Queen Liliuokalani: Royal Prisoner Read Online Free PDF Page B

hand out to her. This time she caught it, and hand in hand they rode the cyclone.
    “Well,” she said, “
this
is fun.”
    It figured that his sister would actually enjoy being caught like this, in a vortex or spiral or whatever it was.
    “What’s out there?” Felix asked. “What do you see?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    “Nothing?” Felix repeated. His heart started to race again. What if they had traveled so far back in time that there were no people even on earth yet? What if dinosaurs were roaming around?
    “Kind of,” Maisie answered unhelpfully.
    Felix could hear a sound in the distance, like people singing. No, he decided. It was just the sound of the gentle breeze. He realized he was sweating. A lot.
    “It’s really hot in here,” he said.
    “Ssshhh,” Maisie told him. She heard it, too. “I think there are people over there. Chanting.”
    “You sure?” Felix asked cautiously. “It might be this wind.”
    Around them, the wind whipped and blew. Maisie strained to listen to the sounds beyond the wind. She squinted to see what was out there.
    Felix was right. It was brutally hot. Even the grass looked hot. When the people chanting came into sight, Maisie forced herself to focus. A group of half-naked men sat underneath trees or on mounds of straw. They were big men—tall and bare-chested—and though they did not look especiallydangerous, Maisie did not think it would be a good idea to find that out for certain. Some of the men smoked pipes; some scooped white stuff out of bowls and ate it. These men listened carefully to the ones chanting, especially the tallest of the onlookers, who stood under a tree slightly away from the others, his head cocked as if to listen better. Maisie could see the top of a thatched roof beyond the group of men.
    “There’s a house over there,” Felix said. His voice sounded funny, like that of someone shouting down a mountain.
    “More like a hut, I think,” Maisie said. “A
grass
hut,” she added, excited. Where in the world did people live in grass huts? She smiled to herself. And
when
did they live in them?
    “So we must be on an island somewhere,” Felix said, disappointed. “No knights. No damsels in distress.”
    “No,” Maisie said, wondering what had gone wrong. A crown should take them to a castle, shouldn’t it? Maybe they had somehow gone back to Saint Croix, back to Alexander Hamilton. But that didn’t make sense. There hadn’t been grass huts there. There hadn’t been practically-naked people.
    Now she saw that there wasn’t
a
grass hut. There were lots of them scattered beneath the trees, windowless, with thatched roofs. The biggest one stood in the middle, near the men.
    “It’s like a neighborhood,” she said to Felix.
    Just when Felix and Maisie thought they might be caught in the tornado forever, four things seemed to happen all at the same time.
    A few drops of rain fell.
    A baby cried.
    The men began to cheer and shout.
    And the door of the big hut opened and a woman ran out, also shouting.
    Everyone was pointing to the sky, ecstatic. There, stretching across the sky and seeming to drop into the distant hills, was a rainbow. Maisie had never seen one like it before. Each color glimmered in the sunlight, and for the first time ever, Maisie could actually see all seven colors, just like her kindergarten teacher had taught them: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each of them vivid and distinct. The rainbow formed a perfect arc in the middle. It almost looked as if someone could actually walk across it like a beautiful multicolored bridge.
    “What are they saying?” Felix asked.
    Maisie shook her head without looking away from the rainbow.
    “They’re not speaking English,” she said.
    Felix tried to make out what language they were speaking, but the wind suddenly grew even stronger, and lifted him and Maisie again, higher and higher. It took all his strength to keep hold of his sister’s hand. Just when he