Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess by Wesley Allison Page A

your
family for so long.”
    “Yes.” She sighed. “And what about you?
You’ve been without your family for quite a while now too.”
    “What?”
    “How long has it been?”
    “How long has what been?”
    “How long has it been since your family
disappeared?”
    “Oh. That. I really can’t say.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking.” Jholeira stood up and began to pace
back and forth beside the campfire. “The purple drops on the floor,
as I’ve already said, could be from the blueberry pie you were
expecting.”
    “Fiends!” said I.
    “As far as Gervil’s knife being stuck in his
bed is concerned, that could be an indicator of foul play or of
nothing at all.”
    “I see.”
    “The floorboards being pried up however
tells us something. Whoever the culprit or culprits were, they were
looking for something hidden under the floor. Money maybe? Family
jewels?”
    “The unpublished manuscripts of the world
famous Eaglethorpe Buxton,” I offered.
    “I suppose that is conceivable,” said she.
“What I don’t understand is the onions in the rafters. The only
thing I can think of is that they were trying to ward off
vampires.”
    “Monsters!” said I. “But wait. Isn’t that
supposed to be garlic?”
    “Maybe they couldn’t find any. Or maybe they
didn’t know the difference. Garlic looks a lot like an onion.”
    “Oh, my family would know the difference,”
said I. “My poor old father was a fine onion farmer. In fact one
variety, the Winter Margram onion was named for him. My cousin
Gervil wrote an epic poem about onions, though I was never able to
memorize more than the first five hundred twelve lines.”
    “Is that all?” she wondered.
    “Tuki was Onion Queen three years
running.”
    “So it is possible that your family would
have had onions around? Say, hanging from the rafters?”
    “Only at harvest time.”
    “Was it harvest time?”
“Was what harvest time?”
“Was it harvest time when your family disappeared?”
    “It could have been.”
    “So there really are no clues at all,”
postulated the half-orphan.
    “What about the tracks?” I asked. “What
about the tracks that ended mysteriously after only fifty
feet?”
    “You said it was a stormy night. The rain
probably washed the tracks away.”
    “You’re right,” said I. “The next time it
will be morning.”
    “What do you mean next time?”
    “Um, nothing.”
    “You mean the next time your family gets
kidnapped or the next time you tell this?”
    “Well…”
    “Your family never was stolen at all!” She
stood up with back straight and finger pointed accusingly. She
looked quite intimidating. “You lied!”
    “It’s wasn’t a lie,” I explained. “It was a
story. Well, it was a first draft.”

Chapter Sixteen: Wherein we travel for two
days without my companion uttering a single word.

    Jholeira curled up in my blanket next to the
fire and went to sleep without another word. I didn’t think this
strange, but when she did not deign to speak to me the following
morning I began to feel a little put off. I decided that if she
wasn’t going to speak to me, then I wouldn’t speak to her either.
We packed up and left our campsite in complete silence. By
elevenses I was getting rather tired of the quiet. Over a brief
meal of raisins and cheese I tried first to coax her and then to
trick her into speaking. She would have none of it however and I
eventually stopped trying.
    The little path that we followed wound down
through a series of small valleys, eventually coming to the stream.
The trees grew thick on both sides of the stream and indeed on the
far side there was a vast expanse of forest that is Elven Wood. The
stream itself was no more than twenty feet wide and its broadest
expanse and in those places where it widened out thus, it was only
a few inches deep. Though the banks were icy, the water was clear
and free-flowing. Upon reaching it in late afternoon, we followed
it southeast until, finding a narrow