Page 87 of Dragon Avenger (Age of Fire 2)

“The thane’s protection.”

“But not from trolls.”

Rainfall poured himself a little more wine. “He has posted a reward, in the form of a small sum and relief from all taxes and excises for five years. But few are willing to take the challenge. What happened to Eyen is still fresh in many minds.”

“Your son tried to kill the troll?”

“His death is my fault. The bundle containing Lada had just arrived, and I’d engaged a wet nurse. He and I argued about his scattering bastards around the thanedom. Elf blood passes down an alliance of aspect and tongue that human females find pleasing, and he took advantage of manner and countenance. I . . . I challenged him to perform some useful duty. I meant that he seek gainful employment to defer the cost of his daughter, but he rode out on Avalanche, the last of his grandsire’s line of mighty warhorses, to solve all our difficulties on the point of his lance.” Rainfall struck the table with his elbows so hard, the plates and goblets jumped. Then he concealed his face with his long-fingered hands.

Wistala stood still, never having seen a violent move from her host before.

“I beg your pardon,” he said when he collected himself. “You’ve finished your salmon already. Would you care to dispose of mine? Having a drakka about so simplifies the clearing up.”

Wistala learned the cloudsign for snow, sleet, and rain that winter—what weather Mossbell saw depended on the direction of the wind. It blew mostly from the west, and if it veered farther south for a while, it grew warmer, but when it came out of the north, it became bitterly cold and made her alternately ravenous and torpid.

Father had hunted in this winter wind a year ago to feed his hatchlings?

Being indoors frustrated her, and on the first sunny day after the sun turned south again, she set out to walk the grounds of Mossbell.

It wasn’t an accident that she walked west, crossed the road, and plunged into the broken forests covering old grazing land. The ground was still snow-covered where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach, and what wasn’t snowy was wet. She found sign for wild pigs and roaming goats.

Finding troll tracks took a little time.

She found several troll-traps easily enough. It took a good deal of ear, nose, and eye-work to establish what they were. The troll would dig holes in the ground, perhaps her full body-length deep, and then cover them with a lattice of slight branches and growth, with fragrant berries in the center. It lined the bottom with flat rocks chipped and broken in the hope that a sheep or pig would blunder in and injure or trap itself.

She found bones at the bottom of one.

Then she cut across its tracks. The troll had huge three-toed feet, though the toes didn’t point in the same direction as they did with elves and dragons. Something like the mark of a horse hoof stood in the center, with the digits stretching out not quite in opposite directions, like widely spread bird toes. Here and there, similar, smaller versions of the tracks could be seen that she guessed were its hands.

She found a heap of droppings close to the river-cliff edge. They were like a rotten melon filled with little white worms left on a hillock. Her nostrils closed in disgust.

The ground here had a trodden-on look like a cattle wade, with a profusion of tracks and divots, and grubby prints on the rocks at the edge of the cliff.

Wistala couldn’t see her host’s bridge from this part of the river, and the twin hills near his estate were just bluish lumps. The river canyon stood so wide here that objects on the far side couldn’t be distinguished from each other.

White birds crisscrossed the river, looking for food. Another variety, gray with yellow beaks, poked around the rocks at the base of the cliff under all the marks.

Wistala craned her neck out as far as she dared, digging her tail into the crevice between two sturdy rocks like one of Rainfall’s fishhooks buried in a trout’s jaw.

A cave marred the fluted sides of the canyon wall, closer to the top edge than the base.

She could imagine what the birds at the base of the cliff were feeding on.

Instincts older than she took over as she evaluated the troll’s home. Fresh water would never be a problem. Enemies couldn’t reach it without a good deal of difficulty, it would take a huge climbing pole or ladder to reach the cave mouth from the river, and anything that walked on two feet would risk its neck climbing down from above. A dragon might like it even better: you could fly in through the river canyon at night, skimming the surface, and escape observation. She imagined there was usually food of one sort or another to be had near a big body of water as the Inland Ocean, just a horizon downriver.

Wistala examined the cliff until she found a ledge thick with mosses and ferns, downwind from the cave. She wanted to get a look at this troll. She climbed down and settled between the branches. It was cool, with the wind whipping up the river valley, but she’d spend nights in worse spots.

Tired but not exhausted from her trip into the troll’s lands, she tried not to sleep, but rather to rest with one eye upon the cave from a perch upriver. Softened by her regular meals at Mossbell, she regretted her missed dinner as the moon rose.

She heard the troll breathing before she saw it. A snerk-snerk-snerk sounded from the cave, startling her into full awareness.

A face emerged in profile from the cave, if it could be called a face. A fleshy orb at the end of a long snakelike body no thicker than Wistala’s tail emerged and waved around. Whether the head smelled, heard, or saw the approaches to the cave mouth, Wistala could not say.

Wistala was just congratulating herself on not being afraid of the wormlike body when two giant limbs unfolded themselves from the cave mouth, gripping the rocks above with three-toed hands. They pulled out a stumpy body split by a wide mouth that reminded her of a frog, especially since its skin seemed wet with some kind of oily extrude. At the tail end, a pair of smaller, but still spindly, limbs steadied the body as long forelimbs did the work of climbing.

Wistala realized she’d been mistaken in her analysis of the tracks. The troll was almost all forelimbs—thick near the body and digits but bone-thin through the long middle part and joint. Its hind legs ended in the smaller graspers she’d mistaken for hands.

The troll’s body seemed featureless save for warts establishing a striped pattern back from the edges of its wide mouth. A snorting sound came from the troll. It shifted and stiffened, opened the huge mouth, and spat out a mass about the size of a large pumpkin. It splattered on the rocks below, and Wistala recognized the foul smell of troll waste even at that distance.

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