Lost Children of the Far Islands (17 page)

Gus didn’t even know she was crying until she felt the tears running in tickly streams on either side of her nose. She went to swipe at the wetness and found she was holding Leo’s hands tightly in her own. Leo’s own eyes were shining with tears. Ila was transfixed, her face glowing in the light from the shifting, singing, shimmering pages.

As the three children watched, the tree changed one more time. The singing, one tune now, high and sweet and wordless, grew louder and louder and then began to fall away. As the music faded, something began to form at the very top of the tree. It began as a bright green bud that burst into a gold leaf, this one much larger than the other leaves had been. All around it, the seals, fish, and birds had gone still and silent, watching from inside the frames of their own gold flowers, waiting.

Ila reached out to the strange leaf, and this time no one tried to stop her. She stroked it gently, just once. It folded on itself instantly, as the other leaves had done,
and then it burst open as a great, glowing flower surrounded by six gold petals. At the center of the flower stood three children. The children were standing on a rock that rose out of a flat green sea. Behind them, a red sun was just at the horizon. Two of the children, a girl and a boy, had dark, shining hair that was colored in ink so black it was almost blue. The smallest child had fiery red hair.

“Are those children us?” Gus asked quietly.

“Yes,” the Móraí said.

As they watched the page, the tree faded away, taking the creatures with it, leaving only the gold flower in which the children stood. Then words began to form under the flower, written by an invisible hand, the ink rising up fresh and clear on the page. The handwriting was some sort of ornate cursive. Each letter twisted and curled into the next like a growing vine. This time it was Leo who reached out to the book, using one finger to trace the coiling, winding letters.

“On this night,” he read slowly. “This—I think it says
darkest
—this darkest hour.”

“On this night, / This darkest hour!” Gus said excitedly.

“It’s the night poem,” Ila said.

She was right.

“Ah,” the Móraí said. She read the poem out loud,
the familiar words making the children all feel, for just a moment, that their mother was near.

“The three,” Leo said. “What does that mean?”

“Sky, sea, and wood,” the Móraí said. “At least, that was what I was taught. Now that I have met you three children, though, I am not so sure.”

“Look!” Gus said. The white space on the page under the poem was filling up with the gold cursive writing.
The words looked like they belonged with the poem, but they were in a language that she had never seen before.

“What does it say?” she asked.

“I will translate it for you,” the Móraí said. Speaking very softly, she read the final stanza of the night poem:

“Our mother never said that part,” Leo said.

“She didn’t know that part,” the Móraí said. “And I have never seen it either. The book is only now showing it.”

“ ‘Lost Children’?” Gus asked. “What does that mean?”

The Móraí traced her fingers over the poem. “From the flame / And sea,” she read. “Salt and iron / Rock and den.”

“Salt and sea and rock,” Leo said. “Seals. But what about flame and iron and den?”

“Foxes,” Gus said quietly.

“Foxes,” Ila repeated.

“It’s us,” Leo said. “It’s about us.”

He leaned eagerly over the book again. But as he scanned it, the orange ball of the rising sun behind the children began to move. It grew larger and brighter until its light eclipsed the sea, and then the rock on which the children stood, and finally the gold flower that held the children’s images. With a sound like a log popping in a blaze, the page burst into flame. Gus and Ila and Leo scrambled backward, but the Móraí sat without moving, the burning book on her lap. The flames did not touch her. They burned without heat or smoke, quickly, and then just as quickly were gone. The book was also gone. On the Móraí’s lap sat a pile of silvery ash.

“Oh no!” Gus said. “The book.”

The Móraí stood up, holding the hem of her pullover in front of her to form a basket for the ashes. Moving quickly, she went into the living room, the three children behind her watching as she bent over the dying fire in the hearth and dumped the ashes in. There was a flare of green light, and the slumbering embers burst back into flame, burning bright and hot—a normal fire.

The Móraí said gently, “Look on the bookshelf, children. Gus will show you where.”

Hesitantly, Gus went to the place where she had found the book. Instead of an empty space, there was the familiar brown spine. Gus put her hand up and could feel the faint heat pulsing off of it.

“Best not to touch it,” the Móraí said. “It will be some time before anyone will be able to open the book again.”

“But how will we know what to do?” Leo’s voice rose
in frustration. Ever since he was two years old, Leo had turned to books for the truth. First the truths that lay in the fairy tales: that heroes could be anyone, that right conquered wrong, that wishes might come true. Then, later, the truths of science, the way a butterfly’s wing functions, or why water always runs downhill. For as long as he could remember, books had always,
always
supplied the answers that he sought.

“The book has shown you what you need,” the Móraí explained. “You just have to recognize it. I will help you, as best I can.”

“Can we train now?” Ila asked. “You said tonight.”

The lamplight shone on the Móraí’s face, lighting the network of tiny wrinkles that fanned out from her eyes and around her mouth. Her cheekbones pressed against her skin, making her look very old, and very frail. She pushed herself away from the fireplace mantel, wincing at some hidden pain.

“Come, Leo,” she said. “Help me. We will go to the beach.”

They followed the twisting path under the light of the full moon. Leo held the Móraí’s arm as they made their way down, but still the old woman stumbled several times. Gus was feeling more and more strongly that they had to find the Bedell. The Móraí seemed to be weakening before their eyes.

They stopped on the rocks, close to the water. The moonlight threw the beach into black-and-white relief
and illuminated the tide pools where the three of them had splashed around only three days before. It felt like much longer.

The Móraí stepped onto a long, low rock. Waves lashed its surface, soaking her almost to her knees, but she did not seem to notice. “Ila, take my hand,” she instructed. Her voice sounded firmer now. “Gus, Leo, stand in front of me.”

The children did as they were told. Gus wished she could take Leo’s hand, but she didn’t dare. They stood side by side on the wet rock. Cold water splashed across the backs of their legs.

“You have the history of the Folk inside you,” the Móraí said. Her voice was strong now, and steady. She stood straight and tall, gripping Ila’s small hand in her own. The moonlight made her silvery-white hair glow.

“Take hands,” she said.

With a sense of relief, Gus gripped Leo’s hand in her own. He squeezed once, hard, and she squeezed back. The wind was howling now, tearing at their clothes and whipping their hair across their faces. The Móraí had to shout over its rising sound.

“Listen closely. It will go hard the first time, but it will get easier. Empty your minds, and look at me.”

What happened next was not something that Gus or Leo could ever describe, even to one another. As they looked into the dark eyes of the Móraí, she began to speak. It was a list of some sort, a list of
things
—trees, plants, bats who hugged the dusk with their leathered
wings, birds who scoured mountaintops for carrion, and great dark fish who moved slowly through the loneliest parts of the sea. She spoke of the hot air of the desert as it billowed over the shifting sands, and then the cool of the icy mud at the bottom of an algae-choked pond in winter. She led them through snow, and blinding storms, onto great floating chunks of ice, and then into the torrid heat of a soaking wet jungle, all green and pungent and close.

It was not like being Turned by the Bedell. That had been a whirling kaleidoscope of confusion, a sense of being changed by something out of their control. This came from within their bodies, if they could even use that word. For it was as if their bodies had become the world. They were waves and wind and seagulls calling and slick rock etched by water and warmed by sun. They were not human, or animal, but were
world
, from their pulsing cells to the arching sky over their heads.

They were freezing, and then dying of thirst, and then gasping for breath on the tip of a mountain, and then plunging through light-specked green water. The Móraí’s words passed through them, scouring them clean with sand and wind and sleet and merciless sunlight and endless darkness.

Gus and Leo cried out, a singular cry that was wrenched from deep within them, far deeper than their human minds could ever travel, as they felt the earth give way under their feet and the sky come to meet them and, at last, they Turned.

* * *

As seals, they dove for the water without thinking, slipping off the wet rock and into the welcoming black water with a sense of relief so profound it blurred into joy. Gus turned a dizzying somersault, and then another, awash in delight. She smelled salt, and mussels, and silvery fish, and the tang of seaweed. She heard waves and sighs and patters and her own heartbeat, laid over the lighter, quicker heartbeats of other creatures.

She straightened out and then dove deep, deep, deep, rocketing into the quiet of the depths, far below the wind-whipped surface. She sensed, rather than saw, that Leo was near her. Then she saw his sleek form streaking for the surface. She followed him, bursting out into the chill night air with a great whoosh, filling her lungs in the next breath. She heard someone calling her name and dimly registered two shapes on the rock, but it meant nothing to her bliss-clouded brain.

She dove again, dodging past Leo as she did, then twirled and gave quick chase to a passing school of fish. She was streaking forward, testing her speed, when a sound reached her from the surface. The sound was like a tickle at the edges of her mind, something once known, something forgotten.

Curious, Gus surfaced. She was quite close to the rocks, and she could see, even with her blurry out-of-water vision, that two people stood on the rocks. One was the Móraí, and the other was Ila, who was holding
out her arms and shouting Gus’s name. The sound of her sister’s voice exploded like a fire inside of Gus. With a feeling like being flipped inside out, Gus Turned and found herself in the midnight Atlantic.

The waves that had carried Gus and Leo out now fought to keep Gus from returning to shore. She was knocked back again and again as she tried to swim in. Each time the waves thrust her back, she swallowed a mouthful of the cold water. Gasping and spitting, she treaded water just beyond the breaking waves, trying to gather her strength even as an icy chill spread through her, numbing her. Then a sleek, dark shape swam up next to her. Leo was still a seal. Gus forced her leaden arms around Leo’s neck and closed her eyes as the seal swam them both in, diving through the waves and dumping Gus onto the wet rock where the Móraí and Ila stood. Then Leo Turned as well and scrambled up beside Gus.

Ila leapt on Gus, who managed to sit up. Wrapping her arms around her little sister, Gus held her close, murmuring, “It’s OK, Ila, it’s OK.”

“Don’t leave me!” Ila cried furiously. “It’s not fair to leave me behind!”

Her hot, angry tears scalded Gus’s icy skin while Gus promised, over and over, that they would never leave Ila again.

After a few minutes, the Móraí urged them up and on their feet, and led them back to the waiting house.

Inside, the three children shivered themselves into their pajamas and then went to the living room, where
the Móraí waited with hot cocoa. They drank the steaming chocolate in silence. Ila would not look at Gus or Leo. She sat on the floor with her back to them and stared into the fire that blazed on the hearth.

“It will get easier,” the Móraí said. “There is always a danger of being too attached to one form or another. Remember I told you that the Folk who left for the land lost their ability to Turn?”