Lost Children of the Far Islands (25 page)

The moon found its place in the sky, throwing a line of light across the water that illuminated the Dobhar-chú. He was bent low in the water and it seemed, for a moment, that he had been wounded badly by the words
of the night poem. But as they watched, he began to straighten out his neck, rolling his head from side to side like a beast shaking off a blow.

“We have to run,” Leo whispered, although they both knew that it was too late for that. They could not run fast enough to escape the Dobhar-chú, especially not while carrying Ila.

“The book, Leo!” Gus hissed. “What else did the book say?”

Leo frantically ran through everything he had read in the book. The creatures who fought for the Dobhar-chú, the ones who had taken the side of the Folk, and the ones who had refused to fight at all, returning instead to the deeps, where they were lost to the world …

“Lost!” Leo said out loud. “Lost to the world! Gus, I don’t think we’re the Lost Children after all! I think the final stanza is about the sea creatures! We need to call them!”

“But I don’t remember the last stanza!” Gus said desperately.

“Something about three,” Leo said. “And dark, oh I don’t remember!”

Then a voice spoke. It was not loud, but it was familiar. It was the Bedell. He was alive, wearing his ripped and stained overcoat, standing behind them on the long rock. His face was deadly pale in the moonlight, and he spoke with great effort, as though the words themselves were causing him terrible pain.

“I will help you,” he said, and then bent double with his hands on his knees.

“Silence, Messenger!” the Dobhar-chú roared. He heaved in the water but did not move forward.

Still bent double, the small man said, “I am so sorry, children. I was a fool.” Then he straightened up and called out to the creature in the water, “I am not of the Folk, King. It was you yourself that reminded me of this. I will never be one of them. But I will never serve you either.”

The man stepped forward and laid his hands on Ila’s forehead.

“No!” Gus cried out.

“Ila,” the Bedell said urgently. “Ila, you must wake. Your brother and sister need you, child. Please.”

“Stop it!” Gus cried out. “You’ve hurt her enough!” She leapt forward, yanking at the Bedell’s overcoat to get him away from her sister, but then Ila stirred in Leo’s arms.

Without opening her eyes, Ila murmured, “This eve.”

“Ila?” Leo said in disbelief.

“This eve,” Ila said again, very softly.

“That’s right,” Gus said. “That’s the beginning, Leo. She’s right!”

“Can you say more?” Leo asked Ila. “Ila, can you say the rest?”

The Bedell stepped away and sank to his knees as Ila spoke again.

“This night / This endless night,” she whispered.
Then, opening her eyes, which glowed a bright, pure green, she spoke the rest of the poem, carefully and clearly.

Shaking off Leo’s embrace, Ila stood and, spreading her arms wide, she called out the last line of the poem one more time. When she spoke the words, two things happened: she shimmered into the form of a red fox, and the Dobhar-chú dove, screaming, as the words from the poem reached across the water for him. And when the monster surfaced again, he was not alone.

The little fox howled, a long, high sound that stretched up and into the night sky.

The darkness of the night was lit by the full moon, and below it, the surface of the sea was alive with motion, eddies and whirlpools and waves rising out of nothing. It might have been sharks, but no fins cut the surface of the roiling water.
Something
was out there, though—the Dobhar-chú was spinning and twisting like a stag with hounds worrying its every step. But there were no black-and-white leaping bodies and no quick silvery dolphins. Ila had called something else.

Leo and Gus found themselves on their feet, each with a hand bunched in the fur of the fox, who strained forward toward the water.

“What is it?” Gus shouted.

“I don’t know!” Leo shouted back, tightening his grip on Ila’s fur.

They heard a scream from the water that sounded like that of a woman, and then a cry that began as the whinny of a horse and ended as the howling of a beast. A long breaker rolled across the sea, smashing near the struggling Dobhar-chú. In the foam of the breaking wave, the children could see what looked like men, at least a dozen of them, all with dark hair and skin and tridents gripped in their hands.

“Finfolk!” Leo cried.

The finfolk dove under the surface. The Dobhar-chú roared and heaved and slashed at the dark water where they had disappeared.

As the Dobhar-chú fought, the water in front of the children split open in a V shape, like the wake that follows a boat. At the head of the V was a horse, swimming strongly, and on its back sat a woman with flowing pale hair.

Ila snarled as the horse approached. Gus could feel the fox trembling under her fingers.

“That horse is a kelpie,” Leo whispered.

Ila snarled again.

The kelpie stopped just short of where the breakers smashed on the rocks. This close they could see the curve of its long incisors, more like fangs than teeth. It shook its mane and screamed, rolling back its black lips to bare its teeth at them.

“You called us!” the woman sang out from the back of the plunging creature. Her hair flowed around her like a silver cape made of moonlight and seaweed.

It was unclear if it was a question or a statement, but Leo stepped forward.

“Yes!” Leo shouted across the breaking waves. “That is, my sister called you.”

Ila leaned toward Leo, whining, but Gus kept a firm grip on the little fox. She did not want her sister anywhere near the creature in the water.

“And we have come,” the woman said. She spoke at a normal volume now, but her voice, high and sweet and indescribably lovely, carried effortlessly across the water. Gus felt her chest tighten with longing at the sound of it. In front of her, Leo took another step forward, and then another. With a wrench, Ila tore free from Gus and raced around Leo, crowding him like a sheepdog, forcing him away from the water.

The woman on the pony’s back laughed, a light, liquid, watery sound.

“Do not fear us tonight,” she sang out. “We have come at your call.”

With that, she wheeled the kelpie around, and together, beast and woman dove underneath the surface. Gus could see, as the pony dove, that the woman sat as though in an old-fashioned sidesaddle. But she had no saddle, and where her legs should have been there was a scaled tail, shimmering in the moonlight. Then she was gone and Gus could breathe again.

Gus ran to Leo and Ila. Now they could see that the foamy breakers in the water were actually the manes of
the carnivorous kelpies. Each one bore a mermaid or a finman on its back. The mermaids’ pale hair streamed out behind them as they rode. They carried no weapons, but their plunging, screaming mounts seemed like deadly weapons themselves. The finmen sat tall and still on their kelpies. Their dark skin and hair blended with the night, so that all the children could see of them were their silver tridents and their flashing teeth. And then, with a great leaping in their hearts, they saw the seals swimming in and among the finfolk and mermaids, seemingly unafraid of the dreadful kelpies. The sea was alive with magical creatures.

The Dobhar-chú was roaring and plunging as he lashed out. He tore a mermaid from her mount and then slashed the snarling kelpie from end to end. Two finmen thrust their tridents toward his side, but the weapons glanced off of the monster. Without ceasing his attack on the mermaids, the Dobhar-chú whipped his tail around and slammed into the two finmen, throwing their broken bodies into the dark sea. A mermaid screamed, high and long, as the Dobhar-chú drove her off her kelpie.

“They can’t fight him,” Gus said desperately. “He’s going to kill them all!”

But the creatures were not fighting back. Those that were not cut down by the monster were swimming around the Dobhar-chú in a wide ring, faster and faster, seals and kelpies alongside mermaids and finfolk. The Dobhar-chú spun and bellowed in fury, like a great caged bear being
baited by dogs. And still the creatures swam, faster and faster, trapping the Dobhar-chú in a ring of water that began to swirl and spin and take shape.

“It’s a whirlpool!” Leo shouted. The water sped up and began to take on a distinct funnel shape, with the Dobhar-chú at the center. As the whirlpool grew, the Dobhar-chú began to tilt, pulled by the inexorably spinning vortex. Then, all at once, the King of the Black Lakes was yanked under by the water, roaring and thrashing as he went. The creatures, as one, dove with him.

The children were left in the moonlit night, alone on the rock. The Messenger was nowhere to be seen. The sea was flat, and calm, and still.

“The Lost Children, Gus!” Leo said excitedly. “Don’t you see? That’s why we had to come back! We were to call the creatures back!
The Book of the Folk
said they were lost to the world. That’s what it meant. And that’s what the last stanza in the poem means. That’s why the book showed it to us!”

Ila, still in her fox form, whined uneasily.

“Do you think—” Gus started to say, but that was all she got out, because with a sound like a rushing tornado, a geyser of water reached up into the night sky. The Dobhar-chú exploded out of the geyser, spit out with such force that he was hurled over the water, landing in a heap on the rocks.

With a scream, the fox made for him.

“Ila, no!” Gus shouted. She glanced at the water, but the creatures were gone. They were on their own.

“Come on, Gus,” Leo gasped, starting to run after Ila.

The Dobhar-chú lay wedged between two chunks of rock. As he rocked back and forth, attempting to get free, they could see his body for the first time. While his giant, bony head was leathery skin, the rest of the Dobhar-chú was covered in wet, glistening black scales. His front legs were short and strong, ending in claws that shone like diamonds in the moonlight. He began to dig with his gigantic claws, tunneling into the rock. But being out of the water was affecting him already. His scales were dulling and his breath was coming in short, hard gasps.

The fox was dodging in and out, barking and snapping at the creature, keeping him from concentrating on his digging. With a wide swing of his tail, he knocked her, yelping, off her feet. Then, with a great wrench, the Dobhar-chú yanked his body free from the rocks and attempted to leap after Ila. But as he opened his mouth, he released a great gout of oily, stinking dark liquid. He staggered backward. His second set of jaws hung limply from his gaping mouth, and a half-dozen teeth clattered onto the rocks below him. The creature swung his head sharply from side to side, like a snake feeling the air for prey, and then moved again toward the little fox, who was on her feet, hissing and spitting, her tail a stiff, angry brush behind her.

As he moved, the twins leapt together for the Dobhar-chú, their leaps turning midair into the sleek dives of seals.

Seals, although they may look gentle, are ferocious
hunters. Leo bared his sharp, pointed front teeth as he leapt, and Gus did the same. Leo landed on the creature first. Lunging for the Dobhar-chú’s head, he caught it high on the neck. Gus grabbed the tail, which whipped around frantically.

The Dobhar-chú fought them, writhing under their gripping teeth, slamming Gus into a rock so hard that her vision went dark for a moment. The seals clung desperately to the fighting creature. Leo’s hold on his throat was restricting the creature’s breath, and gradually, his lunges and twists weakened.

But while Gus and Leo didn’t release their grip on the creature, they did not move to kill him either, because they had remembered the same thing: That whoever killed the Dobhar-chú would also die.

In those few, endless seconds, Gus saw Leo in his G&T classroom, his head turning in answer to her silent call. Then she saw Ila the way she had first seen her, in their mother’s arms, peering up at them suspiciously with eyes that were lit with green light. Then she saw herself in the bath, floating underwater, listening to her parents’ voices downstairs, their familiar, ordinary, wonderful voices. Gus closed her eyes, letting herself listen one last time. Then she released the tail and lunged for Leo, knocking him away from the Dobhar-chú, so that she could close her own teeth on his slick black neck. But the little fox was faster. Ila got there first.

Ila was a blur of fur as she dove under Gus. The force of Gus’s own lunge knocked Leo off the Dobhar-chú, and
the two of them rolled to one side. They leapt together for the fox, their combined weight barreling into her, and the three of them slid across the wet rock, the fox’s teeth still gripping the Dobhar-chú’s throat and the seals trying desperately to break her hold. The Dobhar-chú lashed its thick tail like a bullwhip, pummeling Gus and Leo. Just then, a sleek form shot across the rocks, its teeth bared in a snarl. It was the Messenger.