Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun (18 page)

The guards threw us in a cell and locked the door. Laughing and congratulating themselves, they swam away.

I was beginning to get a sense of déjà vu. Except, this time, I had the feeling that Neptune wasn’t about to turn up and tell us things weren’t how they looked.

I suspected things were
exactly
how they looked. And I can tell you, they didn’t look good.

I swam to the edge of the cave and slid down the wall next to a pipe with a brown jellyfish poking out of its end. Beside me, a bunch of thin reeds were tangled up like a plate of spaghetti. They swayed with the movement of the water.

I put my head in my hands and wondered if things could get any worse.

Which was pretty much the moment that they did.

“Emily.” Shona was tugging on my arm. Her voice was as wobbly as the jellyfish in the pipe.

I looked up. “What?”

She pointed to the bars at the front of the cave. Or, more accurately, she pointed just outside the bars to the tunnel, and to what was swimming along it.

I put everything I possibly had into stopping myself from screaming — mainly because it was such a small space that I would probably have deafened Shona if I had, and the last thing I needed was for my best friend to be incapable of ever hearing me again.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The last thing I needed was to see the shark with a giant spear on the front of its head swimming directly toward us.

But, unfortunately, that was exactly what I got.

“Just stay calm,” I said to Shona.

Who was I kidding?
Stay calm?
How were we supposed to do
that
?

The shark was coming closer. It was right outside the cage. What if it got in? Had Njord sent it? Was this it? Was this was how it was all going to end? After everything we’d been through, were we going to be a midmorning snack?

It came closer still. The spear was up against the bars now.

Shona edged toward me and gripped my arm. “I’m scared,” she said.

“Me too. Just . . . just don’t panic,” I said, stating the obvious and the impossible.

We swam slowly and carefully backward, edging into the farthest corner of the cave.

The creature pressed its head against the bars. Its spear poked right through them and into our cell. We had nowhere to go. The spear was longer than the cave.

Shaking, and trying to remember the words to any prayer I’d ever heard, I closed my eyes as the spear edged toward me and touched my forehead.

D
o not fear me.

What was that? I opened my eyes. The shark and its spear had retreated. It wasn’t going to smash my skull in. Not yet, anyway.

“Shona, was that you?”

Shona was curled up next to me, her tail flapping as fast as a butterfly’s wings, her eyes tightly closed.

“Was what me?” she asked, nervously opening an eye.

I will not hurt you. I am not your enemy.

“That!”

Shona stared at me. “What?”

“The voice. Listen.”

She will not hear me.

OK, this was getting freaky. “Did you hear that?” I asked, a little less certainly.

Shona sighed. “Did I hear
what
?” she demanded. “All I can hear is you asking me questions — and my heart thumping at about a thousand beats per minute.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry. I’m just imagining it. Must be the waves, or maybe one of the guards somewhere.”

You are not imagining it. And I am not a guard.

I jumped up, swam to the front of the cave, and looked both ways. “Come on — stop hiding!” I shouted. “I know there’s someone there. You’re just trying to freak me out.”

Shona swam to join me. She looked left and right, too. “There’s no one there.”

“Exactly. They’re too cowardly to show their faces — hiding in the shadows!” I stuck my head through the bars. “Ha! See! Called your bluff there, didn’t I? You can’t scare me, you know. I’m not —”

Look directly in front of you.

The voice nearly made me leap out of my scales. Look directly in front of me? I wasn’t going to do
that.
The only thing right in front of me was the scary shark with the giant spear. Nothing in the world would make me look
that
in the eyes! Unless . . .

I slowly turned my head to face it. “Is it you?” I whispered.

“Is
what
me?” Shona asked.

“Not you.” I pointed at the shark. I swallowed hard, and then I looked it in the eyes. “You.”

The creature lowered its head in a soft nod.

Yes, it’s me.

OK. So it wasn’t enough that we were trapped in a cave, down in the belly of a mountain, in a place no one would ever find us as long as we lived. Now I was going mad as well, hearing sharks talking to me. Well, that was just great.

You brought me back to life. In exchange, I will be your loyal friend forever.

“What if I don’t want a spear-carrying shark to be my friend forever?” I said.

“What?” Shona asked. “What are you talking about?”

I am not a shark.

“Not a shark? What are you then?”

I am a narwhal.

“A what?”

“Emily! What are you talking about? Are you OK?” Shona was shaking my arm.

How was I supposed to explain this? Lie? Make something up? Brush it off? No. This was Shona. She was my best friend, and I’d always told her the truth about everything. I wasn’t going to change that now — even if she did decide that I’d lost my mind and was probably better off staying locked up.

I nudged a finger at the shark — or the narwhal — whatever that was. “It’s talking to me,” I said.

Shona let out a breath and nodded slowly. “OK . . .” she said.

“Honestly!” I insisted.

Shona looked at the creature, still hovering outside the cage, still directly facing us.

As she did, I looked more closely at it, too. That was when I realized it didn’t actually look like a shark. It didn’t have a fin on its back, and actually, apart from the spear, it didn’t look frightening.

It looked more like a small whale than a shark. It had a dark-black back, two small fins, a little tail, and tiny black eyes. Its tummy was speckled with gray spots that looked a bit like freckles, and its spear wasn’t all that scary. In fact, it made it look almost magical — like a unicorn of the sea.

“You know, there’s something familiar about it, now that I think of it,” Shona said. “I’m sure I’ve seen a picture of one of these somewhere — at school, probably.” She thought for a moment. “I think it was in Seas and Species. There are these rare creatures that have spears sticking out of their heads. What were they called, now?” She scrunched up her forehead, tapping a finger against her mouth and flicking her tail from side to side as she thought.

“Um. Were they called narwhals?” I asked hesitantly.

“Narwhals! That’s it!” Shona said, clapping her hands together. “Wait! How did you know that?”

I pointed at the narwhal. “The narwhal told me.”

Shona stared at the narwhal, then back at me. “It
told
you?”

Please, tell your friend I am a “he,” not an “it.”

“Er, he’s a he,” I said awkwardly.

Shona swam up to the bars of the cave. “Wow. This is, like, one of the rarest creatures in the ocean.”

Stay here.

The narwhal’s voice was urgent.

I will be back.

In a flash, he was gone.

“Did we scare him off?” Shona asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He said to stay here.” Not that we had any choice in the matter.

“What do you mean, he
said
? I didn’t hear anything. Are you making this up?”

I thought for a minute. How was I going to get Shona to believe me? Then I remembered something: the kraken. “Shona, do you remember on Allpoints Island when I could hear the kraken’s thoughts?”

“Because you were the one who woke it.”

“Exactly! Maybe this is similar to that.
I
dropped the crystal that woke the narwhal, so now I can hear his voice.”

“Wow,” Shona said.

“But I think he only activated it when he touched me with his spear just now.”

Neither of us had time to say anything else, as a swishing sound was coming toward us. We both looked up to see the guards heading back to our cell.

“Njord sent us to search you,” one of them said, reaching into his tail pocket for a key. “Says we need another crystal. He thought two would be enough and they’ve melted everything else, but because the spell was cast directly on him, it turns out he needs one more. And you’re our best hope of finding it.”

Suddenly, another guard appeared from nowhere. He must have been hiding out of sight in the tunnel’s dark shadows. “Yeah, I got that message, too,” he said. “Already searched them.”

The guards looked up at him. “You got the message?” one of them asked. He eyed the new guard suspiciously. “We never saw you there.”

The new guard pointed to his ear. It looked as though he had something stuck inside it. An earpiece — maybe a microphone. Was he getting orders directly from Njord? I dreaded to think what instructions he would be given next. “Perhaps you haven’t got one of these,” he said pointedly to the other guards.

They looked at each other. They didn’t seem happy.

“I’ve told you, I’ve already searched them,” the new guard said impatiently. “They’ve got nothing. If they ever
had
a third crystal, they certainly haven’t got it anymore.”

“But they’ve
got
to have one. Njord still isn’t free. His neck has melted enough that he can move his head around, his tail is flapping like crazy, and his arms have melted, too, but his body is still stuck. He needs a third crystal. We can’t go back without one.”

“In that case, you’d better find it quickly. If they ever had another one, my guess is they dropped it when you were bringing them here. Search the tunnel. I’m sure you’ll find it soon and get yourself back in Njord’s good graces.”

The two guards exchanged a quick look. Then, with a shrug, they turned and swam off. As soon as they had rounded the corner, the new guard came toward us and pulled a chain of keys from around his neck. As he approached the door, I noticed he was younger than he’d sounded. He only looked a couple of years older than us — maybe fourteen or fifteen. He was quite tall and very thin, with deep-blue eyes, a shiny green tail, and hair so blond it was almost white. Shona was staring at him — and blushing. He glanced at her and allowed himself a brief smile.

“Come on,” he said, rattling a key in the lock. “We haven’t got long. Even a pair of idiots like those two won’t take long to figure out I was lying and come back to search you.” He rattled the key a bit more. “I’m Seth,” he added.

“You were lying?” I asked. “You didn’t get orders directly from Njord?”

Seth pulled the black thing out of his ear and held it out to show us. It was a small pebble! “What, with this?” he asked, a hint of a smile on his face. “No, I didn’t get my orders directly from Njord.”

“Why are you doing this?” Shona asked, flicking her hair to the side as she spoke. Was she flirting with him? At a time like
this
?

Seth held out a hand to help her out of the cell door. Not that she needed it. She had been swimming perfectly well on her own for her entire life. I swam out behind her and joined them in the tunnel.

“Because of what I saw,” he said. He nodded at me. “I saw you talking to the narwhal.”

Oh, great. He must have thought I was completely bonkers, swimming around talking to a strange sea creature who didn’t show any signs of talking back.

“Hmm,” I said.

Seth looked at me seriously. “No one can do that,” he whispered. “No one . . . except Neptune.”

“Neptune?” I blurted out. “But . . . but . . .”

He glanced around furtively. “Listen, we haven’t got long,” he said. “I’ll tell you all you need to know to keep you safe. And then you have to get out of here as quickly as you can.”

He pulled us into a thin crack in the wall of the tunnel. It must have been where he’d been hiding when the guards had turned up.

“Neptune and Njord used to rule the seas together, many hundreds of years ago,” Seth began, “but things were never easy between them.”