The Crossing of Ingo Read Online Free Page B

quivering with excitement. Sometimes she hates her bath, sometimes she loves it.
    Today she’s decided to hate it. She keeps trying to escape and she sloshes water all over us. Conor helps to hold her while I wash her with special dog shampoo. She whines piteously, as if we’re torturing her.
    “Sadie, if you keep on jumping into ditches you’ll keep on having to have baths.”
    “Cause and effect, Sadie girl,” says Conor, passing her towel. I rub her hard all over. She likes this part. By the time she emerges from the towel, golden and gleaming, Sadie looks extremely pleased with herself.
    “You know you’re beautiful, don’t you?” I ask her.
    “Of course she does,” replies Conor.
    “She’s the most beautiful dog in Cornwall … Hey, Con, wecould take Sadie to a dog show! She’d be sure to win a prize.”
    Conor raises his eyebrows. “She’d hate it, Saph. Think about it.”
    I think about it. Lots of poodles with pink ribbons around their necks, mincing past the judges – and Sadie bounding around the ring, chasing imaginary rabbits. Maybe not …
    “I
am
going to get that ladder,” says Conor. “While the gulls are out of the way it’s a good chance.”
    “Don’t, Conor. What if they come back?”
    “I don’t like the way there are more and more of them all the time,” says Conor quietly.
    He is right. It was just one gull to begin with, and then two, but sometimes there’s a whole row of them standing motionless on the spine of our roof now. They watch everything. They know that Conor and I are alone in our cottage.
    “I counted eight yesterday evening,” says Conor.
    We’re not really alone,
I tell myself quickly. Granny Carne told Mum she’d watch out for us. Our neighbour Mary Thomas and everyone else in the village “keeps an eye”, which can be quite annoying at times. We go to school as normal. But at night we’re alone in the cottage.
    Don’t be so pathetic, Sapphire. You can manage fine. Look at how Rainbow and Patrick cope when their parents are away in Denmark for weeks on end. They just get on with it.
    The trouble is that I spent so much time and energy convincing Mum it was safe to leave us, that I forgot about how I might feel once she was gone. As soon as Mum and Roger’staxi had bumped away down the track and I saw one gull watching from the roof, I began to feel uneasy. If Mum had known about Ingo, or the forces that were gathering there, or the battle between Ervys and Saldowr, or any of a hundred things that Conor and I know and have kept from her so carefully, then she would never have left the cottage.
    Saldowr said we would see Dad again, when the Mer assembled to choose who would make the Crossing of Ingo. Dad will have his own free choice too, one day – to decide whether to stay in Ingo or return to Air. He’ll be able to decide his own future. What if Mum knew that?
    It’s strange how different it feels now that Mum isn’t here. Even Roger’s absence changes things. It’s as if we are boats which were held safe by an anchor, and we never realised it. Now the anchor has been pulled up and we might drift anywhere. When it gets dark the wind roars around our cottage so loudly that it feels like being in a boat at sea. You can easily believe that you have already left the Earth and are halfway to Ingo. Winter is coming. The dark is growing stronger every day.
    “I’m going to see if I can reach that nest. Help me get the ladder out of the shed, Saph.”
    “You can’t destroy their nest, Con! What if there are babies in it?”
    “I won’t do anything to them. And why would gulls try to lay eggs at this time of year anyway? The chicks wouldn’t have a chance of survival.”
    “What if they come back and attack you?”
    What if the gulls are spying for Ervys?
is what I want to say, but I keep quiet. Conor will think I’m imagining things as usual. But to my surprise he says what I’m thinking.
    “I don’t want them spying on us.”
    “Do you