Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1) (20 page)

He began to approach me again, and I did the thing that had so easily become second nature to me; I swung my ax. It flipped, blade over handle, and soared through the air directly towards his chest. I watched with satisfaction and then horror as it met its mark…and then burst right through the other side. The center of Cadoc’s body split open in a giant puff of black smoke, and then closed itself again. He was completely unharmed. He looked down at his chest, a look of mild surprise on his face.
 

“So be it,” he snarled, turning his murderous eyes to me. He advanced.

I could not wait any longer. I could not fight this magic, and I doubted I could win in a race out here in the open, even with my speed. I held up the book, decorated with thin, golden paint, thrust it into the air, and screamed, “GO!”

“NO!” Cadoc yelled as the pull of the jump enveloped me. His red eyes seemed to burst from his head and follow me into the spin, but in another moment they melted away like the smoke in his hands.

I landed on my back in deep, soft snow.
Snow
? I had only ever seen pictures of snow, saved from the days before the famine. I gripped bunches of it frantically in my fists as I lurched to my feet. Above, a million burning stars punctuated the blackness of space. The cold was jarring, something I had never felt, but panic overpowered my wonder at this strange landscape. I spun, searching frantically for any sign that Cadoc had somehow followed me. Nothing but low, rolling hills stretched out as far as the eye could see. Not a single tree sprouted from the frozen ground for him to hide behind. I was alone.

It wasn’t until my breath started coming in thin wheezes that I realized I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth wide and lifted my chin. I could not overpower my fear of his pursuit.

This was different than the asthma that came with my bad heart, but I recognized the sensation. When I was three or so years old, before I had gotten sick, I had been jumping on my mom’s bed one night before dinner. Delighted by the heights my tiny body could reach, I bounced right off the edge of the mattress and landed on the carpeted floor, flat on my back. Every molecule of air that had been in my lungs was thrust out in a whoosh from the pressure of the impact. I lay gasping for what seemed like hours, but had only been seconds.
 

I was doing the same now, but each gasp seemed to only bring on more panic as I scanned the sleeping land. I moved quickly despite the reassuring emptiness of this place, not thinking as clearly as I might have if I had remained still and allowed myself to calm down. But it was too much. I had faced too much danger to do anything now but continue to escape. I ran, panicking, through the knee-deep snow into the darkness of night, but it wasn’t long before I realized I couldn’t get far in the state I was in. My chest felt like a deflated balloon, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t suck in any air. I fell back down to the freezing earth.

 
Cadoc. He wasn’t a man. Not a normal man, anyways. He had been flesh, and then smoke, and then flesh again. And his eyes, those red eyes had tried to follow me here.

I lay down, unable to flee, my body trying desperately to obtain oxygen. As my chest heaved, my eyes drifted upward to the clear night sky. Two moons, one large and white like our own on Earth, and one small and dim with a purple glow, shone full. The white snow rose up all around me, the cold flakes brushing up against my cheeks and fingertips. As air slowly returned to my flattened lungs, my gasps made large plumes of vapor in the cold air with each ragged breath.
 

My body gave an involuntary shiver and I crossed my arms over my chest stay warm. Slowly, so slowly, my breathing calmed.

I slowly sat up and looked around. Yes, I was alone, safe, it seemed, from Cadoc. But I was in trouble. My teeth began chattering involuntarily. I wrestled free of the pack, revealed it and ripped it open with my quickly numbing fingers. There had to be something inside that might keep me from freezing to death. I grabbed at each item, hoping for the feel of fur, fleece, anything. My panic resurfaced as I threw aside apples, jars of jam, and the last of my dried meat. He had to have packed
something
, maybe a blanket for sleeping outdoors. Did they have such things as sleeping bags in the Fold? I was starting to despair, my body shaking with cold, when, at the bottom, my fingers brushed up against something that made me exhale a long sigh of relief.

Kiron had stowed a wooly blanket at the very bottom. I pulled it out and spread it wide. The material was thin, but the piece was broad, much larger than a beach towel, and I quickly draped it around my body. Instantly I could feel warmth returning to the skin on my arms as the fabric insulated me against the biting night. I tied it at the base of my neck and got back to my feet, fumbling through the snow, picking up the items I had tossed aside.
 

Once I had repacked the bag, I sat down in the snow and hugged it to my chest, holding on to the one piece of Kiron that was still with me. I was on my own now, and I held the pack protectively, as though someone might snatch it from me at any moment. Though cold, the air was completely still, and the blanket brought me incredible warmth despite its thinness. He must have done some sort of magic to it, or maybe the fibers themselves possessed some rare power.
 

I pulled the green book from my pocket and inspected it in the moonlight. On the front cover was Almara’s symbol, but when I opened the little book the pages inside were blank. It wasn’t surprising, but it was disappointing. Where was I supposed to go? The other links had been maps, but this one showed no destination, no golden ring. I lay back into the snow, frustrated and exhausted.

My body began to feel weak as I calmed down, and I stowed the book in my pocket and raised my eyes to the sky again, studying the two moons. The bigger of the two was much larger than our moon on Earth, though not as bright. The surface was covered in pocked craters, as ours is, but hovering around it was a thick ring of dust. The smaller moon was half the size of ours, and very dark by comparison. Its grayish purple hue barely reflected any light at all, and its surface was smooth as a marble. Both moons were completely full. I wondered how unusual it was to see two full moons in the same sky on the same night. But then, looking around, I realized there was no one here to see the moons but me.

My eyes meandered to the stars that dotted the cosmos beyond the moons. There were so many more than I had ever seen from Earth. Living in the city, we couldn’t see anything but a hazy, orange glow in the night sky. But here I was awash in the brilliance of a billion points of light. It was this, more than anything, that comforted me, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. The stars weren’t a familiar sight to me, though I did have a memory of seeing them, just one time, before.
 

I was maybe four. She had fought with my dad, and when he took off into the street, she took my hand and we left the apartment. We stopped at a neighbor’s door; I never knew her name, but she and my mom would talk from time to time in the hallway. After several minutes of hushed conversation, and what sounded a lot like pleading on the part of my mother, the neighbor handed her a single, silver key. Before the woman could change her mind, Mom grabbed my hand and together we ran down the stairs. She giggled, of all things, and I was so excited about the smile on her face that I followed suit.
 

The key was to a car, a rusted monster with leather bench seats and just a single working headlight. We drove out of the city as the sun was setting, and soon I fell asleep with my head in her lap. Some time later, she woke me, tickling my feet until I was finally upright. She had driven us to the mountains, she said. She grabbed an old, smelly blanket from the trunk of the car, and together we walked up a small incline to a precipice. She bundled me into her arms and wrapped the blanket around us both. I didn’t mind the musty smell so much, not with her warm arms around me.
 

We lay back into the dead grass, and only then did I realize that the sky was full of strange pinpricks of light. They were stars, she told me, and when she was a girl they could be seen from just about anywhere in the world. Her long fingers zigzagged above our heads as she murmured to me about dust particles and the birthing of stars, science too big for me to understand, but I didn’t care. I lay my head on her shoulder and listened to her talk about how much she missed being able to walk out her back door and look up at the stars.
 

“Why can’t we see the stars at home, Mama?” I had asked.

“Things are different now, baby,” she said. I watched her eyes drink in the light from the sky, the look on her face peaceful and calm. “Do you like them?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered, and I did. If she liked them, so did I. Besides, I had never known that an entire universe lay hidden behind the veil of smog that blanketed our world.
 

“Me, too, baby,” she said. She sighed. “To me, seeing the stars is like seeing a family member you’ve never met, and yet somehow knowing them just the same. They make me feel…warm.”

I was happy there with her, but I was starting to wonder when we might be going home. Little sharp pricks of grass were sticking into my backside, making me long for my warm bed and soft sheets. I didn’t understand quite what she meant about feeling warm, especially since the breeze was starting to blow beneath our blanket, and I shivered beneath her embrace.
 

But now, lying on this soft, thick bed of snow, somewhere deep in the Maylin Fold, I understood. She didn’t miss seeing the stars just because they were pretty to look at. She missed them because seeing them gave her some sort of feeling of connection that our cities of millions, and my father, couldn’t bring. She missed them because of the way looking at them now was making
me
feel. I was lost, hopelessly lost in a frozen expanse of snow, separated from my home and all that I understood. But deep inside me, a primal animal was calmed and brought peace where before there had been discomfort and emptiness. She missed them because for millions of years, us and every other animal that had ever been had looked upward to see their familiar sparkling each and every night, relieved by their reliable appearance. It was a privilege now lost to those who lived on Earth.
 

I now understood a small piece of what the famine had taken from them, and from everyone who came after, and I wished that I could package up this sky and bring it back to her. Because when we look at the stars, we are comforted, rebalanced. And we are home.

I woke, my face smashed into the cold snow, the howls of an already forgotten dream following me into waking. As I rolled onto my back and covered the snowy part of my face with the blanket, I realized that the howls weren’t from any dream at all. The mournful cries met my ears again and again, and I sat bolt upright, looking around.

The rolling white hills betrayed no predator I could see, but the howling continued, each cry piercing the silent night around me. I scrambled up, ready to run away, but in what direction? The noise came from the spot in the distance where the purple moon came closest to the horizon. The moons had sunk low in the sky. How long had I slept? It had felt like hours. Where was the sun?

Each howl that echoed in the night made me more and more nervous, and I quickly gathered up my pack and set off in the opposite direction of the noise, walking fast but not yet running. My boots were tough and warm, but my feet sunk several inches into the snow with each step. Progress was slow, but soon I was warm enough from the efforts of walking to lower the blanket from my head. The howls sounded, and I moved over the landscape in the opposite direction. My nerves jittered, but with no threat that I could see, all I could do was walk away. After a time I started to feel like a sheep being herded to a pen, but my experience with the faylons still sent me scurrying. I didn’t want to be anywhere near whatever it was that was making that sound.

This place was strange, much stranger than the green grasses of Kiron’s or the medieval stones of Stonemore, and utterly silent but for the howls in the distance and the crunching of my feet on the snow. The hills were so alike that there was no way to tell which was which, and my trail of footsteps was the only clue as to what direction I had come from. Without the moons to guide me I would have been entirely lost; at least I knew I was heading in one general direction. From time to time the howling would start up suddenly, pushing me to change course, but the longer I walked, the fainter the cries became.

I pulled out the book again and studied it as I walked, hoping for a clue about where to head next, but the pages remained stubbornly blank. I trudged on, hoping I would find somewhere to hide. The animals, if they caught my scent, would surely be faster than me in this snow.

After an hour, I came to the lip of a valley, the first change in the land I had seen. The basin was enormous and round, surrounded by the same little hills on all sides, and down in the very center stood an object I couldn’t identify from this far away. All I could tell from the edge of the bowl was that it wasn’t a tree or a house. Then what was it? Some enormous animal?

I stood for a time and watched it, but after a few minutes it still didn’t move. I carefully started to walk down the hill. The snow here was deeper, and I found myself almost up to my waist in the stuff as I struggled to keep upright. My feet were still dry, but a thin layer of snow melted against my pants, and soon I was shivering again.
 

I finally made it all the way down and cautiously approached what I now saw was some sort of monument. When I realized that the statue that stood atop it was carved into an enormous wolf, I froze. The wolf stood tall, his form lifted fifteen feet off the ground by a marble base.

It’s not alive.

But my hammering heart didn’t hear the logic in my head. I inched towards it until I found myself face to face with the enormous stone statue.