Page 28 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

“Did you find her?” he asks. I furrow my brow. He stillremembers that? “You’ve said plenty without saying anything,” he says at my expression. “There’s only one little critter walking this land that could do all this to you.”

I shrug my shoulders. “No sign.”

“Maybe she’s already dead.”

This feels like a dagger to the heart. I imagine finding her somewhere face down in the mud, and that ball of iron in my ribcage starts to burn. I would find whoever did it and kill them, even if that ended in my death, too.

But at the same time, I can feel that he’s wrong. No, she’s still out there somewhere. If she were gone, I would know it, deep in my soul. There’s still a chance to find her before we take the capital and the world falls at our feet.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Blizzek says. He holds out his hand, and we shake. “It’s an ugly thing, isn’t it? All this.” He gestures at the filthy camp, our dirty, blood-stained armor, and the bodies piled high in the woods nearby.

I don’t have anything to say to that. It is ugly. It feels like if we win this, the world will come to an end.

My unit marches out the next day. The plan is to attack from both sides and burn their shoddy wooden defenses down with fire. I watch more and more of my fellow soldiers fall around me as a volley of arrows descend on us from the guard towers. I have a shield now, which I hold over my head as I slash again with my axe, bringing down another human whelp in thin leather armor.

Telise might be fast and clever, but eventually the war will find her, too. And when it does, she will fall just like the others.

Telise

On the way back to Culberra, I’m surrounded by people carrying what weapons and armor they happened to have back home. There aren’t enough supplies to arm all of us, so we’re responsible for bringing what we need ourselves. Of all people, I run into Sden at the armory, where he’s been conscripted into making what he can with the small supply of leather that remains.

“I could use an assistant,” he says, offering me a very valuable non-combatant position in all of this. But I decline because I have to find Deleran. I can’t let him face this alone. Sden just nods in understanding, like he expected this answer.

“You won’t find him, by the way. The trollkin have conscripted, too. There are tens of thousands of them out there.”

“Oh, I know.” But there’s a glimmer of hope in me, too. If Raz’jin were dead, I would feel it. That much is an absolute certainty to me.

I learned what that word means, from a book I read. “Mate.” It wasn’t just some fancy word for marriage—it meant a lot more than that. Like the book said, our souls were tied together on some other plane, and I can sense that his is still out there. Dirty and miserable and lonely, but out there, nonetheless.

But I don’t get a chance to look for Deleran. I just have to go where I’m told, and I climb into a train car meant for hauling cargo along with a hundred other shivering humans. We’re shipped like coal to one of the outposts around the capital city, where we’ll act like fodder to keep the trollkin forces at bay. There doesn’t seem to be any greater plan than playing defense. Our bodies will fall like so many dominoes, until ourenemies finally storm the castle over a carpet made of our flesh.

When we finally reach our destination, we’re split into squadrons. My first night in camp, I start to make my rounds looking for Deleran. I ask everyone I come across if they’ve seen the tall man with sharp blue eyes and a family crest shaped like a deer.

“Squad fourteen,” a quiet woman says, and the life has clearly left her eyes. “I saw him. Kind of a hottie if you ask me. You his girlfriend?”

It’s easier if I say “yes,” so I do, and with her direction I find my way to where fourteen is holed up on the other side of town.

Sure enough, Deleran is there and still very much alive. When he sees me, he leaps to his feet and pulls me into his arms, and the familiar smell of him is surprisingly comforting.

“You’re alive,” he says, pushing my hair back from my face. He hugs me again, even tighter than the first time.

“For now. I haven’t seen combat yet.”

Deleran’s face falls. “Oh. It’s awful out there, Tea. You don’t know just how bad until you see it with your own eyes.” Then a little light reappears in him. “But it’s not so hopeless as all that. There’s a plan.”

“A plan?” I’m glad to hear this. Maybe we could get out of this hellhole alive.

He gestures to something that just looked like a pile of wood to me. “Trebuchets. We’ve collected up all the steel leftover from battle—” he means armor and weapons scavenged off the dead, “—and it’s been melted into shrapnel bombs. We drop a few of those on the trollkin and we can take out thirty, forty, fifty with a single shot.”

Oh, no. What a terrible way to die. I imagineRaz’jin hit with one of these, his body filling with shards of steel and falling to the ground in front of me.

Deleran reads my face. “Don’t jump to conclusions yet. You don’t know anything for sure. He could still be out there.”

My troll is a clever bastard. He must have found a way to stay out of this.

“Find me on the battlefield,” I tell Deleran. “I’m not letting you fight alone.”

He smiles a little sadly. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

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