“Then it can wait two more hours,” Caliban answered. Ariel flared, but Caliban pressed on. “If Chiara fails, then this new girl will do. But I will not let her go down into the deeps for nothing.”
Ariel shrugged. “If she lives, she'll be a wizard. That should be enough for her.”
Caliban gritted his teeth, but kept his reason. “Do you want to repeat my mistake? Do you really want to place the island in the hands of some unknown girl? I can vouch for Chiara. She will heal the island, not enslave it. Can this stranger be trusted?”
Ariel wavered. “Your hope is foolish. But we'll do it. We'll wait two more hours. We'll wait to the end of the spell, but no longer. When the Prospero-girl does not return, we'll do the healing with this other wizard. And if the Prospero-girl does surviveâ¦.” He paused, and burned with a malignant glare. “If she does survive, then we'll use the better of the two.”
Before Caliban could say a word the spirit vanished. He sat back down upon the rocks, his fears, impossibly, even greater. He wished he had not left the staff back at the hut. It had seemed safe enough at the time. But now some strange wizard girl was holding it, tasting its power. He shivered.
The rain continued to fall. Some time passed, perhaps an hour. And then, without warning, there was no time left.
He felt the thread of magic break. The shock of it raced through him, like a brand on his soul. He fell forwards and lay prone upon the rocks. Every joint in his body wrenched in protest. Chiara was gone. No matter how he tried, he could not sense her. It was over.
He stared at the sea with empty eyes. His heart slowed and turned to stone. He reminded himself, brutally, of every time she had told him of her nightmare of smothering beneath the weight of water. “Hush,” he had said. “It will never happen.”
He had let it happen.
His stomach rumbled. It was ridiculous. Chiara was his life. How could he be hungry? Chiara would never be hungry again. Her face would never twist into its lopsided smile. It would bloat, and small watery creeping things would feast on her flesh. She would not even have a gravestone. He had called Ferdinand a fiend and a wretch for sending her away to be married. What was he then? He had sent her to her death.
He thought of following her under the waves. But the island still held him. Would he let Chiara die for nothing? Caliban looked back at the wet desolation of his first home. He couldn't leave this trail of misery behind him.
“I kill everyone and everything I love,” he said. “I am Death.”
He imagined how Chiara would laugh at him. She'd cheer, and say something like, “Bravo! That's the best piece of self-pity I've ever heard!”
But she wouldn't laugh. Or cheer. She was dead.
Caliban's mind winced and turned away from its own thoughts. He'd finish the work. The island would be healed. And then he would go to join Chiara.
In the meantime, he needed to be strong. He needed food. His old trout stream was nearby. He would try his luck. The stupid, idle phrase stabbed him. His luck. Caliban rose and walked away.
Scrambling through the loose bracken was hard. He got lost a number of times, and he cursed his clumsiness. “Prospero wouldn't need to use spirits to bedevil me now,” he muttered. “I don't have the skill of a child.” The knife of pain in his heart twisted again. He sat down on a lightning-scarred stump. Why should he save this cursed place? Let it die, and its evil power with it.
Grimly he stood and fought on through the underbrush. “I will not think these things,” he muttered. “I am here, and Chiara is dead. I will do what I must do, and then I will rest. There is no other path.” He kept repeating the words as he stumbled through the trees. They wiped away every other thought.
At last he found the stream. It was smaller than he remembered, and it took him nearly an hour to catch five fish, but time no longer held any meaning for him. He ran a straight stick through their gills and began to walk to his cave. He wasn't ready to face the new wizard yet.
His cave. It was unchanged and yet completely different. It was gloomier, and smelled moldy. The bed of boughs was still there. The branches had become hard and brittle. All the needles had fallen on the floor. He should burn it, along with the wood that he had left piled for that purpose. He had always made sure that there was wood for a fire. New boughs would have to be fetched for sleeping. He checked his thoughts. He wouldn't need a new bed.
He made the fire and cooked the fish, filled with a quiet peace. This cave had been his home and his haven, back in the days when he'd believed it was possible to be safe. Echoes of that feeling stirred in him, but they did not last. There was a strange wizard for him to meet.
A girl wizard.
Caliban gathered up the two remaining cooked trout. It was time. As he walked back to the hut, his only hope was that the girl would be nothing like Chiara.
But how could she be? There never had been anyone like her.
Calypso was shaken awake by a rough hand. She sat upright, pulling the blanket around her. Her clothes were still laid out on the floor, drying. Why had she fallen asleep? She'd slept long and deeply on the ship.
But all other thoughts vanished once she saw the man who awakened her. He was short, no taller than herself, and she was not yet fully grown. But he was broad and thick-muscled. His eyes were pale, ghostly, almost like a drowned man's. His hair was thin and fine and cinnamon-colored. It stuck up in odd tufts around his head, reminding her somehow of a newborn chicken. A very strange chicken. He was dressed in a long cape of black feathers. He looked like a giant portent of doom. She understood why he had kept himself covered with a hood on the ship. Instinctively she drew away from him.
He stepped back. “I won't harm you,” he said.
She understood Italian well, but it formed awkwardly on her lips. “Thank you,” she replied, and then blushed, because she knew how peculiar she sounded. She hated being ridiculous.
“My name is Caliban,” he said slowly, hearing her foreign accent.
“This I know,” she said. His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Ariel said this to me,” she added.
“Ah, Ariel,” he said. His face grew blank for a moment. “What else did he tell you?”
She chose her words carefully. She needed to be trusted. “That you have want for magic, for me helping a spell. I will do this.”
Now that her mind was awake, she suddenly realized that he was alone. The princess was not with him. She felt a surge of hope, and then fought to keep it from her face. Even if he needed her, she would still have to be careful.
He nodded, his face still expressionless. “Good,” he said. “What is your name, young wizard?”
Wizard. It was not a word she knew.
“Or should I just keep calling you Hermes?” he added. He smiled, and she felt suddenly that she trusted him.
“Near to this,” she grinned. “My name, it is Calypso.”
“So, a nymph, not a god,” he teased.
Calypso felt her cheeks grow strangely hot. Life would be easier if she were Hermes, if she were a boy.
“But you are Greek,” Caliban continued, half to himself.
“My mother, yes. My father, his is Turk.”
“Ah. And you, Calypso, what are you?”
The question caught her off guard. He was clever, this ugly-looking man. She would have to be very careful. “I was sailor,” she said, at last. “No more, now. This, ah, disguise, it never works, now. I am too old.”
“Hmm,” he replied. “Are you twelve, then?”
“Thirteen,” she answered. She wished, desperately, that she had not taken off her clothes.
“That's a hard age, especially for a girl. I rememberâ” He broke off whatever he was going to say and covered his face with his hand for a moment. Calypso watched him warily.
He seemed to collect his thoughts. “This island has always been home to the homeless.” His mouth twisted again, as though he had tasted something sour. “As long as they're magical,” he added.
“You live here one time, before? You were, maybe, a shipwreck here?”
He smiled again. It was a gentle smile. It reassured her. “I was born here,” he said.
“Born?” She was confused. He could not mean what she thought.
“My mother was sent here, exiled, punished for being a witch. I was born here. We lived alone together, and then I lived by myself, for a while.” He stopped.
“Oh,” she said. A sudden rush of relief filled her. He wasn't a great royal man after all. “This I know, yes. For me, too, my mother was called this thing, âwitch.' With this, people, they are,” she searched for the word, “cruel, yes?”
“Yes, cruel,” he agreed. He lifted the leaf-wrapped bundle he had in his hand. “Fish,” he said. “It's cooked. Are you hungry?”
She began to stretch out her arm, and then she remembered that she was still naked. “My cloths...” she stammered.
He blushed as well, his skin mottling an unusual purplish color. “I'll just leave this here, then, and fetch some wood. You'll want a fire.”
He disappeared out the door. It was still raining. He'd have to let the wood dry in the hut for a time. He should have done that sooner. He'd build Calypso a shelter beside her fire, as well.
He thought of her eager dark eyes and how thin her shoulders were. No one had taken care of her for a long time. He wondered what would happen to her once the healing spell was done. She would have to stay on the island. It would be lonely for her. He would have to remember to tell her that.
“Here's a familiar sight,” Ariel said, appearing in a tree above him. The spirit glowed and flickered in the boughs of the tree, turning the branches around him blue and gold. He made the day around him appear even more dismal.
Caliban glanced up at him. “My own burning bush,” he said. He might have laughed at his own joke, if there had been any laughter left in him. Instead, he straightened his back, wincing as he did so. “It's a chore I loathe as much as ever,” he replied, gathering all the wood into a bundle. He'd found a tree blown down, weathered enough to break up, not so old that it had begun to rot. It would have been a happy find, once.
“Do you suppose you could end the rain now, or are we not yet sufficiently dreary?” he asked. His joints pained him fiercely.
Ariel shrugged, then clapped his hands together. The rain immediately slowed, then ceased. In the sky, the clouds lifted enough to lighten the gloom. There was still no sign of the sun, but Caliban supposed that would come with the healing. “Thank you,” he said. He managed to keep his tone civil.
“So, you've met the girl, then. What do you think?”
Caliban glared at him. “Were you there, watching?”
The spirit merely smiled in response.
Caliban shrugged angrily, but held on to his temper. “Then you'll know that all I've learned of her is that she's barely out of childhood and that she's been living as a sailor. Now make yourself useful and get this wood back to the hut.”
They stared each other down, neither giving way until Ariel disappeared with an angry snort, the wood vanishing with him. Caliban sat down on the stump of the tree and drew his cape in close around him. Ariel's question had been a fair one. What did he think of Calypso?
She was young, so young, but in many ways she seemed much older than Chiara. His heart stabbed in a painful sideways beat. “Don't compare them,” he told himself. He said it out loud, to give it strength.
Calypso. Think of Calypso. What would make a girl disguise herself as a boy and run away to sea? She must be fearless. She was the sort of girl Chiara dreamed of being. Chiara had loved stories of bold, adventurous girls. She'd sit beside him in the evening and stare out the window as he spokeâ¦.
He stood. What did it matter what Calypso was like? She was strong enough, that was clear. She'd been working magic for years now. She seemed willing enough to help them.
He paused. Why had Ariel asked the question? He had already met the girl. Why didn't he just demand that they begin the spell at once? Something about the girl must bother him.
Caliban shrugged. Of course Ariel was suspicious of her. He hated wizards. But she was only a child. Surely he and Ariel could control her, even if she did turn out to be the most evil witch in the world. He thought of her stammering words and smiled. She was just a little lost soul.
And she needed a home. Perhaps, after the healing, he could stay with her for a while. Just to make sure that she was safe and happy. The island could be such a gentle place.
He began to walk back to the hut. Calypso wanted that fire. And as he walked he chewed back tears, because Chiara would never want a fire again.
Calypso leapt from the bed as soon as Caliban left. She pulled on her clothes. They were still unpleasantly damp, but she was used to that after living at sea. Then she snatched up the fish and ate it ravenously. It dented her hunger, at any rate. She longed for some bread.
Next she turned her attention back to the staff. She was not eager to touch it again, but she wanted to know more about its nature. Steeling herself against the onslaught of pain, she gripped the staff once more and sought out the knowledge she needed.
It told her of the days when it had roots, when it was nourished by earth and air, when it lived. Now it was a captured thing, trapped inside its own broken corpse. And it was she who did this.
She blinked and dropped the staff. Her palm was blistered from holding it. This made no sense. She hadn't been born when the staff was made. Yet it hated her, blamed her for the tree's death. It was absurd.
She would have to hide this from the others.
Calypso shook herself calm and went outside to fix up the ancient fire pit. She was absorbed in this task when a pile of wood suddenly materialized beside her. She jumped back, tripping over a stone and falling to the ground. “Sorry,” said Ariel, appearing in the air before her. Suddenly she was back on her feet, dizzy and breathless.