Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1) (32 page)

The ship knocked me from side to side as I scurried down the tiny corridor like a mouse. Then, from an opening above my head, cool night air gently blew down over me. I raised my head and closed my eyes, relieved at the fresh, sweet smell. A slim set of stairs, more a ladder than a proper staircase, snaked down the wall beneath the opening. I eagerly climbed out of the wooden tomb I had been holed up in.

I hated to admit it, but Jade had been right. The instant I heaved my miserable body out from the depths of the ship I began to feel better. The deck was all but deserted. One man sat at the controls of the ship, bare feet propped up on the wheel, tankard propped up on his stomach. He grinned a toothless grin at me and raised his ale in a drunken salute.
 

“Where’s Jade?” I asked. He raised the mug in the direction of the bow and I nodded. Then he tilted his head back at a sharp angle and poured the remainder of the beer down his throat. His head remained back, his glassy eyes fixed on the stars above.

The night sky was moonless, and the heavens sparkled down on the ocean like glittering rain. Not wanting to lose face again, even in front of the nearly unconscious sailor, I stood upright, supporting myself on the edge of the ship, and began to walk unsteadily towards the front. Up ahead Jade’s dim outline was cut against the dark sea beyond, her mane of hair flying out behind her. As I came closer I heard her humming, but the words I couldn’t make out over the roar of the waves.

She turned at the sound of my footsteps, and her face broke into a wide smile.

“Ah! I told you you would feel better!” she said. “You do feel better, don’t you?”

I smirked at her and nodded.

“Mmm, hmm,” she said, and turned her gaze back out to the ocean.
 

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Two days. They’ve agreed to let us out on one of the lifeboats when we’re near.”

“You mean they’re not even stopping at Riverstone?” I asked.

“No, it appears not,” she said. If she tried to hide the worry on her face, it didn’t work. Suddenly I understood her desire for speed, to get to Riverstone as quickly as possible. As I had been searching for Almara so that I could return home, she was returning home now, and hoping to find him already there. Maybe, with our arrival at Riverstone, our search for Almara would be over. And she would finally have her father back.

“How do you know these guys will take us where they say?” I asked.
 

“Because I know the way. Part of my education, before the rock lore became such an important piece of the puzzle, was navigation. Well, Aria navigation at least. I can read the stars from here as well as any map. I know where we are going.”

I looked up at the blazing night sky. Where I saw an impenetrable mass of twinkling lights, Jade saw roadmaps, street signs. We were in her neighborhood, and it was the first time she had seen it in two hundred years.
 

“Does it still look the same?” I asked. I remembered visiting our old neighborhood back home once, the apartment block we had lived in before my dad left. Things had changed. Paint colors and traffic signals were different than I had remembered, and everything looked smaller than it once had.

“The stars don’t change so much,” she said. “Though here on the ground things are certainly different.”

“We’re not on the ground,” I teased. Land was no longer visible at all from this far out in the ocean. Though I was having an easier time now up on deck, I still deeply regretted ever letting my feet leave its solid, stable footing.
 

“Oh, be quiet,” she said. She stared blankly at the horizon before us. “The harbor wasn’t the same. Things seemed different from how I remember. When I was a child, the town was friendly, lively even. It concerns me greatly, the lack of options we had to reach Riverstone.”

Yes, I was concerned about that, too.
 

Months ago, when I first met Jade, I had been searching for the links Almara had left behind. Each time I found one I would use it to jump to the next location, and each jump would bring me closer to finding him. Together, Jade and I traveled for a time, and we had succeeded in finding several more of Almara’s links.

But then our trail suddenly evaporated. The last link we found, which brought us from the forests on Aegis to the plains of Aria, had failed to give us any further guidance. Unlike the other links, no map had appeared, no driving heat or howl had shown us where to go. It had simply deposited us here on Aria, and no further instruction was revealed.
 

Not knowing where, exactly, to journey to find the next link, we chose to move on to the only place on Aeso we could think of where we might find it: Riverstone. It was a guess and a gamble. Almara had originally left these links for Brendan. Had he hoped that his son would know to find the next link in Riverstone, his home?
 

As the ship jerked up and down with the swells of the ocean, I let the spray mist across my face. In the distance the faintest glow of sunrise was beginning to light the horizon. It was hard to feel fearful about what awaited us in Riverstone just at the moment. I was too caught up in the relief I felt in this delicious, cool air. I leaned slightly over the railing, lifted my chin skyward and breathed long, slow breaths.

But my respite was short-lived. Before Jade could say another word, a shrill whistle pierced through the night. I guess that the few men up on deck weren’t all so drunk as the driver of this great, lumbering boat. The lookouts high up in the sails had seen something, and several alarmed shouts echoed against the surface of the water.
 

I turned, staring around for the cause of the disturbance. No other ships revealed themselves. Land was still out of sight. I couldn’t see any threat at all. What was the commotion about?
 

Someone next to me wasn’t moving, and was, in fact, being much more silent than I usually found her. Jade’s hands gripped the edge of the railing, her eyes wide and fixed on a point in the distance I could not see.

“What is it?” I asked, squinting in the same direction. She stayed silent, her mouth hanging slightly open. I searched and searched, but the darkness, still hanging on to the last hour of night, revealed little.
 

So dark, darker than before, I thought to myself. A moment ago, the moonless sky had still been bright with stars, the promise of sunrise teasing the horizon. But now it was as if half of those lights had gone out. Where had the stars gone? What had happened to the early morning light?
 

Then, with a sickening twist of my stomach, I suddenly understood. The stars hadn’t gone out or moved or changed in any way at all. The sun hadn’t sunk back down below the waves. The light was being obscured by something, something massive and black.
 

Water.

A great, enormous wave rose up ahead of the ship, much larger than anything we had voyaged over since coming aboard. Much larger, in fact, than any wave I had ever seen. And it was headed, fast, in our direction.

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Mother of two, horse enthusiast, and serial entrepreneur, J. B. Cantwell calls the San Francisco Bay Area home. In the Aster Wood series, she explores coming of age in an imperfect world, the effects of greed and violence on all, and the miraculous power that hope can have over the human spirit.