The Tree of Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

There won’t be any blood in the water, either, which is always a bad thing. Sharks can smell even the smallest amount of blood in the water.”
    Char grabbed his neck again.
    â€œPut this in your pocket,” Ven said as he handed Char one of the air stones.
    â€œI don’t have a vest,” Char protested. “And my trousers’ pocket doesn’t have a button like yours.”
    â€œFill your pocket with stones on top of it,” Amariel suggested. “The extra weight should hold it down, and help you keep underwater.”
    â€œGood idea,” Ven said. He bent down and began gathering pebbles from beneath the dock. “You said you saw a sunshadow, Amariel—what is a sunshadow?”
    Amariel stared at him for a moment, then sighed. The fury went out of her green eyes.
    â€œI had forgotten that you really don’t know anything about the sea,” she said. “All right. Let’s have a quick lesson, and then we should go if we want to catch the outgoing tide.”
    Char finished filling his pocket with pebbles, then grabbed hold of a post as well, shivering.
    â€œUnder the sea,” Amariel began, “the sunlight breaks the surface now and then, and goes down very far, leaving a bright, fuzzy beam. If there is any thrum in the way, it causes a sunshadow.”
    â€œThrum?” Ven interrupted.
    â€œThrum is the special vibration that comes from each creature, each thing on earth. Land-livers don’t know about thrum, because the vibrations are caught by the air and the wind of the upworld, and so you can’t usually feel or hear thrum there. But in the sea, beneath the waves, you can feel thrum all around you. When a school of whales goes through, you can hear the thrum for miles. Volcanoes, giant sharks, sinking ships—all of them give off thrum. That’s how I met you, Ven—my school could hear the explosion of your ship, and we came, looking for a party in the wreckage.”
    â€œI remember,” said Ven.
----
    It seemed a million miles away and many years ago, even though only a few months have passed since then. I blew up a ship my father had sent me to inspect, the Angelia . Amariel rescued me from drowning, and Captain Snodgrass, along with the sailors of the Serelinda , had rescued me from the sea. That’s how I met Char, and came to live on the Island of Serendair.
    And now my two best friends and I are off to explore the wonders of Amariel’s world.
    My curiosity is on fire.
    Even the water all around me can’t put it out.
----
    â€œDo you hear thrum?” Char asked. “Or do you feel it?”
    â€œIt’s hard to say whether you feel it or you hear it,” Amariel said. “But it’s the way the entire ocean makes noise. You don’t need to talk with your mouth underwater—your thrum does it for you. And your thoughts are a large part of thrum. If you happen to be in a shaft of sunshadow when you are thinking strongly about something, your thoughts sometimes appear as pictures in the hazy water. It can be very embarrassing.”
    â€œI’ll bet,” Char muttered.
    â€œSo unless you want everyone and everything around you to know what you are thinking, try not to get too excited or think too hard about something near a sunshadow. You wait until you’re in regular drift before doing that.”
    â€œDrift?”
    â€œDrift is just the normal current of the sea, the movement of the water. When there’s no storm, drift is just like being in the air of the upworld. You feel tugged by it when you are close to shore because of the tides, but once you are out in the Deep, you are barely aware of the drift around you unless it changes suddenly. And that usually means trouble is coming.”
    â€œWhy did you think Madame Sharra was a sunshadow, then?” Ven asked.
    Amariel shrugged. “She looked like she wasn’t real, exactly. She seemed to be in a shaft of light