Lost Children of the Far Islands (23 page)

“So what, Leo?” Gus interrupted him. She was far too tired to appreciate the intricacies of the animal world.

“So I think they were on a path,” Leo said. “There’s no other explanation. They must have been following a trail of some sort.”

It took a minute for Leo’s words to sink into Gus’s exhausted brain, but when they did, she felt a sudden burst of energy. She stood up and looked for a moment at the flat blue sea. Then, turning to face the island, she nodded at Leo, who jumped up to stand beside her.

“So,” Gus said. “Let’s find Ila.”

Once they knew what they were looking for, it didn’t take long. Leo was right. The wolves
had
followed a trail. Winding around the boulders was a thin, snaking path of paw prints and packed dirt barely wide enough for one person. It led them up the boulder field to the base of a craggy cliff. This cliff looked the same as the one they had tried to climb—blocky, reddish brown, cut by cracks, and furred in places with bright green lichen.

“The trail ends here,” Leo said, peering down at the scuffed patch of dirt at the base of the crag.

“No,” Gus said. “Look—the prints go behind the rock.”

She was right. A flake of rock jutted out from the cliff. It was just possible to slip behind it. There, in the narrow space between the flake and the rock face, was a steep passageway. Without another word, Gus and Leo set off, scrabbling with their hands and feet to climb. The space between the rock face and the flake was dark, and damp,
and spidery. Wet moss grew in clumps on the rocks on either side of them. Several times the space became so narrow that they were forced to turn sideways and inch along awkwardly. They crawled up the last bit and found themselves, muddy and exhausted, gazing at the dark, fibrous roots of pine trees.

Leo pulled himself up and over the edge of the crag by grabbing the trees’ roots. Then he bent down and helped Gus, whose left arm was beginning to throb painfully again.

“Can you see the path?” Gus asked. She wiped her one remaining sleeve across her sweaty, grimy face. She could taste dirt in her mouth, which reminded her how thirsty she was.

Leo nodded. He was filthy too; mud was caked under his fingernails and the legs of his jeans were sodden. “I think so. Look up ahead.”

He pointed to the scruffy pine trees that had dug their scrubby roots into bits of soil and cracks in the rock. “See—in there. You can just see a few tracks.”

They stood for one more minute at the edge of the wood. Looking behind them, they saw the ocean, now far below, throwing itself onto the rocky beach. The sun was low and the water was bitterly dark.

“Let’s go,” Gus said, trying to sound brave. The woods looked as chilly and unwelcoming as the evening sea. But there was a trail, no matter how faint, and it just might lead them to Ila. Taking a deep breath, Gus stepped into the woods, with Leo right behind her.

The winding track led them deeper and deeper into the woods. They were soon covered with thin scratches from the trees, which seemed to push in on them as they walked. There was no breeze in the forest, no rustling of leaves or scurrying of animals. The only sounds were their feet crunching on small twigs and the noises the branches made as they shoved at them. Gus looked back just once. All she could see were the heavy shapes of pine trees. Limbs blocked the way they had come.

Suddenly Gus stopped walking. “I can’t see the trail,” she said.

Leo knelt down and peered at the dirt. “Maybe that way?” he said, sounding uncertain.

“It’s too dark,” Gus said. “We need to stop. And we need to sleep.” She would have liked to eat as well, but there was no sense in mentioning that. Food would just have to wait.

“Let’s walk off a bit,” Leo suggested.

For a few minutes, they moved away from where they thought the path was. Leo found a large boulder that formed an overhang where the soil had been worn away.

“Perfect,” he said happily. “And look—water!”

One side of the boulder was covered in moss, and a thin trickle of water ran through the moss to gather in a pool at the base of the rock.

“Do you think it’s clean?” Gus said hesitantly. Leo put his face against the rock and lapped at the water like a cat trying to drink from a fountain.

“It tastes good,” he announced.

It tasted
great
. Gus and Leo took turns sipping the water, and when they were done drinking, they splashed their grimy faces and Leo cleaned the cut on his forehead. Then, feeling immeasurably more optimistic, they broke off armfuls of pine branches to make beds.

“Tomorrow we’ll find Ila, right?” Gus said as she slid under the overhanging rock onto her nest of pine branches. The space was cramped, but it was dry and much warmer than the open nighttime forest.

Leo murmured sleepily, something about Folk, and the book.

“What?” Gus asked him, but the only answer she got was even breathing. He was asleep already.

Sighing, she turned on her side and pulled her knees up to her chest for more warmth. It didn’t seem possible that she could fall asleep. Images kept passing behind her closed eyelids—charging sharks, and snarling wolves, and great whales lining up in the ocean … The images faded to the dark blue of the deep water, and then to black. When Gus opened her eyes again, sunlight was streaming into their little space, and Leo was gone.

Gus sat up in a panic, banging her head on the low roof. Rubbing the smarting spot, she slid out of the space and jumped to her feet, scanning the forest for Leo. She pulled on her sneakers and ran in the direction she thought they had come from, calling his name, all thoughts of being quiet forgotten. As she burst out of the underbrush, she nearly collided with her brother. He was standing on the
wolves’ path, and he looked different. He was clean, Gus realized. Shining clean. He grinned at her from under a wet mop of hair.

“I found a pool,” he said.

While they walked, Leo spoke over his shoulder.

“I was trying to follow the trail, but I got off it somehow. And so I was looking all around for paw prints, and I didn’t find any, but I found this instead—look!”

He stopped suddenly and bent down in front of a red spruce. Its drooping lower branches, covered in bright green lichen, brushed the ground. Leo pulled aside some of the branches to reveal a perfectly round pool, big enough for three or maybe four people to sit in at one time. The water was clear and fresh and smelled like—

“Salt?” Gus said in disbelief. She bent down, stuck her finger in the pool, and licked it. It was salty.

“That’s so weird,” she said. “How could there be a saltwater pool here?”

“It must connect somehow to the ocean,” Leo said reasonably.

“But how?” Gus said. “I don’t see a stream leading to it, do you?”

“No,” Leo admitted. “I couldn’t find one either.”

Just then, a silvery fish darted across the pool. Gus’s stomach rumbled loudly. Hunger attacked her insides, biting and twisting at the emptiness in her.

“If we Turned …,” Leo said tentatively.

Gus knew immediately what he meant. “Eww, gross, Leo!”

“It wouldn’t be gross if you were a seal,” he pointed out. “It would be breakfast.”

“We do need to eat,” Gus admitted.

They sat down at the edge of the pool.

Gus closed her eyes and thought about the sea, how it smelled, and sounded, and how the cool water felt closing around her sleek seal body. She felt Leo take her hand. She remembered the sharp smell of mussels clinging to rocks, and the heavier, oxygen-laced odor of the deeper water. Then she remembered the sound of a school of fish skittering anxiously away from her, and the tremendously slow thumping of her own heart when she dove. She followed that sound, its slow beat pulling her deeper and deeper, her nostrils flaring at the rising scent of salt.

Gus strained her entire body forward without moving an inch. She just leaned inside her body. It was like leaning over the edge of a cliff, feeling the movement deep in her muscles and bones, leaning out over the endless drop until she could go no farther. Then something yanked her with tremendous force, an invisible pair of hands that smoothed her from head to foot, and then she was falling forward, over the invisible cliff and into the waiting pool. She heard Leo cry out and then the cool water took her in and welcomed her back.

Gus stretched and rolled in delight. It was so good to be a seal again! Leo rolled next to her, laughing. A small school of round, silvery-pink porgies swam under Gus and Leo. The two seals dove and then surfaced almost immediately with flopping fish in their jaws. They ate the
porgies and then went back down for more. As seals, they didn’t stop to wonder how a school of ocean-dwelling fish had ended up in the pool. They just feasted.

Gus was diving for the third time when she saw Leo chasing a larger fish, a haddock or a pollack. The fish darted out of sight, and Leo dove deep, deeper than he should have been able to. Then he disappeared.

Chirping frantically, Gus dove after Leo, just in time to see him swim into a dark hole in the side of the pool. With a flick of her tail, she followed. It was pitch-black, but Gus could feel with her whiskers that they were in a tunnel, and that it was wide enough for two seals to swim side by side. She thrust forward and caught up with Leo, who was still chasing the fleeing fish.

As she moved, Gus noticed other tunnels branching off from the one in which they swam. She didn’t have time to wonder about them, though—Leo was still swimming hard after the fish, and she had to hurry to keep up with him. They swam together for a minute or so, and then the tunnel abruptly angled upward and dumped them out into open water.

The two seals popped up. “No fish,” Leo barked.

“New water,” Gus barked back.

This new pool was still in the woods, but it was much larger than the first one. Lacy ferns grew all around its edges, shielding it from sight.

“Many ways to go,” Gus said, trying to explain the tunnels she had seen, branching off in various directions.

“Follow one to Ila,” Leo suggested.

And so they did, diving and swimming and following one tunnel after another. All the pools on the island seemed to be connected. It must be how the Dobhar-chú traveled from place to place, they decided. Leo reminded Gus that the Dobhar-chú, besides living underwater, could tunnel through rock. The idea of the monster creating the tunnels through which they now swam made Gus shudder. And the thought of meeting up with the King of the Black Lakes in one of the dark underground tunnels made her so nervous that she accidentally Turned and for a moment was a girl splashing in a freezing cold pool of salt water.

But they met no one on their travels. Just fish, and once a small squid, which filled the water around them with a panicked squirt of ink before making its escape.

Then, late in the afternoon, Gus shot up for a breath in a new pool. As she surfaced, she could see that this pool lay not in the woods but at the edge of a meadow. In front of her the trees gave way abruptly, without first thinning and changing to oak or beech, the way they do in most forests. This forest just came to a halt: dark pines against waving, pale green grasses.

Leo popped to the surface and hung next to Gus. “What?” he barked.

Gus flopped her way out of the pool and onto the forest floor. Shrugging her heavy shoulders, she Turned and was a girl sitting on a bed of pine needles. Leo flopped out, Turned, and sat next to her.

“There’s a building,” Gus said.

She noticed, as she spoke, that she felt much, much better. Her stomach was full, her cuts and scrapes had all been rinsed with salt water, and her head felt clear. The bandage had fallen off her arm, but the wound had stopped bleeding. Leo looked better too. His face had lost its sickly pallor.

In the center of the meadow stood the remains of a stone building. Through the bottom of two rows of arched spaces that might have been doorways or tall windows, they saw a gray stone floor and, visible through the top row, blue sky.

“Let’s check it out,” Leo said.

They crossed the meadow to where the building stood. The only sound around them was the lazy hum of insects and the grasses shifting in a light breeze. As they got closer, they could see that brambly bushes twined around the outside of the ghostly, broken wreck, climbing up the walls to head height in some places.

“What do you think it is?” Gus whispered.

“A church?” Leo guessed. “A fort? Let’s go in.”

“No,” Gus said. The crumbling building suddenly looked dark and menacing. Its jagged roofline seemed to leer at them in the still air.

“The breeze is gone,” Gus said, still whispering. And then she noticed that the sounds of crickets and the rising calls of insects had ceased as well. The meadow lay as silent and still as if it had been buried under a heavy fall of snow.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“No,” Leo whispered. “Something’s here. Can’t you feel it?”

“Yeah, and that’s why I want to go,” Gus hissed, tugging on her twin’s hand.

Ignoring her, Leo pulled aside brambles to climb up and into one of the tall window spaces. Gus looked around the empty meadow and then reluctantly followed him in. The thorns caught at her as she did.