Key Of Valor (Key 3)

She'd traveled these roads before, Zoe remembered, but always with some reluctance and not a little guilt. This time, she hoped, she was heading toward discovery.

The hills were almost colorless now, just the drab grays of denuded trees, the dull, dead browns of fallen leaves. And those trees speared up into a dreary November sky. She turned onto the back roads, following the winding, narrow ribbon through fallow fields, past little houses planted on tiny lawns.

Every mile took her back.

She'd walked this road, many times. Early mornings when she'd missed the school bus because she'd been unable to get everything done in time. She had run across that field, a shortcut, and could remember how green it had smelled in early summer.

Sometimes she'd raced across the field when she sneaked out to meet James, raced with her heart flying in front of her in the soft spring air to where he'd parked on the side of the road to wait for her.

The fireflies had danced in the dark; the high grass had tickled her bare legs. She'd believed everything was possible then, if you only wanted it hard enough.

Now she knew the only things that were possible were what you worked for. And even when you did, they could slip away from you.

She pulled to the side of the road, not far from where a boy had waited for her. And ducking through the wire fence, she walked across the fallow field toward the woods.

They'd been her woods as a child. Her forest, full of quiet and secrets and magic. They'd been hers still as she'd grown older. A place to walk, to think, to plan.

And it was there, she believed, on a red blanket spread over pine needles and crunching leaves, that she'd conceived the child who had changed the course of her life.

There were still paths beaten through the trees, she noted. So there were still children who played here, or women who walked, men who hunted. It hadn't really changed. Maybe that was the point. The forest didn't change, not as quickly, not as overtly, as w

hat and who walked in it.

She stood still for a moment, breathing in the quiet, the November scents of rot and damp. Trying not to think, she let her instincts choose her direction.

Loss and despair, joy and light. She'd known all of those here. Blood from die loss of innocence? Fear of the consequences, hope that love would be enough?

She sat on a fallen log and tried to visualize the roads of her life that led from here, and the key that waited on one of them.

She heard the tap of a woodpecker, and the sigh of wind through empty branches. And then she saw the white buck standing, watching her with eyes of sapphire blue.

"Oh, my God." She sat where she was, afraid to move. Afraid to breathe.

Both Malory and Dana had seen a white deer, she remembered, what Jordan had called a traditional element of a quest. But they'd seen the buck at Warrior's Peak, not in a narrow strip of West Virginia woods.

"This means I was right, I was supposed to come here. It must mean I'm right. But what do you want me to do? I want to help. I'm trying to help."

The buck turned his head and walked away down the rough path. With her knees trembling, Zoe rose to follow.

Had she once dreamed of this? she wondered. Not this exact thing, not of following the path of a white buck, but of magic and wonder and the wish to do something important.

Dreamed, she admitted, of doing something that would take her away from here, away from the tedium and the despair of not being able to see the world beyond these woods.

Had she looked to James for that? Had she loved him, or simply seen him as an escape?

She stopped, pressed a hand to her heart in a kind of shock. "I don't know," she whispered. "I really don't know."

The buck looked back at her, then gathered himself, leaped over the rocky banks of a small creek, and bounded away.

Hoping that she understood, Zoe took the left fork, walked out of the woods and onto the packed gravel of the trailer park.

Like the woods, it had changed little. Different faces, perhaps, different units here and there. But it was still lined with homes that would never grow roots.

She heard radios, televisions—the hum and blare of them dancing out of windows—the sound of a baby crying in short, fitful wails, and the gun of an engine as someone drove out of the park.

Her mother's place was a dull, pale green, with a white metal awning over the side door. The car parked next to it had a dented fender.

She hadn't taken the summer screen off the door yet, Zoe noted. It would make a harsh squeaking sound when you opened it, a slapping sound as you let it go. She climbed the stacked cinder blocks her mother used as steps, and knocked.