Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret - Liz Kessler [52]
“And that’s what was inside the shell,” she said, pointing to the package Aaron still had folded up in his hand.
Aaron nodded. “We were just about to open it when you came in.” He looked up at me. “Ready?”
I nodded.
He unfolded the package, again and again until it was fully open. A plain sheet of paper, covered with hand-drawn squiggles and lines and symbols and strange words that I didn’t recognize.
The three of us hunched over it, trying to make sense of it.
“I think it’s a map of some sort,” Aaron said. “But I don’t know of where. It doesn’t look like any countries I’ve seen.” He frowned at it. “All those maps back at the castle — I can’t think of a single one that looks like this.”
“Of course you can’t!” Mandy suddenly exclaimed, sitting up straight and staring at us both.
“Why not?”
“Look — the map came from a siren, right?”
“Right,” I agreed, trying to ignore the fact that it was drawn on a plain sheet of paper and stuffed inside a sandwich bag. How did a siren get hold of such ordinary things?
“And where do sirens live?” Mandy went on, as though she were talking to a pair of very stupid people. Which was when I realized she was. It didn’t matter how Melody had gotten hold of it. The fact was, it was hers — and she was a siren.
“In the sea!” I said.
Mandy folded her arms and grinned. “Exactly!”
“Of course!” Aaron said. “It’s a map of the sea!”
He leaned back over the map, pulling it straight and indicating for us to join him. “We had these at the castle, too. It’s because it’s hand-drawn. I couldn’t tell right away,” he muttered, clearly embarrassed that Mandy had figured it out before him.
He ran a finger over some lines that looked like contours. “Look. This shows you the different areas and currents of the sea,” he went on, taking the lead now that he knew what we were dealing with.
“What are all the numbers?” I asked.
“They tell you how deep the ocean is at that point. And those darker bits there,” he said, pointing at some dark gray patches dotted on the map. “They’re sandbanks.”
“What are those thick arrows?” Mandy asked. They were all over the paper, pointing in different directions, left, right, up, and down.
“They tell you the direction of the tide. Very useful,” he replied.
“What about that?” I pointed to a circle in the bottom left-hand corner. It looked like an old-fashioned watch, with a little cross on the top.
“That’s a compass, isn’t it?” Mandy said. “The cross on the top is pointing North.”
“That’s right,” Aaron said. He rubbed his chin and stared at the map. “You can tell all sorts of things from a map like this. You can find any point in the sea if you’ve got the right information.”
Which was something we were lacking. We didn’t have any information. How were we ever going to make sense of this?
Aaron ran his hand over some roughly drawn shapes dotted on the map — the only bits of it that weren’t filled with squiggles and numbers. “These will be our best guide,” he said.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Land — islands in the sea. And this one . . .” He pointed at a scraggily drawn oval right in the center of the map. Whoever had drawn it had circled it again and again with a different color. They’d done it so hard, the paper had almost ripped. An arrow pointing toward it made sure it stood out even more. It was different from the other arrows. They were thick and broad. This was more like the kind you draw through a heart to indicate true love.
“What about it?” I asked.
Aaron looked up at me. “This is the place we need to find.”
The pieces started falling into place. “Melody wanted the shell to help her find something,” I said slowly. “The lost thing, whatever it is, I bet it’s out there, on that island. It must be! And if we stand a chance of rescuing Shona from that awful place . . .” My sentence trailed away.
Mandy finished