant. Perhaps the Farwalker inside knew what Ariel did not—that neither her body nor her heart could do what was needed, not then. At that particular moment, Ariel's young body needed food and plenty of rest if she ever was to regain her strength. And her heart desperately longed for the chance to cry like a child in the arms of someone she loved.

That's what she did.

Ariel stopped crying eventually. The trio found their way to the outskirts of Libros, where a family of Reapers took them in. They slept in a corn shed still empty from winter. Scarl told a halting story: the two young people had lost their mother to poison, by her own hand. One look at their ragged father, a lame and impoverished Storian, was enough to explain why. His wife's family had hounded him out of their village, but he would not surrender his kids. To feed them, he would trade any plain labor no one wanted to do for themselves, as long as it could be done with a limp. It was far too dangerous to practice his true trade within rumor's reach of Mason. Ariel thought it a pretty good story, and it earned her and Zeke more sympathy than questions. Anyone who knew their ages would not have believed it, but the miles had been hard on them all. Scarl looked the part.

They were nervous about being spotted until Zeke reassured them.

“The stones say to stay here awhile,” he explained. He'd spent more than an hour poking in the pile of rocks the Reapers
had removed from their field. “Well, what they really said was, ‘You've tumbled enough. Let moss grow to hide you. Rest and grow ready before you tumble again.' I'm sure that means we'll be safe here for more than a couple of nights. Don't you?”

So one week bled into the next, and even Scarl began to relax. Pulling weeds and hauling water from sunrise to sunset, the Reapers had little time to gossip with neighbors. Their guests tried to make themselves useful without attracting attention. They pulled weeds and hauled water, too, but when they could, they gave more valuable help. Zeke became skilled at following the Finder's whispered directions, and the subtle advice of stones didn't hurt. He and Ariel pretended to merely chance upon honeybee hives, medicinal plants, and piles of deer droppings for fertilizer. Though the Reaper family had little enough bounty to spare, nobody suggested the newcomers leave.