Emily Windsnap and the Castle in the Mist by Liz Kessler Page A

what to do next.
    The relief didn’t last long. A moment later, I heard footsteps. They were coming from behind the door, getting closer! There was no time to hide. My body froze as I stood in the recess.
    And then the door opened.

I was looking into a pair of very green and very surprised eyes.
    “Who are you?” asked the boy, staring back at me. He was tall, taller than me anyway, and skinny like me too. He was probably about the same age, maybe a little older, and dressed in black flared trousers and a black T-shirt. He had long jet-black hair parted perfectly in the middle and the most piercing green eyes I’d ever seen, which he continued to fix on me.
    For a brief second, I remembered Millie’s prediction about a tall, skinny stranger. Was this him? What had she said about him? I couldn’t remember. I tended not to listen carefully to Millie’s fortune-telling. For once, I wished I had.
    “I — I —” was all I managed to say.
    The boy glanced quickly down the corridor before beckoning me into the room. “You’d better come in,” he said, recovering more quickly than me. His voice was silky and smooth, like his hair, and serious, like his face.
    As I followed him into the room, I forced myself to speak. “I’m Emily,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I looked awkwardly around me. Three of the walls were covered with maps and scrolls. There wasn’t a blank inch. Every country and every ocean in the world must have been on these walls. The fourth wall had a long rectangular window that looked out to sea. Beneath it, a thick wooden bookcase held rows and rows of books, brown and bound in gold like the ones in the library. The room felt almost unreal, as though the books and maps were part of a stage set and underneath them lay a thousand years of history and mystery.
    The boy noticed me looking. “They’re from my ancestors,” he explained.
    “Your ancestors?”
    “Pirates, captains, travelers of all kinds,” he said.“Many ships have been wrecked on the rocks of Half Light Castle.”
    I nodded as though I understood.
    “Look, sit down,” he said, gesturing to a huge armchair. With its thick, dark wooden arms and green velvet seat, it reminded me of the furniture in the stately homes I’d seen in some of Mom’s books. Mom. Just the thought of her made me ache. Where was she now? Was she trying to find me? Would I ever see her again? Each question was like a knife twisting around and around in my chest.
    The boy went on staring at me as I sat down. He pulled up an identical chair and sat opposite me. “I’m Aaron,” he said. He held out a skinny arm to shake my hand but almost instantly changed his mind and pulled it away.
    We fell silent. I didn’t have the first idea what to say. Well, come on. How many times do you think about what you’d do if you swam to a spooky castle floating on a mist in the middle of the ocean and accidentally landed in some strange boy’s room?
    Exactly.
    He was the first to pull himself out of the shocked silence. In fact, now that I thought about it, he was more mysterious and cool than shocked. Perhaps he was used to strange things happening. Or perhaps he was just a mysterious and cool kindof boy. Either way, I was intrigued — and thrown off balance — by him as much as by everything else that had happened in the last couple of days.
    “How did you get here?” he asked.
    “Um, I swam,” I said uncertainly.
    His eyes opened even wider. “You swam?”
    I nodded. “Through tunnels. But where am I? What kind of a place is this?”
    “Half Light Castle. It’s my home,” said Aaron. “I don’t know any other.”
    “You’ve lived here all your life?”
    He nodded. “All my life. Here and nowhere else, like every generation before me, all the way back to . . .” He looked up at me through his thick black eyelashes. “No, I can’t tell you that.”
    “Can’t tell me what?”
    “My family history,” he replied with a