Boots and the Seven Leaguers Read online

  When we were younger, Pook and I sometimes tried to figure out who’d been there, playing Tracker under my bridge until the light faded and we were both called home. But it was just a game, of course. Neither one of us—by sight or by nose—could really tell who’d been traveling past. I’d never gotten any better at it, but Pook grew into his nose.

  We’d left home so early we’d gone without breakfast, but not without work gloves, which were part of Pook’s plan.

  “Never know what you might be touching” is what he said.

  I knew, and he knew, that he meant touching iron. For most of us, iron is quite painful. To some, it’s downright harmful. For a few, it can kill. Gloves were essential if we were going to be roadies.

  As we waited I drew in a deep breath. It was one of those delicately chilly mornings, with a sky the color of old pearl. Birds were well into the second part of the morning chorus, with blackbirds and larks competing for the lead.

  About an hour into our wait, Magog began to whine, his glasses fogging. For a genius, he can sometimes be a pain.

  “I’m cold,” he said.

  Well, of course, hairless as he was, he was going to be cold. I gave him my jerkin.

  “I’m hungry.”

  Young trolls are always hungry. I shrugged and looked at Pook.

  Snap!

  Pook popped home and back for some tarts. Berrylicious they were. Even cold. And then, just to shut the hairless one up, he popped home again for glasses of milk. Well, for a carton of milk actually, since he couldn’t have done his popping if he’d been carrying three full glasses. Pookah popping needs at least one free hand. And popping can only be done for three round trips in any one day. Three is a magic number in the Kingdom, of course.

  “That’s it,” Pook said to Magog. “I’m saving the last pop for an emergency.”

  “Food is an emergency!” whined Magog.

  We were beginning to be sorry we’d brought him, even if the whole roadie thing had been his idea.

  The milk carton was one of those with a missing kid shown on the side. Not a pixie, like in the poster. This one was a young fairy, her wings hardly feathered out yet, with that wispy fairy smile, sharp little teeth, and big blue eyes under a mop of yellow-white hair. Under the picture it said:

  STOLEN: Windling, four years old.

  Last seen at Yarrow’s Ring.

  She loves to dance in pale moonlight,

  And hear the night birds sing.

  I covered the picture with my hand so as not to have to see her face—which was sad despite the smile—and drank a deep gulp of milk. Then I passed the carton to Magog.

  He drank, too, and stopped whining.

  For a while.

  The sun rose slowly, and I thought about how humans think trolls turn to stone in the sun, which is plain silly. We just get grey like stone, instead of tan like sand. Shows you how stories get started. And then I was thinking about the greenkid and the poster and the tickets. It was all a big jumble in my head. Like I said—I’m troll clear through.

  Just then we heard the rumble of trucks on the cobbled road, sounding like disgruntled giants.

  Magog jumped up, waving his hands and screaming like a banshee. “They’re here! They’re here.” His glasses bounced around on his nose.

  Embarrassed, I grabbed him by the tail of the jerkin and jerked him down.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” I said. Which was three uses of the word. And if I had spoken them all aloud—and I’d been a pookah or a fairy or some other magic-maker—it would have been close enough for a spell. Of course, we trolls don’t do magic. We just do mayhem. “Sit, Magog. Don’t let them know how young we really are.”

  He sat but not happily.

  “You wait here. Pook and I will talk to the road crew,” I said. “Alone.”

  To make sure Magog didn’t move, Pook laid a small holdspell on him, just enough to make him uncomfortable about moving away from that spot, though not so strong as to hurt him if he really needed to get away. And he added a smidgen of transformation, which made Magog look a bit like a pookah. The four-legged kind. A sort of cross between a fox and a feather boa.

  Then we pulled on the work gloves and Pook laid a heavy glamour on the two of us. Under the glamour, my hair got redder and longer, my muscles filled out—becoming corded and knotted with real troll mass—and I put on at least ten stone in weight.

  Pook—well, he got muscle and lost tail.

  We looked older and bigger and much more knowing than we really were.

  We looked swell.

  In our grown-up troll disguises, we climbed the hill to the road, where the green grasses trembled in the breeze, just waiting to gossip about us.

  The road crew were already out of the trucks and looking over the site. They all wore dark Levi’s and black tour T-shirts with yellow lettering:

  BOOTS AND THE

  SEVEN LEAGUERS

  Pay the Troll

  “Hey!” I called out, startled at how deep my voice suddenly sounded. “Need some help? Brawn R Us. Haulage and Heftage.” I didn’t say anything more for fear of becoming grey with a lie.

  They turned as one and stared. My voice really sounded strong.

  One of the drivers, a man with a long mustache that cupped his mouth, laughed. “Roadies? Why not! We could use the extra hands. Work all day, and we’ll give you comps for the show.”

  And just like that, we were in.

  The rain rained up,

  The Queen reigned down,

  The horse reined in,

  In magic town.

  —“Rain,” from BRIDGE BOUND

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ROADIES

  There were six of them—four human men, a human woman, and a twisted little pan who worked the soundboard.

  The humans all had those flat-sounding names that have little meaning and less sense: Joe, Mac, Stan.

  One man—Charles Rudkin—almost sounded Fey but wasn’t.

  The woman was called Jesse Feldman. If she’d been of the Kingdom, she’d have been called Jesamin or Jasmin or Jasminia, for she had the wildflower look of a woman of the sidhe: petal white skin, with deep brown eyes so dark the pupils could not be distinguished, and hair the color of oak bark. But she was a human woman, flat-footed and heavy with mortality, without a hint of fairy magic.

  After they introduced themselves, it was our turn.

  Pook and I hesitated. The giving of names is much more important to the Fey than to humans, who pass around their names with unthinking ease. In the Kingdom, knowing someone’s true name gives you power over them.

  Pook coughed and looked at me.

  I looked down at my feet.

  Neither of us said anything.

  It was the pan who helped us out, though not without cutting us with his tongue, something pans do all the time.

  “We’ll call them Big T …” He nodded at me. “And Little T.” He nodded at Pook. “For Troll. Terribly. Thick.”

  They all laughed.

  At us.

  Except for Jesse Feldman, who just looked annoyed.

  We laughed, too, to ease the hurt. “Big T and Little T,” we agreed.

  The four men took the offered names, but Jesse Feldman was not so easily guiled.

  “We’ll call them that for now,” she said. “Big T.” She nodded at me. “Little T.” She nodded at Pook. Then she smiled a human grin, which was all but unreadable, as it was made up of equal parts sincerity, self-interest, and greed.

  The pan set us to moving the two big generators out of the truck first.

  “Start with those,” he said. “If you can.” His voice was laced with sarcasm, which pans are really good at.

  “Brawn R Us!” Pook answered in his new deep voice. He laughed, and the sound rolled out, mostly troll but with a bit of trickster mixed in. I hoped the pan wouldn’t notice.

  Then I really looked at the generators and groaned inside. They were massive, one for the lights and one for the sound sy
stem. Even my dad would have grunted once or twice shifting them.

  “And get cracking,” the pan added. “We have to do the sound test by noon. Playing outdoors is harder to mix than in a club.”

  The pan, of course, was too small for carrying and too full of himself for fetching.

  Pook and I were to do all the heavy work.

  But then, that was what we’d agreed to. We were roadies for the day. And everyone knows the roadies creed: If it stands, move it; if it moves, get it to buy you lunch.

  “We’re cracking! We’re cracking!” I called out to the pan. But he had already moved off, muttering to himself the way pans do.

  However, one look at those generators, and Pook and I already knew they spelled trouble. We may have seemed like full-grown trolls—thanks to the glamour Pook had laid on us—but we were still only our half-grown selves. Glamour is only the appearance of reality, after all. Underneath the appearance we were who we were: One small pookah. One semi-small troll.

  Pook got into the truck, put his shoulder to one of the generators, and started trying painfully to shove it closer to the edge, where I would haul it down to the ground.

  He grunted and sweated; he pushed and groaned. He said, “By the powers!” loudly, not once but many times.

  The generator didn’t move an inch.

  I got up into the truck and shoved the generator with him till it teetered on the edge, then I leaped down to be ready to catch it on my back when Pook gave it one more push.

  “Spells!” Pook cried, his voice much higher than a full-grown troll’s should be.

  At that, the pan turned slightly and watched us out of the corner of his almond eyes. He lifted a hand and scratched between his little horns. I could almost hear him thinking that two adult trolls should not be having so much trouble with a simple generator.

  “Don’t look at him!” I warned Pook. “Don’t let him see you looking. And keep working. If we can’t move these things—and fast—we’re going to be found out.”

  “The pan knows?”

  “Well—he suspects something.”

  “No move, no comps?” Pook said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I could pop the generators off,” Pook offered.

  “But that would be your last pop of the day, and it’s a long way home after the concert,” I pointed out.

  He brooded over that for a moment. He could always shape-shift into dog form and trot off home when the last song was sung. But trolls are a slow-moving lot. Without the help of something like seven-league boots—which a troll invented, by the way—Magog and I might not make it back before morning.

  And if we came in that late, Mom would ground me for a century. Half lifetime for a troll.

  Pook nodded. “You’re right, Gog. Besides, popping would give us away. Everyone knows that trolls can’t do magic. We don’t want any of them—especially that nasty little pan—to know that we really aren’t grown-up trolls.”

  “Terribly. Thick,” I added, still smarting from what the pan had called us.

  Pook looked up, saw the pain in my face, and nodded.

  “Besides,” I said, “moving something as large and heavy and metal weighted as that generator would make a pop as loud as a sonic boom.”

  “Then let’s get this thing moving without magic,” Pook said.

  “Brawn R Us,” I said.

  Pook settled his shoulder into the first generator and gave it a massive shove.

  The generator fell off the truck onto my back.

  And nearly flattened me.

  A glimmer of glamour

  A half-second’s haze,

  The heart gives a stammer,

  The mind’s in a maze.

  —“Glamour,” from BRIDGE BOUND

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOLDSPELL

  My troll pride would not let my knees buckle entirely.

  Slowly I straightened up, generator on my back, and carried the thing down the embankment to the shore. Pook told me which way to go since—bent over like that—all I could see were my feet. There was a strange popping sound from somewhere in my knees, and Pook had nothing to do with that. I knew I was going to feel awful tomorrow morning.

  The minute we got the first generator down to the riverbank, the pan went back to tuning the guitars with a strange little device made of metal encased in wood.

  All the while the humans were intent on their own project and paid us little mind. Jesse Feldman was holding up a piece of paper and—squinting at the small print—reading the instructions out loud to her crew. Her voice had the authority of a queen’s. Whatever she said, the men did at once.

  “What do you think they’re planning?” I asked Pook.

  He strained to see. Pookahs have far vision, but we trolls are nearsighted.

  “Looks like a floating stage,” he told me.

  “Won’t it just float away?” I asked. “In the middle of a song?” I held my nose and made a sound like glug-glug-glug.

  Before Pook could answer, the four men went over to one of the trucks and carted out eight huge iron anchors, which—with the help of rolling metal carts—they trundled to the shore.

  Pook grinned at me. “There’s your answer.”

  We couldn’t help the humans with their work, of course. Touching cold iron is something no Fey can do with any degree of safety. Not even wearing heavy work gloves.

  They knew better than to ask.

  Pook and I went back to wrestle with the second generator, and after about an hour we had it out of the truck and down the hill, next to the first one. There we shoved them both onto the flattest part of the bank, beneath the bridge.

  “Whew,” Pook said, wiping his forehead, now sticky with sweat. “I could sure use some of Magog’s milk myself. Do you think he’s drunk it all?”

  We looked over at the spot where we’d stashed the kid. The holdspell was still working and Magog was nodding off, the shadows from the bridge keeping him out of the sun; he was a warm golden color still, and not grey at all, which would have given him away.

  “No,” I warned Pook. “Even the humans would guess we aren’t what we seem if we quit now. It’s not even ten A.M.”

  So, we went back to the truck and told the pan we were ready for the next job.

  He looked at us aslant again, then scratched behind his massive pointy ears. It was a long moment as he considered our next task.

  “Soundboard,” he said at last. “Then power tap. Be careful.”

  “Everyone in the Kingdom knows to be careful around power,” Pook said in his new deep voice.

  “Wrong kind of power, troll,” the pan shot back. “You got brownie brains?”

  For a moment I felt sorry for Pook but glad I’d kept my own mouth shut. Which isn’t being much of a friend, if you think about it.

  Luckily the power tap and the soundboard were a lot lighter than the generators. Actually, Pook’s house would have been a lot lighter than the generators!

  We hauled them down without a problem.

  The pan skittered down the hill after us in that rolling, galloping walk all pans have. It always looks like something itches them in bad places as they move.

  Pook and I began to laugh. Then—afraid of annoying him—we coughed loudly into our gloves.

  The pan was not amused. “Hey, T and T, when you’re finished with the funnies,” he said, “get the mikes.” He turned away from us to check over his equipment.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “In the truck, sludge-for-brains,” he said without looking around. Then added, “Trolls!” in a way that sounded like a curse.

  So, Pook and I trudged back up the hill, but we couldn’t find what the pan wanted. The trucks had been completely emptied out.

  “What should we do?” I asked Pook.

  He shrugged. “Ask the pan, I guess.”

  Of course, neither one of us wanted to do that. But what else was there?

  When we called down to the pan, he trott
ed up grudgingly on his little goat legs—trit-trot-trit—and grabbed six metal mikes from where they’d been stashed. Behind the back of the front seat of the smallest truck.

  “And what are these?” he asked. “Wands?”

  I was impressed that he could handle them with his bare hands, but maybe he was used to it after so many years. Or maybe pans aren’t so badly affected by iron. Or maybe the metal wasn’t iron at all.

  But Pook had no shame. Pookahs never do. “You said that they were in the truck.”

  “And what do you call this?” asked the pan. “A pumpkin?”

  “I call it the cab of a truck,” said Pook.

  “You don’t argue like a troll …” the pan said, cocking his head to one side.

  I elbowed Pook into silence before he could answer back. “Just what our dear old mom always says,” I put in quickly. “We’ll take the mikes down to the shore for you.”

  The pan shoved the mikes at us. If they weren’t iron, they were a good imitation. Because we were wearing gloves we could just about handle them.

  Just.

  There was one each for each member of the band to sing into and one extra for Armstrong’s drum, all carefully labeled in a flowery script.

  As we went down the hill, I whispered softly across the top of one of the mikes: “You can always get something from a greenman …”

  My voice, with the glamour-added deep tones, almost sounded like Boots’s.

  Until it cracked on the long note.

  The sun was straight overhead when the pan finally gave us a break.

  “Get whatever sludge you trolls call food,” he said, scratching himself again. “And then get back here. We’ve got plenty more to do. And if you do it quick enough, I might …” He glanced briefly over his shoulder at the riverside, where Jesse Feldman was gesturing to the men with her hands. “… I might have something else for you to do. Something that pays …”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What other things?” Pook asked. “What kind of pay?”

  But the pan was already on his way down the hill.

  There were lots of Fey on the hillside now, standing in line for early tickets.