I looked at Thomas, listening as the Wakefield House cried out with creaks and moans of stone against stone.
"Run!" we both screamed together, darting through the opening and out into the light of day. We kept running as we listened to the Wakefield House begin to crumble from the top. Looking back, I saw that it was leaning farther than it had before, whipping like a snake overhead, dropping rocks and beams from the sky.
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"There!" yelled Thomas. He was pointing ahead, where Miss Flannery stood gaping at the falling building. We came alongside her, and the three of us watched the Wakefield House fall in on itself, then sway to one side and tumble to the ground in a twisting heap of wreckage. When the dust began to settle, I was surprised to see that it had fallen in a path that contained no houses or buildings. It had fallen backward, toward the Dark Hills. It seemed to point like an arrow in the direction we were to go.
"I guess we won't be seeing any more visitors," said Miss Flannery, surprisingly calm in the face of such a catastrophic event. People were gathering around the fallen tower, looking curiously at what had become of the Wakefield House.
Miss Flannery held her hands out.
"Here's your journal back," she said. "And your box of painting things. It's hard letting them go."
Thomas took the box of colors and brushes and the journal.
"I gather my protector has gone," mumbled Miss Flannery, "along with the profits of the Wakefield House." She turned to us, not coldly -- but not friendly either. She seemed to want to send us on our way with a scare, a small repayment for what we'd done.
"Beware the coming fury!" she prophesied.
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"Something watched over the Wakefield House, and that something will be looking for you."
I had the memory of a feeling then, of being watched in the mountains and the forest by something dangerous and unseen. I wanted to ask her what she meant.
"Can we at least have some soup?" asked Thomas. "There was no food or water in there." He pointed to the sky, where the fallen Wakefield House had been, then looked down at the sad remains. Miss Flannery stopped short without looking back. After a moment of quiet contemplation, we were invited once more into her home.
"I offer you water and soup, maybe a hunk of bread for your bag - but it must be quick. You don't want to enter the Dark Hills at night."
We followed behind her, the ruins of the once magnificent and strange Wakefield House behind us and a glorious bowl of yellow soup close at hand. But all my thoughts of the past and the future were dwarfed by the growing shadow of the Dark Hills and the unknown presence that awaited us there.
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***
CHAPTER 20
THE WAY OF YESTERDAY
"So you see," Roland told us, "we were two young boys then, a hard road behind us and what seemed an impossibly long way to go."
A soft breeze had invaded the dead air of night, and the Warwick Beacon rocked ever so slightly back and forth on the water. Neither Yipes nor I had said a word in the preceding hour, but it seemed that Roland had come to a place in his memory where he wanted to engage rather than merely tell. Yipes was accomplished at sniffing out such moments, and he leaped into the opening before I could even think to ask a question.
"How did you get the recipe from her?" he asked. "Did you steal it?"
He was speaking of the yellow soup, which we'd enjoyed many times on our voyage across the Lonely Sea. We'd asked Roland before how he made it taste so good and where he'd learned to make it, but he would never tell or let us watch him make it.
"All that's happened, and you want to know about the soup?" asked Roland.
"Yes," Yipes insisted. "I want to know about the soup. I love the soup! How did you get it?"
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Roland looked at me in the moonlight, shaking his head in disbelief.
"Come on," Yipes prodded on. "How did you get Miss Flannery to give up the recipe?"
There were other, more pressing questions on my mind, but I said nothing. The banter between men amused me, and entertainment was hard to come by on the Warwick Beacon.
"If you must know," answered Roland, "Miss Flannery was very taken with Thomas's little paintings, especially the one of the Wakefield House from our approach to the Western Kingdom. She loved that painting. It reminded her of a time that had suddenly and irreversibly slipped away. Thomas offered to trade her for it. He was good at trading for things. By the time he'd finished bargaining with her, we had a jug of water, a loaf of bread, a collection of vegetables from her garden, and the recipe for the soup. All for the one painting, carefully torn from the journal and handed over."
"Astonishing!" said Yipes, and he truly was amazed, his mind wandering back to some distant memory of his old friend Thomas. "He had a way about him, a way in which he could get people to do as he pleased."
"I think if we'd have arrived in the Western Kingdom with a horse and cart we would have left there with armloads of treasure," said Roland. "Such were his skills of persuasion. The painting was a pearl of great price, at least
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for Miss Flannery -- and Thomas was gifted at...shall we say, developing a person's needs."
"What did you find?" I blurted out, no longer able to contain my curiosity. "When you went into the Dark Hills, what did you find there?"
My own bleak memories of the Dark Hills had never left me. Hearing of them again had reminded me of the cold aloneness I'd felt amidst the sharp rocks and dry brush at my ankles on the long walk to Castalia.
"We come very near the end of my tale," said Roland, and I wondered if he was going to answer my question. "A good thing, too. We must get the both of you off to bed within the hour. Tomorrow brings work of another kind."
I wanted so badly to ask him what he'd alluded to from the beginning -- what tomorrow would bring -- but I knew his ways were mysterious and the answer would come in bits and pieces, not through direct questioning.
"Since you asked, Alexa," said Roland, "I will begin again an hour into our trek through the Dark Hills, when the thing we dreaded came upon us."
Yipes let slip a high-pitched, anxious laugh, trying to hide the fear he felt over what was to come and failing miserably.
"The feeling of being watched loomed over us," said Roland. "It was oppressive, like it would crush us both under the weight of its vigilant eyes. We were so very tired and miserable. You can't imagine the hopelessness of
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looking off in the distance and seeing Mount Laythen so far away. It would take days and days to walk that far, and we had every reason to believe we would never make it. Whatever it was that had been watching us all along was very near, and it seemed to me that it had stopped watching and begun hunting. I thought our first night in the Dark Hills was likely to be our last, and so it was."
"But you're alive, you're here with us," I said, uncharacteristically interrupting the captain of the ship. And then another thought occurred to me. "You must have been afraid."
"Only a fool or a madman would have been unafraid," said Roland. "I'm happy to say I'm neither of those things."
There was a brief pause as he came to the matter at hand.
"We had stopped for a drink of water, but there was no place to sit down. All the rocks were jagged and sharp, and the barren ground was cracked and hot from the scorching sun. We just stood there, trading drinks and gazing over the next ridge in the distance. At first I thought I was hallucinating -- that it was a delusion formed in my weary-imagination -- but Thomas saw it, too. There, over the distant ridge, came the figure of a man. Only it wasn't a man. As he came into full view and bounded down the side of the desolate hill, we blinked our eyes and stared. What came for us was no man but a giant, and I tell you the truth, the ground shook as he came."
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A smile crept onto my face but I didn't say anything.
"It can't be," said Yipes. "Can it?" He looked at me, puzzled but happy. We were both relieved as
we turned our attention to Roland and saw there was a sly smile on his face. The powerful presence that followed Thomas and Roland had been someone we knew all along.
"Armon," I whispered on the wind. The Tenth City had swallowed him up and taken him away from us, but the sound of his name on my lips made my heart leap. He had been my friend and ally -- the last of the mighty race of giants -- and my mind drifted to a time when I rode high on his shoulders, Armon's long, black hair floating on the wind as he ran through the Dark Hills carrying me to some faraway adventure. The memory of him filled my mind as it always had, in such a way that nothing else fit, and I was overjoyed to hear him brought back to life in the telling of a story.
"We thought we might try to run away," said Roland. "But that thought quickly passed when we realized how fast he was coming at a walk. Had we chosen to run, Armon would have overtaken us without much effort. So we waited, shaking in our old, mismatched shoes and boots, assuming our lives were about to come to an end. As Armon came near, Thomas took out the spyglass -- I don't know why -- and held it. Armon bent down on one knee, his head still well above my own, and took the artifact in his huge hand, turning it round and round. He gave it back to Thomas, and then he spoke, and this is what he said:
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"'Sir Alistair Wakefield will see the both of you. It's a long way -- longer than you have in you -- so you'll need my help.'
"He stood back up, towering over us, and stared off toward the Western Kingdom. 'I've been watching you awhile,' he said. 'I saw you enter the forest, the mountains, and go inside the Wakefield House. I have watched that house a long time, waiting for it to fall. My work there is finished.'
"That was all he said. Then he looked down at us both with a rather serious look on his face, as though he were sizing us up and trying to decide the best way to take us across the Dark Hills. He picked us up, and what transpired was one of the most astonishing nights of my life. It remains a powerful memory all these years later. Thomas in one arm and me in the other, carried over a bleak, moonlit terrain. There were times when I slept, bouncing as if I were seated on a huge horse, and other times when I was alert and watching the world go by. After a while there was some talking and we learned a little about him -- nothing you don't already know -- but he was coy when it came to Sir Alistair Wakefield. We knew only that the man was in some way connected to us, that he'd built the Wakefield House, and that he awaited our arrival.
"When morning broke on the Dark Hills we were passing through the Valley of Thorns, and Armon implored us to be very quiet. He had carried us through the night without complaint, though I had to wonder looking up how he
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might handle the mighty mountain yet to come. The Valley of Thorns was shrouded in a low mist, and we heard grunts and howls from somewhere in the distance. Armon moved like a great cat through the thorns, whispering to us not to touch them and to stay alert and still. Once we passed through, he went on until we stood at the bottom of Mount Laythen, where he set us on the ground and took a great jug of water from his back, drinking until I thought he would burst.
"'We've come to the way of yesterday,' he said at length. 'It's a hard way.'
"Looking up the mountain, I was struck by the thought that it was utterly impassable. The way was steep and violent, and Thomas asked if there were any other means of reaching Sir Alistair Wakefield.
"'There is, but this way is faster,' Armon told us. And more secret.'
"He had a contraption that held us on his back, for he would need his massive arms to navigate the dangerous terrain. He moved in such a way that it became clear he'd made the journey many times before, and soon we were high above the ground, bouncing precariously on the back of a giant on the way to meet Sir Alistair Wakefield."
Roland stopped and glanced over the water behind us. There were bits of cloth hanging from poles, and he watched them.
"The wind is picking up," he said, turning the wheel back and forth between his two hands and watching the
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cloth strips dance in the air behind him. He took his pipe out of his pocket and began tamping tobacco into it.
"Why did Armon call it the way of yesterday?" I asked. There was a long, dreamy pause in which Roland lit his pipe and looked thoughtfully out to sea.
"Because it leads to the past."
And then he told us about finding Sir Alistair Wakefield in the secret realm beyond the way of yesterday, in the very heart of Mount Lay then.
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***
CHAPTER 21
Sir Alistair Wakefield
There came a point when we reached the end of the very difficult climbing and Armon set Thomas and me down on the ground. There were blue and white patches of ice-encrusted snow scattered amidst the uneven rocks, and before us lay a path that went back and forth like crude stitching along a rising hemline.
"I believe I've carried you far enough," said Armon. He was, at last, showing a hint of weariness. I looked down the side of the mountain and off into the distance, seeing the Valley of Thorns like tiny pins far below and the wasteland of the Dark Hills beyond. Armon had carried us a long way in a short time, but it fell to me and Thomas now to finish the task.
"Let's keep going," said Thomas, already on the move up to the first switchback on the path. As we walked along, I passed a sheet of white snow and put the heel of my old black boot through the crusty ice covering. I reached down and dug into the hole I'd made and pulled out a fresh clump of snow, eating it as we kept on. It was the first time I could
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remember putting something so cold in my mouth. Chewing it up, I felt the sting of ice on my teeth and my tongue. I told Thomas he should try some, and we both ate snow and ice where we passed it here and there on the way up the path, looking back over our shoulders at the shrinking world below.
There had been a rising ledge as we went -- the mountainside -- but after a time we seemed to turn straight into the mountain itself, no longer switching back and forth along its edge. When the path turned once more, ice walls began to rise up on both sides. We were engulfed in what felt like a glowing tunnel of blue and green.
"We're close now," Armon said from behind us. I looked back and saw that he had to crouch down very low in order to make his way through. There was a chill in the air, and I could see my breath. Cold water was dripping everywhere and the ground was wet and slippery beneath my feet. Looking up, I saw a slick ceiling of clear icicles pointing down at me.
"It's growing lighter here," said Thomas, looking back from up ahead. He had turned a slight corner and I couldn't actually see him, but I hurried to catch up, watching my breath with some amusement. Soon I, too, noticed our way was filling with light.
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"Roland, come quickly!" Thomas called. I broke into a slipping, sliding run until I came to a sharp turn and found my brother standing alone, looking down into a valley of green and blue and gold. Armon came up behind us licking a huge icicle he'd torn from the ceiling, and the three of us stayed there together, observing the world we'd crept up on. It was as if a giant bowl had been cut into the mountain, hidden on all sides by rock walls crawling with bright green moss, orange mushroom patches, leaves of yellow and gold. Near the bottom there were trees shooting up everywhere, and in the middle was a bright blue lake of cold mountain water.
"I know this place," whispered Thomas. And the way he said it sounded ghostly, as though he'd seen it in a dream and wasn't sure if it were safe or not. I felt something deep inside as well, some knowledge of the place before us, as though I'd lived an entire life here before but couldn't remember what I'd done. There was a boat sitting at the far edge of the lake, and this object in particular inspired something in my mind. I knew that boat, though I couldn't have said why.
"Armon, what is this place?" I asked. He was slurping the water off the icicle, and with his free hand he pointed down and to the left, near the line of trees that edged up against the blue lake. There
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was a home, or a building of sorts -- I couldn't decide which. It was tucked in tightly to the trees as if it were hiding there.
Armon tossed the icicle aside and it broke into a thousand pieces. "Down we go. The rest of the way is easy."
And it was easy, a winding path through trees that wasn't too cold and wasn't too hot. The sound of birds was everywhere, and they flew from tree to tree in a jumble of noise as we went. There were small animals darting up the sides of trees -- squirrels of a sort I'd never seen before. They were entirely gray or black, and they looked at us curiously as we came down into the realm of Sir Alistair Wakefield.
"He won't be like anyone you've met before," Armon said as we approached the blue lake and walked along its wide belly.
"How do you mean?" asked Thomas, pulling his paints from his pocket and stopping to make a picture. I think he was a little nervous to go on and was looking for an excuse to stop.
Armon didn't answer Thomas, but he didn't seem to mind that my brother had stopped to paint a picture. It rather seemed the most natural thing in the world to rest a moment, breathing the sharp, cool air, watching the rings from the feeding fish
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blip on the surface of the water. I glanced at the page Thomas was painting and saw that he'd gone back in his memory and was drawing the cave of ice and the view from above. He drew them both at once on two adjoining pages, moving back and forth between the images as he changed colors, swishing his brush in the water of the lake. The lake was so blue I half expected the wet brush to come out the same color, and everything Thomas painted to come out infused with sapphire.