“How can you be so uncaring?” I asked before I could stop myself.
The man leaned heavily on his door and poked his face so far out his nose was almost touching mine. I forced myself not to jump back. His breath smelled like a rotting carcass.
“What good does it do to care?” he asked. For the first time, I thought I saw something different in his eyes. Instead of the darkness of his irritation, it looked more like sadness and hurt.
Before I had the chance to say anything, he pulled himself up as straight as he could and went on. “Now, leave me alone. I am an old, useless man. I have no desire to help you, and I have no ability to do so, either. So go about your day. Go find your giant. Or don’t. But whatever you do, remember this . . .”
“Remember what?” I asked, hoping that this would be the moment. The nugget that he would give us to take away or maybe a clue so we could find the giant.
Lowering his voice, he replied, “Remember that I don’t care one tiny little bit what you do as long as you leave me alone !”
And with that, he withdrew into his house and slammed the door behind him.
Aaron and I stood in silence for a moment. Then he turned to me.
“I’d say that went well, wouldn’t you?” he said with a grimace.
The joke broke the tension of the moment, and I relaxed as I allowed myself to laugh. I was still smiling as we moved away and sat on a rock just beyond the house, my shoulders shaking with laughter. Except I soon realized they weren’t shaking with laughter anymore. They were shaking with sobs.
Aaron sat next to me and put his arm around me. “Emily, don’t cry. Please,” he whispered, wiping my tears away with his sleeve.
“What else can I do?” I asked. “There’s no giant here. He was our only hope — and he doesn’t even exist. The Prophecy was wrong. But how could it be? It hasn’t gotten anything else wrong.”
The more I talked, the more helpless I felt. And the more helpless I felt, the stronger the tears flowed. I leaned on my knees and let myself cry loudly.
“All this way, everything we’ve gone through — it was all for nothing,” I said, sobbing. “We’re stuck on a mountain ridge with no one but a grumpy old man for company, who refuses to help or listen or anything. Aaron, this is serious. I’m really scared. If we don’t find the giant, all the people whose lives are in danger — their lives are on us.”
Aaron took his arm from around my shoulder and stood up. “Wait here,” he said firmly.
I dragged my arm across my face, wiping my nose and cheeks. “Where are you going?”
Aaron puffed his chest out. “I’m going to fix this,” he said. “I’m going to talk to the man again. We haven’t come all this way for nothing.”
He started to walk away.
“Wait.” I got up and followed him. Holding out my hand, I said, “We’re in this together. I’m coming with you.”
“OK,” Aaron said, nodding. Then he took my hand, and together, we walked steadily back to the cottage.
Aaron knocked on the door.
Nothing.
He knocked again. “We’re not going away!” he shouted.
Still no movement inside.
I knocked. Aaron knocked. We banged on the door, over and over, calling to the man inside until, eventually, it opened again.
Looking wilder and angrier and darker than ever, the man stood in the doorway. “Which part of ‘leave me alone’ do you not understand?” he bellowed.
Aaron cleared his throat. He hadn’t said much to the man the first time. I’d done most of the talking, and the man had replied mostly to me.
This time, Aaron spoke, calmly, clearly, and firmly.
“Which part of ‘no’ do you not understand?” he replied.
The man turned his gaze to Aaron.
“We’ve come a long way,” Aaron went on. “We did not have an easy journey here, and we will not have an easy journey back.”
The man kept his eyes on Aaron. He looked mesmerized by him.
“A lot of people are going to suffer if we can’t help them,” Aaron went on. “This might be fine with you, but it is not OK for us. So, no. We will not leave you alone. We can’t.”
As he spoke, he was reminding me why I liked him so much. This was the Aaron I’d fallen for. The one who stood up for himself, who was daring and brave and intelligent. I liked him so much more than the one who kept telling me how adorable I was.
I silently willed him on and hoped the old man would give us the information we needed.
The man stared at Aaron. “I’m not who you are looking for,” he said weakly. He sounded like the fight had suddenly drained out of him.
“You might not be who we are looking for, but you are who we have found,” Aaron went on. “Now, you can ignore us and yell at us as much as you like, but we are not going away.”
They were locked in a standoff — the man, staring at Aaron so hard his eyes had begun to water, and Aaron staring back, chest puffed out, hands on his hips, like he was declaring war on the old man.
And then, into the silence, into the standoff, something happened.
The man held up a spindly arm, reached out with a bony finger to point at Aaron, and said in a whisper hoarse with emotion, “It’s you.”
The moment seemed to stretch out forever. None of us knew what to do with it.
The man and Aaron were locked in a mutual gaze that was as taut as a wire. It felt so tense it was as though a spark of electricity flowed between them.
The idea felt familiar.
Where had I heard that before?
Eventually, the man waved his finger at us both. “Stay here,” he growled. “Don’t move. You hear me?”
“Um. OK,” Aaron muttered.
“Good,” the man mumbled back at us. And then he turned, withdrew into his house, and shut the door in our faces.
Aaron and I stood exactly where we were.
“Now what?” I asked eventually.
Aaron raised his shoulders in a puzzled shrug. “I don’t know. Stay here, I guess,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
We stood in silence a bit longer. I could hear rummaging sounds coming from inside the house. A moment later, the door creaked open.
The man stood in the doorway. He had something under his arm. It looked like a piece of bark from a tree.
“You had better come inside,” he said, standing to the side and beckoning us in with a bony finger. “I’ve got something to show you.”
I glanced at Aaron. He nodded, and we went inside the house.
Calling it a house was maybe a bit of an exaggeration. A small square. Four walls. Three windows and a door. Random objects piled up in the corners. A fire at one side.
“Sit,” the man said.
I looked around for something to sit on. He pointed at the boulders in the corner so Aaron and I took a seat on two of them. The man pulled a log in front of us and bent his spindly legs to sit down facing us.
Only then did he pull the piece of bark from under his arm.
“Look,” he said. He held the bark out high in front of him, right in front of our faces. There was a drawing on it! A picture — just like the pictures from the Prophecy.
Only this one was a close-up.
A man. Maybe the man who was sitting in front of us now. He looked younger on the picture so it was hard to tell — but the eyes looked the same. The same thin mouth, the bushy eyebrows. Yes, the longer I looked at it, the more certain I was that it was him.
But that wasn’t the thing that took my breath away.
“You see it?” the man asked, leaning over the picture, prodding it, and looking back up at us.
Oh, yes. We saw it.
The man was standing with a boy. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale complexion. The man had an arm slung around his shoulders. Man and boy were smiling at each other. Their smiles were the same. Their eyes were the same. They looked like family.
And the boy looked like Aaron. It
was Aaron.
For a moment, there was no sound. Nothing except the occasional crack and hiss coming from the fire in the corner.
Finally, Aaron spoke. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What does this mean?”
The old man let out a long, slow, whistling breath. He shook his head. “You know how long I have been here?” he asked. “You know how many of my questions have gone unanswered in that time?” He made a tutting sound. “No, of course you don’t know,” he went on. “No one knows. No one cares.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I offered gently. “I mean, maybe —”
The man cut me off with a sharp wave of his arm. “I am resigned to it,” he said. “You do not have to try to comfort me. I am beyond comfort.” He half smiled, one tiny edge of his mouth curling upward while the rest of it twitched. “See, it doesn’t matter to me if there is anyone to care. I don’t care.”
Aaron shuffled in his seat. “You don’t care . . . ?”
“About anything!” the man exclaimed. He laughed, a rattling wheeze that burst out of him like a dart. Then just as suddenly, he stopped laughing and turned serious again. After pulling the picture to his chest with one arm, he reached out to Aaron with the other.
The man touched Aaron’s chin with the tip of his finger, lifting his face to look more closely, and in a cracked voice, he said, “Or at least, I didn’t.”
Aaron sat tall on his boulder, back straight, face set as he met the man’s eyes with his own. Their gaze was identical, and yes, there it was again: the spark, the feeling of electricity running between them.
I suddenly realized why it was familiar.
The picture of the giant and the boy. The jagged symbol between them that no one could explain. It was here in this room!
Except that this old man wasn’t the giant.
So what did it all mean? Could it possibly mean that he could help us, even if he wasn’t who we thought he’d be?
The man let go of Aaron’s chin and stood up. “You want a drink?” he asked.
I glanced at the fire and the crooked pot on top of it with steam coming from it. I looked at a couple of hollowed-out stones that I guessed were the cups. Brambles, weeds, and nettles hung from the ceiling. I tried to imagine what he might be offering us to drink — and decided I could manage without it.
“Um. We’re OK. Thanks,” Aaron replied for both of us after glancing at my expression.
“Suit yourselves.” The man turned his back on us and shuffled over to the fire. He took the bark with him and balanced it on a wooden table, the picture facing us.
I reached over to take Aaron’s hand while we waited, and we sat in silence as we watched the man stir a clump of herbs into his pot, then pour the mixture into a stone cup.
“Well, then,” he said as he brought his drink over and settled himself back on the log in front of us. “I suppose I had better explain.”
Long ago, I was quite an important man,” he began. “Important in some circles.”
He paused as if waiting for us to disagree with him. I’ll admit, it was hard to see exactly in what context this broken old man could ever have been important — but we didn’t interrupt.
“Me and my . . .”
The man stopped. He seemed to choke.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He ignored me. Instead, he took a sip of his drink and spoke again. “Me and my wife,” he said in a low, steady voice, looking at the ground.
He paused again, taking a few more sips of his drink before placing it on the floor beside him and folding his hands in his lap.
“I would say that what I am about to tell you might sound unreal, that you may think I’m making it up. An old man’s silly stories.” He wagged a finger at us both. “But I don’t think I need to worry about you two.”
“Why not?” Aaron asked.
The man looked wistfully out through a window. “Out there,” he said. “I know this mountain like the back of my bony, old hand. I know every piece of ground, every tree, every twig. I know every single animal in the woods. I know the water sources, the food sources — I know it all.”
“OK,” I said carefully. “And . . .”
“I know the waterfalls, the tunnel that is the only way out of here. The gravity-defying, life-threatening torrents inside the tunnel,” he went on. “And you know what that means, don’t you?”
Before we had a chance to reply, he added, “It means I know it is impossible for anyone to get here,” he replied. “Impossible,” he repeated, in case we hadn’t heard him the first time.
Then he laughed. “And yet here you are.”
He narrowed his eyes at us. Was he waiting for a reply? An explanation?
“I . . .” I began, but he waved his hand, as if to swat me away like a fly.
“You do not need to explain,” he said. “Not yet. The very fact of your presence here is enough to tell me that you are already familiar with magical happenings, and that my story will not shock you.”
Neither of us denied it. He was right. He seemed to know us so well, and yet we still knew nothing about him.
“So,” he said. “First things first. Let’s start with my name. I am Jeras.”
“Jeras,” I repeated. It sounded a bit like Jerry — only more important somehow.
“I’m Emily,” I said. “And this is Aaron.”
“OK, Emily and Aaron, here’s my story. My wife, Fortuna, and I, we worked for Terra,” the old man began. His eyes flickered briefly between us, to see if we knew what he was talking about.
We didn’t.
“What’s Terra?” Aaron asked, echoing the question in my head.
“Who, not what,” the man corrected him. “Terra Mater is the queen of the land.”
The queen of the land? I had never heard of a queen of the land before. I knew all about the king of the sea, Neptune. I guessed Terra Mater was some kind of land equivalent.
“We were only minor members of the team,” Jeras went on. “At least, I was. I never had any particularly exciting duties. Anything small and irritating always seemed to be left for me to do. But I worked hard. We both did.”
He stopped to lift his cup and take a sip of his drink.
“My wife had a skill that hardly anyone knew about.” After placing his cup back down on the floor and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he added, “She could see the future.”
I took in what he was saying. “Your wife — she’s the one who did the picture you showed us?” I asked.
Jeras nodded. “No one knew about her skill, not back then. She kept it hidden.”
“But you knew?” Aaron asked.
“I knew. Yes. And so did Terra. No one else. So my wife rose through Terra’s ranks quite quickly. She became indispensable to her. Any decision that Terra needed to make, she would call for my wife, then ask her to draw a picture and show her what was to come.”
“And did she?” I asked.
Jeras shook his head. “She couldn’t make predictions to order. She couldn’t see the future at the click of someone else’s fingers. Even someone as important as Terra Mater.”
“So what happened?” Aaron asked.
“Terra became more and more impatient with her. Demanded she tell her what was coming. One day, in fear that we were both going to lose our jobs and our livelihoods, Fortuna drew a picture for Terra. Told her it was the future, that it answered whatever question was being asked of her that day — I forget what it was. There were so many. She had to come up with something, so she drew. And she said this was Terra’s answer.”
“Had she really seen the future?” I asked.
“No. It was a bluff. A lie. It was a mistake. The next day, Terra made a bad choice based on Fortuna’s picture, and that was that. We were out of favor, out of jobs, out on our ears. Our brief time in the light of the land gods was over.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“We survived. We managed somehow,” Jeras replied. ??
?It was around the same time as this that we found out Fortuna was pregnant. She gave birth to our beautiful daughter, and soon we were so preoccupied with our little family that the world beyond the three of us barely mattered.”
“So it all worked out OK?” Aaron asked.
“For a while, yes. The years went by. We were happy enough. Poor, but content. Some years later, our daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman. One day, I happened to meet an old colleague while I was out with her. He said something that put an idea into my mind.”
Aaron leaned forward in his seat. “What did he say?”
Jeras smiled to himself as he replied. “He said my daughter could steal the heart of a king.”
For a moment, he appeared to be lost in the happiness of his memory. I didn’t want to disturb him. It was the most peaceful he’d looked since we’d been here.
“I believed the man was right,” he went on after a moment. “And his words stuck with me. At first, I basked in the warmth of the compliment. But we were nearing the end of our reserves. Our lives had grown tough with our poverty. We were always cold, always hungry. We couldn’t carry on like that much longer. And so I had an idea that would transform our lives.”
“What was the idea?” I asked.
“It was perfect,” he said, his eyes glistening now as he spoke. “The idea would bring us back into the favor of the land gods and enable us to branch out and make new connections, too. Our daughter would live in comfort. We would never go hungry again.”
He paused and clamped his mouth shut.
“What was the idea?” I asked again. And it was strange because a part of me suddenly knew what he was going to say. It was as if I felt his answer come to me, whispered on the wind, whistling through the window of his tumbledown house, as it slipped into my mind.
And then he said the words, and even though they confirmed what I was thinking, I couldn’t hide my shock at hearing them.
“I decided she would marry Neptune.”
I watched Aaron’s face drain of color.
“You . . . You . . .” he said.
“Don’t judge me,” Jeras went on quickly. “It wasn’t as if we sold her into a terrible situation. We gave her the opportunity of a wonderful life — a much better life than she had grown up in.”