Read Online Lost Children of the Far Islands by Emily Raabe - Free Book Online Page B

their hauls. His speech, however, was far more precise and formal than the Canadian lobstermen’s.
    “And my, oh my,” the man said, turning to Ila, who was wide awake and sitting up. “Just look at you, little one.” She smiled up at him, and then slipped off her cot and crossed the room to climb into bed with Gus. Sitting there with the warm weight of Ila against her, Gus decided not to be afraid.
    “Mr. Bedell,” Leo asked, his voice quavering slightly. Leo clearly had not reached the same conclusion as Gus about the little man. “Um, not to be rude, but were you just an
animal
? And why are you … what …” He stopped, clearly frustrated, and, leaning over, he picked up his glasses from the bed stand and shoved them on his face. “Why are you here?” he said more steadily.
    “I am here for you, of course!” he said. “I am taking you to Loup Marin.”
    The twins looked at each other. “Loup Marin?” Leo asked.
    “Well, of course,” the Bedell said impatiently. “Where the Móraí waits for you. She is the Watcher there,” he added helpfully.
    The children stared at him in silence.
    “You are Folk,” he said. “Your mother is Folk, and so you three are as well. It is time for you to come home.”
    “Folk?” Gus said. “What in the world is that?”
    “
Who
is that,” the man corrected her. “You and the boy are approaching the doubled year. Your power, therefore, is growing.”
    “The doubled year?” Leo said.
    The Bedell looked at the three of them again and sighed like an exasperated teacher with very slow students. “Anyway, here I am, and here we are, and so on, so forth, etc., etc., and we must get a move on, yes?”
    “We can’t just go off with a …” Gus couldn’t think of what to call this strange visitor, so she dropped it. “We can’t just
go
,” she said lamely.
    The man looked at her, and all the jolliness was gone from his face. “There is very little time,” he said. “The wolves are on the trail. Your father did well to drive you in circles all night—he almost lost me, and that is saying a lot. But if I can find you, the wolves can too. With your mother ill—Oh yes,” he said, noticing Gus’s startled expression, “I know all about your mother. Anyway, shehas done as much as she can do. The only thing left to do is run.”
    “What if we don’t?” Leo asked. He wasn’t being belligerent. Leo never held grudges, and anyway, he looked more fascinated than annoyed now by their odd visitor. He was just being Leo, and that meant gathering all the facts that were there to be gathered. “What if we stay here, and go to Pop’s tomorrow with our father?”
    “I doubt very much you will ever arrive,” the Bedell said, his nose twitching in an agitated sort of way. “The King’s wolves will find you, just as sure as a flounder is flat.”
    One foot (bare, and covered in fine brown hair) jerked in the air as though trying to find something to scratch.
    “This is America,” Leo said. “We don’t have kings.”
    “And this is Maine,” Gus added. “We don’t have wolves, especially not wolves who go around
killing
people!”
    “Your mother will certainly die as well,” the little man continued, as if neither of them had spoken. “She has used up all her strength trying to hide the three of you.”
    At the man’s words, an image of their mother swept over Gus, one of her before the illness, laughing at the dinner table at one of her father’s silly jokes—
Where does the king keep his armies? In his sleevies
! She suddenly missed her mother, needed her, more than she could stand.
    “Don’t you talk about our mother,” she said angrily. Ila whimpered as Gus tightened her arms around her.
    The little man stood with his hands held looselytogether in front of the lapels of his coat, the way a squirrel sitting on its haunches holds its paws, looking at Leo and then to Gus and Ila and back to Leo again.
    “Who is this ‘king’ person anyway?”