Page 70 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

I laughed. “You made a joke. Did you make a joke? Oh, this is going to be good. We do need to figure out how to get back to Moerrven, though. Because the poor guy has had enough heartbreak. I mean, assuming he loves me back.” That thought hit hard.

“Why wouldn’t he love you back?” Oallian asked. “You reached me.”

“Is that… a quality trolls recognize? Dragon-reaching?”

“No. But it bespeaks a certain quality of character. So I assume he loves you back. It’s only natural.”

Only natural. Right.

“Fuck, I hope you’re as wise as you sound. Also, you still haven’t covered your dick.”

He sighed and lifted the jacket. “It is very, very small. Perhaps I could fashion a loincloth.”

Chapter 24

Moerrven

Two days since the dragon took him, and the good people of Norloch Village had begun to avoid me. Norloch sat a hard day’s ride south of Frostholm, tucked into the steep peaks that ring the north shore of Stonedeep Lake, and I doubted anything this interesting had happened to it in a century.

I couldn’t blame them. I had arrived at their gates at a dead run with a wagon I’d half-wrecked on the mountain switchbacks, demanding maps, demanding rope, demanding the names of anyone who had ever survived an encounter with the dragon they called Vyranthos, following a trail of Sky’s thoughts so faint that I was starting to believe I was deluding myself.

But the logic checked, too. Vyranthos lived in the mountains above Norloch, and was the only known dragon of that color. Unless you counted Emberrick Korvanthos, his brother, who had been in human form and married to Queen Delsynarea for centuries before he’d disappeared.

This couldn’t have been Korvanthos, though, could it? No, because Korvanthos had a torn wing from the long war. I knew this because I had read everything the county archive held on fire dragons, which was thin and unhelpful and written by people who had clearly never met one. I had paced a groove in the cobblestones of the market square. I had, at one low point, tried to hire a goatherd to guide me up the Stonecrest peak, and when he sensibly refused, I had begun pricing other methods of transport.

I was going up that mountain. I did not have a plan for what I’d do when I reached the top. I am a writer and a bridge-keeper, not a warrior, and the entirety of my combat experience consisted of one shouting match with a heron. But I was going, because the alternative was standing still.

Late on my second day in Norloch, my sisters arrived, because of course they did.

“We came the moment your bird reached us. We nearly rode for Frostholm, but all the gossip out of Sorrend said you were chasing a dragon in Norloch.” Grunnhild swung down off the ox-cart with a battle-axe strapped across her back that I was almost certain was decorative. “Where is the dragon? Point me at the dragon.”

“You are not fighting a dragon, Grunnhild.”

“I’m not going to fight it. I’m going to have a conversation with it. With my axe present.” She cracked her knuckles. Behind her, Dagmarra was already unloading Grunnhild’s casserole, the size of a millstone and wrapped in a brand new knit bag. Dagmarra had clearly been worried on the journey. In our family, grief and food are the same gesture. “Nobody takes your Sky and just keeps him,” Grunnhild said. “He is part of our family.”

“I — yes,” I said, and my throat closed around the rest, because I hadn’t known, until she said it so plainly, that they’d decided. That it wasn’t only me. “Yes. He’s part of our family.”

“I did not know, the day I met him at that bridge, that he would matter this much,” I added.

Grunnhild went very still. Behind her, Dagmarra set the casserole down on the tailboard with the care of a woman clearing space for a long conversation.

“The day you met him at the bridge,” Grunnhild repeated. “You told us he was your soulmate from a far-off land. The lost bracelet. Moerrven Mossren. Did you invent that entire story while we stood there on the road?”

There was no air left in me for another lie, and no reason for one. “Yes. He was on my back with both hands on my trolgar, half the road was staring at me, and it was easier to invent a soulmate than to explain a stranger. Then Jodvara had it by pigeon before nightfall, and there was no taking it back, and then—” I stopped.

“And then it came true,” Dagmarra said gently.

Grunnhild snorted. “Blarinda found the hole in your story within the hour, little brother. You have never once lied well. We decided to let you keep the story, and see what you did with him.” She shrugged the axe strap back into place across her back. “And you hauled him halfway across the north and fell in love. So who cares how it started?”

My sisters had known. All this time, the county’s worst-kept secret had been mine, and the only person I had truly fooled was no one at all. I did not know whether to be mortified or grateful, so I settled, in the family tradition, on both.

The cart had carried a third passenger. She climbed down unhurried, in a traveling cloak, a wooden case held against her chest the way Dagmarra held the casserole, and for one blank moment I could not assemble a single reason she should exist in Norloch.

“Thessaly?”

“I got your letter,” she said.

“I was only asking for—”