Franny Billingsley - The Folk Keeper

But I was still thinking of what Finian had said before. “You can’t build a ship if you like?”

“Pity, isn’t it,” he said. “Even Edward chides me sometimes for my inelegant interests. I wish I liked guns and loud bangs. That’s an amusement worthy of a lord, it seems.”

“I’d be ashamed to be you!” The heat in my voice surprised me. “Ashamed to let anyone stop me from having a shipyard if I liked, a great lad of twenty-one and a lord in the making.”

I’d been a powerless foundling, yet hadn’t I managed to escape the endless drudgery of my life? Hadn’t I turned myself inside out, turned Corinna into Corin, to become a Folk Keeper?

“I am only a Folk Keeper, but I do as I like.”

“Tell me how to do that?” said Finian.

I shrugged. I’d already said too much.

“Quite right,” said Finian. “Why tell me for nothing? I propose an exchange.” He was teasing and not teasing, all at once. “Tell me how to get what I want. Tell me that I can get what I want. I’ve almost lost all hope. Fill me with words of . . .” He paused.

“Conviction?”

“Conviction,” said Finian. “I like that. You give me a Conviction every few days, to keep my spirits up.”

“What do I get in return?”

“Name your price,” said Finian.

“Secrets,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Secrets, about Marblehaugh Park.”

“A fair exchange.” Finian looked as though he might laugh. Was this all a great joke to him? “My Secrets for your Convictions.”

But it was not a joke to me. “Don’t we exchange blood for a solemn pact?”

Finian closed his hands. “My fingertips are too precious. It will be just as binding without. Come, ask for your Secret.”

“What does your mother love best of all?” It’s when you know people’s secret passions that you can get power over them if need be.

“I won’t charge you a Conviction for that,” said Finian. “It’s no secret that she loves me!”

“What does Sir Edward love?”

“He loves Marblehaugh Park.”

“That’s hardly a secret, either,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know what I love best?” said Finian.

I patted the boat. “I already know.”

Finian laughed. “You shall see why. Take the tiller.” He pressed a length of wood into my hand, telling me to hold it firmly, to fall off as the sails began to flap.

“I see!” I said, and I did. I pushed the tiller, and the sails belled out with the wind.

“Well!” said Finian.

Prisms of light skimmed the surface. A wave broke against us, and before it shook apart into splash and spray, I felt the strength of it, the hundreds of pounds smashing our boat. There were prisms in the spray, too, showering us with drops of light.

“You must have sailed before,” said Finian.

“I first saw the sea yesterday night.”

We were silent then a long time. He did not ask for the Conviction I owed him, nor did I offer it. The sun wheeled through the sky, pausing at the top when Finian took out a lunch of bread and cheese, plunging westward by the time we spied a mound of gray stone rising from the sea.

“The Seal Rock,” said Finian. “We’re almost to Cliffsend.” Against the rock, waves shattered and turned to gauze.

“I see no seals.”

“I’ll call them for you,” said Finian.

He drew a little whistle from his pocket. It was made of tin, but the music it made was at least silver, wrapping itself round me with an invisible lifeline.

Five sleek heads rose from the water. They are lovely things, the seals, so alert and intelligent they look as though they might speak. Huge eyes, ringed with black. Dark heads, silvered by the afternoon light.

“May our boat be blessed,” said Finian.

My voice came as an echo. “May our boat be blessed.” And even after the last note had died out over the water, every nerve along my spine stood on tiptoe to hear him play.

“Can you call the Sealfolk, too?” I have always loved the stories of the Sealfolk, who swim the sea as seals. Why, though, do they ever shed their Sealskins to walk the land as humans? If the skin should be lost or stolen, they can never return to the sea. I’d never risk losing any Cellar where I was Folk Keeper, the only place I truly belong.

“Surely you know how to call them,” he said. “You with your knowledge of charms.”

I did know that. “Seven tears shed into the sea at high tide to call the Sealfolk. But I have no tears.”

“I’ll lend you some of mine,” said Finian. “I have plenty.”

Suddenly the world paused, then turned itself inside out to run the other way.

“What has happened!” I cried. “What is happening?”

“What do you mean?” said Finian.

“Don’t you feel it, everything turned round?”

Finian sniffed the air as though I were describing a smell. “The tide just turned, but you can’t mean that?”

“No, I can’t mean that.” But I did. With Finian’s words came a burst of understanding. I knew where my internal clock had gone wrong.

It is the tide that pulls the seconds through my blood. It is the tide that threads the minutes through my bones. But the Mainland tides are set to a different clock from those of the Northern Isles. I breathed in deeply, settling myself into the ebb of the sea.

I have more power than I know.

I will need it all, too. The Folk of Cliffsend must draw terrific strength from their stony home. The red cliffs of the western coast stretch easily for ten miles, and Finian said the whole island runs thirty miles across. There might be hundreds of miles of tunnels, all connecting underground. But much of the island is uninhabited (save for legions of Otherfolk). Just a handful of villages, and the Manor.

The cliffs reared hundreds of feet above the sea, sculpted by the waves into spectacular shapes. “See there?” Finian pointed to a long, low scallop in the cliffs. “You’ll see the Manor in a moment. The cliffs are just babies there, no more than fifteen feet high.”

The Manor was enormous, even from a distance, a small castle almost, with turrets and spires and diamond-paned windows winking in the late sun. Behind everything rolled a treeless landscape of brown and purple heather.

We hugged the cliffs now, the waves rolling into smooth combers as we entered a sheltered bay. The cliffs yawned in around us, then curled out again to keep on with their job of holding back the sea. The beach was a semi-circular shelf of crumbled rock mixed with feathers and fish skeletons and broken shells. The retreating tide showed that the beach ended abruptly and turned into vertical cliff-face again. We docked at a pier of weathered silvery wood with a ladder up one side, for at low tide, Finian said, there was a long drop off the edge of the beach to the seafloor below.

There were thousands of birds, tens of thousands, nesting in the cliffs’ shingled sides, wheeling through the air, screaming, plummeting into the water, and diving at my head. I don’t blame them. I don’t like strangers myself.

“Now you get to meet my sweetheart.” Finian patted the overturned hull of a boat. “The Windcuffer. By spring, she’ll be the prettiest, fastest little boat in Cliffsend.”

“You’re building her?”

Finian put a finger to his lips. “Repairing her. Don’t tell my mother or Edward. We’ll go sailing in her, you and I.”

“I’ll be spending my time in the Cellar,” I said.

“So hellishly bored,” muttered Finian. “Bored, and stuck. Up we go, Corin, so you can see our lovely home and sleep in our lovely beds and eat our lovely meals and tend our lovely Folk.”

But the path up the cliff face was so narrow it might have been scratched in with a hat pin. “I can’t, not with my Bag.”