Page 2 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

He couldn’t understand me. He squared up further, chin lifted, and began making something like a growling sound while curling his fingers into claws.

I had no idea what to do with him. He was clearly mad, or foreign, or both.

I held up both hands in what I hoped was a universal gesture of peace. I took a step toward the bridge.

He leaped in front of me and planted himself directly in my path, arms spread wide, still grinning. The top of his head came to the middle of my chest. He said something that sounded like a declaration, passionate, emphatic, unintelligible, and poked me in the sternum with one finger. He looked past me, and his eyes widened.

Someone was coming, and this someone was accompanied by a lowing I recognized immediately. My sister Grunnhild’s ox, Berta, had a call like a foghorn.

I turned right as the ox-cart rounded the bend, Grunnhild at the reins, the younger of my sisters, Dagmarra, beside her, knitting as usual. Between them sat a young troll woman I didn’t recognize. She was pretty, and studying the landscape with the wide-eyed interest of someone who was new to town.

She couldn’t be another matchmaking candidate. That would make four this month, and Grunnhild had promised that the cartographer from Ironhold would be the last, and here she was, rounding the bend with a fresh victim and the unstoppable force of sisterly concern.

I needed to escape.

My cottage was two hundred yards up the lane. If I sprinted, I could make it inside before they reached the bridge, lock the door, pull the curtains, and pretend I’d gone to Highmark for the month. I turned back, ready to abandon the bucket and mortar and sprint like my life depended on it.

The human was in my way.

He was still blocking the bridge approach with his arms spread, the muscles of his shoulders flexed in a way that might have been attractive had he not been crazy. He was delivering a monologue of some length and passion. If he didn’t shut up, my sisters would cease their chatter and notice us. Even his strange outfit was glinting in the sun like a beacon.

I needed him out of the way, so I grabbed him by the waist and lifted him off the ground like a sack of flour, ready to set him aside and make a run for it, like the shameless coward I was. He weighed nothing, but he fought like a cat being threatened with a bath, all claws and flying limbs.

“I’m not kidnapping you, I’m just trying to get you to move,” I hissed as his knee caught my cheekbone and his foot made contact with my abdomen.

He wriggled in my hands and somehow looped his legs around me, twisting and climbing like he could take control if he made it to the top of me. He was a graceful little thing, I’d give him that. And fast.

“What is your objective here, tiny human?” I asked, swatting at him like a pesky fly.

He grabbed the nearest solid thing, which happened to be my left horn, his fingers wrapped around the base, right where it met my skin.

Right where the trolgar gland sat, nestled against the skull, the gland that every troll learned to protect before they learned to walk. No hand but a bonded mate’s should touch me there, and in troll culture it was a grave violation, but I understood that he probably felt he was fighting for his life, so I forgave him the trespass.

Then he gripped the other horn, his thumb pressed into the soft hollow behind the horn’s root, his fingers curled around the ridge, and he held on as he hauled himself to my shoulders and wrapped his legs around my throat.

My knees buckled as heat and pressure surged through my body, something electric and sensual that started at the point of contact and cascaded down through my skull, my jaw, my spine, my chest, pooling low in my belly with a weight that made me sway. My vision blurred for half a breath. Every nerve in my body focused to a single bright point under his fingers, and my blood surged toward it like a tide answering the moon.

Then the sensation shifted, deepened, and underneath the physical intensity something else opened, something I hadn’t expected, hadn’t prepared for, and didn’t want. A flicker of awareness that wasn’t mine.

I had never experienced a trolgar connection, not even with Bryndala, who had feared it the way many modern trolls did. Our orderly, sensible way of life had no place for such passions. I had respected her decision and never told her how much I wanted it, but experiencing it now made me fear I’d been writing it completely wrong.

Because it was wonderful.

The little human was infusing me with something that filled my heart and mind with a bright, chaotic warmth that could only have come from him. There was curiosity and fear, bravado layered over vulnerability, and a complexity of emotion that I understood existed in all people but had not interacted with in such an intimate way before. And beneath all of it, I knew at once that he was good. That he must be protected.

“Stop. Grabbing. My. Horns,” I said, which was difficult because my body was doing things that were deeply inappropriate for a public road in the middle of the afternoon.

I staggered. He clung, still producing a steady stream of sounds that I was beginning to suspect were profanity.

“MOERRVEN!” Grunnhild yelled. The ox-cart had reached the bridge. I could hear Berta lowing. I could hear the wheels creaking. I could hear my entire life collapsing into a single, catastrophic moment.

I turned around, the human on my shoulders, his fingers still wrapped around my horns in the most intimate grip known to troll culture, and faced my sisters. The human went quiet.

Grunnhild’s mouth was open, and her face held the slow, dawning recognition of a woman whose fondest hope had just manifested. Her eyes tracked from my face to the human’s hands to the precise location of his fingers, and her expression transformed into a delighted grin.

Dagmarra dropped her knitting.

“Oh,” she said. Then: “Oh.” Then, softer, her eyes filling: “Oh, Moerrven. A trolgar bond?”