The Fathomless Fire Read online

  “Have they been unpacked yet?”

  “Right, never mind the nice bowls.”

  As Will was just finishing setting out the plates and cutlery, the front doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it!” came a shout from upstairs, and a moment later Jess bounded down the stairs. Will met her at the door just as she was flinging it open.

  Aunt Carrie stood on the step, smiling and holding a flat white box.

  “Auntie Carrie!” Jess shouted.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said, holding the box aloft with one hand and hugging Jess tightly with her other arm. “Mmm, smells like dinner’s cooking.”

  “Dad’s making lasagna and mashed potatoes,” Jess said.

  “Is he?” Aunt Carrie said. “Interesting combination. Come here, Will.” She gave him a hug, too, and handed him the box. “Apple pie for dessert. In case dinner doesn’t turn out quite as planned.”

  “I heard that,” Dad shouted from the kitchen. They all laughed, even Will, despite his thoughts being elsewhere. He had always liked his Dad’s lively younger sister. The fact that she lived in this town was one of the reasons Dad had decided they should move here, and Will had to admit it had been good for all of them to have her nearby. She’d made the move to a strange town a little easier, and she had the knack of bringing out the seldom-seen fun side in Will’s father. Jess loved her, too. Over the past few weeks his little sister, who had been so quiet and withdrawn since their mother died, had begun to talk more and even laughed a little again, and Will knew it was mostly thanks to Aunt Carrie. All of which made him feel somewhat less guilty about what he had to do.

  “We’re going to have a great weekend, pumpkin,” Aunt Carrie said to Jess, giving her another squeeze. “You’re more than welcome to join us, Will.” Aunt Carrie was taking Jess to stay with her for a couple of days while Dad went out of town on a construction job. Dad had wanted Will to go with them, but after much discussion, and a lot of chores done without too much complaint, Will had managed to convince the adults that he would be fine on his own at home.

  “Thanks,” Will said to Aunt Carrie. “I’ve got things to do here.”

  He couldn’t help glancing at Jess. She was giving him that odd look again. He turned away quickly.

  “Your schedule’s full, is it?” Aunt Carrie said with a wink.

  “Chow’s ready, cowpokes,” Dad announced, striding to the table with the lasagna pan held on high. “Prepare to feast.”

  “This looks wonderful,” Aunt Carrie said, gazing over the spread laid out on the tablecloth. “But looks can be deceiving.”

  “Gee thanks, sis.”

  They sat down and tucked in eagerly. As the dishes were passed around so were the funny family stories. Most of them were told by Aunt Carrie about their dad when he was a boy, and there were a few surprises.

  “Did you know that your dad used to do nothing but read?”

  Will and Jess shook their heads in disbelief. Dad’s bedside shelf held maybe half a dozen books, if that.

  “He was such a bookworm, he rarely saw the light of day. If we did something bad our parents punished us by sending me to my room, and your dad outside.”

  “All that changed when I got my first motorbike,” Dad said, grinning.

  “No kidding,” said Aunt Carrie, rolling her eyes. “After that we hardly ever saw you.”

  Will listened to the stories eagerly, and told some of his own, but he couldn’t keep from glancing at the clock on the wall, secretly willing the hands to move faster. With all the stories and the laughter, no one else paid attention to the time. Finally, Will had to speak up.

  “Don’t you have to leave soon?” he asked Dad, nodding his head towards the clock.

  “Oops, you’re right!” Dad shouted, jumping up from the table. “We didn’t even get to the pie.”

  “We’ll bake a new one for your return,” Aunt Carrie said. “You’d better get going.”

  Dad hurried to his room and came back lugging his beaten-up duffelbag. He threw on his old leather jacket, then kissed Jess and put his arm around Will.

  “Be good, you two,” he said, then turned to Will. “Be safe.”

  As before he gave Will an uneasy glance, as if he wanted to say something more. But instead he hurried out and a moment later they heard his truck roar away.

  They had a slice of apple pie, then Will and Jess cleared the table. Aunt Carrie wanted to help, but they told her Dad had insisted they do the work themselves. Grudgingly she gave in and had a cup of coffee while Will and Jess washed up. They didn’t talk as they worked, and Will was acutely aware of the tense silence. As they were putting away the last of the dishes, Jess turned to him. In a barely audible voice she said, “Are you going tonight?”

  Will shut the cutlery drawer with great care.

  “I already told you,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual, “I might go for a hike tomorrow.”

  Her unwavering look cut right through his lie.

  “I mean, are you going back,” she said. “You know, back there.”

  Will stared at her.

  “How do you…?” he began in a strained whisper.

  Aunt Carrie came into the kitchen with her coffee cup.

  “Time to make tracks, pumpkin,” she said to Jess.

  Will waited impatiently while Aunt Carrie helped Jess get her things ready. He hoped his eagerness for them to leave wasn’t too obvious, and more than that he was worried Jess would say something to Aunt Carrie. But when Jess came to the front door with her suitcase, the look she gave Will told him that she would keep his secret.

  “You sure about this, Will?” Aunt Carrie asked him as he saw them off at the front door. “I don’t know if I’d want to spend the night by myself in this creaky old place.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Will said, with a twinge of guilt. He wasn’t happy about lying, especially not to Aunt Carrie. If only he could tell her, it would take a lot of the weight off. He had the feeling she would actually listen. Maybe she would even be on his side about leaving. But it was too late for that now.

  A few moments later Aunt Carrie’s car drove off down the street. Will let out a long breath and shut the front door. He was on his own at last.

  He hurried up the stairs to his room and checked the contents of his pack one more time. He was bringing enough food and water, he thought, for at least a day or maybe two. He hoped it wouldn’t take him anywhere near that long to find the place he meant to go.

  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.

  The Far Lands of the Realm, little known to us here in the Bourne, are by all reports strange and wondrous. Roaming Alicantrax is an entire country on the back of a giant elephant. The inhabitants of Zazamanc live for only a day. In the desert of Surth is a lake of blood that heals all wounds. Yet it is said that the further you go from the Bourne and the stranger folk become, the more everything reminds you of home.

  –
Redquill’s Atlas and Gazetteer of the Perilous Realm

  ROWEN 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.