Tuesday, October 25, 2005

   Chapter 14: Girls (part 3)
None of the kids questioned the words of the Havoc graduates. There was no stopping against these cliffs; there were no banks or anchors for their boats, and only the angels would have a way to get to the top. Elves did not have the power of flight, and the magic of the kids was still too weak to use airlift. There were too many of them for even the combined power of Nano and Contra to take them up.
At first, the current of the river was hardly noticable. They kept up their former pace, but after an hour the girls had started to drop behind.
“Do you want me to take the paddle for a while?” they heard Tari ask.
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” Aurora responded. She was clearly tired; the current had taken a toll on her. She gratefully switched places with Tari.
“Are you okay?” Lucifer asked her, concern in his eyes. She looked weary, even though they had only woken up within the last two hours. The suns were still in opposite skies, but they almost high enough that they could be seen over the mountains.
Aurora nodded. “I think I’m just not used to work like this,” she told him. “My folks aren’t river people, you see.”
“Neither are mine,” he answered, casting a fond glance at the summits of the mountains. “The rivers are what locked us in, and, over many years, made my people the way they are.”
“That reminds me,” she started, “I’ve been wanting to ask you about your hair. How did you make it look like that, and why?”
Lucifer laughed and twisted one of his red ends with his fingers. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I hate to have to disappoint you, but it isn’t something I can tell you about. At least not now.”
“When can you tell me about it?”
He shrugged. “Maybe sometime. But not now.”
“Sasheeta, what are you doing?!” Yatii exclaimed. The dragon had braced herself at the edge of the boat. With one mighty leap, she jumped and landed right in Aurora’s lap.
“You must be Sasheeta,” she said. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“Hmmhmm,” the dragon squeaked.
The two boats talked more after that, paddling side-by-side, but Pen no longer listened. He was wrapped up in his own thoughts about what Gerrit had told him about Lucaya. When it is complete, the sword will give up itself, and there will awaken something of far greater creation, he had said. What had he met with those words? Lucaya would be destroyed when her spell was finished, but what could be the result? And what was it that would complete the spell? It couldn’t be her two-word name, because that was already a part of the sword. It had to be something else.
“Do you want me to take over your paddle yet, Pen?” Raine asked, dragging him out of his thoughts. Yatii was switching with Lucifer.
“No, I can keep going,” Pen said. “You will need to conserve your strength for the harder stretches of the river.”
“You think that it will get worse?”
“I think that the current will be become much stronger as we go farther into the mountains,” he answered. “What do you think, Lucifer?”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I have a feeling that we will need all the strength we can get.”
He was right. But how right he was, none of them could have known.
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