by James Bow
“Merius was with her?” Grim satisfaction edged her voice. “Good. Gather the search party at the edge of the village. And wait for us. Before we go, I’m summoning Merius. I’m sure Eleanna will be interested in what he has to say.”
She swept to the kitchen. Peering out, Peter saw her emerge and step out the front door. The door slammed behind her.
Peter was about to leave the bathroom when movement sent him skittering back. Eleanna shuffled out of the kitchen and slipped into the front room. He waited for silence, and then crept down the hallway, focusing on the playroom behind the front room. He stepped inside. To his surprise, it was empty.
The front door opened and closed softly. Ariel stood in the entranceway, her young face in a pensive frown. She stepped to her playroom, stopping short in astonishment. “Peter —”
He put his fingers to his lips.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Can we speak outside?”
Ariel followed, staring but not questioning as Peter snuck past the living room and out the front door. They stood a moment in the front yard. The central park was empty. The other houses were silent. Finally, Peter spoke.
“Ariel,” said Peter. “Is Rosemary all right?”
Ariel hesitated. Then she nodded.
“Why is Fiona searching for her?”
Ariel swallowed, but she looked Peter in the eye. “The council believes that she has escaped into the wilderness.”
“What will they do if they find her?”
Ariel gave Peter a firm, earnest look. “They will not harm her.” Then she bit her lip and looked away. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Suddenly, she wrapped her arms around him and began to sob. “Peter, I want you to stay and be my brother. I’m so lonely here!”
“Hey, it’s okay.” He crouched down and hugged her. “I’m not going anywhere. Don’t cry.”
She sobbed into his shoulder a moment longer. Then she pushed herself away. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed.
He sat on the ground and laughed sadly. “Look at us. We’re going to be lonely wherever we live.”
Ariel looked at him. “But now we’re together.”
“We’re just two people, Ariel. Two people can be as lonely as one. But at least we can be lonely together, wherever we are.”
“But we belong here,” said Ariel.
“You do.” He sighed. “I’m not sure about me. I spent over half my life with parents I didn’t realize were adopted, and the rest of my life as an orphan.” He drew himself up. “Ariel, I need to know where my parents — our birth parents — are buried.”
Ariel’s brow furrowed. “Buried?”
“Yes. Where’s your graveyard?”
“Graveyard?”
Peter frowned. “Where do you put your dead?”
She gasped. “You wish to visit the burning grounds? Nobody goes there!”
Peter spluttered. “How do you remember your dead?”
Ariel stopped. Finally, she said, “What do you need, Peter?”
He took a deep breath. “I need to know that I’m a part of this place. I need to find some place where our parents are, where I can remember them.”
The light came on behind Ariel’s eyes. She took his hand. “Follow me.”
She led him across the central park, past a wooden stage being raised on the stone amphitheatre that reminded him of a dry wading pool. Peter hadn’t noticed anybody working on this before, but Ariel tugged him forward before he could think about what it meant. She took him on the path to the bay.
As they stumbled down the steep and rocky slope, he could hear the breakers below. They rounded a corner of the escarpment, and the lake stretched before them. The warm, moist wind touched his cheeks and ruffled his hair. And still Ariel walked, tugging his hand whenever he hesitated. They were on the beach, heading for the large boulder where he’d first seen Ariel. It stood, shorn from the cliffs, just short of the water’s edge. A scraggly tree grew on top.
Ariel stopped before the great rock. She pointed at the tree, then out towards the lake. Peter looked at her, befuddled.
“There,” she said, pointing at the top of the rock again. “Sit there. That is where I go to remember the dead.”
***
In her hideaway, Rosemary eased awake. She tried to swallow and wondered why it hurt, so. Then she remembered and she sat up with a start, clutching her throat.
She took a deep, calming breath, swallowed, grimaced, and pieced together the chase and her surroundings. She was not dead. She was not in a cell. The gaps between the stone pillars were quiet. The wind whistled through the gullies. She was safe, for now.
She stood up and crept back to the junction. It was silent there too, even in the surrounding houses.
“Have they all gone looking for me?” she rasped. Even at a whisper, her voice was too loud for the silence.
It could be a trap, but Rosemary doubted it. The silence was not one of secrecy but of emptiness, as though she was in the middle of an evacuated city. It was a gift, unless Peter had been evacuated too. She wouldn’t know until she found him.
She looked around, picked the wider branch that angled downhill, and set off in search of Peter’s house.
As she walked, she thought about her miraculous escape. Merius had had her up against a wall, strangling her — her heart skipped a beat and she touched her throat — and suddenly the wall had given way … only it hadn’t. She saw that it hadn’t.
She remembered Peter standing on a ledge so small, his heels were in midair. He’d said he’d been standing on a box, and had jumped down fifteen feet as if it were nothing. It was clear what Peter was seeing wasn’t real. But what she was seeing — what Merius was seeing — might not be real either.
“‘You could disassemble the very bonds that hold this civilization together,’” she muttered. “No wonder he was afraid of me.” But if what he saw wasn’t real either, what was?
A picture of the world, glamour wrapped over glamour, whirled before her eyes and she suddenly felt dizzy.
The walls of her prison had held her inside, though, despite her best efforts to push through. Only when Merius was strangling her did the glamour give way. She hadn’t thought about making those sirens on the beach disappear, it had just happened. If she was a songbreaker, maybe she was only able to break songs when she wasn’t thinking.
She went up to a wall and pressed her hands on the stone. It felt as hard and rough as granite. Then she closed her eyes, thought about nothing, and pushed harder. She felt her wrists sinking, as though through sand. Opening her eyes, she saw her hands embedded in the wall. She pulled out her hands and wiggled her fingers. The wall she left behind was smooth. “Huh!”
She wondered what the place really looked like. Perhaps it was a ruin. Or perhaps it wasn’t there at all.
“That trident was real enough,” she muttered, shuddering. “I may be able to walk through walls, but they can still bash my head in.” She resumed her search.
Eventually, she found the gully near where she’d found Peter and confronted Fiona. She walked cautiously, ears open for any sound, but this gorge echoed with emptiness like all the rest. She found Peter’s bedroom window. She was about to haul herself over the sill when she stopped.
“I can walk through walls, remember?” she said. She backed up, scuffed her feet on the ground, and charged.
As she picked herself up and checked her nose for blood, she said, “Okay, so some of the walls are real. Noted.”
She hauled herself through the window.
She looked around Peter’s room, moist like the inside of a cave, and lit by a phosphor glow. Her eyes lingered on the bed, built out of a canoe. She fingered the hand-stitched quilt. She didn’t know much about quilts, but she knew a work of art when she saw one.
Then she remembered the woman and her second on that beach with the squid, peering at the shipwrecked furniture. “You’re scavengers,” she muttered, “taking the things you need from the shi
pwrecks. Did you sink those ships? I wouldn’t put it past you.”
She crept to a wooden door that had been cut to fit an opening in the cave wall. Opening it an inch, she listened to the hallway beyond. The place was either empty or asleep. Rosemary staked her life on empty.
She crossed the hallway and tested the first door she came to. It opened onto another cave with sea-green robes scattered around a full-length gilded mirror. A pile of papers lay on a rich, wooden desk that had had its legs cut to level it on the uneven floor. Mismatched utensils and a plate holding crumbs and a dried, halfeaten fishcake lay abandoned.
“Fionarra’s room, I bet,” Rosemary muttered. She spotted an ornate bookcase wedged between floor and ceiling, laden with leather-bound tomes, and she crept in to investigate. Many of the books were old enough to make collectors weep, and stacked in no order. Bibles and ships’ logs rubbed shoulders with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. On a lower shelf were newer, more primitive books; sheets of paper bound by thick thread. Rosemary pulled one out and saw pages of handdrawn pictures and handwriting, in a language Rosemary could not read. She closed the book and shelved it, and turned to the desk.
On it, there were maps and nautical charts showing Georgian Bay, decades old but on crisp, white paper. Underneath the maps was another primitive book, opened to a picture. Rosemary couldn’t recognize the writing here either, but the picture was drawing of a siren wearing a crown of twelve smaller sirens, and each of these had a crown of their own. Rosemary remembered the two sirens chanting on the stony beach, pulling back, and leaving two more sirens between them.
Was this an instruction manual? If so, why would Fionarra need to read it before she came to Clarksbury to steal Peter?
Beneath that book was another open to a diagram of siren women walking in a solemn circle around two sirens joining hands.
Rosemary put the books down and moved the papers back on top of them. She crept back into the hallway.
Fionarra’s bedroom was the only bedroom in the house, other than Peter’s. The bathroom revealed a stone tub with no internal plumbing and dried, sweetsmelling seaweed in thick glass bottles. In the kitchen, Rosemary helped herself to a fishcake.
Looking in on a playroom of battered toys, Rosemary stopped. There was only one room left to explore: the front room. She’d found only two bedrooms in this house: Peter and Fionarra’s. Fionarra’s bedroom belonged to a teenager. These toys belonged to someone much younger. Where did this child sleep?
Then Rosemary heard her first noise.
She held her breath. The sound beat, creak-click, creak-click, as regular as clockwork. Peering into the front room, Rosemary saw a grandfather clock, and laughed at her own fright. She entered, heading for a promising looking bookcase.
As she peered at these books, the clockwork tick continued, creak-click, creak-click, “Znnnk! Guh!”
Rosemary carefully set the book she was holding back onto the bookcase and straightened up. Slowly she turned, and looked at the clock.
Its pendulum was dead in its case.
Her heart filled with lead.
Casting her eyes around the room, she spotted movement in a shadowed corner. An old siren woman sat in a rocking chair, creak-click, creak-click.
Rosemary stopped breathing until she realized that the woman’s eyes were closed. Her soft breath was regular. She was asleep as she rocked.
Okay, she thought. Right. I’m okay. Thank God. I’ll just tiptoe out of this room — The front door burst open with a volley of two voices.
“You have no right to threaten me! It was your mistake that sent the songbreaker after us in the first place!” yelled Merius.
“It was your incompetence that led the songbreaker here!” shouted Fionarra.
Rosemary dove beneath a maple dining-room table pressed against the wall. She pushed herself as deep as she could into the shadows.
Merius stormed in, Fionarra hot on his heels. The old woman stopped rocking and looked glassily up as the pair rounded on each other and almost touched noses.
“You compound your offence by blackmailing me!” Merius ranted.
“You sought to embarrass me before the council, except that your plan backfired!”
“How was I to know?”
“A-ha! So you admit it!”
The old woman cleared her throat. “What is going on?”
“I have done nothing to be ashamed of!” shouted Merius. “You are the one who violated the principles of the Homecoming!”
The glassy dullness vanished from the old woman’s stare. Her knuckles whitened on the armrests and she stood up. “What is it?” she intoned. Merius and Fionarra fell silent.
“Well?” the old woman continued. “Fionarra, you speak first.”
Merius turned aside in disgust as Fionarra drew herself up. “Eleanna, I must report that the girl discovered earlier today in Peter’s bedroom is, as the rumours reported, a songbreaker. I have evidence proving that she was led here —” she jabbed a finger at Merius, “— by none other than this incompetent fool!”
Merius rounded on her. “You seek only to cover up your mistake by pointing out another —”
“Leading a songbreaker to this village is a very serious mistake, Merius,” said Eleanna firmly. “I wouldn’t brush it off lightly. But go on; your point?”
Merius huffed. “My point is, this songbreaker was drawn here. However she passed through the edge of our world, she would not have been looking for us if she had not been tied to our initiate, Peter, and Fionarra knew this!”
Eleanna turned her gaze on Fionarra, who could only stare at the floor. “I asked you before, Fionarra, did you choose well? With this development, I ask again: did you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Fionarra snapped. “I chose with my heart.”
Merius let out a hollow laugh.
“Whatever the dispute between you two,” said Eleanna. “Put it aside. There is a songbreaker amongst us. What measures have you taken to protect this village?”
“A search party has been organized,” said Fionarra.
“I’m leading it.”
“Then I’m going too,” said Merius at once.
“You —”
“Go! Both of you!” Eleanna snapped. “Your disgraceful rivalry has almost brought ruin to us. Therefore you will both search for the songbreaker, and decide how best to nullify her.”
Rosemary put a hand to her throat.
Merius and Fionarra glared at each other a moment longer, and then stormed out in silence. Eleanna watched them go, then sagged like a deflated balloon. She touched her back, grimaced, and hobbled across the living room. She leaned against the table under which Rosemary was hiding.
“You can come out, now,” she said.
Rosemary banged her head against the tabletop.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TRICKS OF DESPERATION
Peter scrabbled for a foothold, knocking free bits of rock as he hauled himself the rest of the way up the boulder. He turned to lend a hand to Ariel, but she was already crouching beside him.
There was room for the both of them, as well as the tree that gripped tenaciously at the dry stone. They could see far out to the horizon. The waves rumbled in around them and died.
Peter looked to Ariel for guidance. She crawled over the flat part of the stone and sat, cross-legged, looking out at the lake. Peter slid up beside her and did the same.
“What now?” he asked after a while.
“Just remember,” she replied. He saw that her eyes were closed, so he closed his own. He took in a deep breath and felt himself relax. He felt as though he was floating above the water, soothed by the hush of the waves.
For a while, he remembered nothing. He just felt his spine relax and the tension ease out of his head. I should do this more often, he thought, before he shushed himself.
“Peter?” Ariel’s voice eased across his consciousness.
/> “Hmm?”
“This Rosemary … who is she?”
“A friend,” he said.
“From your old world?”
He nodded.
“But I thought you had no friends.”
“I did have friends. Not close friends, but … and I had her. She was my best friend.”
“How did you two meet?”
“I saw her on the first day I came to school in Clarksbury. There was something that made me notice her.”
“She is pretty,” said Ariel.
“She is,” said Peter. “But it was more than that.
The way she stood apart from everyone; it was like looking in a mirror. I wanted to talk to her, but I had to pluck up a lot of courage first.” He chuckled ruefully. “After a long time building up my courage, I saw these bullies picking on her. She wouldn’t back down, even though she couldn’t see to fight them. So, I ran in and helped her. Then I introduced myself. Then things got really strange.”
Ariel looked at him. “Strange?”
“This isn’t the only alien world I’ve visited, Ariel.”
His eyes were closed, but he could picture Ariel blinking at him, so he said, “Rosemary had to go to some surreal fantasy world in order to save her brother. I went with her. I wasn’t going to let her go alone.”
“You followed her into a strange land to help her on a quest?” Ariel breathed. She swallowed hard. “Do you love her?”
He hesitated, then forced the truth past his lips. “Yes. I’m in love with her. But I don’t know if she loves me.”
A part of his mind spoke up, saying, of course she does, you dolt! She followed you here, didn’t she?
Maybe.
Ariel slid closer and rested her head against his arm. He put his arm around her shoulder.
The clouds rolled across his mind, obscuring his thoughts.
Ariel turned back to the lake.
***
Rosemary scrambled out from under the dining room table and scampered across the floor.
Eleanna folded her arms. “Stop.”
Rosemary froze, hand stuck in midair as if she were suddenly coated in glass. She couldn’t even turn her head.