Clouds End Read online

  “Brook! Your sister blew through here with kids flapping in front of her like jib sails in a storm.” Stick looked up, and slowly considered Brook’s guest. He peeled off another switch of bark. “Shouldn’t be surprised if there’s dirty weather coming.”

  Purple clouds now bruised the eastern sky. The wind was freshening, kicking up whitecaps off Crabspit Point. Villagers called to one another. The door to the Witness’s house banged open and Finch came out, dragging Shandy by the sleeve.

  “Great flock of gulls just came in. Never a good sign.” Stick studied his old knife, its blade seated in its third whalebone haft and worn thin with many sharpenings. “My grandfather came to Clouds End before it was one year calved from the Mist, you know. A lot of queer catch swimming out of the East, back then. We learned to be careful.” Stick paused and spat. He looked at Brook. “We learned to take care of our own.”

  Shandy walked up to meet Brook and the haunt. “Don’t you make a fine pair!” (And Jo felt Brook’s memories ghost through her. Shandy the Witness, like an old boat weathered but sound. Her stubby fingers stained with liver spots and traces of dye, her hair driftwood grey. Her eyes shrewd in a face worn to wrinkles.)

  Brook stood behind the haunt like her shadow, as cold in the spring sunshine.

  Shandy squinted up into the rising wind. “Storm coming. So, Brook. Just had to top Shale’s new island, eh?”

  Villagers were watching them from every window. When they caught Brook’s eyes they looked away as if she were already dead.

  Jo said, “I come to warn you of a great danger.”

  Shandy grunted. “We’re obliged.”

  They walked back to the Witness House, where Shandy’s husband, Moss, was waiting. Shandy invited Jo inside to talk. Brook she told to wait on the porch. “So everyone can see we’re looking after you,” Moss said, after his wife and the haunt had gone inside.

  Every night for as long as Brook could remember she had seen Moss and Shandy sitting in the two old net chairs hung from hooks in the porch beams, facing west to watch the sunset. Now she sat in Shandy’s chair, swinging slowly back and forth. She was deeply grateful for the older man’s company, his stories or his big comfortable silence.

  As the afternoon passed, her foster-mother, Otter, came by with a plate of honey cakes, which she and Brook ate while Moss went inside to check on Shandy and Jo.

  The eastern skies bruised more badly. Otter left to start dinner. Boats ran back into the bay. Rope’s came in soon after the tide turned. Shale leapt from the deck to the dock and turned the painter a quick couple of hitches through the docking ring. Foam ambled after, and then Rope, last as always to leave his ship.

  Brook watched them from Shandy’s porch. There were tears on her face.

  Shale came first, racing up the meadow path and into the village. Someone must have told her the news.

  “Are you all right?” Shale demanded.

  “I always run like there’s something coming after me,” Brook said, trying to smile. “But you always run like you’re hunting something down.”

  “Is she inside with Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  Foam and Rope were now hurrying toward them.

  “You shouldn’t stay here. It isn’t safe to be near me,” Brook said.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  A moment later Rope and Foam joined them. Foam sat with his back to a post and his lanky arms around his knees. Rope sat in Moss’s chair. He reached for Brook’s hand. She wanted to take some comfort from him but her fingers and hands were wood, her whole body like driftwood abandoned on an empty beach. Unfeeling.

  Down at the harbor the docks groaned. Boats creaked and bumped. Up at the center of the island, the elms around Teardrop Pond began to murmur darkly about the rising wind. Driving westward, the darkness of a great storm front raced over the sea toward Clouds End. Gulls swirled along its leading edge, glints of white fire lit by the westering sun.

  “It will get dark early,” Rope said.

  Foam frowned at a small tear in one of his elaborately braided cuffs. “Time to get out my needle.” In a village where most men would cheerfully have worn walrus pelts, Foam was cursed with a sense of style.

  “Get with carriage what you can’t with cargo, eh?” Shale’s sharktooth earring danced as she paced restlessly along the verandah. She stopped in front of the hanging chairs and wiped a tear off Brook’s cheek. “Come on, Bug! You aren’t dead yet.”

  “I used to wish I were Shandy’s daughter instead of you. I used to imagine I was the Witness, seeing magic things.”

  Shale grimaced. “Your face would cloud up with this Mysterious Look I always hated. The one that said, ‘I am a deep person, thinking deep, secret thoughts.’ ”

  Foam grinned. “We all know that one.”

  “Sometimes I would pretend I had died,” Brook said, “and I could wander anywhere on the island without being seen, and listen to what people said about me.” She sat silent for a moment, twisting her bracelet of blue shells around her wrist. “Well that’s me now. I’m the walking dead.”

  Shale swore and kicked her. Not very hard.

  Women’s voices murmured from the room behind them as Shandy and Jo kept talking. Jo’s voice clear, rising and falling like the wind. Shandy’s blunt and to the point.

  “Come on, Brook. This isn’t the time for self-pity. It doesn’t help.”

  “That’s our friend Shale,” Foam murmured. “Always a kind word or a friendly smile.” Shale favored him with a look that could gut fish.

  “Though I admit you would have made a better Witness’s daughter,” she said. “I always got Mom’s stories mixed up, and the incense made me sneeze.”

  Brook laughed in spite of herself. “When I’m Witness I’ll make you Trader, then. First woman Trader in the Eastern Islands.”

  Shale nodded. “A fair bargain.”

  “Is there nothing in your hold for me?” Rope said, scratching his beard in a thoughtful way. He was heavy-muscled and still thickening; the sailcloth shirt his mother had made him only last summer was already tight across his shoulders and around his broad, hairy wrists.

  Shale grinned. “Oh, I’ll let you be my first mate, I suppose.”

  Foam said, “I think Brook has an idea about Rope’s first mate.”

  Shale laughed, watching Rope and Brook blush. “Better. See—you’re not dead yet.” She examined her eelskin boots, sticking two fingers through a hole in one toe.

  “Was it terrible?” she said.

  Brook looked at the darkening sea. “You know how it is when you climb the bluff to watch the sun set? It goes down and everything gets very dark, until it’s so dark you can’t see the edge of the cliff. But you still feel it there. You still feel the drop.” Her shell bracelet, turning, clicked and whispered.

  Foam said, “It’s hard to untie a knot made of Mist.”

  Shale’s fingers tightened on the haft of her knife. “So you cut it.”

  “How would you try?” Foam said. “Wait until the haunt lies sleeping—in your mother’s house—and cut her throat with a scaling knife? Watch her blood go spilling across your mother’s floor after having offered her traveller’s welcome? I don’t think so.”

  “It doesn’t have to be in the house.”

  “Then where?” Rope said. “A haunt’s death brings down a haunt’s curse anywhere on the island.”

  “On the sea, then,” Shale said. “She said she had a warning.”

  Brook nodded. “A message to send to Delta. She says Sere is bringing his fire to the first island. I heard that much before they went inside.”

  “So give her a boat and a crew, get a day’s sail away . . .” Shale sliced her knife across an imaginary throat. “Dump the body overboard. Scuttle the ship within swimming distance of home and drown your bad luck with it.”

  “What if Sere really is burning through the Mist?” Brook looked away from Shale’s angry eyes. “She twinned me, yes. If the stories are true, she’ll
try to kill me some day, or throw me into the Mist. But that doesn’t make everything she says a lie.” Brook’s fingers wound tightly into the lines of the net chair. “She is a little in me now. I think her fear of Sere is real. I can feel his fever.”

  From under raised eyebrows Foam said, “Now, would this be that distant, Mysterious Look you were talking about, Shale?”

  Quickly Brook shook her head. “No, I’ d be much grander about it. Believe me, I’ve never felt less distant and mysterious in my life. I feel like a bug on the bottom of someone’s boot.”

  “What about sailing off?” Rope suggested. “Not forever, Shale. A few weeks. Long enough to let the haunt go and leave Brook alone. We could go over to the Harp, or back to Trickfoot and visit some of Brook’s kin.”

  “Or sail out to the new island,” Foam suggested quickly, for about the thirtieth time in the last day.

  “No, no, and no,” Rope growled, exasperated. “For Fathom’s sake, will you shut up about the new island? It’s too new, it’s too dangerous, and it’s too near the Mist. Shandy will send someone over when the time is right.”

  Foam grinned and shrugged. “You can’t blame the fisherman for casting his line.”

  Shale’s short bangs fluttered in the rising wind. “I want to go out there as much as you do, Foam. But is the Mist the best place to go if you’re running from a haunt?”

  “I don’t think I can run from her,” Brook said. “We’re a Sheet-Bend story now, she and I: a little rope and a big one knotted up together. The knot can’t be slipped. It has to be untied.”

  Shale flicked her dagger. “Or cut.”

  * * *

  As Witness, it was Shandy’s duty to give the haunt supper and offer her a bed for the night. Her daughter Shale she sent to stay with Brook at the Trader’s house. When she had seen the haunt to her room and her own family to their beds, Shandy returned to her tower and sat before her brazier for long hours, deep in thought.

  Outside, the bad luck that had been building for days around her island had broken into a fierce squall. The wind battered her house with flying rain. Down at the harbor, wood roared as ships slammed against the dock.

  In her hands the Witness cupped a burning cone of incense. A bittersweet scent stole from between her fingers.

  In the room below, her two halves slept. Moss, her husband and her anchor: for thirty years her line to all that was human. And Jo. Jo who was all Shandy might have been, if she hadn’t loved her parents and her family and the small doings of her village, but listened instead to the wind’s wild voice.

  Jo had chosen that freedom, and become one of the people of the air. She had turned away from the world of men—or perhaps men had driven her out, afraid of her strange gifts. There had been no Moss for her, no anchor line. She had given herself up to the wind and the world.

  The storm blew harder, rattling at the shuttered windows. Shandy shook her head. Why, why did the haunt have to pick Brook? For thirteen long years Shandy and Stone the Trader, with Otter his wife, had taken such care to bring Brook back into the sunlight. She had more of the Mist in her than was healthy. For years they had feared their fosterling would leave them; would sink into herself and walk into the Mist. But Shale and Rope held her, and her love for her sister, Finch, and Otter her foster-mother, and patient Stone.

  Until the stupid girl had gotten herself twinned by a haunt. Well. If stories were easy, they wouldn’t be told in knots.

  Fear almost kept Shandy from going down the stairs.

  Duty. She had to know the haunt’s thoughts. She had to brave the wind.

  She crept downstairs in the dark, skirting the table and the stove, and eased herself onto the low stool beside Jo’s cot. Incense like scorched honey trickled down her throat.

  She didn’t want to die.

  Duty, Witness.

  Shandy stared at Jo. The room was dark, but the haunt’s white skin shone pale as the moon burning through a bank of cloud. Her breath had a strange uneven rhythm, ragged and gusting like the storm outside. It took a long time for Shandy to match it. Slowly, slowly she fell into the creaking house, the spattering rain; the restless, raging, wild-hearted wind. Incense crawled and buzzed in her blood, and she drowned in the haunt’s dreaming.

  A flock of gulls carved circles on the wind, swooping and screaming around a young woman. It was Brook. Blood welled in streams from her palms. The mob of gulls thickened, obscuring her. When a big wind came up and blew them away she was gone.

  Shandy despaired.

  A single gull preened upon the rock and laughed. “Witness! I am shocked! What courtesy is this, to peek at other people’s dreams?”

  “Is this nothing but a joke to you?”

  Jo hissed and clacked her bill. “The spy who peeps through the window can’t complain at what she sees!” Her gull’s body stretched and blurred. “You think you are so clever, you aging island witches. Peering and blinking at the world like moles, impressed that you can see at all. You thought you could come sneaking and prying into me!”

  Jo shifted, taking the shape of a white-skinned woman with narrow silver eyes. “Creeping into my sleep like a crab in the ooze. I heard you and I caught you. Don’t pretend you should be offended! I came to tell the sea’s people of Sere’s great advance; fine thanks this is for my warning. Perhaps you islanders deserve the gift the Fire will make you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shandy said. “Sorry to have tried it, and sorrier still to be caught.”

  “Aaiee! At least you are honest! Yaw.”

  “What did you expect me to do? Nothing? After you spelled one of my people?”

  Jo shrugged and grinned. Brook’s features floated into her face.

  Shandy said, “You will give back everything you take from her.”

  “I did not come to cause trouble. I came to give warning, and seek help.”

  “What help do you need that an aging island witch can give?”

  “Company.” Jo shook her arms into wings, changing back into a bird. “Sere works the world through human hands, and human hands must stop him. I need a guide to take me to Delta, and perhaps beyond.”

  “Why? Go! You can ride the wind faster than we can sail the water. Take your warning to the first island yourself.”

  The gull hissed and screamed. “Yaw! And what good would that do, aaaie? They hate haunts no less there, and have no Sight to show them what I say is true.” Jo flapped down onto the rock. “Have pity, Witness. I dare not make such a trip. A gull does not remember the purposes of men. I would fly to Delta and forget why I went.”

  “Mm. And who would you have me send?”

  Jo preened and cocked her head. “Brook! Why not? We are easy together. Send Brook! I would take care of her.”

  “No doubt,” Shandy said. “No. No ship will sail from Clouds End if you are on it.”

  “What isn’t offered will be taken!”

  “You will give back everything you take from her, Jo.”

  Jo screeched, flinging herself into the sky. “Don’t presume to threaten me! Haunts get what they want, Witness. Remember that! I am of the air!” She yawped and circled over Shandy’s head. Her wings roared like a crackling fire, like a rushing wind. “So you want to touch the air? Then hold your ear up and tell me what you hear!”

  And now the world was a storm of sound, a thousand voices crying out at once; stone sea sand bird’s banter, the emptiness of the terrible sky. The crushing noise was driving Shandy mad. She shouted but her words were broken and whirled away.

  And then she was sitting by Jo’s bed.

  The storm had broken.

  In the deafening silence Shandy thought she heard the sound of unhappy laughter, faint as memory.

  The cot was empty.

  The haunt was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  SAGE CREEK

  THE NEXT morning the squall was gone. The sea still remembered the wild night; the swell ran heavily against Crabspit Point, and boat-bells clanked down at the harb
or as ships rocked at anchor. But above the waves, the air hung heavy with fog.

  It was a strange, still, expectant mist, Stone thought as he walked up from the boathouse in the darkness just before dawn. The meadow path he knew so well in daylight was gone; the one he walked seemed steeper and rougher, studded with unfamiliar roots and rocks. Tripping, he swore and stumbled through a pocket of fog. Its clammy touch on his face was cold as a ghost’s kiss and unwholesome. He realized he was bracing himself for something dreamlike and dreadful. As if at any moment an omen might step out of the dripping darkness: the spirit of a drowned man, or some cursed traveller, knotted in a story bigger and more terrible than himself.

  Dawn had yet to break when the Trader came to Shandy’s house. She almost didn’t hear his knock, it was so uncertain—and that wasn’t like Stone either.

  But when she pulled the door open and peered out into the deep blue before dawn, there he stood on her stoop, with one hand pulling at his long beard. “Regrets, Witness. I shouldn’t have come so soon—”

  “True,” Shandy said, yawning. “But she’s your fosterling, eh?”

  Stone ducked under the lintel and came inside, nodding to Moss, who was already awake and bustling over the oil cooking lamp in the corner of the room. Though Stone was only thirty-seven, his face was seamed by sun and wind, and his forked braid was shot with hanks of white. He breathed the dim, homey smells of Shandy’s house: beeswax and cut planking, old dry cloth and apple vinegar, scorching butter and fresh-steeped peppermint tea from the breakfast Moss was making.

  He glanced at the guest bedroom.

  “Already gone,” Shandy said. “As for our daughters, Nanny is still asleep and Shale stayed with you, of course.”

  “Knife drawn and pacing half the night, it seemed. Otter finally had to yell at her to lie down and be still so the rest of us could pretend to sleep in peace and quiet.”

  “How many times have we heard those two whispering in the corner of a room, eh?”

  Stone said, “Not enough times yet.”

  “No. Not yet.” Shandy got herself a mug of tea and sweetened it with honey. “Sometimes I think it isn’t me that gets frailer as the years go by, but the world. More ripped sails, more warped wood. More friends lost. Everything is taken, sooner or later, by the Mist, or the sea.”