The Alpha King Call Boy
Chapter 87

The plane ride was the fastest but least comfortable part of the trip out to the moors.

The flight was eight hours, nothing too dramatic, but I simply cannot stand to full height inside of an airplane. It was a relief to finally straighten my spine all the way when we disembarked.

The overnight train was another story. Kayden and I had reserved a two-bedroom sleeper car with a private bathroom. We boarded after nightfall, and it appeared either the train was mostly empty, or all the other riders had already tucked in for the night. We spent our first hour in the dining car eating steaks and drinking wine, but it didn't take long for the lulling sounds of the train chugging along the tracks and the effect of the day's travel to have us both ready to crash.

Kayden was closed into his room and I'd just laid my head on the pillow when I remembered Fiona's gift. The white box she gave me in the morning with the enigmatic bidding to open it "later."

I retrieved the box and brought it back to my bed, sat and lifted the lid.

Inside was a card. My name was printed on the outside in Fiona's tidy lettering. I picked it up, found that underneath was a pale blue neck scarf, a soft and semi-sheer one that I'd seen her wear a few times. She had folded it into a very neat little square.

I pressed it to my nose and breathed in the faint but distinct scent of Fiona. My head dropped back against the wall and my eyes closed with the first whiff. It was an unexpected comfort, one I didn't know I needed until it was there in my hand. I tossed the box aside and slid down under the covers with the scarf and the card, which I read with my head on the pillow.

The note was short and sweet. A message of good luck and a reminder to hurry home. When I finished reading it, I brought the card to my lips and kissed it before I could think of what an oddly sentimental thing that was to do.

I blamed the wine.

When morning arrived with an aggressive blast of yellow sunlight through the train windows, the spectacular landscape outside suddenly became visible.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. A picture of oblivion.

The sky was a real presence here, unlike in the city where it only hovered over the top of everything. It was bigger here, somehow. Expansive, all-consuming, deepest blue and teeming with infinite depths of clouds.

The earth was undulating, hillside after hillside, lush with flora in every shade of every color imaginable. I began to understand, for the first time, why Iris had wanted to see this.

We got off the train at our destination, taking our belongings with us since we would be catching a different one in the evening. From the station, we took a local bus into the nearby town, where I wasted no time beginning my interviews.

We found lunch, tea, and more beautiful sights in the town, but not much in the way of information.

A dairy shop proprietor proved the most helpful. She knew nothing of Iris, but indicated that at a small farmstead a few miles out, there lived a family that had resided in the moors for countless generations, and whose patriarch was widely considered the town historian.

We followed the milk merchant's directions and made a short, rather beautiful hike, then stumbled upon the farm in question rather suddenly when the whole of it came into view below us as we crested a hill.

There was a woman not fifty yards from us, partway down the hill, hanging damp laundry on a line. Kayden and I were surprised to see her, but it appeared she'd noticed our approach. Her eyes were already fixed firmly on us by the time we noticed her.

I waved, trying for a friendly gesture. The woman acknowledged me with a very slight movement of her head, but said nothing, continuing her laundry as though it were perfectly uninteresting to see two strange men approaching her remote homestead. We started toward the woman slowly, and when we were close enough to earshot that I didn't have to yell, I introduced myself and Kayden and asked the woman if I could have a minute of her time. She nodded, a little more intentionally this time, but kept her lips pressed closed and her eyes on her task.

"We're looking for someone," I told her. "I wonder if you or anyone in your family may be able to help us replace her. I knew her by the name Iris. She would have moved out here around ten years ago."

The woman frowned. "Don't know any Iris," she said, still not looking at me. "Folks that live on the moors, lived here their whole lives. Not a place to move to."

She pulled a long white sheet from the basket, shook it out and let the wind catch it from the bottom. The force of the air lifted the sheet up and over the line gracefully, and the woman swiftly clamped it into place with a couple of wooden pins. It was nothing to her, something she'd done a million times and would do a million more, but struck me as remarkable, a kind of seamless cooperation with nature that I respected.

"Could I describe her to you?" I asked. "She may have begun to use a different name since I knew her."

The woman didn't answer. She just fished a pair of long woolen socks from the bottom of the basket and hung them on the line. Then she turned, squinting against the yellow sunlight, and gave me and Kayden each a couple seconds of long, hard stare. "Your train won't come till sunset," she said at last. Then she turned around, wedged the woven basket between her hip and elbow, and began to waddle away in the direction of a cottage at the bottom of the hill.

Kayden and I turned to each other, befuddled.

Then the woman wheeled around. "What you waiting for?" she called up at us. Then she shook her head and resumed her route.

Supposing we were to follow, we hoofed it downhill after her.

The cottage was somehow both dust-coated and tidy. An older man was seated in a rocking chair in a corner, smoking a pipe. As much as our arrival had strangely not surprised the woman, the man likewise seemed unfazed, only sliding his eyes sideways to watch as Kayden and I stepped over the threshold into their tiny home.

The woman pulled two chairs back from a rectangular table, then shuffled off into the small kitchen, depositing her basket on a countertop as she went. Immediately she filled a teapot with water and placed it on the stove.

I introduced myself to the man as Kayden and I padded forward. He gave a nod, then a grunt. Then looked expectantly at the table and chairs.

We sat. Then we waited patiently for the woman to finish fixing the tea. That seemed to be the pace of things here.

Finally the woman said, bringing the steaming mugs to us on a tray that also held a saucer of milk and a pot of honey, "John, these men are lookin for someone."

I repeated in the man's direction the same facts I'd given to her already: Iris's name, how long it had been since she may have arrived in the moors. Then I proceeded with a description, the best I could come up with. "She would be thirty now. Short, with a small frame and medium brown hair. A soft-spoken and gentle person."

"What do you want with this woman?" the man asked in a gruff voice. He rose from his chair. His back was angled sideways, but still he reached an impressive height, even with the slant.

"I know her from childhood." It was a broadly true statement. "And I need her help with something back home."

The man grunted. "I don't know no one that looks like what you're describing. Not ten years ago, not today." He emptied his pipe ashes into the fireplace, then returned to his chair. Across the room I spied a flash of red.

The woman was occupied at the kitchen stove, now tending a giant pot leaking fragrant steam, and John was situating himself back into the rocker. Neither noticed the little red-haired girl as she popped her head inside a back door, snatched up a metal pail, and locked eyes with me.

She disappeared again as quickly as she appeared.

"Would you excuse me for a moment?" I asked, sliding my chair back from the table.

I didn't wait for or expect a reply from either the man or the woman. They were clearly not sticklers for polite formalities.

When I made it out the front door, I looked in the direction that the little girl had seemed to be headed.

She was standing near a walking path with the bucket in hand, waiting.

Once she saw me, and saw me see her, she took off again.

I followed.