Riverlilly Read online

  Chapter the Second,

  The Third to Last Night,

  In which the dark delivers a friend.

  I. For Keeps

  There was no sail on the dilapidated boat nor any oars, but the West Wind carried them as surely as if they were hooked by an invisible line reeling them in with infinite patience. Jai could not tear himself out of his defensive trance, still wary of an ambush. If Seaweed was so inclined, he imagined, it would be an effortless task to poke a hole in the bottom of the boat and leisurely watch the two children sink like stones. That’s what I would do, Jai told himself. Thinking this and other ill things like it, his thoughts took a murderous turn as the boat sped farther away from the coast.

  In his trance he saw schools of fish swimming to and away from the boat in formations mirroring larger versions of the same species which composed them. He saw jellyfish that looked like phosphorescent mushrooms a scale below the surface. He saw a thing like the carapace of an enormous crab, as big as a mountain, scuttling across the horizon to the south. But he saw no sign of Seaweed.

  Jai carefully leaned over the edge of the boat and drank a cupped handful of the sea, then poured another handful over Ceder’s wound. The dried blood on her face melted away and the feverish gash on her forehead was clearly exposed. He flung himself over the side of the boat and vomited water and old apple seeds. His consciousness tried to swim away; he let go like an angler who would never catch a fish for keeps.

  There’s no acid or venom in the sea. There are probably no wool fish, wyrms, or pirates either. The water isn’t waiting here to snatch us up. It doesn’t even look alive—it’s just another object, like the earth and the sky. How much of what Sorid told me was a lie? Everything? Jai shot a worried look at Ceder. But she’s here and real, so she must have been there all the time, right above me. That story was true. So is it true she’s cursed, as well?

  The black heavens played canvas to Jai’s imagination. He saw all the monsters from Sorid’s tales surging through the air a hundred times larger than they could truly be: he saw killer whales with a hundred eyes, mangy packs of dire wool fish, and Ghazahg, the wyrm that was big enough to strangle the entire Land of Lin. As a young boy Jai had imagined these legends swimming at him through the maze of dark tunnels, devouring him where no one would ever find his bones.

  He thought he might lose his mind this first long night, gazing into the vast unknown, but he had only to look at Ceder to recall himself. Her eyes did not open or flicker for all the crawling hours of Jai’s watch. He held her hand, his back hunched, his head hung. Once or twice a faint dribble of speech fell off his lips, coaxing her to wake up, to open her eyes to see the stars now that she was free, but at long last he could not hold his own eyelids open anymore. “Watch over her,” he whispered to himself, or to the moon, or to no one at all. He slept curled up like a dog at her feet.

  If any friendly creature in the open sea was aware of the sorry ruin of a boat wending its way eastward, taking on more water with every tail it traveled, then none came to its aid, and so it was the wind alone that watched over the children this first cold night.

  II. Hide and Seek

  Something bumped the boat.

  Slouching like a seasick sailor, Jai sat up, still half-asleep. He checked Ceder first—her breath was but a hint—then he peered timidly over the side of their soggy craft to see what had jarred him awake.

  He saw nothing. The water was undisturbed. Their boat, however, was rocking violently and showed no sign of settling, except perhaps at the bottom of the sea.

  “Seaweed?” Jai asked the night. No, it won’t be him—he has what he wants. Unless he thinks we have two more apples for him.

  A far more terrifying thought struck Jai: the most gruesome stories Sorid told were about the savage scavengers of the sea that sailors grimly named ‘wool fish.’ An aberrant hybrid of pack sharks and shaggy wolves, they hunted where they smelled spilt blood, ripping the skin or scales off anything they ate while it was still alive, as if sheering sheep for the slaughter.

  Jai studied the seascape. From Ceder to the sea, back and forth his eyes flitted fervently. There, he saw a fin in the water! Two! Two sleek fins, cruising through fractured shards of moonlight.

  There are two scents of blood in the water tonight, Jai quickly tabulated, Ceder and Seaweed. The wool fish will be ravenous.

  The fins hunted the boat in smooth, quickly-closing spirals. Jai’s knuckles were moon-white gripping his knife. He had not put it down for all the hours since cutting Seaweed, not even when he had fallen asleep. The blade had no true handle—every edge was equally jagged, twisted, and corroded. His hand bled freely as he held it. Gritting his teeth for a disappointing end to life, he pointed the knife outward, aimed at the first snout that should dare break the surface.

  The fins sank into the sea, their circling only half complete. Jai marveled for a moment at the ripples left in their wake: opposing rings passing into and through each other like steel hoops wed into one by a magician’s sleight of hand. Inflated by the good fortune of having not been killed and eaten, Jai congratulated himself.

  They bumped the boat again—whatever they were—jostling Jai hard enough that he stumbled forward and fell down next to Ceder. Staring at her profile he found a shred of courage, for her sake if not his own. He rose and peered over the side again, puny and exposed to the gaping maws of insatiable evil which he could not now help but envision. Rows and endless rows of razor-sharp teeth did not consume him; when he opened his eyes—he did not remember closing them—and unhunched his shoulders, he was still in one piece.

  A splash of water hit him in the face, whipping his hair back. Something was laughing at him, squawking like a dunked goose. He shook his hair dry. “No wool fish,” he said sheepishly, “but what?” When he looked for the sound the dark sea was as silent as a child playing hide and seek. Jai wrapped his arms across his scrawny chest and tried to appear menacing, lest the culprit make another run at them. Or maybe this is how wool fish play with their food. His courage faltered.

  He was wondering whether their boat could sustain another hit and remain in tact when a third bump came just hard enough to catapult him off his feet, over the side, and into the sea.

  Jai heard a spurt of high-pitched giggling before he sank. Disoriented, he tried to shout for help but instead swallowed seawater. Bubbles burped up his unready nose. Before he could focus and try to swim, something powerful and sure sidled up underneath him, whisked him back to the boat, and tossed him brusquely aboard.

  “Thanks,” he squeaked, squatting next to Ceder in the bottom of the boat. Jai quickly checked her heartbeat—still a subdued echo—then stole another look over the side of the boat. The sight made him fall to his knees.

  III. Somehow Familiar

  Jai could only stare. There, before his eyes, a pair of dolphins, one pearl white, one charcoal black. A glowing, seashell-colored horn grew from the middle of either dolphin’s head. “Unicorns,” Jai said under his breath with stunned reverence. Quite at once he was convinced that these were two animals of an ancient and most sacred magic.

  As Jai stared slack-jawed and vapid both dolphins drew near to the boat, standing on their tails, poised like two lords of the sea. Jai vaguely felt he should kneel before them, but found that he was still on his knees from the shock of their appearance so he lowered his shaggy head instead. When he opened his eyes the unicorns had approached to hand’s reach beside the boat. Jai dared not touch them, though the temptation was nearly overwhelming. “Hello. Ummm, how’s the water?” he stammered, blushing. “Not too cold?”

  Before Jai could embarrass himself further the black dolphin leaned forward and lowered something into the boat. The moon ducked behind a cloud; Jai could not see what the secret bundle was other than a hazy pile of shadows and a handful of flower petals. The petals glowed like embers in the night, but they did not illuminate the indistinct mass of solid darkness to which they were tethered.

 
; The white unicorn reached its horn over the side of the boat and unlooped the strap of Jai’s satchel from around his shoulder. The dolphin lifted the satchel over the choppy water; with it, the two luminescent red eggs.

  “Hey,” Jai feebly objected.

  The black unicorn turned its attention to the satchel. Without a glance at Jai it tapped each of the two eggs with its horn. Each tap produced an unmistakable crack. Jai clenched his teeth and winced—Ceder had told him the eggs were valuable, to guard them well. And that’s all we had to eat, he lamented.

  The black took the satchel from the white and immediately dove below the surface. The white returned to the boat and met Jai eye to eye. It piped a singsong salutation, then sidestepped a fin to stare down directly over Ceder’s pale face.

  Ceder moved, shifting oh-so-slightly in her sleep—a sign of life! Her lips parted and a tiny cough fluttered in her throat. Her eyes flickered open. Jai saw a look of profound relief wash over her face as she beheld the unicorn and at once fell back to sleep.

  The charcoal dolphin emerged shortly thereafter, Jai’s waterlogged satchel securely in tow. The dark unicorn wasted no time in giving the bag back to its rightful owner.

  “Thank you,” said Jai, not sure why, as he had not willingly given the bag away to begin with. In his hands the satchel jumped and shook as though the eggs had been replaced with wriggling fish. Jai removed one of the eggs and raised it to his eye, examining the hole that had been cracked in the top of it.

  A storm raged inside the egg, a whirlpool as small as a cup of tea but violent as a hurricane. The egg itself was no longer scarlet, but deep blue. Jai was astonished to behold that both eggs were still aglow with internal light—now a cool, soothing sapphire rather than ruby red. Enchanted, he held the cracked hole to his mouth and drank. He poured the water over his face and his hair and his itchy tunic. Then he realized that he had poured from the little egg more water than might fit in a wheelbarrow, yet the mad whirlpool inside the shell still spun with endless fury!

  He looked to the dolphins, and they to him. In their level gaze was conveyed a strict imperative which was one and the same as Ceder had told him: guard them well. Jai nodded and tucked both eggs tightly into his satchel.

  The unicorns turned away from the boat and regarded one another for a long moment. An aura of love and respect as old as the waves passed between them. Then the white turned back to Ceder. The black approached Jai. In one of its reflective eyes, Jai saw a glowing horn dipping toward Ceder’s bloody face. For an instant, he thought he saw the unicorns not as dolphins but as man and woman—he as old as time with a beard like snow, she his ancient equal, wearing a quizzical expression that struck Jai as somehow familiar. Then the dark unicorn’s horn touched Jai’s forehead and he was no more.

  IV. A Reflection

  In no story told is a kiss from a unicorn a trifling thing and the Land of Lin does not dissent from this fine and long-standing tradition, though the unicorns are nearer fish than fancy goats. By law of the land, the aftermath of such a rare affair will be perpetually complex and impossible to predict, but these two gentle blessings given to two children who had never known a tender touch before also bore an effect that was both immediate and self-evident: without blankets or beds Jai and Ceder slept like rocks. Any lingering nightmares or chills in their blood were swept away like fire in the rain.