Emily Windsnap and the Castle in the Mist (9 page)

And then we saw it.

“Look,” Shona whispered. She pointed into the mist along the horizon. Millie and I peered to follow the line of her finger. Gradually it came into view as we stared, standing out above the mist as though it were balancing on it.

A castle.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

No one replied.

We went on staring, each thinking our own thoughts and silently asking our own questions. I didn’t ask any more questions out loud. What was the point?

Standing at the very front of the boat, I slowly turned around in a circle, taking in the whole view. Absolutely the same all around us. Totally, totally still sea. Stiller than I had ever known it, bluer than
I had ever seen it, quieter than I had ever heard it. The boat lay on the slightest tilt, lodged on something. But what? There was no land to be seen, nothing to be seen at all, in fact, except the ocean, and the castle, and the mist.

Shona ducked under and swam out of sight. A moment later, she emerged, wiping the hair from her face. “We’re stuck on a sandbank,” she said flatly.

A sandbank. In the middle of the ocean?

Shona shrugged and shook her head in answer to my unasked question.

I squinted at the castle to examine it more closely. It stood proud and majestic above the sea: a gothic silhouette against the sunset, like a cardboard cutout. It was a child’s picture of a castle, perfectly symmetrical, a turret balanced squarely on each side, a tower in the center. Two thin arched windows were just visible in the top corners. As I looked, something tugged at me. It felt as though there were a wire between the castle and my chest, pulling at me. I knew in that moment I would have to go there.

The sky was turning red behind the castle, blacking out everything except its outline and the line of mist wafting around it like cigar smoke. Every now and then, as the mist ebbed and flowed, I noticed that the castle seemed to be standing on an island of rocks. Jagged and threatening, they held it high, as though carrying it on a platform, a grand stage in the middle of the ocean.

Millie was the first to shake herself out of the trance we all seemed to be in.

“All right, girls,” she said, dusting herself off and shaking out her gown. “I’m going to find out where we are.” As soon as she spoke, the feeling about getting to the castle left me as rapidly as it had come.

Shona looked blankly up at her from the sea, as though Millie had spoken in a foreign language.

“How?” I asked.

Millie gave me a big false smile. Just like the ones Mom gives me when she doesn’t have a clue how to work something out either. “I’ll find a way. We’ll have you back with your mom and dad in no time. Just you wait,” she said, doing nothing to soothe my worries. If anything, she’d made them even bigger. Who said Mom and Dad
wanted
me back? Maybe they’d both realize they were better off without me messing things up all the time. Millie looked down at Shona and gave her one of the not-real smiles too. “You too, dear. I’ll work something out. Don’t worry.”

She stepped carefully across the deck and patted the big, long sail that lay rolled up along the side. “Come on, let’s see if we can get this up,” she said. “We could sail back, no problem.”

I stared at her in disbelief, briefly shaken from my somber thoughts. Surely she didn’t really believe we could sail
Fortuna
?

But then I thought again. Why not? Perhaps we could! If only we could figure out where we were, maybe we could get it started and sail back to Allpoints Island. I mean, sure, it was an ancient pirate ship that had been wrecked on the reef two hundred years ago and hadn’t been sailed ever since. But we weren’t exactly overwhelmed with other options. What harm could it do to try?

Together we pulled and tugged at the ropes and poles, Millie heaving the boom high enough for me to dodge underneath, the sail in my hands. Around and around I went, unwrapping the maroon fabric until it lay across the whole deck. I tried hard to ignore the rubbery feeling in my toes, pushing it away like all the other horrible things I was trying not to think about.

“Oh,” Millie said, looking down at the torn, fraying, useless sail at our feet.

I looked down at it with her. “Maybe we could sew it?” I said eventually.

Millie sighed and smiled tightly. “We’ll give it a try, dear,” she said, patting my arm. Neither of us mentioned the fact that the boat was stuck on a sandbank and that the lower half of it was submerged in water. Or the fact that we didn’t happen to have the tiniest idea of where we were. We needed something to cling to, even if it was a complete illusion.

“We’ll work something out,” Millie said as she
turned to go back inside the boat. “Now I’ll just have a cup of Earl Grey, and then what do you say we get started on the cleaning up?”

We managed to put everything back where it belonged. Everything that wasn’t completely smashed to smithereens, that is.

The worst part was when I came across a glass that Dad had given Mom only a couple of weeks ago. He’d painted a heart with their initials on the side. It was broken right across the middle of the heart, their initials on separate shards of glass at opposite ends of the boat. It wasn’t significant, I told myself again and again. It didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t superstitious.

But I couldn’t convince myself. It was all I could do to hold back the tears lining up behind my eyes, desperately trying to squeeze out.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t seen Millie suck in her breath between her teeth and shake her head when she saw it. As soon as she spotted me, she did the smiling thing again. “It’s only a glass,” she said. “We’ll get your mom a new one, soon as we get back, eh?”

Then she ruffled my hair and sent me off to the kitchen area with a brush and dustpan.

It was pitch-black outside by the time we’d finished. I went downstairs to see Shona while Millie made us all a snack. She’d figured out that if we rationed ourselves tightly enough, we could survive for a week on the food and water we had on the boat. “Not that we’ll be here anything like that long,” she’d said brightly. “But just so’s we know.”

Shona and I talked about what had happened, going over it again and again, trying to make sense of it.

“So, he tried to get the ring from you, but he couldn’t even touch it?” she asked for the fifth time. “But Neptune can do anything! Why couldn’t he get it back if he wanted it so much?”

“I don’t know,” I said, as I’d said each time we came around to this point. “He said something about his own law stopping him.”

Then I paused. I hadn’t mentioned the curse yet. I didn’t know how to. So far, the worst effects had been while I was human. What would happen as my merself got worse? Or what if that was the half of me I was to lose forever? If I wasn’t going to be a mermaid any longer, that would mean I’d lose Shona as well as everything else that was going to happen. I’d never be able to go out swimming in the sea with her again. I might have one of Neptune’s memory drugs forced on me and never even remember her! My best friend, the best friend I’d ever had.

And there was the other thing too. The thing that was so awful, I kept trying to stop myself from even thinking the words. But they were there, in the center of everything.
My parents.
Was I ever going to see them again? If I lost half of what I was, did that mean I would lose one of them as well? Even if they wanted to be together, maybe it wouldn’t be possible. The thought was like a kick to my stomach.

“Shona, there’s another thing,” I said nervously. “A really bad thing.”

So I told her about the curse, about how it would take a few days to work, and I wouldn’t know which way it would go, but whichever way it did, that was where I would stick. I stopped short of telling her it had already started, about how my feet hadn’t completely formed when I was on the deck. And how even now, swimming down here as a mermaid, I could feel something was different. Just here and there a scale missing. Bits of flesh showing through my tail. She didn’t need to see that yet, the proof that the curse had already started.

“Fighting fins!” Shona exclaimed when I’d finished. “That’s awful! What are we going to do?”

“That’s what I thought you’d help me work out.”

Shona grabbed my hands. “I will, Emily,” she promised. “We’ll stop this from happening, OK? As sure as sharks have teeth, I’m not going to lose you.
Whatever happens. And you’re not going to lose your parents either.”

I winced at her words as though she’d lashed me with a piece of wire. Just the thought of it!

“We’re going to solve this, all right? You and me, we can do anything, can’t we?” Shona looked at me desperately, her eyes begging me to say yes.

I looked at her and squeezed her hands. “Of course we’ll solve it,” I said, lying as much as she was lying to me with her words, and as much as Millie had lied with her smile. “Of course we will.”

I stood on the front deck with Millie. Shona was in the water next to the boat. I rubbed my stomach, trying to ignore the fact that it was rumbling from my rationed dinner of a third of a can of beans and a piece of toast. A feeling of warmth spread into me from the ring, against my body. Everything was going to be OK. I could feel it. The ring was telling me so.

“That’s the Plow, and that’s Orion’s Belt,” Millie said, pointing up at the stars, clustered together in tight clumps. I craned my neck to follow the outline she was pointing out. I don’t know how
she could tell what was what. The longer I stared, the more it just looked like a completely black sky filled with a million billion tiny white dots.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a dark shape like a shadow in the distance. It was coming closer, changing as it slid across the sky. Another cyclone? Please, no!

It looked like a giant snake, gathering and bunching up into an arc, then stretching out to form a long black line cutting through the stars. It was heading for the castle. The shape disappeared into the mist, reemerging above it to swirl around the top of the castle, circling it, spinning into a spiral, around and around, tighter and tighter, faster and faster, until it faded into nothing. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. And one of the most magical too.