Free The Last of the High Kings by Kate Thompson Page B

was the púka who had taught her how to be comfortable in the cold and wet and that human intolerance for wild weather was a mental, not a physical, problem. And it was the púka, that May Sunday, who taught her how to see the wind.
    Goats, he explained, could see the weather on the wind. That was why they were always in the right place at the right time, always sheltered when they needed to be. People, if they were taught properly, could see it too. But that wasn’t all that could be done. An assiduous reader of the wind could tell a great deal about the world and many other things besides.
    He would begin by teaching her to see the coarse winds, those that moved in simple time across the surface of things and pushed the weather fronts from place to place. They were relatively easy to see, andbefore too long Jenny should be able to forecast not only the upcoming weather but more long-term things, such as the optimal growing and harvesting times and the probable movement of fish and bird nations in their migrations around the globe.
    Then, if and when she was proficient at that, the púka would teach her to see the winds of change, which also moved on the surface of things, and in simple time. They could show her the trends that were affecting not only humankind but all life on the planet, whether animal or vegetable. They were blowing sour these days, he said, and they had been for some considerable time; but he hoped they would sweeten again before much longer.
    After that, if Jenny passed muster with those ones, he would try to show her the winds that traveled across complex time. These were the stellar winds, which blew from one side of the universe to the other and took all the shortcuts through space and time, and the subtle winds, which crossed between worlds, as well as within and without, behind and betwixt, above and below, and beyond.
    It was somewhere around there that Jenny lost the plot, and the púka decided it was time to move from the theoretical to the practical. He gave hera first short lesson and sent her home.
    â€œBad storm tomorrow,” she told Donal when she got home.
    â€œThat’s not what the weather forecast says,” said Donal.

17
    The day wasn’t stormy. It wasn’t even raining.
    â€œBit more practice,” said Jenny to the púka as they climbed up the hillside at first light, and the púka agreed. He left her at the top of the series of steep escarpments that J.J. called the stony steps, and she went on alone to the beacon.
    The ghost was where he always was, standing on a tiny level spot about a meter from the summit stone. As Jenny approached, she remembered that the reason the púka had told her how to see him was so that she could rescue him; set him free from the vow that bound him to the hill of stones. She hadn’t the faintest idea how she would do it. The last time she had asked the púka about it he had told her just to keep talking to him. “Be his friend,” he had said.“That’s the first thing.” So that was what she had done, and it hadn’t occurred to her before now to ask what the second thing might be.
    Not for the first time she found herself trying to imagine the vast expanses of time that the ghost had passed in that same spot. If no one rescued him, would he really stay there forever? She wondered where the other people went, all the millions of ghosts who hadn’t made a vow that they would stay. There was a lot of talk in school about heaven and hell; but J.J. and Aisling weren’t religious, and they encouraged all the children to ignore that stuff. Still, the ghost was proof that something continued after death, and if the others didn’t go to heaven or to hell, then where did they go?
    She sat down on a stone. The ghost was very quiet today, and she thought of telling him about seeing the wind, but she changed her mind. He might ask her where she had learned to do it, and the púka was