Read Online Emily Windsnap and the Castle in the Mist by Liz Kessler - Free Book Online

though someone had taken out a peach-colored felt-tip pen and was drawing an outline around each one. As though they wanted to make up for the heavy blackness of the storm. Soon pink and orange seeped into the spaces between the clouds. The sun forked out, through every gap it could find, in bright orange fans. It was like a painting.
    A lone seagull sailed across the sky as though it were putting its signature on the picture.
    And then we saw it.
    “Look,” Shona whispered. She pointed into the mist along the horizon. Millie and I peered to follow the line of her finger. Gradually it came into view as we stared, standing out above the mist as though it were balancing on it.
    A castle.

“Where are we?” I whispered.
    No one replied.
    We went on staring, each thinking our own thoughts and silently asking our own questions. I didn’t ask any more questions out loud. What was the point?
    Standing at the very front of the boat, I slowly turned around in a circle, taking in the whole view. Absolutely the same all around us. Totally, totally still sea. Stiller than I had ever known it, bluer thanI had ever seen it, quieter than I had ever heard it. The boat lay on the slightest tilt, lodged on something. But what? There was no land to be seen, nothing to be seen at all, in fact, except the ocean, and the castle, and the mist.
    Shona ducked under and swam out of sight. A moment later, she emerged, wiping the hair from her face. “We’re stuck on a sandbank,” she said flatly.
    A sandbank. In the middle of the ocean?
    Shona shrugged and shook her head in answer to my unasked question.
    I squinted at the castle to examine it more closely. It stood proud and majestic above the sea: a gothic silhouette against the sunset, like a cardboard cutout. It was a child’s picture of a castle, perfectly symmetrical, a turret balanced squarely on each side, a tower in the center. Two thin arched windows were just visible in the top corners. As I looked, something tugged at me. It felt as though there were a wire between the castle and my chest, pulling at me. I knew in that moment I would have to go there.
    The sky was turning red behind the castle, blacking out everything except its outline and the line of mist wafting around it like cigar smoke. Every now and then, as the mist ebbed and flowed, I noticed that the castle seemed to be standing on an island of rocks. Jagged and threatening, they held it high, as though carrying it on a platform, a grand stage in the middle of the ocean.
    Millie was the first to shake herself out of the trance we all seemed to be in.
    “All right, girls,” she said, dusting herself off and shaking out her gown. “I’m going to find out where we are.” As soon as she spoke, the feeling about getting to the castle left me as rapidly as it had come.
    Shona looked blankly up at her from the sea, as though Millie had spoken in a foreign language.
    “How?” I asked.
    Millie gave me a big false smile. Just like the ones Mom gives me when she doesn’t have a clue how to work something out either. “I’ll find a way. We’ll have you back with your mom and dad in no time. Just you wait,” she said, doing nothing to soothe my worries. If anything, she’d made them even bigger. Who said Mom and Dad wanted me back? Maybe they’d both realize they were better off without me messing things up all the time. Millie looked down at Shona and gave her one of the not-real smiles too. “You too, dear. I’ll work something out. Don’t worry.”
    She stepped carefully across the deck and patted the big, long sail that lay rolled up along the side. “Come on, let’s see if we can get this up,” she said. “We could sail back, no problem.”
    I stared at her in disbelief, briefly shaken from my somber thoughts. Surely she didn’t really believe we could sail Fortuna ?
    But then I thought again. Why not? Perhaps we could! If only we could figure out where we were, maybe we could get it started and sail back to