Lost Children of the Far Islands (14 page)

“That’s why the storms are getting worse, isn’t it?” Leo said. “She’s getting weaker.” The Bedell did not answer.

“If she’s so old,” Gus said, “what happens when she’s gone?”

The Bedell shuddered. Ila jumped up with a small scream as a furry creature spat and hissed on the rock next to her. Then the Bedell was back, pale-faced, with beads of sweat across his forehead.

“My apologies,” he said.

“OK,” Ila said, and seated herself back down next to the little man.

Gus was watching the Bedell closely. She opened her mouth to ask her question again, but before she could, Ila spoke.

“Are you the only Messenger?” she asked.

The little man smoothed his green waistcoat with one hand, rather like an animal smoothing its fur with a paw.

“I am,” he said proudly. “The Folk have used Messengers before, of course, but usually they have been birds. The Móraí needed a Messenger who could swim as well as travel overland. Someone clever, and quick, and brave. At least, that is what she told me,” he added modestly.

“Could someone take a boat here?” Leo asked.

The Bedell snorted. “Oh dear me, no,” he said. “They
would pass right by this place. This is not a train station, after all! One cannot just come and go. The Watcher must stay here, and no one else may come. Except, of course, for me.”

“Mr. Bedell,” Leo said. “Um, I was wondering—that is,
we
were wondering—if maybe you could do that thing again? If we could be seals again?”

“And a fox,” Ila said.

“And a fox,” said Leo, who was still feeling kindly toward Ila after the sharing of the scone.

“Well …,” the Bedell said slowly.

“You could do it, right?” Gus said. “I mean, you’re pretty much Folk yourself,” she added coaxingly.

“Ah well, the next best thing, perhaps,” the little man said, but the tips of his ears were glowing pink and he looked very pleased. He smoothed his waistcoat one more time and said, “I would have to ask the Móraí, of course.”

“Please ask her,” Gus said. “Oh please!”

The little man nodded slowly. “I cannot see the harm in it. I shall ask her tonight, if you like.”

They packed up the picnic quickly, each of the children feeling a thrill of joy at the thought of Turning again. Then, with the Bedell close behind, they wandered back to the meadow at the top of the island, the one with the broken houses. There had been thirteen of them, the Bedell told them, set in a semicircle that faced the ocean. There were treasures to be found in the dirt—bits of broken crockery and polished green glass. Ila even found a
tiny teacup half buried in the soil near one of the stone foundations.

“Look, Gus,” she said. “It’s so little!”

The teacup was white porcelain, with a spray of pink roses painted on one side of it. When Ila held it up, the sun shone right through its delicate edges. They continued to dig and found more pieces of china, but everything else was broken and scattered. Only the teacup had remained intact. It made Gus think of the long-ago child who had played with the tea set.
Where is she now?
she wondered.

“Let’s bring it to the Móraí,” Leo said, but the Bedell shook his head.

“Leave it where it belongs.”

In the end, they put the teacup in a slight hollow in the rock wall and filled it with buttercups. They stepped back together to admire their work.

The cup looked pretty, overflowing with the tiny yellow flowers, but in the lonely, mournful way that a memorial might look both beautiful and sad at the same time.

At dinner, no one mentioned the stone foundations, or the little teacup. The Bedell had promised to speak to the Móraí after supper, so the children didn’t dare bring up the subject of Turning, or seals, or Folk, for fear of ruining his efforts on their behalf.

Leo talked, instead, about his turtles. He was worried about their training. “People think they have long memories,” he explained to the Móraí, “but they forget their tricks really fast if you don’t work with them.”

“I’m sure the turtles are fine,” she reassured him as Gus and Ila snickered.

They went to bed early, with a kiss from the Móraí and a wink and a significant nod from the Bedell. Lying in the small bed across from Ila’s, Gus realized that she felt at home on Loup Marin, in a way that she was not sure she could explain. It was just that when she woke up in the morning and smelled the fresh sea air, she wanted to leap out of bed. And at night, snuggled in under the heavy cotton coverlet, she listened to the boom of the waves against the rocky shore and felt safe and content. And the next day they would be able to swim in the breakers and explore the deep water and dive and play … She fell asleep in the middle of imagining just how wonderful it was going to be.

At breakfast, the Móraí said that the Bedell could take them down to the sea as soon as he returned from hunting, but by the time they had finished eating, he had not appeared. They made their beds, cleaned up from breakfast, and polished glass and brass fittings in the lighthouse, but there was still no sign of the little man.

Outside, gray rain poured down and the waves smashed monotonously against the rocks. Irritable, bored, and restless, the three children roamed around the living room, turning the pages of old books and playing an endless game of checkers that they had to start over every time Ila cheated, which was often. She was currently jumping all of Leo’s pieces, her chubby hand gripping the red checker in her fist.

“Cheating,” Leo said with a sigh, reaching out to reclaim his lost black checkers. “You can’t jump around the board, Ila. You can only jump one space, remember? One space.”

Ila growled and swept her arm across the board, scattering checkers all over the woven rug.

Leo lunged for her and got a handful of red curls, which made Ila scream and twist around to bite her brother’s arm.

“Brat!” Leo shouted, letting go of Ila’s hair. Ila danced out of the way and stuck her tongue out.

“Enough!” It was the Móraí, and although she was speaking quietly, it was clear that she was angry.

“Ila, come with me. You can help me cook dinner. Leo, that is not at all what I expect of you. Not at all.”

Taking Ila firmly by the hand, she led her back to the kitchen.

“Little brat,” Leo said grumpily to Gus. “I wish she’d at least learn to play a board game without cheating or crying or wrecking the board.”

They decided to explore the books that were shelved in the tall bookcase near the sofa. It was Leo’s idea. Gus was skeptical. It didn’t really sound like her idea of a good time.

“Maybe we’ll find some information about the Folk,” Leo argued, shoving his glasses up on his nose.

Gus rolled her eyes, but she was sick of checkers and tired of watching out the window for any sign that the weather might be changing, so she reluctantly agreed
to join “the hunt,” as Leo insisted on calling it. After a while, she drifted over to the comfiest armchair and pretended to read a heavy clothbound book while she watched the gray sea toss and crash.

Leo didn’t notice. He was too busy paging through the books, sometimes reading bits out loud, sometimes silently. Suddenly he said Gus’s name.

“What?” Gus said guiltily. She picked up the book that had fallen closed on her lap and quickly read a few sentences. It seemed to be about the familial lines of mussels.

“Look at this, Gus. It’s really weird.”

Gus sleepily pushed herself out of her chair and walked over to where Leo was sitting on the floor. In his lap was a large book, bound in plain brown leather. Its cover was blank.

“What’s so special about that?” Gus said, reaching out to touch it.

It was
warm
. Frowning, she placed her palm on the cover, just to be sure. The book was definitely warm, as though it had been lying in the sun all afternoon. Gus checked the window. Rain fell in steady sheets past the glass. Then, with a gasp, she yanked her hand away.

Leo grinned at her. “Yup. It’s breathing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gus said. “It’s a book.”

“So touch it again.”

Gus hesitated. Of course it couldn’t be breathing. But then what had she felt when she laid her hand flat on the blank cover? As if it could sense her hesitation,
the book on Leo’s lap seemed to sigh and
stretch
, like a cat looking to be stroked. Gus blinked. Books didn’t stretch. Or move. Or breathe. But even as she watched, the plain brown book sighed and settled down more deeply into Leo’s lap.

“Oh my gosh,” she whispered.

Leo grinned. “Yep.” He stroked the book like a tabby.

“What’s inside?” Gus was almost afraid to ask. She reached out one finger, tentatively, and touched the warm brown leather. It was definitely rising and falling, for all the world like a creature asleep.

Leo opened the book. The inside was in complete contrast to the simple brown cover. Color seemed to leap off the page and flood the room.
The Book of the Folk
was written on the first page in a thick, glowing gold script that blazed against a vivid blue background like rays of sun lighting a morning sky. Dark green vines twined around the letters, with bright orange poppy-like flowers bursting out against the green. The vines reached down below the letters to meet a navy sea splashed here and there with frothy white breakers. The flowers moved on the vines, as though in a gentle wind, bowing and bending toward the sea. And wherever one of the blooms touched the surface of the sea, it disappeared and was replaced with the sleek, dark-eyed head of a seal.

“It’s beautiful,” Gus whispered, her fear forgotten. She reached out to touch the picture, but Leo was already turning the page.

The book told the story of the Folk. Leo and Gus read
about their coming, so long ago now that the time was lost to history. They read about the laws of the Folk. For the Folk, when you are twelve, you are an adult. When you are ten, you are a child. But when you are eleven, you are in the changing year, neither child nor adult. It is the year that the Folk children begin to Turn without assistance, and from then on they lead a life split between the land and the sea. But any Folk who completely leave the sea lose their connection to the others and can no longer Turn.

“Mom,” Gus said, feeling a pang of sadness for their mother, for what she had had to sacrifice to make a life with their father.

The book talked about the other creatures of the sea who lived in harmony with the Folk. The dark-haired finfolk, and the singing mermaids who sometimes fell in love with humans and took them to live underwater with them forever. There were also the carnivorous water ponies, the kelpies. They were wild creatures, and dangerous. The seals gave them a wide berth. But occasionally one of the Folk in human form would tame one of the wild ponies and ride it over the foam, only to flee from the same creature when back in its seal form.

Leo turned the pages carefully as schools of fish appeared and disappeared and birds shrieked and dove and flapped away carrying struggling silver bodies in their claws. They read about an island where many Folk lived, sometimes as humans, sometimes as seals.

“It’s Loup Marin!” Gus whispered. She recognized
the description of the broad, flat meadow that sat at the top of the island, in which a semicircle of thirteen tidy cottages was said to face the sea. They read about rocky outcroppings covered with shining seals, sheer rock cliffs that dropped into coves, women who combed their long dark hair in the sun as children with round brown eyes ran naked in the surf, laughing. Gus and Leo laughed with them, in sheer delight. The room filled with the smells of kelp and salt water and crisp, fresh air.

It was impossible to know how much time had passed. The fire popped and hissed in the hearth, burning itself out, but neither Gus nor Leo noticed. Their heads remained bent over the book on Leo’s lap as the afternoon deepened, unnoticed, around them.

An illustration showed a woman with dark hair coming out of one of the thirteen houses. She held a small baby in her arms. The woman walked across the meadow to where the lighthouse stood, except that there was no lighthouse. There was no red-roofed cottage either. Instead, there were wild, thorny bushes and a twisting path that had been worn down to dirt by countless feet passing along it. The woman worked her way down the path as it curled through the rocks to the beach below. She stood on the rocky beach, now deserted and empty of seals, and looked out at the sea. The woman looked like the Móraí, only much, much younger. The expression on her familiar face was one of fear.

The colors on the pages of the book darkened, shot through here and there with green light. Larger shapes
moved more slowly now, dim on the suddenly murky paper. The long gray body of a shark flicked across the page, making Gus lean away in fear.

On the left-hand page, something shifted way down in the deep of the sea. Then a great shadow slid across the page. The shadow spread like spilled ink, and as it did, an oily, rancid stench rose off the book, so thick it seemed to blacken the air with greasy soot.

“Ugh!” Gus said, covering her nose and mouth against the stink of rot. “Close it, Leo!”