Aster Wood and the Lost Maps of Almara (Book 1) Read Free

Grandma’s attic was not the sort of place that a hieroglyph made any sort of sense in. Yet still, here it was.  
    I couldn’t shake the chills that were crawling down my spine as I looked around the room. Maybe this place wasn’t everything it seemed to be. Was there something here, in the attic, in the house, on the farm, that I was missing?  

    “How long have you lived in this house, Grandma?” I asked an hour later, between mouthfuls of sticky spaghetti. She looked up at me and then her eyes focused on a point beyond me as she thought of the answer.  
    “Hmmm, let’s see,” she said, “I moved here with your grandfather right after we were married. We moved in with his parents, which is what most young couples did back then. So that’s about sixty-five, no, sixty-seven years.”  
    “Wow,” I said. “That’s a long time. When was this place built?”
    “Oh,” she said, “your grandfather’s grandparents built it, so you do the math.”
    I twirled my spaghetti around and around my fork. That had to be almost two hundred years back. And it sounded like the place had been in the family that whole time. I eyed her, trying to decide if I should ask my next question.
    “Did anyone in the family ever do anything… strange?” I asked.  
    She snorted and said, “What do you mean strange? We’re just farmers, Aster, not magicians. At least, we used to be farmers.” She smiled at me lovingly. “Though you with that blond hair, you might have a little magic in your blood.”
    I snorted. It was true: everyone in my family had brown hair except for me. In the old baby pictures I had seen, most people on my dad’s side had white blond hair as kids that then darkened as they got older, and Mom’s side of the family was almost entirely brunette. But I had always had a light blond mop on my head, a “toe-head” as some people called it, and it had barely darkened at all since I was little.
    “Hair aside,” I said, “was anybody in the family not a farmer? You know, before? Like did anybody travel a lot or disappear or do anything strange?”
    “Disappear?” she asked. She thought for a moment. “Well, your grandfather once traveled to New York City,” she said, “but that’s not that unusual, is it? I really wanted to go on that trip with him. I was so excited about seeing the Empire State Building. But your father was just a baby and I couldn’t leave him alone here with my parents; they were getting on in their years and wouldn’t have been able to manage an infant on their own.” She paused. Finally she said, “I’ve barely made it out of this town.”
    I stared down at my plate. My father. His mother had cared so much for him and the people around her to not leave them when they needed her most, a trait he apparently did not inherit.  
    “Do you ever see him?” I asked, eyes still on my marinara.
    “Who, Jack? No, not for a few years now,” she said quietly. “He sent me a letter a while back. Said he was getting married. Don’t expect I’ll ever meet her.”
    We both sat in silence, the weight of the conversation hanging around us.
    “Your ma doesn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see why I would need to burden her with something like that. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything to you, either.”
    So he really had moved on for good. I stayed silent, fuming with anger at the man I hadn’t seen in seven long years.
    “Aster,” she finally said, “I’m so sorry…about everything.”
    When I looked up from my plate she had tears in her eyes. My eyes fell back to the faded tablecloth. I had set down my fork, and now my fingernails were tearing the woven fabric to shreds on the edge of where my plate sat. After a couple minutes I raised my head. She was watching me, and quickly wiped a tear from her cheek.  
    “You know, your ma…you know she had to go, right?” she asked.
    “Yeah, I know,” I said.  
    “I know this place isn’t where most kids your age