The Floating Island (19 page)

I
T TOOK A LONG TIME FOR THE ECHOES OF THE JAILER’S BOOTSTEPS
to die away.

When at last they did, the first thing Ven noticed was how loud the sound of silence could be.

Then all he could hear was the distant sound of water dripping.

Except for him, the dungeon was empty.

The fierce itch of curiosity that had lived below the surface of his skin all his life gave way to a sickening tingle of numbness. Ven’s eyes, however, adjusted quickly to the dim light. He realized after a moment that it was because of his Nain heritage. Even if he had never been below ground for more than a few moments in his life, his ancestors had lived for thousands of years in caves and mountain tunnels and underground cities far darker than this jail cell. The thought brought him little comfort.

In the back of his mind he remembered Amariel’s voice, sensible and calm above the splashing of the waves in his memory.

There are places that are truly dark in the world, Ven, but this place here is not one of them. It’s not really dark here—it’s just night.

The lantern the jailer had hung outside his cell gleamed a little brighter in the gloom.

Ven glanced at the table, then at the quill, ink, and parchment in his hands. The voice in the back of his mind changed from Amariel’s to his father’s, speaking the words he had heard almost every day of his life.

Ours is a working family. Get to work, Ven!

He sat down at the table, staring at the blank paper for a long time. Then finally he began to write.

He continued to do so, stopping only when he was so tired that he could no longer keep his eyes open, or when the lantern burned out and the cell was plunged into total darkness. Whenever the light vanished, the thoughts of his home and family took over his mind, leaving him as lonely and homesick as he had been on the floating wreckage of the
Angelia.
Eventually the jailer would return with a burning wick and relight the lantern, watching him suspiciously the whole time. As soon as the light returned, Ven went back to work.

Most of the time he was undisturbed. The jailer stayed upstairs, coming only to deliver food or more ink and paper. The spiky-bearded man shoved the quills, inkpots, and parchment scrolls through the same opening in the bars through which food was passed, then disappeared again, usually without saying a word.

After a long and very draining session of writing describing the battle with the Fire Pirates, Ven heard footsteps approaching. He kept working, waiting for the familiar sound of the floor grate opening behind him, but the footsteps stopped outside his cell, followed by silence.

Ven looked over his shoulder.

A figure in a long gray cape stood outside the barred gate, its head cloaked in a hood.

Ven put down his quill and rose from the chair, rubbing his tired eyes. He walked nervously over to the gate and stared up into the hood, but could make out only the shadow of a face. He waited for the person to speak, but the cloaked man just stood, watching him, in the flickering lanternlight.

“Who—who are you?” he asked finally, his voice cracking. “What do you want?”

“A friend,” came the whispered reply. “And I want to help you.”

“How?” Ven blurted. His heart began to beat thunderously in his chest.

“I can get you out of here,” the man answered softly, his words masked by the sound of dripping water. “I can take you back to your home—your real home.”

“How?” Ven asked again, his face flushing.

The man in the hooded cloak stood silently for a moment. He glanced over his shoulder toward the staircase, then turned back to Ven and leaned closer to the bars of his cell.

“Do you want to go home, Ven?” he asked, his voice low and scratchy.

“More than anything,” Ven replied.

The hooded man nodded. “I can arrange that. I can get you out of here right now. Get your things.”

Quickly Ven checked his pocket for the jack-rule, then ran to the cot and pulled his hat out from underneath it. He ran his fingers over the albatross feather, wondering if it had brought him this newest round of good luck. Ven smoothed his rumpled hair and pulled his hat onto his head.

“Thank you,” he said gratefully to the hooded man. The man nodded, then walked over to the staircase and shouted up to the jailer.

“Guard!”

The word rang against Ven’s eardrums, and the voice, no longer soft, now sounded unpleasantly familiar. “Wait,” he demanded. “Who are you?”

The man in the hooded cloak walked back to the cell.

“I told you,” he said. “A friend.” With that, he reached up and pulled down his hood.

It was Maurice Whiting.

Ven jumped away from the bars, sputtering in surprise. Mr. Whiting reached toward him, a look of concern on his face.

“Be calm, now, my boy,” he said quickly. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand that you are no friend of mine,” Ven said. “Go away and leave me alone.”

“Hear me out,” Whiting urged. “You will change your mind when you hear what I have to say.”

“I doubt it.”

“I’m sorry you had to suffer the hardships that brought you here,” Mr. Whiting said. His eyes grew bright in the light of the lantern. “You are in this place because it was the only way I could save you from the terrible danger you were in—and will still be in if you don’t leave this island and get back to your home as soon as possible.”

Ven continued to back away, eyeing Mr. Whiting distrustfully.

The man inhaled deeply, then exhaled and let his hand come to rest on one of the iron bars.

“I know you think that I am your enemy, but that was all for show,” Mr. Whiting said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper again. “I had to get you into the custody of the king, and make certain that people at the inn and in town knew you were there, so that you would be safe from the enemies who are really after you.”

“Who—who are those enemies?” Ven asked suspiciously. “Someone worse than
you,
who lies about me, insults me for being Nain, and has me arrested and thrown in a dungeon for something I didn’t do?”

Mr. Whiting’s other hand came to rest on the bars of the cell. He stared thoughtfully at Ven for a moment.

“Sometimes things are not as they appear, Ven,” he said, his voice soft. “Sometimes the people who seem to be your enemies are trying to help you, and those who seem the most friendly are using you for purposes of evil. Great evil.” Ven eyed him stonily but said nothing. Whiting leaned a little closer, so that his hawklike nose was protruding through the cell bars.

“You were attacked by Fire Pirates, were you not?” he continued. “So you know that they are among the most vicious killers roaming the world, but what you may not know is that they need people to help them, to buy the chemicals to make their terrible fire, to sell the spoils of their conquests, to keep them supplied—they need support. Do you know where they get that support?” When Ven did not answer, Whiting’s eyes grew even more bright. “They get it from legitimate ship owners and sea captains. People in the sea trade. Seemingly honest men—like the good Captain Snodgrass.”

Ven’s mouth dropped open in shock. “That’s a lie!” he shouted. His words echoed off the underground chamber, punctuated by the sound of dripping water.

“I wish it were so, boy. I know you want to believe it, because the captain seems a kind man, a good man—but as I told you before, not everything is as it seems. How do you suppose he found
you,
hmmmm? What is the possibility that a ship will sight a single young boy in all the vastness of the sea? How did it happen that the
Serelinda
was passing through when you happened to need it to be?”

Ven’s eyes narrowed. “It just was. They saw the albatross.”

Maurice Whiting sniffed. “Oliver Snodgrass was there to see the albatross because shortly before that, he was
meeting
with the Fire Pirates, delivering the catapults they used in their attack. The ships came abreast of each other in the dark the night before; I watched myself as goods were unloaded from the
Serelinda
into the long-boats and rowed over to the pirate ship in the darkness.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ven said.

Whiting smiled sadly. “I know you don’t, but you must, my boy. The people who seem to be your friends, who smile at you and make you feel at home in a place you don’t belong, are using you in ways you could not imagine, unholy ways that would make you fear for your life, and your soul, if you had any idea of them.”

In the back of his mind, Ven suddenly remembered something McLean had said to him on his first night in the inn.

That sly fox, Oliver Snodgrass! He certainly made good use of you, then, didn’t he?

“Using me how?” he asked Mr. Whiting uncertainly.

Whiting looked over his shoulder at the sound of the jailer’s footsteps as he approached. He waved dismissively at the man, who glared at him in annoyance at being summoned for nothing, then turned away and headed up the stairs again. Mr. Whiting waited until the sounds of the footsteps died away, then turned back to Ven.

“Do you know the stories of how the Floating Island was made? The wind blowing back the sea to reveal the earth for the first time?” Ven nodded grudgingly. “Well, what do you suppose comes to pass when something so rare and improbable as what you did aboard the
Serelinda
—what the captain
had you do
—happens?” He smiled. “Think about it, lad—you’re a Nain. For all that some humans consider people like you to be freaks, the truth is that you are of an ancient race, a race that still has a lot of old magic in it. You are a creature of the earth, like the rest of your race. Nain are never found on the sea, are they? Nain don’t swim; they’re afraid of the water, never travel on the sea. But there you were. And what did the captain do, upon pulling a Nain from the sea? Almost as soon as you could stand upright, he made you
climb the mast.
Why?”

“To—to help me get over the sea-shakes,” Ven stammered.

“Nonsense,” said Whiting. “A Nain, a creature of earth, traveling on the sea, at the top of a mast in the wind? Don’t deceive yourself, lad. By sending you up that mast, he was re-creating the birth of the Floating Island—earth, wind, and water. He was
calling the island.
” His eyes narrowed, and his voice dropped to just above a whisper again.

“And a few days later, it came. Didn’t it?”

Slowly Ven sat down on his cot.

That sly fox, Oliver Snodgrass! He certainly made good use of you, then, didn’t he?

Ven thought back to standing atop the mast with Oliver, watching a light streak across the sky, then hitting the deck to the cheers of the crew.

I’d like to propose a toast,
the captain had said.
To Ven Polypheme, who this day has been pulled from the sea, gained his sea legs, and is the first Nain in my knowledge ever to climb the mainmast of a sailing ship at sea, and without question the first to summit the mast of the
Serelinda.

Whiting was watching him closely.

“It’s easy to trust people who seem kind, isn’t it?” he said softly. “And to distrust those who seem cruel or harsh, like me. But one thing you learn as you grow up, Ven, is that many things are not as they seem.” He let go of the bars of the cell and began to pace slowly back and forth in front of the gate. “Oliver Snodgrass pulled you from the sea, saved your life, made you feel welcome, when you probably have never felt welcome outside your own family before. He gave you a job and treated you as if you were an adult. That must have been a heady feeling. How could you have known you were being used in an unholy purpose?”

“How—how is it unholy?” Ven asked nervously. “So what if he used me to call the Floating Island? Nothing evil or bad was done there.”

The sad smile returned to Whiting’s face.

“You think not?” he said, continuing to walk back and forth in front of the cell. “Did you take anything from there?” His smile grew wider as Ven’s eyes did. “No need to deny it—there is only one purpose for going to the Floating Island, and that’s to obtain some of the Living Water.”

Ven could feel the rough stone of the dungeon wall scraping his back through his shirt as he inched farther away.

“No,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “That soldier, Marius, went to put his name on the wind, nothing more.”

Whiting’s smile faded and he rolled his eyes.

“That fool,” he said, contempt in his tone. “That is like being a starving man who finds a great feast spread out by the banks of a rushing stream, stops to take a sip from the stream, and then crawls on, leaving the food untouched. The Living Water is the most precious substance in this world. It has powers that you cannot imagine. It is more valuable than diamonds, than gold, than any treasure you can name.” He stopped, and looked sharply at Ven. “And you, my boy,
you
have the natural ability to find it. The Floating Island is not the only source of the Living Water, but the others are said to be even harder to find, and almost impossible to reach. How simple it was, really, to have you climb up into the wind on the high seas, duplicating that same combination of earth, water, and wind that the island is made from, and, by doing so, summon the Floating Island itself. And you can do it anytime you want.”