Casper held his breath as the canoe drifted toward the Damp Squib, because on the porch jutting out from the house there were three old ladies sitting in rocking chairs—and all around them the air misted with drizzle. The women wore rags over their hunched frames, their hair was strewn with mud, and their feet were webbed. Back and forth the rocking chairs creaked, and the drizzle hags stared ahead with empty eyes.
“I think they might be asleep with their eyes open,” Casper whispered. Then he leaned closer to Utterly. “Whatever you do, don’t wake them up before we’ve decided on a plan.”
Utterly nodded, then she fumbled for the mooring rope and chucked it round the Damp Squib sign. And it was all going well—Casper even had time to tidy the canoe a little, which it needed after the business with the mudgrapple—until Utterly yanked the rope to pull the canoe closer to the house and it bumped against the ladder leading up to the porch and the drizzle hags stopped rocking.
Utterly winced and Arlo scuttled up the sleeve of her coat as one by one the hags blinked and three sets of gray eyes fixed on the canoe.
“Well, well, well,” crooned the hag in the middle. She was the tallest of the three and her chin was so pointed you could have cut a piece of toast with it. She cricked her neck and Casper shuddered as the bones inside it clicked, but then something far more disturbing happened. The woman’s neck craned out from her shoulders and grew longer and longer, and though the drizzle hag remained slumped in her chair, her neck slid down the ladder like an old snake until her head was hovering before them.
“So,” she said, her neck curling around the children as she spoke, “you passed through the Silver Tears and all the mudgrapple?” She smiled, revealing toothless gums, then she glanced up at the porch. “Come on down, ladies. We have company. It is time to make our guests feel as unwelcome as possible.”
There were several more cricks as the bones inside the necks of the other two hags loosened and then, moments later, their weathered faces coiled around the canoe. Casper tried not to gag at the smell of their breath, a revolting mix of rotten eggs and mold.
“Allow us to introduce ourselves,” the tallest of the hags smirked. “I am Hortensia Quibble and these are my dear friends, Sylvara Buckweed and Gertie Swamp. It is our displeasure to greet you on this beautifully drizzly afternoon.”
Sylvara and Gertie gave wheezy sniggers.
“So, how long have you two burplings been friends?” Gertie asked.
“We’re not friends,” Utterly replied sternly. “We’re… work colleagues. Things are purely practical around here.”
Casper nodded nervously. At least Utterly was clear on the subject. Saving Arlo had confused things a bit, but it seemed there really was no hope whatsoever of them becoming friends. Casper comforted himself with the realization that he could spend more time thinking about lists, timetables, and staying alive instead of worrying about being Utterly’s friend.
Sylvara twisted her neck up to Casper’s face. “Come about a message you got from a magical wind, have you? Most people do…”
“Y-yes,” Casper stammered. “And if you’re able to help us, we’ll be on our way immediately so as not to bother you a moment more.”
Sylvara hissed with displeasure, then Hortensia stretched her neck right up to Casper’s face so that their noses almost touched. And Casper realized that the drizzle hags did have teeth. They just weren’t in their mouths. They were dangling on a piece of string around their necks.
“You break our enchantments,” Hortensia spat, “you wake us up, and then you expect us to simply send you on your way with the information you require?”
Beads of sweat prickled through Casper’s forehead.
“Just because we have sensed dark magic in these parts of late and a handful of disgusting griffins managed to sneak past our enchantments and steal a few marvels this morning—”
Casper’s heart skipped a beat at the thought of Midnights in these parts that very morning.
“—does not mean that we will yield our wisdom for free. We are the drizzle hags and any answers we give come at a price.”
Casper thought back to the silver waters. Would finding out where this familiar face was mean losing his sight or his voice or, worse, his memories of home?
In front of him, Utterly straightened up. “What will it take to make sense of these words from the cometwhirl: ‘find a familiar face to destroy the Midnights’?”
Hortensia, Sylvara, and Gertie slid up close to Utterly, their rotten breath pulsing against her cheeks.
“I think you had better come inside,” Hortensia sniffed.
Casper glanced at the ramshackle house. A Spanish phrase he’d heard of before had been painted onto the front door, only the wording wasn’t quite how he remembered it: MI CASA IS NOT SU CASA.
Casper leaned over toward Utterly. “Going in might mean never coming out.”
“It might,” Hortensia wheezed. “But staying out might mean never going home.”
With that, the drizzle hags wound in their necks and, with their heads in place, rocked back and forth in their chairs. Casper, Utterly, and Arlo nodded to one another warily before climbing out of the canoe and making their way up the ladder and onto the porch.
The drizzle hags rose together, their joints clicking so many times it was like listening to a bunch of twigs snapping, and led the way into the Damp Squib over a doormat that bore the words HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, except the words HEART IS had been painted over so that really the mat said HOME IS WHERE THE ARGUMENTS HAPPEN instead. They entered a gloomy sitting room in which sat two damp sofas that were stained with mud and scattered with cushions embroidered with decidedly glum messages like HOME MISERABLE HOME. And at the far end of the room, rather than a fire crackling in the hearth, there was a cauldron filled with bubbling blue liquid that rose up the chimney as tiny blue droplets and looked exactly like a stream of marbles.
Casper blinked. So this was where the world’s rain was conjured and what he had seen earlier puffing out of the chimney wasn’t blue smoke but marvels—rain in its purest form, caught by ballooners in spidersilk nets.
Sylvara and Gertie busied themselves with the cork-stoppered bottles on the shelves either side of the cauldron, tipping the contents of a small bottle labeled OGRE TEARS (WARNING: SPICY) inside, then adding a few drops from a larger bottle entitled PITTER-PATTER OF SPRITE FEET (BEST BEFORE YESTERDAY). The mixture hissed blue smoke, then more marvels floated up the chimney while Gertie poured in a bottle of DAWN DEW (KEEP REFRIGERATED AFTER OPENING) and Sylvara stirred.
Casper gawped as Gertie reached for yet another bottle—WATERFALL ESSENCE (HANDLE WITH CARE)—and emptied it into the cauldron. He had no idea there were so many magical ingredients in rain.…
Hortensia, meanwhile, slumped down onto one sofa, motioning for Casper, Utterly, and Arlo to sit on the one opposite, then lay her toothy necklace on the coffee table between the sofas.
“Cometwhirl is often easier to understand once you get your teeth into it,” she croaked. “And I will throw my teeth to give you an answer if you can solve my riddle.”
“And if we can’t?” Casper asked.
“When you can’t,” Hortensia corrected him, “because we at the Damp Squib are here to make your stay as unhelpful as possible, then we shall pickle you.”
“Pickle us?” Utterly cried.
Casper gasped. “I thought only onions and cucumbers got pickled!”
“And irritating children.” Hortensia’s eyes flicked toward a collection of jars wedged into wooden pigeonholes in the far corner of the room. “We do so like to keep mementos of our guests.”
Casper’s toes curled as he read a few of the labels on the jars—PICKLED EYEBALL (TROLL); PICKLED TONGUE (NYMPH); PICKLED TOENAILS (OGRE); PICKLED LEFT ELBOW (ANONYMOUS)—then he tried his best to focus on why they had come. “What’s the riddle?”
Hortensia snapped her neck loose and it swam close to Utterly and Casper. “The more you take, the more you leave behind.” She blinked two dull eyes. “What am I?” She nudged a bowl of greenish-brown gloop toward them. “And do have a bite to eat while you mull that one over; lunch today is river slug with a side of marsh weed.”
Utterly turned to Casper. “But… but that doesn’t make sense. How can you be carrying more and more but then leaving more and more behind?”
Hortensia glanced over at the cauldron. “I think it would be wise to begin measuring our guests for the Pickling so that we can look out for the right-sized jars because these children are not going anywhere.”
But Arlo, as it turns out, was. He hopped off Utterly’s shoulder onto the coffee table and began pattering back and forth across the surface.
“Not much of a dragon, is he?” Hortensia snorted as Gertie hobbled over with a measuring tape, wrapped it around Casper’s head, and noted down the circumference.
Casper watched as Utterly’s hands balled into fists and her spine straightened, but just as she was about to unleash a torrent of abuse at Hortensia, Casper butted in.
“The more you take, the more you leave behind… what about cake? That would work! You’d leave crumbs behind if you took lots.”
“Not if you were greedy.” Hortensia curled her lip. “A pathetic attempt.”
Sylvara held another tape measure up to Utterly’s hair. “Can you pickle hair, Hortensia? I never know.”
Hortensia smiled. “My dear, you can pickle just about anything.” She glanced at the clock above the door, then glared at Casper and Utterly. “You have until five o’clock to give me your answer, then we shall commence the Pickling.”
“But that’s in one minute’s time!” Utterly cried.
“Precisely,” Hortensia snapped. “So, if I were you, I would stop wasting it.”
Utterly and Casper exchanged panicked glances while the clock ticked on into the silence and Gertie and Sylvara continued to hobble around with their tape measures.
“I can’t think of anything!” Casper groaned. “My mind’s gone blank!”
And then he noticed that Utterly had gone unusually quiet and was watching Arlo pacing back and forth across the coffee table. Every now and again the little dragon looked up at Utterly and Casper before continuing his steps. And then Casper’s heart quickened and Utterly’s eyes lit up. In the dust on the surface of the coffee table lay the answer to the drizzle hags’ riddle, only Arlo had worked it out long before they had—just like he had with Utterly’s password for the door leading into the castle!
Hortensia clapped her hands together as the clock struck the first of its five chimes. “Well, that concludes this afternoon’s miserable affairs. I suggest you—”
“FOOTPRINTS!” Casper and Utterly blurted out together, pointing to the little claw marks in the dust. “The more you take, the more you leave behind!” Hortensia’s face contorted and for a moment Casper wondered whether she was going to be sick.
“It’s right, isn’t it?” Utterly cried. “Arlo solved your riddle!”
Hortensia’s eyes shrunk to slits, then she sent her neck down to inspect Arlo’s footprints. She blinked in surprise, then she scowled at the dragon. “You think you are clever? Well, what is thirteen thousand five hundred sixty-five divided by two thousand seven hundred thirteen?”
Arlo was thoughtful for a moment, then he pawed his answer into the dust: 5.
Hortensia gasped. “He’s right!”
“What’s the chemical symbol for sodium chloride?” Gertie asked.
Arlo grinned as he wrote four letters onto the coffee table: NaCl.
Sylvara leaned closer. “What’s a pentasyllabic word for rain?”
Arlo rapped his tail on the table as he thought, then he wrote “precipitation” into the dust.
“The dragon is a genius,” Hortensia muttered. “And just think how splendid it would be to pickle the brain of a genius dragon. Like Christmas come early!”
Sylvara and Gertie licked their lips and their necks rose once more and curved around Arlo like a noose. But as they did so, Casper thought of the way Arlo had nuzzled into his legs as they passed through the Silver Tears and of how he had purred in his lap after the mudgrapple attack, and before he could stop himself, he found that he was on his feet.
“You will not pickle Arlo! How dare you even say such a thing, you miserable old toads!”
He paused to catch his breath—no one had warned him quite how exhausting being brave was—but then Utterly was on her feet, too.
“Casper’s right,” she snarled. “We beat you fair and square and you have to honor your word and help us.” She scooped up Arlo and held him close. “So, we’d very much like to know where in the kingdom Casper can find a familiar face. Then we’ll be on our way.”
Like a sulking child, Hortensia slipped her teeth off the string she’d fashioned into a necklace, shook them in her crinkled palm, then rolled them across the table.
To Casper and Utterly the scattered teeth looked like what they were—scattered teeth—but Hortensia, Gertie, and Sylvara were crowded around them now, twisting their necks this way and that and tutting as they thought. Then, finally, Hortensia looked up.
“At the mouth of the river, take a right. If in doubt, keep climbing.”
“That’s it?” Utterly cried. “Couldn’t you be a bit more specific?”
Casper nodded. “When will we reach the mouth of the river? What are we climbing? Do you at least have a map you could give us?”
“We will send a message to the castle to let the Lofty Husks know your progress, if only to stop them hounding us for news of a missing bottler-in-training called Utterly Thankless.”
Utterly looked suddenly hopeful, then tried her best not to show it. “Do they know I’m not guilty of working with the Midnights, then?” she mumbled.
Casper thought back to the note he’d sent Utterly’s mum. Had it already arrived? And had Utterly’s mum told the Lofty Husks that her daughter was innocent and that’s why they were hounding the magical creatures in the Beyond for news? Casper didn’t want to tell Utterly he’d gone behind her back, so he said, “Maybe the Lofty Husks realized there was no way you could be bound up in all this really.” He paused. “When they read the drizzle hags’ message, though, they’ll know for sure, and then I bet they’ll rush out here to help us in any way they can.”
Out of pride, Utterly pretended not to care. But Casper had seen her face back with the Midnight and the mudgrapple, and he knew that both times she’d felt far, far out of her depth.
Hortensia, meanwhile, eyed the children with contempt, then swiped up her teeth from the table. “If you leave now, you will reach the mouth of the river by sunrise tomorrow morning. If you leave any later, you will risk immediate pickling—starting with the angry girl’s bottom. Now, be gone!”
And so, keen to avoid the Pickling and anxious about the Midnight escaping the jailbird soon, Utterly, Casper, and Arlo left the Damp Squib.