Yet life in the Soulless Land remained unsettled. The denial of the Spirit left a hole in the hearts of its people.
And so they came to the Blessed Lands. Many were not seekers of the Spirit but failures at living: children of the privileged unable to find a niche in life, fugitives from the law, or those devastated by tragedy. When they’d given up hope, they sought to transmigrate. His job was not to heal the soul-sick but to identify those who could contribute. The Supreme Leader’s emerging society had no place for the unproductive. Two out of three were sent back.
He’d found the job to be more distasteful than rewarding, the rejection stamp always heavy in his hand.
Then the poetess arrived.
She was from one of the finest families in the Soulless Land—a child of wealth and privilege, of culture and education—but something was missing in her heart, a void where faith should have been. She’d requested transmigration for all the right reasons.
They were as different as could be: he was thick-boned and swarthy; she was delicate and fair. He had black hair and almond-shaped eyes like his countrymen; her eyes were round and framed by locks of gold. He was practical, grounded in his work and on a mission to provide a better life for his people; she was a poetess who spoke in metaphors and had thoughts that threatened to make her float away.
Despite all that, somehow, she’d touched the Spirit that dwelled in his heart.
The barkeep eyed him warily, no doubt suspecting he was police. No wonder. Despite new rules and better training, some remained heavy-handed in enforcing dogma—why they were called zealots, and the reason he searched alone.
When the barkeep had nothing to say, the minister turned and headed for the door.
Before he could cross the threshold, the man called him back. “Excellency, I can help.”
The minister turned, the muscles in his arms tensing. “Don’t play with me.”
“But I’ve seen her, Excellency, the golden child with eyes like the ocean.”
The minister froze. “When?”
“Three, maybe four weeks ago.”
“Where?”
“She came into my café.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She was looking for a boat.”
The minister withdrew his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Are you certain it was her?”
“Excellency,” the barkeep said. “If you’ve met this girl, you know. This is not a child one easily forgets.”
Chapter 12 – The Northern Kingdom
Helena gazed at the mountain stream that ran alongside the road. The ride had passed quickly, and they were now less than an hour from the farm. She turned toward Jason, needing to watch him as he watched the road ahead. Her own personal fog was beginning to clear, and she almost dared peek past the present to see what the future might bring. If only—
Cries of distress rang out from the back, and she jerked around to see Kailani clawing at the fabric of her seat in a swimming motion and gasping for air.
Helena unbuckled her safety belt, reached behind, and stroked the child’s arm. “Wake up, Kailani. You’re having a dream.”
“Should I pull over?” Jason said, checking in the rearview mirror.
“No, she’ll be okay.”
Kailani rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and then stretched until her fingertips brushed the padded roof overhead.
“What were you dreaming?” Helena said.
“Where are we?”
Jason pointed to a blue sign up ahead. “That says we’re entering the Northern Kingdom.”
Helena smiled at Kailani. “How come you’re always asking questions, but you never answer any of ours?”
“It was a dream, Helena, nothing more.” She slid forward and stared out the front window. “Is it really a kingdom?”
“It’s just a name,” Jason said. “Not a kingdom, but it’s northern all right, almost as far as you can go before coming to the fenced-off zone around the land bridge.”
“Then why do they call it a kingdom?”
“I don’t know. It’s an old name, maybe a kingdom of nature.”
Kailani slid over to the window and cried out with delight when she spotted the stream running alongside the road.
“Water! Where does it come from?”
Jason tossed a glance at Helena. They’d agreed to take turns responding to Kailani’s endless questions, and now was her turn.
She’d been no different at that age, always asking questions. Her mother got annoyed, but her father answered them all, one after the other: the moon controlled the ebb and flow of the tides; the rocks on the breakwater were to keep the beach from eroding in storms; the constellation in the summer sky was called the Great Archer and the three stars in a row were his belt; when you died, you went to sleep.
“It comes down from the mountains when it rains,” she said, “or when the snow melts. Aren’t there streams like this in the Blessed Lands?”
“Just ocean, and water in wells.” Kailani crinkled her nose. “What’s snow?”
“It’s rain that freezes when it gets cold and comes down in white flakes. I guess there’s no snow in the Blessed Lands, either.”
“No. It never gets cold. But I remember now.” She brightened. “The sky once told me about white water that floats down from above and makes the land glisten.”
“And what does the sea say about snow?” Jason said.
“The sea has never seen snow. The sea is too busy helping the Supreme Leader create a better world.”
“Ah-hah. At least we know the sea has a job.”
“I didn’t say—” Kailani put a hand over her mouth.
“Am I right?” Jason said, ignoring Helena’s glare.
“No. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t be so sure.” Helena reached back to touch her.
Kailani pulled away. She took a quick breath, as if she were about to say something but swallowed her words. Her posture stiffened.
When she finally spoke, her voice was more adult than child. “Why do you deny the Spirit here?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“It’s what the senkyosei say.”
“What’s a senkyosei?”
“It means one who preaches the Spirit. What word do you use for that?”
Helena looked at Jason, who came to her rescue.
“We have no such word. It’s against our law to preach.”
“Then you do deny the Spirit.”
“No, we don’t. We can believe whatever we wish, but we’re taught to think rationally.”
“Then why can’t you preach?”
How could Helena explain it to this child who’d been raised in a different world? Should she tell her the stories they’d learned in school about the smuggled-in fanatics who gathered followers and led them into madness? Should she describe the suicide bombings that killed and maimed so many?
She took a deep breath and chose her words carefully. “The prohibition against preaching is to keep people from organizing into groups to impose their beliefs on others.”
“Maybe,” Kailani said, “that’s why you’re so alone.”
Helena squirmed in her seat and worried how such talk would be received at the farm. Glen Eagle was an art colony, not a religious retreat, though she’d heard some members had mythmaker tendencies—a problem if the department found out. An eccentric commune in the northern woods was fine, but they’d frown on a group of would-be zealots, even this far away.
She set aside her concerns.
Kailani was finished with her questions for now, focusing instead on the unfamiliar landscape. She folded one arm on the window’s edge, rested her chin on it and watched the world go by.
They passed the remains of corn fields, brown stalks stripped of their ears, left to be tilled under next spring. They drove by hillsides slanting down from the road into tree-filled glens, where spring water ran and dappled cows went to drink. They came to a lake whe
re a stand of white birches bordered the shoreline, like those that framed the Brewster home but a hundred times more. Sunlight played off their paper-thin bark, making them shine.
At one point, Jason rolled to a stop on the shoulder. He touched a finger to his lips and gestured across a clearing to the edge of the woods. At first, Helena couldn’t understand, but then she saw them—a doe and two speckled fawns. For all his practicality, Jason had stopped for a family of deer, something her father might have done.
Kailani, who was the last to spot them, let out a gasp and spoke in a reverential whisper. “They’re beautiful.”
The doe turned and stared at them. No one in the car moved; none dared twitch. Finally, the doe made up her mind: danger. She nudged the fawns toward the woods, and all three took off with a bound. Jason waited until they were out of sight before easing back onto the pavement.
Later, they passed a diamond-shaped sign with a drawing of a moose. Kailani noticed it and asked what it was. Helena tried to answer first, anticipating the more difficult question to follow, but Jason was quicker.
“It’s a moose, like the deer we saw, but bigger. And the males have antlers.” When he sensed she wasn’t following, he added, “Horns on their heads, like the branches of a tree. That’s what you see on that sign.”
“But why is its picture there?”
A tilt of Jason’s head declared it Helena’s turn. She caught a hint of a smirk at the corners of his mouth.
“It’s a warning to motorists,” she said. “Sometimes, the moose run out onto the road unexpectedly.”
“And what happens?”
“Drivers do their best to avoid them,” Jason said. “But sometimes they hit them by accident.”
“And then?”
He took pity on Helena and responded, even though it was her turn. “And then they’re killed. Sometimes the drivers too.”
Hoping to soften the blow, Helena added, “It’s not on purpose, Kailani. It’s just a part of nature.”
Kailani went quiet for the next ten minutes, and Helena had almost forgotten the moose-crossing sign when the child spoke up again.
“It’s not on purpose,” she said. “Death is a part of the Spirit too.”
Helena gaped at Kailani, trying to find words to pose her own question. “Did... that sign remind you of something?”
“No.”
“Is there something you’d like to tell us?”
“No.” She slumped against the window and mumbled into it. “No deer, no moose, no snow. Nothing like this at all.”
Then Kailani’s attention lapsed, returning to the stream.
Soon, the unending miles of forest and farms changed. An occasional cottage began to appear, and then houses clustered together along the roadside, a precursor to the village of Northweald.
The road curved around a green guarded by a statue of a weary soldier, sabre at his side, returning from some forgotten war. A gazebo stood in the center, a place for band concerts on summer evenings. At the edge of the green sat the town hall, its white steeple poking into the blue-green background of balsam and spruce that covered the surrounding hillside.
Jason swung round to the far side of the green, and seconds later, they were there. Northweald contained a dozen stores crowded into a single block—art galleries and a craft cooperative, a sandwich shop that featured homemade ice cream, a post office, a gift shop, and opposite each other in the center, the two largest buildings: Hal’s Sporting Goods Mart and the Northweald Emporium.
Helena considered asking Jason to stop at the Emporium. When she brought her mother to the farm, they’d stopped there to check out the rows of handmade quilts and the plastic case with slabs of fudge. A wholesome smell had permeated the store—fresh fabrics and penny candy, baked goods and pine incense. Now she longed to bring Kailani there, but she blocked out the thought.
Time for that later. This was no visit. This was the next phase of her life.
A mile north of town, she directed Jason to take a sharp right onto an unmarked dirt road. The winding road climbed, snaking back and forth over a ridge and across a stream. No one said anything. Even Kailani had no questions. There was no sound save the pinging of pebbles on the underside of the car, the whining of gears, and the rattling of loose planks as they crossed over three narrow bridges.
Shortly, they descended into a flat valley, where the road ended. A hand-carved sign, framed in birch limbs read Glen Eagle Farm.
Jason coasted to a stop and set the brake in a dirt lot at the edge of a lawn. The farm’s great house stood at its far side, guarded by an arc of oaks a hundred years old or more, its façade fronted by a wraparound porch with white columns supporting the roof.
A manicured garden framed the porch stairs on either side, with a vibrant mix of purple asters surrounded by yellow and pink mums. At the corner nearest them stood a waist-high statue of a girl with a sunbonnet, holding out a basket of flowers in greeting.
A man waited between the statue and the garden. He was slightly built, almost frail, with what might have been a young face except for crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a prominent wattle below his chin. His ears seemed too big, or rather they may have been the right size when he was younger but stubbornly stayed the same as the rest of his face shrunk. His smile spread easily, nearly reaching to his earlobes.
He grasped a walking staff that rose a foot above his head. Carved into it where the handgrip would normally be were four preposterous faces, each with a different expression. As the guests approached, he caught Kailani staring at the faces in the staff. With a wink, he spun it around like a wizard, while his free arm stretched wide in welcome.
“Who’s that?” Kailani whispered to Helena.
“That is Sebastian, the Supreme Leader of Glen Eagle Farm.”
Chapter 13 – Sebastian
Sebastian waited for the car to roll to a stop. The bridge that formed the gateway to the farm needed some work, but in the meantime, while he scratched for funds to repair it, the clatter of loose boards served a useful purpose: alerting him to arriving guests. He liked going outside to watch them before they realized they were being observed.
The three newcomers emerged from the car. Even if he hadn’t met Martha Brewster’s daughter once before, she’d be easy to pick out. Her hair color was different—Martha had gone gray—but they shared the same prominent cheekbones and astonished eyes, and their bearing reflected the same lingering grief. The daughter seemed like all young people who came to the farm—beautiful and sad.
Then there was the young man. Martha had said little about him, only that he was tall, fit—a distance runner, apparently—and worked at the Polytech, where she and her late husband had spent their careers. He looked normal enough, perhaps too normal for this little community of craftsmen, artists, and lost souls.
And finally, the girl from the Blessed Lands.
Martha had told him nothing more than that she loved the ocean, had a sweet tooth, and was extraordinary. He’d learned over the years to maintain a level of detachment with those who came to the farm. All had stories, most special in their own way, but this little one was different. She reminded him at once of a spring day in his youth and the deepest sorrows of his life. No doubt the residents of the farm would like her, but some might... embrace her too much. He’d have to keep an eye on her.
He stepped forward and broadened his smile. It was no act. He loved his job.
“Welcome, welcome, Helena, Jason, and little Kailani. Welcome to Glen Eagle Farm. I trust you’ve had a comfortable drive.”
Helena turned to face Jason. Their eyes met—a knowing glance.
If it were dark, Sebastian suspected he might have seen sparks.
Helena urged Jason forward. “Jason, this is Sebastian, the managing director of the farm.”
Jason nodded politely and extended a hand, which Sebastian pressed in both of his, more a hand clutch than a shake. The young man’s grip was firm. When Sebastian hugged Helena
, he could feel tension in her shoulders and made a note to find out where that came from. Then he squatted on creaky knees and reached out to the little girl.
She held back, her cheek pressed into Helena’s hip, her eyes never leaving his staff.
“Do you like my walking staff, Kailani? It was a gift from one of the many artists who’ve passed through here. The four faces signify sadness, joy, anger, and surprise. I try to keep my hand over the angry one. And some claim the happy one looks just like me. What do you think?”
She edged closer and touched the staff, letting her fingertips linger over the sad face. He invited her to hold it, but she shook her head and backed away.
He tugged on the staff to pull himself upright. “Why don’t we all go to my office? I have some tea brewing and I bet I can come up with some candy for you.” He smiled at Kailani. “A little bird told me you have a sweet tooth.”
Once they were settled in his office, he got down to business.
“While your cabins are being set up, I’ll take you on a tour to get you acquainted with the farm. You’ve come at a good time of year. Soon the leaves will turn and the woods will be aglow at sunset.” He turned to Kailani. “I hear you love the ocean. I’m sorry we have no coastline here, but if you’re an early riser, you can hike up a nearby hill and catch the valley below hidden in mist. With a bit of imagination, it’ll look like the ocean on a foggy day.”
She remained sunk into her seat but gave him a wan smile.
“Before I show you the grounds, I need to find out more about my new members, to get to know you better so I can determine how we can serve each other’s needs.”
Kailani spun around to Helena. An elusive fear had crept into her eyes. “You said there’d be no more questions here.”
“It’s just a few,” he said, trying to mimic the happy face on his walking staff. “It’ll take no time at all.”
The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky Page 9
