A Riddle in Ruby #2 by Kent Davis

Author:Kent Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Make the Wilderness a Garden? Are you mad? The flora and fauna of this land are rich beyond measure. Full of wild, heated life we have not yet seen. Explore it? Absolutely. Live in it, revel in it. But if you try to tame it, you will kill it.

—Dr. James Sutherland, fellow, Royal Society

Ash gets in your breeches.

Cram shook out his leg to try to coax the ash out, but the shaking just drove it all deeper. It was everywhere: in his hair, in his nose, in his armpits, and let us not forget the breeches, including parts that Mam said never to talk about in polite company. Lady Athena and the professor looked like ancient warriors from the homeland Mam had told stories on, covered head to toe, except it weren’t blue dye they were wearing. It was gray-black, like they had taken baths in a charcoal pit.

And it itched. Oh, Providence, it itched.

He tore his scarf from his face. “I can’t take it,” he said. “Milady, please.”

“Cram, I said no.”

“I beg of you, mistress of mine, I will do for you whatever you desire, I will slay demons, I will carry mountains, I will float you on my back across the River of Hell itself if you only, for goodness’ sake, and for the respect of my childrens and grandchildrens, and because I know you are at heart a goodly person, if you only scratch this little place below my shoulders.” He turned to her, hoping that his pose of helplessness might stir some tiny little fire in her stern and iron heart.

“No.”

“But—”

Athena stopped on the slope and turned around, kicking up a small puff of ash and debris. She pulled down the handkerchief covering her mouth and spat. “Cram, please. If I scratch that place, you will simply itch worse. Henry Collins is your warning. Look there.”

The professor was bringing up the rear, and he did indeed have his long arm out of its sleeve and was scratching his back as if it were a fiddle at a barn raising. When he noticed them watching, he stopped. “What?”

“I see your point,” said Cram.

They forged on. Behind him Henry cursed under his breath in very unscholarlike tones.

The fire had burned for three days, and when they finally could cut loose from the beaver lodge, they had emerged into a blasted world: grass, trees, bushes, even animals scraped from it like the icing from a cake. Only blackened trunks, the bones of the hills, and ash, ash, ash lay underneath. In an odd way it made the journey easier. The thorn brakes and switchbacks were gone, and their path to the hilltop lay bare in front of them.

Course, the toad in the pudding was what happened to them others. Winnie Black and the captain had more sand and more sense than most folk Cram’d ever met, but worry tugged at him nevertheless. Had they been burned? Had they been caught? He tried to soothe the little voice inside

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