Page 63 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“Resources? Like mining and stuff?”

“Yes, but this is their most guarded secret. So it’s difficult to find the source of it. There are also rumors that time runs differently in each world.”

“Time runs differently.” Something cold and hopeful turned over in my chest. Pip had fallen hours before me, back on Earth. If a handful of Earth-hours could unspool into days over here, then by the time I came through, he’d have been gone long enough to be anywhere at all.

The thought of Pip out there alone snagged on a worse one. “What if he ran into someone dangerous? Is the Queen dangerous? She’s been requisitioning copies of Liminian texts from the library in Highmark.”

“She’s a queen, and she is fae. Of course she’s dangerous. But if she’s requisitioning texts, it seems more like she’s doing research than declaring war.” She flipped open a book. “Perhaps the best move is to see if we can figure out what she’s researching.”

I nodded, set the clerk’s journal aside, and took the next volume from the stack, flipping it open and waiting a beat for the pendant to do its magic, as strange symbols blurred and changed into letters I could read. “Research is my least favorite kind of reading.” I stared down at the dry text.

She chuckled. “Mine, too. But I should like you to find a way to see your family again. And perhaps, when you return, you could bring me some of the novels from your world. It would be quite illuminating.”

“Would I return?”

“Of course you would! You’re Moerrven’s soulmate. His heart has already been broken once, and we must protect it at all costs, don’t you think?”

I closed my eyes, and an image of Moerrven’s grumpy, adorable face popped up. “Yeah. We do,” I whispered, before remembering the soulmate thing was all a lie.

Chapter 20

Moerrven

The cottage behind Kethilda’s library was too small for two grown men and a cat, which meant we lived in a state of permanent, accidental contact. Not that I minded. By the fourth day we’d formed a routine that felt far too much like a permanent lifestyle choice and far too little like the fleeting moment in time I knew it to be.

Like we did every evening, we lay tangled skin to skin on the narrow bed with the lamp turned low and a borrowed Liminian ledger open against my raised knees. Sky was reading with me, sprawled across my chest, warm as a banked fire. Poppy had claimed the foot of the bed and was pretending to be asleep. The window was open to the summer dark, and the whole of Frostholm had gone quiet around us.

“Read me the part again,” Sky said. “The bit Kethilda flagged.”

I flipped to the page and found it. “‘And the crossing,’” I read, “‘is not a single act but a road, which is to say it may be walked in both directions by one who knows the manner of it.’” I let the page settle. “Kethilda thinks it confirms the rest. That the Order didn’t only send people through. They brought them back.”

Sky went still against my side. “Both directions,” he said. “A door that swings both ways.”

“So the account claims.”

“So the Liminal Order knows the technique for finding the way back. We just have to figure out how to find it from them.” He was talking faster now, the way he did when hope outran him. “It’s a method. A thing a person could learn.” He pushed up onto an elbow and looked at me, and his face in the lamplight was so openly, painfully hopeful that I had to work to keep mine still. “Moerrven. I could go home. And come back. It goes both ways.”

“You wouldn’t have to pick,” I said, chest tightening with fear. Every page we turned took him closer to a door, and the door led away from me. And there was no guarantee of his return once he was back in his regular life.

I understood what we were doing in Kethilda’s cottage every morning. We were building Sky a way out, a way home, a way away from me. He bent over the ledgers because he wanted his brother back, his mother, his school, the whole warm, crowded world that had made him who he was. And he was right to want it, and I wanted it for him. I would have torn the island out of the sea with my hands to give it to him.

But every inch of progress was a stone out of the bridge I was standing on.

Trolls do not move. That is the thing humans never understand about us. When a troll wants a town, but happens to be on a mountain, he does not weigh whether the mountain is convenient. He builds the town on the mountain, because that is where he is. You do not relocate a life because the ground is hard.

Not that he could ask me to join him. A troll in a world where everyone looked like Sky would be a disaster.

“Hey.” Sky’s hand came up and turned my face toward his, and his eyes had gone soft, and for one cold second I thought he’d heard the whole thing I hadn’t said. “You went somewhere.”

“I’m here.”

“Your body is here. Your mind just wandered miles away.” He studied me. “You’ve been working as hard as I have, for a guy who’s going to use it to leave.”

His words landed too close to the bone, and I flinched.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

“I know how you meant it.”