Page 85 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“That she does. Can’t leave the royal sewing room for too long!”

“Well then, we bid you goodnight.” I glanced at the window, cheeks going hot. “Erm, I mean afternoon.”

“But we’ll be gone for the rest of the night,” Sky added, then dragged me out of the tavern and up the hill toward our inn. We ignored the other guests, gave a courtesy wave to the innkeeper, and raced up the stairs. Sky set the key on the mantel and looked at me.

“Clothes off,” he said, stopping to pet Poppy under the chin, and smuggle her a small piece of some treat from his pocket. “I think I need one of those hard, bed-breaking fuckings.”

I bowed to him. “At your service, my lord and master.”

He tilted his head. “Not quite daddy, but it’ll do.”

“Should we perhaps not break the bed, though? So we don’t have to pay any kind of fees?”

“You will fuck me against a wall with every ounce of your strength, and then I will beat you for being so impertinent and make you come again. Then we’ll fall asleep with your mouth on me. Sound good?”

My cock was fully on board with that plan, and I made quick work of stripping nude, slathering myself with oil.

His eyes were wide as he watched me. “You’re so damn beautiful, Moerrven.”

I smiled. “I love you more than I knew it was possible to love.”

He beamed up at me, arms slipping around my waist. “Me too, my good boy.” Then he tilted his head. “What if you tear open my trousers like you’re desperate to be inside me?”

“I am desperate to be inside you, but I anticipate damaging clothing will result in a hefty punishment.” I ripped the trousers anyway, lifting him into my arms, and shoving him into the wall, spreading his legs wide. “I do like hefty punishments, though,” I said as I drove inside his hole, happy he was still gaped from our morning activities.

He grabbed my horns and kissed me as I settled into him, pinning him in place with my cock. It was frantic, wild, and equally damaging. We knocked four pictures off the walls with the force of my thrusts, and Sky, at one point, was grappling for something to hold on to and accidentally took out a vase. But it was perfect, and I had the coin, so I didn’t care.

Epilogue

Moerrven

More than two weeks after I gave Sky the necklace, on a ship out in the middle of the Qoksmere Sea, the trolgar bond reached its peak. I had begun to feel Sky more and more, even when he wasn’t touching my horns. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t prepared for the full force of feeling him as he walked into the room, feeling him as he spanked me, as he buried his cock inside me, as he laughed with Poppy, playing with a feather he’d found.

Of knowing he was mine and I was his, and it was a forever sort of thing.

It wasn’t just the thread I’d felt when I lost him to the dragon. It was the full of him. It was the last step in the slow, steady formation of a trolgar bond.

Sky had spent the first morning of the voyage draped over the starboard rail, sharing his morning meal with the ocean. He had spent every hour since discovering that ships agreed with him. He knew the name of every sailor aboard. He had organized a betting pool concerning the first mate’s courtship troubles and appointed himself its commissioner. He had talked the cook into a dish he called fusion cuisine. The crew adored him. I understood them completely.

He had also, on the fourth morning, begun teaching the crew tai chi.

It started with the first mate, who wanted to know what Sky was doing alone on the foredeck at dawn, moving as though the air had grown thick around him. By the sixth morning there were nine of them arranged in ragged rows, barefoot on the boards, following him through the slow shapes while he called out corrections with obvious delight. “Sink into it, Havversen. You are a jellyfish with knees. Beautiful.”

I attended as an observer. I brought a book. The book went largely unread.

“My grandfather taught me this form,” Sky told them, turning his palm over as slowly as honey poured in winter, and nine sailors turned theirs with him. “He’d have had opinions about your elbows, Havversen. Loud ones.” The laughter that moved through them did not disturb the shape of the practice at all, and I suspected that trick was his grandfather’s too.

Afterward he folded himself under my arm, sweat-damp and grinning, and stayed there while the crew dispersed to their stations still rolling their shoulders. “I thought I left my whole family on the other side of a mirror,” he said. “Turns out I packed some of them. Every time I run the form, the old man is right there, counting me through it. And now nine Qoksmere sailors are going to carry it around in their bodies for the rest of their lives. He’d lose his mind. In the good way.”

“Then you must keep teaching it,” I said.

“Yeah.” He tipped his head back against my chest. “I think I will.”

Poppy had ruled the cottage since the first hour, and we moved a dresser in front of our small window, placing her bed there so she could sit and stare out at the sea birds.

And we worked, reading text after text on Liminia, from the history and customs of the land to accountings of the Liminal Order. Everything was vague, but the information was there, buried deep, and we were determined to root it out.

And in the evenings, when the accountings blurred into one another, I wrote. A new story, the first in years that was not marching toward a graveyard ending: a dancer from another world, and the grumpy bridge-keeper who loved him. This time it was something I knew Sky would swoon over. He had made his opinions on my backlist abundantly clear. He pretended not to read the pages over my shoulder, and I pretended not to write faster when he gasped.