Magic Three of Solatia by Jane Yolen

breast. The wreck was picked clean, as clean as the Triades of growth. “Surely,” thought Lann “a crystal pool would mean trees nearby.” He steered the boat around the three and past them.
    When the Outermost Isle came into sight, some time later, a small oval isle with a groove in one side which some called a cove, Lann felt a chill. There the seawitch, Dread Mary, had made her home. Lann knew that the seawitch had saved his mother’s life and taught her all her spells in exchange for the Solatian songs. So she must have been a good witch, regardless of all the bad tales they told about her.
    “Still, if there is any crystal pool on that small isle, my mother would have known,” he said aloud, as if addressing the boat.
    And despite a rude rudder that did not want to listen to his hand and tried to steer itself straight toward the Outermost Isle, Lann put the boat’s nose into the wind and sailed her out toward the open sea.
    “To the Crystal Pool!” he shouted into the wind, feeling very brave and fortunate. A sound came back to him, as if in answer, but it was only the wind returning his voice to him in cries and whispers and sibilant sounds.
    So Lann spent a day and a night in his boat, Song of the Sea. He fed himself from his small pack. His mother had put in some bread and cheese, and he had added dried golden fruit from her winter stores and a flask of berry wine. To keep himself warm, Lann drank several draughts of the wine. He slept then, wrapped in his dreams and rocked to sleep by the waves.
    When he woke in the morn, the boat was caught on the edge of a strange green isle as if it were moored.
    Lann stood up and rubbed sleep from his eyes, then he stretched and looked around. The isle was small and dome-shaped, and the ground seemed smooth and spread with moss. Lann slung his lute across one shoulder, the pack across the other, and stepped ashore. The ground was not smooth and mossy at all. It was slick and covered with a green slime. But by walking with care, Lann made his way to the top of the peak.
    “’Tis odd,” he thought when he stood upon it, “but the isle is the same on all sides like an egg. No coves, no grooves, no indentations.”
    Just as he made that observation, there was a rumbling and the entire island began to shake. Lann slipped and fell. But luck was with him, and he landed upon the pack of food and not upon the lute. When he was at last able to sit up again, he was shocked to find that the isle had grown a head and a tail.
    “’Tis no isle at all but a giant turtle,” he said to himself. He did not scream or call out, for doing so would have been useless. And like his mother and her father before her, he did not like to make useless cries for help.
    “If it dives below the sea, I am a dead man,” he thought. And added ruefully, “Though man I am not yet.” Then he thought briefly about the button, the Magic Three, which he carried around his neck. He even put his hand on the chain. But when the tortoise, contrary to others of its kin, set to swimming above the waves with long leisurely pulls of its legs, Lann dropped the chain. He settled himself upon the island’s peak, which was the uppermost part of the turtle’s shell, and looked about.
    The giant creature seemed not to notice him at all, and kept swimming in a northerly direction.
    “Perhaps I had best get off while I can,” Lann said to himself. But when he looked for his boat, he could just make it out on the horizon. And before he had time to blink again, the boat was out of sight.
    “Well,” he thought, “this monster is speeding faster than I thought. I wonder if I should try to swim?” But there was nothing but sea for miles around.
    Lann looked down at the lute. “I wonder if it would float,” he asked himself. He stroked the fine wood, not out of fear or even possessiveness, but with a kind of pity that he would not now have time to make its acquaintance. And then a sudden thought struck him.