Free On the Isle of Sound and Wonder by Alyson Grauer Page A

not weigh much, but its spindly feet were as prickly as a briar patch, and after several minutes of squirming, Truffo could bear it no longer.
    “Hey, hoy, get off of me,” he exclaimed, his voice torn and sore from salt water. He tried to shoo the bird away, but his arm was quite heavy, as though it had fallen asleep, and his shoulder screamed with pain. He abandoned the attempt, groaning in agony.
    The bird clicked its long beak at him, ruffling its neck feathers and hopping from one of Truffo’s legs to the other. The young man gritted his teeth.
    “It hurts!” he told the bird as it tutted its way slowly up his body, prodding him gently with the sandpiper-like beak. His voice was brittle and dry. “It’s unbearable.”
    He closed his eyes, remembering the steep pitch of the Brilliant Albatross as it plunged toward the waves, the clattering of glass wine bottles crashing and rolling about them, and the explosion of the airship’s engine as it hit the cold sea. He knew only darkness thereafter.
    Truffo opened his eyes to find the brightly colored bird settling down on his chest, staring at him with feathers shimmering. “Don’t get comfortable,” murmured the fool. “If I don’t die in the next few hours, I’ll be starving, and I’ll have to eat you. Probably raw, since I don’t know how to build a fire. Feathers and beak and all. Oh, gods, I hope it doesn’t get cold at night,” he realized, a note of panic creeping into his voice. “I’m going to need a fire. Even if I knew how, I probably couldn’t . . . my arm . . .”
    He craned his neck to the side, peering at his injured shoulder—a considerable amount of dark blood had seeped through his shirt, and the sleeve of his motley coat had been torn off. It felt like an arrow had buried itself in the muscle, though he could see no certain evidence of what was causing the pain. It hurt like hell.
    The bird cocked its head almost disapprovingly, and Truffo frowned at it. “I told you, it hurts,” he insisted through his teeth. “It hurts a lot.”
    The orange-yellow bird fanned out its blue tail and gave a trilling series of whistles and chirps. Then it leaned over and jabbed its beak directly into the wound in Truffo’s shoulder.
    He screamed, an infantile shriek that echoed off the flat beach and the rocks beyond, startling some sparrows out of a shrub. The prodding of the bird did not cease, and Truffo continued to cry out loudly, voicing his excruciating displeasure. It wasn’t until he lurched upright and tried to scramble to his feet that the bird trumpeted and flapped its wings, trying to cling to him.
    “Get off, get off of me,” Truffo sobbed, the pain in his shoulder a flaming spike of agony that nearly caused his knees to buckle, even as he stood. “Stop, just stop it!”
    The bird trilled and cawed and clucked in a myriad of different voices. Its orange and yellow wings spread and flapped and ruffled at him, its dark little claws clutching his torn shirt and jacket, and its sandpiper beak poked at his wound, causing the dark blood to flow once more.
    Truffo staggered forward, still swatting at the bird, but the pain shot deeper into his body and he stumbled to his knees in the hot white sand. Black shimmering dots swam at the edges of his vision, and Truffo wondered if he had survived the shipwreck only to die at the beak of a tropical bird on a desert island.
    What a punchline, he thought bitterly. Then he felt the bird grasp something deep in his shoulder and yank hard. Truffo sucked in air so quickly that he was utterly silenced from shock, and the bird hopped back from him, beating its wings. Much of his pain left with the bird, like a candle blown out, and Truffo sagged as blood trickled down his shirt.
    The odd sandpiper dropped the offending object onto the beach beside him, and Truffo saw that it was a twisted splinter of metal, slick and shining with his blood—shrapnel from the shipwreck. His arm throbbed, as though it