Page 74 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“What? No, why would he be my husband? We only met a few weeks ago.” Sky’s glance landed on me, warm as a palm. “But keep it down, his sisters are around here somewhere, and they think we’re engaged.”

They did not, as of this afternoon, think anything of the sort anymore. I saw no reason to interrupt.

The commander crossed the square at a measured pace and presented himself with a formal bow. “Aeldryc the Ironstorm, Lord High Commander of the Queen’s Grey Guard. Pippin’s husband. At your service.”

“Sky Liang.” Sky waved, then jerked a thumb in my direction. “That’s Moerrven. He’s mine.”

Two words, delivered offhand, over his shoulder, like a fact everyone already knew. Somewhere in my chest, a bridge took the weight and held.

They descended on our table after that, chairs dragged shrieking across the stone, hand pies ordered by the tray. What followed was an hour of two best friends attempting to exchange a month of catastrophe at full speed and in both directions at once. Pip had been found wandering in Clovermere, had been taken to the palace at Feravael, had somehow married the commander of the Queen’s armies — “You got MARRIED?” Sky shrieked, and half the square looked over — and was now, if I followed the chronology, personally responsible for the Queen’s solstice gown. Sky countered with the highwaymen, the bridge, the Great Archive, the gorge, and the dragon, in an order that obeyed no calendar and required constant correction, which Pip supplied by shrieking.

“You were not an easy man to find,” Aeldryc said, when the flood slowed enough to permit a tributary. “The first reports had a strange human in Sorrend, traveling with a troll. By the time a rider reached Sorrend, you were gone. Then Frostholm, and gone again, up the mountain road, of all the directions a lost man could pick. You kept moving, and always away from the portal. The flyers were a last resort once we understood we were chasing a traveler and not a resident.”

“The flyer worked,” Sky said. “Best piece of paper I’ve ever read in my life.”

“What I don’t understand,” Pip said, “is why you were all the way out here to begin with. The mirror lets out in Clovermere. You came through practically on top of me and then went the entire wrong direction.”

“I didn’t go. I was carried.” Sky counted it off on his fingers, mouth half full. “Highwaymen grabbed me out of a field about an hour after I landed. Tied my hands, gagged me, threw me in a cart with the rest of their loot, and hauled me around for a day before they worked out that nobody could understand me and nobody was coming to pay for me. So they dumped me at a bridge in Stonedeep County.” He pointed at me with a hand pie. “His bridge. Best thing that’s ever happened to me. I do not recommend the delivery method.”

He said it lightly. He said everything lightly. Under the table I covered his hand with mine, and through the bond felt the small cold place the lightness was built over.

Aeldryc had gone very still, in the manner of a blade being quietly drawn. “Armed men, binding travelers, in the Clovermere farmlands.” He said it the way a man writes a name in a ledger. “When we ride back, I’ll detach a squad to find their camp. If they carried off one stranger for ransom, they have done it before, and to people who had no troll waiting at a bridge.”

“Thank you,” I said. It came out rougher than I intended.

It was Pip who tripped over the arithmetic, somewhere in the third retelling. “Hang on. Three weeks? Sky. I’ve been here six.”

The table went quiet while everyone counted on their fingers and arrived at different answers.

“Twenty-five days,” I said. “Sky landed at my feet twenty-five days ago. And by his accounting, he followed you through the mirror on the very evening you vanished. Whatever that mirror is, it did not set the two of you down on the same day.”

“That,” Aeldryc said slowly, “will interest the Crown a very great deal.”

“Then I suggest dinner,” I said, standing. “A proper table, a proper meal, and everything my research has turned up, laid out in order, beginning to end. It’s a long story.”

“Oh no,” Sky said fondly, taking my hand. “He loves those.”

Pip walked backward in front of us the whole way to the inn, talking. Sky talked over him. Neither of them appeared to require answers, or air. Over their heads, the Lord High Commander of the Queen’s Gray Guard caught my eye and gave me the small, weary nod of one man to another who has also handed his whole life to a hurricane, and has no complaints about the weather.

Chapter 25

Sky

The inn at Norloch had great rooms, and ours was at the end of the hall with a huge bed, a deep tub, and a door that locked. The last one was all I really cared about, because I needed my bare skin against his bare skin in order to survive another minute.

He made me take a bath, and I relented, but only because I could use the time to prep myself. And when I came back out, he was sprawled on the bed, naked and waiting.

So I did what I do. I reached for control.

“Hands up.”

And my big grump went without a single question. He lay back on the inn’s creaky bed, put his wrists up against the headboard, and let me loop my leather cord around them, checking to see that they were snug. This I could run. This had rules. You don’t have to feel the weighty thing if you’re busy being in charge of it.

“There,” I said, climbing over him, straddling those huge thighs, skin against skin, both of us already hard, that gorgeous troll cock heavy against his stomach. “Now you’re going to be good and quiet and let me—”

“How did you escape the dragon?”

I blinked. “What?”