Page 65 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

Moerrven

The walk to the bridge had become a regular activity.

I carried a basket of hand pies, because Sky had declared that a ritual without snacks was merely walking.

It was a clear day, the early summer sky scrubbed bright, and Bryndala’s bridge stood at the far end of the path the way it always did. I’d reached the point where I could see it without flinching. Where seeing it meant her, and meant Sky, and the two things sat in my chest together without fighting.

“Okay, but hear me out,” Sky was saying. “If trolls live five hundred years, and you spend, what, the first forty being a kid—”

“Twenty. Childhood runs much the same as yours. It’s young adulthood that goes long. Twenty to eighty, or thereabouts.”

“Sixty years of being a hot young thing. That is wild, that is an entire human lifetime of being twenty-five—”

“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

“—then you’ve got like four hundred years of being a boring middle-aged adult, with middle-aged adult hobbies like birdwatching and knitting—”

“I love birdwatching!”

He laughed, bright and cheerful. “And that means you’ve read a truly unhinged number of books, which means—” He spun and walked forward again, falling into step, his shoulder bumping my arm. “You have favorites, and I want all of them. Ranked. Especially the smutty ones.”

“That would take the rest of your life.”

“So?” he said, and grinned up at me, and I had to look at the road to keep from processing the implication into something it wasn’t.

We came to the pillar at the edge of town where the road forked toward the heights. It was an old waystone, squared off at the top, where people nailed up notices. There were a few: a livestock auction, a notice about the well. And lower down, curling at one corner, a fresh sheet of paper with a drawing on it.

I saw the drawing before I understood it. A face, rendered in a competent official hand: a young man, narrow, sharp-jawed, the eyes tilted up at the outer corners.

It was Sky.

It was not a good likeness. The nose was wrong, and the artist had made the mouth too solemn, missing the grin the real mouth was always about to break into. But the bones of it were his, and the wrongness only made it worse, like seeing him reflected in bad water.

“Hey,” Sky said, all the chatter gone out of him. “That looks like me.”

I read the lines beneath the drawing. They were in plain Common, the blocky official script of the Crown’s clerks, and they were brief.

SOUGHT: A young man of the description above, believed to have arrived in the kingdom by uncommon means. Any sighting to be reported to the Queen’s Grey Guard. He is awaited at the Court of Feravael. Reward for true word.

“You’re sought,” I said. The word came out wrong in my mouth. “By the Guard. They want you brought to Feravael.”

But Sky wasn’t reading the Common. He had reached past it, to the bottom of the page, where someone had added a few lines by hand in a cramped, looping script that was nothing like the clerk’s, a script I couldn’t read at all. The letters were foreign, rounded, slanting. They might as well have been the tracks of a bird.

Sky read them. I watched it happen: his eyes moving along the strange letters, his whole face breaking open like a window thrown wide.

“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh my god.” He grabbed my arm. “Moerrven. Moerrven, it’s Pip. He added this, in English.”

“What does it say?”

“It says—” He laughed, and the laugh had tears in it. “It says he’s okay. He’s okay, he’s at the palace, he says they’re amazing, he’s with the Queen’s people, and they’re treating him well, and he’s been looking for me, he’s been looking for me this whole time, and he says—” His voice cracked. “He says find a guard post and tell them Pip sent me. He’s coming to find me.”

“And he says—” He laughed again, wiping his eyes. “He says ignore the scary summons part. It isn’t a real royal summons. The Queen only worded it that way so people would take the flyer seriously, because Pip asked her to. Because Pip is friends with the Queen now.” He shook his head, glowing. “Of course he is. Of course he is. He’s Pip.”

“Wait. How is his handwriting on a printed flyer?” Sky turned it over, like the back might explain. “Did he sit there and write this on every single copy?”

“It’s part of the plate. Our presses print from a single plate: an iron elemental takes the master page, drawing and script and all, and shapes a metal plate from it by magic. Whatever the page holds, every copy holds.”

“So, somewhere in the palace, a very serious iron elemental faithfully forged the words ‘tell them Pip sent me into official Crown metal.’” He laughed again, wet and bright. “God, I hope Pip watched.”