The Folk Keeper Read Online Free PDF

villages, and the Manor.
    The cliffs reared hundreds of feet above the sea, sculpted by the waves into spectacular shapes. “See there?” Finian pointed to a long, low scallop in the cliffs. “You’ll see the Manor in a moment. The cliffs are just babies there, no more than fifteen feet high.”
    The Manor was enormous, even from a distance, a small castle almost, with turrets and spires and diamond-paned windows winking in the late sun. Behind everything rolled a treeless landscape of brown and purple heather.
    We hugged the cliffs now, the waves rolling into smooth combers as we entered a sheltered bay. The cliffs yawned in around us, then curled out again to keep on with their job of holding back the sea. The beach was a semi-circular shelf of crumbled rock mixed with feathers and fish skeletons and broken shells. The retreating tide showed that the beach ended abruptly and turned into vertical cliff-face again. We docked at a pier of weathered silvery wood with a ladder up one side, for at low tide, Finian said, there was a long drop off the edge of the beach to the seafloor below.
    There were thousands of birds, tens of thousands, nesting in the cliffs’ shingled sides, wheeling through the air, screaming, plummeting into the water, and diving at my head. I don’t blame them. I don’t like strangers myself.
    “Now you get to meet my sweetheart.” Finian patted the overturned hull of a boat. “The
Windcuffer.
By spring, she’ll be the prettiest, fastest little boat in Cliffsend.”
    “You’re building her?”
    Finian put a finger to his lips. “Repairing her. Don’t tell my mother or Edward. We’ll go sailing in her, you and I.”
    “I’ll be spending my time in the Cellar,” I said.
    “So hellishly bored,” muttered Finian. “Bored, and stuck. Up we go, Corin, so you can see our lovely home and sleep in our lovely beds and eat our lovely meals and tend our lovely Folk.”
    But the path up the cliff face was so narrow it might have been scratched in with a hat pin. “I can’t, not with my Bag.”
    “I’ll carry it for you.”
    “No other human can touch a Folk Keeper’s Bag!”
    “I won’t look in the thing,” said Finian. “Come along!”
    But I hugged the Bag to me, not arguing (if you don’t argue, you can’t give in), just looking about and smelling the salt and dead fish — wonderfully good together, at least in small doses.
    Finally Finian laughed a little. “Perhaps I won’t be quite so bored with you about. I’ll go on ahead and give you a hand.”
    I was dragged and bounced up the path behind Finian, setting off waterfalls of stone from the cliffs, but mere rivers of blood from my knees. A flock of gulls beat into the air with indignant cries.
    “I’ll leave you to catch your breath,” said Finian, as I lay gasping on the cliff top. “It’s my turn now to fetch my things from the beach. Don’t move, else the Hill Hounds will get you! I’ll be back in a moment to collect my Conviction. You needn’t think I’ve forgotten.”
    But he was a great deal more than a moment, and at first I picked bits of stone from my hands, then blew on my knees, and finally I rose to look behind me.
    The Manor was as spectacular as the cliffs. Huge granite blocks of it stretched down the coast for quite as far as I wanted to walk. I wondered where the Cellar was; perhaps I could find a door. The park was astonishingly green and beautifully kept, as though the rugged landscape had been shaken out hard and laid down again as a carpet of grass.
    There were plenty of windows, gray and flat in the waning light, but I saw no entrance to the Cellar. A long row of French doors caught my reflection just as a wild howling came from behind.
    My feet exploded into a run before my mind could make sense of the howling. It was deep chested, savage, melancholy. The Hill Hounds, they were not just some jest of Finian’s!
    My feet pounded now into the grass, now into the loose stones of a circular carriage