Emily Windsnap and the Castle in the Mist (14 page)

The boy went on staring at me as I sat down. He pulled up an identical chair and sat opposite me. “I’m Aaron,” he said. He held out a skinny arm to shake my hand but almost instantly changed his mind and pulled it away.

We fell silent. I didn’t have the first idea what to say. Well, come on. How many times do you think about what you’d do if you swam to a spooky castle floating on a mist in the middle of the ocean and accidentally landed in some strange boy’s room?

Exactly.

He was the first to pull himself out of the shocked silence. In fact, now that I thought about it, he was more mysterious and cool than shocked. Perhaps he was used to strange things happening. Or perhaps he was just a mysterious and cool kind
of boy. Either way, I was intrigued — and thrown off balance — by him as much as by everything else that had happened in the last couple of days.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“Um, I swam,” I said uncertainly.

His eyes opened even wider. “You swam?”

I nodded. “Through tunnels. But where am I? What kind of a place is this?”

“Half Light Castle. It’s my home,” said Aaron. “I don’t know any other.”

“You’ve lived here all your life?”

He nodded. “All my life. Here and nowhere else, like every generation before me, all the way back to . . .” He looked up at me through his thick black eyelashes. “No, I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t tell me what?”

“My family history,” he replied with a grimace. “It’s not exactly straightforward. You’ll never believe me.”

I laughed. “You think
your
family history is hard to believe. Wait till you hear mine!”

He didn’t smile. “Trust me. It’s complicated. Or it was. There’s nothing too complicated now, though, as it’s just Mother and me.”

“Just the two of you in this whole place?”

“And a few si —” He stopped himself, covering whatever he was about to say with a cough.

“A few what?” I asked.

“Servants,” he said quickly.

“You weren’t going to say that. What were you going to say?” I insisted.

Aaron shook his head and stood up. “I don’t think I can tell you,” he said. “I’m not sure. Look, why don’t you tell me about you instead? How
did
you get here? It’s supposed to be impossible.”

“It nearly was,” I said. “I tried again and again.” Could I tell him about the ring? It was tight on my finger, the diamond warm against my closed palm. I could feel it almost scorching my hand, getting hotter. What was it saying? Tell him? Or keep it to myself?

Why should I keep it secret, anyway? I had nothing to hide. “Look, if I tell you, you promise you’ll believe me?” I wanted to tell him. I felt I could trust him. I don’t know why. There was just something about him that I could connect with. As though we spoke the same language.

“Why would I do otherwise? Why would you lie?”

“OK,” I said. “Well, it was this. It kind of led me here.” I held my hand out and opened my palm to reveal the ring. “Now, I know you’ll think I’m making it up or you’ll think I’m crazy or something, but I promise I’m telling you the —”

“Where did you get that?” Aaron reached out and grabbed my hand, pulling it toward him to look closer. His voice shook so much I could barely understand what he’d said. He swallowed
hard, catching his breath. His pale face had turned even paler. “Where did you get it?” he repeated.

“I — I found it,” I said uncertainly.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

“Well, I — yes, I think I do.” Did he know what the ring was? Had he heard of Neptune, heard the story?

“I’ve never seen it,” he said in a whisper. “Not the real one!”

He fell silent, squeezing his mouth into a tight line and his eyes into slits while he thought. “All right,” he said, making up his mind about something. “We’ve got time. Come with me.”

With that, he motioned to me to follow him to the door. Glancing down the corridor again, he nodded back to me. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

Aaron led me down a maze of corridors, scurrying quickly along till we came to a thick wooden door with bars and bolts across it. I followed him outside. Below us, the sea washed against rocks in the semidarkness. We ran around to the front of the castle and back inside through a small arched door. Following Aaron inside, I felt as though I were stepping further and further into a dream. Was any
of this real? I mean, it
felt
real. The bricks of the castle were thick and hard, the rocks below were jagged and cold. But, still, something in the at mosphere made me feel as though I were floating, suspended just above reality, as if the castle really were floating on the mist.

I closed the door behind me.

We were in what looked like a small church. A tiny chapel in a remote wing of the castle. A few rows of seats all faced a raised platform at the front. Stained-glass windows were filled with pictures of biblical scenes.

I followed Aaron to the raised platform. Right at the back of it there was a chest. He opened it. “Look,” he said, pointing inside.

I peered into it. It contained a glass cabinet and, inside that — two rings. I looked closer at the one on the left, comparing it with the ring on my finger. It was identical!

“But that’s — but they’re —”

“Imitations,” he said. “My great-grandfather made them. From the descriptions, from the stories passed down through generation after generation.”

“What stories? What descriptions?” I asked, my head spinning. “Do you mean about Neptune and Aurora?”

“You know?” He gasped. “You know the story?”

“That’s all I know,” I said. “Please, tell me.”

Aaron moved away from the cabinet. “When
Neptune and Aurora married, they cast a spell on their rings. While they were held by a human and merperson who were in love —”

He glanced at me to check that I understood what he meant, to check that we were talking about the same thing. Maybe to check that I didn’t think he was ridiculous for believing in mermaids.
I don’t only believe in them,
I thought,
I am one!
But I wasn’t going to say that. Not yet. Not if it was just a story. Surely boys like him didn’t really believe in mermaids. Not that I’d ever met a boy quite like him. I don’t know if I’d met
anyone
like him before. All I knew was, I wanted to hear all about whatever he had to say.

I nodded for him to continue.

“As long as the rings were worn by one from land and one from the sea who loved each other, there would always be harmony between the two worlds,” he went on. “And there was. For the brief time the marriage lasted, there really was peace between land and sea. No ships were wrecked on rocks; no cargo was stolen; no sirens lured fishermen to their watery graves. Just peace. The two worlds thrived together. It was a magical time.”

“And then she left him,” I said, remembering what Shona had said about her history lesson.

Aaron’s green eyes bore down on me. “She
what
?” he asked angrily.

“She — she left him?” I said more uncertainly. “Didn’t she?”

“You know nothing!” he snapped. “Believing in such nonsense. How dare you?”

I pulled at my hair, twisting it around my fingers. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought she did. I thought she broke his heart. I’m sorry.”

“She did not leave him,” Aaron said firmly. “She loved him more than anything in the world. I’ll tell you what her love for him drove her to do.”

I clamped my mouth shut. No more interruptions.

“She loved him so much and believed so strongly in the magic they had created that she attempted the impossible. One night, she decided to show him what she could do out of love for him. You know what she did?”

I shook my head.

“She thought she could swim underwater to his palace. She believed their love was so great, it surpassed the normal laws of her human world. She believed she could become a mermaid. She drowned.”

Neither of us spoke for a long time. As we stood in the silence, it felt as though the chapel were the whole world. As though the sea outside the window were there only for us. We were somehow at the center of everything, the center of something so important that — that what? I couldn’t tell.

“It was her birthday. She’d wanted to surprise him as her present to him,” Aaron went on. “Her own birthday, and she wanted to surprise
him.
They’d only been married two years and a week.”

“Go on,” I said softly.

“When Neptune found her body, he took the ring from her and —”

“I know this part,” I said quickly — even if it wasn’t exactly how Mr. Beeston had told it. I had to get it right this time, show Aaron he could trust me. “He tore the pearl ring from her finger and threw away his own ring, the diamond one.”

“That’s right,” Aaron said. “And no one has ever seen the rings — till now.” He fell silent.

“The kraken had Neptune’s ring,” I said. “I found it.”

Aaron stepped toward me. “Emily, these rings can only be worn by certain folk.”

“I know,” I said, swallowing.

“A human and a merperson in love, or a child of such a pair . . .” His voice trailed off, and he looked at me, questioning.

I didn’t reply. Finally I nodded.

“I thought as much,” Aaron said, suddenly smiling. “You’re a semi-mer! You are, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

“You said you swam here through the tunnels. No human can swim underwater that far. It’s impossible.” He grinned wider. His whole face
changed with his smile; it was like watching a two-dimensional picture come to life. “You found the diamond ring!” he said. “You really found it!”

“Why is that so great?” I asked.

Aaron led me back to the glass cabinet. “Look,” he said, pointing to an inscription in black, swirly writing beneath the rings.

I read aloud. “‘When the rings touch, they will overrule any act born of hatred or anger. Only love shall reign.’”

I looked up at Aaron. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“There’s a curse,” he answered me, his face darkening. “It must be undone. And soon.”

“What curse?” I shuddered. Did he know about the curse on me? Surely not — he couldn’t!

Aaron brushed my question away with a flick of his hand. “We still need to find the pearl ring, though,” he said. “And that’s impossible.”

“Who says it’s impossible? I found this one!” I said, my breath tripping over my words as it raced into my throat.

“The second ring will be much harder to find. The one Neptune ripped from Aurora’s finger. He swore it could only be found when it was seen under the light of a full moon. But there was a catch.”

“A catch?”

“The ring was buried so deep it has never seen the moon’s light. And so it has never been found.
Neptune and Aurora married under a full moon on the spring equinox, at midnight. At that moment, the sea’s tide is the lowest it ever gets — and only then is it low enough for the ring to be visible. But those conditions occur only every five hundred years. It’s virtually impossible to find it. We’ll never stop the curse.”

“What curse?” I asked again.

Aaron walked to a small recess. His breath misted the windowpane as he looked out. “After Aurora died, Neptune turned to hatred and anger. There were storms for years. Ships were wrecked at sea. Many fishermen died, many humans perished in the seas, over the years that followed. But even that wasn’t enough for Neptune. Even that couldn’t take away his rage.”

“So what did he do?”

“First he banned any more marriages between humans and merfolk. He swore the two worlds would never again live in harmony.”

Well, yes, I knew all about
that.
“And second?” I asked.

“Neptune and Aurora had two children,” said Aaron. “A son and a daughter.”

“What happened to them?”

“In his grief and sorrow, Neptune cursed them,” he went on. “His own children. Each of his own children, and their children, and every generation that followed — every single one of them would
die young, and always on Aurora’s birthday, as she did. He couldn’t forgive her — and because of this, her family would forever be punished.”

“His family too,” I said.

Aaron nodded. “Their family. And there was another curse placed on them. They would never fit in, never be of one world or the other. They would be not quite human, not quite merperson. Whichever form they took, it would always be held back by remnants of their other form. Every single generation forever would be the same. Do you understand?”

Did I understand? If only he knew how well I understood! It was almost the same as the curse on me! “Aaron. Look!” I thrust my hands in front of his face, opening my fingers so he could see how they were webbed.

“Of course,” he said. “I should have noticed before. I was too busy looking at the ring. “You’re the same.”

I nodded.

“The only way to undo these curses would be to bring the rings together again,” said Aaron.

“Because the curses came from hatred and anger,” I said, finally understanding the significance of what I had found. We just had to find the other ring, and we could end the curse on his family! And end the curse on me too! I could keep being
a semi-mer! I wouldn’t have to lose my parents! The thought sent my hopes soaring. Till Aaron spoke again.