Page 28 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“You weren’t fondling. You were… it was casual. You treated them like—”

“Like horns. Because I thought they were just horns.”

He looked at the fire. His jaw worked. The blue had spread down his neck.

“Moerrven. Why wouldn’t you tell me if I was doing something that was such an intimate violation?”

The silence stretched until the only sounds were Poppy shifting in her habitat and Clover breathing where she was tethered and the fire eating through a log with a series of small cracks.

“Because it felt good,” he said. “Because no one ever touched me there and I did not expect it to feel so… right.”

“Didn’t your wife touch you there?”

“No.” He stiffened and glanced at me. “You knew her name, back at the inn. I never told it to you.”

“I may have overheard a few things while we were staying in your village.”

There was another long silence, and he blew out a breath. “You heard right. I had a wife. Her name was Bryndala, and she was wonderful. We met when we were in our early twenties, and we were the best of friends. She was an engineer, working on bridges, and there was an accident. About five years ago.”

“Oh, Moerrven.” I blinked back tears.

“I had over a century with her. It would be greedy to yearn for more.”

“But you expected to live out the rest of your days with her; that’s not greedy, that’s normal, when you marry a person.”

“Yes, well.” He huffed, and I dropped the book beside me and crawled into his lap and hugged him tight. He hugged me back, his breathing shaky as we held each other.

“Tell me more about her,” I said.

“She was kind and so smart, just a brilliant mind. One of the best engineers in all of Qoksmere. When we were young, she designed and helped build the bridge where you and I met.”

“Oh! Was that why you were underneath it?”

He chuckled softly. “Yes. The county wasn’t taking a loose stone seriously!”

“The horror!”

This time, his laugh was deeper, rich and rumbling against my chest. “Well, Bryndala would have been alarmed. She had a true talent for understanding these things. She could talk about stone arch configurations for hours.”

“I would have liked to have met her.”

He chuckled. “I mean, in all honesty, her obsession with arches bordered on slightly dull, but I loved her too much to care. She took on more and more challenging projects over the years, and became even more famous than I am for my writing.”

“Is that why everyone meddles in your affairs?”

“They wish me the best. It has been five years since the accident, and they still worry.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“Not today,” he said, and the way he said it closed the subject.

I hugged him tighter. “I’m so sorry. That must have been terrible.”

He was quiet for a beat, his hands doing slow circles on my back as he held me close.

“The thing is,” he said, “she was fearless when she was working on bridges, climbing over cliffs with just a rope to secure her. But she wasn’t fearless in love, not even with me. She was afraid of the trolgar. The bond it can form over time is intense, all-consuming. She never wanted to experience that.”

“That’s what the book described. A deep and lasting bond for the troll character. Joku could sense Hoareyn’s emotions when they touched. Is that true?”