Lalani of the Distant Sea

by Erin Entrada Kelly

  Except.

  There was no mountain.

  The horizon had played tricks on her.

  There was only a hill.

  A single hill with a tree on top.

  She made a small, quiet sound, like a whimper.

  She fell again.

  Lalani thought that was the end of her story. She thought she was a girl who had gone on a journey, suffered many hardships, and would now drift away, having accomplished nothing.

  So after she fell the last time, she stayed there. She inhaled the smell of fragrant grass. She felt the blades against her cheek. She closed her eyes.

  When did she open them again?

  When she heard a sound. Getting closer.

  The pahaalusk. Its round, webbed feet pushing into the ground. Its soft eyes looking at her. It seemed to reach her quickly, though it moved slowly. The pahaalusk lowered its head and nudged its nose under Lalani’s body. Was it nuzzling her? Perhaps it was afraid, too, but no—it was lifting her. It moved her onto its back, and now she was draped over its shell, holding on.

  The pahaalusk moved gracefully for several hours. It placed her in front of a tree with a magnificent trunk. The bark coiled and twined into beautiful patterns all the way up, sprouting into heavy branches filled with hundreds of birds. There were so many that Lalani thought they were leaves at first.

  It was such a wonderful sight that she forgot she was so miserable.

  But only for a moment.

  Lalani and the pahaalusk stared at the tree as the coils of the trunk moved and rearranged themselves. The trunk was thick and strong but seemed to move as easily as water. It was being pulled open, Lalani realized, by two brown hands emerging from the tree itself. A delicate foot followed. Then another.

  A girl.

  Her hair was bright and shining.

  She wore a dress made of leaves and a belt of vine.

  She was a small creature, even smaller than Lalani, but her eyes—brown and sparkling—held many secrets.

  Something was slung across her back, but Lalani couldn’t see what it was.

  “Do you have my udyo?” the girl asked.

  Her voice was delicate, too.

  Lalani’s mind tumbled. Udyo? She was so tired. Where had she heard that before?

  She searched her memory and remembered Ellseth touching his magical cane to her knee.

  “I’m Fei Diwata,” the girl said. “Are you human? Why do you not stand? Do humans move about this way?”

  I’m tired and ill, Lalani said. Or, she meant to say it.

  Fei Diwata crouched in front of her, placed her hand on the pahaalusk’s shell, and leaned forward. Her hair splayed across the ground like a dazzling puddle. Her lips were pink, and her breath smelled like flowers. She frowned and touched Lalani’s cheek.

  “You’re hurt,” Fei Diwata said.

  Lalani found the strength to speak at last: “My friend, Usoa . . .”

  “Ah, the mindoren.”

  “Yes.”

  “The nunso are taking care of her. She will be fine.”

  “The nunso? But I thought . . .”

  “They are complicated creatures. But aren’t we all?”

  Lalani tasted dirt on her tongue, and blood.

  “You’ve been bitten by a goyuk,” Fei Diwata said. “You need to eat one of my osnoom.”

  “Osnoom?”

  Fei Diwata disappeared. When she reappeared, she was holding a flower. Bright yellow, with specks of white.

  “Here.” Fei Diwata plucked off a petal and placed it in Lalani’s mouth. “Don’t worry, I have gardens full of them.”

  The osnoom tasted sweet and bitter all at once. Before Lalani could decide whether to chew or swallow it whole, the petal melted onto her tongue and Fei Diwata replaced it with another one.

  Lalani wondered how many bushels of osnoom she could carry back to Sanlagita. Would Fei Diwata be willing to part with any seeds? Ditasa-Ulod had made it sound as if Fei Diwata would never help a human.

  What had Ditasa-Ulod said?

  Fei Diwata sees into the hearts of all living things. And she prizes one virtue above all else. If she looks into your heart and doesn’t see it there, you will die. Do you want to die?

  “I don’t want to die,” Lalani muttered.

  “You won’t die if you eat my osnoom,” Fei Diwata said. After she placed the third petal on Lalani’s tongue, she asked, “Have you seen my udyo?”

  The udyo?

  She was asking about Ellseth’s cane, wasn’t she?

  “Your udyo was lost,” Lalani said. She groaned. She ached so badly. “It was lost when our mountain broke open. I’m sorry.” She spit blood into the dirt.

  Fei Diwata puckered her lips. “That’s strange, because I sense that it is very near,” she said. She cast her eyes at the pahaalusk and studied him from under her dark lashes. “Perhaps this creature has it.”

  “I saw it disappear,” Lalani said.

  “What’s that around your neck?”

  “It’s a pouch I took from a mindoren before he died. I didn’t mean to steal it. I was trying to save him, but . . .” Lalani replied. “His name was Ellseth.”

  “Ellseth is the mindoren who stole my udyo,” Fei Diwata said. She took the pouch from Lalani’s neck and worked it open with her small fingers. When the arrowhead fell into her palm, her mouth curved into a perfect O. “This is it! You do have it!”

  “No,” Lalani said. “This is just an arrowhead.”

  Fei Diwata raised an eyebrow. “I know my own udyo.”

  She reached behind her and grasped the strange object slung across her back.

  “This is my bow and arrow,” Fei Diwata said proudly. She kissed the arrowhead and shoved it in place. “See? My udyo.”

  “But how—” Lalani began.

  How could such a small thing make such a big difference?

  Fei Diwata strode forward, closing the distance between herself and her tree. She aimed her arrow. It sailed through the air and landed in the trunk between two coils in the bark. The tree immediately sprang to life. All those birds—hundreds of them, impossible to count—spread their wings and took flight. There was a sound unlike anything Lalani had ever heard. A most beautiful music.

  “Birdsong . . .” Fei Diwata said, “carries all of life’s good fortunes.”

  Rise

  Drum and Kul left after first dawn several days later. Did they believe they would make it? No one could tell. Their faces were hard as stone and never wavered—not as they boarded the ship, not as they gave their speeches, not as the ship pushed away from Sanlagita with a thick crowd of villagers looking on.

  No one cheered.

  Veyda, Cade, Hetsbi, and Lo Yuzi watched silently, elbow to elbow.

  The water lapped against the sides of the boat. They heard every splash. They heard their beating hearts. They felt a breeze from the distant sea.

  Veyda and Hetsbi started a new routine. They met Cade in the dark and the three of them walked to the northern shore together, Veyda following Cade, Hetsbi behind her. They sat together, watching and waiting.

  Night after night.

  “What if Drum and Kul make it across the sea and Lalani is there, too? What if they find her?” Hetsbi asked one night, his voice like a cresting wave.

  They had discussed this before, of course.

  But surely Drum and Kul wouldn’t make it—would they?

  No, they would not.

  The ship appeared on the fifth daybreak, but it didn’t announce itself from the fog intact. It arrived on the waves in pieces. One board, followed by another. Ragged and splintered. Perhaps the ship had fallen apart in a storm. Perhaps something had taken a bite out of it.

  As pieces of wood wandered to shore, Veyda, Hetsbi, and Cade gathered them and wondered: What if Drum and Kul had still survived, somehow?

  Their answer came soon enough.

  Drifting in with the tide: a man’s arm, cut off at the elbow, clutching a gavel. Veyda was the f
irst to see it, and she didn’t waste a moment. She grabbed the gavel and ran to the village. Her hair trailed in the wind behind her. Her feet pounded the earth. The gavel was heavy, but weightless.

  When she arrived at the gong, she stopped. A cloud of dust puffed around her.

  She heaved her arms back and swung. The sound vibrated through her wrist, into her elbow, and across her shoulders to her heart. She hit the gong again and again, until she couldn’t do it any longer. Then she dropped the gavel to the ground and waited for the villagers.

  But she heard something else instead.

  Strange. Miraculous.

  She lifted her chin to find out where the sound was coming from and squinted into the sky, which had suddenly brightened. Music—yes, it was music. She had never heard anything like it before.

  Birds.

  Birds—hundreds of them.

  But not all of them were singing. Some carried plants in their beaks. Plants with thorny stems. Plants with leaves and berries. Plants heavy with possibility. And they carried flowers, too. Yellow flowers speckled with white. And Veyda watched, wide-eyed and curious, as plants, flowers, and seeds rained down around her, one by one.

  Pointed to the Sea

  When Veyda ran off, Cade was at her heels. He was there to hear the gong. He saw the first flight of birds, just like she did. But not Hetsbi. He had been ready to follow—he had his feet pointed in that direction, even—but something stopped him. A break in the mist.

  His heart thundered. What if it was Kul, clutching desperately on a piece of driftwood? And here he was, alone. He squinted his eyes for a better look. A long gaze over his shoulder.

  No, it wasn’t a piece of driftwood.

  It was a ship.

  No, not a ship. A boat.

  His boat.

  He would have recognized it anywhere, even from a hundred miles away. It was the boat that would never sail, the one left for scrap.

  But it didn’t make any sense. His boat had been discarded with the others. Destined for nothing.

  He turned around. How had his boat managed to crawl across the shore and drift into the current by itself? But now he saw that was not what had happened at all. There was someone inside the boat. A small outline that came into focus as the fog slipped away. Here was the dark hair. Here were the wide-set eyes. Here was the round face.

  “Lalani,” he said.

  You Are a Sanlagitan

  Imagine you’re a Sanlagitan. Things are no longer as they were. You don’t know everything about how a twelve-year-old girl made it to Isa and back again. Nevertheless, she is here. She arrived one morning like a ghost. No, not a ghost. She was an ordinary girl, made of flesh and blood. She arrived when the morning sun was just hitting the water. She was paddling a small scouting boat with a pahaalusk at her side. There was a tower of orange fruit in the bow.

  Look at the pitched roofs of the flenka houses, covered with thick meha leaves. There is the water well, in the center of the village, and a bright garden blooming with yellow flowers. And here is the schoolhouse, where boys learn to become men, and Veyda Yuzi teaches girls—and some boys, such as her brother—how to turn plants into medicine. There are plenty of plants for this purpose. The island is lush with them.

  There is birdsong. There is more than enough. You see Lalani and her mother, walking along the shore, carrying their fishing nets. They have a pen of shek who are never thirsty. They weave soft wool and dye it in the brightest colors, shades that Sanlagitans had never seen, like purple and marigold.

  The Sailing Days are no more. For now, there is no need. It is best to leave Isa to Isa. The village celebrates something else instead—the day a girl climbed out of an abandoned scouting boat and came back home.

  Lalani Sarita.

  Lalani of the distant sea.

  About the Author

  New York Times–bestselling author ERIN ENTRADA KELLY was awarded the Newbery Medal for Hello, Universe. Erin Entrada Kelly’s debut novel, Blackbird Fly, was a Kirkus Best Book, a School Library Journal Best Book, an ALSC Notable Book, and an Asian/Pacific American Literature Honor Book. She is also the author of The Land of Forgotten Girls, winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and You Go First, a New York Times bestseller, Spring 2018 Indie Next Pick, Kirkus Best Book, and School Library Journal Best Book. She grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and now lives in Delaware.

  www.erinentradakelly.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  LALANI OF THE DISTANT SEA. Text copyright © 2019 by Erin Entrada Kelly. Illustrations and map copyright © 2019 by Lian Cho. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  Cover art © 2019 by Lian Cho

  Cover design by Sylvie Le Floc’h

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kelly, Erin Entrada, author. | Cho, Lian, illustrator.

  Title: Lalani of the distant sea / by Erin Entrada Kelly ; illustrated by

  Lian Cho.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Greenwillow Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2019. | Summary: “Twelve-year-old Lalani Sarita takes on the impossible task of traveling to the legendary Mount Isa, towering on an island to the north. Generations of men and boys have died on the same quest—how can a timid young girl in a tiny boat survive the epic tests of the archipelago?”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019012556 | ISBN 9780062747273 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Village life—Fiction. | Sex role—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Fantasy. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Friendship. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Emotions & Feelings.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K45 Lal 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012556

  Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-274729-7

  Print ISBN: 978-00-62-74727-3 (hardback)

  1920212223PC/LSCH10987654321

  FIRST EDITION

  Greenwillow Books

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