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Dawn Island is an old, old land, and knows well the meaning of secrets.
In its earliest days, it is a fountain of magma slowly growing layers around a secret core until it crests above the waves and lets the heat die to a slow, warm hearth-heart as seeds find their homes in secret crevices. From those seeds sprout trees and grasses; nurtured in their secret windswept shade grow all sorts of insects and rodents and animals of every kind, in the forests pouring like their own streams down the mountainside and the flat coast with all its flowers and marshgrasses reaching upwards.
A kingdom grows from a settlement in one plateaued corner of the island, building wall upon wall to enclose its secrets in the way of the island, turning in on itself again and again until protection turns to poison. Dawn Island watches and holds the kingdom’s secrets safe, because it understands, but it waits, too, for time to wear its winding way until the walls collapse and the poison ceases to accumulate burning and desolate in the streets and the homes.
And on the other side of the island, past the bandits secret in their mountain hideouts, nestled among spring flowers and placid windmills, there is a village. It is older than the kingdom, and plainer, and more secret, and with all the warmth in its deepest cores the island loves it.
A Sea King takes up residence along the shore, given rare berth by the Island to discourage any sort of incursion on the village by the kingdom’s poison or by raiders or by the world outside. The village lives simply, untroubled by secrets wider than the most precious, secret ones every thinking creature holds next to their heart, undisturbed even by one of their own leaving for wider, grander horizons until one false-summer day early in autumn he comes home with a warship and a coat worn threadbare with the keeping of a secret.
Dawn Island watches him stalk to the peak of Mount Corvo along secret paths familiar to him from childhood, undisturbed and unheeding of the animals lurking secretly in the undergrowth, stalking behind him. He picks up a rock, makes certain of his aloneness, and falls to the ground to whisper over it. He tells the island about his son, and about the tangled threads of a years-long argument, and about all the secrets they both keep, and about his fear. The island wraps him in all the secret industriousness of the earthworms making soil and the trees reaching underground; he stands, puts down the rock exactly where he took it from, walks back down to the village.
Spring comes, some other year, and the island keeps the secrets of squirrels' buried treasure from even themselves, hides the secret shoots of newborn saplings from deer and goats, observes a child not old enough to walk snuck secretly ashore under cover of night and of regulation. The father, now a grandfather, pads into the deeps of the forest to the bandits whose secret he keeps in tandem with the island, and hands their leader the child to keep secret.
Clothed in secrets, the child grows, ranging wild and lonely across the mountain paths until soon enough the island knows that he will know and clutch and keep the island's secrets as well as any of his tempestuous, troublesome family before him. And in the village below, secret still, the grandfather hands a young child to the bar-owner, the mistress of secrets, with a plea to keep his grandson hidden. The bar-owner, for all she is young and new to her charges, knows well the ways of the island, and with a secret affection in her heart she agrees.
In the deeps of the kingdom, a child shakes off poison like leaves unfurling to shake off the dew and slips, secret and quiet, through the moonlit glitter of the kingdom's gates and streets until the air is crisp around him, and Dawn Island swaddles him in hiddenness, in the secret unknowing freedom of night, away from any searching eye.
Free, laughing, clutching secrets close to their chests like precious coin, two children find each other in the wavering line between trash and tree, and together in the way of children they make grand, sweeping plans for the future.
A pirate comes to the village. He wears his secrets like he wears his smile, natural and heavy and fitted to him, and the island has never met him but it knows from the moment he arrives that it loves him. It lets him in, him and his hat and his unknowing crew, and he befriends the bar-owner, mistress of secrets, and he befriends the child she secrets under her wing, and he befriends the island with a whispered name and an offering of rum. The island holds him, and hides him from all but its own, and knows he cannot stay, that his secrets call him away. Accepts this, and rejoices when its creature takes his arm, because he will keep that story secret in memory of the island and the island will keep the secret of his presence eternal in its waters.
The pirate names and mantles and crowns the child he loves in secrets, and slips away.
And the grandfather returns, and sees the secrets scattered in his absence, and in horror pulls the child from beneath the bar-owner's wings to entrust to the bandit-leader whose secret he keeps. There, sullen with secrets, the child clothed in secrets meets the child crowned with secrets, and the child crowned with secrets resolves to spread his mantle over them both. But the child clothed in secrets and the child who slipped secret away from the kingdom refuse him, and refuse him, holding their secrets tight in their hands like Dawn Island has taught them, until he keeps for them their secrets in the way of the island and they take them to their favorite secret place and they name themselves brothers in each the shadow of their secrets.
The seasons change, and the islands delights in the mosquitoes spawning secret in the ponds and the highborn trading secrets in their towers and the tigers stalking secret in their shadows. And one day the kingdom shades itself in clouds of smoke and ash and screams to keep its secrets, and the grandfather's son comes home secret to the island. Keep me secret, he prays, and Dawn Island, who loves the way his secrets sit unsaid in his throat, wraps smoke around him. Keep me secret, prays the boy from the kingdom in his little boat, and the island wraps fire around him and makes itself secret from him.
And the island keeps the secret of his survival like it keeps the secrets of its rabbit-dens and ant-mimics, and as the seconds wind their secret way into years it cloaks and gilds the brothers who remain until they are draped and shining with all the things they will never say, until they sail out to sea trailing secrets behind them like scarves and chains and endless gleaming streamers, and it sits content with its secrets until with a vast gasp something it loves takes his last breath so far from home and the world shifts.
There is a moment of resettling, a moment of magma bubbling in its core, of deer streaking down the mountain, of sea and waves.
And then there is the after, and in that after it keeps the secrets it snatches from the winds' gossip and drags with breezes and silence into its heart, news of secrets it has kept so long hidden exposed jagged and bloody to the world, news of the boy chewed and spat out and chewed and spat out by the kingdom awakening to a knowledge so long hidden in the secret places of his mind, news of the boy crowned with secrets speaking in secrets to the only ones who will understand. It keeps the secret of the villagers' grief, and the bandits' grief, and the grandfather's grief.
And it keeps the secret, too, of when the grandfather finds the bandit-leader with unerring precision in the deeps of woods where noise fades to silence, of when he finds her there at the foot of a broken treehouse and awkwardly, self-consciously, unpracticedly lowers himself to his knees in apology. And it keeps secret for the both of them their tears.