Pieter nodded and made a vague noise; there were no words in it, but the general tenor was that he was fine with being touched. Giselle reached out and touched his hand. It felt exactly like sun-warmed rock. “Are you made of rock?” she asked, looking up into his craggy face. He had a nose like an elongated boulder, a split below it for a mouth, and two solid black orbs under overhanging moss-covered juts for eyes. His . . . skin, if you could call it that, was the texture of a water-worn boulder, a bit rough, but not unpleasantly so. Only his eyes were shiny, but despite the fact that they were as black as night, they somehow looked kindly.

“Yesss,” Pieter said. “All rock. Pieter is tough.”

“I personally have never seen anything that could take him on in a fight,” said Rosa, and patted his hand again. “He’s figured as a bit of a hero in our histories for a very long time now. I wish there were more like him! Pieter, you will know them again if you smell them, yes?”

By way of an answer, Pieter raised his head a little and inhaled. Well, “inhaled” was putting it mildly. He sucked in air so hard that her skirt flattened against the back of her legs and Cody’s jacket flapped in the breeze he made.

Then Pieter stopped inhaling, and let out his breath in a long sigh. She had expected a fetid aroma, given what she had heard about the sanitary habits of trolls, but instead his breath smelled of nothing worse than a damp cave.

“Yesssss,” he said, looking down at Rosa. “Pieter will know them.”

“Thank you, Pieter,” she said, and turned back to the two of them. “Now if you run into trouble anywhere near here, just run for Pieter’s bridge. He’ll protect you.”

“Yesss,” Pieter agreed, nodding. “Pieter go back down now. Goats must go to bed. Then Pieter will listen to the rocks sing.”

“Thank you for coming up to see us, Pieter. Oh! And I brought you some honey from Bad Schoensee!” Rosa opened the rucksack she had carried all this way and brought out an enormous brown pot with a waxed stopper. “Here you are!” she said, giving it to the troll as Pieter reached carefully for it.

“Red Cloak good,” Pieter said, somehow getting an expression of glee on his rocky face. “Red Cloak never forgets what Pieter likes. Pieter thanks Red Cloak.”

“You deserve it, Pieter,” Rosa replied warmly. “Good night!”

“Good night, Red Cloak, Yellow-hair, and Hat Man,” said Pieter, and then, carefully cradling the enormous jar of honey in one hand, he began climbing back down into the gorge. Within a few moments he was gone. From the bottom, they could hear . . . well, if rocks could hum, that would be the sound of it. Something like gravel falling, but somehow holding a tune in it.