Spiritwalk Read Online Free

asked.
    Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears... Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the House, though they’d all tried.
    “You’ll go away... won’t you?” she said.
    He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.
    “I’ll go away,” he replied. “And you won’t remember me.”
    “I won’t forget,” Sara said. “I would never forget.”
    “You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”
    “They’d be... gone forever... ?”
    That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend never having been there in the first place.
    “Forever,” Merlin said. “Unless...”
    His voice trailed off, his gaze turned inward.
    “Unless what?” Sara asked finally.
    “I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”
    Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”
    “The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”
    They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.
    Sara stepped closer to him, hesitated a moment longer, then hugged him.
    “I do love you, Merlin,” she said. “I can’t say I don’t when I do.”
    She felt his arms around her, the dry touch of his lips on her brow.
    “Go gentle,” he said. “But beware the calendaring of the trees.”
    And then he was gone.
    One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.
    The pain felt like it would never go away.
    But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.
    But so were her night fears.
    The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.
    Could any of that really have happened? she wondered. The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic—not supernatural.
    She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost—at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.
    Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell, and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye. Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.
    A hazelnut.
    Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.
    Had she regained memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream