The Farwalker's Quest (9 page)

It wasn't until after Storian had departed that Ariel decided he might deserve just a teaspoon of blame—not for giving her away to the Finders, but for letting Scarl release Madeleine's birds. If he'd stayed in the square, she might be Ariel Healtouch now.

That wistful notion made Ariel's third apologetic visitor doubly surprising. She and her mother had just eaten lunch when a tap came at the door. By then, as much as she hurt, Ariel was starting to imagine that life could go on. She might even comb the tide pools that afternoon.

“Why don't you answer that, love?” Luna didn't add that it was probably another well-wisher anyway.

But when Ariel opened the door, Elbert stood on the threshold. A cluster of pink heartthrob flowers trembled in his fist.

“Supposed to help a broken heart,” he said, extending them
toward her. “Although a Healtouch probably knows better than I do.”

If Ariel's teeth hadn't been well attached, they would have dropped from her mouth. He grinned at her expression. It was the first honest smile she'd seen on his face.

“These are for you,” he said. “But I also would speak with your mother, if I may.”

Ariel stumbled backward. Luna came to the door. After a blink of surprise, she swept her hand back.

“Would you like to come in?”

Elbert rested his bouquet on the table. “I don't blame you for being suspicious of these,” he told Ariel. “I know we have frightened you, being strangers and all. Too intense in our interest, perhaps. We were only excited by the end of our quest, and surprised where it led us.”

Feeling defenseless after yesterday's havoc, Ariel tucked herself behind her mother's left hip.

“No harm done,” Luna said. “What can I do for you, Elbert?”

He clasped his hands over his belly. “We're preparing to leave, Scarl and I.”

Trumpets rejoiced in an unbroken corner of Ariel's heart.

“I wonder,” he continued, “if you've thought of that reward we discussed.”

Luna smiled down at her folded hands. “If you could turn back the days, I'm sure Ariel would choose that. Since I doubt even you can find a way to do that, then no. There's really no need.”

He chuckled and scratched at his whiskers. “I've hunted for ‘do overs' myself more than once. I haven't found any. Yet. But
since you haven't thought of a suitable reward, I'm happy to say that I have. If you'll hear me.”

“Go on,” Luna said doubtfully.

He reached one hand into a pocket. When his chunky fingers emerged, the telling dart rested between them. Ariel edged out a bit from her mother.

“We're going to Libros to take this back to the man that I told you about.” His eyes flicked between Luna and Ariel. “We have a few more to find, but our orders are to return with each singly. We'll be back for another, not far from here, soon. That being the case …” He pressed his lips together, choosing words. He focused on Luna, but the hand holding the dart drifted toward Ariel. “Ariel could deliver this dart herself.”

Ariel wasn't certain her ears had worked right. Elbert hurried to explain before he heard “no.”

“It would be worth a great deal for him to meet her personally, be able to talk to her, get some idea, perhaps, why the dart came to her. That's nothing I'm skilled at, as you could probably tell. We have the horse; she could ride. And we'd deliver her back here in a fortnight and a half. Or certainly not more than a month.”

He had to stop for a breath, and then, before anyone else spoke, he added the clincher. “By then everyone might have forgotten Namingfest Day.”

“Oh, I really don't think …” Luna's voice faded.

To escape from Foolery for as much as a month! The idea was too tempting for Ariel to resist. Images spun through her head. She'd never been out of Canberra Docks. The tales Storian told about other places, however, were always exciting.
Buildings with towers. Hills of salt. Houses in trees. Once, a Fisher blown lost by a storm had sailed home months later with patterns drawn on his back and a musical instrument made from hundreds of tiny gold bells.

Elbert might have been hearing her thoughts. “Libros is quite different from here,” he was saying, “a grand adventure for someone her age. There's a market where people trade sweets and a whole building filled with relics to look at. One little telling dart would be lost there.”

Ariel could not imagine seeing anything from the old days more mystical than her telling dart—and then she could. Libros might have a bike.

Elbert let his words sink in, and then he looked squarely at Ariel. “I'd understand if she was too scared to go. Nobody travels much anymore, least of all someone young. A few Finders and the odd Tree-Singer, that's about it—them that aren't fearful of losing the way. Not many others are bold enough.”

Sparks flew inside Ariel at the suggestion that she might be too scared. The whole proposal was terrifying, of course. It would have been scary with someone like Jeshua, whom she trusted completely. With Elbert and Scarl—! She felt faint. But the thought of treading distant hillsides awoke a yearning inside her, a fire in her gut under the fright. She wanted to go.

“And it wouldn't be easy,” he continued. “Even with the horse, there's rain and rough country and bugs.” He grinned, shifting his gaze again to Ariel's mother. “But I can assure you she wouldn't get lost.”

“Goodness.” Uncertainty wavered in Luna's normally firm features.

Holding her breath, Ariel watched her mother's face. Consent would mean entrusting herself to strangers who had given
her nightmares. Yet denial would be worse, if only because it meant that nothing would change. She'd remain a girl with no talent and no future, a failure. Stung by that truth, Ariel's heart clamored to prove that she had a worth, even if it was only a willingness to step into the unknown. If she could not be a success, she could still be a rebel, breaking the unspoken rule that chained others to places they already knew.

“Let me,” she whispered. And then she told the biggest lie of her life, and the only one she'd told more than once. “I'm not scared.”

Surprised, Luna smoothed her apron. “There's really no need to consider,” she told Elbert. “Whatever I thought, there's no way she could be ready to leave with you today.”

“Hmm.” Elbert scratched at his beard again. Ariel wondered if lice lived there, and whether she'd still want to go if they did. “We could wait until morning, easy enough,” he said. “It is late to be starting today.”

He added, “I confess, it would be more a favor to us than a reward. Maybe a little of both.” His mouth remained poised to keep rolling. He stopped it with visible effort.

Ariel wanted to beg, “Mama, please?” like a toddler. She pressed the words back. Her eyes strayed to the dart in Elbert's hand, and a memory flashed in her mind. Zeke had told her the dart would fall into her keeping again. This must be how.

Thoughts of Zeke begot an idea. She tugged gently at her mother's arm and murmured, “Could we ask Jeshua?”

“Could you give us a little time to discuss it?” Luna asked Elbert.

“Of course, of course. I should have said that myself.” He started to put the telling dart back in his pocket. He paused.

“Tell you what.” He dangled the dart before Ariel. “So you
know that I mean it, you keep this until you decide. If the answer is yes, you'll already have it to carry”.

She drew the brass gingerly from his fingers before he moved to the door.

“I'll be about, trading for provisions,” he said. “Or Scarl's just there across the lane. When you've reached a decision, let one of us know.”

Once he was gone, Luna turned to her daughter. A dozen arguments flicked over her face. She voiced only two. “They're practically strangers, Ariel. I'm not sure I can trust them. And I don't know if I can bear to be without you that long.”

Ariel dragged her palms along her thighs. She had no idea how it felt to be away from her mother. She didn't want to imagine. It would confuse her too much.

“If I was going to apprentice with somebody else,” she said slowly, “I'd be away, too.”

“Not nearly so far. Not out of Canberra Docks.”

“It's just a few weeks, though,” Ariel said.

“Well, I have a mind about it,” Luna said, “but I can tell that you do as well. Let me wash up our lunch dishes and we'll see if Zeke's father can guide us.”

Word of the Finders' offer skipped from one neighbor to the next before Ariel and Luna even reached Jeshua's house. Two people they met along the way remarked on the reward, simply assuming that she would accept.

“Heavens, you can be a Healtouch next year,” said one, “but you might never get another chance like this.”

Another neighbor observed, “It's lucky for the rest of us, too, since it means the Finders will be back in a few weeks—more trading then!”

“We haven't decided yet,” Luna told them, plucking uneasily
at one elbow. “It depends on what Jeshua and the sycamore say.” But Ariel could see the opinions of others nibbling at her mother's misgivings.

As they neared Zeke's house, she kept her eyes on the sycamore, silently begging its approval. Meanwhile, her skin prickled with worry that the tree might actually give it.

“I'm glad you came to ask me,” Jeshua told Luna. He, too, already had heard that Ariel might go off with the Finders, but unlike most others, he didn't approve. After saying so, he added, “My opinion means nothing, of course,” and went to sit for a long time alone near his tree. Ariel and her mother waited on the edge of the square, far from his voice.

When he rose and approached them at last, he looked somber. But he shared what the sycamore had said.

“It is best that she go. And she will.”

Through the waiting, Ariel's own fears and her mother's had sneaked over her heart. The tree's answer sent relief surging through her and bolstered her nerve.

It seemed to have the opposite effect on her mother. “She will?” Luna demanded. “As if I have nothing to say about it? What does that mean?”

Jeshua shook his head. “I can't tell you. Regardless of my question, that is the answer I receive.”

Luna drew Ariel to her. “I won't let her go. I can't do it.”

Reaching a sympathetic hand to her arm, Jeshua replied,
“You know how I feel about ignoring their advice, especially when it's this clear. That always seems to cause trouble.”

Luna smoothed Ariel's hair. Feeling too much like a pet, Ariel pulled away.

“I can't command you,” Jeshua added, “but if she were my child, I would send her.”

At that, Ariel's mother bowed her head, pressed her fists to her chest, and nodded. Ariel squirmed, a silent shriek of excitement vibrating through her bones.

She wanted to tell the Finders herself she was coming. Her mother insisted on knocking together at the door across the lane. When Scarl had been summoned, Luna didn't even say hello.

“Walk with me, please,” she said, striding away. Over her shoulder she ordered, “Ariel, you stay here.”

Scarl gazed thoughtfully after her. Then his eyes slid to Ariel.

Her breath caught. Could she really spend three weeks with those piercing eyes?

“The horse is around back,” he said under his breath, “if you'd like to go make friends.”

Ariel watched Scarl's long legs catch him up to her mother. He tipped his head toward Luna and clasped his hands at his back as he walked.

“There's that crow again,” Ariel thought. If she didn't know that shape-shifters existed only in stories, she would have thought she had met her first one.

Seeing them hurry away, she abandoned the hope of overhearing their talk. Disappointed, she skipped from cobble to cobble, watching her mother's gestures from a distance before she took Scarl's advice.

Luna must have walked him ten times around the village square before returning. Meanwhile, Ariel found the horse tethered on a patch of scrubby grass. She stood lock-kneed at first, her heart thumping, until she could look at the horse without flashbacks of the forest on Namingfest Day. His enormous, warm eyes won her over. She stepped closer, first gingerly stroking the animal's nose, then slipping both hands into the cozy nook beneath his thick mane.

“Would you protect me, if I needed you to?” she whispered.

The velvety nose merely sniffed at her pockets.

Hearing footsteps, Ariel looked up. The two adults turned the corner of the cottage. Luna's eyes still crinkled with worry, no conviction clear on her face.

“His name is Orion,” Scarl said, approaching.

“Is he smart?” Ariel asked.

Scarl shrugged. “Not really. He's sturdy. And kind. Have you ridden before?”

Ariel's eyes shot to her mother. Luna allowed a fraction of a smile to soften her lips.

Words could barely get out through the cramp of anticipation and fright in Ariel's chest. “No,” she admitted. “But I've been on a boat and climbed a tree.”

Scarl's lips twitched. “It's not much like either. You'll learn.”

“Run to Madeleine's house now,” Luna told Ariel, “and see if she'll trade with me for one or two of her birds. Scarl says that in a few days you could send me something tied to its neck. A bit of ribbon or string, so I'll know you are well. He thinks that since they've had practice, the bird would find its way home.”

In fact, Madeleine gushed and nodded, round-eyed about
the idea. Ariel soon returned home with two birds in a grain sack. Luna sat Ariel down with them sternly.

“This part is my idea, not his. Keep it secret.” She waited for Ariel's promise, then handed her several strings snipped from an old fishing net. “The yellow means you're all right. The black …” Luna kneaded her hands. “If anything is wrong—anything at all—send me the black. Some Fishers will come after you. You know they will if I ask.”