style="font-size:15px;"> Childheart sprang to his feet, coughing, choking on smoke that had engulfed him and was filling his lungs and stinging his eyes. The smoke was so dense that it blotted out the light from the sky, rendering Childheart incapable of seeing anything whatsoever, including most urgently any place providing a way of escape. And he knew he couldn’t last long; so any way out of the smoke, of necessity, would have to be nearby.
Childheart’s thoughts turned to the river—toward which he was already dashing, heading in the direction of its sound. Within seconds, the unicorn, galloping with utter abandon, tumbled harshly into the surf, his left hind leg striking a submerged rock as he plunged beneath the roiling waves, and was pulled by fierce currents swiftly downstream to the east.
Childheart knew that struggling against the currents would only waste oxygen. Moreover, he saw no light penetrating the water from above, and so concluded that surfacing for air at this point, despite his dire need, would simply deliver him to the same smoke he sprang into the water to escape. He wondered: would there be the lights of Fire Eyes to save him this time?
But Childheart had only just begun to search for lights as he continued to tumble and spin about in the undertows, fearful of some fatal collision with another submerged boulder, when with a jolt he felt himself lifted by a surge and launched out of the water. He landed hard against the ground, in a depression-like trough that was nearly ten feet beneath the smoke that continued to blanket the ground. And there was also some dim light, just barely seeping through the smoke, but enough for Childheart to see—to see the trough below and the smoke above, and so, with happy relief, to see the smokeless space where he lay.
The unicorn lay where he landed, breathing in air that was friendly to his lungs, and gathering his wits. Right away, Childheart sensed, in the darkness both ahead and behind, that the trough continued on some sort of course. Accordingly, he drew in several more breaths and then stood, his head just inches beneath the hovering layer of smoke, and at once began to step cautiously in the direction he was already facing, which seemed to be away from the river.
As he walked with probing tentativeness along the bottom of the depression, which was about six feet across, Childheart noticed: first, that he was working his way up hill, if ever so slightly; and, second, that there were deep wheel ruts in the hard-packed earth, suggesting a lengthy history of cart transport. How recently the carts had traveled along the route, however, Childheart could not determine. But it wasn’t as if Childheart had any inclination to allow wariness to dictate his movements. Proceeding on the present course, albeit with caution because of the darkness that veiled from sight whatever was twenty feet in front of him, was his only reasonable option, regardless of what lay ahead.
It wasn’t long before the smoke began to thin and Childheart was able to see well enough up the path to be able to trot, if not to gallop, if he so chose. But he still had no idea what existed just outside the trough—including anything that might be unfriendly—and reminded himself that any pace other than a slow walk would surely alert anything nearby to his presence.
On he walked up the path, gaining strength as he continued. Out of immediate danger, and aware of nothing imminent, Childheart now had the slight luxury of considering a pause on his journey to ponder his friends’ whereabouts. But Childheart continued walking up the path, “pausing” only in his mind.
He had every reason to believe that Kahner yet lived, if only still ensconced inside the industrial cavern or otherwise alive in the grip of capture. He was optimistic that Starnee and Thorn were still alive, there being no evidence that they were forcibly removed from Taralina’s compound during his brief absence while exploring the castle’s interior. He was optimistic, albeit less so, that Elli and Beatríz were still alive, since Kahner and he had not discovered them anywhere inside the tomb—or along the tunnel leading away from the Queen’s bier—and there being no evidence of any injury to the girls or of their deaths.
Childheart was not at all optimistic that the two boys were still alive, his last sighting of Alex and Jamie being the enemy closing in on them in fierce battle on the field between the two castles. And yet, he fleetingly reflected, as the smoke was fast dissipating before him, there seemed to him to be an inexorability to the story that their collective lives were unfolding that left him vaguely hopeful—as if the story itself was somehow in control, and the only determinative question was how the story would choose to end itself. But it was only a sense, and perhaps only wishful thinking, and not something that he at all could understand—and, therefore, not something he at all could believe. Still, even the merest sense of a controlling story was welcome, if only because it necessarily suggested a storyteller and an imagination, as well as a story with some direction, if not teleology, and because this sense, by being a sense, was (happily) unassailable by reason and logic.
What was logical, however, and therefore also unassailable by logic and reason, was that, if there was an imagination unfolding the story he was in, then ineluctably there was, as well, a storyteller who was good—or at least not evil; maybe entirely inscrutable, but certainly not evil. Perhaps not good either, if that were possible, but certainly not evil. And that was enough for now. It had to be; there wasn’t anything else. Just this sense . . .
So lost in his thoughts was he that Childheart was startled, both by the complete absence of the smoke and by the disclosure of the twilit, cloud-wrapped sky that had been an unwavering companion since first emerging from The Mountains, seemingly so long ago. More startling still was that the trough seemed to have become a ravine. The path-turned-to-ravine was thirty feet wide, and its sides were each two hundred feet of sheer rock towering toward a thin slice of sky above—the only light, drifting down against the gloom of the gorge.
Childheart stopped to listen, feeling vibrations in his hooves. There was a din of activity going on—deep in the ground beneath his feet; and he wondered if it wasn’t the sounds from the cavern he had fled—where Kahner might still be—and which he promised Kahner he would return to, within hours, if at all possible. He wondered, in that regard, how many hours, if not days, it had actually been since he had abandoned his companion.
Childheart, still stationary, searched up the path and along the canyon walls with his eyes, and then pivoted, to continue the same search behind him, looking for any other opening into or between the canyon walls besides the one he was following. But seeing nothing, he resumed his walk, maintaining the same quiet pace, constantly looking above, as well as ahead.
The pathway forming the bottom of the canyon continued to ascend, but more sharply now, and the height of the canyon’s walls was diminishing. Again Childheart stopped. No longer did he feel any vibrations or hear any sounds, save the whistle of a breeze cutting across the top of the gorge, now no more than fifty feet above his head. But he stopped just the same because there was a pale light in the distance, as if from the end of a tube, far up the path. He began to walk again, probingly, traveling for another fifteen minutes or so. Then, in the near distance, he saw that the sides of the canyon abruptly disappeared, and that he was about to enter a tunnel roughly the size of the initial trough the rapids had launched him into.
For another half hour Childheart walked through the tunnel, amazed at just how far away the light was at the other end, if, in fact, it was an end the light was signaling, and the light simply a light. Within another half hour, however, the light grew markedly larger and brighter, hurting Childheart’s eyes and reminding him of those moments just before Kahner and he had exited the bowels of The Mountains the first time, just to the north of Sleeping Guard River. Even more cautiously now Childheart stepped, a single footfall at a time, toward what just fifty yards ahead was almost certainly the tunnel’s end, and daylight.
The unicorn’s heart lightened as his eyes grew accustomed to the bright light. There, just ahead, just beyond the tunnel’s wide end, the grasses of a green meadow, with flowers of various sorts, and large, leafy trees in the distance, were beginning to come into focus. With exulting thoughts
