The Tree of Water

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “Good idea,” Ven said. “Thanks for the rescue, Amariel. Good night.”

  “Don’t mention it. Good night, Chum.”

  Char, who was wet and shivering with cold, only nodded.

  By the time the moon rose over the wave-swept island, the only sound howling around the skellig’s peaks was the whine of the wind.

  And the crash of dark waves.

  8

  Firstlight

  When Ven awoke the sky was gray. The sun had not yet come up, but night was waning. The moon was gone, and the eastern horizon was brightening slowly. The men he had sailed with called this time of the day Foredawn. When the first ray of the sun finally did crest the horizon, it was known as Firstlight.

  In his sleepy haze, Ven felt certain that Firstlight was still a good way off.

  * * *

  I had been dreaming of home.

  Not the home in Vaarn where I was born and raised and lived with my Nain family, but my home at the Crossroads Inn on the Island of Serendair.

  My second home, and the place I consider my home now.

  In my dream I was standing in the center of the inn, in front of the roaring fire on the enormous hearth. That’s where McLean, the blind Lirin Singer, can almost always be found, playing music on his strange stringed instrument for the Spice Folk, invisible fairies who live in the inn as well.

  Only in my dream, there was no one to be seen in the inn.

  I could hear banging in the kitchen, where Char works when we are home. I went to the kitchen, but when I opened the door there was no one there, either.

  But I could smell the most delicious food cooking in the kitchen.

  I shouted for Char, and then Felitza, the girl Char has a crush on who does most of the kitchen work.

  No one answered.

  Finally I called out the name of the innkeeper, the lady who has been most like a mother to me since I left home.

  “Mrs. Snodgrass?”

  In reply, I could hear her voice, though I still could not see her.

  “Kitchen’s closed, Ven.”

  * * *

  Ven’s stomach was gnawing at him by the time Foredawn came.

  The heavy mist of Skellig Elarose was cool against his eyelids, which stung from the salt of the seawater. He still had not opened his eyes, but he could feel Char stir beside him. He reached over and poked his best friend, who groaned and rolled over.

  “You awake?” Ven asked sleepily.

  In response, Char stuck his cold, wet nose into Ven’s face and belched loudly.

  The odor of fish and unbrushed teeth filled his nostrils.

  Ven’s eyes popped open wide in shock.

  All around him was a sea of shiny dark fur and brown whiskers.

  Ven sat up.

  The entire slanted side of the skellig was covered in sea lions, hundreds of them, some stretching and groaning, some lying still. There were so many that the black rock of the tooth-like mountain had turned glossy brown and looked as if it had been covered completely in fur.

  He glanced around to find his friends. He saw Amariel a stone’s throw away, her arm tucked around the middle of an enormous sea lion sleeping on its back. Char had taken shelter nearby beneath a rocky outcropping on which four more sea lions were stretched out, still sound asleep.

  And beside him, an enormous female was snuggling against him, burping every now and then.

  “Er, Amariel?” Ven whispered.

  The merrow sighed but did not respond.

  He looked back at Char, but he was even farther out of earshot. He tried sending thoughts to him, the way thrum worked under the sea, but then remembered what Amariel had said.

  Land-livers don’t know about thrum, because the vibrations are caught by the air and the wind of the upworld, and so you can’t usually feel or hear thrum there.

  * * *

  I had absolutely no idea what to do.

  Amariel had said that the sea lion I came face-to-face with last night could have bitten my nose off. From the size of the teeth on the female sleeping next to me, I could see that she was not joking.

  And we were surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of them.

  Sea lions for the most part seem to be fairly harmless, playful creatures. But one thing I have learned from our journey in the sea so far is that most of the animals that live in the drift are much stronger than we land-livers, because the water is so much harder to just exist in.

  The slap of Amariel’s tail in the sea lion’s face last night was eye-opening. I had always known she was strong. I had forgotten this when she chose to grow human legs and walk on land, as merrows can, because being in the upworld made her fragile and nervous. But in the water, she is powerful, like the other creatures of the sea we had come upon.

  So while the sea lions may appear silly and awkward on land, in fact they weigh more than we do, and most of that weight is muscle.

  I had no idea how to warn my friends of the danger we were in without bringing that danger down upon us.

  Then, before I could come up with an answer, it was too late anyway.

  * * *

  A tiny ray of sun appeared at the edge of the eastern horizon.

  Firstlight.

  The sky near that sunbeam lightened to a pale blue, while the rest of the world remained gray.

  A bellowing bark sounded from the top of the skellig.

  A moment later, hundreds of harsh voices took up the reply, echoing off the rocky island and making the ground shake. The noise battered Ven’s eardrums, then was swallowed by the heavy mist of the sea.

  Like an avalanche, the slippery brown beasts began sliding down the sharp hillside, rolling into the water, howling and barking with glee. They dove into the waves, chasing their breakfast, taking rocks, pebbles, plants, and everything else in their path with them into the sea.

  Including, Ven noted with horror, the merrow.

  “Amariel!” Ven screamed as her beautiful tail tumbled past him. The multicolored scales caught the light as the merrow rolled toward the water beneath a landslide of excited sea lions. “Amariel!”

  “Ven!” Char’s voice rang out over the clamor. “Get out o’ the way! Hurry! Get over here!”

  Ven pushed himself away from the giant female, who was flapping her flippers, preparing to slide. He stumbled to his feet just in time to see Amariel’s tail disappear into the crashing waves at the base of the skellig.

  “Amariel!” he shouted again.

  “She can swim, ya idiot!” Char called from beneath the rocky outcropping that had served as his shelter through the night. “You’re about to get crushed! Get over here!”

  Ven dodged a trio of slithering sea lions as they slid past him, then ran as fast as he could toward the rocky shelter. The sun was beginning to crest the horizon now, and as the sky grew lighter, more and more sea lions took up the barking shout, hurrying down the pointy hillside. He dove for cover just in time to avoid a wall of slick brown fur and whiskers as more than a dozen of the hungry animals hurried past him into the rolling white foam of morning.

  “I barely remember crawling over here in the dark last night,” Char said. He grabbed Ven by the shoulder and hauled him further back in the small cave of stone as sea lions rained down from the top of the skellig on either side of them. “I don’ think I’ve ever been so cold.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Ven said as he scanned the waves, looking for a sign of the merrow. “But of course I was being a sea lion’s pillow, so I guess all that thick fur and blubber kept me from feeling the chill.” He looked past the rolling tide of sea lions into the misty distance. “There’s land! We must be off the northern coast, up past the Gated City. I thought we were farther out to sea than this. Amariel brought us back pretty close to shore.”

  Char had spotted the merrow and was pointing past the waves.

  “There she is!”

  Ven followed his finger, and a moment later could see her waving from beyond where the colony of sea lion
s were fishing. She was signaling for them to go around to the other side of the skellig toward the open sea. He crawled out of the rock cave and stood up.

  “Let’s go,” he said, shaking the sand and pebbles from his clothes. “The sea lions will be back soon, and will probably want to nap in the sun. I think we should be out of here before that happens.”

  Char stopped him.

  “Ven, haven’t we seen enough? We’re miles from home as it is, and I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve had enough explorin’ of the depths for one lifetime. We’re lucky we didn’t run into a shark or somethin’ equally nasty down below the surface. You’re one of the few men—er, Nain—that went into the Deep at night and lived to tell about it. How’s about we head back now? Besides, I’m starvin’.”

  “Me too,” Ven admitted. “But I think we’ve barely seen the edge of the sea, Char. From all the tales Amariel as told me, we’ve barely seen anything. I know she wants to go to the Summer Festival, which sounds like a lot of fun, and I have to discover what I’m supposed to do with the dragon scale, as well as why I undertook the journey in the first place. That journey may involve returning this scale to a sea dragon, the way we took the first one back to Scarnag. If you want to go home, I understand completely. But I’m not ready to go back yet.”

  Char sighed. “I knew you would say that. All right, let’s get ’round to the other side.”

  The boys made their way to the beach, which, while slanted like the rest of the rocky island, was a little flatter. The waves crashed in, rolling up the jagged sides of the skellig, then slipped quickly back into the churning ocean.

  “What’s that?” Char asked as they crawled away from the land side of the skellig and over to the side that looked out onto the open sea. He was pointing to a rocky shoal at the edge of the beach which was being battered by surf. A shiny object was bobbing around in the waves as if it were dancing, leaping up against the rocks and then being pushed back again.

  “I don’t know,” Ven said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Carefully they climbed onto the black rocks at the water’s edge. Ven waited for the waves to roll out, and in the moment before the next breaker crashed in, he made a grab for the object. His fingers wrapped around something smooth and cold. He had just enough time to seize it and step back onto the beach before he was drenched in surf to his knees. He closed his eyes, but the salt spray caught him in the face anyway, and he had to wait a moment until the stinging stopped.

  He opened them again and looked down in his hand.

  He was holding a small green glass bottle, its cork sealed with wax. Inside it a slip of parchment was rolled around something that rattled and clinked when he shook the bottle.

  “Well, I’ll be tied to the keel and fed to sharks,” Char murmured. “What do ya suppose is inside there? Most people only put messages in bottles if they’re gonna toss ’em into the sea.”

  Ven shrugged. “We can always find out. I’ll need to pry the cork out with one of the tools in the jack-rule, but I can’t risk taking it out now, especially since Amariel is waiting for us. We’ll open it after we catch up with her.”

  The hairs on the back of his neck bristled for a moment, as if a cold wind had caught them.

  Ven looked behind him.

  All he could see was the waves crashing on all sides of Skellig Lilyana, foaming and whispering over the rocky black sand. In the distance the land was swallowed in morning fog, too far to see anyway.

  He ran a hand over his neck.

  The feeling was gone.

  Ven exhaled. He tucked the small green bottle into his pocket and made his way over the rocky shoreline to where Amariel was waiting. Char followed glumly.

  * * *

  Far to the south, atop a wall that surrounded the Gated City, a man in a hooded cloak exhaled at the same time.

  He collapsed the spyglass through which he had been watching the sea to the north, tucked it back inside his garment.

  And smiled for a fleeting moment.

  As the smile faded he wiped the spray of the sea off his bushy eyebrows and hooked nose, drew his cloak closer around him, and disappeared into the shadows that always lingered inside the walls of the Gated City.

  Even in morning’s light.

  9

  The Herring Ball

  By the time they reached the seaward side of the tooth-like rock, the merrow was looking impatient.

  “Come on!” she called as the rolling breakers splashed over her. “We’re late for school!”

  “School?”

  “Of course! Every morning you can find a school lesson in the sea. There’s so much to learn each day that you can never get bored. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving!” both boys called back in answer at the same time.

  “Well, there’s a lot of herring past the waves, or if you’re not in the mood to eat it raw, there is some lovely spiny seaweed and a big patch of kelp out here as well.”

  “Yum,” said Char sarcastically as Ven’s face fell. “I had forgotten in all the excitement that we would need to eat. I was dreamin’ of Felitza’s cornbread. I imagine the taste of seaweed might be a little less appealin’ for sure.”

  “It can’t be that bad if the whole ocean survives on it,” Ven said. “Come on, Char, cheer up. We’re going to have an amazing adventure together, as we always do. And you will have tales to tell the crew of the next ship we sail on that will keep them entranced through even the roughest of storms or the longest days without wind. You might even get out of swabbing the decks when you tell them. Make sure your air stone is still in your pocket, and let’s go.”

  “Aye, aye,” Char muttered as he followed Ven into the waves. He patted his trousers and sighed. “Yep. Still there. That’s a good thing, at least.”

  “You’re in luck,” said the merrow when they finally made it past the surf to where she was waiting in the drift. “The lesson in school this morning is Herring Ball. That’s always a sight to see.”

  “What does that mean?” Ven asked. He was glad to be able to communicate with thrum once again.

  “It’s a defensive lesson for fish, but it can be useful to anyone who travels in a group. I think you, Chum, and I can learn a lot from the lesson, even though the predators that would threaten us are not the same as the ones the herring are trying to avoid.”

  “Who’s teachin’ this lesson?” Char asked.

  “Well, this morning it’s a four-year-old herring schoolmaster. As herring go, that’s very old. I was chatting with him a few moments ago during breakfast, and he told me about the lesson.”

  “What did you have for breakfast?” Ven asked.

  “Herring, of course.”

  “You were, er, eating his fellow herring?”

  “Yes.” The merrow looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Didn’t that upset him?” asked Char.

  “Goodness, no. In the sea you eat whatever you can to survive. No one takes it personally.”

  “Oh,” said Ven. He thought back to Madame Sharra’s warning.

  Everything in the sea is food to something else. And the sea is always hungry.

  “Well, I suppose if I get eaten, I won’t take it personally either.” He watched as all the color drained from Char’s face. “Just kidding. Where’s the school, Amariel?”

  The merrow pointed out to sea in the direction of the other skellig, this one smaller and darker than Skellig Elarose, its peak blanketed in soft mist.

  “Just past Skellig Lilyana is the beginning of the coral reef, that wall of living creatures I told you about. Between here and the reef the water is deep enough for the herring to practice forming their Ball. The reef near the skelligs is thinner than it is around the rest of the Island of Serendair. Once you get past the reef the ocean floor drops off sharply, and that’s where the krill are.”

  “Krill?”

  “Tiny shellfish that everyone in the ocean feeds on. They hatch in swarms, bazillions at a time, and when they
do it’s a huge feast. The herring like the krill because they are about the only food in the sea smaller than herring. But since whales, sea lions, dolphins, salmon, and all kinds of other creatures feed on the krill, too, it’s important for the herring to stick together. When predators show up, the herring form a gigantic ball to protect themselves—although depending on the kind and number of predators, it sometimes doesn’t help much. But it makes them feel less defenseless, and it’s fun to see. Sometimes a Herring Ball can be a mile wide.”

  Char whistled. “That’s a lot of herring.”

  Amariel nodded. “Millions. There will be fewer this morning. The herring are eager to get out to the krill beyond the reef. So if you want to catch the lesson, we have to go now. The schoolmaster will be looking for sunwater to demonstrate the technique—you’ve seen sunwater, it’s that fuzzy light beneath the surface. Thrum, in combination with sunwater, causes a sunshadow.”

  “Is that where your thoughts look like pictures in the water?” asked Ven.

  “Yes, so be careful what you are thinking if you are swimming through it.” The merrow pointed to a spot where the early-morning rays of the sun were reflecting on the surface of the sea. “That seems to be a likely place—and, as you can see, the birds are gathering, so I assume the Herring Ball practice will be there. Come on.”

  She dove beneath the surface.

  “Got your stone?” Ven asked. Char nodded.

  “All right—then let’s go.”

  They followed the merrow through the swirling water. The waves around the skelligs were violent, crashing in many different directions, so the boys sank as deep as they could, away from the surface, to the skittering sand of the ocean floor where the drift was not so strong.

  All around them, denser curtains of small, thin fish were swimming, mostly in the same direction, making the green water flash with the reflection of sunlight on their silver scales.

  Ven peered into the hazy light where the sun had broken below the water’s surface. A long, thin fish, more gray than silver, was hovering at the light’s edge.