"What about Fatty?"
"I will bring her down in due time." Pryde tore Wendell from Prudence's grasp, slinging the boy over his shoulder. Then he and his animal disappeared through an opening into the rock down to the caverns below. The reverend took Prudence's arm, hauling her up to her feet. "Now, my child, it is time."
"No, you can't put me in there!" She struggled against Reverend Crane's grasp, but couldn't break free. He seized her by the hair to bend her down towards the Fountain of Youth. In the water she saw herself at every stage, growing fatter with each passing year. Tears ran down the many cheeks reflected in the water. "Please don't do this," she said. "Don't do this to me. I don't want to be a child again."
"I will offer you a choice," the reverend said. "In this new kingdom I will need one such as yourself to look after the others, to handle the mundane details of childrearing. You, unable to bear children of your own, can have fifty of them to care for. Or you can become one of them."
She studied the faces of herself as a little girl. If she turned down the reverend's offer, these were the faces she would see in the mirror for the next three hundred fifty years. And yet to accept his offer meant aiding the man who had murdered Rodney. No, better to be an unwitting slave than a witting accomplice in the reverend's evil. "I will never join you."
"So be it," Reverend Crane said. He grabbed the back of Prudence's dress and dunked her head into the pool. The glow of the water blinded her and her lungs filled with liquid to muffle her scream. I'm going to die, she thought and was glad.
After a few moments she was thrown backwards, landing on her back. Air returned to her lungs and her vision began to clear. She held up an arm, but saw only the sleeve of her dress. Looking down, the rest of her body was almost invisible among the folds of the dress.
Reverend Crane smiled at her and then reached down to pick her up. He peeled the dress away from her so that she could see how tiny and thin her limbs had become. He pushed a wave of copper hair away from her face. "You're as pretty as I remember you from that day," he said.
He reached into a pocket for a mirror and held it up to her face. In the glass she saw reflected the face of a frightened toddler. The eyes she remembered from that day twenty years earlier.