The Folk Keeper Page 3

He followed his own command at once, dropping effortlessly off the jetty and into the pretty boat. I stood looking down uncertainly, until Finian gave me his hand, which I all but stood on as he helped me down.

  “May the Sealfolk swim unharmed?” cried Lady Alicia.

  We shot away from the jetty. “The Sealfolk?” I said.

  “Three drops of Sealfolk blood on the waters is enough to raise a storm. So you don’t want to be sailing when one of them is harmed.” I’d never heard that, for all my hanging about the Rhysbridge market. But then, there are no Sealfolk on the Mainland.

  The sea is powerful enough without a storm. I felt its deep-running currents, the whole vast world of it, shuddering with life. Dawn had brought a silver sheen to the surface, mercury floating on fathoms of night. It’s extraordinary when you think of it, sailing on those infinite waves with just a thin layer of wood between you and the world beneath.

  Finian pressed something cool and round into my palm. I held it to the sky, which had been slowly brightening and was about to snuff out the moon. It was a bead, the color of honey. “Amber,” he said.

  “A gift to the sea,” I said. “For smooth sailing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “A good Folk Keeper knows all about charms,” I said, which is true, although most are schooled in them, while I ferret them out. I tossed the bead into the waves.

  Finian looked at me a long time. “I suppose you do, at that. I can certainly believe you’re casting a spell on me with those big green eyes.” He laughed softly. “I hope it’s a pleasant one. Listen, let’s be friends. I have enough enemies already, although there’s one gone now that His Lordship’s dead. Here then, Corin, what are you staring at?”

  I have little family feeling myself, but I couldn’t help thinking it was strange to speak of his father as an enemy, and before he was even buried!

  “Not my father, my stepfather! I’m no Merton, but a Hawthorne. My real father died long ago, leaving me a title, but no land to go with it. My mother remarried only last year, and strange as it may seem, I believe she married for love. So here I am, Sir Finian Hawthorne, at your service, but I will box your ears if you call me Sir.”

  He was teasing. I know people — ordinary people — tease each other, but it felt queer to be teased myself. Should I permit it? After all, I am in no way ordinary.

  “He was your enemy?”

  “I like to speak broadly,” said Finian. “It goes with the rest of me. He wasn’t terribly happy I was to be the lord of Marblehaugh Park after my mother — although she’ll doubtless outlive me by several hundred years.”

  “You’re to be the lord of Marblehaugh Park?”

  “It isn’t polite to sound so surprised. Yes, my mother is mistress now, and I shall inherit after her. Too bad for me Lord Merton had no children by his first wife, for they would have inherited instead.”

  “Most people like to inherit,” I said.

  “But His Lordship didn’t like me to indulge my passion for boats, sailing them and building them. I’d planned to have a shipyard someday, but he said that was no fitting ambition for a future lord. My mother stood behind his decision. It’s hard to forgive her, even if I realize she’s trying to learn the ways of the estate. Poor Finian!” He shook his head in mock self-pity. “Poor Edward, too. Had he been a closer cousin to my stepfather, he would have had the estate.”

  But I was still thinking of what Finian had said before. “You can’t build a ship if you like?”

  “Pity, isn’t it,” he said. “Even Edward chides me sometimes for my inelegant interests. I wish I liked guns and loud bangs. That’s an amusement worthy of a lord, it seems.”

  “I’d be ashamed to be you!” The heat in my voice surprised me. “Ashamed to let anyone stop me from having a shipyard if I liked, a great lad of twenty-one and a lord in the making.”

  I’d been a powerless foundling, yet hadn’t I managed to escape the endless drudgery of my life? Hadn’t I turned myself inside out, turned Corinna into Corin, to become a Folk Keeper?

  “I am only a Folk Keeper, but I do as I like.”

  “Tell me how to do that?” said Finian.

  I shrugged. I’d already said too much.

  “Quite right,” said Finian. “Why tell me for nothing? I propose an exchange.” He was teasing and not teasing, all at once. “Tell me how to get what I want. Tell me that I can get what I want. I’ve almost lost all hope. Fill me with words of . . .” He paused.

  “Conviction?”

  “Conviction,” said Finian. “I like that. You give me a Conviction every few days, to keep my spirits up.”

  “What do I get in return?”

  “Name your price,” said Finian.

  “Secrets,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Secrets, about Marblehaugh Park.”

  “A fair exchange.” Finian looked as though he might laugh. Was this all a great joke to him? “My Secrets for your Convictions.”

  But it was not a joke to me. “Don’t we exchange blood for a solemn pact?”

  Finian closed his hands. “My fingertips are too precious. It will be just as binding without. Come, ask for your Secret.”

  “What does your mother love best of all?” It’s when you know people’s secret passions that you can get power over them if need be.

  “I won’t charge you a Conviction for that,” said Finian. “It’s no secret that she loves me!”

  “What does Sir Edward love?”

  “He loves Marblehaugh Park.”

  “That’s hardly a secret, either,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to know what I love best?” said Finian.

  I patted the boat. “I already know.”

  Finian laughed. “You shall see why. Take the tiller.” He pressed a length of wood into my hand, telling me to hold it firmly, to fall off as the sails began to flap.

  “I see!” I said, and I did. I pushed the tiller, and the sails belled out with the wind.

  “Well!” said Finian.

  Prisms of light skimmed the surface. A wave broke against us, and before it shook apart into splash and spray, I felt the strength of it, the hundreds of pounds smashing our boat. There were prisms in the spray, too, showering us with drops of light.

  “You must have sailed before,” said Finian.

  “I first saw the sea yesterday night.”

  We were silent then a long time. He did not ask for the Conviction I owed him, nor did I offer it. The sun wheeled through the sky, pausing at the top when Finian took out a lunch of bread and cheese, plunging westward by the time we spied a mound of gray stone rising from the sea.

  “The Seal Rock,” said Finian. “We’re almost to Cliffsend.” Against the rock, waves shattered and turned to gauze.

  “I see no seals.”

  “I’ll call them for you,” said Finian.

  He drew a little whistle from his pocket. It was made of tin, but the music it made was at least silver, wrapping itself round me with an invisible lifeline.

  Five sleek heads rose from the water. They are lovely things, the seals, so alert and intelligent they look as though they might speak. Huge eyes, ringed with black. Dark heads, silvered by the afternoon light.

  “May our boat be blessed,” said Finian.

  My voice came as an echo. “May our boat be blessed.” And even after the last note had died out over the water, every nerve along my spine stood on tiptoe to hear him play.

  “Can you call the Sealfolk, too?” I have always loved the stories of the Sealfolk, who swim the sea as seals. Why, though, do they ever shed their Sealskins to walk the land as humans? If the skin should be lost or stolen, they can never return to the sea. I’d never risk losing any Cellar where I was Folk Keeper, the only place I truly belong.

  “Surely you know how to call them,” he said. “You with your knowledge of charms.”

  I did know that. “Seven tears shed into the sea at high tide to call the Sealfolk. But
I have no tears.”

  “I’ll lend you some of mine,” said Finian. “I have plenty.”

  Suddenly the world paused, then turned itself inside out to run the other way.

  “What has happened!” I cried. “What is happening?”

  “What do you mean?” said Finian.

  “Don’t you feel it, everything turned round?”

  Finian sniffed the air as though I were describing a smell. “The tide just turned, but you can’t mean that?”

  “No, I can’t mean that.” But I did. With Finian’s words came a burst of understanding. I knew where my internal clock had gone wrong.

  It is the tide that pulls the seconds through my blood. It is the tide that threads the minutes through my bones. But the Mainland tides are set to a different clock from those of the Northern Isles. I breathed in deeply, settling myself into the ebb of the sea.

  I have more power than I know.

  I will need it all, too. The Folk of Cliffsend must draw terrific strength from their stony home. The red cliffs of the western coast stretch easily for ten miles, and Finian said the whole island runs thirty miles across. There might be hundreds of miles of tunnels, all connecting underground. But much of the island is uninhabited (save for legions of Otherfolk). Just a handful of villages, and the Manor.

  The cliffs reared hundreds of feet above the sea, sculpted by the waves into spectacular shapes. “See there?” Finian pointed to a long, low scallop in the cliffs. “You’ll see the Manor in a moment. The cliffs are just babies there, no more than fifteen feet high.”

  The Manor was enormous, even from a distance, a small castle almost, with turrets and spires and diamond-paned windows winking in the late sun. Behind everything rolled a treeless landscape of brown and purple heather.

  We hugged the cliffs now, the waves rolling into smooth combers as we entered a sheltered bay. The cliffs yawned in around us, then curled out again to keep on with their job of holding back the sea. The beach was a semi-circular shelf of crumbled rock mixed with feathers and fish skeletons and broken shells. The retreating tide showed that the beach ended abruptly and turned into vertical cliff-face again. We docked at a pier of weathered silvery wood with a ladder up one side, for at low tide, Finian said, there was a long drop off the edge of the beach to the seafloor below.

  There were thousands of birds, tens of thousands, nesting in the cliffs’ shingled sides, wheeling through the air, screaming, plummeting into the water, and diving at my head. I don’t blame them. I don’t like strangers myself.

  “Now you get to meet my sweetheart.” Finian patted the overturned hull of a boat. “The Windcuffer. By spring, she’ll be the prettiest, fastest little boat in Cliffsend.”

  “You’re building her?”

  Finian put a finger to his lips. “Repairing her. Don’t tell my mother or Edward. We’ll go sailing in her, you and I.”

  “I’ll be spending my time in the Cellar,” I said.

  “So hellishly bored,” muttered Finian. “Bored, and stuck. Up we go, Corin, so you can see our lovely home and sleep in our lovely beds and eat our lovely meals and tend our lovely Folk.”

  But the path up the cliff face was so narrow it might have been scratched in with a hat pin. “I can’t, not with my Bag.”

  “I’ll carry it for you.”

  “No other human can touch a Folk Keeper’s Bag!”

  “I won’t look in the thing,” said Finian. “Come along!”

  But I hugged the Bag to me, not arguing (if you don’t argue, you can’t give in), just looking about and smelling the salt and dead fish — wonderfully good together, at least in small doses.

  Finally Finian laughed a little. “Perhaps I won’t be quite so bored with you about. I’ll go on ahead and give you a hand.”

  I was dragged and bounced up the path behind Finian, setting off waterfalls of stone from the cliffs, but mere rivers of blood from my knees. A flock of gulls beat into the air with indignant cries.

  “I’ll leave you to catch your breath,” said Finian, as I lay gasping on the cliff top. “It’s my turn now to fetch my things from the beach. Don’t move, else the Hill Hounds will get you! I’ll be back in a moment to collect my Conviction. You needn’t think I’ve forgotten.”

  But he was a great deal more than a moment, and at first I picked bits of stone from my hands, then blew on my knees, and finally I rose to look behind me.

  The Manor was as spectacular as the cliffs. Huge granite blocks of it stretched down the coast for quite as far as I wanted to walk. I wondered where the Cellar was; perhaps I could find a door. The park was astonishingly green and beautifully kept, as though the rugged landscape had been shaken out hard and laid down again as a carpet of grass.

  There were plenty of windows, gray and flat in the waning light, but I saw no entrance to the Cellar. A long row of French doors caught my reflection just as a wild howling came from behind.

  My feet exploded into a run before my mind could make sense of the howling. It was deep chested, savage, melancholy. The Hill Hounds, they were not just some jest of Finian’s!

  My feet pounded now into the grass, now into the loose stones of a circular carriage drive. I’ve always despised the foolish hero of the Otherfolk stories who breaks the rules to look over his shoulder. But I did, just the same; I couldn’t not look behind, and the sight of a pack of muscular bodies was punishment enough. No ordinary dogs these, but Hill Hounds, cut from shades of dusk.

  Face forward again, seeing a tree growing in the shelter of a wall. Even I could climb it, for like me, it was thin and stunted. One branch, two branches, then a yell, a tug at my breeches. I never felt the fall, but my head exploded with brilliant light.

  “My Saints, it’s Corin!” I knew that voice. “Fall off, lads! Fall off!”

  I found myself staring into a white moon caught in a web of branches.

  A gray rain began to fall inside my head, then the world turned to a whirling wheel of gray. My last memory is of the gray shrinking to the size of a fist, to the size of a coin, then folding in on itself and the whole world turning to black.

  4

  Saint Valentine’s Eve to the Feast of Saint Valentine

  February 13 — Saint Valentine’s Eve

  I can sit up now without getting dizzy. The lump on my temple’s no bigger than a goose egg, and my brain no longer feels as though it’s been borrowed for a game of croquet. Tomorrow is a feast day, so I shall walk myself to the Cellar, the Cellar and the Folk. Mrs. Bains, who is my jailor (but says she is the housekeeper), has ordered me to stay in bed some days longer. But she doesn’t know Corinna Stonewall!

  How improved I am from the night of the hounds, when I awoke to the taste of blood, my own small sea of water and salt. The infinite weight of my eyelids pressed me into darkness, but small sounds rose all around. The crunch of stone, the sound of striking flint, a chorus of soft, quick sighs.

  “I warned Corin about the Hill Hounds.” It was Finian’s voice, but very strange, like a bead rattling down a metal cone into the shell of my ear. “I should also have told him they’re susceptible to the power of The Last Word.”

  The Last Word? Could it work against the Hill Hounds? I tried to speak, but the furniture of my mind had all been rearranged, my words neatly folded and stored out of sight.

  “He’s stirring!” said Sir Edward.

  Yellow light swam through the tissue of my eyelids. I squinted them open.

  Tall shadows stood behind the torchlight; panting shadows slid about their feet. “Silver eyes!” said Sir Edward. “He has silver eyes in the dark.”

  “Corin!” said Finian as my eyes began to slide closed. “Don’t slip away again. Remember, you owe me a Conviction!”

  “A what?” said Sir Edward.

  “It’s our secret,” said Finian.

  The moon still hung in the branches; loose stones pressed into my back. Everything was so very rocky here. The torchlight leaned closer; one of the shadows knelt and turned
into white lace and black satin.

  “At least they’ve not killed you!” said Sir Edward.

  I found at last the place my words began. “I must tend to the Folk!”

  “Don’t trouble yourself about the Folk,” said Finian.

  “Never say that!” said Sir Edward.

  The Finian shadow also knelt and turned itself into enormous fingers, which began very gently to feel my head.

  “Where’s my Folk Bag?”

  “I have it here.” Finian found the lump and hissed in sympathy. “Ouch! You’ll have a headache for a week. Why did you go walking about? I told you about the Hill Hounds.”

  I smelled the salt spray in his hair. “The Last Word works against them?”

  “You’ve been eavesdropping!” said Finian. “It’s actually a family secret for which I should charge you a Conviction. But I’ll give it to you free, as an apology for lingering so long on the beach. Yes, you can control our hounds with The Last Word, but mind you, they can be very fierce.”

  “So can I,” I said, although it was hard to feel fierce on the long journey to the Manor. It comes back to me now as a jumble of pain sliced with a few vivid memories. A brisk, bossy voice saying Finian might carry me. A sickening surge as my head left the ground. Infinite tiny jolts over those infinite stones.

  I bit at the inside of my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut, and all the while the owner of the bossy voice was urging Finian to be careful. “The boy weighs no more than a chicken, Mrs. Bains,” he said, irritated at last. “I shan’t drop him.”

  There were more voices then, and the heat and light of many candles. I opened my eyes to a press of faces. Servants in powdered wigs, Sir Edward’s deep blue eyes, Finian’s wild-winged eyebrows. At the corners of his eyes were little lines from squinting. Mrs. Bains, not brisk and angular like her voice, but with a great white biscuit of a face, stuck with two black currants.

  Someone poured something nasty in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but a salt-spray hand wouldn’t let me. The stuff burned down my throat and set a fire in my head.

  A sludge of time oozed by until Mrs. Bains tried to undress me. Oh, then I came to life again, shouting, biting, kicking, striking something too solid to be Mrs. Bains.