Chapter 24

The girls waited, but Ricky stayed quiet for a full minute.

Then another minute ticked by, and then another.

“Ricky,” Micky said gently. “Honey, you can’t leave it like that. I know it must hurt. I can’t even think of my parents not being around anymore. It’s like, I got kidnapped, and I feel they are waiting for me to get sorted out and come home to them as soon as I can.”

“Yet another part of me knows that Kerr did as he said and that, they were killed before I even left River City. Intellectually I know they are gone, but my heart doesn’t want to believe it,” she sobbed.

Ricky found a very distraught girl curled into his right armpit. Then he had another sobbing girl on the other side as Ronan started bawling. Ricky even knew why she was crying. What has been done to her parents was just as heinous as what had happened to Micky’s. And he had to admit, to his wife and daughter.

He sucked back his own tears and, haltingly, he continued his story.

“That year, I was to turn fifty-years-old,” he told the girls as he hugged them.

“I’d gone back to the crossroads for the winter and for some peace and quiet. I had planned to stay the winter as I’d been given a box of fascinating texts to decipher.”

“They were written in some archaic language that no one seemed to know, but at the time they did seem familiar to me. I was by then a renowned Professor of Ancient Histories and Languages, so the box of books had been given to me.”

“At the time, Matty has fallen madly in love with one of Queen Ella’s boys. No one even bothered to complain about the match. Matty only had to smile at you, and you became her willing slave.”

“She even managed to stay in Angeni’s good books, and Angeni approved of her marrying Prince Byron so who was I to argue. I was just her father, and no one expected me to like the man who was stealing my little angel.”

“Kineta’s people all the way back to her great-grandmother loved Matty to death. Even I was a favoured son since I had ‘Fixed’,” he quoted with his fingers, “Kim and Kineta. Kim had found a great match when he moved back to Energy City, and he had sired one ankle-biter and given birth to two more.”

“So Kineta and Matty were in royal wedding mode. They even forgot about my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks and happily saw me off. The wedding was going to happen at the end of the Spring Festival, and since between the two of them, the couple were related to all six Queen’s, so it was going to be a gala event.”

“I wasn’t really needed, other than to provide the bride price and pay all the bills. I used this as an excuse to escape to my treehouse. I told Kineta I would collect a box of crystals to bring back with me. I knew they were better than coin as Quaz crystals had become harder to purchase of late even with what I supplied the market.”

“While I did work at the Academy as a Professor, we had used the crystals for currency all my married life. It was another good reason why a lot of people who may not approve of me didn’t bother me. I had set up my trade of them some years before.”

“The crystals from this cave have exceptional quality and clarity, and I am paid well for the crystals I do sell. I have no idea who told who that I was bringing the crystals back with me, but some not very nice people knew I would have a large quantity of them with me.”

“Even so, when I am travelling with a lot of extra crystals, I don’t travel the known paths or stay in the well-known inns. Also, it was only me coming back from the hills.”

“I only had a small pack that my grandfather has spelled for my father, so it held more than it looked like it could. I found this bigger pack some years later. Still, I could put a lot of crystals in it, and they weighed almost nothing to carry.”

“One trick I had also learnt by then was that if I had a good supply of charged crystals, I could blink quite a reasonable distance in a day. It is very draining but, in a pinch, I could get from here to my house in Spirit City in two days using three jumps.”

“Unfortunately, at the time it took me as long as four days to get here from any of the six coastal cities if I didn’t have the extra crystals, and I didn’t get the boost from the cavern to start with. It takes as many as six jumps, and I also needed about twelve hours to recharge myself and the crystals between jumps.”

“So, because of all the crystals, I didn’t take the lankys back with me that year. I was unaware that the thieves must have had watchers at various points on the Spirit Road waiting for me to leave the crossroads.”

“The problem for them was that spring came, and as far as they knew, I didn’t leave the crossroads. I’d also come back early and had been back in town for two weeks before I learnt that my leaving without the thieves knowing, had upset their plans to waylay me.”

“In retaliation, a week later and before the wedding, they took Kineta and Matty when they were out shopping. I got a note that demanded all of the Quaz crystals I had brought to town with me as a ransom.”

“I had already given them to Byron’s parents as the bride price and sold on most of the rest to pay for the horrendous bills. They had already sent them west, so they didn’t have them anymore either.”

“I beseeched the kidnappers to give me time to go get more explaining what had happened. At first, they didn’t believe me, and after three days they finally agreed that I had ten days to go get more crystals. I don’t know why they thought I was giving them the run-around. They had to have known why I had brought the crystals back with me in the first place.”

“I had been searching all over town, but wherever they had put my wife and daughter, I couldn’t mentally connect to them. I was beside myself with worry. Even my grandmother had her soldiers and guards looking for Matty and Kineta. Angeni was very upset that Matty was missing.”

“The kidnappers told me that for every day I was late, they would send me body parts from my beloved wife and daughter. Prince Byron agreed to stay at my house so they could contact him if they needed to. He promised to keep pleading for their safe return.”

“I damned near killed myself and two lankys getting back to the crystal cavern in three days. I was able to blink as far as Quartz Dale the first day, but I had to ride from there to here. As you two know it is at best a six-day trip on horseback and ten days in a carriage if you can change the lankys regularly.”

“I filled my knapsack and loaded two carry baskets I use for the lanky’s with crystals and then tried to blink out of the cave to my transport ring at the crossroads. I was going to go back using the lankys.”

“To this day, I have no idea why I couldn’t leave this cavern system for two days as it has never happened to me again. I tried every version of the transportation spell I knew, and finally, one worked.”

“To my horror, I found myself in a cavern I didn’t know. What crystals had been left in it were sadly depleted, and the growths were very small and mostly concentrated over the dais. I would have to recharge my crystals to blink away again.”

“I tapped a macro tunnel to find a source of magma. I was surprised that it wasn’t that far below me. I soon had the old lava pits glowing with fresh lava. It still took another two days for me to charge my crystals enough to blink. During my time in the cavern, I found that all of the passages into it had been deliberately blocked off.”