The Battle for the Castle by Elizabeth Winthrop Page A

she said, pointing straight down. “There it is. In the lee of the shore.”
    At first glance, the ship looked like any other. It was a one-masted vessel with what had once been a square sail and high turreted edges at the bow and stern.
    But this ship had an unnatural look about it. The breeze and the current seemed to have no effect on it at all. The sail hung in long dirty strips like hair ribbons, and the rudder flapped idly back and forth on its own irregular schedule. The sea did not lift this vessel or shift its position in any way.
    â€œGive me the binoculars,” Gudrin said, and he handed them to her without even looking through them first. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was down there.
    Gudrin sat still for such a long time that Sorrel put his head down for a snack. He curled his long lips around some tufts of brown grass and ripped them from their roots. Mandrake snorted and blew, searching for thistles. Only Gudrin’s head moved as she slowly scanned the decks of the ship from bow to stern and back again.
    Finally William couldn’t stand it anymore. “What is it? What do you see?”
    â€œBones,” she said without lowering the glasses. “Some connected, some just scattered around. And odd bits of clothing and debris.”
    â€œThere were bones and garbage in the river that day. Are you sure?”
    â€œThe skeleton ship. See for yourself,” she muttered and handed over the binoculars. “Come to ravage / Come to kill / Bones will crack / Blood will spill.” At the lilting chant of her voice, Mandrake stirred uneasily and briefly lifted her head to look at the girl.
    The binoculars were lightweight, small enough to fit in William’s belt pack, so the magnification wasn’t particularly strong. But he could see enough. Sometimes the bones of the sailor were laid out in perfect formation as if the man had fallen in his tracks and his flesh and organs had been sucked away in one single instant, leaving the skeleton undisturbed. But in other places on the deck, William could see a skull here, a foot there, as if whatever had stripped the meat away had tossed the bones aside like so many pieces of trash.
    He yanked the binoculars from his eyes. For a minute he thought that he might be sick, but he had never thrown up and he wasn’t going to do it now in front of a girl. He forced himself to breathe deeply, to the diaphragm, as Coach would say, once, twice, another time. The feeling of nausea passed and he busied himself with putting the binoculars away. Mandrake was up to her neck in a gorse bush, and with a gentle kick and a tug on the reins, he backed her out. Still Gudrin said nothing. She sat on Sorrel and stared down at that ship as if she had nowhere else to go, nothingelse to think about, as if by sheer force of will she could make the ship disappear.
    When she turned toward him, she was changed. There was a wild look in her eyes that shocked him. It was as if some animal were peering out at him through her face.
    â€œWe have to burn it,” she said. “We have to come back tonight and burn it.”
    â€œLet’s go tell your uncle about it,” William suggested. “He’ll know what to do.”
    â€œHe’ll do nothing,” muttered Gudrin. “He wouldn’t listen to my grandmother. That’s why he let them lock her up in that convent. He won’t listen to you or me either. If we show him the ship, he’ll just wring his hands and worry. Or have it towed out to sea again. And it will return. I know that now. We have to destroy it.”
    She yanked Sorrel’s head out of the grass and wheeled the horse around. William reined Mandrake in and let her gallop ahead of them down the path. It was no use killing themselves getting back to the castle, he thought, as he let his horse take her time going down.
    They rode most of the way in silence. When the castle loomed into view, she looked at