The Fathomless Fire (3 page)

On the journey to their new home Will had taken his dad’s prized antique motorcycle without asking and crashed it, knocking himself out. When he came to, he’d found himself in another world, a strange and frightening place called the Perilous Realm. He hadn’t been looking for it, he hadn’t wanted to be there, but not for a moment since returning from the Realm had he been able to forget it.

In the Realm he had met Pendrake, the kindly old toymaker who was really a master of ancient lore, and Finn Madoc, a brave young knight-apprentice. Shade, a talking wolf, had become his good friend.

And Rowen.

Rowen of Blue Hill, Pendrake’s granddaughter.

Together they had gone on a long, dangerous quest to find Will a way home. They were joined by Moth, an archer of the Fair Folk, or the Tain Shee as they called themselves, and Morrigan, his sister. Will had been pursued by mindless spectres called fetches, and nearly eaten by hogmen, and had even met an ice dragon. So much had happened to him, to them all, and then he’d returned to his own world. Now he no longer knew for certain where he belonged. He had never felt about anyone the way he felt about Rowen, and being apart from her had made those feelings even stronger. He knew she cared about him as a friend, but whether she felt anything more for him he didn’t know. Even if she didn’t, he was determined to see her again. He had to get back to the Realm, he had to help her if there was any way he could.

Malabron, the Night King, sought to destroy the countless stories of the Perilous Realm, leaving only one, his own, an endless story of darkness and despair. According to Pendrake, Will had a special gift for finding lost and hidden things, and Malabron, so it had seemed, wanted to use that gift for his own purpose. So Will had set out from the city of Fable where Pendrake and Rowen lived, to find a way home before Malabron’s most terrible servant, the dreaded Angel, tracked him down. But it had turned out in the end that Rowen was the one Malabron really sought, not Will, as everyone had believed. He was not the Night King’s prey, she was. And that was even worse.

What was happening to her right now, to Shade and the others? Even before the shadow’s visit, Will had been thinking about little other than them. Helping his family move into the new house, he’d felt as though he was watching someone else from a distance. His old familiar life seemed strange to him, and all he wanted was to return to the Realm, to Rowen. But he couldn’t just leave his family, he couldn’t run away again. He’d had to wait until the chance came to get away without anyone noticing, and that chance had finally come. But what troubled him most now was that he knew from his own experience that time passed differently in the Realm. He had spent weeks with Rowen and the others, but when he got back to his own world he discovered he’d been missing only a few hours. Since then, for him, a few weeks had gone by, but for Rowen maybe much more time had passed. Maybe months, or even years. What if the things the shadow had warned him of had already happened, and he was too late?

His eyes burned.

A friend will fall.

He glanced out of his bedroom window, which overlooked the weed-choked, uncut jungle of the back yard. The late summer sun was setting and the garden was already in shadow, but the trees beyond were flooded with a warm golden light.

How do I get back?

The same way you left.

He had returned from the Realm that first time by walking through a forest. This scrubby patch of woods at the edge of town wasn’t really a forest, but it was the closest thing to one around here. It would have to do.

Will hurried back downstairs, took one last quick look around, then turned off the light in the front room. For a moment he stood still in the dark, silent house, aware more than ever of its unfamiliarity. It wasn’t his home. Not yet. Maybe it never would be. Maybe his real home was the place he was hoping to get back to.

As he passed through the kitchen on his way to the back door, the light came on. Will froze. Dad was sitting at the table, his finger on the light switch.

“Sit down, son,” Dad said, patting the chair beside his. Will hesitated a moment, then obeyed. He thought for an instant about making up some story about going for a late-night walk, but the look in Dad’s eyes warned him not to bother.

“Aren’t you supposed to be…?” Will began, and trailed off.

“I got a ways down the road but I turned back. I don’t have your mum’s uncanny sixth sense about you kids, but I had a …
feeling
. I’ve had it for a long time, really. Ever since we moved in here. I guess it was accurate.”

So Jess hadn’t told him anything, Will thought. Which didn’t explain how
she
knew.

“Tell me what’s going on, Will.”

“It’s a long story,” Will said, his shoulders slumping, then he laughed in spite of himself. “A really long story.”

“This has something to do with what happened on the trip, doesn’t it?”

Will nodded. He was almost relieved it had come to this. They hadn’t really talked about the incident with the motorcycle, but as far as his dad knew, Will had simply been missing for a few hours then had just suddenly turned up, safe and sound. All Will had said was that he’d got lost, which was the truth, or some of it at least. Now he wasn’t sure what to say.

“When you crashed the bike and disappeared, I was  worried sick,” Dad said. “Mad as heck, too, but mostly worried. Then when you came back, Will, I saw something had changed. I mean you had changed. I know it doesn’t make sense but it was like you’d been … very far away. Like you’d gone through something that mattered a lot more than a motorcycle. You weren’t the same kid who’d ridden off all angry with the move, with me, with … the way things turned out. It’s crazy, but it was like in a couple of hours you’d grown up.”

Dad reached over and put a hand on Will’s shoulder.

“So I’ve been watching you,” he went on. “These past few weeks, you’ve been in another world. When you look at someone you look past them, to some other place no one can see.”

Will glanced away. This was how Jess had figured it out, too, he realized. They may not have known where he’d gone, but he hadn’t been able to disguise what he’d been through, or the fact that he meant to return. He wasn’t finished with the Realm, or it wasn’t finished with him. The urge came now to tell Dad everything, but he didn’t know where to start, or what would happen if he did. It was almost too much to think about, let alone speak of.

Dad studied Will in silence for a while, then he laughed softly.

“We’re not all that different, you know, Will. Hard as that is to believe. When I was your age, I wanted so much to be part of something bigger than the world I knew. All those books I read as a kid, about fantastic adventures in faraway lands, I really believed those things could happen to me. They never did, of course. But you, I don’t know how but I know you’ve become part of something like that, something larger than …
this
. Can’t you tell me what that something is?”

Will turned to look at Dad. Slowly he stood up.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to go now, before it’s too late.”

“If your mother was here, she’d kill me if I let you walk out that door,” Dad said, and Will heard the pain in his voice. “How can I let you go?”

“Dad, please. I … need you to trust me. This is something I have to do.”

Dad stood and faced him with a look in his eyes Will had seen only once before, when his mother had died. For the first time he understood just how much his father needed him, and feared for him. A lump formed in his throat. He swallowed hard.

“I do trust you, Will,” Dad said. “I … just can’t lose you, too.”

“You won’t,” Will said. “I’ll come back, I promise.”

“Don’t do this, Will,” Dad said, but there was no warning in his voice, only sadness.

Will looked at Dad for a long moment, then he picked up his pack. He felt empty inside, and all his eagerness to leave had vanished. He turned away quickly, fighting back tears.

“Will,” Dad said, his voice a cracked whisper.

Will opened the back door and hurried down the steps. At the end of the garden there was a gate in the rickety, falling-down wooden fence. Will lifted the latch and pushed. The gate swung open with a shriek of rusty springs.

Will looked back. Dad was standing on the back porch. The light was behind him and Will couldn’t see his face, but he stood there with his arms at his sides like someone lost.

Will stepped through the gate. With another shriek it swung shut behind him and rattled loudly, as if angry at being disturbed.

Under the trees the shadows of twilight closed over him. Suddenly he was aware of the trees whispering and creaking in the wind, and other sounds: faint clicks, knockings, all the small, unidentifiable noises of the woods at dusk. He walked on, quickening his pace as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, all his senses on alert.

After he’d gone a short distance he paused to look back the way he’d come. The light over the kitchen door was already a tiny flicker, like a star in the empty reaches of space. He walked a little further, then looked back again. The light was gone.

R
OWEN WOKE SUDDENLY
in darkness. For a moment she had no idea where she was, and she sat up in fear. Then she saw the glow of embers, and felt a warm woollen blanket over her shoulders, and she remembered. She and her grandfather were in a snug, in the Forest of Eldark. They were on the way home to Fable.

“Rowen?” Her grandfather’s voice came from somewhere nearby. She thought she could just make out, beside the fireplace, the shape of his cloak, the pale grey of his beard.

“What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

She could see him better now, seated in one of the rocking chairs by the fire. She wondered if he had slept at all or whether he had sat through the whole night, keeping watch. They had found the snug at sunset the previous evening. A snug was a mysterious but always welcome refuge on a long journey through the wild. It was a hidden shelter, concealed from all passers-by but those who knew where and how to look for them. If you found one there was always a bright, welcoming fire inside, a pot of stew bubbling on the hearth, and soft, warm featherbeds, even though you never saw or heard whoever it was that had prepared all of this for your arrival.

“What did you dream, Rowen?” her grandfather asked her now.

“I don’t remember much of it. It’s not important. Just a dream.” Though it was warm in the snug, she shivered and drew her blanket around her like a cloak. She did remember the dream, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. The dream had been so real. Fable in flames. The walls and houses tumbling like children’s blocks. She had been standing in a high place, looking down upon the destruction, unable to move or turn away. Then she was surrounded by a circle of dim, silent figures in armour. One of them had approached her, and to her terror and confusion it had knelt before her. The figure wore a blank mask of polished metal with no features where a face should have been, so that she saw only her own dark reflection. The figure reached up a gauntleted hand and took off the mask, and there was nothing inside. No one. She turned to run but she couldn’t move, she couldn’t escape, and then someone took her hand. It was Will Lightfoot, the boy who had come from the Untold, the world beyond the Realm.

In the dream he was just as she remembered him, his unruly dark hair that she’d always wanted to brush back from his face, his warm brown eyes. He had taken her hand, spoken to her as he led her out of the circle of faceless figures. What had he said?

Now she was awake and he wasn’t there, and she wanted him to be, more than anything.

She took a deep shuddering breath, drew her arms close around herself.

“What’s wrong, Rowen?” her grandfather asked softly.

“Nothing,” she said, not wanting to add to his worries. “I’m just cold.”

It was a year ago now that Rowen and her grandfather had gone with Will on his journey to find a way home, with Finn Madoc of the Errantry, Shade the wolf, and Moth and Morrigan of the Fair Folk. They had travelled far, through lands Rowen had never known existed. They’d faced many dangers together and made new friends, like Freya Ragnarsdaughter of Skald, a young woman who had joined them on their journey and who Rowen was sure had fallen a little in love with Finn Madoc. She wondered if Freya and Finn would ever see each other again. Skald was so far from Fable.

Rowen and Will had become good friends themselves. Perhaps more than friends. She remembered how Will had looked at her before he left, how fast her heart began to beat when she understood what she felt for him. She wondered where he was now and whether he was thinking about her this very moment, as she was about him. He’d said he would come back some day and find her. According to Grandfather, it was very rare for anyone to cross over from Will’s world to the Perilous Realm, but Will had done it once. Surely he could find the way again. If he still wanted to. Maybe he was glad to have escaped the terrors of her world and didn’t want to come back. Maybe now that he was with his family again, living his own life, he’d already begun to forget her.