The Ruby Dream (4 page)

Chapter Six

“We shouldn’t be in here, Ruby!”

“Do what you want, Cath,” I
snapped. “I’m going in.” I stepped defiantly into the woods. As I placed a hand
on an old oak to steady myself and climbed over a fallen branch, a trio of
hummingbirds appeared and danced happily around my head. I giggled and ducked
my head to see around the blurry wings as they squeaked to each other in their
little language. They moved around me like planets orbiting the Earth, and we
moved forward together like that. My own little universe.

“What if the stranger was a
thief?” Cath insisted. “Or, or what if he’s trying to enslave people to work in
the mines? Or what if –”

“Then what good would the
two of us be to him?”

“Or what if he’s a murderer
looking for souls to sacrifice?”

“Somebody’s been listening
to Pat Manor too much,” I muttered. Cath had the imagination of a scared child,
but she was the only girl in town I could even remotely stand to be with. The
others talked of kissing and boys and marriage nonstop. I wouldn’t have called
Cath a friend exactly, but she was better than being alone. Sometimes.

“You flirt with danger too
much, Ruby,” Cath insisted.

I’d meant to ask Maisie
about the strange conversation she’d had with Sarah, but I’d forgotten in my
need to get a glimpse of my ghosts. I yearned for that more than I feared the
stranger. I’d never seen the two girls in the daytime, but I also needed to
find the clearing from my dream, and I had little hope of that in the
pitch-black night.

I kept walking until the
edge of the forest was out of sight. There, with none of the outside world
peeking through the tree trunks, nothing but dappled light fell onto the forest
floor. In the otherworldly peace, hummingbirds appeared in the soft, magical
light like tiny, iridescent fairies.

“What do you want to do in
here, anyway?” Cath whined, staying carefully behind a nearby tree, too
terrified to go any farther into the forest. Her white-blond hair fell limply
to her shoulders like a protective curtain, and I briefly considered walking on
until I couldn’t see – or hear – her anymore. But that wasn’t very
polite. And being polite was something Sarah always insisted on.

“I just want to wander,
Cath.”
And look for the clearing. For my
mother
. If I could just know something – anything – about who I
really was …

“You’re a loon, Ruby Beg.”

Didn’t I know it. I had
reminder enough that I wasn’t like the other girls without Cath babbling on
about it. The memory of my failed first kiss warmed my cheeks.

“I’m leaving,” she announced.
“A girl has better things to do than traipse around the forest. Like work. And
flirting.”

I rolled my eyes. “Your
priorities are laughable.”

“
Mine
?” she demanded. “It’s you that’s laughable! What are you doing
with your life? Sitting in the forest as every other girl in town snaps up each
eligible man?”

“That’s really what keeps
you up at night?” I turned to my comrade, several yards away, just as an
unfamiliar hummingbird came to a sleepy rest on my shoulder.

Her face seemed to fall,
defeated. “We’re not five anymore, Ruby. There are more of us than there are
men.” She wasn’t lecturing me anymore – she sounded despondent. “I’m
plain and I like my peace and quiet. What would a man want with me? I’m liable
to be the last one standing, and then what? I’m not made for traveling. I can’t
go off and find me a husband. But I shan’t end like Maisie, either.”

The little bird on my
shoulder tipped over, righting itself just in time to avoid falling to the
ground, and I took him into my palm for safekeeping. His tiny eyes blinked
once, then twice before falling closed again.

“I wouldn’t mind so much to
end up like Maisie,” I said softly.

A disbelieving breath
escaped Cath’s mouth. “Oh, wouldn’t you? I’ve seen the way you look at Wyn.”

My cheeks flushed
indignantly. “Do you think of anything but marriage?” I bellowed. “What if I
want more than marriage and a house in Killybeg?”

She looked genuinely
confused. “What else is there?”

My mouth hung open,
searching for the words.

I don’t know
, I realized with a shock. And there it was, the root of my
hesitation, laying out before me in crystal clear vision now.
What if the rest of the world is awful?
What if Wyn and I got lost – or died? What if Wyn died on The Great and
Mighty Voyage and I was left alone?

“I don’t know what else
there is, Cath,” I said softly. My thumb brushed against the sleepy
hummingbird’s neck, desperate for a comforting, familiar feeling.

“Well, I know what there is,”
she said sternly. “And it doesn’t include a whole lot of options. I’ll find a
husband if it’s the last thing I do!”

“Eh! Stop the woman talk!”

I twisted around to find
Pat Manor walking toward us from the depths of the Haunted Wood. He grasped a
huge walking stick as gnarled as his hands, and wielded it in front of him as
if to ward off the evil talk of women.

“Stop the girly drivel!” he
yelped again. “There’s a man about! An old one, aye, but I still quake in the
presence of lace and love and matches and florals and all else womanly!”

My cheeks flushed. Just how
much had he heard?

“Sorry, we were chatting
like old birds, so we were,” Cath said pleasantly. “And what are you doing
lurking in the forest when there are strangers about? Were you trying to give
us a scare?”

“Eh? Did you not hear?” Pat
said. “The stranger left this morning.”

Cath’s mood immediately
catapulted, and a bright grin stretched across her face.
She’s not plain
, I thought absently. If she thought
she
was plain, what did she think of me?

Cath continued to fire off
questions about the stranger toward our old neighbor.

“Stop, child, stop!” he
finally cried. He leaned against a tree near me, pulled off his plaid cap, and
dragged a sleeve across his forehead. “I know nothing. He slept in my barn and
left this morning. That’s all I know.”

“But what did he want?”
Cath went on.

Pat’s faux shocked stare
came to me. “Oh dear lord and savior!” he cried dramatically. “Has the child
gone deaf? Has she not heard me say I don’t know?”

I smiled, but my heart was
too heavy to trifle with the old joker. If Cath knew my deepest feelings about
Wyn … who else did? Was it possible that
Wyn
did? And if so, why hadn’t he kissed me? Maybe he didn’t want to. It was a
plausible option, I thought as I pressed the tip of my finger to the beastly ridge
in my nose. Was I too plain?

I’d worried about many
things before. Whether I was a good person … if my real parents were good
people. If I’d live a long and happy life. Whether I was smart or funny.
Whether my parents were mages. But I’d never worried about whether or not I was
plain.

Every bit of me felt hot as
I realized with humiliation that I’d just discovered the worries that plagued
the other young women of Killybeg on a daily basis. If I opened that chest of
pain and nerves, I’d surely become one of them, prattling on about kissing and
dresses and other things I’d never cared about before.

“What are you doing out
here?” Cath asked the old neighbor once again, determined for an answer.

This time, he answered
simply, “Visiting my wife.”

Pat Manor’s wife had been
dead these ten years.

Cath rolled her eyes, but
my heart rate picked up and my eyes must have been the size of oranges.

“You see her during the
day?” I asked breathlessly. The little hummingbird stirred in my hand, as if it
could feel the pluck of my tightly strung nerves.

“Ruby!” Cath cried,
appalled that I would exhibit even the slightest interest in such a topic. The
topic of a lunatic.

“Aye, and the night, too,” he
replied, as if seeing visions was the most natural thing in the world.

“Every time?” I asked. “Do
you call for her? How do you find her? Or does she find you?”

His eyes narrowed. “Does
the child see her own phantoms?”

The silence went on a beat
too long, and I took in a deep breath of woody forest air to prepare my lie.

But I didn’t have to.
That’s precisely when the familiar toll rang out.

It was the deep, booming
bellow of an old bell, and it reverberated around the trees and roused the
hummingbirds to the sky in a thick flash of dangerous color.

Chapter Seven

We left Pat Manor to hobble along behind as we
dashed out of the woods. I paused at the edge to place the little hummingbird,
still deep in torpor, on a low branch. He blinked gratefully at me and I dashed
away after Cath.

My first worry was for
Maisie. Her stiff, wrinkled hands and tired eyes came to mind. Surely they
wouldn’t have sounded the alarm if Maisie went peacefully …

“What’s happened?” Cath
demanded, huffing and puffing. We’d come upon George and Mary Finney on the
lane.

“I don’t know, child!” Mary
cried.

“Has the stranger come back
for us all?” Cath cried, tears springing to her eyes.

My thankful breath came out
in a sigh as our little blue house came into view. Maisie herself stood in the
doorway, alive as ever, her floury hands hanging limply by her sides. I paused
to look at her but the old woman’s shoulders lifted slightly in silent
affirmation that she didn’t know the reason for the alarm, so I ran on.

Instead of going to the mines,
which were a good fifteen minutes’ run away, or running up and down the coast
to find the trouble, I ran for the bakery. From Diamond’s Peak, I could look
down upon Killybeg and see what was happening immediately.

I left Cath, whose plaintive
cries at everyone we passed were grating on my nerves, and began the climb. As
I took the stone stairs two at a time, I wondered if someone had died. If there
was a new ghost in the Haunted Wood, and a soul floating to the sky that very
moment. There were few enough souls in Killybeg as it was. My blood ran cold
and it felt as though chunks of ice were piercing my veins. That’s precisely
why I
had
to leave. There was nothing
in Killybeg but a lifetime of waiting for the call to go up – the one
that would some day send rescuers much too late to my own lifeless body.

My black, dusty boots
stopped short of the last step. There was a frantic group in front of me. In
front of the abandoned diamond mine. And a great pile of rubble and rocks where
the gaping black entrance to the cavern used to be.

Dust muddied my sight,
thick in the air like smoke. I edged nearer, but there were too many
townspeople, too much shouting, and too many rocks.

“Get away, girl!” somebody
yelled, moving in a flurry too fast for me to recognize the face or voice.

I stepped obediently
backward, stopping just in time to keep from striding right off the edge of the
hill and tumbling to my death. Shaken, I started up the path toward the bakery.
Surely Sarah would know which miners were stupid or desperate enough to enter
the old diamond mine. Once I was clear of the dust cloud, I took a deep, clean
breath of ocean air and scrambled up the grassy bank to leave the winding path behind.

Sarah was already standing
on the edge, looking down upon the scene.

“Careful, child,” Sarah
said softly. The barely visible wrinkles in her forehead were deeper than usual,
and a crevice of concern had been carved between her eyebrows.

She grabbed my hand and
held on until I was back on flat ground, my boots even dirtier than before.

“Who is it?” I asked,
breathless from the unorthodox climb. Sarah didn’t even spare two glances at my
appalling blue dress. The frock had been
dirty
the day before. Now it was a downright mess.

“I’m not sure anyone
knows,” she said. “There was an almighty crash down below and the bakery shook,
and then everyone came running.”

I remembered what she had
said about Oren the boat maker taking a tumble over the cliff’s edge, ending
all Sarah’s troubles.
Sarah would never …
would she?

There were shouts from
below, then, and we strained our necks to see over the familiar terrain.

“Careful, child,” she said
again, putting an arm out in front of me. “It wouldn’t do to make the commotion
double.”

The people shifting the
rocks down below paused as two men pulled something long and seemingly heavy
from the rubble. I couldn’t discern what it was. The dust was beginning to
clear, but I could still only see the shiny bald spot on the top of one man’s
head.

“They’ll need water,” Sarah
breathed. Ever logical in her concern, she dashed away to the bakery.

I stayed put, my grimy
boots planted on the edge. Whose family would be mourning tonight?

The two men carrying the
heavy burden knelt amidst the group of townspeople. The shouts grew louder and
several people pointed toward the stairs. A little figure, bowed and gray, was
climbing up the stone steps with much difficulty. It had to be Jan, the only
one for three towns who had ever studied the art of medicine.

I watched as the group
waited, tense and nervous, while the little doctor lumbered upward. Sarah
appeared behind me with a bucket and shuffled down the path, water sloshing
over the edge, darkening the dirt behind her like blood. With her heavy burden,
Jan beat her there, lugging his great big black bag behind him. The bag that
had, on so many occasions in Killybeg, marked a failed attempt at resuscitation.
Marked death.

As the group parted to let
the doctor in, a prone figure was revealed, unmoving and covered head to toe in
gray-brown dust. A man rolled the figure over, but the grime obscured the face.
Just before Sarah reached the end of the path, a pair of men broke away and
rushed to relieve her of the burden. As they did, one stopped and stared
wonderingly at a pile of rocks. As I looked, I realized it was wobbling
slightly.

“Hey!” the man yelled.
“There’s someone else here!” He bent and pulled at the rock, but it didn’t
budge. The man near Sarah rushed back and together they heaved until the rock
tumbled over itself and away.

A shaggy black and white
dog hopped up, limping slightly, and licked his savior all over the face. The
dislodged rock seemed to have tumbled right into my stomach, cutting down my
heart in one fell swoop.

“Felix!” I nearly screamed.
Felix was never alone.