“Morgan Prince, please! Please say to me you are here!”
He peered between the reeds and saw a small figure standing a few paces up the riverbank. It was Qina, the troll girl. His first urge was to remain hidden, but there was something about her worried face that shamed him into giving himself away.
“I’m here.” He stood so she could see him past the reeds that surrounded his stone island.
“Daughter of the Mountains!” she said. “Oh, but I am good to see you well. You should not be here.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, Qina. I’m a prince, remember?”
“No, should not be here because making danger.” She waved her hands in agitation. “Come back!” Her face changed, as if she had thought of something new and even worse than whatever was bothering her. “No, do not come. Stay there. I will coming to you.” She backed a little way farther up the bank, then ran to the water’s edge and leaped across the sizeable distance with her arms spread wide. She landed with both feet on Morgan’s stone refuge, but one of her boots slipped and she began to fall backward. Irritated by the loss of his solitude but alarmed that she might hurt herself, Morgan grabbed her jacket sleeve and kept her from toppling back into the cold water.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “And how did you jump so far?” He was almost twice her height, but he could not imagine jumping the same distance, not on the first try.
“Where I am living, many are places ice is gave way or path is breaked. Sometimes jump is only way.” She never took her eyes off the water beside them. “Now I will call after Snenneq to help us back. He can be watching.”
Morgan could not understand almost anything the troll girl had just said. “Watch? Snenneq needs to be here to watch us?”
“Ssshhhh!” She held her finger in front of her lips. “Not so much noise making. River Man will hear.”
“River Man? Who is that?”
But instead of answering him, Qina continued to look past him, her eyes fixed worriedly on the stream. “There,” she said in a whisper. “He has smelled of us.”
Morgan wondered if this was some kind of religious ceremony. Was there a taboo on this place? Was this some kind of trollish sacred site? “Who is River Man?”
She grabbed his hand and pinched it with her strong little fingers, then again gestured him to silence. “Watch,” she whispered. “See, there.” She pointed.
Now Morgan saw a pattern in the ripples a few dozen paces upstream, a sort of curved, invisible obstacle around which the water flowed less evenly, an obstruction now sliding toward them through the shallows. Then he saw something else he had missed—a large gray heron, standing in the midst of a nearby patch of reeds, so motionless on its long, thin legs that it seemed to be part of the vegetation.
“That’s just a bird,” he told Qina, who was still staring at the spot with wide eyes. “It’s a heron. They don’t eat anything bigger than rabbits and frogs . . .”
He did not finish explaining about the heron’s diet, because at that moment something massive, long, and flat surged up out of the shallow water and crashed into the reeds. Before he could even make out what it was, it had sucked the large, struggling bird into its impossibly broad mouth.
Morgan shouted out in shock and terror. The long body and wide, flat head was brown and green and gray, mottled like stones on a river bottom, but the belly and the underside of its massive jaw that he saw as it took the heron were white. The head was shaped like nothing he had ever seen, a great, flattened ham with two piggy eyes set far back from the vast mouth and its tiny, sharp teeth, but most upsetting of all were the thing’s forepaws, which despite their mottled shininess seemed to end in wide, flat human fingers that had curled tenaciously in the heron’s feathers, holding it fast even as its wings spread and beat.
The struggling heron swallowed down, the thing slid backward into the river, leaving nothing to mark that either creature had existed, except the agitated water and broken reeds.
“By the Aedon!” Morgan realized he was shaking all over. “Merciful God—what was that?”
“River Man,” said Qina. “River Man by us he is called. He lives in such places. We have him in Blue Mud Lake where my people go, but we know his hiding holes.”
“Qina!” This time Morgan recognized the voice immediately. “You are there?”
“Out here, Snenneq!” she called, her relief plain. “Qallipuk is in this water. We saw him.”
“What are you doing out on the rock?” Snenneq asked as he got closer. “Qina, dear wife-to-be, I did not know you had such foolishness in you. I am worried.”
“I came. Morgan Prince was on the rock.” She stood. “Do not speak me with the words speaked to children. Help us to shore.”
Little Snenneq cautiously made his way down to the river’s edge and stood on the bank upstream from the large rock, jabbing at the water with the sharp end of his hooked staff. “I see him not,” he said. “Come now.”
This time Qina did not jump, but took Morgan’s hand to lead him back to the shore. As they slid down into the water, he realized that although the cold but gentle current came no higher than his thighs, most of the young troll woman was going to be beneath the water. He bent down and, though she protested, lifted her up and carried her to the shore. As he took his last step in the river, he thought he felt something brush his leg. In a sudden panic, he tossed her onto the bank and scrambled out of the water as swiftly as he could.
? ? ?
Back at the camp, Binabik and his wife Sisqi came to make certain their daughter and Morgan were unhurt.
“It is a sobering thing to be meeting the Qallipuk,” said Binabik as he examined bloody scratches on the prince’s ankles. “Do not give yourself hard words, Prince Morgan. They have great fierceness, and attack from where they are not being seen first. And some of them are having twice the length of a man your size—perhaps more.” He patted him on the knee. “I see nothing but small wounds coming from rocks in the stream. You have been having a luckier first encounter with the water monster than is given to some!”
Morgan didn’t understand how the troll’s comments were supposed to make him feel better—so the River Man he’d met was only a small one? Binabik’s use of the word “sobering” troubled him too, as if the little man might be repeating something he’d been told by Morgan’s grandparents.
Have they told him to keep an eye on me? That I’m a drunkard who can’t be trusted?
Snenneq wrapped his beloved in a cloak and took her off to change into dry clothes. When Binabik and Sisqi returned to tending the feverish Sitha, Morgan got up and walked across the camp to take a seat by the fire where Porto sat.
The old man looked at the prince, still shivering and wet nearly to the waist, and asked, “What happened, Highness? Did you fall into the river?”
“Not quite.” He leaned closer to the flames. It was summer, and even with evening coming on quickly the air was warm, but Morgan could not remember feeling so cold in a long time, even in snowy Rimmersgard. “I almost became a meal for River Man.”
“Who is that?”
“The trolls call it a ‘Kallypook’ or something. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He described the monster to Porto, who reacted with appropriate awe at the prince’s close escape.
“That is why I never go far without my sword,” Porto said, patting the hilt fondly. “The forest, all these wild lands—they are full of terrible things. Did I tell you of some of the things I saw at the Nakkiga Gate?”
Morgan was about to answer wearily—when his teeth had temporarily stopped chattering—that he had heard about Nakkiga Gate from the old knight a hundred times, but he realized that he had never heard Sir Porto talk of anything quite like this. “Were there such things at Nakkiga?” he asked. “Kallypooks?”
“I did not see your water-monster, so I cannot say. But I can promise you that we fought many kinds of demon-spawn. The Norns themselves were bad enough, with their corpse-skin and dead eyes. And silent! Like fighting ghosts. There was one I had to fight by myself in a cave on the mountainside. He was already wounded, thank merciful God. And when I cut the arm off him, he never said a word, made no cry of pain—just kept crawling toward me, blood pouring out of him like a river. I had to slice his head away, nearly, before he gave up. But it was not the Norns I feared most. No, that would have been the giants.”
In his present mood, Morgan was not certain he wanted to hear any more, but he was also too cold to move away from the fire. “I have heard many stories about the northern giants,” he said to the old knight. “And not just yours. My grandfather had to fight one, he told me.”