The Floating Islands

by Rachel Neumeier

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Rachel Neumeier

  Map copyright © 2011 by Cathy Boback

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neumeier, Rachel.

  The Floating Islands / by Rachel Neumeier. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: The adventures of two teenaged cousins who live in a place called The Floating Islands, one of whom is studying to become a mage and the other one of the legendary island flyers.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89782-5

  [1. Fantasy. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Flight—Fiction. 4. Cousins—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.N4448Fl 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010012772

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  This one’s for Margaret Brown—my aunt and one-woman

  PR department. Thanks for all your enthusiasm!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  1

  Trei was fourteen the first time he saw the Floating Islands. He had made the whole long voyage south from Rounn in a haze of loss and misery, not really noticing the harbors in which the ship sometimes anchored or the sea between. But here, where both sea and sky lay pearl-gray in the dawn, the wonder of the Floating Islands broke at last into that haze.

  A boy high in the rigging called out in a shrill voice, pointing, and then the deeper voice of an officer rang out and the ship smoothly adjusted its heading. Before them, the Islands rose shimmering out of the dawn mist. They stood high above the sea—too high, even in that first mist-shrouded glimpse. Then the early sun, rising, turned the air to gold and the sea to sapphire and picked the Islands out of the mist like jewels. In that light, they seemed too beautiful to hold terror or despair or anguish. Trei could hardly bear to look at them, yet could not bring himself to look away. He gripped the railing hard and bit his lip almost till it bled.

  Each of the Floating Islands was broad on top, narrowing to points of jagged rock below. Trei found a place to sit among coiled ropes, near the bow of the ship, out of the way of the busy sailors. He propped his chin in his hands and watched the Islands grow larger as the morning passed. They only seemed more astonishing as the ship approached them. Trei could have believed that someone had painted them on a backdrop and the ship would eventually tear through the canvas to find, waiting, a far less magical scene.

  The Islands proved to be farther away than Trei had first thought. All morning, while the dawn cool gave way to the heavy southern heat, the ship sailed toward the nearest of the Islands, drawing close at last only as the sun crested in the sky. Pastures scattered with grazing sheep were visible upon its heights as they approached it, and the fluted pillars of a temple. Trei found his eye persistently trying to fill in the slopes of a mountain below the floating stone, but no matter how he stared, the red rock ran out into nothing but empty air where the gulls wheeled.

  Trei craned his neck back and stared upward as they passed under the Island. Drifting mist, contorted trees growing directly out of the rock, gulls’ nests, and the odd vein of white marble, all so high above there would have been room below for masts five times the height. Barely audible beyond the shrill cries of the gulls came the delicate thread of some unearthly melody.

  “That’s only Talabri,” Mana said, stopping beside Trei. The burly sailor’s tone was dismissive; Trei looked at him with mute amazement that anyone could sound like that while sailing hardly a long stone’s throw from such a miracle.

  “Sheep and shepherds, orchards and vineyards, temples and priests.” Mana waved Talabri away with scorn. He enjoyed talking and never minded Trei’s silence. Despite his own distracted indifference, Trei had come to like the sailor’s friendly one-sided conversation. “It’s peaceful, aye, but there’s nothing on Talabri to interest a man. Candera, now—where’s your family, lad, Candera?”

  Trei closed his eyes briefly, wishing desperately that his family was on Candera, was anywhere at all in the living world. It took him a moment to manage anything like a normal tone. “Milendri. My uncle’s family.”

  “Oh, Milendri! That’s lucky for you, lad, supposing you want to live on an island held up in the air by nothing but sky magic. But Milendri’s the greatest of all the Floating Islands, they say. Your uncle’s family lives in Canpra, I suppose, the king’s capital city, what’s his name—some up-and-down Island name, nothing but vowels from start to finish.”

  The king of the Floating Islands was Terinai Naterensei, but Trei said nothing. His uncle’s family did indeed live in a city called Canpra, but Trei hadn’t really understood that this was anything special.

  Mana, never deterred by Trei’s silence, went on cheerfully, “I hear Canpra’s a splendid city. Not that they let ships’ crews up, but they say the old king, three back, built it to rival even Rodounnè. Not that I believe it. But it’s true the bit you can see from the sea looks splendid enough.”

  Trei wondered how a city would look if it was deliberately built to be splendid. In Tolounn, all the towns had just sort of grown up where people had once decided to settle, like the town of Rounn growing up around the Rounn River, where, according to family legend, Great-grandfather Meraunn had once made his fortune backing the new steamboats over ox-drawn keelboats. He found he was curious about this new city, but didn’t know exactly what to ask.

  “We won’t see Milendri before tomorrow afternoon,” Mana rattled on. “We’ll be passing islands all day, of course.…”

  But Trei was no longer listening. He had just caught sight of his first winged Island fliers, and had attention to spare for nothing else.

  There were a dozen of them—no, Trei saw as they approached: fourteen. Fifteen. They flew as geese fly in the fall, in a formation like a spear point. At first the shape the winged men made was stark as a rune against the empty sky, but as they approached the ship, they broke their formation, wheeled, and circled low. The morning light caught in the feathers of their glorious wings, crimson as blood, except for one man whose wings were black as grief.

  As the fliers passed above the ship, Trei saw how each man wore his wings like a strange kind of cloak. Crimson bands crossed the fliers’ arms and bodies. Though the wings looked like real wings, he saw clearly that the men were flying by some understandable kind of magic and were not actually winged people. He held his breath, staring up at them.
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  Then all the fliers tilted their wings and lifted up and up, spiraling back into the sky and away toward Talabri. Trei let out his breath, only then aware that he had been holding it.

  “Show-away Island wingmen,” Mana muttered.

  “How do they do that?” Trei breathed.

  The sailor lowered his voice even further. “Don’t they tell stories about the Island wingmen, then, way up in the north? They don’t fly with good solid human magic, but some gauzy dragon stuff. It’s not right for men, is what I say. They like to come down low over foreign ships, especially Tolounnese ships. Impress the mainlanders. Like Tolounn isn’t a thousand times the size of all the Floating Islands put together, and a hundred times richer besides, but Islanders don’t know their place.” He spat over the railing and added, “Clannish sorts, and the wingmen are the worst. Stick to men who walk on solid ground, lad, not those crystal-eyed ride-on-air dragon-loving wingmen.”

  Trei said nothing. He already knew that if he couldn’t learn to ride the wind on great crimson wings, he would die.

  Milendri was much larger even than Talabri, hard though this was to believe: thirty miles long, Mana said, and nearly as wide. The graceful towers of Canpra, blinding white upon the edge of the Island, were visible while the ship was still distant. The towers drew the eye insistently, yet as they approached, Trei found himself staring at the broken rock that fell away below that edge. At last, strange regularities descending below the towers resolved themselves into great structures that had been carved into the red stone above the sea. He stared in awe, understanding that Canpra’s builders had carved their city down into the stone as well as flinging it up toward the sky.

  Bridges and airy colonnades were strung between the white towers or out over the waves, but intricate stairways carved into the stone led down and down, to wide galleries almost low enough to feel the spray from high waves. Some of the stairways … Trei stared. But as they approached, he saw it was true: some of the stairways mounted straight through the air, broad steps following one after another, suspended from nothing. Most were carved of red stone, some of blinding white marble. Nothing but air was visible between each stair step and the next. The spray broke over the lowest ones—if they were the lowest: it seemed to Trei that those steps might go down and down into the sea, just as they mounted into the sky. But who might follow them down into the depths, if so?

  And how was one supposed to climb those stairs, if one did not have wings?

  Once Trei stood on the lowest of the stones, however, he found himself grasped firmly, as though the air itself held him in place. Even though the breeze pressed at him, once he was on it, the stair step felt wide and perfectly secure. And the floating step carried him somehow upward, though he felt no sense of motion; every time he looked down, he found himself farther from the rippling sea and the increasingly tiny ship below—already departing. So there was no way back, even if he could make his way down stairs that seemed bent on carrying him upward. Trei sat down in the center of the stair, next to the small pack of his pitifully few belongings, and waited to reach the surface of Milendri.

  Canpra proved to be enormous, filled with brilliant light, shattering noise, chaotic movement, and crowds of people. Perhaps it was splendid, but nothing about the city made sense to Trei. He found it impossible to imagine that it ever could, not if he lived here a hundred years. Now that he stood surrounded by the clamor of the Island city, he was suddenly and fiercely homesick for the gentle hills of Rounn. But Rounn was gone. There was no way back home.

  Trei blinked hard and used almost the last of his coins to hire a boy to guide him. When he followed his guide, he lowered his head, trying not to look at anything.

  “Fourteen-three-forty,” announced the boy at last, turning to look with curiosity at Trei. “Avenue of Flameberry Trees, Fourth Quarter of the Second City. You all right?”

  Trei did not know. He was almost sure the address was right, but now that he had come here, he was not at all sure of his welcome. His other uncle had not wanted him.… He had never met his mother’s brother, and if this uncle also refused him, he had no idea at all where he might go. He was seized with a conviction that he would find himself stranded, lost and with hardly a coin to his name, in a city and a country he did not know.

  Slowly, Trei reached out and touched the brass clapper. The distant reverberation of the clapper’s alert sounded from inside the house. There was a long pause. Trei held his breath. The boy shifted his feet, sighed, and glanced over at Trei, opening his mouth to make some comment or suggestion. But the door opened at last.

  It was not Trei’s uncle who peered out at them, but a thin, narrow-faced girl in a plain dress of undyed linen. The girl had a small mouth, a strong chin, and chestnut-colored hair as shiny and crisp as the feathers of a thrush—exactly the same shade as Trei’s mother’s. Her eyes were dark, determined, and notably fierce. Trei’s sister had had eyes like those.

  The girl glanced at the boy and then looked at Trei. Chestnut eyebrows rose over dark eyes. “Yes?”

  “I’m looking … I’m looking for Serfei Naseida?” said Trei. He tried not to sound frightened, and thought he probably sounded stiff.

  The girl tilted her head curiously and stepped back so he could enter. “Please be welcome to our house,” she said. “I shall bring my father to speak with you.”

  “All right, then,” said Trei’s guide. He gave Trei a casual flip of his hand, accepted another coin with a grin, and jogged away down the street.

  Uncle Serfei proved to be a tall, angular man with sharp cheekbones and smiling, quizzical eyes. He looked nothing like Trei’s mother. But he recognized Trei at once. The smile disappeared from his eyes, and he stepped forward to take Trei by the shoulders, looking down into his face. “Your mother?” he asked him. “Your family?”

  The kindness in his tone brought grief rising unexpectedly into Trei’s throat so that he could not answer. He was unutterably relieved to find himself recognized.

  Uncle Serfei’s look became grieved and pitying. Trei looked away. He found the girl … his cousin … gazing at him from the doorway. She didn’t look exactly unfriendly. But she didn’t look friendly, either. She said abruptly, “I’ll tell Mother,” and vanished into the house.

  “Come.” Uncle Serfei gently drew him further in. “You’re exhausted, I’m sure. And starving. The kitchen is through here—this is the servants’ half day, so we must fend for ourselves,” Uncle Serfei explained apologetically. “But Araenè does very well for us in the kitchen. There’s pigeon pie, and I’m sure there are figs. Let me pour you some wine.” He topped the cup up with water and handed it to Trei. “You needn’t—that is, even here we’ve heard what happened at Rounn. We were sure you must all—” He stopped.

  “Is it true the whole town was covered by ash?” Araenè asked, following her mother into the kitchen. Trei’s aunt, Edona, was a comfortable, softly rounded woman. She gave her daughter a small frown and Trei a welcoming smile.

  “Trei, my dear,” she said warmly. “I’m so happy to see you, and so sorry to see you here alone. You needn’t talk about it if you don’t wish to—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Trei said. He looked at the cup his uncle had put in his hand, then gulped the watered wine. It wasn’t nearly as strong as he’d have liked. He looked straight at his cousin and said in the flattest tone he could manage, “It was all buried. Mount Ghaonnè took everything. The provincar’s mansion was the only building tall enough to stick out, and it was four stories tall and had a bell tower on the top. But it wasn’t the ash that killed everybody. They say poisonous air came out of the earth right into the middle of the city, where the baths were, over the hot springs. They say a lot of poison came out suddenly and just filled up the valley. So everyone died from that, before the mountain even exploded. And we—we couldn’t even go down, afterward—”

  Trei had to stop. His cousin, he was satisfied to see, was looking rather ill. So was his aunt Edona. Tr
ei was sorry for that. He said quickly, “They say it would have been fast.” He had not known whether to believe this assurance. How would anybody know?

  “We are so glad you escaped, at least!” Aunt Edona exclaimed, coming to press Trei’s hands. “And we thank the Gods you came to us. How difficult a journey this must have been for you, my dear! Please don’t speak of such terrible things.”

  “You are safe now, nephew, and among family once more,” added Uncle Serfei.

  Trei put his cup down abruptly and left the kitchen. Then, ashamed, he hesitated at the base of a narrow stair, knowing he should go back.

  “I’m sorry.” Araenè turned up, leaning in a doorway. She did look sorry. “I don’t … I don’t think I really believed that, about Rounn, until you said that. She sent us stones one time. Your mother. Fossils from the river, the kind that coil around, you know? My father loved them. And she sent me some really good recipes for salt-cured fish. I’m sorry she—they all—”

  Trei made himself nod.

  “Why’d you come here, though? Didn’t your father have family in other parts of Tolounn?”

  Her tone wasn’t exactly hostile, but it was hard to see that kind of question as friendly, either. Trei’s other uncle, his father’s brother in Sicuon, had made it clear that summers were one thing, or had been when his father was alive, but as for taking an Island half blood into a good Tolounnese family—and, worse, paying the tax to register a half blood as a Tolounnese citizen—well, that was something else. Trei wasn’t going to tell her how he’d always thought his Tolounnese uncle and aunt liked him. But when he’d begged to stay in Sicuon, in terms he was ashamed to remember, his uncle had only given him some money and sent him away. Trei wasn’t going to tell this girl about that. He said nothing.

  “Well … let me … Shall I show you the house, then? Your room? You can get something to eat later. Or I can bring you something. But if you’re tired now, that’s all right. Father says we’ll make the low attic over, but you can have my room for now and I’ll go in with Mother.”