On the Isle of Sound and Wonder (36 page)

“I’m not dead, not yet anyway. Oh, my boy,” murmured the king, pulling Ferran toward him.

Ferran put his arms around his father and shut his eyes, his heart pounding.
Thank the gods,
he thought.
We’re all here. We’re all together and safe again.

Torsione opened his eyes and sat up, too, wincing as though stiff from sleep. “What time is it?” he murmured, hazily, and then saw Bastiano beside him. The sight seemed to snap him out of his fog a bit more. “Bas! Wake up, man. We’re alive!”

Bastiano stirred and mumbled, but Tor shook his shoulders gently and Bas opened his eyes. “What? Alive?” Bas blinked and looked around. “My gods, look! Alanno!”

Alanno opened his eyes, still hugging his son, and looked at Bastiano. “Brother!” he breathed. “Thank the gods.”

Bastiano’s eyes welled up with tears. “And Ferran! He’s alive! You’re alive,” he added, excitedly, turning back and touching Torsione’s cheek. “We’re okay.”

 “I’m more than okay—my leg is healed. And we’re all here,” marveled Torsione, in hushed tones, his expression full of amazement. He ran a hand along his leg, feeling the healed limb. “All of us, together. It’s unbelievable . . .”

“Oh, I don’t know about unbelievable. Amazing, yes. Wonderful? Absolutely.” Bastiano shook his head, beaming, and pulled Torsione close, hugging him tightly.

Ferran raised his eyebrows at the sudden display of affection.

“Well, that was rather a long time coming,” muttered Alanno, and Ferran laughed.

Bastiano was blushing bright scarlet, but his eyes were full of light, and he smiled widely. Torsione closed his eyes, pressing his forehead to Bastiano’s. He let out his breath with a laugh.

Alanno exhaled slowly. “Ferran, my son, forgive me. Please forgive me, my strangeness, my words . . . You are my only son and I love you. I thought I’d lost you. I thought we were all done for.” He searched Ferran’s eyes.

Ferran half-laughed, half-sobbed in reply. “It’s all right. It’s all right now,” he said, and opened his eyes to look over his father’s shoulder toward the sea. “I’ll explain everything in a while. All that matters is we’re all right.”

Beyond the dark waves, the pink and gold rays of dawn glowed through the clouds as the sun came up again at last.

Mira watched as the men woke from their bespelled slumbers and reunited with one another. From a distance, she watched over the sleeping servants, the weeping king and his son, and the embracing lords. She heard their exclamations of joy and gratitude and disbelief, and felt as though she were a million miles away.

What now?

The words thumped quietly in her mind like a heartbeat. She had done the impossible—saved Ferran and his family and friends, and found a way to restore her father’s sanity. But now it was as though she stood on the edge of a precipice in the dark, and although she knew she had to take the leap, she was unsure what would meet her at the bottom.

What now? What now? What now?

“Mira.” Dante’s voice was hushed, humbled.

She looked at her father beside her, and found his expression somewhat frightened as he watched the joyful reunions taking place mere yards away. “What is it?” she asked.

“I’m so ashamed,” he confessed, “of what I was . . . of what I intended to do.”

“It’s over now,” Mira said dismissively as she met his gaze. There was a strange weight in her chest as she said it. “Everyone’s all right. It’ll be like it never happened.”

“But my brother, and the king!” Dante protested, and began to cough. “My head is swimming.”

“Here,” Mira said brusquely, helping him to lie down again on the sand. “Just rest. You’re exhausted. I’ll go fetch them.” Glad of something to do, she scrambled to her feet and moved quickly down the beach, past Karaburan with his arms around the tiger’s neck.

“Sweet merciful—who is that?” Bastiano exclaimed as Mira approached, the staff in hand.

Ferran stood up to meet her, brushing sand from his hands onto his trousers. “Mira,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Is your father—?”

“He’s recovering,” she replied, glancing from face to face as the castaways stared up at her in confusion and awe. Their eyes were uncertain, a little afraid, even. Mira felt oddly powerful in that moment. “As are we all,” she added.

“Mira?” The king looked perplexed, peering up at her from under his wrinkled brow. “Did you say Mira?”

“Yes, Father!” Ferran looked excitedly at the king. “This is Mira. She saved me, she saved all of us. We owe her our lives.”

“But where did she come from?” demanded Bastiano, astonished. “We walked all over the island and saw no signs of civilization, no one at all . . .”

“Except for the harpy,” breathed Torsione. His expression shifted to one of horror, as though it could appear at any moment. Bastiano squeezed his hand gently.

“The island does strange things to the mind,” Mira admitted, and felt her voice falter a little. “When I was young, I tried to map the whole thing, and every time I went back over my steps, I found my notes were wrong. I tried to sketch it with charcoal on canvas and the backs of pages in books, but no matter how I tried, the maps always turned out wrong or rearranged. The island doesn’t care much for logic, I think.”

Bastiano and Torsione exchanged puzzled looks, and Mira met the king’s gaze at last. Alanno sucked in his breath.

“My gods,” he murmured. “Those eyes! Forgive me, my dear, you . . . remind me of someone. A dear friend we lost long ago.”

“Sophia?” Mira’s heart pounded.
Do I really look like my mother?
The idea reassured her.

Alanno paled. “Yes.” The others looked amazed, studying Mira even closer now.

“Sophia was my mother,” Mira answered, finding the phrase strange but gratifying to say aloud. “My father . . . was the Duke of Neapolis.”

“No! Dante?” Torsione staggered to his feet, thunderstruck. “Is he here?” There was desperation in his tone, but also something like anger.

“But we received word that the ship was wrecked and all aboard were drowned!” Bastiano protested.

“We didn’t. My father . . . his powers brought us here safely.” Mira took a step back as Torsione rounded on her.

“Where is he? Where is my brother?” His voice was hoarse and shrill.

“He’s over there,” Mira pointed with the staff, “resting a little ways up the beach. He’s very weak.”

            “Weak?” Torsione frowned again.

“Exhausted. From escaping the cave-in.” Mira looked from face to face, seeing the confusion etched upon them like carved stone. “We stopped the ritual.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Alanno asked. “The last thing I remember was the ship sinking.”

“That was my father’s storm,” Mira confessed.

“I was taken by the harpy.” Bastiano shuddered. “Just after Tor was. I don’t remember what happened after that.”

Mira was dumbstruck for a moment, but Ferran leapt to her aid. “He had us all in a cave, bound and shackled, and we’d all surely be dead if Mira hadn’t saved us,” he said, fiercely. “Dante had a spell, a ritual of some kind. He meant to bring back his wife.”

Alanno frowned softly. “He intended to give us to Death in exchange for her. I had thought sending him away for a time might help him recuperate some of his senses . . . but I see that only made things worse.”

Mira was at a loss for words, studying the sad face of the king. “He was already on a dark path when you sent him away,” she replied finally. “He may not have been saved by staying where he was. He may have continued to choose the darker path.”

“Perhaps,” said Torsione, his voice wavering, “but we could have chosen to try harder. He’s my brother.”

“You tried,” protested Bastiano.

“I should have tried harder.”

“He pushed you away!” Bastiano looked indignant. “You tried as much as you possibly could, Tor. All you can do now is try to reconcile, if he will hear reason.”

They all turned their eyes to Mira again, and she swallowed to push the uncertainty back down to the pit of her stomach. “He is much changed. We broke more than his ritual, I think. Come and see him; he asked for you,” she added, and turned to lead them back up the beach.

Karaburan cried out in alarm, and, from a distance, Mira saw the huge form of the tiger leap toward her father’s prone body.

Mira’s heart stopped. She sprinted toward them, the sand shifting and slipping beneath her feet. The tiger pounced at her father, snarling, but even as Mira skidded closer, the tiger was flung backward onto the beach, tumbling tail over snout. Karaburan staggered to help the tiger up again, and Mira saw what had prompted the attack.

Aurael had Dante by the hair and throat, his shimmering lower body entwined about Dante’s torso like a gigantic serpent. Dante gasped for air, his arms pinned down by the spirit.

“Aurael, stop!” Mira cried, stabbing the staff into the sand. The runes flickered brightly for a second, but Aurael did not recoil. He tilted his head to look at Mira, his eyes filled to the brim with a starless, deep black void. His smile was humorless and hungry.

“Oh, no, my love,” he hissed through his gleaming rows of teeth. “There’s not a thing that could stop me now.”

“I command you to stop!” she called out hoarsely, but the runes on the staff only glowed dimly.
Why isn’t this working?
She brandished the staff as though it were her old spear again.

Aurael’s laugh was like broken glass. “You’ve only got half the toolkit, precious girl,” he told her, “and besides—you freed me, remember?” The serpent tail of his lower body curled around Dante one more time. Mira saw that, wrapped in the very end of the tail, was her father’s book, shuddering with energy as the snake-body squeezed it ever tighter.

“Don’t,” she begged. “Please don’t, Aurael. He’s my father. He’s been a terrible, awful man, but he’s my father!”

“All children must bury their parents,” the spirit snarled. “Isn’t that right, Karaburan?”

The tiger lay in a jumbled heap on the sand, Karaburan at her side, distraught. Aurael smiled again.

“Please, Aurael,” Mira insisted. “Please. I have one more chance to have him as my father, a real father. One last chance. Don’t do this.”

Aurael’s face contorted as he squeezed both Dante and the book tighter in his coils. Dante made a hollow, painful sound, his eyes rolling back into his head.

“Say ‘please’ again,” hissed the spirit.

“Please!” Mira couldn’t help it. Her father’s face grew redder and redder. “You’re killing him, please, Aurael!”

“I vowed when I was put into that tree that once I got out, I would never be trapped again. And what happens? Your selfish, pathetic father snares me by a trick of words and makes me his slave. For fourteen years I served and suffered, and now I am free at last. This is my final duty from a servant to a master.”

“Please!” Mira’s voice hardened. “I know we have all been trapped, but you don’t need to—”

“Trapped? You, who have never known the ecstasy of a pure wind and the open sky? You, who have never seen the stars from above, the seas from below, the earth from its core? You are mortals. I was trapped. You were simply inconvenienced.” Aurael sneered. “You are nothing compared to me! I am a god. You are as ants to a titan!”

“Show him mercy,” Mira pleaded. Aurael’s shimmering brightness, the gleaming of his teeth and dark stare made her own eyes water and burn. “Please, Aurael! For whatever love you bore me as a child, please!”

Aurael glared back at her, but his churning rage began to flag, his coils loosening around Dante’s body, and the old man gasped weakly for air as the spirit let him go, bit by bit.

“Gods be merciful,” breathed Bastiano from somewhere behind Mira.

Dante sagged onto the sand, choking on the air that rushed too quickly to his lungs now that he was loose. The spirit slid back a little from the old man, eyes locked with Mira’s, his tail still coiled about the heavy book.

“Be free, Aurael,” Mira commanded, her breath shallow. “Go away and never come back.”

“Free,” echoed the spirit, sounding dazed. He looked down and saw the book still in his grasp. His eyes narrowed. “Yes. Now, I am free.”

Aurael squeezed hard, snapping the book’s spine and weather-worn cover as easily as driftwood. A flash of light burst from the book as it split. A spark caught fire on the pages, blazing with sudden brightness and consuming the book as it fell into pieces on the sand. Blue and white sparks flew, the heat keeping Mira at bay even as she dove to save it.

“No!” Mira cried out in anguish. Ferran yanked her back from the flames, stumbling on the sand with her.
Not the book!
Burning pages of the old volume fluttered to the ground as Aurael opened his snake-jaws to strike.

An echoing roar erupted from off to the side. The tiger leapt onto Aurael’s back, sinking her claws and teeth into him. He howled and, with a blast of wind, shook her violently off. She scrambled to her feet again, but the spirit slapped at her with the length of his thick tail. Something cracked, like a huge branch snapping in two. The tiger collapsed onto the sand in an orange heap, motionless. Karaburan screamed, and Mira felt her entire body go cold. She looked up to see Aurael crush Dante in the folding coils of his silver-blue scales. She stared, paralyzed with disbelief, as her father’s body vanished into the serpent’s grip.