Clouds End

  “Wonders and miracles!” Foam looked curiously at his captain. “What made you change your mind?”

  “Swap’s Breeze is blowing. I don’t want to be left out.” Rope looked fondly around the decks, feeling his ship roll beneath his boots, hearing the creak of her timbers. “You know, I think this will be the trip she finally gets her name.”

  “If you go by the new island, your boat will find her name by sunset tomorrow. Or be lost,” Brook said.

  Shale stirred. “I hate it when you’re like that.”

  * * *

  “It’s typical,” Shale said later that evening as they ate their first supper on board. “I find a new island and nobody cares. You get twinned by a sea gull, and we’re off to Delta!” She rummaged in a fuseware jar for some pickled mushrooms.

  Rope had finished laying strips of seaweed and salted fish between two potato cakes. “Do you believe what the haunt said, that Sere was fighting the Gull Warrior?”

  “That’s the whole reason we’re going to Delta,” Shale answered in a fine spray of mushroom. She swallowed. “To warn them. Mom said she thought the first island was in danger.” She pointed to a band of blue knotwork braided around Brook’s wrist. “That’s why she put a Witness Knot on Brook, so the Witness of Delta would know to take our warning seriously.”

  “Shandy is sending us to Delta to make sure I won’t be on Clouds End when Jo kills me.” Brook fingered the Witness Knot. “I don’t blame her. It’s what I would do, if I were Witness. Better to lose one woman than a whole village. And after all, it isn’t like there’s any family to offend.”

  “That’s so like you. You never believe that anyone acts with honor,” Shale said. “No. Everything is always about you. Always about people cutting you out.”

  “Hey now,” Rope murmured, covering Brook’s stiff hand with his own.

  “No, really,” Shale said. “Why see loyalty when you could see treason? Why see good will when malice is so much more interesting?”

  “The thing I like about old friends,” Foam remarked, “is that you can heave all the fair words overboard and go straight for the kill.” He inspected a pickled gull’s egg and popped it into his mouth. “Delicious. But as for the argument, is it not possible that both things are true? Maybe Shandy did mean to send Brook off the island until she is no longer spliced to this haunt. And maybe the Witness really is worried that Sere is burning through the Mist. What could be more sensible than sending Brook to Delta? At best, Brook frees herself from the haunt, and warns the first island of Sere’s threat. At worst, Brook dies at sea.” He paused to swallow a sip of water. “Along with her three closest friends.”

  Silence brooded abovedeck.

  “My mother is no spider-minded murderess,” Shale said.

  Foam nodded. “She would have to have a cold heart indeed, to send Brook to her death with her own daughter on board.” He glanced at Brook and shivered. “Hmm! Scary wicked bad!”

  “All right! All right!” Brook threw her hands in the air. “Everyone loves me! Everyone needs me! They won’t let me near their children now because they don’t want me to catch cold!”

  Foam nodded. “Much better.” He picked up another pickled egg and delicately belched. “Otter made these, didn’t she? Lovely.”

  Shale sighed. “Yes, all right Brook, people are scared. Maybe everything you say is true, but other things are true too. Why not think about the good parts? How many people have a chance to make a trip like this in their whole lives? Tomorrow we’ll put the first human footprints on an island just birthed from the Mist. If Rope is still willing.”

  “Sail into the Mist,” Brook murmured. “What a splendid idea. I’m fairly seething with good luck.”

  Rope’s hand stilled on her ankle. “We won’t let anything take you.”

  “You may not have much of a—”

  “We won’t let anything take you,” Rope said.

  Sea and ship talked in slaps and mutters at the water line.

  Together but not speaking they watched the sun set, somber as an embering fire, majestic and a little sad. When the last flames guttered in the western sky and were lost beneath the rolling dusk-blue sea, they all felt as if a part of their old lives had flickered and gone out, never to be rekindled.

  The next morning Swap’s Breeze came up at dawn, blowing away sleep and filling every heart on board with wonder as Shale’s island crept out of the Mist.

  Its contours seemed to shift and waver before them. Behind the beach, gleaming like beads of dew, boulders rose toward a looming cloud. Beyond this cloud was the Mist, grey and featureless. Shale’s island lay at the edge of the world and nothing lay behind it, not even darkness.

  No one looked up into the sky above their boat to see what might be circling there.

  A gull’s cry blew into Shale’s heart. “I want to get off this damn boat,” she growled.

  Rope shook his head and stamped on the deck, grinning. All night he had been afraid that dawn would bring disappointment, but the magic was real, and he was a part of it.

  Brook leaned against him, needing his steadiness. “We should go back.”

  “Back!” Foam cried.

  “It makes me feel . . . Can’t you hear it? We should go back.”

  Shale grunted. “Nobody’s making any sense.” Her straight black hair fluttered in the breeze, tangling around her shark’s tooth. “There are too many people on this damn boat.”

  “We’re almost there, Brook. It won’t hurt just to take a look.” Rope fought to control his frustration. “Wind’s quartering.” The sails luffed, sliding out of trim. Rope squinted at the waiting sea. “It smells like singed pine needles.”

  Shale shook her head. “I can make out some colors, but they feel bent.”

  “Spring,” Brook said. “Spring and cinnamon.” Magic passed through her, pure and unpredictable as birdsong. “The wind in the reeds. So lonely.”

  “Or scorched leaves burning,” Rope said.

  “A spire of cloud reaching down to touch a spire of stone,” Foam said. “Two islands, one in the sea, one in the sky, reflections reaching to one another.”

  Rope grunted and spun the tiller, swinging the ship around. “I can’t come this far and no farther. It’s my story too.”

  “The cloud-color drips onto the rocks,” Shale said.

  “Island, island, island,” Foam said. “That’s what this place shouts at you. It’s more like home than home is.”

  Shale shook her head, laughing in wonder. “No. It’s like every place that isn’t home. Every place new and exciting.”

  Foam laughed. “Let’s call it Shale’s Adventure, then, and make you famous forever!”

  But Brook said, “Not yet. The story isn’t over yet. The island isn’t finished. It has not yet found its name.” The Witness Knot around her wrist was a chain shackling her to Clouds End. “Shandy sent us to Delta. That’s our business and we should be about it. This island is no part of that.”

  “It’s part of the story!” Foam said. “We have to know what Sere is up to. Shandy would want us to learn anything the island could tell us about what is happening in the Mist.”

  “Heroes deal with Heroes. Our business is with the real world.”

  Silence washed over the deck for the space of five heartbeats. “I’m sorry you didn’t see it first,” Shale said. “But I’ve waited all my life for an adventure to happen to me. I won’t turn it down now. Foam! Help me with the dinghy.”

  When the others shipped out for the island, Brook went with them.

  * * *

  Rope left the others as soon as he could. He knew he ought to stay by the dinghy, ought to return to his ship. He shouldn’t have left Brook alone. They were supposed to stay together.

  He was tired of caution.

  The island was alive with voices of wind and wing and fire. The sea wove mighty songs against the Mist. The air smelled of scorched herbs. There were no paths and the ways he took closed behind him as he walked. br />
  It was farther to the island’s peak than he expected. He plodded on, always climbing, until the muscles in his legs ached. A gull flapped heavily overhead. It screamed three times and disappeared behind an outcrop of crimson rock. The sky above was cream, no longer clear. He caught a rank smell and shouted, startling a beast with a topaz pelt from a stand of silver birches. He fled under a canopy of vines, stumbled and fell. The ground rippled heavily beneath him.

  Rope struggled to his feet. He was in a clearing walled with honeysuckle; hundreds of humming bees drowsed in the liquid air. A carpet of moss crept to the lip of a small black pool.

  Jo stood on the other side.

  Honeyed sunlight dripped on her ivory skin. Her narrow silver eyes were still and sad, looking at him. She was naked except for a bracelet of blue shells she turned slowly around one wrist. The honeysuckle smell made it hard to breathe. Somehow the odor seemed to come from her, from her white skin. Her hair floated before her face like wisps of cloud. Diamonds beaded on her shoulders and sparkled in the snow-white hair at the bottom of her belly. Pale as a drowned woman, her reflection glowed in the black pond.

  “It is lonely here,” she said.

  Rope’s heart raced. Bees. Bees crawled across her white flesh. They used their wings to balance, scrambling clumsily along her shoulders, her arms.

  Jo reached behind her head and shook out her long white hair. A cloud of bees rose humming into the air, circled and landed on the honeysuckle, on Jo’s shoulders, on her hands and on the tips of her breasts. “So lonely. I thought this was what I wanted. But the wind blows everything away.”

  Alone. He was alone with her.

  His eyes met hers and he thought, She could twin me. Twin me, kill me, have it all. Brook, the ship, the human contact. No one would ever know.

  Shells clicked and clattered as Jo turned the bracelet around her wrist.

  And he was lost in the Mist-time, with no paths to follow, surrounded by honeysuckle and drowsing bees. He was alone with her. There was no place to run. These things he thought in the space of one long look, while Jo’s shells clattered and clicked.

  “Well met!” he said. “I . . . We thought you’d left.”

  “I had.”

  “We’re very grateful. For your warning.” Rope took a deep breath and walked a couple of steps toward her. “We fear haunts. You know that. Haunts and Mist.”

  “Where is Brook?”

  “I left her beside a stream.” Rope frowned as a swell passed through the moss below his feet. The island was rocking like a boat at anchor.

  Jo stood quite still on the other side of the pond. The air smelled of honeysuckle and sex and milk. Bees clambered and buzzed. “I am hungry.”

  They were terribly alone. Rope looked around the clearing. “Not much here.”

  “Perhaps in the pond,” Jo said, not looking at the black water, not looking away from his face. “I thought I saw a fish—here.”

  “We lack a net.” Rope walked around beside her, wondering if she would kill him. He smiled and rolled up his tunic sleeve. “Ever tickled for fish?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  Rope laughed with her. “You have to wiggle your fingers a certain way; so.” He let his arm hang limp and wriggled his hands, using a trout pattern. He was good at it. He was pleased with the craft in his body.

  Her pale fingers slid down his arm, cool and soft as blossoms. She lifted his hand and placed it on her breast. She trembled, looking at him, and her silver eyes widened. The smell of honeysuckle rippled out from her, damp with warm rain.

  “Make love to me.”

  “I want to.”

  Her blossom skin made his fingers tingle.

  “We are very near the Mist, here,” he said. “My father sailed out one morning into a day clear with sunshine and never came back. I don’t want to go where he went.”

  “Haunts get what they want,” Jo told him. “You came here when all sense would have kept you sailing for Delta. You came here alone to me.”

  “It was Foam, he . . . we had to, to find out about Sere . . .”

  Tears stood in Jo’s eyes like drops of dew. “I won’t make you want me. I ask only what anyone might ask. I ask to be loved. I am tired of freedom.” Desire crawled under Rope’s thoughts like the blood beneath his skin.

  He took his hand off her breast.

  Jo kicked at the black pond, shattering their reflections. “Twins. Haunts. Idiots! In the Mist everything is true.” Bitterly she stared at him. “One day life will slit you open like an oyster.” She screeched, an inhuman sound. “What could I have seen in you?”

  She dove into the black pool. There was no splash; the water closed smoothly behind her, swallowing her white feet. After many heartbeats a swarm of bees bubbled to the surface.

  Jo’s reflection still floated on the black water.

  Rope touched the reflection’s white cheek. It was cool and petal-smooth. He drew back his hand without rippling the water. His fingers were wet.

  He reached out again, more firmly this time. He stroked her cheek and her neck. Reached further under the water to touch her breasts.

  From beneath a hidden rock an ancient trout rose and struck his hand. Rope jerked his fingers away, swearing. A ripple started in the pond, breaking Jo’s nude body into confusion.

  Bees hummed and drowsed.

  A water skater tested the black surface, growing bolder as the ripple died.

  The wave was gone.

  * * *

  Shale stayed by the shoreline, hopping from rock to rock. Foam followed her, stooping to pop strange flotsam into a bag at his side. They stopped to study a tidal pool. A gemmed crab sidled by Foam’s foot. “To each barnacle the crab is an island,” Foam mused. “An island within an island. Shale, have you ever stopped to consider that the world is an island? Yes, that’s it, sticking out of the sky just as Clouds End juts from the water. And the sound of the wind blowing through the trees is the sound of water breaking over the rocks.” He frowned. “No, wait. We’re still in the air. Which means . . . which means we must be fish,” he cried. “And perhaps the Mist is a net the sky’s people throw down to us air-dwellers from time to time, dragging us off like poor Rope’s father, to be, to be . . .”

  “Eaten.”

  “Mm. I suppose.”

  Softly Shale chanted the verse that began all her mother’s stories. “The Mist churns into sea, the sea hardens into stone, then islands, then land. The land leaps into mountains and the mountains fade into clouds and Mist; for change is the way of the world.” She stood looking back across the water. “Every step I take seems like the first in a journey whose end I cannot imagine.”

  Foam grinned back at Shale. “You are beginning to sound like Brook.”

  Shale laughed and started down the beach. “She’s much better at it.”

  Foam tarried, admiring the way Shale hopped from boulder to boulder. Never graceful, always sure. He ambled after her, studying the great cloud that bulked behind the island, swallowing its summit. Gleams of muted light shot through it, and suddenly he remembered the haunt’s warning about a fire growing in the Mist.

  But of course this was only the sun, he told himself. Only the sun.

  They were at the edge of the Mist. They should be scared. The Mist from which twins came. The Mist that had taken Rope’s father.

  “Where’s Rope?”

  Shale started. Behind them, the beach was empty save for the smell of burning herbs and a single gull’s cry. “And Brook. Weren’t we supposed to stay together?”

  They looked at one another with growing fear.

  “Shale.” Foam stared at the great cloud of Mist boiling above the island’s heart. Where before they had seen gleams and glimmers, a shape was beginning to emerge. Jerking and dancing, taller than the tallest tree, a puppet-shape with limbs of flame ate through the Mist: a body of flat and bending fire.

  “Sere,” Shale whispered.

  One of Sere’s arms
was still within the Mist, and one shivering leg. A stench of burning came from him, and a terrible hunger.

  Like a flame leaping in a breeze, his huge flat hand stabbed out to touch the crown of a mighty tree standing just beyond the line of Mist. Its head exploded into flame. A moment later Sere pulled the fire into himself, gobbling down the blazing tree as if swallowing a candle.

  The Mist boiled up behind him, stirred by a thousand wings. Sere’s head snapped around, his long curving eyes streaming fire as he stared back at a dim figure bulking in the Mist—a glimpse of white and a sea bird’s scream.

  So rich the island was with magic, that even Shale could understand Sere when he spoke in a cruel, hissing voice, like the sound of dry leaves burning.

  I told you she was mine, he said. I am in her now.

  Shale swore, dizzy with fear and furious with herself. The island was alive. The world she knew was weak as rotting sailcloth here, and the Mist-time was pushing through. Sere and the Gull Warrior might be only moments away from sweeping across them all.

  What madness had made her leave her best friend alone, in the Mist, with a haunt stalking her?

  “We’ve been spelled,” she said. “Foam, we have to find Brook and Rope.” Her eyes searched the endless jumble of boulders above the beach. “Fathom drown me and all my line.” The haunt had called them here. They had been mad to come.

  CHAPTER 5

  SERE

  FROM A shelf in the topmost room of her tower Shandy pulled a black fuseware jar glittering with mica. She grunted and tapped a dark brown ball of incense into the palm of her hand. It was flaky and oily at once, a wad of old leaves gummed with resin.

  She missed her daughter. Shale the sharp-faced, all elbows and knees, with a shark-tooth earring swinging by her cheek as she scrambled through the day.

  Shandy prayed for the safety of her travellers, feeling as helpless now as she had twenty years before with Shale at her breast, wondering how so small a thing as a baby could so easily hold her deepest hopes and most terrible fears.

  What kind of mother could have sent her daughter to the lonely sea?