The Golden Door Read Free Page B

home triumphant, the Warden will not dare to refuse me.”
    Again he ruffled Rye’s hair, his broad, handsome face alive with hope.
    “Imagine it, Rye! Imagine if I was Warden of Weld! Think of the good we could do! Think of the changes we could make! How often have we talked of it?”
    Rye felt hot, treacherous tears burning behind his eyes. “But that was only … talk !” he cried. “I never thought it was real !”
    Dirk’s hand dropped from Rye’s head onto his shoulder.
    “Then you did not understand, Rye,” he said soberly. “It was very real. Mother knows this. She will understand that I must go.”

A nd so it proved. The next morning, with his mother’s blessing, Dirk marched away from Southwall, his father’s skimmer hook over his shoulder and the cheers of his neighbors ringing in his ears. Joliffe, Crell, and a handful of other brave men went with him.
    The volunteers were singing as they swung along the broad, straight road that led west to the Keep. Those they had left behind stood watching until they were out of sight.
    “We should feel very proud,” said Lisbeth, putting her arm around Rye’s shoulders. “Dirk is doing what must be done, to save us all.”
    But watching the small band of marchers disappearing into the distance, Rye felt only terrible fear, and an aching sense of loss.
    A few days later, Crell slunk back into Southwall with a rag tied around his leg. He said he had hurt his ankle at the Keep, so had been forced to come home. He was certainly limping, sometimes more and sometimes less, but he refused to see Tallus the healer. Few believed in his injury, though no one said so aloud.
    Shamed and sullen, Crell said little in answer to the townspeople’s eager questions. The Keep had been crowded with volunteers from every part of the city. The group from Northwall had been the largest and noisiest of all. Crell had lost sight of Dirk, Joliffe, and the others from Southwall. He had not been shown the secret way out of Weld.
    He retreated to his home and stayed out of sight for days. His mother, who was Lisbeth’s friend, clearly felt disgraced. But Rye could see, deep in her shadowed eyes, a flicker of relief.
    The house seemed very empty without Dirk. His cheerful whistling no longer brightened the early mornings. Dinners around the table were dull without his whispered talk, teasing, and laughter. And at night, Rye lay listening to the sounds of the skimmers with only the silent Sholto for company. Dirk’s empty, neatly made bed seemed to dominate the hot, still room.
    Lisbeth and Sholto went on with their lives just as they had before Dirk left. Lisbeth tended her bees and sold the honey at her market stall. Sholto continued grinding powders and mixing potions for Tallus thehealer, examining dead skimmers in Tallus’s workroom, and studying his books in every spare moment.
    Rye did not understand how they could. He missed Dirk so much! He dreamed of him every night, and every morning woke to the misery of his brother’s absence. It was as if a great hole had been torn in his world, and it changed everything.
    School lessons seemed pointless. Games seemed pointless. His friends talked constantly about the adventures Dirk, Joliffe, and the others must be having beyond the Wall. Their chatter seemed to rasp on Rye’s nerves like sandpaper, and he began to spend more time alone.
    “You must have courage, Rye,” Lisbeth murmured to her youngest son when she found him moping in the shade of the bell tree one afternoon. “We all miss Dirk, my dear, but what must be, must be.”
    Rye looked up into her face and saw how pale she was. He saw the shadows beneath her eyes, and a line between her brows that he had never noticed before. With a pang, he at last understood that Lisbeth was suffering even more than he was, but was bearing her pain bravely, for all their sakes.
    He nodded and forced a smile, suddenly feeling much older.
    “There will be news of Dirk very soon, I am sure