It’s an old tree, tall and strong, with a thick pale trunk and branching arms that end in bursts of narrow purple-green leaves. Although it grows on a cliff edge, its roots run deep. Some of its branches reach right out over the Restless Sea, and the longest of them forks into an outstretched hand. In the palm of that hand is a tree house with walls made from planks of sea-washed driftwood and windows that drink in the view.
The roof of the tree house is a dome, shingled with scallop shells on the outside and painted inside with scenes from a great battle. There are cats with their claws dug deep into vicious ugly birds, and fish that fly through the sky like arrows. The birds snap their beaks at a Winged Dog who soars over them all, and a small girl shoots arrows from her seat on his back. This roof has a secret, though, and it’s this: on the wall is a lever, and if you pull it, the dome will slide open and let in the sun, or the starshine, or the buttery fingers of a full moon.
The inside of the tree house has all the things a girl might need, and not much more. The veranda that rings the house holds a table and two chairs, and a potted garden of herbs and medicinal flowers. There is also a hammock where a girl might rest. And rest she does, sleeping soundly as a pearl dawn starts to spill onto the surface of the Restless Sea. The girl would deny it, but she snores, just a little.
It’s not snoring that you can hear right now, though: it’s a sneeze. A sneeze as dainty as the little pink nostrils it came from. And as the girl wakes, her ears prick, most especially her right ear, the one with the pointed tip. She hears it again: sssnizoo! Vivienne looks all around her but sees nothing. Then she feels the soft tickle of long whiskers against her neck.
“Ermengarde,” she whispers, hardly daring to believe it.
Grinning, she reaches up and draws out a small, black rat.
“How did you get here?”
The rat merely yawns, showing sharp yellow teeth, and makes a tidy leap back onto Vivienne’s shoulder, where she can nestle once again into the warmth of the girl’s hair.
“Hang on,” says the girl, partly to Ermengarde and partly to herself. “How did I get here? And where exactly is here?”
Vivienne tumbles out of her hammock, and the view over the Restless Sea momentarily knocks the air out of her lungs.
“Oh!” she gasps. She leans on the rail and smiles. She laughs and runs the full circle of the veranda, marveling at the timberwork and peering inside. It is, she thinks, the strongest and most beautiful tree house ever built.
Now she sees that in the middle of the table on the veranda, there is a package. It’s wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with brown string. A label reads IN CASE OF RAIN. The girl tears off the paper without ceremony and finds a glass bottle. Inside the bottle is a sailing boat with a red hull and a white sail, and—she grins—a cabin! Written on the stern in tiny letters is Vivacious II.
There is one more thing, and she feels it as an itch in the tips of her blue wings. She wriggles them, but the itch grows stronger. She notices it first in the shadow she casts on the wall of her tree house. But it’s not until she sees it out the corner of her eye that she believes it. Her wings are growing. They are still leathery, still blue, but they grow and grow until they are large enough and strong enough to let her truly fly.
Vivienne Small gives a whoop of joy and leaps up onto the railing of her veranda, spreading her wings against the shimmering sea. A breeze comes skittering over the water, and in a moment it will reach her, rush into her wings, and fill them like sails. Her nose will catch the scent of adventure, and in that moment, something new will begin.