This scene is set the evening after the previous one, and before the ritual at Half Moon Farm and Quin's epiphany in the Cabinet of Curiosities.


"But red potatoes are the best to dig," the god said. "Not because they're easiest, but because they're tastiest once you've got them aboveground. Aha!" He grinned in triumph and tossed a potato into Ariel's basket. "That's white, but maybe the next'll be red. Clever of you, planting all kinds of potatoes in the same bed. It makes digging 'em into a treasure hunt."

"It wasn't cleverness at all," Ariel said. She squatted on her haunches and wiped her forehead with the last strip of clean sleeve on her shirt. All around her the potato vines were dead and drying in the straw. The potato patch was humped with mounds where Ariel and Quin had made forays into potato-digging. "Vin and I wanted a potato patch one year, but all we had were the tag ends of eight bags of potatoes, so we tossed them all in. We thought potatoes were potatoes, and you got red or white or blue ones by digging them up at different stages. We killed two plants by digging too early in hopes of blue ones."

The god laughed. He had a warm, rich laugh; it made Ariel feel like she was drinking an entire cup of hot chocolate at once. "Why blue?" he said. "White ones look the newest."

"Because blue are rare. That must be because farmers don't want to sacrifice their young plants, right? It's the same reason baby reds are more expensive than regular reds. That's the next stage, by the way."

"But blues are bigger than baby reds."

"Some sort of contraction process obviously takes place in the transformation from blue to red. You know, like how adolescent penguins look bigger than the adults--" The god sat back, laughing. Ariel grinned. "You're expecting too much from a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old from the suburbs."

"Was there nobody to tell you how to do it?" the god said. He tossed another two potatoes into her basket.

"Mother probably thinks potatoes are laid by chickens."

The good shook his head. "And you call yourself an educated woman."

"Oh, and you're so terribly agricultural, with your--"

Ariel stopped. She felt a pop as though her eardrums had popped, and the world sharpened around her into horrible clarity. "Wait. When did you get here?"

"About a quarter of an hour ago."

"Why didn't I feel you coming?"

"I walked up the path through the woods instead of through the house." The god pointed at the path, then went on digging unconcernedly. Ariel stared. Yesterday no one walked through the woods enough to beat down a path, but today there was a path there, and why shouldn't there be? It was the most natural thing in the world for a wood to have a path.

"And that's different?" she said dazedly.

The god stopped digging and smiled. "Do you need me to tell you there's something queer about that house?"

"Oh. Yes. No." She focused on him. "When did we start talking about--about potatoes, of all things?"

"It was the topic to hand," the god said. "You were digging potatoes, I came upon you, you offered to share if I'd help. I helped." He dropped a last three potatoes into the basket and weighed the basket in his hands. "That's enough for dinner, don't you think?"

"What does a god want with potatoes?"

"To eat, dear," the god said.

Ariel glared at him. It was better than panicking. Now that she was paying attention, she could see him better--it was the traveling god, the one who brought her news that Quin was a girl. [to be finished when my brain wakes back up]