Lost Children of the Far Islands (13 page)

“Yes. He killed his own mother, and then went to the lakes, where he hid in the deepest of them. Fishermen learned to leave their small ones at home when they took to the water. For many years, he ruled as the King of the Black Lakes.”

“King of the Black Lakes,” Leo said dreamily. “He sounds like a good villain.”

“A very
bad
villain,” the Bedell said sharply from the corner of the room where he stood listening. “I will take my leave, unless you have further need of me?”

The Móraí smiled at the Bedell. “Go, my friend,” she said.

The Bedell bowed briefly and left the room. They could hear the front door close behind him.

“He has strong feelings about the King of the Black Lakes,” the Móraí explained. “The Dobhar-chú offered
the sea minks much power if they would follow him. The Bedell alone chose not to fight alongside the King of the Black Lakes. He came to me instead. And when the battle was over and the Dobhar-chú was defeated, the surviving sea minks were without protection. They were hunted down by men for their fur until they were all gone. Only the Bedell remains. But he has paid a high price for his loyalty to the Folk. He is terribly alone in this world.”

There was a small silence at the table. No one would say it, of course, but the Móraí appeared to be every bit as alone as the Bedell, both of them marooned on this mysterious island.

Why, she’s not our grandmother at all
, Gus thought as a shiver ran down the back of her neck like a thread of cold water.
She’s much, much older than that
.

“Um, actually,” Leo said, interrupting Gus’s thought, “I have this book about the proof behind mythical creatures? There’s lots of evidence that the gryphon, for example—” He pushed his glasses up, getting excited.

“Stop,” Gus ordered him. “I want to hear the rest of the story.”

“Fine,” Leo said. “Forget it, then.” He looked sadly down at his toast.

“Where was I?” the Móraí said.

“The Dobhar-chú,” Leo said. “In the lakes.”

“Oh yes. The Dobhar-chú. So the creature grew, in both power and greed. He took to the sea, and he amassed an army of creatures to fight for him. A great
battle followed between the creatures of the deep and the Folk. The battle was for the entire sea, and all that dwelt in it.”

“I’ve never read anything about Sea Folk and a battle,” Leo said.

Gus punched his arm.

“What?” Leo said. “I just said I’ve never read anything about a battle between—”

“Leo, stop talking,” Gus said sternly.

“Sorry,” Leo murmured. “It’s just—”

“Leo!”
Gus hissed.

“Sorry,” he said. “Go ahead. Please.”

“Yes,” the Móraí continued. “The battle was a costly one. Many, many Folk died, as well as many of the creatures who had allied themselves with the Folk. The Folk were unable to fully defeat the Dobhar-chú, but they managed to imprison him on an island.”

“Why didn’t they kill him?” Leo asked.

The old woman started to speak and then stopped and shook her head. “I think that is enough to take in this morning.”

“That’s it?” Gus said. “You’re not going to tell us anything else? I want to know what’s going on.”

She looked at her brother and sister for support. Ila was peering into her bowl to see if she could scrape up any more porridge. Leo was munching toast.

“Hello!” Gus said angrily. “Ila? Leo? Don’t you want to know what’s going on here?”

“Well, she just said she can’t tell us yet,” Leo said reasonably. “Sorry, I’m not sure what to call you.”

“
Móraí
is fine,” the woman said, smiling at him.

Ila said, “May I have more porridge, please?”

“Come
on
!” Gus said in frustration. “I want to know what happened out there! And I want to know why we’re here. And I want—I want—” She stopped herself before she could say
I want my mom
. She couldn’t stop the tears that welled up in her eyes, though. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said instead.

The Móraí nodded. “I know,” she said, and Gus could tell that the Móraí meant that she knew what Gus had stopped herself from saying. “Please trust me,” she added. “I will tell you everything when the time is right. Why don’t you explore the island today? I’ll pack you a lunch and you can stay out all day.”

The Móraí wrapped sandwiches in cloth and put them in a bag along with glass bottles of water and some delicious-looking cookies and sent the children outside to explore. She was going to the lighthouse to polish the huge lamps at the top, which made Leo pause longingly for a moment. It was clear that he was dying to get into the lighthouse.

“Tomorrow,” the Móraí promised him. So Leo put on his sneakers and took the lunch bag and joined Ila and Gus.

“Only stay away from the rocks below the lighthouse,”
the Móraí warned them. “They are slippery and treacherous. Head off to the right and you will see a path down.”

They followed a thin track that wove between the boulders, working its twisting way to the sea. The sun shone on the waves and threw off green shots of light that made the children shade their eyes with their hands. The rocky beach gleamed wetly, marked here and there with tide pools.

They went straight to the pools, poking the reluctant sea stars with sticks to watch them curl their arms into their bodies for protection and stirring up the bottoms to flush out the hidden hermit crabs. In one of the pools, Gus and Ila found bits of soft-edged green and blue glass.

Gus’s mood gradually lightened. It was a beautiful day, and hadn’t the Móraí told them that their mother would be fine? Actually, she couldn’t remember if those had been the old woman’s exact words, but she thought it was close enough. She helped Ila stuff her pockets full of tiny pink shells. They would all be broken by bedtime, but Ila seemed pleased anyway.

At lunchtime, they found a dry spot high up on the rocks and spread out their picnic. The smells of salt and sea and the tang of fish were so strong that Gus couldn’t help drawing in deep lungfuls of sharp, delicious air. The wind flicked her hair against her face. She thought she had never felt more alive than at that moment, sitting there with the sun and wind and the fine salt spray of the sea. Leo sighed happily.

“It’s amazing,” he said.

Gus laughed out loud.

“But, Gus,” Leo said, “did it really happen? Did we dream it?”

He didn’t need to say what
it
was. Gus closed her eyes for a minute, remembering the smells and the sounds of the living sea, the power of her seal body moving through the silken water. “We did not.”

“But,” Leo said, “it’s not possible, Gus. We—you and I—we turned into seals? And Ila was a fox? How could it have happened? Maybe the Bedell put a spell on us. Maybe we only
think
we remember, but really we dreamed it. There just isn’t any other way.”

Gus looked at her twin. It couldn’t be true, and yet she wanted more than anything else in the world for it to be so. Because if what the Móraí had told them was true, then it just might happen again. And Gus would give anything to feel it again, to swim without even thinking about it, to turn as if freed from gravity in the lit water, to be
of
the world instead of just in it, to hear fish jumping and smell a mussel cracked open on the beach. She longed for it.

“Really, Gus,” Leo said again. He shoved his hair back on his forehead impatiently.

“But I remember it,” Ila said.

Leo’s face brightened. “The way the sea smelled—”

“Yes,” Gus interrupted him. “And remember how we could hear everything, and the way we could spin around and that tunnel of rock we went through—”

“Four legs!” Ila said. “Four legs, and fish!”

“The way the fish ran from us!” Gus said.

And then they were all speaking at once, all three of them, the joy filling them: “And the sunlight—remember the sunlight under the water”—“On the water!” Ila cried—“And remember we could smell the island before we saw it, and the swimming, we were so
fast
, it was so amazing, amazing!”

They finally ran out of things to say.

“I wasn’t sure—” Gus began, just as Leo said, “I’m so glad,” and Ila said simply, “Again!”

Then they all laughed. It was real. It had happened. And it might, just might, happen again.

The rest of the day passed quickly. Gus, Leo, and Ila explored the beach and splashed in the shallow, freezing water until the sun streaked the edge of the sky red. At dinner, they were so tired and hungry that even Gus did not ask the Móraí any more questions.

Leo spent their second morning on the island in the lighthouse with the Móraí, polishing brass bits, winding clockworks, and trimming the wicks for the lantern that warned ships away from the dangerous shoals that surrounded the island.

“It’s called a Fresnel lens,” he told his sisters. Gus and Ila had wandered into the lighthouse after a morning of shell collecting. Leo was giving them a tour of the lantern room, where the beehive-shaped glass light was kept. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It doesn’t look like a lens,” Gus said skeptically.

Ila tapped on the glass. Leo frowned and pulled her
hand back. As soon as Leo turned away, Ila patted spiteful handprints everywhere that she could reach.

The lens, which was enclosed in a giant lantern housing, was easily twice or even three times as tall as Leo. The lantern had glass fins all around it, jutting out like the slats of mini blinds over a window. Leo explained that the fins were actually concentric rings of prisms.

“They bend the light,” he explained, “in order to focus it all into a really narrow, really powerful beam. And the lens is shaped like a magnifying glass to make it even brighter.”

Gus yawned. Ila surreptitiously patted another section with her sticky hands.

“It was invented in 1823 by a French physicist named Augustin Fresnel,” Leo said, somewhat desperately.

“I’m hungry,” Ila said.

They left Leo with his lens. “What are all these little handprints?” they heard him say as Gus hurried Ila out of the lantern room and down the narrow stairs to the watch room. Gus liked this room better. It was cozy, with a rag rug on the floor and a rocking chair pulled close to the little round window. There was also a narrow bed covered in a blue blanket and a table with two white-painted chairs. The Móraí sat in one of the chairs. On the table was a tray bearing cups of tea and freshly baked scones wrapped in napkins.

“Why don’t you two take your tea and scones to the rocks and eat in the sun,” the Móraí suggested, her eyes
twinkling. Upstairs, Leo’s voice was rising as he discovered the extent of his little sister’s handiwork on the glass housing of his beloved Fresnel lens.

They hurried out with their treats while the Móraí carried the tray upstairs. “He won’t mind, really,” she said as she started up the stairs. “He likes cleaning the glass.”

Ila looked disappointed.

As they left the little house, a shadow detached itself from the lee of a large gray rock and slid after them.

“Bedell!” Ila said happily, waving at the animal, who, with a shrug, turned into the Messenger. He smiled down at Ila.

“Cannot sneak around this one,” he said approvingly.

Ila reached for the man’s hand. They hiked up to the meadow and then settled on a large flat rock in the sun for their picnic.

Leo found them just as they were finishing the scones.

Ila shared her last bites with him as a way to say sorry about the handprints. They all sat in a companionable silence. The sun was pleasantly warm on their faces. A bumblebee flew in lazy circles around the pot of jam, and a light breeze brought with it the salty smell of the sea. The Bedell, as usual, did not eat. Instead, he told them stories of the island, back in the day when the sea was full of seals and every night on the stony beaches there were bonfires around which dark-haired humans sang and danced until daybreak.

“And when the sun rose,” he explained, “the fires
were but gray ash, and the people were gone. All that was to be seen were the seals, far out to sea, playing and diving in the blue water.”

“It sounds like a wonderful place to live,” Gus said. She was lying on her belly on the warm rock, resting the side of her face on her crossed arms.

“Oh, it was, it was.” The Bedell’s voice sounded sad.

“I wish it was like that now,” Ila said dreamily. She was leaning on the Bedell, her face sticky with tea and crumbs.

“And I as well,” he said. He smoothed Ila’s hair away from her forehead.

“The battle between the Folk and the what’s-his-name,” Gus said, changing the subject. “What happened next?”

“Well, the Sea Folk were mostly gone by then, either killed in the battle or Turned to their animal forms forever. This island that used to be full of life became home to only one. The Watcher. And me.”

“And our mom,” said Ila.

“And Rosemaris, yes, of course.”

“And now the Móraí keeps the Dobhar-chú prisoner?” Leo asked.

“Yes. Her power holds the creature fast.”

“How did his wolves get free?” Leo asked. “To track us, I mean.”

A shadow passed over the Bedell’s face. “The Móraí is very old,” he said. “And her power is weakening. She was ill this winter. So ill she almost died. Because of that, the
fog slipped. Just a bit, and just once. It was not enough to allow the King of the Black Lakes to escape. But it was enough for the creature to loose some of his wolves.”