"How can you be drowned by time?" I frowned.
"Very easily," she sighed, turning away from me to gaze out a window at the river. "A long while ago, magic worked anywhere in this world. Magic folk lived where they wanted, practiced magic as they liked. Not at all like these days, when magic sputters and fizzes at best. Just try walking through a brick wall. You'll see what I mean. Today there's only a few enchanted pockets left here and there, protected by spells that shield them from the passing of time. We dare not stick a toe outside the spell protecting us or we freeze up worse than ice."
"Even in the summer?"
"Especially in the summer. I'm talking of a different kind of cold than you're thinking of, my dear. Cold caused by time is a cold that you feel on the inside. More like loneliness than ice. And when any of us feels it, we can't help but burn ourselves up trying to keep warm. Usually we magic folk stay warm by migrating, like birds in the fall, but those of us along the river here have been left behind, stranded."
"How'd that happen?"
"Miscalculations," she said with a grim look that discouraged follow-up questions.
"But where do you migrate to?" I asked.
"Other worlds, where the time for magic is now."
I nodded slowly, thinking of those other worlds until a thought occurred to me.
"If you're like the birds, does that mean you come back in the spring?"
"Oh, yes," the old lady said, brightening. "That's what we're waiting for. Our spring, when magic will work all over this world again. It's coming, but for now we're so cooped up along the river that you can hardly turn around without bumping into a hex, a curse, or general witchery of some kind. In the olden days, when we had more elbow room, magic folk weren't so quick to anger, but packed in tight as we are now, well, it's gotten out of hand lately. And Bodacious Deepthink's the worst of all. That's one of the reasons I need to pay her a visit, to bring her down a peg or two. Maybe then she'll behave a little better. So there you have it. That's what happened to my name, and the name of every other blue-wing along this stretch of river."
"But can't you take another name?"
"That would only weaken the spell," she said, patting me on the head as if it was kind of me to want to help. "And now you better try to get some rest."
"Will I need it?"
"I'm afraid you will," she answered, lifting some sparkly dust from her apron pocket and sprinkling it on my eyes. Once again I felt as though I were slowly falling, just like at the wagon wheel bridge, but this time I was falling asleep.
Forty-three
Nettie's Message
The next thing I knew, the old lady was blowing gently across my face, her breath sweet as fresh cider. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the store windows, so only a few hours had passed, but a week of sleep couldn't have refreshed me more. I popped right up.
"Is there anything that dust can't do?" I asked.
"Quite a bit, actually, but for small kinds of magic that involve falling of one kind or another—even falling asleep—it's quite handy. Put enough on and it's good for raising things too, 'cause of course that's just falling done backwards. But now we have to get moving. It's getting late, if we're going to get that stone feather before Bo forgets where she put it. First off, we need to have a word about trolls."
I nodded to show that she had my attention.
"I may not be able to save you if we get caught," the old lady continued. "Bodacious Deepthink's not called the Great Rock Troll for nothing."
"Are you trying to scare me?"
"I'm doing my best," she said with a chuckle that was more friendly than mean. "Before we get started, I need to be certain that you want to go through with this."
"It doesn't matter if I'm scared or not," I told her. "My grandpa and the others need that feather, and Duke may be a pill, but I don't think he belongs down there."
All of what I'd said was true enough, but there was one last thing I'd left unsaid—maybe even to myself—that was even more true. Where else was I ever going to get a chance to stand up to Bodacious Deepthink? The old lady had said that was the only way to undo the Great Rock Troll's curse, which meant that it was the only way to find out if I was once a river troll.
The answers to some questions can change your whole life, and this answer seemed scary enough to be one of them. I wasn't exactly sure that I wanted to know the answer, but my once being a river troll would sure explain some things. Big things, like how I measured up so different from my sisters or felt so good around turtles and toads and such. And little things too, like hating vegetables and almost feeling sort of comfortable around Stump.
"Very well," the old lady answered with a satisfied nod that said she'd judged me right. "Then we'd better gather ourselves and our supplies, starting with our guide." With that, she collected the cage holding Reliable St. John. "There's tunnels all over where we're headed, and this cricket's been through them before."
"I haven't, I haven't, I haven't," Reliable St. John sang from his cage.
"Now where did I put that rope?" the old lady said, ignoring Reliable's chorus.
"We need rope?" I asked.
"For tripping." She hunted up a white rope, which she wrapped around and around her waist until it looked like a wide belt. "Rock trolls take a long time to get back up. You've still got a good riddle handy, right?"
"I guess so."
"Let's hear it." The old lady made an out-with-it motion.
So I recited the riddle that Two-cents Eel-tongue had made up. To my surprise, the old lady kissed her fingertips the way a chef does when a dish tastes just right.
"Perfect," she said. "Pure river troll, which is exactly what you need to flummox a rock troll." She rubbed her hands together in anticipation. "All right, except for a couple of bags of gravel, I'd say we're about ready. Have you ever used a slingshot?"
"Once. Before my cousin took it away."
"You'll need some practice, then."
She and I spent an hour knocking empty pop cans off a counter with a slingshot. By then Stump had joined us, but he shied away from an offered slingshot, refusing to trust anything made by a human hand. The old lady was a deadeye, but I broke a few things. After an hour or so, she declared I was ready as I'd ever be.
"What exactly are we going to be shooting at?" I asked.
"Lanterns."
"Glad to hear it," I said. "I didn't think these would be much good against Bodacious Deepthink."
"My dear," the old lady confided, "there's not a thing in my store would hurt Bo. That's why it's best if she never even knows we've been there until we're gone."
"What are the chances of that?" I asked, kind of quavery-like.
She answered my question by saying, "Maybe I better have a look into your eyes again."
Without thinking, I snapped my eyes shut, afraid. What if she saw a river troll that bore a striking resemblance to me? But then Stump stepped close to whisper in my ear.
"You shouldn't ever pass up a chance to look in a fairy's eyes."
"Why not?" I whispered back.
"They say you can see the answer to whatever's troubling you."
"Is that true?" I said, raising my voice to the old lady. My eyes were still shut.
"It's been known to happen," she answered modestly.
Taking a deep breath, I popped open my eyes, and the old lady leaned forward until we were nose to nose.
"What do you see?" I was ready to flinch.
"Still crickets," she said, amused by my brave face. "Maybe what you see is more important."
So I looked.
"It's that young lady again," I said, relieved. "The one in the sunbonnet. Who is she, anyway?"
"Does she look familiar?"
"Sort of."
"That's because you two look a good deal alike. She's your Great-Great-Great-Grandmother Nettie."
Gazing closer, I could see it was true. The girl in the sunbonnet did look remarkably like me, though several years older.
"How do you know all this?" I asked.
"Oh, I knew Nettie as a girl. We came upriver on the same steamer—the Rose Melinda. I'm not at all surprised she's come back to help you. Family always mattered a good deal to her. What's she doing right now?"
"Standing on the bank of a sandbar," I said, looking more closely. "Writing something in the wet sand with a stick."
"Can you read it?"
"It's upside down."
"Concentrate."
I did. This was what I saw:
Ask for Floyd.
Tell him to hurry up.
Finally I pieced it together by mouthing the letters out loud, one by one, until they made sense as words.
Ask for Floyd.
Tell him to hurry up.
After repeating it to myself two or three times, I read it louder for the others.
"Who's Floyd?" I asked.
"If memory serves," the old lady said, "you have a great-great-great-granduncle named Floyd Bridgewater."
"That's right!" I remembered. "Grandpa B told us about him. He grew a horn and disappeared. But how am I going to ask for him? He's been gone for a hundred years or better."
"I don't know," the old lady said thoughtfully, "but something tells me we'll find out."
Forty-four
Stump's Message
"Do you mind if I have a look?" Stump asked the old lady. "In your eyes, I mean. Please?"
He really did have exceptionally good manners for a troll, and good manners are awfully hard to turn down, especially when they're least expected. The old lady waved him closer.
The way Stump approached her, he might have been trying to look at the sun. He squinted at the old lady's eyes a long time before stumbling back, in shock.
"What is it?" I asked. "What'd you see?"
"Your cousin." He shook his head to clear his vision.
"Huh?"
"All I see is your cousin," Stump repeated forlornly. "How's he going to help with my troubles?"
"You're sure it was Duke?" I said.
"He's pretty hard to miss, don't you think?"
"Was he doing anything?" the old lady asked.
"Not that I could see," Stump complained. "Other than eating. He sure wasn't writing me any messages in the sand, if that's what you mean."
"Where was he?" I asked.
"In the dark."
"What was he eating?" I was hoping to find something that might cheer Stump up and be useful at the same time.
"It was too dark to tell. All I could see for sure was that he was chewing and chewing and chewing."
"Was he alone?" the old lady asked.
"I couldn't tell."
"Was he still a rhinoceros?"
"Yes, yes," Stump answered, turning away dejectedly. "Just the way we left him."
After that, the old lady fed us supper, dishing out raspberries and cream to me, Princess Trudy, and herself; more willow cats for Stump, who remained in a funk; and an apple seed or two for Reliable St. John. When done eating, the old lady seated Stump and me at the store's big front window to watch for her brother. Behind us, she went about closing up her shop. She sprinkled dry food on the fish tanks, flipped an enormous hourglass, and wound up the engine of a toy train. The train chugged off down wooden tracks, hauling a line of cars filled with sunflower seeds. Just before the train disappeared into a wall hole, a fat mouse, dressed in a blue conductor's uniform, stepped onto the caboose's back platform to wave farewell. The old lady waved back and stepped over to a refrigerator, where she filled her apron pockets with sparkly powder from a canister. Then she joined us at the front window.
Nobody felt like talking, especially not Reliable St. John. The old lady had removed him from his cage and set him on Stump's shoulder, saying we needed to travel light, which meant no cages. The closest any of us came to talking was grinding our teeth. Stump and I took turns doing that.
Finally, near dusk, headlights pulled up in front of the store and a horn honked twice. The old lady hustled us out the door to her brother, who had driven over to Big Rock.
"Farmer Bailey's pasture?" the old man guessed.
"By the back way," the old lady said. "And when you hit the Sweeny place, would you mind turning off your headlights?"
"It seems to me," the old man groused, "that I'm always driving you somewhere with my headlights off."
Forty-five
Farmer Bailey's Pasture
We turned off the highway onto a narrow blacktop road that wound up the far side of a long valley. Just one night ago I'd been carted up the same valley while hanging from a pole. Curving away from the woods and the rock face that Bodacious Deepthink had stepped out of, the road continued climbing.
A little past an abandoned farmhouse, which must have been the Sweeny place, the old man flicked off his headlights and we drove silently on in the gathering darkness. The higher the road went, the slower the old man drove, till at last we were barely creeping. Glancing at his hands on the steering wheel, I noticed a silver ring identical to the one the old lady wore. The ring was frosting up, but when I looked at the old man's high forehead, I saw beads of sweat. What the old lady had said about magic folk burning up if they left the valley came back to me. But still the old man drove on. Just below a final crest out of the valley, the old lady said, "This should do."
Her brother dropped us off beside a black ditch, turned his pickup around, and headed back down with Princess Trudy and Pumpkin, whose whiskers were frosty. When passing us, he rolled down his window.
"You've still got that stone glove?" he asked.
"Of course." The old lady patted a bulge in her apron pocket.
"Well, don't lose it."
And off the old man drove. I was hoping the pickup would lift off the ground and fly away—it did belong to a blue-wing fairy, after all—but it stuck to the road. If the old man turned his headlights back on, I never saw them.
"It won't be long now," the old lady told us.
"What are we waiting for?"
"Farmer Bailey. He knows the way, or has always claimed to. We'll see."
She walked up to the barbed-wire fence fronting the road, crawled underneath it, and motioned for me and Stump to follow. I didn't have any trouble skinning under the wire, but it was a tight fit for Stump. First he tried sliding on his stomach, but his tail stuck up too high. Then he tried on his back, but his gut wouldn't go. Finally the old lady tossed a handful of sparkly dust on him and floated him over.
We stopped right on the other side of the fence in a thinly wooded pasture. So that he wouldn't drift away, Stump clung to an oak standing barely twenty yards from the top of the ridge. While hanging on, he grumped about a chill in his tail. Though the night was warmish, I could hear the old lady's teeth chattering from time to time too, and every once in a while Reliable St. John would say with a shiver, "Don't start a fire. Don't start a fire. Don't start a fire."
Which let you know how cold he was.
Beneath these small complaints, I kept imagining that I heard low and distant voices. Finally I couldn't take it any longer and whispered, "Who's talking?"
The old lady pointed to the matted brown grass beneath our feet and whispered back, "Our friends."
Forty-six
Smack Noodles & Gumboil Soup
An hour passed. If I told you it got darker during that hour, I don't see how you could believe me. A lump of coal didn't have anything on that night.
The voices kept jabbering below us. They might have been singing or arguing. From the little I knew of trolls, it was probably both.
Finally two headlights came slowly bouncing over the crown of the hill. With them came a noisy tractor pulling a hay wagon that we crept after, stumbling in the dark. Fifty yards later the tractor came to a stop near a clump of trees that dipped lower than the surrounding pasture.
"A-ha," said the old lady.
When the rock in a place is limestone, like around here, it's easily hollowed out by water. There's ha
rdly anything groundwater loves to eat more than limestone. Sometimes so much limestone gets washed away that top layers of rock collapse, making a sinkhole, and that's where the clump of trees was growing, in a sinkhole. Of course what goes hand in hand with sinkholes and hollowed-out limestone is caves.
By the light of the tractor, Farmer Bailey used a hand-held hook to snag bales of hay and drop them down an opening at the sinkhole's center.
"What's he doing?" I whispered.
"Paying tribute."
"I thought tribute got paid with gold and things."
"Bo prefers hay," the old lady answered. "And if she doesn't get it, the first thing Farmer Bailey knows, he's missing some cattle or sheep."
"What's Bo want with hay?"
"Shhh."
The voices beneath us had inched closer.
As soon as Farmer Bailey left, we crept into the sinkhole, which sat in the pasture like a bowl the size of a house. Inside the bowl was grass, moss, a small grove of stunted oaks, and—near the center—a hole the shape of a narrow bathtub that gave off a weak, purplish white glow. Peeking over the hole's edge, we could see a pair of rock trolls loading hay bales on an old two-wheeled cart. They were bickering, and we were now close enough to catch most of what they had to say.
"Smack noodles and gumboil soup. I'm sick of 'em."
"Watch your tongue or it might go missing."
"All I'm saying is, her highness could snag us a calf or piggy now and then, couldn't she? For variety. But no, she wants this hay for her pets, so Farmer Bailey's livestock is off-limits. Is that fair?"
"Maybe yes. Maybe no. It ain't for the likes of us to..."
About then I quit listening. Why? Harnessed to the cart was Duke.
I recognized my cousin by the black zipper coat still hanging on him. Though the coat's seams had split open to make room for the rhinoceros he'd become, it still clung to him around the shoulders, like a cape. He was busy munching on a bale of hay set before him. Back home a brass band would have started playing if he so much as touched his greens.
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