Shade wanted to fly for days until any chance she had of ever seeing Ginch and the Professor would be long gone, but the cold ocean winds buffeted her so that she was forced to give up soon after she started. She landed, stumbling, near a cottage on a low cliff overlooking the sea. Taking shelter behind a barn, Shade cursed her luck, her inability to fly better, and, most of all, her former companions. I don’t need them! she thought. I’ll be much better off on my own, just like I’ve always been.
The feelings of loss and betrayal crashed over her like the white-capped waves of the sea on the nearby rocks, and she sobbed deeply, the sort of all-body, soul-emptying sob that comes when we fully give ourselves over to heartbreak.
When the tide of her sorrow finally ebbed, she was puzzled to still hear crying. She crept along and peered around the edge of the barn. A hyena-headed goblin, a tall wolf-headed wulver, and a leathery-skinned spriggan, all wearing red caps, were gathered around a squat, warty, green-skinned, pot-bellied little bald man with a pig’s snout and short horns poking out from his forehead. The little green man was clad in a diaper, held a smoldering cigar in his hand, and cried and fussed, sounding just like your baby sister Letitia does any time you’ve become really engrossed in a good book (as opposed to reading a book like this one, in which case a squalling infant should be a pleasant distraction).
“Das ist gut!” the wulver said, nodding approvingly.
“’Course it’s good, youse mooks!” the little man replied in a deep, raspy voice. “I know my bidness!”
“We just need to make sure you got your act down before we do this job,” the hyena-head goblin said. “So let’s see the baby body.”
The little man took a couple puffs of his cigar and then began to shudder and shake violently. Amidst the convulsions, his skin began to lighten, his features soften, his horns retract into his skull. When it was all done, there he stood, looking exactly like a human baby. “‘There ya go, pally,” the changeling said, chomping on his cigar with now-toothless gums. “Ya wanna a baby—bam!—ya gotta baby!”
“All right, let’s do this,” the goblin said, clapping his hands together. The sinister troop of fairies crept—or, in the case of the changeling, toddled—to the house and crouched under a shuttered window. As Shade watched, the spriggan began to inflate, its droopy, wrinkled skin filling up and drawing taut, until it towered over the others. The wulver picked up the changeling and handed him up to the spriggan, who lifted him up to the window, opened the shutters, and dropped him inside. After a moment, a tiny pair of hands handed a baby, completely identical to the changeling, out to the spriggan.
Watching all of this, Shade forgot her own problems and worried instead about the infant. They’re stealing that poor baby! Shade thought, covering her mouth to stifle a cry of horror. But Sir Justinian said that was completely outlawed! Somebody has to stop them!
Knowing that she must do something but with no idea what or how, Shade silently trailed the red-capped gang to a copse of trees further along the cliffs. She watched as they approached a campsite where a hyena-headed goblin identical to the first tended a fire. “You get it, brother?” he asked, picking his teeth with a small chicken bone.
“We got the little beastie, Laffer,” the identical goblin declared, holding up the baby who peered about and burbled.
The other goblin made a face. “Disgusting. Put it in the cage so it doesn’t crawl away, Gaffer.”
“Right.” The brother handed the baby to the wulver, who walked to the edge of the camp where a large metal cage, big enough to hold a couple hunting dogs, sat. He opened the hinged top panel and lowered the baby to the bottom. The baby immediately rolled over, sat up, and rattled the cage.
“Vy boss vant kinders?” the wulver asked, joining the others around the fire. “Very little meat on bones.”
“She’s not gonna eat the thing, Wolfgang,” Laffer explained as he handed out cups and filled them from a wineskin hanging around his neck. “She or somebody else is gonna take that thing, pay us very well for it, and then raise it up to be a warrior for the Sluagh.”
“’At little fing’s gonna be a warrior?” the spriggan sneered. “Oi could squish it ’tween me toes wivout ’alf tryin’.”
“Give it time, Struggs,” Gaffer replied. “Eventually that thing’ll be as big as Wolfgang over there, and it’ll be able to swing around iron weapons—”
“In the service of our noble Queen Modthryth,” Laffer interrupted. He held up his cup. “Long may she reign.”
“As long as the money’s good!” Gaffer added.
“And the drinks are strong!”
They all laughed and drained their cups, refilled them, and drained them again as Shade watched from a safe distance. If I wait a little and they drink enough, maybe I can sneak the baby away and back to his parents, she thought.
Drink enough they did. Cup after cup of wine gurgled down their throats until every one of them was loud and loopy and stumbly.
When she thought the gang suitably distracted (and wobbly), Shade crept over to the cage, stood on her tiptoes, and ever so quietly opened the top of the cage. She tried lifting it to see if she could tilt it onto its side, but with the baby inside (who cooed at her) it was too heavy. No sweat. I’m getting good at flying, Shade told herself as she fluttered up and dropped into the cage. I’ll just grab the baby and fly it on ho—ugh!
It was then that Shade realized that while flying may not be that hard, flying while carrying a sizable load is, and flying with a baby almost as big as you is impossible. Shade couldn’t even pick up the baby, let alone airlift him out of the cage. She also learned (just as you did when you were three and they brought your little brother home from the hospital all red and wrinkly and wrapped up like a burrito) that if you grab a baby that doesn’t know you and start poking it and prodding it and try to yank it up by its clothes, it will scream and cry. Quite loudly.
“Shh! Quiet!” Shade whispered as the baby wailed. “I’m saving you, you stupid baby, so shut up!”
Babies, however, are notorious for not shutting up when you kindly ask them to, and this boy was no exception. In spite of Shade’s best efforts to calm him (which, let’s be frank here, were not very good and mostly consisted of her patting him roughly and muttering words under her breath that would make sailors blush), the baby’s cries were so shrill and piercing that Shade had no idea that the spriggan had come over to see what the trouble was until he slammed the top of the cage down.