He listened to every person who came without means to pay, weighed their circumstances, then asked them to solve a riddle. If they succeeded, the Ferryman would hand them a token on one bank, to be paid back to him on the other side. The riddle was different each time; he would vary the difficulty depending on the traveler’s circumstances. In this way, Isaac Knickpointe became a trickster Ferryman.
One evening he was moored on the Nagspeake side of the river, enjoying a moment of quiet and a chapter of his book, when a greenish light appeared in a lantern on the far side, summoning him across to pick up a fare.
This was unusual. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to cross into Nagspeake from the far side of the Tailrace, but it was relatively uncommon. The Ferryman cast off his boat, punted through the mist with a pole that reached long talons into the ground to grasp the rocky riverbed at each stroke, and found himself looking at a young boy. I think he would’ve been about your age, Miss Maisie. Certainly not much older.
“I need to cross, please!” the boy shouted as the Ferryman approached. He barely waited for the older man to tie the Inferus up to the dock before he crouched as if to leap down onto the deck.
The Ferryman caught the boy by the collar before he could jump and, stepping off the boat himself, hauled him back onto the pier. “Belay a minute, there.” He deposited the child on a bench on the dock and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Have you got payment?”
The boy frowned. “How much does it cost?”
“How much do you have?”
The boy emptied his pockets and held out three cracked acorn caps. “I have three. Will three do?”
The Ferryman sighed. “I don’t take payment in acorns, much as I might like to.”
He considered the kid through eyes that had gotten very accustomed to evaluating potential passengers. Usually he could work out the entire story of a crossing in a matter of heartbeats: someone fleeing a dangerous spouse, a parent trying to find a child, someone seeking answers or changes they thought couldn’t be found without venturing into the deep unknown. There were endless variations, but those were all mostly motives for people crossing in the opposite direction, and they all involved some measure of desperation. Folks crossing into Nagspeake—or back into it, for that matter—were rare, and although he had said I need to cross rather than I want to cross, there wasn’t so much as a whiff of anxiety about this kid. Eagerness, yes. Fear, worry, or despair, no.
“I will give you a token,” the Ferryman said at last, still puzzled, “but you’ll have to answer a question first.”
“What kind of question?” the boy asked with an air of anticipation.
“A riddle,” the Ferryman said, trying to think of a suitably easy one to ask.
“Oh, all right.” The boy brightened. “I like riddles.”
“Good.” And he meant it. The Ferryman was generally in favor of helping people get where they wanted to go, and though he couldn’t quite work out the particulars here the way he usually could, Knickpointe had no interest in making this crossing difficult. “There is a gent who came to me; he whistled tunes to pay his fee. With him aboard, I used no pole. Who is he?”
The boy’s face fell, and the Ferryman rapidly worked out a clue he could give the child to help him figure out the answer. But when the kid spoke again, he replied in a voice that was confident but a little sullen, “The wind.”
“Correct,” the Ferryman said, confused about the boy’s dissatisfaction but trying to sound grand about it all nonetheless as he reached into the vest pocket where he kept his small supply of trade tokens.
“I know. I thought it would be harder, is all.” Still looking mildly disgruntled, the boy held out a hand to receive the Ferryman’s token.
“You’re upset that you got the answer right on the first try?” the Ferryman inquired as he opened the lantern and blew out the light.
“I’m not upset,” the boy retorted. Then he made a frustrated noise. “Can I please have another one?”
“Another token?” the Ferryman asked, looking down at the circle in the child’s hand. It was a nice one, cut from a piece of very old, licheny driftwood. “A different one? It doesn’t much matter to me, but you’re only going to give it back once we’re across.”
“Not a different token,” the child said, exasperated. “A different riddle. A harder one.”
The Ferryman looked at him. “You want a harder riddle?”
“You went easy on me,” the boy accused. “It wasn’t fair.”
Under the circumstances, there didn’t seem to be much point in lying about it. “I did it so I could give you a token,” the Ferryman said, feeling like this was stating the obvious. “What part of that, exactly, do you object to?”
“I like riddles, and I want to do the crossing properly,” the boy said. “That can’t be the only one you know.”
“All right,” the Ferryman said. “Come aboard. I’ll think of another as we go.”
“All right!” The kid leaped aboard. “But don’t make it too easy this time.”
The Ferryman cast off his boat and took up his punting pole again. As he began to maneuver the Inferus into the Tailrace, he mentally ran through the riddles he knew. They fell into three general categories: simple ones, for when he wished he didn’t have to worry about taking payment at all; hard ones, for when he didn’t particularly want to make life easy for the traveler but didn’t feel it was his job to deny passage outright; and finally, a handful of riddles without answers, which he kept for special occasions. These last he used most often when the passenger was another roamer.
