Island of Fire (The Unwanteds) Read Free Page A

Gondoleery Rattrapp had made the skies above her little gray house open up and pour down rain, she barely gave a thought to the Artiméans. She didn’t think often about the new acting High Priest Aaron Stowe, either, though she’d been one of his prime supporters as he attempted to restore Quill to its former state of control.
    No, Gondoleery had been awfully scarce around Quill lately. And for good reason. She was very busy sitting at her kitchen table, thinking about her childhood.
    If she knew how to write, she’d be writing down everythingas she remembered it so she could free up her mind for more memories. But there were no pencils for ordinary people in Quill, and no knowledge of how to use them. So instead of writing, Gondoleery was thinking.
    Sometimes she napped in her chair in the heat of the day, and she began to dream for the first time in decades. It was frightening at first, since dreams were not allowed in Quill, but she was wise enough to realize no one would ever know unless she told them. Her dreams were filled with ideas she could never have imagined when awake—dreams of fiery rivers of lava hurtling down a jagged mountainside. Dreams of swirling dust, of gusting winds, of frigid ice and quaking earth. Dreams of destruction that both frightened and thrilled her.
    Yet when she awoke each day, she knew she had seen such things before, though none of the people of Quill ever had. None, that is, except for the three remaining droolers in the Ancients Sector.
    And Eva Fathom.
    Gondoleery needed time to think. She needed time to remember, and time to see just how powerful her own bit of magic really was. And so it was that she decided to disappearfrom Quill by staying right where she was, in her chair, and not emerging until she had thought every thought and dreamed every dream. And relearned every bit of magic she’d lost.
    And then, when she was good and ready, when she was stronger and more powerful than any nonmagical high priest, when she required no team of Restorers to back her up . . . that’s when she would make her move.

Caves
    T he breeze came, and the breeze went away.
    Day after day, Samheed and Lani huddled together somewhere below ground on Warbler Island, telling time by the breezes that swept over them—the gentle wake of Silent people bringing them daily food and water. As on the first day, the two friends remained blind, deaf, and mute, and they still had metal bands of thorns threaded through the skin of their necks, which had finally begun to heal.
    In the vastness of their dark days, they created a language with their fingers, tapping the other’s palm or knee to spell out words. The letter A was one tap, B was two taps, and so on.It was a long process to spell anything of length, but they had plenty of time in which to do it. After a few days, having memorized the number of taps that corresponded to each letter, they were able to go more quickly, using a full-palm slap to count for five. The twelfth letter of the alphabet, L , was two slaps, two taps. S , the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, was three slaps, four taps. A brush of the hand meant a space between words, and a closed fist meant the speaker was finished. Sometimes they skipped a letter to save time and effort if they thought the other would be able to figure the word out without it.
    Through this method, Lani recounted what she had seen while Samheed was unconscious. She told Sam of her hope for Meghan’s escape, which lifted his spirits, although only a little bit. If it weren’t for each other and their new language, they might have gone insane by now.
    Sometimes, when they were tired of tapping and there was nothing left to say, they linked arms or clasped their fingers together as they fell asleep, desperately afraid that if they didn’t stay in constant physical contact, one of them could one day wake up alone and have no idea what had happened to the other.
    A few times each day Lani pulled Alex’s