So, Valeria wasn’t whole, either. Neither am I. No, Alex is the most whole.
Malachi, Hazel, Russell, and Jeff
They stood together, the four of them, set slightly apart from the four adults. Larissa and Ben stood to one side; Roth and Thorfin, to the other. The four children stood in between, leaning into the white lip of the wall of the White City, looking down at the sea. Alex, his front paws on the white lip, stood between the children and the centaurs, but only for a short while. He sat down and began to wash, starting with his paws, so that he could wash his head. A barely visible current passed in and around and through the four of them, crackling in the salt air, like the last kernels to be popped. For a long time, or so it seemed, no one spoke. They all were content to smell the air, feel the sun, listen to the singing of the gulls, and the faint, faraway sound of the waves on the sand, and to watch the sea. Malachi saw the dolphins first, leaping, white-silver flashes above the water. Jeff saw the swimmers, in dark counterpoint to the dolphins’ flashes. Russell was sure he recognized the dolphins. And farther out, Hazel saw a dragon, its wings at full-spread, over the water.
No one could tell, later, just whose idea it was, perhaps, it was the idea of all four—something Larissa told them would happen more and more. But it was Malachi who first floated a few feet up from the wall’s stones, the others drifting up with him, until they were just above the wall. Then, as if blown by a sudden wind, they dropped, then dove down and out, out, and out, and down again, swooping down the grey rock face that grew into the white walls, and out, over the rocks at the bottom, and out again, over the white sand, over the waves, over the sea.
Two thousand copies of this book have been printed by the Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, Binghamton, NY, for Golden Gryphon Press, Urbana, IL. The typeset is Electra with Scriptek display on 55# Sebago. The binding cloth is Roxite A. Typesetting by The Composing Room, Inc., Kimberly, WI.
Harvest of Changelings Page 41
