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

was, did that mean I would lose one of them as well? Even if they wanted to be together, maybe it wouldn’t be possible. The thought was like a kick to my stomach.
    “Shona, there’s another thing,” I said nervously. “A really bad thing.”
    So I told her about the curse, about how it would take a few days to work, and I wouldn’t know which way it would go, but whichever way it did, that was where I would stick. I stopped short of telling her it had already started, about how my feet hadn’t completely formed when I was on the deck. And how even now, swimming down here as a mermaid, I could feel something was different. Just here and there a scale missing. Bits of flesh showing through my tail. She didn’t need to see that yet, the proof that the curse had already started.
    “Fighting fins!” Shona exclaimed when I’d finished. “That’s awful! What are we going to do?”
    “That’s what I thought you’d help me work out.”
    Shona grabbed my hands. “I will, Emily,” she promised. “We’ll stop this from happening, OK? As sure as sharks have teeth, I’m not going to lose you.Whatever happens. And you’re not going to lose your parents either.”
    I winced at her words as though she’d lashed me with a piece of wire. Just the thought of it!
    “We’re going to solve this, all right? You and me, we can do anything, can’t we?” Shona looked at me desperately, her eyes begging me to say yes.
    I looked at her and squeezed her hands. “Of course we’ll solve it,” I said, lying as much as she was lying to me with her words, and as much as Millie had lied with her smile. “Of course we will.”

    I stood on the front deck with Millie. Shona was in the water next to the boat. I rubbed my stomach, trying to ignore the fact that it was rumbling from my rationed dinner of a third of a can of beans and a piece of toast. A feeling of warmth spread into me from the ring, against my body. Everything was going to be OK. I could feel it. The ring was telling me so.
    “That’s the Plow, and that’s Orion’s Belt,” Millie said, pointing up at the stars, clustered together in tight clumps. I craned my neck to follow the outline she was pointing out. I don’t know howshe could tell what was what. The longer I stared, the more it just looked like a completely black sky filled with a million billion tiny white dots.
    “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a dark shape like a shadow in the distance. It was coming closer, changing as it slid across the sky. Another cyclone? Please, no!
    It looked like a giant snake, gathering and bunching up into an arc, then stretching out to form a long black line cutting through the stars. It was heading for the castle. The shape disappeared into the mist, reemerging above it to swirl around the top of the castle, circling it, spinning into a spiral, around and around, tighter and tighter, faster and faster, until it faded into nothing. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. And one of the most magical too.
    We stared into the black night. The shape didn’t come back.
    “I have no idea,” Millie said eventually. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And I’m not one for superstition, as you know, but I’ll bet it’s portentous. Let me think.”
    “What about the stars, though?” Shona asked. “There are constellations that can help us work out where we are, I’m sure of it. I just can’t remember what they’re called. Or what they look like.”
    Which was a big help.
    “I’ve got it!” Millie said, her eyes brightening. “I have a great idea.” She headed back inside the boat and beckoned me to follow.
    For a moment, for one silly, ridiculous, heart-stopping moment, I actually thought she’d come up with a plan to get us out of this. I let myself hope. Until she said, “I’ll do our tarot cards.”

    I followed Millie into the kitchen. “You clear a spot for us, and I’ll lay out the cards,” she said.
    Shona swam up to the