The Strider and the Regulus (The Star of Atlantis Book 1), page 1
The Strider and
the Regulus
By Tricia D. Wagner
The Strider and
the Regulus
By Tricia D. Wagner
“Tricia D. Wagner's attention to pairing psychological struggle with the adventure of finding a promised treasure creates a story that pulls on the emotions of young readers as it satisfies their desire for action and adventure.”
-D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
“The Strider and the Regulus is another out-of-the-park homerun by author Tricia D. Wagner. The story is tight, riveting, and fun, and it will pull on your heartstrings. This novel deserves a broad audience.”
-Nick Chiarkas, author of the award-winning novel, Weepers.
“A memorable coming-of-age story that blends elements of Celtic pirate history with parental expectation through an accessible and well-written, compelling narrative. Readers will appreciate the profound messages of following one’s desires and strengths while balancing the freedom of youth with the responsibility of age.
Well-designed and brimming with adventure, this story is enjoyable for readers with an interest in pirates, personal growth, and the call of the sea.”
-Mary Lanni, Reedsy Discovery
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Night Swiftly Falling
by Tricia D. Wagner
Eight-year-old Swift is lost in dreams of sea legends and pirate adventures, until an encounter with the deadly power of the ocean shocks him into reality.
Swift struggles to hang onto his childhood fantasies, but his new understanding of the fragile nature of life and friendships threatens to swamp his hope.
Under the guidance of his older brother, Caius, Swift must learn to brave the challenging waves of change without losing himself to their destruction.
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The Strider and
the Regulus
By Tricia D. Wagner
A ship is safe in harbor –
but that’s not what ships are for.
John A. Shedd
1
Swift raced through the house, away from his father.
“I’m not finished talking to you,” rang his father’s voice—merry, but full of serious intent.
“Did you think trapping him would be so easy?” asked Caius, Swift’s nearest brother, older by a decade.
Their father, Justus, chuckled. “Lad hardly gave me a chance to start.”
Swift snuck out the back door, and with a smack of its metal on wood, silenced Justus and Caius.
He sprinted over the green and ducked into the woods, pounding the leaf litter toward a thicket crowded with old English oaks.
“Stay,” Justus had pleaded. “Hear me.”
But was he willing to hear Swift? Didn’t seem he was. So why should Swift hear him?
Swift ran along a pathless course, dawn’s misty light shafting through twisting boughs. Soggy leaves stuck to his ankles and shins, casting him in a skin made of woods, lending him a taint of moss and damp earth.
If only he could vanish so easily into these Devonshire woods as a part of them, sly and invisible as the fox whose path he was beating, whose musk was all that remained from its secret trek through the shire sometime in the night.
He slipped behind an ancient oak tree and clung to its broad trunk as to the coat of one trusted and ready to defend. Justus didn’t seem to be following.
But Justus wouldn’t give up so easily.
Justus seemed to believe he perfectly understood all his sons. And as he’d spoken the six most dire words—“It’s time we had a talk”—he laid on Swift a gaze that seemed to blow him wide open, as a storm wind might part a glade to unmask a rabbit warren.
Those fearsome six words were the ozone-rich first breath of an encroaching summer storm—the dreaded ‘Justus Talk’ was upon him.
A Justus Talk was the dulling of the sunset. The unsalvageable shattering of a ship. A Justus Talk meant boyhood days were at an end.
All three Kingsley brothers who’d come before had failed to evade the Justus Talk, and so each had succumbed.
It was a Justus Talk that locked Trystan into clocking thousands of hours of cello practice while his friends grew up and moved away. A Justus Talk propelled Edric into rugby, which yielded a short, amateur career that a back injury had finished. It was a Justus Talk that had Caius reading medicine before his friends had even graduated.
But Swift wasn’t anything like his brothers. To them, he was nothing more than “the Lad.” Unformed and incompetent. Too wild. Too lost. Too childish. A bit young for even his own age.
And, as painful as it was to admit—they were right. Even if Justus believed otherwise, as advanced as Swift was in school, thirteen was too young for anyone to face the threat of a Justus Talk.
The others had been years older before having to deal with this.
Caius, though, seemed to think it was coming.
Swift didn’t believe him—couldn’t believe a Justus Talk could be anyplace close—until last week.
Justus had initiated a friendly conversation with Swift, in the guise of pretending to want to see a pirate history book he was reading. But Swift smelled the rat and flitted away faster than Justus could blink.
He’d slipped along a creek in the woods that day, following a path to a muddy bank where it was unlikely Justus would follow.
And Justus hadn’t followed. One would think he might pick up the hint and give up the whole idea.
But today, Caius had been telling Swift about his medical school rounds, and all Swift had done was betray a sliver of interest and ask one meager question—shouldn’t a specialist have been called in?
And Justus was on him, his eyes cobalt daggers, aiming to pin his final son and present a proof that he belonged on Caius’s path—on his own path—to reading medicine.
“Who, at thirteen, could be expected to do such a thing?” Swift whispered to the oak.
The oak seemed to look down on him sympathetically.
“Well, not me,” said Swift.
For as much born to medicine as Justus thought Swift was, Swift couldn’t see it—much.
Rather, he knew—he just knew—that he belonged to the wilds. That he was meant for adventure.
Natural places like this—blowing woods and thrashing seas, windswept coasts, and starry shores—seemed his perfect fit.
But this part of Swift, the greater part, Justus refused to see. He’d probably already made up his mind to be disappointed if Swift didn’t follow Caius. If he couldn’t follow him.
“Swift,” Justus called from the house. “I know you’re close enough to hear me.”
Cockle shards.
Swift flew deeper into the wilds.
These woods, backing up to Devon’s north coast, were haunted with history, with the ghosts of the games Swift had played. Games of maritime wars and piracy and archaic people living off the land. Its sandy, bronzed earth offered countless good places to hide.
This grove had been planted by Justus’s grandfather, who like Justus, like Caius, had been a doctor. But the stories Great Grandfather recorded in his journals—which Swift had read several times—made medicine sound more adventurous and less clinical than the anecdotes Justus and Caius told.
Justus insisted that Swift could improve on his “maturity” and “reserve,”—that these weren’t obstacles. He called Swift’s interests—wonderful interests in things like sea adventures and stellar navigation and maritime myths and their legends of treasure—"the dregs of juvenility.”
“Tell that to Great Grandfather, who served as a doctor on a Welsh ship,” said Swift to the trees he sped by.
Great Grandfather, perhaps, was like Stevenson’s doctor in Treasure Island.
If so, it seemed the track to medicine required less maturity and reserve, and more a good heart for adventure.
Swift crouched at the base of the broadest tree in the whole wood, whose limbs he knew like the rooms in his house.
“What does Justus know?” He picked up an acorn. “What will you be?” He shook it to hear its nut rattle. “A tree, of course. You’re bound to be an oak tree.”
Swift longed for such true understanding from the father he loved. If only Justus would take the trouble to really look inside Swift, his identity would show just as clearly.
“Swift?” echoed his father’s voice—from the back patio, now.
Swift glanced around his blind. It was good enough for the moment, well out of the sightline from the house and down a shallow hill. But it would be useless if Justus closed in.
He slipped further into the thicket.
It felt indeed childish, literally running away from his father. This certainly was at the level of a lad.
But Swift had to be firm on the point. Mum had confided in him that Caius and Trystan and Edric, all three, had all starkly changed once Justus got his claws into them.
Well, Caius less than the others, but over the last several years—since Caius has started medical school—even he seemed to have lost some of his joy.
“Maturity” and “reserve” and whatever other false skins Justus could bully Swift into might chase the life right out of him, pressing him into a mold that would cut out the truer parts.
Justus coughed as he did when he brought out his pipe.
He was in the yard now, at least, if not moving into the trees.
Cockle shards.
Swift edged into a closely grown copse and crept along its narrow trail—a trail leading to a clearing behind the home of their closest neighbor.
There were some good hiding spots that way but trying them would be risky. Ash, Swift’s best friend—well, former best friend—lived there. Ash ventured outside as much as Swift did. Trekking too close to his yard would be chancy.
“I know these woods better than you do,” called Justus.
Swift dropped to his stomach and stared through a crop of loose weeds.
A blur of motion told that Justus was standing at the edge of the woods, scanning the trees.
Swift slunk to the edge of their property, where boxwoods lined the clearing behind Ash’s house.
He studied the clearing.
There was no one in Ash’s yard. And these boxwoods were obscured pretty well from Ash’s windows by a holly thicket.
Justus’s footsteps crunched through the leaves.
Justus knew Swift avoided Ash. He wouldn’t come looking this way.
Swift wedged himself into the green globes of bushes, their sharp branches scratching his hands and his cheeks. He ducked low until he could barely see above their crests.
Lifting just his eyes above them, he felt stealthy, as though he were a slick water monster, surmounting an agitated green sea.
“What in the world are you doing?”
Swift stood and spun.
There, right in the middle of the holly crop, holding a box of tackle and a fishing pole, stood Ash.
“You look a mess, all scratched up,” said Ash. “Why are you in the middle of our bushes?”
“These aren’t your bushes.” Swift felt a fool to be caught—by Ash of all people—bunkering. “My mum planted them.” He tried to slip out of them gingerly, but there isn’t really a graceful way to disembark from a bundle of bushes grown so tight that every move lays a mark.
“Yeah, she did plant those,” said Ash. “On our side of the property line.”
Justus’s steps sounded closer.
Swift tripped his way out of the bushes.
“Aren’t you wondering where I’m going?” Ash held up his tackle box.
Judging from the insulated wind jacket he wore, he must be headed for the Bristol Channel.
Cockle shards.
“My father and I are setting off to Lundy Island for some sailing practice,” said Ash.
In the old days, whatever Ash was up to, he would’ve wanted Swift to come. Now, he mainly looked for chances to gloat.
“Then it’s up the coast of Wales, around Pembrokeshire,” said Ash. “All this rain will move out quick, Father says. We’re in for some great sailing weather, for the rest of the weekend! It’s going to be so much fun.”
Swift narrowed his eyes. “Why the Welsh coast?”
Swift had once owned the greatest collection of Welsh sea faring books of anyone in the whole school. Books of maritime histories and pirate tales and sea legends. Now, though, almost his entire trove lay hidden—lay stolen—someplace inside Ash’s house. Ash denied that he had the books, but he certainly did.
Ash narrowed his eyes right back. “I just want to look into something I read.”
A crack rang in the forest—a twig breaking under a boot.
“I can’t talk more,” said Swift. “I have to scram.”
“Why? What are you afraid of?” asked Ash.
Swift checked the forest behind him.
Justus was moving into the trees—casually, slowly. As though he put no stock in Swift’s stealth or skill. Like catching him was no challenge. He was tending the wrong way, though.
Swift scanned the thicket for a better blind.
“Hey, there’s your father,” said Ash.
“Will you be quiet?” Swift whispered. “He’s who I’m—”
“Mr. Kingsley,” Ash shouted, waving. “You looking for Swift? He’s right here.”
Swift threw Ash a look. “Thanks a lot.”
“Hey, it’s my pleasure.” Ash started back to his house, then turned. “I know your father hasn’t taken you out on the water lately. You must miss it.”
Though Justus loved being out on the water, he clearly loved his patients more. Several promises of sailing had lately gone stale.
“I don’t need my father to go sailing,” said Swift.
Ash cocked a brow.
And maybe he could go sailing all on his own. The Clovelly coast was within walking distance. Maybe Caius would loan him some money for a dinghy to rent, or for sailing lessons.
If Swift was old enough for a Justus Talk, he was old enough to take on sailing. And if Ash could sail, then Swift certainly could.
“I’ll bring you back a shell or something.” Ash’s large eyes harbored a growing satisfaction from the jealousy he must be reading on Swift’s face.
Swift tried to conceal it, of course—he always tried to conceal his thoughts from Ash. But some feelings are like driftwood, liable to burble to the surface no matter what you do.
And the truth was—as cruel as Ash tended, he was adventurous and so creative. Swift had never laughed harder with anyone. He missed the old Ash.
But the old Ash was gone.
Swift cast him a sharp grin. “Lots of luck to you.”
Ash, waving his rod, tossed back a satisfied smile. He trod through the holly thicket back toward his house.
What a numbskull. Ash might’ve appropriated Swift’s love for the sea, but he’d left alone Swift’s love for Norse mythology. He was oblivious that, in Old Norse, the word for “luck” and “hell” were the same.
Swift watched Ash until he was far gone, then muttered, “Son of a cock up.”
“Let’s watch that mouth, shall we?”
Swift spun.
Justus, biting his pipe.
Justus—completely relaxed, like a hunter who’s bettered his kill and aims to toy with it before sending the blade home.
“Shall we speak?” asked Justus.
“Do I have a choice?”
Justus grinned around his pipe. “No.”
Swift drifted down onto a boulder.
“Well?” Justus settled his foot on a thick stump. “What are your thoughts of one day venturing into medicine?”
The question seemed hypothetical enough to be harmless.
But—Justus wasn’t wanting Swift to agree to “one day venture into medicine.” He envisioned Swift gaining a competitive seat in a medical internship program for youth; graduating at the pinnacle of his class, and early; and ultimately topping his class at the university he himself had conquered.
This was Justus’s one and only vision of Swift’s future.
“Why get after me now?” asked Swift. “You didn’t hunt Caius ‘til he was fifteen.”
“The internship program I’d like you to try for—for young lads aspiring to take on medicine—it didn’t exist when Caius was your age.”
Swift winked up into the strengthening sunlight. “And what if told you that I’m just a young lad—not someone capable of taking on medicine?”
“Then, I’d say you don’t know yourself.”
Swift drew breath to argue, but—the way Justus was watching him—it was like he was measuring Swift and finding him exactly as expected.
Swift picked up an acorn and toyed with it. “I’d say I know myself.”
Justus didn’t ease up on the stare he was sending. He really believed he was right.
“That terrible morning”—Justus glanced at Ash’s house—“when Ash tumbled into the water—your instinct was to save his life. Not everyone carries that reflex.”
But it was that very tumble which Ash couldn’t forgive. It was that terrible morning that’d ended their friendship. Though it happened five whole years ago, Ash would still tell anyone that his near-death accident was Swift’s fault.
And the truth was—Swift hadn’t saved Ash’s life. Justus had.
“I’m no good with blood and such things.” Swift lifted his bare, dirty foot, showcasing a scar on his heel from where a nail had punched in last winter—the ghost of the worst wound he’d ever suffered. “I went all black in the eyes and woozy when Caius pulled out that nail. Remember?”
