The Ruby Dream (6 page)

Chapter Ten

He couldn’t walk very well on his own, so we shuffled
along, his arm slung over my shoulder. We met townspeople who greeted him
excitedly, but steered carefully away from the field where Maisie and Sarah
were. If they knew he was up and about, he’d be sent straight back to bed. And
I would get quite an earful.

It was slow going, but I
didn’t mind, as long as I was touching Wyn, feeling the warmth of his body.
When we reached the bottom of the steps to Diamond’s Peak, I grew suspicious.

“Are we going to the
bakery?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he replied,
hopping onto the first step with his good foot and nearly toppling me over in
his quest for stability. “We’re going to the mine.”

“Why?” I asked, dread
creeping up my spine.

“Just wait.”

“It’s all caved in,” I
protested. “How do you think you got that lump on your head and a mashed-up
leg?”

“Just wait,” he repeated,
huffing as he struggled up the steps.

A few more perilous hops
brought us to the giant pile of rocks that had come tumbling down on my knight.

“See?” I said, waving my
free arm at the rubble. Whatever idea he had up his sleeve was making me
anxious.

“Help me over there,” he said,
pointing toward the grass on the far side of the cave opening. The side that
faced the sea.

I did as he ordered,
inching around the hill, and my stomach did a somersault as the horizontal path
we treaded turned into a slight grassy slope. Wyn’s good foot slipped, but I
caught him and hauled him back to even ground. My arms around him, he faced me,
my nose barely reaching his chin.

His smile struck my heart.
“Keep going,” he insisted, and turned away to move farther around the hill. And
so we went like an awkward, two-bodied cat.

Soon it Killybeg wasn’t
beneath us, but instead the ocean, moving in a steady rhythm against the hill
far below, the tide seeming to wave up at us, begging us to drop into its
welcoming arms.

“Where are we going?” I
asked, my voice belying my fear.

“Right there,” he said
triumphantly.

I tore my eyes away from
the treacherous slope and the waves below to see a small opening in the
hillside. It was maybe half the size of the cavern, opening on the path to
Diamond’s Peak, but it had to lead to the abandoned mine. The hole here was
wide, but not nearly tall enough for a man to walk through. The sun, in the
middle of the long process of setting, was flinging a handful of rays through
the opening into the space beyond.

“Come on!” Wyn called. He
moved forward without me, his hands on the hillside guiding his hops along to
the opening. Once there, he crouched and crawled and shimmied through, his hurt
leg sticking out stiff like a tree branch.

“Wyn!” I shrieked. “Have
you learned nothing? It’s dangerous!”

“Come on, Rube!” he called
from inside. “Five minutes, no more. I promise.”

I trusted a Wyn promise
above all others.

“Wyn …”

“Ruby, this isn’t the part
that fell in. I promise I won’t go digging for diamonds.”

With a heaving sigh and
then a steadying breath, I bent to all fours and crawled through. He held his
hand out to help me up on the inside, but when I took it, he teetered and I
grabbed the wall instead.

As soon as I turned around,
my breath was stolen away.

We stood inside a tall
cavern that glittered with half-buried gems. The space was strewn with wood and
all sorts of tools, and the back wall was made entirely out of crumbled stone,
suggesting that it had once been part of the mine. But in the very middle of it
all was a giant boat, upside down and perched on a set of four tall rocks like
a giant beetle.

“What the … What is it?”
Wyn had never kept a secret from me. My tired, overwrought brain couldn’t
understand it all.

He laughed easily. “It’s a
boat!”

“I know that!” I breathed.

“I was building us a boat,”
he explained. His eyebrows were pushed up and together like a kid presenting
his original artwork to a grown-up for the very first time.

I stepped toward him, and
my fingers found his without looking, intertwining as naturally as vines. “You
built us a boat,” I said breathlessly.

“To go across the sea,” he
said.

It was unlike any boat Oren
had ever built. Nothing like the tiny skimmers townspeople used to fish, this
boat’s hull was at least five times the size of any boat I had ever seen.

My boots clunked across the
stone floor as I approached the smooth, wooden hull that stretched above my
head. Still holding my hand, Wyn hopped along beside me. “You built us a boat,”
I repeated.

“I’d like to call it a
ship
,” he said.

I laughed uncontrollably,
then spun to face him, my hands on his shoulders. He grasped my waist as though
we were about to dance. I probably would have danced a frenzied dash around the
cavern, had he been able to move. “You built us a ship,” I whispered.

“I built
you
a ship,” he corrected.

I let out a mad laugh.
Emotions I didn’t recognize taking over my being, I leaned against the boat and
pressed my cheek to the sleek wood. How many hours had it taken him to sand
that wood to the smooth, beautiful texture that glided under my fingers now?
All those hours
for me
. All those
times I’d wondered about his feelings, and he’d been doing this all along. For
me
.

“It wouldn’t fit out this
hole,” he said proudly. “I was just keeping it here to hide from anybody that
might go into the mine. Then when I was done, I planned on pulling it out the
main entrance. But … not anymore, I guess …” He hobbled toward the back of the
boat, one hand on the dusty, earthen wall, and shook his head. “It’s my own
damned fault.”

I joined him and saw that
what seemed like the back wall of the cavern was actually a rubble pile that
had tumbled down on top of the very back end of the boat. Probably when Wyn had
taken a pickaxe to the old diamond mine.

Boards that once made up
part of my boat now littered the ground, and rocks were piled on top of the
boat’s backside, splintering the boards there. I took his hand back up and
squeezed it.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“But I’ve ruined it now,”
he said miserably.

I shook my head and turned
to him, resuming our dancing pose. “While you were sleeping away, giving us all
a scare, I made a decision.”

“To scare me out of my
concussed mind?” He laughed.

I grinned, but tried to
keep the seriousness of the conversation. “No. Well, that too. But before that,
I decided we should stay.

“What?” he said.

And then it all came
rushing out. “I’ve been scared, Wyn. Before you got hurt. I don’t know why.
I’ve always wanted to go on The Great and Mighty Voyage, but I don’t think I’m
ready! And now, with your leg, I think we should stay here in Killybeg. Where
you can heal, and if … if your leg doesn’t …”

“No,” he said, shaking his
head violently. He ripped his hand out of mine. “No!” It was only the second
time I’d heard him raise his voice, and both within the last two days.

“Wyn, we could have a great
life here. I can work in the bakery and you could … well, I don’t know, but
we’d find something. I’ll learn to sew and … well, I don’t know. Just all those
things the other girls do. And –”

“Ruby, stop!” he yelled.

“We have to be reasonable,”
I insisted.

“I
am
being reasonable!” he shouted. “I’ve waited my whole life to run
away with you. With or without a left leg, we’re going. The both of us. We’re
going to go and make our lives into whatever we want them to be, wherever we
want them to be. We’re going to create our own adventure, our own excitement. I
promise you we will not stay here. Our lives will be filled with excitement and
grandeur. I promise, Ruby.”

Tears were unaccountably
springing to my eyes, and I began to hang my head to hide them, but one bruised
finger pushed my chin up to face him and his lips caught mine.

In that bottomless moment,
I wasn’t Ruby. I was some celestial spirit that could see the whole, beautiful
world when this boy’s lips touched mine. I was at once everything and nothing.
As though I had ceased to be, except in this moment. Perpetually.

As he pulled away, that
familiar grin on his lips, a splash of color amind the gray rubble at our feet
caught my eye. A long piece of wood hung, still attached to the boat by one
nail, stretching down to the floor near my dusty boots. I bent and picked it
gingerly from the rocky debris, twisting it up so that it continued from its
perch on the hull as though the collapsing mine hadn’t nearly snapped it in
two.

The board had a name
scribbled across it in red paint and loopy handwriting, upside down, as the
boat was now. I twisted the board on its single nail until the handwriting,
shaky as I knew Wyn’s cursive was, faced me. It read:

The Ruby Princess.

Chapter Eleven

Neither Maisie nor Sarah let the scolding rest
when we got back to the cottage.

“Just disappeared into thin
air, the pair of you!” Sarah squeaked bitterly. “What do you think we thought?”
Happy tears poured down her face.

“Well you didn’t sound the
alarm, so I guess you weren’t
too
worried,” Wyn said sarcastically. I helped him to the bed in the corner, where
he sat down and sighed. I’d been so elated by
The Ruby Princess
that I’d forgotten what pain he must have been
experiencing. He twisted around and lay back against the pillows. We’d closed
Felix in the house when we went to the diamond mine, and he perched on the edge
of the bed alone now, throwing indignant looks at his boy.

“These children will be the
death of me!” shrieked Maisie.

Sarah moved hurriedly
around Wyn, checking all his injuries as though she was a doctor, and I sat
gently on the edge of the bed, carefully lifting Wyn’s hurt leg back onto the
tower of pillows.

“No, no, no! You, up!”
Maisie screeched. “You’re going to bed this instant!”

I grinned at Wyn. We
wouldn’t share a kiss in front of the brooding mother hens, but I knew he
wanted to as he took my hand and squeezed, his mahogany eyes twinkling, before
Maisie ushered me out of the house.

I skipped into the house
ahead of Maisie, eager not to let her ruin my wonderful mood with her moping.
The sick little lamb was still curled in the corner by a fire now extinguished,
and I picked him up and took him to my bed.

I pulled my hair out of its
bun and climbed into bed, putting the lamb against my side, where he’d be warm.
My quilts felt comfortable and warm compared to the night outside. But my heart
was on fire.

I’d loved him all my life,
and now I knew. For sure. He wanted me, and he wanted to go away with me so
badly he’d built an entire ship. A ship named after me.

Despite the setbacks, I
knew we’d go one day. We’d go away together, someplace where we could kiss all
day, and I’d read more books than I’d ever seen, and maybe there would be mages
across the sea that could tell me if I really had mage blood in me. Maybe the
hummingbirds would come with us, flying along behind the boat …

I was awake before I even
realized I’d been asleep.

The night outside my window
was black as coal, but the moon cast a small yellow square on the trunk beside
my bed. I looked around, unsure what had woken me. The little lamb wasn’t
beside me anymore. As my mind adjusted to consciousness, I felt that familiar
feeling.

The one of being watched.

That’s when I saw the
little lamb, standing in the corner of the room, his little limbs shaking.

“Hey you –”

There was someone in the
room.

The breathing I heard
stepped out of the shadows to become a tall, dark figure at the foot of my bed.

I drew in a giant breath to
scream, but a hand clamped over my mouth. Another figure was at the head of my
bed.

I thrashed around, tearing
my arms and legs about, kicking and punching and shaking my head, a bitter
taste between my teeth. But there was more than one pair of hands.

I tried to scream into the
airless chamber, but my words were caught by a leather, gloved hand cupped over
my lips. A sickly vapor was filling my lungs as they fought for air. My muffled
screams barely made it to my own ears; I could hear only the little lamb
bleating lamely, and then a matching gloved hand covered my eyes.

The blackness seared at my
lungs until there was nothing.