Three Weeks Of Silence
For three weeks, the wind had not blown in Saltgate.
This had never happened before. The grown-ups said so. The mill — which depended on the wind — had stopped. The fishing boats sat at their moorings, sails hanging slack. The harbour was a strange dead-blue colour, like a mirror that had forgotten what it was for.
The grown-ups argued about it. Some said it was the weather. Some said it was a stagnant pressure system. Some said it was a sign.
Pia was eleven. She lived in the small house behind the mill, where the back garden ran up to the slope of the dunes. She had grown up with the wind. She knew its weather. She knew its moods.
This was not the wind being absent. This was something else.
The wind had not, Pia thought, gone away. The wind had been *taken*.
This was the kind of idea that an eleven-year-old can entertain easily, but that no grown-up will accept. Pia did not bother telling anyone.
Instead, she did what she always did when she had a question: she went and walked.
She walked along the dunes. She walked along the cliff path. She walked round the harbour. She listened.
She had a theory she could not quite explain. The theory was that wind, like everything else, had to come from somewhere and go somewhere. If it was not coming, something was holding it.
On the third afternoon of her walking, she found something odd.
At the far end of the dunes, in a