“Well, you won’t find one here!” a voice hissed from under the nearest bridge. “Go fall apart somewhere else! I don’t want my sequence of events unsequenced or my vowels disemvoweled or my consonants disconsolate!”
A-Through-L got down on his belly and peered through the grass under the bridge, quite terrifying the troll who worked there. A large red lizard face appearing suddenly at your office window would put anyone off their day. The troll wore a long, mulled-wine-colored magician’s cloak and a sleeping cap with gleaming symbols stitched all over it. His face was nearly all nose and moss, and his strong shoulders could have out-lifted Atlas. The troll yelped and waved his huge hands in front of his face.
“Who’s that trip-trapping on my bridge?” he tried to bellow, but his heart wasn’t in it. He hadn’t started right, and now the whole rhythm of the thing was ruined.
“Me!” cried the Wyverary. “A-Through-L, if you please. But I don’t trip-trap. I sort of boom-crush and pound-smash.”
“Very well, but please no crushing, this is a family bridge and I don’t want it pounded. My name is Hemlock and you must answer my riddle if you wish to cross my bridge!” The troll cleared his throat and spoke with elaborately trilled r’s. “Until I am measured, I cannot be known, yet how you will miss me, when I have flown!”
“But I don’t want to cross your bridge,” began Ell.
“Time!” September didn’t look back as she called Brother Tinpan’s answer over her shoulder. She touched Saturday’s face gently.
“You can’t forget,” she whispered to him. “It’s all too much to forget.”
She reached down to flick something off her ankle—an ant or a moth or a bit of dandelion fluff. Spring was coming in Fairyland. It had gotten almost too hot for a jacket, smoking or otherwise. But the little creature crawling up her leg was not an ant or a moth or a bit of dandelion fluff. It was a tintype letter S, and it was snuggling up against her and purring contentedly.
Hemlock sighed, wholly unaware that a little block of tin with a raised letter S carved on it in a rather Gothic style was trying desperately to make friends with September. “Tourists are getting too clever,” the troll groaned. “I remember the days when a top-shelf conundrum like that would get you written up in the folktales. Now everyone’s heard your best before you get out of bed in the morning. My brother Monkshood got so fed up with losing the game he’s started asking for state capitals. My wife says we oughta switch over to differential equations. But I’m a classicist, me. I’ll still be singing the golden oldies when the worms are trip-trapping over my head. I like it when the answer is Time. It always is, anyway.” The troll rubbed his boulderlike nose with one mossy wrist. “That was the riddle I asked the day I lost my son. I ask it once a day so he knows I still love him, even though everyone knows the answer. I’m a weepy old billy goat when you come down to it. That’s the trouble with being a troll. You can’t forget any ruddy thing, any more than a rock can forget its own hardness.”
The tintype letter S hopped up onto September’s hand like a parakeet. It danced a happy tinny dance. Its fellows, seeing S had got an in with the long-haired lady, came bouncing through the grass on the corners of their blocks: a wooden letter T, a bronze B, a silver F, a stone Z, and a gleaming golden E.
“You’ve got an infestation,” Blunderbuss said.
“What’s wrong with them? What are they?” September chewed on her lip. You oughtn’t show your fear when strange beasts come round. The letters Y, K, and V rolled up her arms under her hair. I shan’t be afraid of a bunch of letters! A Queen wouldn’t be afraid of anything—oh, but if that’s the size of it I shan’t ever be Queen. But a great lot of letters are just words, and I like words. The bigger and longer the better. H, C, and M clattered into her lap.
Hemlock chuckled. “They’re an alphabet! They run wild round these parts, always have. Some grow enormous, up in the higher elevations. Ideograms and hieroglyphics as tall as a horse’s shoulder. But here in Skaldtown we mostly get the wee ones. Italics and umlauts and the like. Aren’t they precious? I found a little nest of Cyrillics in my rafters last week. Tufa, that’s one of the three Primeval Trolls, hunted one down in the beginning of the world and taught it to turn into language. Nowadays they don’t need to be taught—though you get more slang than proper sentence structure. Huh. It likes you. That’s funny. I’ve only ever seen alphabets cuddle up to trolls before. Little traitors,” he added fondly. He narrowed his eyes. “What did you do? Did you use a big word or a lot of subclauses in your sentences?”
“Velocipede.” September shrugged. “I don’t think that’s such a big word.”