A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) by Willow Rose Page B

sleeping?” Sara said.
    “Then we will have to follow it.”
    Sara looked up at the cloud. As the sun went down and it got darker the cloud became lighter, almost white, and it lit up in the sky.
    “We have to take turns to sleep,” Manolo said.
    Sara nodded.
    “You will go first,” Manolo said.
    And so she did. She put her head on the moist forest soil and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
    When Manolo woke her up, the cloud still hadn’t moved. Manolo lay down on the ground and fell into a deep sleep while Sara watched the cloud above her. Everything was so quiet. An owl was making a noise from a tree somewhere but other than that there was nothing. It was a night of a full moon and she enjoyed staring at this big white planet in the sky dreaming about the day she would hold her little brother in her arms again and he would smile at her. Sara sat there quietly for a long time and let her mind drift off.
    Until she heard something.
    Like a howling. Sara got up from the ground she had been sitting on and looked around her. It sounded like a wolf, she thought. A wolf howling at the moon.
    The rest of the night Sara was alert and watched every move of the forest and its animals. She looked after the sleeping Manolo, keeping an eye on the cloud in the sky as she looked out for animal movements. By the time Manolo woke up, she was tired and asked to get half an hour of sleep more. Manolo agreed to that since the cloud hadn’t moved yet. Just before she dozed off Sara told Manolo about the wolf she had heard, and he promised her to keep an eye out for it.
    Two hours later Sara woke up. It was bright daylight. She sat up, Manolo was still sitting at his spot. The cloud, now black, had not yet moved. It had turned black again.
    “Are we leaving soon?” she asked while packing the blanket in Manolo’s bag.
    “Don’t know,” he answered.
    Sara ate and began to feel strong again. She took a quick swim in a small lake close by, and when she came back both Manolo and the cloud were in the same place as when she left them.
    She sat next to him and stared at the cloud in the blue sky. It wasn’t smiling or even winking as it had been the day before. Sara wondered if it had all been something she had imagined. It didn’t even look like it had a face any longer.
    “Maybe it is the wrong cloud,” she said.
    Manolo scraped the ground with a stick.
    ”No. This is the one,” he said.
    “So it is being mischievous again?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
     Since they couldn’t quite do anything about it, they decided to keep waiting for the cloud to move again. It was their only guidance so it wasn’t like they had any choice.
    Sara killed the time by making drawings in the soft soil with a pointy stick she found. She made a picture of a beautiful horse, and she thought for a while about their beautiful stallion that they had to let go of in the singing cave. It sure would have helped them a lot to have had a horse on the rest of the trip. Sara was tired of walking, tired of putting her fate at the mercy of a mischievous black cloud.
    She looked up once again. She felt like yelling at it, waking it up and getting it to move. So she did.
    “Hey cloud!” she yelled. “Is it going to be today or what?”
    But nothing happened.
    They waited like that for hours and hours, and as the afternoon came, the cloud still showed no sign whatsoever that it was about to move.
    Sara stood up again.
    “I say we just start walking,” she said. “Maybe we can find the path on our own without the cloud.”
    Manolo stood up as well. He sighed and put a hand on her shoulder.
    “We need patience, that is what we need. Just sit down and rest,” he said.
    But as he opened his mouth to speak more, Sara started jumping and yelling pointing to the sky.
    “The cloud, the cloud! It is moving!”
    They both looked up and saw the cloud suddenly move very fast across the sky.
    Manolo took Sara by the hand and they started to follow it