When I explained my quest to the weird orthodontic fairy, she forgave my effrontery and took me down a road made of teeth and through a gate made of teeth to her mansion made of teeth so we could sit on her tooth couch and drink tea from a pair of enormous hollowed-out molars pulled from some young giant’s mouth. She was eager to off-load her surplus, honestly.But even so, she refused to let me have any unless we made some kind of trade. Some further chat revealed she was almost out of under-pillow coins; she didn’t earn any income apart from teeth, which made me question her business model.
I went out to fetch some money for her and came across a cave where a troll was hoarding an enormous pile of small change. He was primed to eat me until I mentioned I was willing to strike a deal for cash, and he revealed that he was a collector of rare manuscripts with a desperate desire for first editions. It ended up turning into a whole…thing, and by the end I had traded the jewels of a princess (my earrings, since I am a princess, technically) for a fiddle that played itself for a goat with a golden fleece for a musty pile of handwritten pages for a sack full of coins for a whole lot of teeth. As an added bonus, the fairy directed me to the field where the teeth needed to be sown; she was an expert on all matters dental.
She didn’t mention the stone sphinxes, though. And by the time I discovered their presence, I was utterly exhausted from travel and dealmaking.
But exhausted or not, I had a task to perform. I was about to take a stab at my final question—one that I was fairly sure would result in my being chomped to bits—when I noticed the field had begun ploughing itself.
I watched in astonishment as neat furrows opened in the dirt, in lines as even and parallel as musical staves. They ripped right through the grass and undergrowth without pause. In less than a minute, anyone would have thought a farmer with a team of oxen had been working the field over for days on end.
I opened my mouth to ask if that was supposed to be happening and then snapped it shut just in time. That would have been a depressingly bad final question to get eaten for.
“Hi, Melilot!” came a voice from behind me, startling me so much that I jumped.
“Calla,” I said, closing my eyes.
I had a half-formed hope that if I didn’t look at her, my younger sister would turn out not to be there after all, her voice merely a hallucination brought on by stress and fatigue.
“How’s your quest been going?” she asked, persistently real. “Have you been getting on well with the sphinxes?”
“Swimmingly.” I swung around, wrenching my eyes back open and plastering a smile on my face. “We’ve become the best of friends.”
“A lie!” said Probably Truthful Sphinx.
“The truth,” said Probably Lying Sphinx.
“On the pebbled coast— / Hold on, I’ve nearly got this— / Roaring, foam-tipped surf…” No-Nose Sphinx trailed off and pouted as it ran out of haiku syllables.
Calla grinned at me, no trace of malice on her face. There never is. I felt like an ass for wishing her away. Don’t get me wrong. I like my sisters. I love my sisters. But it would be nice if once, just once, they got hopelessly lost on one of our assigned tasks and utterly failed at it, while I came home with every problem solved and all the spoils of victory neatly wrapped up in a bow. Maybe then the queen would stop treating me like the broken cauldron she never quite got around to throwing out. The way she’d treated me ever since she released me from my tower prison.
Calla, as usual, looked like she had been sleeping in a hay barn—and very possibly she had been, although I’ve also seen her look that way after a comfortable night in her own bedroom. Mysterious stains spotted her surcoat, and so many holes riddled her kirtle that it was less kirtle than hole. My own well-worn traveling clothes were pristine in comparison. Pieces of straw flecked her uncombed hair, and speaking of her hair…
“You’ve got birds,” I said, “nesting on your head.”
She nodded slowly, making an effort not to wake them. “Yes. They’re starlings. The little one is AntonioFrühvogel-Featherington, and the bigger one is Tweet. Aren’t they adorable?”
They were. The pair of them were fast asleep and nestled together, tucked heads resting one atop the other. I was relieved it was only birds taking a nap on her head this time. I’ve seen her infested with naked mole rats. Or even beetles, which is rather off-putting. Calla loves all of nature’s creatures and would never think to evict a friendly beetle from her hair just for being a beetle. No matter what, however, she always somehow smells like a fresh spring breeze. It’s almost obnoxiously pleasant.
Beneath the birds and above the tattered clothing, Calla looks more like me than our other sister does. That isn’t really surprising, since Calla and I share one parent, while Jonquil isn’t related to me by blood. Jonquil inherited the queen’s looks; my older sister is statuesque, with hair that cascades down her back in long dark plaits—although unlike the queen, she bears angry scars around her neck and all her joints. Calla is on the smaller side, and she and I share the tight curls and dimpled smile that we both received from our father. But Calla has my stepmother’s eyes, and I, of course, do not. I also try to keep my hair cropped a bit shorter than Calla’s since mine tends to grow spontaneously when I’m under stress. If I let it go untended, I start to trip onit.
“So,” I said, “I’m guessing you’re behind the magic self-ploughing field.”
“It’s not magic,” she replied. “Some earthworms agreed to do me a favor.”
“Of course they did.” Peering more closely at the roiling earth in the middle distance, I could just make out the wriggling mass of them as they churned their way through the soil. As a plan, it was disgusting but effective. I was glad she wasn’t carrying any of them in her hair. “How did you manage to make friends with earthworms?”
“I rescued one from being eaten by a bird.”
“You saved one worm, and every worm on earth became your sworn friend for life?”
“Well…yes.”
If I had tried to save a worm from a bird, all I would have gotten was pecked. In Calla’s case, the only surprising thing was that she hadn’t enlisted an army of gophers and moles as well.
“I suppose all we have to do now is get past the sphinxes and sow the teeth, then,” I said.
“Oh, well, that’s…” She sounded almost embarrassed. “That’s taken care of, really.”
“What do you mean, it’s taken care of?”
