“I can do that,” Kalys said. “I can help you.” She hesitated. “But first . . . I just wondered . . .”
“Yes?” Queen Celina said.
She said it gently, but Celie could tell that her mother was waiting for bad news. A condition that would be impossible for them to meet. Celie certainly was expecting the worst.
“Could I touch one of the griffins?” Kalys asked wistfully.
“My dear Kalys,” Rolf said in a gallant voice, “if you can get us out of here I will give you my griffin.”
They all looked at him.
“Well, not really,” he amended sheepishly. “But I mean to say, get us out of here and you can touch all the griffins you want, including Dagger, who is back on the Ship, which we need to get to as soon as possible.”
But as soon as they walked out of the tent into the muggy open air, Rufus gave a shriek and flew off in the opposite direction from the sea, and the Ship.
“Rufus, no!” Celie shouted, as her griffin disappeared rapidly over the green treetops.
“Quick, come on,” Pogue said. He held out his hand, and she took it so that he could help her onto Arrow’s back.
“Our very Rufus must have seen something of importance,” Lulath reasoned, as he threw a long leg over Lorcan’s back.
“Poor Orlath must think we’re dead,” Queen Celina said, looking at Juliet and Lilah. “Why don’t you and I return to the Ship?”
“Dagger is probably kicking up a fuss by now,” Rolf said.
“You all go back to the Ship,” Pogue said. “Celie and I will catch up to Rufus.”
“I have to gather some things, and then I’ll find your ship,” Kalys said.
Celie was keeping her eyes on the spot where Rufus had gone, much as she’d watched the white flash that had been a unicorn earlier. She was vaguely aware of some fussing about the dogs’ baskets, and ended up being handed the basket with the puppies and their mother. She took it without comment, cradling it close, and finally Pogue swung onto Arrow’s back behind her and they were able to take off.
“Do you trust Kalys?” Pogue said as soon as they were in the air.
“Yes,” Celie said, without really thinking about it. She could no longer see Rufus, but she kept her eyes trained in the direction he’d gone. “Why shouldn’t we? It won’t hurt to bring her back with us. Ethan’s history was even more suspicious, and that turned out well for him and us.”
“True. But then why is she sneaking around, if they don’t care?”
This was also true. As they passed over the village in the trees, everyone looked up, and many waved. No one seemed concerned in the slightest. They’d been told when they were taken to the private tent to rest and talk that they were free to come and go, so why had Kalys snuck in under the wall?
“Maybe she—hey!”
A gold flash had risen out of the trees and then darted back down again. Celie pointed to it, but Arrow must have also seen it, because he veered to the left and began to fly faster.
“Was that Rufus?” Pogue asked.
“No,” Celie said, hope rising in her breast. “Rufus isn’t that bright a gold. I think that was Lady Griffin!”
Kitsi sat up straight in the basket, raising the lid with her round head, and barked. Arrow sped up. The little dog was straining toward the place where Lady Griffin had disappeared, and Celie clutched the basket to her chest, willing Kitsi to not try to jump out before they landed.
Another flash in the trees, and this time it was Rufus, followed by his mother, and then they dove back down again. Celie’s elation at finding Lady Griffin alive faltered.
“They’re attacking something,” Celie said.
“It looks that way,” Pogue said grimly.
When they got over the spot where the other two griffins had swooped down, Arrow didn’t hesitate. He folded his wings and arced between the trees, landing neatly on the moss beside Rufus. And just beyond Rufus was Lady Griffin.
“Rufus! You found your mother! Clever boy,” Celie said. Pogue’s arm around her waist tightened. “What? Oh.”
The clearing they were standing in was a narrow corridor in the trees. They were at one end of it, and at the other end was a massive wild pig. Celie pulled the basket close to her chest, until the wicker was almost cutting through the fabric of her gown.
“Fly away,” she whispered. “Rufus! Lady! Just fly!”
The pig began to charge, but Rufus and Lady Griffin screamed and flew toward it. They raked it with their talons as they flew up and over it, then dove back down, driving it back. Arrow was vibrating with the need to join them.
“Fly! Fly away!” Pogue shouted in frustration, but Arrow wouldn’t listen, and neither would the others.
“I’m getting off,” Celie said, sliding from Arrow’s back with the basket. Kitsi and her puppies had gone mad, barking and rattling the basket.
The pig made another charge, and Celie screamed and sank to the ground, curling around the basket, but the griffins beat the pig back again. Pogue leaped from Arrow’s back, allowing his griffin to join the others, and drew his sword. He stood between Celie and the fight, moaning that he needed a spear, not a sword.
“What are they doing?” Celie cried. “Are they trying to actually kill it?” She had never seen Rufus hunt anything other than a stuffed toy.
“I don’t know,” Pogue said, frustrated. He made some lunges toward the pig, shouting and brandishing his sword. “Hah! Hah!”
“Why won’t it leave?” Celie said. “Ouch!”
Kitsi had flipped open the lid of the basket with her head, and it hit Celie in the chin, making her bite her tongue. The little dog tumbled out and onto the moss. Celie tried to grab her with one hand while holding the basket of puppies with the other, but the dog eluded her and went to a large fern right where Rufus had just landed.
Celie felt all the blood drain from her face.
“Kitsi,” she whispered, her mouth dry. “Kitsi, please come!”
Kitsi had begun to dig as though she’d smelled a treat hidden in the ferns. With Pogue guarding her, Celie crept closer, one eye on the dog and the other on the wild pig.
Suddenly Kitsi’s barks were answered by a high-pitched whinny from within the fern. The sound drove the wild pig to absolute madness, and it let out a truly hair-raising squeal as it charged straight for the fern, the dog, and Celie.
Pogue leaped forward and braced himself with his sword point extended. All three griffins leaped. There was a horrible sound of screams, and Celie squeezed her eyes shut and prepared for the worst.
Silence.
She opened her eyes and saw Rufus and Arrow, triumphant, standing over the dead pig.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Celie said.
“Why? You’re safe now,” Kalys said, dropping down from the trees.
“Thank you for your help,” Pogue said wryly.
“I only just got here,” she said, contrite. Then she spread her hands. “And I have no weapon. I would only have been in the way!
“Now let’s see what the fuss was about.”
She knelt beside Celie and parted the ferns. In a hollow at the base of a tree, hidden by the green leaves of the underbrush, was a delicate baby unicorn.
Chapter
24
It looked at them with wide, frightened eyes and whinnied pitifully.
“The pig probably killed the mother,” Kalys said.
As if it understood what she’d just said, the baby bleated and hid its face, with its tiny nub of a horn, under one gangly foreleg. Lady Griffin, too, seemed to understand, and she came to stand guard over the baby, pushing Kalys aside with a wing. The queen griffin gave Celie a speaking look.
“We’re taking the baby unicorn with us?” Celie asked. “But they . . . they fight and are horrible!”
“Not if you can get them this young,” Kalys said.
“What?” Celie sat back on her heels. “What about all that talk of them being dangerous and killing thin
gs and people?”
Kalys gestured to the pig. “Some people keep pigs as pets, but wild pigs are killers,” she said reasonably. “The trouble with unicorns is that it’s impossible to get a baby and raise it to be tame, because the parents won’t let you anywhere near. But they’re smart. After all, my ancestors managed to herd them across three countries and onto a ship, and keep them alive for weeks at sea. If they were mindless killers, that wouldn’t have been possible.”
“So you really think if we took this baby, Lilah could raise it to be tame?” Pogue said.
“Hey,” Celie interrupted. “Maybe I want to raise it.”
“I assumed that you had more common sense,” Pogue said.
Celie burst out laughing. “Actually, you’re right; I don’t want it. But Lilah will!”
Recognizing that she was about to get her way, Lady Griffin stepped back. Celie carefully gathered up the baby unicorn, and Kalys helped her tie it over Rufus’s back with ribbons unraveled from the hem of her skirt.
Kalys worked with surprising dexterity. She seemed to know exactly where to tie the unicorn’s legs so that they wouldn’t interfere with Rufus’s wings, and positioned the little unicorn so that Celie could sit behind it. Then she very reverently stroked Rufus’s head, after looking to Celie for permission.
“How did you know how to do that?” Celie asked.
“I told you. My family is trained to be griffin riders. Even though we thought there were no more griffins, we still pass down that knowledge. I know all about caring for griffins.” She made a face. “And I’m the first person in a dozen generations of my family to see one.” She tried to run a hand over her hair but she was wearing her headdress, so instead she just adjusted the ribbons hanging around her face.
“Would the rest of your family like to see the griffins before we go?” Celie asked. “I’m sure we could stop and tell them good-bye.”
Pogue flashed her a look as he mounted Arrow. Celie watched Kalys’s face carefully as she answered.
“I don’t have any more family,” she said firmly. “They have all passed on. I am the last person to come from Hatheland.”
“Oh,” Celie said, reassured. She could see that Kalys was telling the truth.
“And that’s why I have to leave,” Kalys said.
She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Pogue and Celie exchanged looks, but waited for her to speak. Celie knew they were about to get the rest of the truth.
“The Master has decided that it’s time for me to marry into a Found family,” Kalys said. “Since there are none of the Unicorn Lost left, they wish me to marry into the Griffin Lost.”
“The Griffin Lost?” Celie said. “But . . . is that what they call us?”
“How would they have decided that so quickly?” Pogue asked, looking equally baffled.
“The Griffin Lost,” Kalys said, shaking her head, “are those who lost the griffins.” She gave them a meaningful look, but they could only stare back. “The Arkish.”
“There are Arkish here?” Celie said so loudly that the baby unicorn bleated and Kitsi barked.
Pogue and Celie exchanged another look. “When did they get here?” he asked. “Are any of them wizards?”
Kalys looked startled by their reaction and hurried to explain. “No, no wizards. They only came last year. They have been living in some other place, since they left the Glorious Arkower, along with my people.” She made a face. “They do not say much; they keep to themselves. But they have agreed that I may marry among them if I never speak Hathelocke again, or mention griffins or the Castle.”
Pogue rocked back on his heels. “Looks like we’ve found the missing village,” he said. “And we were right: they’re Arkish.”
“Why didn’t you say so before?” Celie said to Kalys. “That’s awful! We can’t let that happen!”
“Right,” Pogue said. “You’d better come with us.”
He handed Celie the basket of dogs, with Kitsi once more inside, and she balanced it in front of her on the baby unicorn’s back. He held out an arm to Kalys and swung her up behind him on Arrow. Kalys couldn’t help laughing from sheer joy, and that made Pogue and Celie smile as well. They set off for the Ship, with Lady Griffin leading the way.
“Can I get my things?” Kalys called to Celie as they rose above the crown of the trees.
“Of course,” Celie called back.
Kalys directed them to a spot that looked like any other part of the jungle. But when Arrow and then Rufus dipped down into the trees, they saw a series of brightly colored tents hidden among the branches—like the City in the Trees, but on a much smaller scale. The trees themselves were so close together that several of the bridges between them were doors laid flat, with woven ropes as handrails.
They landed on the wooden terrace of one of the tents, though they weren’t really tents, Celie saw on closer inspection. Most of them were wooden houses, up to about waist height. But there the builders appeared to have run out of wood, and from the middle of each wall up to the roof the houses were made of sailcloth. Everything was much more worn than in the City in the Trees, and there were dead leaves in the corners of the terrace.
Kalys saw where Celie was looking and made a face.
“It’s hard to take care of it all by myself,” she said defensively.
“By yourself?” Pogue said, looking around curiously.
From where they were standing, they could see five or six of the half-wooden, half-canvas houses, all linked by short bridges. But there were no signs of any people, and some of the houses were badly in need of repair. Drifted leaves were nothing compared to the rips in the canvas Celie saw, and in one place, a tree branch had fallen and was sticking out haphazardly from a cloth roof.
“What is this place?” Celie asked.
“It’s my home,” Kalys said, still sounding defensive. “I told you: I’m the only one left.”
“You live here alone?” Pogue asked in surprise.
Celie, embarrassed, fiddled with the ribbons tying the unicorn to Rufus. Improbably, the little creature had gone to sleep. She supposed it had been a very long day for the unicorn. It had been a very long day for Celie as well.
But Kalys had climbed off Arrow’s back and was leading them into her home. Celie slipped down from Rufus’s harness, tucking the basket of dogs under one arm and leading her griffin with the other.
Inside it was clean and tidy and looked like the main room of any cottage Celie had ever seen. There was a small round table, though there were cushions to sit on instead of chairs, and the table was very low. The pots and plates were displayed on shelves above a small cooking stove that was cobbled together from mismatched pieces, but was shiny and clean all the same. There were a couple of trunks, and slung along the back wall was a hammock like the kind the sailors on The Golden Griffin slept in, except it was woven of red and pink strips rather than white canvas. That was Kalys’s bed, Celie realized with a shock. She wondered if the other girl had ever slept on a mattress with a pillow, but knew it would be rude to ask.
“It will only take me a moment,” Kalys said.
Kalys opened one of the trunks and pulled out an armload of clothing. She threw it into the hammock. She took a picture off the wall, a painting of a family, and put it in atop the clothes with considerably more care. Then she put some small carvings into the hammock and took it off the wall, deftly wrapping the hammock around the clothes, picture, and carvings and making it into a bundle she could carry. She took some long strips of cloth out of the bottom of the trunk and used them to make straps so that she could put the whole bundle on her back. Then she turned to go.
“I’m ready,” she said calmly, though her eyes looked shiny with unshed tears.
“We—we have room on the Ship,” Pogue said. “You could bring more things. We could carry your trunks between the griffins or something.”
“Yes,” Celie said hastily, feeling bad that she hadn’t thought to say something sooner. “
And . . . and . . . I’m sorry, but did you really live here all by yourself?” she blurted out.
“Yes,” Kalys said. “But only since . . . only since my parents died.”
“So all this was just for your family?” Celie asked, pointing out the window to the abandoned tree houses nearby.
“Oh, no,” Kalys said. “These were the homes of all the Unicorn Lost.”
“There are a lot of houses,” Pogue observed, looking out another window.
“There were five households, originally,” Kalys said. “Then there grew to be as many as twelve, for a time.” She shrugged again. “There were but two when I was a child, and now there is only me.”
“What happened to them?” Celie couldn’t help but ask, though she quickly added, “I mean, if you want to talk about it.”
“It’s all right.” Kalys looked surprised at Celie’s question. “It just . . . happens, you know? Fevers, falls, that sort of thing.”
Pogue and Celie could only look at her, and then at each other. There had been twelve households; how many were in a household? And now they were all gone? That seemed like an awful lot of fevers, falls, and “that sort of thing” to Celie, and she could see that Pogue felt the same.
“I’m ready,” Kalys said.
She adjusted her pack on her back. It was very small.
“You can bring more,” Pogue told her again.
“None of this is mine,” she said, waving a hand at the rest of the house.
“But you said this is your house,” Celie said.
“It is, or it was,” Kalys said. She pursed her lips as though looking for the right words. “It was my house when I needed a house to live in,” she said at last. “And those were the pots we cooked in, the dishes we ate from,” she explained as she pointed to the dresser. “But now others here who need them will take them. Because I’m guessing you have pots of your own.”
“Well, yes,” Pogue said, frowning. “But—”
“We have pots,” Celie said firmly. “We have trunks and dressers. Beds and blankets.” She nodded her head decisively. “You’ll like sleeping in a proper bed. And it will be your bed. Your own . . . things.”
Saturdays at Sea Page 16
