Bedtime Story by Robert J. Wiersema Read Free Book Online Page A

1949.
    I went to the Biography page. It showed a painting of a dour-looking, slim man, middle-aged and greying, leaning against a short stone wall with an ocean in the background, one hand resting on the crystal head of a straight cane.
    I lingered over the picture for a moment: I’d never actually known what Took looked like, and the deliberate asceticism came as something of a disappointment. For someone whose books were so full of life, he looked like a prat.
    Trust the art, I always say, not the artist.
    But then, I would, wouldn’t I?
    The picture was the most interesting thing on the page. The biography added little to the Wikipedia entry. Took was born in 1895 into a wealthy family. It seems he was a conscientious objector during the Great War, and was involved in one of the many mystical societies that flourished during that time, the Order of the Golden Sunset. The writer took pains to point out that other writers, including Yeats, had been involved in similar organizations. Took married Cora Agatha Tinsley in 1930, and the two settled in Norfolk in the middle of that decade. The biography listed the four novels that Took wrote before his death in 1950, but, again, there was no mention of
To the Four Directions
.
    I brought up a new Word window and started to type.
    The summer that I was eleven, my life was changed forever. No, more than that—the world was changed forever, and I was pulled along with it
.

    A soft scratching at the door jarred Matthias from his sleep. For a moment he didn’t recognize his surroundings: a large bed, plush down blanket, a crackling fire. Where was he? And then it all came rushing back: the Queen, the quest, the Berok, the captain leading him to the palatial guest quarters.
    “Matthias?” a voice called gently, before the door opened a crack. “Might I come in?”
    He recognized the voice as that of Loren. “Yes,” he said, standing up from the bed, straightening the covers. “Come in.”
    The gaunt old man slid into the room, barely opening the door. He smiled. “I trust you rested,” he said. He crossed the room toward the fire.
    “A bit,” he said, watching the old man carefully.
    The magus settled in the chair closest to the fire, his grey robes settling around him. He began unpacking the bag he had been carrying over his shoulder.
    “I thought you might have some questions. I’ve brought books and maps.”
    Matthias sat in the other chair by the fire. There was a low table between them, which the magus was piling with books and scrolls. “I tried to follow along with what you were saying this morning, but—”
    “That’s understandable,” Loren said. He seemed to have finished unpacking the bag and was now tamping golden tobacco into his pipe. “Where to start?” he asked himself. “Where to start?”
    Loren drew a long splinter of wood from inside the folds of his robe and, after extending it into the fire, lit his pipe, puffing huge clouds of sweet-scented blue smoke as he considered his words.
    “Perhaps the Brothers of Thomas,” he said slowly. “Well.” Another puff on the pipe. “For as long as there have been kings and queens in Colcott, there have been magi. Scholars. Historians. Advisers.”
    “Sorcerers,” Matthias said, thinking of the stories he had heard when he was younger.
    Loren smiled. “Our magical powers have been greatly exaggerated.”
    “Then what about the Sunstone?”
    “The Sunstone is something altogether different,” he said. “Gafilair, the first high mage of Colcott, wasn’t the founder of the Order. In fact,he was little more than an adept when he rode into battle with Stephen the Bold. The Order had been around for hundreds of years, even then. He was the one, though, who forged our relationship with the royal family, with the kingdom. He was the first to ride with a king of Colcott into battle. And he saved him, with the Sunstone.”
    “But how—”
    “No one really knows. The true Sunstone is shrouded in