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

Allpoints Island. I mean, sure, it was an ancient pirate ship that had been wrecked on the reef two hundred years ago and hadn’t been sailed ever since. But we weren’t exactly overwhelmed with other options. What harm could it do to try?
    Together we pulled and tugged at the ropes and poles, Millie heaving the boom high enough for me to dodge underneath, the sail in my hands. Around and around I went, unwrapping the maroon fabric until it lay across the whole deck. I tried hard to ignore the rubbery feeling in my toes, pushing it away like all the other horrible things I was trying not to think about.
    “Oh,” Millie said, looking down at the torn, fraying, useless sail at our feet.
    I looked down at it with her. “Maybe we could sew it?” I said eventually.
    Millie sighed and smiled tightly. “We’ll give it a try, dear,” she said, patting my arm. Neither of us mentioned the fact that the boat was stuck on a sandbank and that the lower half of it was submerged in water. Or the fact that we didn’t happen to have the tiniest idea of where we were. We needed something to cling to, even if it was a complete illusion.
    “We’ll work something out,” Millie said as sheturned to go back inside the boat. “Now I’ll just have a cup of Earl Grey, and then what do you say we get started on the cleaning up?”

    We managed to put everything back where it belonged. Everything that wasn’t completely smashed to smithereens, that is.
    The worst part was when I came across a glass that Dad had given Mom only a couple of weeks ago. He’d painted a heart with their initials on the side. It was broken right across the middle of the heart, their initials on separate shards of glass at opposite ends of the boat. It wasn’t significant, I told myself again and again. It didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t superstitious.
    But I couldn’t convince myself. It was all I could do to hold back the tears lining up behind my eyes, desperately trying to squeeze out.
    It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t seen Millie suck in her breath between her teeth and shake her head when she saw it. As soon as she spotted me, she did the smiling thing again. “It’s only a glass,” she said. “We’ll get your mom a new one, soon as we get back, eh?”
    Then she ruffled my hair and sent me off to the kitchen area with a brush and dustpan.
    It was pitch-black outside by the time we’d finished. I went downstairs to see Shona while Millie made us all a snack. She’d figured out that if we rationed ourselves tightly enough, we could survive for a week on the food and water we had on the boat. “Not that we’ll be here anything like that long,” she’d said brightly. “But just so’s we know.”
    Shona and I talked about what had happened, going over it again and again, trying to make sense of it.
    “So, he tried to get the ring from you, but he couldn’t even touch it?” she asked for the fifth time. “But Neptune can do anything! Why couldn’t he get it back if he wanted it so much?”
    “I don’t know,” I said, as I’d said each time we came around to this point. “He said something about his own law stopping him.”
    Then I paused. I hadn’t mentioned the curse yet. I didn’t know how to. So far, the worst effects had been while I was human. What would happen as my merself got worse? Or what if that was the half of me I was to lose forever? If I wasn’t going to be a mermaid any longer, that would mean I’d lose Shona as well as everything else that was going to happen. I’d never be able to go out swimming in the sea with her again. I might have one of Neptune’s memory drugs forced on me and never even remember her! My best friend, the best friend I’d ever had.
    And there was the other thing too. The thing that was so awful, I kept trying to stop myself from even thinking the words. But they were there, in the center of everything. My parents. Was I ever going to see them again? If I lost half of what I