Isle of Tears by Deborah Challinor

asked in a wobbly voice, ‘Where are Jamie and Jean?’
    ‘A woman took them away. She said she was gonnae give them a wash and something tae eat.’
    Isla gave her brother a sharp, shocked look, and Niel’s face paled as he belatedly realized he shouldn’t have let the twins out of his sight.
    Isla was on her feet in a second, but at that moment Jamie andJean appeared on the other side of the camp.
    Jean waved, and announced loudly as she approached, ‘A nice wifey took us tae do a wizzle in the trees. And we’ve just had oor breakfast. It wisnae verra good, though.’
    ‘It wis meat and tatties, but they were cold,’ Jamie added, and Isla realized with a surge of relief that it was the first thing she’d heard him say since the horror of the previous day. She gave Jamie a quick hug and asked Niel why he hadn’t gone with his brother and sister.
    Niel hung his head and mumbled, ‘I didnae want tae, ’til ye came back safe. I didnae ken ye were gone ’til I woke. And then that wifey said she’d look oot for the weans.’
    Isla felt her heart ache as she realized how overwhelmed and ineffectual he must be feeling. ‘It’s all right. I went tae the stream tae clean up. Mere came wi’ me.’
    ‘The one who gave us the food last night?’
    ‘Aye. She’s merrit tae that one Wira, the leader.’
    As if in response to his name, Wira appeared. He was carrying Donal McKinnon’s rifle.
    Very slowly and carefully, as though Niel and Isla were imbeciles, he said, ‘We are leaving for our village. Will you come with us?’
    ‘Ye dinnae need tae say it like that. We’re no’ a pair o’ dunderheids, ken!’ Niel retorted, eying his father’s rifle sourly.
    As Mere had commented, Wira appeared thoroughly baffled by Niel’s accent and didn’t seem to know how to respond.
    In the end, Isla sighed and said, ‘Aye, we’ll be coming wi’ ye.’
    It took them another day and a half to walk to the village, heading more or less north-east now, according to the position of the sun.
    On the morning of the second day, Mere asked Isla, ‘Does your heart hurt with your grief?’
    Isla said yes, and it did, but in a strange, muffled sort of way, almost as though the events of two days earlier had happened a very long time ago. But when she told herself that her mother and father were dead—that someone had murdered them—she still could not fully comprehend the fact. There was a sense of missing them, of course; but it was more as though they had simply gone away for a while and would be back soon. But now and then, when she was least expecting it, an image of their still and bloodied bodies would rush into her mind and she would understand, and the knowledge would hit her like a kick to the stomach. She tried to explain it to Niel, and he said he felt the same way. Jamie and Jean, though, seemed not to understand that their parents had gone forever. Jean wondered aloud if anyone had told Mam and Da where they were, and Jamie wanted to know what his father was going to say when he found out someone had taken his rifle.
    ‘It will never really pass,’ Mere said gently, ‘but the hurt will become less. You will learn to live with it.’
    Isla doubted it, but she nodded anyway. And even if the hurt did fade with time, her anger wouldn’t, and she didn’t want it to.
    She wanted to nurture it until she found a way to use it to avenge her parents’ deaths. Somehow the thought gave her a kind of comfort, and she clung to it resolutely.
    When the sun was almost directly overhead, and the terrain over which they were travelling had gradually become less rugged, Mere announced that they were approaching her people’s kainga.
    ‘Our village,’ she amended at Isla’s questioning look. ‘You will have to learn to speak Maori, I think.’
    Isla was struck by a sudden and not altogether welcome thought. ‘It’s no’ on the Peka Peka Block, is it, your village?’
    ‘No, we are south of the Pakeha surveyors’ pegs,’