Chaos Quest by Gill Arbuthnott Read Free Book Online Page A

their backs against a nearby boulder and got out the cheese and dried apples and bread they carried. Thomas went off a little way to refill their water bottles from a stream. Morgan ate absently, his eyes on the wood.
    ***
    Erda walked between the warm trunks of the trees, occasionally putting her hand on red-brown or silvery bark, feeling the slow movement of the tree’s life beneath it.
    Now that she was close, she could feel the consciousness behind the force that pulled her. It was a man, and he was aware of her as no one else in this world was. How could this be? No one else, not even Kate and David, with whom she had shared so many words, could see her like this. She walked a little faster.
    ***
    Thomas packed away the last of the food and fastened his pack, talking of nothing to break the silence that seemed to grip Morgan. There was no alternative now but to go into the wood and face whatever lay in wait for them there.
    He straightened up and shouldered the pack, looking back towards the town for anything that might reasonably distract Morgan from the wood.
    “Look.”
    The single word froze Thomas momentarily. He raised his eyes slowly to Morgan’s face, saw all the colour gone from it and turned to look at whatever had come for them.
    At the edge of the wood stood a girl, just a girl, slightly built, with long, dark-red hair and outlandish clothes. As he looked, a sudden gust of wind ran out of the wood around her, flattening the heather between them.
    Thomas found his voice.
    “Is the Stardreamer with her?”
    “She is the Stardreamer.”

FALLING
    For some seconds, Thomas had no idea what to think or say, then he decided that it was impossible he had understood Morgan properly.
    “What do you mean?”
    Morgan didn’t look round, his gaze locked into that of the girl who stood at the edge of the wood. “She is the Stardreamer.”
    “But she’s just a girl. How can she be?”
    “Can you not feel the power in her?”
    Thomas shook his head. “No. It is you who can feel the Stardreamer’s power, not me. Are you sure about this?”
    Morgan nodded.
    At the edge of the wood the girl raised her hand and pushed the hair back from her face and as she did so, Thomas thought he saw a brief flash of light behind or perhaps around her. She stepped out of the trees and walked towards them.
    “What do we do now?”
    His eyes still on the Stardreamer, Morgan smiled grimly. “We go to meet her, of course.” He turned and looked at Thomas then and gave a sudden heart-felt grin. “Or we could turn and run, if you think you’re fast enough.”
    “Faster than you anyway.” Thomas rose to the baitautomatically and the tension of the moment broke.
    They walked to meet the unlikely figure of the Stardreamer.
    As they drew closer together, Thomas began to feel, or to imagine, a tingling in his fingertips which spread all over his skin, a prickling. He shook himself like a dog.
    “Now you feel it,” said Morgan beside him.
    To Erda, walking slowly out from the wood, it was as though she followed a shining thread now towards the man who knew her. He was tall, with brown hair and green eyes and clothes that were different from hers. A word she didn’t recognise spun its way from his mind to hers.
    Stardreamer
.
    She searched among the words she knew, but could find nothing to make sense of it.
    The other man with him was a little shorter and more slightly built, with black hair and a fine-boned face. He seemed to be about the same age as she was, here, while the man who knew her was a few years older. She walked towards them through the sudden wind that had sprung up to run across the heather from the wood, watching the thread that linked her to the brown-haired man grow shorter and thicker. Five paces apart, they stopped and stood in silence, absorbing each other, each waiting for what the other would do.
    In the end it was Erda who spoke first. “I felt you. You were looking for me.”
    Morgan swallowed and opened