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Chapter 1: A Forest Full of Frobby Beasts CHAPTER 1 A FOREST FULL OF FROBBY BEASTS
THE HERD OF UNICORNS WITH blue horns ran in a thundering gallop through Hungry Snout Forest, past the softly rippling stream where fairies were washing their swords and wings. Dragons with purple bellies flew like geese in the shape of a V above the trees, their fiery breath blowing out just enough to scorch the edges of the clouds in the bright green sky. The Enchanted Woggles brushed their tangled beards as they crooned from the mountaintops, and the tree wart trolls collected roozle wart and twizzle stems covered with the morning dew for their breakfast tea. This was summer in Hungry Snout Forest, and as me and Aunt Cauldroneyes walked through it, she collected polka-dotted leaves and barking twigs to drop into her pockets.
She picked up a twig that barked so loud, it sounded like a whole pack of hounds.
“I love early mornings in the forest,” she said, her large eyes twinkling. “Don’t you, Spella?”
She turned to me as I said, “I love it like a sky full of dragons, Aunt Cauldroneyes!”
We stopped as a pudgy creature with purple fur came rolling toward us out of the bushes. He bowled past her bare feet, while I got smacked in the face with his long furry tail, which had black and orange stripes.
“Oh, I always love a Frobby Beast1 * sighting.” Aunt Cauldroneyes clapped as the creature flipped upright and faced her.
The Frobby Beast chewed the air until his cheeks puffed. Then he spit his old tongue out loosely onto the ground. It looked like a piece of bright taffy. Grinning, he rolled away, his newly grown tongue flapping in his mouth.
Aunt Cauldroneyes quickly picked up the old tongue. It swirled in shades of purples and greens.
“A fresh Frobby Beast tongue. Oo-voo!” Aunt Cauldroneyes shook with excitement as the slobbery tongue flopped in her old hands. “It will make a marvelous bow.”
She started quickly toward the round hatbox that was tinkling with small bells. We had set the box down on a pile of leaves on the ground.
“Actually, this tongue is better than marvelous.” Aunt Cauldroneyes turned to me. “It’s so amazing, it’s toadfire. What do you say, Spella?”
“It’s definitely toadfire!” I smiled back at her.
Aunt Cauldroneyes was at least one thousand five hundred years old. The wind through the keyholes whispered that she was older than that. Under her shaggy cloak she wore long dresses she made herself. They were printed with things like blue thunderbolts or bright green snakes, which matched her green skin.
“When I was a little bubble,” she had told me, “I made a pickle potion that exploded all over me. I’ve had green skin ever since, but I don’t mind. Having green skin has allowed me to be an enrolled member of the Order of the Whaddy Wiggles.”2 *
Aunt Cauldroneyes would always toss her two braids up when she said this. Her braids were colored like salt and pepper and were so long, the ends fell to the ground and bunched at her bare feet. Whenever she brushed her hair, cobwebs collected in the brush’s bristles because of the silver Star Spider who lived in the braids. The spider was the last of her kind. Aunt Cauldroneyes had rescued her after the other Star Spiders had been hunted to extinction.
I loved Aunt Cauldroneyes and how her voice always made me think of a pot full of bubbling soup in the winter. She had large eyes, which helped her spot things in the deepest of cauldrons. She was always looking into cauldrons and had found all kinds of things, including cackling dust, broken wands, and even a jar of vampire fangs one time.
Sometimes she would put the fangs on at dinnertime and pretend her glass of loopy woopy berry juice was the vampire’s delight.
Aunt Cauldroneyes always said that out of everything she had ever found, I was her favorite. I was just a baby when she discovered me in the bottom of a purple cauldron. It was during a thunderstorm, and she wore the hood of her cloak up to keep her face out of the rain.
“I heard the cauldron before I saw it,” she’d said when she had told me the story. “I heard the rain drumming against its iron, heard the thunder captured in its bowl, heard the whispers of the wind passing through its legs. When I looked inside that purple cauldron, I thought the lightning had struck you. Then I realized it hadn’t struck you at all. You had captured the lightning. Captured it in your bright blue freckles, all lit up like a sky full of stars.”
It wasn’t always easy being a girl with blue freckles. Meaner folk called them pumpkin pox or cauldron pimples. Some even started a rumor that I was a moon hag. But Aunt Cauldroneyes said that anyone who said those hurtful things turned into werewolves during a full moon.
“Then we’ll see who’s the moon hag,” she would say with a howl.
After Aunt Cauldroneyes found me in the cauldron, she named me Spella De-broom Cauldroneyes and raised me in a cozy stone cottage in Hungry Snout Forest. It was from her that I learned all about my shadow, and why it wasn’t like hers. Mine was shaped like an egg and had tiny bolts of lightning flickering through it.
“Because you’re a Wand Keeper,” she’d told me in one of her many lessons. “Every Wand Keeper has a shadow of an egg. When you turn ten years old, the egg will crack, and out will hatch your creature shadow. The shadow will be different for everyone. Some may have the shadow of a mighty dragon with large wings. Another may have the shadow of a unicorn who gallops as if in a vast herd. But what is true of every shadow is that, when called to a Wand Keeper’s hand, the shadow will transform into one of the greatest instruments of magic ever known. A wand. That is why the creature is not only your shadow, but is the shadow of the wand itself.”
By the time I was eight years old, Aunt Cauldroneyes had taught me about more than the lightning and mystery in my shadow. She had taught me how to make magical hats. She never had to carry spools of thread in her pockets, and she never had to polish a silver sewing needle. Her thread lived inside her hands, unraveling from the lines of her palms in whatever color she wanted. The thread could be as green as a path in the forest, or as blue as the eye of the all-knowing troll. It could shine like the scales on a dragon’s back, or smell like the cinnamon in the kitchen.
Best of all, when she clacked her tongue three times, her nails became the sewing needles that stitched the hats that would make her the most renowned magical hatmaker in all the world.
“I’ve sewn hats for fairies, ghouls, goblins, and plenty of trolls,” she’d say. “I’ve also created hats for unicorns and dragons. Though when I design them for dragons, I have to make them flameproof on account of all the fire the dragons are always breathing out.”
From morning to night all kinds of creatures and magic folk came to our house. Wizards wanted hats shaped like the crescent moon or covered in wild, spotted ivy. Goblin cyclops tended to prefer the wide, flat hats with a hundred eyes that blinked each time the hat was put on, while the midnight monsters favored hats with ribbons made out of screaming buttons.
Together, me and Aunt Cauldroneyes made them all. And we always made them unique for each, like the hats for gnomes that were enchanted to turn to stone anytime the gnomes did. Gnomes always turn to stone in sunlight, in case you didn’t know. I learned that from Aunt Cauldroneyes. She taught me all kinds of things, especially about how to forage for Frobby Beast tongues in Hungry Snout Forest.
I loved Hungry Snout. Summer in the forest was my favorite season of all. I always wore my boots when we foraged. They were full of critters that peeked out from the holes in them. I also made sure to wear my vest. Aunt Cauldroneyes had made it for me out of purple corduroy and shaggy fur she’d collected from the Enchanted Woggles, which shed more than any other animal I knew. The vest was excellent to have while finding bits and baubles in the forest because it had enough pockets to hold everything I collected, like Gobbler Gnarls and sparkledust spores. They were all things I knew would be great to add to the magical hats.
“Aunt Cauldroneyes,” I said as I helped her tie the Frobby Beast tongue onto the hatbox, “I was thinking of weaving a new thread. You know all that illuminated frog slime we collected from the swamp? And the jar of thousand-year-old comet dust? If I weave those together, with crushed sparkledust spores, then the thread will glow like the frog slime, light up like the comet dust, and sparkle like the spores. It will be great thread to use for hats that will be worn by those who like to fly after midnight. Like that old witch who lives next door who said she nearly flew her broom into a mountain after her thousand-year-old lantern went out. But if we use this thread, any hat made with it will shine brightly in the night sky.”
“Oh, Spella.” Aunt Cauldroneyes held both of my cheeks. Her hands smelled like the dragon drool she had jarred that morning. “The night will sparkle the way it used to when the Star Spiders lived in the skies.”
The Star Spider hung down on a strand of her web and swung by Aunt Cauldroneyes’ cheek.
“It will be beautiful thread, little dear,” Aunt Cauldroneyes continued. “I can already imagine all the hats we will sew with it. You are full of such wonder. One day, they will make legends out of you and your hats. I just know it. Speaking of hats, let’s get this one wrapped up nicely.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes was careful not to step on any toadstool fairies as we finished tying the Frobby Beast tongue into a big bow on the hatbox. We always used the tongues as bows.
“Well,” she said, planting her hands on her hips with a sigh, “I suppose this hat is all ready for the woodland unicorn to wear. Would you mind calling her, Spella?”
“I’d love to,” I said, running over to the tall tree the hatbox was sitting by.
After I laid my hands on the moss-covered trunk, the bark started to swirl, and my blue freckles began to shine brightly. I used my fingers to write words on the tree in an ancient language known as Elflock. The words began to glow as the tree’s branches moved on their own.
“I love this part,” Aunt Cauldroneyes said as I ran back into her arms and the Star Spider climbed up her hair to peek out. “You know, Spella, you have a magic not even your old aunt Cauldroneyes has. You can raise the ancient unicorns from out of the earth.”
We watched the tree as it broke up from the ground and started to rise above our heads toward the sky.
- 1 * A FROBBY BEAST GETS TIRED OF HAVING THE SAME TONGUE EVERY DAY, SO THEY SPIT IT OUT AND GROW A NEW ONE. IF YOU’RE HOPING TO FIND ONE OF THE OLD TONGUES, YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THEY ARE ONLY FOUND IN THE DEEPEST PARTS OF THE FOREST. IT IS WHY YOU MUST MAKE SURE TO TAKE A SPOOL OF TRAVELERS THREAD WITH YOU. THE THREAD WILL UNRAVEL AS YOU WALK, LEAVING BEHIND A PATH THAT GLOWS, SO YOU MAY FIND YOUR WAY BACK OUT OF THE FOREST AND NOT BE CURSED WITH A CASE OF THE LOST-ME WARTS, WHICH TEND TO BE QUITE ITCHY.
- 2 * THE WHADDY WIGGLES ARE AN ANCIENT CLAN OF GREEN-SKINNED TROLLS WHOSE EXISTENCE PREDATES WRITTEN HISTORY. BECAUSE OF THIS, NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW THEIR SKIN TURNED GREEN, THOUGH THERE IS A PERSISTENT, IF NOT THOROUGHLY EMBARRASSING, RUMOR THAT INVOLVES A SPINACH LEAF, A VERY CRANKY LEPRECHAUN, AND A POORLY TIMED SNEEZE.
