The Poisoned Crown Read Free

smokes stung his eyes, and he felt the talons of the albatross digging into him, tugging, lifting, sweeping him through the fume toward clear air and cool sea. Sudden pain scorched his flank—a well-aimed spear glanced off him and dropped into the fog. And then before he knew it he was plunging down, betrayed by his own weight, torn from the albatross’s grip to fall into the seething water …
    It was hot, but it did not burn. He was through the barrier. They had done it.
    T HEY SWAM south for many days at leisure while the spear wound healed and fur and feathers, singed in the sulfurous vapors, grew again. The days were longer, and the sun had barely dipped below the horizon before reemerging to resume its orbit of the sky. Once, they came across a great shoal of silvertail and fed until they were almost too full to float, but they saw no creatures they could talk to save a few small-fish who spoke a dialect they did not recognize. Another time they found a vast mat of kelp, rootless, drifting on the current with all its mobile populace. Ezroc thought it might be one of the Floating Islands from the stories, but Keerye said no, islands were solid and did not wallow in the water.
    “I think there are no islands anymore,” Ezroc said.
    But they kept on searching.
    And then they saw it, on a day without sunset, a great hump looming out of the water ahead of them. It looked like a boulder or cluster of boulders, sea-smoothed, rose-tinted, marbled in blue, with occasional fan-like growths sprouting from cracks and testing the air with feathery tendrils. Keerye swam eagerly toward it, ran his hands over the boulders, then pulled himself out of the water and sat in the sun, shedding even the semblance of a tail, naked in his skin and gilded with light. Only his long silver hair and velvet-dark eyes showed him for a selkie.
    “This is what we sought,” he said. “A Floating Island. Where there’s one, there will be more. Maybe there’s real land still, in the utter south, land with roots that go all the way to the world’s heart. The stories must be true after all.”
    “Are you sure it’s an island?” Ezroc circled the atoll, still too wary to land there. “Denaero warned us—”
    “Denaero was a child, afraid of ghosts. This is solid: look!” He slapped the boulder, making a wet sharp
thwack!
, but to Ezroc’s ear it didn’t sound quite right.
    “It doesn’t feel like rock,” he said, alighting beside Keerye. “Rock should be hard.”
    “It’s hard enough. I’m going to sleep here for a while. It’s been too long since I slept out of water.”
    “I’m not tired,” Ezroc lied. “I’ll keep watch.”
    He took off again and drifted on the high air, scanning the sea in all directions, but he could see no other island nor any living thing. The translucent water seemed to be empty even of smallfish, clear and limpid as a lagoon. That troubled him, though he couldn’t define why, and he widened the radius of his flight, covering a large area around the atoll, but still there was nothing to be seen. At last he settled on the water close to the island, folded his wings, and slept.
    When he awoke he was alone. The sun was low, though it would not set; sky and sea met on the horizon in an arc of reflected fires. And in every direction there was only water. The island—and Keerye— had gone.
    Ezroc hurled himself into the air with a great cry that seemed to carry to the ends of the world. He told himself it was a Floating Island: it had simply floated away. He would find it soon, and Keerye still sleeping, stretched out on the blue-veined boulders. He had only to fly high enough and he would see it: how could you lose an island?
    Those are not islands
, Denaero had said.
Don’t go near them …
    The dread lay coldly on his heart, dread and worse than dread, the terrible foreknowledge that it was too late, it had been too late from the moment he fell asleep. The island was gone and Keerye was gone and he