Page 56 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“I worry sometimes about taking pleasure in hurting my partner,” I whispered.

“Is that what you took pleasure in? Or did you take pleasure in the way I responded? In the things you were doing for me?”

This time, I couldn’t think of a joke or deflect, and I was frozen there, holding his horns, staring into his eyes.

“So I would like to take the shortcut,” he said. “If you would be willing to cross the bridge with me, and hold my horns, and let me absorb some of that strength.”

I smiled, leaned down, and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a plan.”

He pulled my face down to his for a hard kiss. Then he set me beside him, stood up, dressed, and began packing with the efficient precision of a man who had made a decision and was not going to think about it further until the moment arrived.

We loaded the wagon, settled Poppy into her habitat, and gave Clover a big carrot stick for all of her hard work before fastening the bridle into place. We pulled out of the stable and wound down Highmark’s switchback roads, past the Archive with its book-carved columns, past the market square where the too-thin vendor waved goodbye, and out through the lower gate onto the road.

The road to Greymere Gorge branched off a mile south of the city.

Moerrven guided Clover to the junction and turned east without stopping, no hesitation, no long pause at the crossroads. He’d made his decision in bed this morning, and he wasn’t going to make it again.

The gorge road snaked down the mountainside, narrow and steep, the trees thickening around us as the elevation dropped. I dug into our supplies and made us both lunch on the bench, bread and cheese and dried fruit, tearing pieces and handing them to Moerrven while he drove, because someone had to make sure the man ate when he was in stoic-determination mode. He chewed mechanically, his eyes on the road.

I didn’t push. I ate my bread, scratched Poppy behind the ears, and watched the mountains get closer and the gorge get deeper. I kept my mouth shut, which was possibly the hardest thing I’d ever done.

We came around a bend, and Moerrven slowed, then stopped the wagon.

He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me, down the road, at something the trees had been hiding until we cleared them.

The bridge.

It spanned the gorge like it was part of it, a single, massive stone arch that curved from one cliff face to the other. The stone was pale gray, almost white in the afternoon light, and the engineering of it was so precise that the arch seemed to float, gravity-defying, over the dark slash of the canyon below. At the near end, where the road met the bridge, stood a statue carved from the same pale stone: a troll woman, broad-shouldered and steady-eyed, a roll of architectural plans clutched in her hands, with a plaque at the base that I couldn’t read from here but didn’t need to.

This was Bryndala’s bridge, Bryndala’s statue, the thing he’d been avoiding on our long trek through Clovermere.

And it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful piece of engineering I had ever seen.

Moerrven climbed down from the bench like a man moving through water, and walked slowly down the road, looking at the thing his wife had made. Whatever joke I’d had loaded, I let it die in my throat. I swung down off the wagon. This was the only thing in the world that mattered, and it couldn’t wait.

I ran at Moerrven and launched myself onto his back. He staggered, not from my weight, which was nothing to him, but from the surprise of it, and my hands found his horns, and I gripped the bases, thumbs pressing into the trolgar points the way I’d learned to do, the way that opened the door to my emotions. And I did my best to do as he asked, pushing every ounce of strength and warmth and care I could summon to the forefront of my thoughts.

He made a sound that was half sob, half laugh, and his hands came up, caught my thighs, and shifted me onto his shoulders until I was sitting on them, the way I had that first day on the bridge, when I’d been a stranger climbing him like a tree. This time, when I pressed into his trolgar, he sighed.

I pushed everything I had at him. I pushed warmth, joy, wonder at the bridge that his wife had built, the bridge that had outlived her, the bridge that was standing in the afternoon light like a monument to everything she had been. I pushed sadness too, because sadness was part of it, and strength, because he’d asked me for that this morning.

Tears were streaming down his face. From above, they caught the light, rolled down his jaw, and dripped onto his shirt. He didn’t wipe them away. He stopped where his dead wife’s bridge met the road, a human on his shoulders, his hands on my thighs, and he cried, openly, in broad daylight, on a public road. He didn’t try to stop.

I rubbed his horns in slow, gentle circles on the trolgar points. It wasn’t sexual, not charged like it usually was between us; I was just trying to be present. I held him the only way I could from up here and let him feel whatever he needed to feel, for as long as he needed to feel it.

The bridge waited. The statue watched. Clover stood patiently behind us, Poppy meowed softly in her habitat, and the gorge wind carried the smell of stone, water, and the faintest trace of wildflowers.

After a while, Moerrven took a breath. Then another. Then he squared his shoulders under me, and his hands tightened on my thighs, and he started walking.

He took Clover’s reins, and led her forward, and we crossed Bryndala’s bridge together.

Chapter 18

Moerrven

I stood on the far bank in the gold light of late afternoon, looking back over Bryndala’s bridge, with Sky still on my shoulders, still rubbing my horns, and I felt his strength and his warmth, and behind all of that, a gentle determination to make sure I got through this in one piece. That alone made me smile.

Behind me, Clover huffed and stomped her hooves, and Poppy meowed for release from her habitat.