The Tree of Water (42 page)

“He? Who? The dog?”

The children exchanged a glance. Then the girl spoke again.

“Our father. The guards bringed him one night when the moon was full, a long, long time ago. We was very little then. He wasn't allowed to stay very long, just long enough to hug us and tell us our names and not to be afraid, that he would find a way to get us out one day. But he never did. He never comed back. I don't think he ever will. It's been a very long time.”

Ven scratched his head. His curiosity was blazing like wildfire, making his scalp and skin itch. “You're brother and sister?” The children nodded. “Twins?” They looked at him oddly, and he realized if they didn't know the word for
dog
, they probably didn't know what he meant. He thought about every warning he had been given in the sea about telling names, and then threw caution to the winds. “I'm Ven—and this is Char. Can you tell me your names?”

“I'm Hannah,” the girl said after a moment. “And my brother is Sam. He doesn't talk much, so I do it for him.”

“Who teaches you things?” Ven asked. “How did you learn to talk?”

Hannah shrugged. “I listen to the guards when they don't know it.”

“We need to get them outta here,” Char said. “The tide's comin' in, and soon it will be Total Dark. They probably can't swim.”

“You're right,” said Ven. “This dog is Finlay, by the way—he belongs to a friend of ours inside the Gated City. I'm glad he has taken care of you.” He helped Hannah to stand, while Char helped Sam, then signaled to Finlay, and slowly helped them out of the ballast tank and into the dark core of the prison ship.

“It's prolly a good thing it's dark,” Char said as he pulled Sam's arm up over his own shoulder to steady him and help him walk. “After spendin' their whole lives in darkness, the sun's gonna burn their eyes at first.”

“Very true,” said Ven as he helped Hannah out of the shipwreck and onto the rocky sand of the windswept beach. “Plus it should help hide us until we get back to the Crossroads Inn. We're going to have to walk right past the Gated City—and even if the thieves aren't able to get out right now, they still always have guards on the walls and people on the Skywalk. I think we should try very hard not to be seen. I want Felonia to think I'm long gone.”

“Yeah, and we don' wanna tip her off that these two are free,” Char said. “I don' know why they were so important to the Thief Queen, or whoever was keepin' them prisoner, but there's sure to be some fallout when they find out they're missin'.”

“If they ever do,” Ven said. He looked back at the broken piece of the
Athenry
. It looked like nothing more than a large black rock formation in the dark. “No wonder no one knew what had become of it. It must have run aground in the harbor just outside the Gated City, probably in a storm. All these years it's been here, the last dozen or so serving as a prison for these guys. I wonder what's so special about them.”

Char looked back at the Gated City in the distance. The torches had been lit all along its high walls, filling the darkness with thin wisps of smoke rising ominously into the air.

“We prolly will never know,” he said. “At least
I
won't. I'm never goin' back in there again—and that's prolly the only place to find out.”

Ven came to the edge of the beach where the dry, rocky dunes met the wet sand. He squinted in the darkness, but could see nothing but the rolling waves.

“Amariel? Are you there?”

“Yes.” Her voice floated over the wind and the crashing of the waves. “Can't you see me? I can see you clear as day.”

“Not a bit,” Ven admitted. “Can you follow us down the coast back to central Kingston?”

“Certainly,” shouted the merrow over the noise of the ocean. “Who do you have there?”

“The innocent prisoners.”

“Ah! So that's the
Athenry
,” Amariel said. “I guess that makes sense. By the way, there's someone watching you from the wall of the Gated City.”

Panic coursed through Ven, quenching his curiosity and leaving him weak.

“Where?”

“About midway down the wall, towards the Outer Market. On the good side of the tunnel. Near the torch that keeps flickering.”

“Hannah, do you think you can stand without help for a minute?” The girl nodded. Ven dug into his vest pocket and pulled out the jack-rule. He extended the glass that magnified things from far away, thankful that he had not dropped the tool in the sea the many times he had come close to doing so.

He held up the jack-rule's glass to his eye.

And gasped.

 

45

A Rescue, Long Time in Coming

What looked like a giant watery eye, black as the coming night, was staring back at him from within a dark, floating ring.

Ven almost dropped the jack-rule.

He blinked quickly, then held the glass up to his eye again.

The floating eye was gone.

In its place he saw a man in a long, dark cloak and hood. He was standing near one of the large streetlamp torches, half turned away, putting a spyglass of his own into the folds of his cloak. Then he turned back to Ven.

As if he could see him.

I must have been looking straight into the lens of his spyglass
, Ven thought.

The man stood motionless for a moment. Then he grabbed his hood and pulled it down.

Ven gasped again. Even in the almost-complete dark he recognized him.

“It's Mr. Coates!” he shouted. “Char, it's Mr. Coates!”

“Seriously?” Char's voice rang with excitement. “Oh, I'm so glad he's alive. Last time we were in his shop, I wasn't sure he had made it out, blood on the floor an' all.”

Ven turned the tiny ring on the edge of his telescoping tool to try and focus better. Mr. Coates's dark eyes above dark circles and beneath dark hair came into view. That hair seemed a little grayer than the last time Ven had seen it a few months before, but perhaps he was imagining it.

He stepped back a little farther, and saw through the glass that at the man's side was an enormous dog, muscular and shaggy, standing atop the Skyway with the weapons maker. The giant beast shook, and tufts of hair exploded into the air around him and were carried off a moment later by a gust of wind into the dark. Ven broke into a wide grin.

“It's Munx!” he called to Char. “Munx is on the Skyway with him!”

Char exhaled happily. “Good. Good—he's all right too, then. I love that dog.”

Mr. Coates held out both his hands in front of him, palms down. Then he put one hand flat on his chest, near his heart.

“He's trying to tell me something,” Ven said as the weapons maker repeated the gesture. “But I can't tell what it is.” He held the small telescope out for Char to look through. Char did, then shrugged.

Ven peered through the glass again. Mr. Coates was patting his chest harder now, insistently.

“It looks like he's trying to say that something belongs to him,” Ven said. Through the glass he could see Mr. Coates look over his shoulder anxiously. The man reached back into the folds of his garment and took out his spyglass again. He extended it toward them, looked through it, then began sweeping his left arm violently, as if to hurry them away toward the north.

“He wants us to get out of here, that seems clear,” said Ven. “We had better do as he says.” He heard a bark, and turned around to where the two young former captives stood, fighting to remain upright in the sea wind.

Finlay, Mr. Coates's other dog, was running in circles around Sam and Hannah, chasing the foaming waves away from the children as they skittered back into the sea. Char chuckled, but Ven felt the backs of his eyes burn with sudden curiosity.

And realization.

“They're—they're
his
,” he said slowly. “That's what he's telling us, Char—Sam and Hannah are
his kids
!”

“Criminey,” Char whispered. “Are—are you sayin' he's the one that put the skeleton key in that bottle?”

“Makes sense, doesn't it?” Ven said as he hurried toward the little girl. “When you saw the skeleton key, you remembered you had seen one like it in his shop. And he told us that while he knew about the tunnel out of the market, he couldn't leave, didn't he?
There are many layers in a prison—it all depends on who's doing the watching,
that's what he said, remember?” He stopped in front of the young girl. “Hannah—can you look through this, please? Up on the wall.”

The girl stared at him, then reluctantly put her eye to the glass.

She stood still for a moment, then began to shake with excitement.

“That's him! That's our father!”

“Oh, man, we gotta get them outta here,” Char said. “If he's on the north wall of the Gated City, he's real far away from his shop in the Outer Market. In fact, he's a deep as you can get in the Inner Ring—right in the middle of the Raven's Guild territory. He's prolly watchin' to make sure we get the kids outta the
Athenry
and to safety.”

“Let's do that, then,” Ven agreed. He took hold of Hannah's arm. “Come on—let's get out of here.”

“I want to see him! I want to see my father!” the young girl squealed, twisting away.

“Come with us—please come with us,” Ven begged, pulling her as gently as he could. The sand was slippery, and he was having trouble standing upright after all the time in the sea. His lungs and skin were still waterlogged, and even the weak girl was more than he could hold on to.

Hannah twisted free and stumbled toward the city in the distance. She had only gotten a few paces before Char tackled her, pulling her down with him in a heap on the sand. “It's all right,” he said, grabbing her arms as she scratched at him. “I know—I really do—but we can't go there right now. We have to get you and Sam to safety before we do anythin' else—your dad wants it that way, too. Come on. Please. Just come on.”

Weeping, the girl pulled away and tried to drag herself toward the city.

Night had fallen completely, and the moon had not yet risen. All around them was dark wind and crashing sea, and the flickering lamplight in the distance. Over the sound of the waves, Ven suddenly heard a voice floating on the wind. It was sweet and warm, a wordless tune he thought he knew, and he smiled.

The children stopped. Hannah ceased her struggle, and Sam froze where he stood. They turned toward the south, following the sound.

Ven sighed in relief. The merrow's song had not only enchanted the frantic children, but made the buzzing in his ears from the salt water and the ache in his head disappear.

Thank you, Amariel,
he thought.
You are always there when I need your help.

Maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought that the song grew a little louder, a little more amused in reply. The merrow had said that thrum in the upworld got lost in the wind, but now that they had been to the edge of life and death together, maybe their messages would still be able to find each other.

Ven took hold of Hannah's limp wrist, while Char put his arm around Sam's small shoulders. Together they helped the frail children along the beach, long into the night, as the moon rose and set again, over the pebbles and broken shells, around the fragments of lobster traps and scraps of rope wedged in the sand, away from the walls of the Gated City, all the way south until the lights of Kingston finally came into view as the sky was growing paler with the coming of Forelight.

At the edge of an old abandoned dock.

Just as the merrow's song ended.

The twins collapsed, exhausted, onto the sand. Char bent down beside them, puffing as well.

“I thought movin' through the water was harder than the air,” he said between breaths. “But now I miss how much the sea carried me.”

“Rest for a minute,” Ven said. “I'll be right back.”

He trotted to the dock and out to the end of it, taking care to avoid the rotted planks. His face, dry and sore from salt, broke into an enormous smile.

Floating in the water, where she had been so many times before, was a girl with green eyes and long, wet hair, beautiful multicolored scales peeking out of the water below her armpits.

She was grinning broadly in return, unbothered by the fact that her porpoise teeth were showing.

“Thank you so much,” he said earnestly. “It's amazing how a merrow song can calm down even the most panicking land-liver.”

Amariel shrugged. “I've gotten used to having to do that, ever since I rescued you. It is, however, getting a little old.”

Ven thought back to his birthday, to the thrill of the Inspection voyage, the terror of the Fire Pirate attack, the explosion of the ship whose name he could no longer remember, and the beauty of the songs that greeted him as he lay on the piece of floating wreckage.

“Well, we did it,” he said. “We finally did it! You've shown me the Deep—”

“Keep your voice down,” the merrow interrupted. “As you know by now, that's hardly something for me to brag about.”

Ven laughed. “I don't know about that. You brought the first son of Earth to the bottom of the world, fulfilled a couple of prophecies, saved the Tree of Water, helped return the dragon scale to Dyancynos, and lived to tell about it. I think that may make you more famous one day than—what's her name? The merrow from your school that the skellig is named after?”

“Lilyana,” said Amariel, smiling more slightly. “And you did a lot of that while I was sleeping.”

“It doesn't matter. It was always your idea.”

The dragon's words returned to his mind.

We can sometimes observe each other's worlds, but that does not mean we can live in them. Think of Coreon's people, who gave up the air to live within the sea—and they can never go back.