“Are you having fun with me?”
“Not at all! Myths reveal the history of a place. I mean, who are these warriors? What do they protect? Why do they wander? I know the Hawaiian chieftains never suffered commoners to look them in the eye—I read that once, but . . .” I stopped myself; I was gushing. “Well. I’ve never had a tour guide.”
“I would gladly teach you all I know about the islands. I’d need some time, of course.”
“A few weeks?”
“A few years!”
I laughed. “Maybe I should just look over your sketchbook.”
“Oh, Miss Song. It’s so much more than what you could read in a book.”
A red bird flitted across our path, and the trees opened up into a clearing where flowers winked from the edges of the undergrowth. The sun warmed the grass beneath Pilikia’s hooves, but the air was quite cool and as soft as a kiss. In the distance, rushing water whispered about where it had been.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“Oh, no, we’re not there yet. This is . . . well. You can see the places where the grass is growing a bit thinner? That’s because the earth was packed down under the hale pili—the grass houses. There was a village here when I was a small boy. The signs are faint, though.”
“Where did they go?”
“They died.”
I gasped. “How?”
“Foreign disease. The least dramatic type of slaughter.”
The path continued on the other side of the sunny clearing, but it had grown narrower, and the trees lower; green and yellow guavas hung from lichen-gray branches that wove themselves together at a height just above our heads. Blake stopped Pilikia and swung down from her saddle. He offered me his hand.
“We have to continue on foot, but it’s not much farther.” I took his hand and slid from the saddle; my shoes sank into the loamy earth. Blake removed his own shoes and socks. He grinned when he saw me watching.
“How do you think I keep them clean?” He threw his jacket over the pommel of the saddle. “Come.”
I followed him along a path no wider than my feet, lined with feathery ferns and drooping pink ginger. He pushed ahead of me, through the branches, bending them out of my way.
“What is this place?” I stepped under his arm as he held open a fall of vines like a curtain. The roar of water grew louder, and the fresh smell of crushed greenery filled my lungs.
“I told you before. It’s a sacred place. A secret place, where the water comes out of the caves in a fall so powerful it turns to mist and drifts in clouds down into a healing pool. Please,” he added with a grin. “Try not to lure me in and drown me.”
I smiled back at him. “Don’t you know how to swim?”
“Miss Song. Do you think I could have lived my life on an island and not learned how to swim?”
“Why is that a given? Do you want to escape?”
He laughed and reached for me, helping me across a rocky patch of the trail where orchids bloomed at my feet and my father’s words resurfaced: “heaven in a wild flower.” The path smoothed, but I didn’t let go of Blake’s hand. “My mother talks of sending me to England to complete my education,” he said. “But no, I don’t want to leave.”
“Why not?” I asked, and then I stopped dead in my tracks. We had emerged from the exuberant undergrowth into a large clearing where, as Blake had said, a silver spray of water burst from the cliff face fifty feet above our heads, enveloping the mossy black rocks in clouds of mist as it fell to shatter the mirror of the black pool at our feet.
“Why not?” He turned to me, his face shining. “This is paradise, Miss Song,” he said, gesturing at the roaring falls. “This is home.”
Blake dropped me off at the ship near dinnertime. We hadn’t had time to explore the caves above the falls, but Blake gave his word he’d show me some day. Neither of us set a date, though; we knew the promise was empty. Despite the guavas, I heard his stomach growling on the ride back, and I hoped it was loud enough to mask the sound of my own. This close to the ship, I smelled Rotgut cooking fish stew and I hesitated on the dock. I might have invited Blake up for a bowl, if he were of another era, and I’d had another upbringing.
Bee was there on the deck, watching us impassively. Blake raised his hand to hail her, and she nodded without saying a word. His eyes sparkled as he leaned in to whisper. “She is certainly a pirate.”
“Not at all. She was a cattle herder.”
“What? Like a paniolo? A cowboy?”
“Cowgirl.”
“Like Annie Oakley!”
“She’s better with a revolver than a rifle.”
“Who cut her throat? Was it cattle rustlers?”
“A man jealous of her . . . her marriage, actually.”