The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley

Author:Franny Billingsley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fables, Legends, Family, Juvenile Fiction, Fairies, Fantasy & Magic, Fiction, Myths, Fantasy, Other, Orphans & Foster Homes, General, Orphans, Selkies
ISBN: 9780689828768
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1999-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

June 22

The evening sun hangs in my bedchamber mirror, setting the room on fire. Everything seems to have been on fire, from the torches tossing their reflection into dark windows, to the flames licking at Sir Andrew’s shoe, to the bricks of smoking peat.

An evening all of fire, then all of water.

How lucky that the new, nimble Corinna stayed with me all that short Midsummer night. Lucky, too, I hadn’t yet left my cliff-top perch when the shouting began.

Two figures, white canvas and black satin, stood not two hundred feet away. How close they were to the edge of the cliff! I leapt to my feet just as the big one, in white, staggered backward and disappeared.

Time slowed down while I sped up. Now only five seconds had passed, now only twelve, but I seemed a long time running. Seventeen seconds, Sir Edward waving me back. ““Run for help! I’ll go in after him.””

But I was a small tidal wave, boiling along the cliffs, blasting Sir Edward aside and peering over. The sea had swallowed Finian whole; there was not a bulge or seam to show where it had taken him in. I thought more of the plunge into the sea, fifteen feet down, than of how little I swim. When do I jump? Now? Now?

And oddly, it was the crowd’s voice inside my head that helped me most. The Folk Keeper shall jump!

““I won’t,”” I cried, and jumped.

Fifteen feet. It is nothing. I did not shatter against the water; I did not drown.

I was reborn.

I was born in reverse, exploded from one medium into another, from air into liquid, from dawn into darkness; and all around there was the singing of the sea.

I closed my ears — I can close my ears! — and against all proper instinct, squeezed my lungs empty of air. There came a slowing of the world — no, not of the world. A slowing of Corinna. A slowing into new life, not into drowning and death. I was suspended underwater yet needed no air, my heart beating to the slow, rhythmic pulse of underwater life.

The scratch from Sir Edward’s button stung my cheek. There was a wild joy in that, and a joy, too, in releasing the burden of my own weight, exchanging thin air for this dense world.

I glanced everywhere, looking for a length of white canvas. But eyes are made to work with light; they’re all but useless deep in the sea.

All this, which takes so long to explain, happened only in mental time. But real-world seconds started to tick away when I turned my head with its useless eyes, looking, looking, my hair following the motion of my head through water, and then . . .

You cannot be surprised underwater in the ways you are on land. You cannot gasp; you cannot stagger back. You observe calmly as your hair — well, I can only say that my hair opened a door into another dimension. It caught at the shape of a new world.

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