by E. D. Baker
Determined to know what the interloper on her island might be hiding, Grassina inserted a slim, pointed stick in the tiny gap between the lid and the base, and attempted to pry it open. Aside from jamming her thumbnail, nothing happened, however, so she took the chest in both hands and was shaking it when an angry voice behind her said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Startled, Grassina stood, bumping her head on one of the posts that supported the lean-to. The lean-to tottered and swayed. A strong arm reached out and pulled her to safety just before the shelter fell with a crash. While Grassina staggered and tried not to fall, Pippa slipped under the neckline of her tunic.
“Ow! What are you doing? Oh . . . my . . . ,” said Grassina, glancing from the scowling boy who had saved her to the jumbled branches that had formed the lean-to moments before. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
The boy let go of her arm and stepped back. “To what? Destroy the only shelter I have or snoop around in my personal possessions?”
“Both. Neither. I mean . . .” Grassina bit her lip. “Wait a minute. I’m not the one in the wrong. You shouldn’t even be here. Who are you, anyway?”
“That’s not the point,” said the boy. “Hey, give me that!” Snatching the dilapidated chest from her hand, he inspected it as carefully as if it were his most precious treasure. Grassina decided that, from the way he was dressed, it probably was. The oversized tunic he wore came down past his knees. His feet were bare like an urchin’s and his sandy brown hair was long and uneven, as if he’d trimmed it himself. He was taller than Grassina, although not by much, and she might have been afraid if he hadn’t had such an open, honest face and warm brown eyes that would have looked friendly if he weren’t so angry.
“Why are you here?” asked the boy, looking up from the chest to glare at her. “You weren’t supposed to come anywhere near . . .” His voice trailed off as if he’d said something wrong, leaving Grassina wondering what it might have been. “I mean, no one was supposed to come here. This is my home, and I want to be alone.”
“You can’t make me leave! I have more right to be here than you do. I’m . . .” It occurred to Grassina that it might not be a good idea to tell this stranger exactly who she was. Although some people might respect her royal status, others might try to use it to their advantage. He didn’t look like a bad person, but looks could be deceiving, as her old nurse used to say. Grassina didn’t know anything about this boy—who he was, where he came from, and certainly not what his intentions might be should he hear the truth about her.
“You’re what?” asked the boy.
“Not leaving, that’s all. I spend more time in this swamp than anybody else. What makes you think you can show up all of a sudden and lay claim to it?”
“I’m not claiming the whole swamp, just this island. And I didn’t just show up. I’ve been here for a while.”
“Then how come I haven’t seen you before?”
The boy shrugged. “I guess you haven’t gone to the right places. It doesn’t matter though. I built my home here, so this island is mine. You can just—”
“If that’s all it takes to claim it, I’m going to build my cottage here, too. It will be a lot better than that thing you had. Your home was all crooked and wobbly . . .”
“It was a perfectly good lean-to!” said the boy, sounding indignant.
“It was more of a lean-from, if you ask me!” said Grassina. “I hardly bumped the thing and it fell over.”
“Ha!” said the boy. “I doubt you could build anything, let alone a cottage.”
“We’ll see about that!” said Grassina.
“Fine!” said the boy. “Tell me when you’re finished. I could use a good laugh!”
Grassina turned her back on the boy so fast that the end of her braid whipped around and stung her cheek. She was careful not to look his way as she studied the ground, trying to decide where to build her cottage. Finding a level spot, she cleared away the debris and left the island in search of long, straight branches.
Although she’d envisioned the cottage as roomy and large enough to walk around in, she began to think that might not be practical if she was going to build it all by herself. Without an ax or saw, she’d have to take whatever windfall she could find, which wouldn’t leave her much to work with. She found a few branches that might suffice, although they weren’t nearly as long as she’d hoped.
Grassina was about to start back to the island when Pippa said, “I’ll sstay here for a while. I don’t want that boy to ssee me.”
“I wouldn’t let him hurt you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Grassina.
“It’ss not that. I don’t like meeting new people. You’re nicer than mosst sstrangerss. The old witch wouldn’t come near me without a forked sstick in her hand. She alwayss looked like she wass afraid I might bite her.”
“Would you?”
“Only if I had to, but that’ss besside the point. I think it’ss better if I keep to mysself while you’re around him.”
Grassina shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”
“What I want is a nice fat mousse,” said Pippa. “But that’ss ssomething elsse I’ll have to do on my own.”
Thinking about building a shelter was a lot easier than actually building one. It took Grassina a number of botched attempts before she finally found a method that would work. After carefully placing the branches where she wanted them, she lashed them together with willow wands, propping them up again each time they fell down. It was frustrating work, made all the worse because she knew the boy would be watching. When she had the branches angled well enough that they could stand on their own, she covered them with twigs and stuffed the spaces with mud and grass.
Pippa returned shortly before the shelter was finished. “It lookss like an upsside-down bird’ss nesst.”
Grassina shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m too tired to care.”
“What’ss that noisse?” asked Pippa.
Rubbing her growling stomach, Grassina said, “I’m hungry, that’s all. I haven’t eaten all day.” She glanced at the boy, wondering if he was watching her, but he was still reinforcing the lean-to he’d rebuilt and didn’t seem to notice her.
“Sso, are you going to call that boy over to ssee what you did?” asked Pippa. “I’ll wait in the grasss if you are. You sure showed him, making thiss housse and all. It’ss sso much better than that thing he built.”
“Not really,” said Grassina. “It isn’t at all what I wanted to make. It’s not a cottage. It isn’t even big enough to call a hovel.”
“That’ss all right. You don’t have to show him anything. We don’t want to look like we’re bragging.”
The sun was setting, and with the advent of nightfall came a cool breeze and the scent of rain. Grassina shivered and slipped into her cottage on her hands and knees, avoiding the still-wet mud in the walls. She was cold, her skin felt grimy, and her stomach ached with hunger. It was hard not to think about all that she’d given up—hot food, a roof over her head, clean, dry clothes, and the safety of solid stone walls. While Grassina pried a small rock out of the ground so it wouldn’t dig into her side when she lay down, Pippa investigated the little bit of floor space, then slithered up the wall and disappeared among the branches.
Grassina’s tiny cottage creaked as the wind picked up, finding its way through the holes she’d missed. Wrapping herself in her blanket, she huddled in the center of her shelter, yawning so hard she could hear her jaw creak. A larger gust shook her shelter, and Pippa dropped out of the ceiling. Gathering the little snake to her, Grassina curled around her friend, trying to warm her. When the wind died down for a minute, she thought she heard the boy talking, but then the rain began and the gentle tapping lulled Grassina into an exhausted sleep. Even after the rain became a steady downpour, she did little more than pull her blanket over her head and continue sleeping. As the rain grew heavier, globs of mud washed through the chinks in the walls and ceiling. Plip! Plip! Cold mud dri
pped on her blanket, trickling down her hunched figure and turning the blanket into a sodden weight.
“You might want to get out of there before this thing collapses,” the boy said from the doorway, but Grassina was sleeping too deeply to hear him.
She didn’t wake when Pippa slipped away, or when the boy sighed and crept into her shelter on his hands and knees, then carried her out, still wrapped in the saturated blanket. As the rain lashed them both, the boy held Grassina closer, smiling to himself when she snuggled into the warmth of his arms.
It wasn’t until Grassina smelled meat roasting over an open fire that she finally opened her eyes. The sun had risen, making the drops quivering on the leaves of the closest plum tree shimmer like diamonds in a world washed clean by the night’s rain. A small flock of sparrows flitted among the branches, greeting the day and each other with a chirping chorus. Confused when she didn’t see the stone walls of her chamber, Grassina threw off the dry blanket that covered her and sat up. Even as the events of the previous day came back to her, she couldn’t remember leaving the shelter she had built.
The smell of roasting meat was too hard to resist. Grassina climbed out from under the boy’s lean-to, rubbing her back to ease the stiffness. The boy must have helped her; it was his blanket that had been covering her when she awoke, and she couldn’t imagine how else she could have ended up in the lean-to. Before approaching the fire pit and the source of the tempting smells, she glanced around the clearing, expecting to see the boy. She saw her shoes, clean and drying in the sun, as well as her own soggy blanket draped over a branch, but the boy was nowhere to be found. Pippa was gone as well.
Peeking inside the shelter she had built, Grassina was dismayed at how poorly it had survived the rain. She thought the sagging roof was bad enough until she saw the mud puddle where she had sat the night before. Shuddering, she backed away and hurried to the fire pit.
Some sort of small animal had been skinned, skewered, and left with the stick resting across two forked twigs. The scent of fat sizzling on the coals of the fire was almost more than she could bear, but she rotated the stick to cook it on the other side, still expecting the boy at any moment. When he wasn’t back by the time the meat began to char, she took it off the fire and blew on its golden brown surface to hasten its cooling. With no sign of the boy, Grassina could wait no longer. She tore into the crisped morsels, savoring the flavor while watching the pathway for the boy’s return. Although she intended to eat only half, she was licking her fingers before she knew it, having already cleaned the bones.
After one last disgusted glance at the sorry shelter she’d made, Grassina decided that it was time to begin searching for the Swamp Fairy. While she was at it, she’d see if she could find the boy. She would thank him, but she’d also let him know that she didn’t really need assistance and could take care of herself.
Grassina spent the rest of the day visiting many of the places she’d frequented before her mother had changed. She went deep into the swamp where only muskrats, otters, and wildfowl left their prints. She circled the quagmire, collecting useful herbs that grew at its edge and nibbling berries as she picked them. At the pond that bordered the enchanted forest, Grassina kept an eye open for werewolf prints like the ones she’d seen before and was relieved when she failed to find any. She did smell smoke, however, and followed it to a patch of weeds that had been crisped in a fire. Because the burn mark was so small that only a very young dragon could have made it, she decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about.
The shadows were lengthening when Grassina returned to the island with a sack full of edible roots and found that the boy was there ahead of her. He offered her some plums and a seat beside the fire where two leaf-wrapped fish baked amid the coals.
“Where did you go?” Grassina asked, watching the boy poke the steaming fish with a stick.
“Someone had to catch our dinner,” the boy replied without looking up.
Grassina opened her sack to offer him some of the edible roots. “You didn’t have to get one for me. I can fend for myself when I have to.”
“I’m sure you can,” he replied, looking pointedly at her sagging shelter.
“Who are you anyway?” Grassina asked. “How did you end up here?”
“My name is Haywood. I ran away from home. I couldn’t live there anymore, not the way things were with my father. So I came here looking for someplace where I could be by myself.”
“Then I guess you couldn’t have found a better place than the swamp,” said Grassina. “No one comes here except me . . . and the Swamp Fairy, of course.”
Haywood chuckled. “The Swamp Fairy! That’s a good one.”
“Shh! Don’t laugh. She might hear you. You don’t want to make her angry.”
Haywood gave her an incredulous look. “You don’t really believe . . . I guess you do,” he said, seeing how serious Grassina looked.
“Of course I believe in the Swamp Fairy. She’s helped me more than once. Why, if it weren’t for her, I’d be a snail or something even worse.”
“Really?” said Haywood. “And what exactly did this Swamp Fairy do?”
“She sent a toad when I needed one and later a flock of blackbirds with eggshells.”
“How thoughtful of her. But if she’s so busy helping people, I wonder why I’ve never seen her.”
“I think she must be shy,” said Grassina. “To tell the truth, I haven’t seen her either.”
“Here,” said Haywood. “I think these are ready.” Using one of the longer sticks, he deftly flipped the leaf-wrapped fish out of the fire and onto a flat rock to cool.
“You’re a good cook,” Grassina told him between bites a few minutes later.
“Thanks,” he said. “You’d be surprised at all the things I can do.”
Twelve
Although Grassina hoped to get up before Haywood left the next morning, he was already gone when the touch of the sun’s rays on her eyelids woke her. Grassina had meant to repair her shelter and sleep there, but nightfall had taken her by surprise, and she hadn’t done more than clean out some of the mud before it was too dark to see. The boy had let her sleep under his lean-to again while he slept at the opposite end. Grassina appreciated that, after that one meaningful glance, he never again referred to the deplorable condition of the shelter she’d built. Even so, she was well aware of how few things she’d actually accomplished since she’d arrived in the swamp and how bleak her future looked. It was almost enough to make her want to pull the blanket over her head and never come out from under it.
“Are you going to eat thiss egg or what?” asked Pippa. The little snake was curled beside an egg that had been carefully placed just beyond the lean-to. “That boy boiled it in hiss pot and left it for you. I prefer them raw, but I’m willing to give it a try if you don’t want it. We could call it my good luck and—”
“I’ll eat it,” Grassina said, reaching for the egg. “Who knows when I’ll get something else? Finding food has been harder than I thought it would be. And don’t you dare tell me it’s because I have bad luck. Sometimes luck has nothing to do with what happens.”
“Hmm,” said Pippa. “Sso tell me, why do you ssupposse the boy takess that box with him when he leavess? Maybe it’ss a deep, dark ssecret. Maybe he keepss the finger boness of a murderer in it. Or maybe there are love notess from a jilted mermaid, or a horde of deadly sspiderss trained to jump up and bite you on the nosse when you leasst expect it.”
“That’s a horrible thought,” said Grassina. “Where do you get such ideas?”
Pippa coiled herself on Grassina’s knee and rested her head on her tail. “I didn’t make them up. They were part of a sspell Mudine ussed once.”
“So why do you suppose Haywood takes the box with him?” asked Grassina.
“Either he takess it becausse he needss ssomething that’ss in it, or sso ssomeone, maybe you, can’t ssee what’ss insside.”
“I wonder which it was.”
&nbs
p; “My guesss iss,” said Pippa, “it’ss probably both. Ssay, are you going to eat the resst of that egg? Becausse if you’re not . . .”
“I’m eating it! See!” Grassina took her second bite.
Pippa eyed a bird’s nest at the top of a plum tree. “Then I ssupposse I have to go get my own food. I feel a ssudden yearning for fresh eggss, sso if you’ll excusse me . . .”
Grassina finished the egg while following the path off the island. It had occurred to her that the fairy might have left the swamp on some sort of errand, but she wasn’t ready to give up yet. However, she was beginning to wonder just what she would say if she found the fairy. Should she ask for a place to live? A new family, perhaps? But even that wouldn’t work. The only family she really wanted was the one she’d had. Then a thought occurred to her that was so stupendous that she gasped and almost forgot to start breathing again. Maybe she could ask the fairy to use her magic to remove the curse from the queen and put everything back the way it had been. Then her father would be alive and Chartreuse wouldn’t hate her and . . . How strong was fairy magic anyway?
Having started the day feeling dispirited, Grassina now had a spring in her step and a new purpose to her search. Finding the fairy could change not only her life, but that of her entire family. All she knew about the family curse was what her father had told her, so maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to end.
“Swamp Fairy!” called Grassina as she waded through the tall grass beside the bottomless pit. “Oh, Swamp Fairy,” she shouted across the river where the otters made their home. “Are you there, Swamp Fairy?” she wailed.
Although she searched high and low for the Swamp Fairy, Grassina never saw any evidence that the fairy was around. She was on her way back when she passed another patch of weeds burned to a crunchy black, a patch that had been lush and green the day before. Grassina shrugged and continued on, once again certain that she had nothing to fear. It was probably just a baby dragon, although she had yet to see or hear one.