Queen Liliuokalani: Royal Prisoner (6 page)

“And I’ve lost my sister,” he added.

“But where did you come from?” the girl asked again.

Felix studied her as he tried to think of an answer. Oddly, she wore a long black skirt and a long-sleeved button-down shirt that came all the way up her neck. She even had on a black jacket, despite the heat.

She narrowed her eyes. “You are so pale, you must be
aumakua.
They pop up everywhere, and then disappear again just as quickly.”

“Ghosts? Is that what au…au…”

The girl laughed as he tried to pronounce the word.

“Aumakua,”
she said again. “Yes. Ghosts.”

“I’m not a ghost,” Felix said. “But I am worried about my sister.”

“Where did you leave this sister of yours?”

Again, Felix searched for an answer.

“She was right next to me a moment ago,” he finally said helplessly.

A terrible thought struck Felix. He jumped to his feet and ran toward the water. The waves were gigantic. What if Maisie had landed in there? She might be struggling right now to stay afloat, or to safely catch a wave to shore. Or…He shook his head. He didn’t want to think of all the awful possibilities.

The girl appeared by his side.

“You think she’s surfing?” she asked in disbelief.

Felix turned away from the ocean for an instant. This girl was so persistent, so present. Could she be Liliu? Did
lame demon
make finding the right person this easy?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Lydia,” she said.

Disappointed, he returned his gaze to the ocean, scanning the faces of the surfers riding into shore. But he did not see Maisie among them.

Shielding his eyes from the bright sun with his hand, he nervously tried to locate his sister.

Then, suddenly, a commotion broke out on the
water, way in the distance. What had been an uneven line of surfers on their boards became a busy circle. The sounds of shouting carried across the balmy air.

The people on the beach and the surfers who had ridden waves to shore all turned. The surfers began to paddle frantically back toward the commotion.

“What’s going on?” Felix asked when he reached the crowd of onlookers.

“A girl got hurt,” someone said.

“Haole,”
someone else added.

Felix began to tremble.

“Haole?”
he asked Lydia.

“Haole,”
she said. “Foreigner.”

Without thinking, Felix joined the others who were running into the pounding surf.

“Maisie!” he called as loud as he could. “Maisie!”

Maisie opened her eyes. Everything around her was spinning and blurry, and her head throbbed. As if from somewhere far, far away, she heard her name being called. But she couldn’t answer. She closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again things would be clearer. Where was she? And
what had happened to her? As she squinted from beneath one half-opened eyelid, the world around her slowly came into focus. First, she saw Felix looking wide-eyed and terrified, his face pale and his hair sticking up at crazy angles. Then she saw two bare-chested boys peering down at her with serious expressions.

“She’s waking up!” one of them said, but even though his face was close to hers, his voice sounded faint.

“Maisie?” Felix asked desperately. “Can you hear me? Maisie?”

She wanted to tell him that she could hear him, though with the ringing in her ears, everyone’s voice sounded small and distant. But when she opened her mouth, only a small groan came out.

“Your head,” Felix said. “You banged it pretty bad.”

How had she banged her head? Maisie wondered. She tried to think, but her brain felt all cloudy and mixed up.

“Do you know where you are?” the handsomer of the two boys asked her.

Maisie shook her head slightly, which sent pain
shooting into it. She winced.

“Do you know what year it is?” the other boy asked.

“Two thousand thirteen,” she croaked.

The two boys looked at each other, worried.

Felix laughed nervously. “Boy, did you hit your head hard.”

“Maybe you time traveled?” the handsome boy said with a little teasing smile.

“Oh, yes,” Maisie mumbled, closing her eyes again. “I do it all the time.”

The next time she opened her eyes, only Felix was by her side. Things looked less blurry, but her head still ached.

“What happened?” she whispered.

Felix’s face flushed with relief. “You sound better,” he said. Then he frowned at her. “You got hit in the head with a surfboard.”

“A surfboard?” Maisie repeated, struggling to remember. Why in the world would a surfboard fall on her head?

“We were in that weird tornado or funnel or whatever it was, and then we said
lame demon
again, and
I landed on the beach, but you landed in the water, and you got hit in the head with a surfboard and practically drowned.” Felix’s words came out in a rush, as if he’d been waiting a long time to spill them.

“Slow down,” Maisie said. She could not remember being in a funnel or even in the ocean. In fact, looking at the size of those waves, she couldn’t believe she’d go in the water at all.

“I…I don’t remember,” Maisie said softly.

Felix leaned closer to her.

“Maisie, do you know that we’re in Hawaii?” he asked her in a low voice. “In the 1800s?”

She let his words sink in. They must have time traveled again, she realized. But hadn’t Great-Uncle Thorne sealed off The Treasure Chest?

“Remember?” Felix was whispering. “You brought a crown with you to New York when we visited Dad? A crown you took from The Treasure Chest?”

A vague memory of their father in a strange apartment floated across her mind. Then another memory, of a pretty woman by his side.

“Agatha the Great?” Felix was saying.

And: “That southern girl living in our apartment?”

And: “The conch blower?”

Felix shook her gently. Had she just fallen asleep? Maisie wondered.

“Maisie?” he was saying. “Do you still have it?”

“What?” she murmured.

“The crown!”

Maisie tried to focus on her brother’s face, but her vision doubled, then blurred. What was he talking about? Southern girls and conch shells and crowns?

She felt his hands patting her fleece vest.

“It’s gone!” Felix said, and his voice sounded desperate.

But Maisie closed her eyes, his voice receding into the darkness that enveloped her.

Maisie felt a cool cloth on her forehead, and then a soft voice told her that she was at Haleakala.

She looked up to see a girl at her bedside.

The girl pressed a finger to her lips, then indicated with a small nod that Felix was sleeping on a mat on the floor beside Maisie.

“Haleakala is my home,” Lydia continued quietly. “My
hanai
father, Paki, is here to check on you.”

“
Hanai
father?” Maisie asked, her throat dry and scratchy.

“You are in Hawaii,” the girl said. “In the palace of the king.”

Surprised, Maisie tried to sit up and look at her surroundings. But as soon as she did, a sharp pain jolted her skull.

“Ouch!” she said, easing herself back down.

“You foolishly went into the surf at Waikiki Beach, and you were floundering about when a surfboard crashed down on you and knocked you out. Lot saved your life,” she added.

Funny,
Maisie thought. The girl spoke with a clipped British accent and wore western-style clothes, but she was clearly Hawaiian.

“My
hanai
father,” Lydia said again. She leaned closer to Maisie and explained, “Here we have a tradition of giving a baby away to other parents in order to improve its status and strengthen bonds between royal families.”

Even though it didn’t quite make sense to her, Maisie managed to nod before Lydia stepped aside and the largest man Maisie had ever seen appeared in her place. Paki stood at least six feet four inches
tall and must have weighed over three hundred pounds. His hair was red and his skin was fair.

Paki smiled gently down at Maisie.

“We teach our youth that when we
he‘e nalu
together, we are sharing the
nalu
of mother earth,” he said, his voice lyrical and kind.

“He‘e nalu,”
Lydia interpreted. “Surfing.”

“You see, youth have the opportunity to wash away their past mistakes and troubles by returning to the water, by
he‘e nalu
.”

“I don’t think I meant to surf—” Maisie began.

“When we surf together,” Paki continued, “we become family. Therefore, you are now part of our family, Maisie. You will stay here with us until you are healed.”

“Thank you,” Maisie said sleepily.

Paki’s laugh was more of a low rumble. “Sleep,” he said. “Heal, little one.”

In the two days before Maisie began to wake up, Felix stayed by her side. They were in the royal palace, a place of contradictions. Some rooms were filled with heavy wooden furniture, oil paintings, and even white linen tablecloths, crystal glasses, and heavy
silver—not unlike what they had at Elm Medona. But other rooms were spare, with tatami mats on the floors and low tables where meals were eaten not with silverware but with your hands, or with hollowed coconuts for scooping poi, the thick mashed taro root that seemed to accompany every meal.

All the royal children lived at Haleakala, Felix had learned. Lydia told him that for years they had lived in a boarding school called the Chiefs’ School in Honolulu that had been run by the Cookes. But the school had closed and the children had returned to the palace.

“The ones who survived,” she’d added sadly.

She went on to explain that when the westerners came to Hawaii, they brought diseases with them. A measles epidemic had wiped out a fifth of the population, including her brother Moses.

“The westerners,” she added, “have changed everything.”

Felix had squirmed uncomfortably beneath her solemn gaze. He had felt this way before, when he and Maisie landed in South Dakota with Crazy Horse and watched the Lakota struggle to keep their land and their traditions. Was the same thing
happening here? he wondered.

Ever since he and Maisie first went into The Treasure Chest and ended up in 1836 with Clara Barton, Felix had become aware of how little he knew about history, despite the As he always received in social studies. That feeling had returned again and again during his two days with Lydia and the other royal children. All he’d known before landing here was that Hawaii was the fiftieth state. But slowly he was learning that many Hawaiians did not want to be part of the United States. In fact, Lydia had told him that Hawaii had been briefly under British rule.