The Ruby Dream (2 page)

An involuntary smile took
over my face.

Wyn
.

Chapter Two

The tiny lambs jumped up and bleated with
excitement as I neared. Wyn lay, unmoving, in the long, wispy grass. I
remembered when he had been tall and thin, but as the years thrust him through
adolescence, he’d grown strong, solid. The arm tucked under his head was lean
and muscled, and his socked toes stuck out of holes in the front of his shoes.
Thick eyebrows topped his chocolate eyes, and the sun made tiny stars of light
on his messy hair, the color of burnt sienna, and the delicate eyelashes that
lay flush against his cheeks. I knew he was awake because he was absently
twirling his wooden flute between his fingers. He didn’t notice me until I
stood above him, blocking the sun and casting him in a chilly shadow. Then he
finally opened one eye and squinted up at me.

“Did the warden free you
early?” he asked with a grin. Dimples appeared in each cheek, vestiges of his
childhood, and a smattering of freckles flashed atop his nose.

“Yes. Right after I ruined
yet another batch,” I added miserably. The skirt of my dress billowed around me
when I plopped down in the grass next to him. As I leaned back against the
mother sheep that Maisie sometimes called Old Bertha, Wyn
tsk
ed.

“Oh, Rube. You’re going to
put us out of house and home. Or at least out of bread.”

“That’s what your mother
said.” I pouted. Wyn had Sarah’s gentle eyes and her soft, pink cheeks, but his
sharp wit and lightning-fast smile were all his own. Though Sarah had been like
a mother to me all my life, Wyn had never been like a brother. He was my
neighbor, my closest conspirator, my best friend … and, still, he’d always
seemed like even more than all that …

“What were you thinking
about this time?” Wyn asked.

He was the only person in
the world to whom I told my thoughts and dreams – both waking and
sleeping. After all, one didn’t like to be called a loon. Even Maisie told me I
was making things up for attention when I told her about my dreams. But, today,
I was embarrassed to even tell Wyn what I’d been thinking up on Diamond’s Peak.
I didn’t want him to know how scared I was of finally embarking on The Great
and Mighty Voyage.

Felix noticed me just then.
He wasn’t the brightest dog in Killybeg, but he was the sweetest. He bounded
toward me and jumped into my lap, causing Old Bertha to bleat disapprovingly. I
took that as an adequate change of topic.

“Hey, Felix,” I said
happily, finding the sweet spot behind the dog’s velvety ears.

But Wyn nodded as if he
knew what I’d been thinking. I prayed he didn’t. It had been Wyn’s idea in the
first place, to save up the pocket change we made at the bakery and the boat
maker’s and go away, together, some day. There was a whole other world over
there, on the other side of the sea, and there were rumors of amazing things.
Schools where children were taught anything they wanted, right up to adulthood.
Buildings full of books that told you anything you wanted to know. Countries
where you could make money doing things other than baking bread or building
boats. Or mining precious stones.

Killybeg’s own schoolhouse,
which was really just Mary Finney’s cottage with a few wooden desks in the
corner, taught reading, but I had been a fast learner, and had been done with
school since I was seven. Maisie had taught me to write, and had four books in
her house – more than anybody else in Killybeg – but it wasn’t
enough to satisfy me. There was one special story, a fairy tale of a king and
queen who sent an explorer out on a great and mighty voyage. I’d read it aloud
to Wyn one summer long ago, and that’s when our plan was crowned with its name,
and became serious. For I longed to read all the books in the world. And eat
foods I’d never even heard of before. Breads as diverse as the gems of Lorrha.
Wyn longed to sail ships as big as houses and learn to speak in an entirely new
language. Maisie’s books told of men who could forge beautiful works of art out
of glass and women who could divine your future just by looking at your hand.

“I was thinking … ” Wyn
said hesitantly.

“Oh really?” I smirked. “That’s
quite alarming!”

He punched me gently in the
arm, and I pretended it hurt. His fingers rubbed the spot gently and the burn
scars on the back of his hand reflected the sunlight. “I’m serious,” he said.
He ran a hand through his messy hair and some of it flopped back over the top
of his forehead, the tips of it darker where sweat had gathered. “I was
thinking we could start The Great and Mighty Voyage a lot sooner if … if we
made loads more money a whole lot quicker.”

“So far your logic makes
sense,” I said with a smile. The tiny lambs returned from a romp around the
field and settled beside my legs, rubbing their soft little wool backs against
my bare shins – a comforting, familiar feeling. “If you’re going to
suggest robbing Oren,” I went on, “I think it’s a lost cause. Sure, he spends
everything he makes on drink.”

“No, I was thinking I could
work in the mines.”

My playful smile wilted.
That would mean much more than the pitiful handfuls of coins Oren gave him. And
any gems we took with us would be worth more than I could imagine in lands
beyond Lorrha. My hand went to the crimson rock hanging from a delicate chain
around my neck. “But it’s dangerous,” I said.

Wyn shrugged. “So is boat
making.” His perfect teeth peeked out of his grin.

“You’d have to be building
boats much larger than Oren’s to be in danger,” I said petulantly. Killybeg
didn’t have reason to build boats that would traverse the ocean. All the gems
went to Kinscourt and were traded from there. So Oren built small, wooden
fishing vessels that stayed in the waters near the coast, needed only to fill
the dearth of food created by a rocky landscape.

“I’m old enough to do it,”
Wyn said defiantly. “I’m seventeen.”

I shook my head
disapprovingly. “Edwyn Martin, you sound like a child. You’re old enough to
risk your life for a little money but you aren’t old enough to wash your own
clothing?”

“It’s not
a little
money, Rube,” he protested.

“Ah, then I’ll alert Sarah
that you think you’re finally grown. She’ll have you washing your own britches
and cooking your own meals in no time.”

He rolled his eyes. “But if
we could take some of those gems with us … we could have a fortune, Rube!”

“I know,” I breathed. My
eyebrows scrunched together – an unfortunate reaction to my mind trying
to gather my thoughts into rational sentences.

“Nowhere else has mines
like we do,” he barreled on. “Any gem would be worth a fortune.” He gestured
toward my neck. “A simple ruby like that could get us … I don’t know, a house!”

“You are
not
selling my necklace, Edwyn Martin!”
I sat like a sullen child, a protective fist over my ruby, so familiar it was
like another limb. It had hung around my neck for as long as I could remember,
the only remnant of a life I couldn’t recall. And Wyn had always respected
that.

“A ruby for Princess Ruby,”
he had said once when I was around ten. We’d been playing prince and princesses
with another little girl in town, when Sarah came charging out of the house.

“That’s enough!” she had
yelled, her face as white as a sheet. “Didn’t I tell you to take the sheep to
pasture?” I hadn’t remembered being told to do that, but I did anyway. And
later that night, I’d heard Wyn, a whole two years older than me, getting a
lecture from his mother.

Old Bertha moved beneath
me, bringing me back to the present. How could he even speak of selling my
ruby? More than anyone in the world, he knew what it meant to me. “Don’t you
even dream of touching my necklace,” I added darkly.

Wyn changed tack, and his
voice softened. Now it was the same voice that had sung me softly to sleep when
I’d first seen specters in the Haunted Wood. “We’re not getting any younger,
Ruby. Are you really serious about going on this adventure with me?”

Oh, God
.

It was as though he could
sense my hesitation, my newly hatched doubt. Going away with Wyn had been a
deep, lingering fantasy for so long now that I didn’t know if I could be happy
here. I didn’t know if I ever
had
been. I wanted this journey – and all the things that implied. Just him
and me alone, on the seas, on a mighty odyssey that would change us forever.
But like a worm in an apple, there was a niggling misgiving in my heart now. What
if I never saw Maisie again? Or Sarah? But admitting my uncertainty would only
cause this boy hurt. This boy who had been my most constant companion and
fiercest protector from my very first memory of him.

“Of course I’m serious
about it,” I said without meeting his eyes.

His gaze made my face feel warmly
sensitive. “Well, the amethyst mine is looking for men,” he explained. “I could
have the money in no time at all.”

Something inside me quaked.
Was The Great and Mighty Voyage worth him laboring in the mines? Killybeg had a
huge, working amethyst mine that had gone untapped until recent years. A
plethora of them, along with a few emerald mines, scattered the coast, giving
rise to the area’s name. It was how most families kept their children fed. But
that didn’t go without a degree of danger.

In fact, long ago it had
been incredibly dangerous. Prior to the Dihari Siege, which happened before my
memory, the mines had been property of the royal family. The people had worked
like mad to quarry the wealth for the palace, their own wives and children
going hungry. And mines regularly collapsed. “Slavery,” Pat Manor had once
called it, before Sarah had swept into the house to chastise the old man for
drunkenly “filling the child’s head with tall tales.”

But ever since the rebels
from the town called Dihari sieged the castle and cast out the royal family, it
had been the people who received the wealth of Lorrha’s mines. And if a mine
was deemed dangerous, it wasn’t mined to the breaking point, it was closed,
like the old diamond mine below Diamond’s Peak. It had been years since a mine
collapsed, but it had happened. I remembered the sound of the alarm – the
same that marked any injury, any drowning. The same that would have sounded in
a village down south when my parents drowned, had anyone been around to see it.
It was the deep, booming knell of an enormous bell that echoed around Killybeg
and instilled fear in every heart in the area – young and old. Mining was
safer now, it was true, but it was Wyn’s safety at stake …

“I have an idea!” I said,
instilling as much brightness into my voice as I could muster. “We might
already have enough to go east. If we don’t cross the sea, we don’t need so
much. We could go to Kinscourt or –”

His face clouded over and I
fell silent. “We’re going to cross the ocean,” he said simply.

Chapter Three

“I should get them home,” Wyn said absently,
nodding vaguely toward a group of sheep. It was true, Maisie would worry if
they weren’t penned up by nightfall. But he didn’t move.

The sun grew shorter as
Maisie’s sheep cuddled their young and Felix ran in happy circles, while Wyn
blew a feathery, blissful tune on his wooden flute. Old Bertha hadn’t moved an
inch, and I felt eternally indebted to the sleepy new mother. For as the sun
inched ever closer to the horizon, the light grew softer, and so did Wyn’s
gaze.

I could see it in the way
he looked at me, his eyes darting between my hair, spread across Old Bertha’s
back, and my eyes and my lips. The long grass tickled my bare arms, sending a
tingling sensation through my senses, but it was the way he lay, half-turned
toward me, his eyes running up and down my face in an unpracticed trail, that
made my stomach twist.

As much as I’d dreamed of
it, Wyn had never kissed me. He’d held my hand, he’d slept curled around me a
hundred times when we were little. But he’d never kissed me.

At fifteen, I was the last
of the girls in the village to be kissed. And in a village the size of Killybeg
– where no one ever came or went – my inexperience was common
knowledge. As legendary as Oren’s murderous tendencies. But this hurt all the
more because those boys and girls that kissed behind the barns weren’t best
friends. Not like Wyn and me. Maybe, just maybe, if he kissed me now, all my
doubts about going away with him would clear like an errant cloud in the summer
sky.

As I lay next to him in
that moment, a tiny burst of hope flowered in my chest. A herd of hummingbirds
hatched in my stomach, their tiny wings feathering my insides. His brown eyes were
softer than melted butter, and I knew. If it was ever going to happen, it would
be a moment precisely like this …

Old Bertha stirred then,
and Wyn climbed to his feet, pocketing his flute.

Blasted ewe!

Pressing my eyelids
together, I willed the frustrated tears not to come. Then I sat up and let my
ragged, defeated breath out.

“Help me get them home?” he
said, holding his hand out to help me up.

I narrowly resisted rolling
my eyes, and jumped to my feet without his help. He quickly withdrew his arm
and we trudged silently toward the tall wooden fence that enclosed Maisie’s
field. The fence had been built by Wyn’s father long ago, to keep the Martins’
cows in, but the sheep wandered pleasantly under it without any regard for
boundaries.

As Wyn climbed over the
fence, Felix squeezed below it, barking at his charges. Wyn paused at the top
of the fence, perched like an awkward bird, and I climbed up beside him. The
sheep knew their way home. Even when Felix stopped to look expectantly back at
Wyn for directions, the sheep kept trotting along toward the small sky-blue
cottage a few houses away.

“Ruby … you’re my best
friend.” Wyn’s thick, dark-umber eyebrows were scrunched up in confusion, as if
even he didn’t understand what he was about to say.

I dug my fingernails into
the wood. If my heart failed me now I just might fall to my death – by
broken head or broken heart. Maybe both.

“You’re
my
best friend,” I replied. Surely the
pounding of my heart punctuated my words and would scare him away from whatever
thought he was contemplating.

Willing my hands not to
shake, I scooted closer to him, hoping to make the decision as easy as
possible. If only my stomach didn’t feel as though it would turn my breakfast
to the ground. When he finally pressed his lips against mine, would he feel me
shaking like a leaf?

He cocked his head ever so
slightly, like a lost little lamb, and took a deep breath. In that infinite
moment, my heart beat in time to his breathing, and I watched his freckles as
he floated toward me. Surely I was no longer on the ground. I felt no gravity
around me. Did everyone fly when they kissed? I squeezed my eyes shut, afraid
of what stories they’d tell him, and –

“Good evening, children.”

We sprang apart, and the
rough wood of the fence bit into my hands and the backs of my knees as I only
just managed to keep my balance. Wyn wasn’t so lucky.

He tumbled backward and
landed in the field with a soft
thud
.

“Wyn!” I cried as he
groaned.

It would be just my luck
that my first almost-kiss turned into a fractured spine! But before I could
drop to his rescue, Wyn sprang to his feet, muttering curses. Eyebrows
shrouding his eyes, he climbed over the fence to face the interloper.

A man stood in front of us.
A
stranger
.

Wyn jumped to the ground in
front of me and brushed grass off his wool pants before planting his fists on
his hips. “Hello,” he said hesitantly. He whistled sharply and Felix quickly
left the man’s boots, which he’d been sniffing excitedly, and reported to Wyn’s
feet. “Now that you’ve given me a lump the size of Lorrha on my head, what do
you want?”

I looked questioningly at
Wyn.
Should we run? We should probably
run.

This couldn’t be a merchant
or trader. They rarely made it past Kinscourt, and definitely not as far west
as remote Killybeg. Besides, the few that ever had were familiar to everyone in
town. This man wasn’t. And a lack of familiarity was the perfect guise for
thieving.

My hand darted for my neck,
but halfway there, I willed it to still. If he hadn’t noticed my necklace yet,
maybe he wouldn’t.

“I’m terribly sorry to
interrupt,” the man said in a gravelly voice. He didn’t sound sorry. He also
didn’t sound threatening, but his appearance told a different story. An older
man with close-cropped gray-white hair, he had a verifiable mural of scars across
his face. He wore dark, weathered traveling clothes, and his leather boots were
covered in a thick layer of mud.

And despite his apology, he
didn’t appear to have any intention of moving on.

Wyn stood straighter,
trying to draw his height up to that of an impressive warrior. “Well? Can I
help you?” he asked crossly, folding his arms over his chest. Lean cords of
muscle rippled in his forearms, and had I not been so frightened, I may have
giggled at his peacock display.

As it was, I was terrified.
So I scrambled down from the fence to join him at his side. My dress caught on
a splinter of wood and I wrenched it free with shaking hands. A tiny rip joined
the myriad of others in the hem.

“You
can
help me, young man,” the stranger said. And as he said it, his
ice-blue eyes traveled across my face, leaving a trail of frozen skin, and came
to rest at the bottom of my throat.

A thief indeed
.

My hand flew to my neck
against my will. I wrapped my sweating palm around the bright ruby, willing it
to lose some brilliance, to fade into anonymity just this once.

“Well then?” Wyn prodded.
He grabbed my free hand.

Felix must have sensed some
nervousness in his boy, because he barked then, an angry, warning bellow. He
stood in front of us like a pathetic steed in battle, his hackles lifted.

The stranger laughed, a
brittle snicker. “You ought to teach your dog better manners, boy.”

“Your mother ought to have
taught
you
better manners,” Wyn shot
back. “We’re working. What do you want?”

A smirk spread from the
sharp corners of the man’s mouth. “Yes, indeed. It did appear that you were …
working
.”

My cheeks blushed like
wildfire, the kiss, broken and forgotten, sitting heavy in the bottom of my
heart.

“What do you want?” Wyn
demanded again. His mahogany eyes were lit with an anger I had never seen
before.

“Simmer,” the stranger
commanded, looking around him in a bored manner. “I’m simply in need of directions
to the nearest inn. This tiny town of yours is hardly worth my time, but it’s
also so very far from everything that I won’t be able to make it anywhere
worthwhile in the next twenty hours.” He paused and a throaty chuckled escaped
him. “Why, I’d be murdered in my bedsack.”

A chill crept up my spine.

“There’s a boardinghouse
there,” Wyn said, pointing back toward the lane.
Boardinghouse
was a rather ridiculous term for it – even
inn
was generous – but it was
where Pat Manor lived, and he had a barn set up with enough hay to sleep an
entire fleet of trading ships just in case they ever deigned to stop in
Killybeg. There were also plenty of pigs to keep you warm when the moon rose
and turned everything bone-cold.

Wyn’s hold on my hand had
instilled me with enough confidence to speak. “It’s the white house,” I said,
clarifying, lest the man go wandering into someone else’s cottage.

The stranger tore his eyes
away from where Wyn was pointing to look at me, standing confidently despite
the way my hands shook. It was just as his eyes settled upon me that I
recognized the feeling.

The feeling of being
watched.

“Why, thank you,” he said,
his eyes darting between my face and the gem around my neck. “Thank you very
much.”