by Matthew Cody
“You thought we were all stone?” said the boy. “No. Most of us can move around in daylight. But those who can’t have gone into hiding below ground or…you know.”
Max suddenly remembered the massive bridge they’d crossed back on the Summer Isle. That bridge had once been a living, breathing troll before the sunlight turned it into stone.
“I’m sorry,” said Max. “But you don’t look much like a troll. You’re big, sure—like, really big—but that’s it. Trolls are all bumpy and toothy and stuff.”
The boy shrugged. “My great-great-great-grandfather was full-blooded troll, although according to the family stories he was kind of a runt. Since I’m only one-eighth troll, I can walk around in the daylight, but I try not to because I get really itchy and break out in hives. Also, as you all keep saying, I’m big.”
“Whoa,” said Max, stepping closer for a better look. He really did look like a seven-foot-tall kid.
“Manners,” chided Mrs. Amsel.
“It’s all right,” said the boy. “I’m used to people staring.”
For just a moment, Max felt like she was talking to her brother again. He’d grown up with people staring, too, and he’d usually handled it with the same nonchalance as this trollson boy. But because Max knew Carter better than anyone, she also knew what an act that was. You never got used to the stares, not really.
Max quickly looked away. It was odd that a trollson boy could make her miss Carter so terribly, and make her feel ashamed at the same time. “That was rude, and I’m sorry,” said Max. “My name’s Max. This is Mrs. Amsel.”
“Harold,” said the boy.
“No offense,” said Max, “but that’s a terrible troll name.”
“My great-great-great-grandfather was named Bigsnout Stonemuncher, so I think I got lucky.”
“Well, Harold,” said Mrs. Amsel, “thank you for saving our lives.”
The boy looked uncomfortable and scuffed his enormous feet along the ground. “That’s all right.”
“But you’ve also been following us, haven’t you?” asked Max. “Ever since Hamelin.”
The boy’s pale cheeks turned pink. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure what you’d do. I’m…I’m not real good with people. I tried to work up the courage in the station, but then you ran away. So I…I hopped onto the train as it was leaving.”
“They let you on?” asked Mrs. Amsel.
“I stowed away. I’ve ridden lots of trains that way. Sometimes I have to ride on top, but that’s okay.”
Just like he’d ridden on top of their car, although holding on for dear life might have been a better way to describe it. What a strange way to live, being too big for most things and too young to do anything about it.
“Where are your parents, Harold?”
“I have a mom and a dad, but they left for the mountains when I was nine. They’d gotten so big that people were getting scared of them.”
“How old are you now?” asked Max.
“Eleven,” he answered simply. Then, noticing the shocked looks on Max’s and Mrs. Amsel’s faces, he quickly added, “But it’s all right. That’s what trollsons do. We spend time out in the world while we can. No one bothers me. But…it’s been lonelier than I expected.”
Mrs. Amsel made a little clucking sound with her tongue, like she had just found a lost puppy. “You poor thing.”
“Wait a minute,” said Max, stepping in before Mrs. Amsel started trying to feed him from her handbag. “We do appreciate what you did back there, but you still haven’t explained why you were following us in the first place.”
“I wasn’t at first. I was just following the rats. Hundreds of them—thousands, even. I was down under the bridge in Hamelin when I noticed them, scurrying by in single file like an army. I got curious, so I followed them to your house.”
Max remembered that day, when she’d seen Harold for the first time. He’d been hiding in the shade of a grocer’s awning, across the street from the house her father had rented. She’d seen rats playing there, too—ordinary rats, not like the giant creatures on the Summer Isle. And that night thousands more of the creatures came bursting from the vents inside the house. They’d tunneled into the house through the basement.
“I saw the rats come, and I saw how the rats left,” said Harold. “I knew there had to be strange magic going on. I got curious.”
“You followed us all the way from Hamelin because you were curious?”
“At first,” said Harold. “Then I heard you were asking around about Vodnik. He has a bad reputation among the trollsons. Very bad. That’s when I decided to try and talk to you. To warn you not to look for him.”
“At the train station?” asked Mrs. Amsel.
Harold nodded. “That didn’t work out so well. I didn’t mean to scare you. Honest.”
“Harold,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Back in Hamelin, you were sleeping under that bridge, weren’t you? Because you have nowhere else to go.”
“It’s not so bad. We trollsons kind of have a thing about bridges anyway.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” said Mrs. Amsel again. She reached up like she wanted to pat him on the cheek, but there was no way she could possibly reach that high. She settled for taking his hand instead.
“No,” said Max. She saw where this was heading. The last thing they needed was for Mrs. Amsel to start picking up strays. “No way.”
The little woman gave Max a sharp look. “He has nowhere to go. And we owe him a hot meal at least.” She patted Harold’s stomach. “Bet you have a good appetite, yes?”
Harold nodded as his belly gave a rumble.
“Look,” said Max. “Maybe we can buy you some food, but then you have to go back to…wherever you came from. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you did—I really do. But we are on a sort of quest. We need to fly to America to find the Winter Children, because that’s where the door is and well…”
“I don’t fit on planes,” said Harold.
“Sorry.”
“But if you’re looking for the Winter Children, you can’t take a plane anyway. You have to go by boat.”
“What do you know about it?”
“I told you Vodnik has a bad reputation among the trollsons,” said Harold. “That’s because so many of us try to make deals with him. Some of us get sort of trollier the older we get. I know what Vodnik promises, that the Winter Children are protecting a door to the land of magic where trollsons won’t have to hide, and the magician has the only key.”
“Yeah, we heard pretty much the same story,” said Max.
“Some trollsons get desperate enough to deal with the magician,” said Harold. “My cousin Geldorf did.”
“And what happened to your cousin?” asked Mrs. Amsel.
The giant frowned. “I don’t know. But I got a postcard from him before I left home. Look, I still have it.”
Harold dug around in one of his massive pockets and produced a wrinkled postcard with a picture of seagulls flying over a blue bay. “He wrote that he was getting on a boat for America. See?” He pointed to a messy scrawl on the back and started reading. “Don’t worry about me. Got what I needed from Vodnik, but still don’t trust him, so I’m arranging my own transportation. I’ve found sailors here who know the way. All will be well.”
“Can I see that?” asked Max, and Harold handed her the card. She could barely make heads or tails of the handwriting, but she could clearly make out where the card was from. “Cuxhaven?”
“It’s a fishing town on the coast,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Not far from here.”
Max undid her backpack and took out the map. Harold’s eyes went wide as she unrolled it on the ground in front of them.
“There!” said Max, and she pointed to a little dot near the sea. “Shipwreck Way.”
“Doesn’t sound promising,” said Mrs. Amsel.
“That’s just its old name,” said Max. “That’s how the map works. Call it Cuxhaven or Shipwreck Way, the
map is leading us there.”
“Is that a magic map?” asked Harold.
“Yeah. It shows us where we need to go.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Don’t be,” said Max. “Even if you’re right, even if there is a boat in Cuxhaven that can take us to the Winter Children, we still need the key. And Vodnik has it.”
“You can’t go back there,” said Harold.
“I have to!” said Max. “I don’t have any other choice.”
Mrs. Amsel cleared her throat. “Actually, you do.” The old woman held a small brass chest in her hand. Very gently she opened the lid, and Max saw the key inside.
“The Key of Everything!” breathed Max. “But how did you get it?”
“During the fighting, when you grabbed your parents, I grabbed the chest,” said Mrs. Amsel, smiling. “Not bad for an old lady, eh?”
Max hugged the little woman until she complained she couldn’t breathe. Max’s parents were still trapped, but they were no longer in Vodnik’s possession and Max would find a way to free them. She knew where to find the door to the Summer Isle. Apparently, she even had a part-troll bodyguard, whether she wanted one or not. And now she had the magician’s key.
“Where’s a troll bridge when you need one, eh?” said Paul as they gazed down upon the vast expanse of the Great River laid out before them. Emilie shushed him, but Lukas silently agreed with the scout’s sentiment. After a week of hard travel, they’d finally reached the Great River. Here at the narrow crossing, the river was only fifty or so feet across, as opposed to a quarter of a mile in most other places. To travel south to try the shallower forks would take days, and their passage north was blocked by mountains. This stretch of river was their best bet to get across safely and without losing additional days.
But the Great River was not their greatest worry at the moment—the ogres were.
Paul’s keen ears had identified the booming crashes and heaving grunts long before the others were aware of them. What Lukas might have mistaken for distant thunder, the experienced scout recognized almost immediately. Emilie and Lukas had refused to believe him at first, because ogres rarely strayed far from their homes in the Bonewood (they needed a ready supply of trees to club each other with), but Paul had insisted they follow the sounds until they found a steep rise that looked down on the river valley. There they crawled to the summit on their bellies so that they could take advantage of the natural cover as they peeked over the top.
Paul was right. There were ogres down near the riverbank. Four of them, which by ogre terms was practically an army, since the brutes were not known to get along in pairs, much less in groups. It was often said that two ogres would beat each other for fun, and three would beat each other to death.
The two pressing questions now were what were these ogres doing so far from home, and what force was keeping them together without killing each other? Emilie wanted to forget about the ogres altogether and follow the river south to the forks, but Lukas’s curiosity was piqued. And more, his intuition was telling him that spotting four ogres this far north was cause for concern. What sort of concern, he could not yet say, but he was content to wait and watch awhile.
At first Paul found watching the ogres exciting. Every now and again two of them would get into a shoving match, and Lukas and he started placing bets on which one would be pushed into the river first. With nothing else to bet, they traded chores: “If the great big fat one with the bald patch wins, you have to dig the fire pit at camp for the next three nights. If the stupid-looking one with half an ear wins, I’ll do it.”
But after a few hours, even betting on ogre fights grew tiresome, and soon Paul was siding with Emilie’s plan to give up on the ogres and head for the forks, just because it was something to do. So Lukas kept watch alone. Not a one of them was seriously considering trying to sneak past. Ogres had terrible eyesight, but there was nowhere to hide down there. They would surely be spotted if they tried to cross.
Still, Lukas didn’t want to leave just yet. The ogres had spent the day doing what ogres do—hitting each other and trying to eat things that aren’t usually eatable, like rocks. There was nothing more to see here and yet, even as the afternoon gave way to evening, he couldn’t bring himself to leave. His instinct told him that these ogres were waiting for something, and that something was important.
This meant Lukas was left with ample time to worry about Carter, and to second-guess his decision to let the boy go south with Leetha to the Princess’s castle. On the surface, Carter’s argument had made sense. It was a far more treacherous path that Lukas and the others were on now. Even if they could find a way to rescue their fellow New Hameliners from the rat king, there was no telling what dangers they would face along the way. The ogres down below were proof enough of that. And yet, just as Lukas’s instincts told him to watch the ogres, his instincts also said that Carter’s own road would be more dangerous than any of them expected. It was a nagging worry he’d had ever since they’d split up, and one he tried to ignore. Carter was better off with Leetha and the elves, he told himself, and he worked hard to believe it.
It was well into evening by the time Lukas discovered what the ogres had been waiting for. He’d been trying to ignore Paul, who climbed back up the rise to whisper to Lukas what a terrible idea it would be to make camp this close to the ogres and that they should move on while they still could, when Lukas spotted new figures approaching. They were following the river down from the north, and Lukas had to squint to see them in the evening gloom.
The newcomers were too small to be ogres, and it wasn’t long before Lukas recognized their odd loping gait—sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two, with their noses high in the air to sniff out the path ahead of them. Rats. Lukas counted six of them, each bigger than a boy. When he pointed the creatures out to Paul, the scout smiled and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. He naturally assumed that the rats would stumble upon the ogres and he’d get the pleasure of watching them get squashed flat by the brutes. But Lukas feared otherwise. The ogres weren’t waiting in ambush, but they were waiting.
As the rats drew near to the narrow crossing, the one in the lead continued on while his companions held back. Then one of the ogres, the fat one who’d won his fair share of the day’s fights, stomped out to meet him.
“What are they doing?” whispered Paul, incredulous.
“They’re talking,” said Lukas.
After a few moments, the rat went back to his companions and the six of them made for the river crossing, in the company of the four ogres. Rats and ogres were traveling together, and what’s more, they’d been expecting each other. This was a planned meeting.
Paul shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Ogres not killing each other—and now they’re friendly with rats? What’s the world coming to?”
“Things are changing,” said Lukas. “The leaves have turned, and the days are colder. The Piper’s loose, the Peddler’s dead and, if that witch Roga is to be believed, there is a new rat king on the throne. Bad things are happening everywhere.”
“So, what do we do?” asked Paul. “I’d hate to make camp on that side of the river knowing that there’s rats and ogres about.”
Lukas thought for a minute. The rats had come down from the north and the ogres up from the south—why did they choose to meet here in the middle?
“Those ogres cross the river, and the rats could lead them north to the mountains. To the rat king’s nest.”
“Why would they go there? Rats inviting them over for supper?”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” said Lukas. “Ogres and rats working together. What if this is the start of some kind of alliance?”
Paul let out a low whistle. “That would be bad. Really bad.”
“We should follow them,” said Lukas. “If they’re headed to the rat king’s nest, then let’s find out why. Go get Emilie and tell her to get ready to cross the river.”
Paul
nodded and ran back down the hill. Something about this was wrong, and they didn’t even have the whole story yet. As Lukas tightened his knife belt and stared out at the dark river, he was struck by another troubling thought, but one that he couldn’t help now. His instincts about the ogres had been right—they were up to something.
So what about his instincts about Carter, about the feeling he’d had but ignored? Just how much danger had Lukas left the boy in?
After nearly two days at sea, Max was finally able to stomach a slice of toast with jam and a cup of hot tea. She’d gotten sick that first evening aboard the dilapidated little steamer, ironically named the Leviathan, and spent the next twenty-four hours in their cabin, which was really just a small storage room that was currently being used to store passengers instead of cargo. She remembered hearing, in between bouts of throwing up, Mrs. Amsel question one of the sailors about the seaworthiness of their vessel. His only reply had been a barking laugh.
Cuxhaven had turned out to be a charming fishing town, although the shipwreck museum failed to inspire confidence in the journey ahead. Mrs. Amsel had quickly and rightly identified the people they needed to talk to by their sheer ugliness. The sailors were hard men, and Max guessed that a life spent at sea led to a tough demeanor and more than a few wrinkles. But the crew of the Leviathan were beyond weather-beaten. First off, they were short. Some smaller even than Mrs. Amsel, with long buck-toothed faces and scraggly beards. And a few of them, if the light hit them just right, looked positively greenish.
One glance and Mrs. Amsel declared that these little men were just too ugly to be entirely human. And the elfling woman was right. The Leviathan was crewed by goblinfolk, a sort of magical half blood descended from, of course, goblins. Goblins were great sailors, so the sailors said, which Mrs. Amsel warned was a very goblinish claim. Goblinfolk had rather inflated opinions of themselves, but they were not inherently dangerous. The Leviathan’s captain never showed his face, but after a bit of negotiation with the first mate, plus what cash Mrs. Amsel could afford, the sailors agreed to take on Max and her friends as working passengers, as they were bound for New York anyhow. And yes, they remembered Harold’s cousin because he had nearly cleaned their galley bare on the voyage to America. Trollsons were not timid eaters.