Page 26 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

“I really didn’t mind, not at first,” he says. He approaches me and turns me by the shoulders to face him. “But now I’m starting to mind.” Taking my chin in his hand, he tilts my face up to look at him, and I flash immediately to when Raz’jin held me this way, looked at me this way, and tears spring to my eyes.

It’s the first time I’ve cried about him.

“Oh, Tea.” He notes the water dribbling down my face. “I know you were hurt, but you did it to yourself, you know.” I just nod. I know. “We have to stop doing this.” I nod again. I know that, too. “All right,” Deleran says, getting back into his bed. “Well, good night.”

Like usual, I put on my clothes and head for the door. I feel like an era of my life is ending.

“I’m sorry,” I manage to say.

“It’s fine. I knew thewhole time.”

The next morning, I say goodbye to my parents. “You could stay for longer,” Dad says. He doesn’t want me to go. “I know you’ve been seeing Deleran. Maybe you should—”

“It’s over,” I say. “I don’t love him like that.”

Mom crosses her arms like she always does when she disapproves, which is often. “You don’t have to love him to marry him.”

Why is everyone so obsessed with settling me down? I want the opposite of that. I want to travel the entire world until I find the piece of me that’s missing, wherever it might be, whatever it might be. I have to fill the hole that Raz’jin left behind or I might just die.

I say goodbye to my parents, but not to Deleran, then call a carriage. Soon I’m on the next train back to Culberra, poring over a map for where I’d like to go next. I could hunt spotted caribou up in the north, which have the most beautiful white pelts with brown dots, making them perfect for a rich woman’s shawl. Or I could head south for the summer, to the Red Towers, where certainly no one else would be braving the weather during the hottest months of the year.

Yeah. Some suffering sounds right up my alley.

Raz’jin

I stand in line behind at least two hundred other trollkin, waiting for my chance at a bowl full of slop. Maybe it doesn’t taste like much of anything, but it’s nutrition, and nutrition is what I care about now.

We’ve been at this muddy camp for weeks, just waiting for the terrible rain to let up so we can advance on the human town forty miles from here. It’s one of their last strongholds inthis area, and they’ve been using it as a scout position. If we can wipe it out, they lose one of their sets of eyes. We could blind them.

I’ve killed not an insignificant number of humans since I joined up a few months ago. I keep hoping it will feel good, that it will fill up the gaping emptiness, but every time I cut off a head or bury my axe in one of their soft middles, I see Telise’s face, instead. I kill her over and over, and every time it chips away another bit of my soul.

The war was supposed to help me forget her, not remind me of her constantly. But now I’m here and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I leave, death would be my only reward for desertion.

So I slog onward, eating slop, freezing as I sleep under a hole-ridden tent, doing training exercises in the mud and rain. What kind of moronic decision was this?

And then, the rain finally stops. We pack up camp, sling our weapons across our backs, and trudge onward.

It’s easy to take the town with the force we have, even though we’re all tired and wet and some of us have trench foot. We lose more troops than we should have, given the circumstances, but our captain assures us this will be a turning point in the war. After this, we’ll advance on the next town, slowly working our way towards the capital, where we’ll meet the rest of the trollkin force. That’s the plan, anyway.

If I’d stayed with Blizzek, at least I could still drown myself in drink and trolless pussy. But as it is I’m stuck here, trying to keep my boots dry and my axe sharp.

I dream about her frequently. Her little cries as she shivers underneath me; her big, toothy smile when she makes a filthy joke; the frightened look on her face when I told her,Mine, and grabbed the dagger with my bare hand.

As we advance onward, meeting greater resistance as wego, I start to hope that some enterprising little human will make it through the front lines and stab me through the chest. Maybe then I could finally get some rest. Maybe then I could find some peace.

But there’s a tiny part of me, the size of a pebble, that wants to keep going. That little nugget insists that I dig deeper and deeper into human land until I find her there. I don’t know whether I’d kill her or spirit her away if I did, I just know that I want to see her face again before I finally die.

And yet, as we club our way through the human defenses, and more of my fellow soldiers fall at my side, there’s no sign of her. I don’t know what I expected, but of course she wouldn’t be here. My Telise is a rogue, a hunter, and deeply independent to boot. She would never put her life on the line for someone else’s cause.

I’m surprised at how much progress we’ve made when I finally come up for air again. We can almost see the capital on the horizon. Seizing the city would be like taking the queen in a chess match—all that would be left is the king, powerful but helpless. After that, little mongrels like Telise would become nothing but homeless prey, ripe to be picked off one by one until every sentient creature but trollkin are extinct.

And I have no choice in the matter but to keep walking, keep fighting, keep killing.

Soon I’m one of the few soldiers left in my unit, so I join another one. But then their numbers dwindle, too, until the ranks are suddenly refilled by a surprising abundance of new recruits.

They’re young and agile, but also afraid. They are not soldiers like the rest of us.

“The Grand Chieftain has begun conscripting,” one of them tells me, an orc that reminds me of a young Blizzek. “Iwas pulled off the street. Couldn’t even tell my mother where I was going.”

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