With her familiar insouciance, Boozy agrees to join the family party as they depart from the unnamed hamlet where she now lives. What Ti’imit thinks of her plans doesn’t seem to matter. Her tenure will last only for the time that the family takes wandering through the lowlands, northeast, in the general direction of Qhoyre, capital city of Quadling Country. Once Boozy can deliver them into a place where the nighttime streets are lit with oil lamps, she’ll have had enough, she tells them. Perhaps, Elphie later thinks: That harridan called Chaloti’in had privately ordered Boozy to escort the family out of the region. Or even hired her to do it. Boozy doesn’t sweat the details, however, or not out loud. Not in front of the Thropp family.
In those weeks, or are they months, probably, Boozy becomes the majordomo of the outfit. While Frex has managed to put away a small bankroll from his earnings, he isn’t working now. His confidence in his calling has been shattered for the second time in his life. He becomes a hermit in the marshy wilderness, praying for his own salvation, or begging for strength to live until his children grow up enough to survive his death. He makes little effort to summon a prayer meeting. Instead, he relies on Boozy to buy or barter food for the family. He hands over cash so she can pay the occasional landlord for the relief of a roof instead of a tent over their heads, especially in a rainy week. Boozy and Nanny between them manage the household, Boozy cooking with her easy indolence, Nanny fretting and laying down the law.
Ah, but it isn’t easy for Nanny, either. Elphie guesses that Nanny has become somewhat paralyzed in this stifling humidity. Sensing, perhaps, an eternity of punishment for her, too, adjacent her employer, with no possibility of parole.
Meanwhile, Nessa grows serene and self-admiring, or at least seems to—who knows what she really feels, now that she has learned to govern her expressions more strictly?
And poor unparented Shell, he remains the juvenile scofflaw, an afterthought in the family history, betrayed by both his dead mother and his absentminded father. He’s growing up without anchors, Elphie thinks. Once she sees him poking open the wallet where Frex keeps the reserve funds. She is about to squeal on her little brother until she realizes that he’s taking some funds from a satchel hidden inside his tunic, and he’s adding coins and notes to the depleted stash her father had taken when they’d left Ovvels. Probably Shell pickpocketed the cash from Ovvels parishioners, but even so.
Before Boozy does leave, though Elphie doesn’t see this as a good-bye conversation, the cook offers her the corpse of the crocodrilos as a souvenir. “A souvenir of what?” asks Elphie. Boozy just shrugs. She shows Elphie the thing. No, it isn’t a skeleton. Boozy explains that the thing was pulled from the water and buried for a while in a bog, where its skin leathered up, its bramble-hedge of cresting armor withered off, and its expression settled into a grimace of reproach. It has shrunk, or it never was as big as Nanny remembered it. In fact, it fits into the bottom of a reticule made of leather of reptile, a cruel touch or a fitting one, Elphie can’t decide.
Elphie’s curiosity about Animals makes the bizarre souvenir attractive to her, but how can she agree to babysit a sack of ribs and preserved organs capped by what is left of its dorsal phalanges? What does Boozy expect her to do, bring the creature back to life? Elphie bites her lip, considering. It might have stopped there except Nanny has been listening across the wooden platter of rice and pepperstems.
“I’ll take it,” says Nanny. “Elphie, I’ll hold it for you while I can manage it, and I’ll spring it on you sometime as a curio of your childhood. Surprise!”
“This is what I have to prove a childhood in Quadling Country,” says Elphie. “A bag of bones and intestines. Who needs a toy porcelain tea set? I wish I were back at show-and-tell at the lodge, and allowed in the door. I’d show them this gristle, and then I’d tell them about it.”
“You can make something out of this someday,” says Frex, a rare instance of his paying attention to what someone else is talking about.
“I can make sense of it, maybe,” says Elphie. “If I learn how.”
“Make Nessa some crocodrilos arms,” says Shell, filching the ripest of the pepperstems from the serving board. Nanny thwacks him with a wooden spatula. “Hex them up for her. You think you’re so smart, figure out how to do that.”
Elphie doesn’t answer. She is ever more aware of her limitations and of her needs, too. The answers don’t lie in prayers or in magic, though, not as far as she can tell. She’s inept in both departments. The troubles in her mind are beginning to weigh upon her. It isn’t easy to say, then or ever after, what she struggles with except trying to survive being young. She wants to know more, however heartbreaking it might be. She is impatient with not knowing. Unger Bi’ix and Pari’isi To’or between them have a lot to answer for, shaping in her an appetite that she is impatient to slake. But she does not know how.