Troll Mill

by Katherine Langrish

  “It’s—a wonderful idea,” he said. “Why did I never think of it before?”

  Hilde grinned at him. “See? I told you so. You were never cut out to be a miller.”

  For a second, that stung. Peer opened his mouth to snap—but he began to laugh instead. He picked up Sigrid and swung her around. “You’re so right! I’ll be a boat builder! I’ll build my own boats, and everyone will want them.”

  “Build one for me!” squealed Sigrid, giggling.

  “I will! I’ll build you a boat that a queen would be proud of,” Peer told her, “and it will have a neck like a swan, and gilded wings and silken cushions, and the Emperor of the Southlands will hear about it and come courting you!”

  “What a useless sort of boat,” said Sigurd.

  “All right, then, for you I’ll build a warship, Sigurd, with a striped sail and a fierce dragonhead, and you can go off in it, fighting and raiding.”

  “No.” Sigurd gave him a pitying look. “I shall be a farmer.”

  “And what sort of boat will you build for me?” asked Hilde.

  Peer turned to her. “A boat that will carry two,” he said, and was pleased to see her redden and look away. Arnë’s eyebrows went up thoughtfully Gudrun’s lips twitched.

  “And the babies?” clamored Sigrid. “What about Eirik and Ran?”

  “Oh, Eirik will need a washtub, not a boat.” Peer laughed. “As for Ran … well … I don’t quite know. Shall I ask her?” He hoisted her out of Bjorn’s arms and tickled her. “Any ideas, you?” he teased—and was rewarded with the widest, merriest, most infectious smile he’d ever seen. He found himself grinning breathlessly back at her gleaming red gums and crinkled nose.

  “Look at her!” gasped Hilde. “Ran’s smiling!”

  “She’s smiling!”

  They all crowded round to see, chattering excitedly, while Ran looked from face to face, beaming at them as if they were the most wonderful people in the world.

  “You got her to smile. Well done, Peer!” Hilde banged him on the back, and he shook his head helplessly.

  “But I didn’t do anything. I suppose she was just—ready.”

  “She can smile and she can cry! She’s not a seal-baby anymore, is she, Ma?” Sigrid said.

  Gudrun’s eyes were wet, and she leaned on Bjorn’s good shoulder. “This is a day of marvels, to be sure. A day of new beginnings! Bjorn, my dear boy, I think it’s time we changed her name. We’ll call her ‘Elli’ from now on, the name you wanted.”

  “Elli,” said Sigrid softly. “Elli, my little sister.”

  Keep watch for Troll Blood, the exciting conclusion to Katherine Langrish’s trilogy set in a world of mysterious creatures, Vikings, and trolls.

  TROLL BLOOD

  CHAPTER 1

  MURDER IN

  VINLAND

  The Mist Persons are busy, crouching on wave-splashed rocks out in the gulf, blowing chilly whiteness over the sea. Their breath rolls like a tide over the beach and the boggy meadowlands near the river mouth, and flows far up the valley, spreading into the dark woods on either side.

  A birchbark canoe comes whirling downriver through the wet fog. Kneeling in the prow, Kwimu braces himself against the crosspiece. He lifts a long pole like a lance, ready to fend off rocks. Each bend, each stretch of rapids comes as a surprise. Even the banks are hard to see.

  The canoe bucks. Kwimu feels the river hump its back like an animal. The canoe shoots over the hump and goes arrowing into a narrow gorge, where tall cliffs squeeze the water into a mad downhill dash. Spray splashes in, and Fox, curled against his knees, shakes an irritated head. Fox hates getting wet.

  A rock! Kwimu jabs the pole, swaying to keep his balance as the canoe swerves lightly away. It hurtles down a sleek slope and goes shivering and bouncing into roaring white water at the bottom. Again and again Kwimu flicks out the pole, striking here and there, turning the canoe between the rocks. Sometimes a whirlpool catches them, trying to hold them back and pull them down, but Kwimu’s father, Sinumkw, kneeling behind him, gives a mighty thrust with his paddle and sends them shooting on.

  A bend in the river. More rocks. Kwimu throws back his wet hair, every muscle tense. They dart down, twining into the curve, hugging the base of the cliff, where the water is deeper and smoother. It’s cold here; the wet, grainy stone drips, and the mist writhes in eerie shapes. There’s a splash and an echo, and it’s not just the paddle. The canoe tilts, veers. Fox springs up snarling, showing his white teeth and black gums, and for a heartbeat Kwimu sees a thin muddy hand clutch at the prow. A head plastered with wet hair rises from the water. It winks at him with an expression of sullen glee, and ducks under.

  Cold with shock, Kwimu flings a wild glance back at his father. But Sinumkw simply shouts, “Look what you’re doing!” And they’re snatched into the next stretch of rapids.

  They hurtle into the crosscurrents, Sinumkw paddling grimly. Kwimu thrusts and fends with dripping hair and aching arms until the gorge widens, the cliffs drop back, and the canoe spills out into calm water flowing between high banks covered with trees. On either side, the gray-robed forest rises, fading into mist.

  Kwimu twists around, panting. “Did you see?” he bursts out. “Did you see the Water Person—the Grabber-from-Beneath?”

  Sinumkw frowns, but says calmly, “I saw nothing but the rocks and the rapids.”

  “He was there,” Kwimu insists. “And Fox saw him too.”

  His father nods. “Maybe. But if you’d taken your eyes off the water for a moment longer, we’d have capsized. So his trick didn’t work. Anyway, well done! That’s the worst stretch over. No more rapids between here and the sea. And we’ll land here, I think.”

  He drives his paddle into the water. The canoe pivots toward the shore.

  “But I thought we were going all the way down to the sea. Can’t we go on in the canoe? It’s so much quicker than walking,” Kwimu pleads as they lift the canoe out of the water.

  “Quicker, yes,” says Sinumkw drily. “Speed isn’t everything. Just look around. Somebody’s been cutting trees.” Kwimu looks up in surprise, and his father is right—the bank is littered with chips of yellow wood, and studded with stumps like broken teeth. Piles of lopped branches lie in the trampled undergrowth.

  Sinumkw picks up some scattered chips. “These aren’t fresh. This was done moons ago, before the winter.”

  “Who would need so many trees?” Kwimu asks quietly. His scalp prickles. There are Other Persons in the woods. One of them cuts down trees. Sometimes, in lonely parts of the forest, hunters hear the sound of an ax chopping—and a tree comes crashing down, though no one is visible.

  But his father is thinking along more practical lines. “See here. They rolled the trunks into the river and floated them downstream. Who did it? It could be enemies: the Kwetejk, perhaps. What if they’ve built a stockade at the river mouth, in just the spot we want to use?”

  “Oh!” Kwimu thinks with a shiver of their fierce rivals from the northwest woods. “What shall we do?”

  His father shrugs. “This is why we came, n’kwis, ahead of everyone else, to find the best place for the summer camp, and to look out for danger. Imagine if the whole clan was with us now—grandmothers, babies, cooking gear, and all! No. We’ll leave the canoe and come back for it later. We’ll circle into the woods and climb the bluffs above the river. We can look down on the bay from there.” He turns, setting off on a long uphill slant into the forest.

  Kwimu follows. The encircling fog fills the woods with secrets. It’s a shape-changer, turning the trees into looming giants that drip and tiptoe and creak and murmur. Anything might lurk there, or stealthily follow them at the edges of sight. But if there was danger, Fox would sense it; Fox would warn them. Reassured by the thought, Kwimu strokes Fox’s cold fur, and hurries after his father.

  Snow still lingers under the hemlocks and firs, and the buds on the birches aren’t open yet. The forest is colorless, black, white and gray. A dozen paces ahe
ad, Sinumkw climbs silently through the swirls and pockets of vapor, like a ghost passing through world after world.

  The woods are full of mysteries….

  Grandmother said that yesterday evening, her bright birdlike eyes blinking in her soft wrinkled face. Kwimu thinks of her now, as he trudges uphill under the dripping trees. He can see her in his head, like a little partridge with bright plumage, wrapped in her big beaver-fur cloak with the colored quill-work glinting in the firelight. She’s so tiny, but so strong. And she has the Sight. Everyone listens when she speaks.

  Long ago, in the time of the Old Ones …

  All the stories begin like this.

  … in the old days, two brothers go hunting. And they find a deep ditch, too wide to jump. A strange, smooth ditch, scoured out of sticky red mud, twisting along between the trees. The track of a Horned Serpent: a jipijka’m track.

  Now this track is full of power.

  One of the brothers climbs into the ditch to see what sort of thing made it.

  Aha!

  At once, his body changes. It bloats and swells and pulls out like an earthworm, growing longer and longer. His eyes widen and blaze, and two horns sprout from his head, one yellow, one red. He fills the ditch from top to bottom; he raises his head and hisses at his brother; he slithers away like a snake. The track leads into the lake. He plunges deep into the water, and no one ever sees him again.

  The woods are full of mysteries….

  In spite of his thick moose-hide robes, Kwimu is cold. Why did Grandmother tell that story? What does it mean? Everywhere he looks he sees omens. Layers of fungus, like thick lips that might open and speak. A rotten log like a corpse rolled up in birch bark.

  Can anything good happen on such a day?

  The slope steepens, broken by small ravines where icy creeks hurry down to join the river. There are voices in the creeks, Kwimu is sure, quarrelsome voices that squabble and bicker. Perhaps it’s the Spreaders, the nasty little people who peg you to the ground if you fall asleep by the streamside.

  They cross one creek near a waterfall. Spray has coated the boulders with ice, and the pool boils and froths like a black kettle. Just the place for Grandmother’s story to come to life! What if a huge head crowned with twiggy horns emerged from the water, snaking toward them on a long slimy neck? In this haunted fog, anything seems possible.

  It grows lighter. The woods thin. Kwimu follows his father along a knobbly headland that juts out from the forest into the white nothingness of the mist. He feels giddy, as if walking out into the Sky World. He knows that down there, where the ground plunges steeply away, there’s a fine gravel beach and grasslands beside the river. The bay, their summer home, where the women will gather shellfish, and the men and boys will take the canoes out past the sandbars and right over deep water to the islands, to fish and to gather birds’ eggs. Right now none of that is visible. A mother-of-pearl sun peers through the haze.

  All is quiet except for the hushing of the sea. But the mist tastes of smoke, sweet dry smoke floating up from below.

  Fox growls quietly. His fur bristles, full of prickling, warning life. Kwimu and his father exchange anxious looks.

  They hunker down in the wet bushes, ill at ease. Smoke means people, but a friendly village would be noisy with dogs, children, women chattering—so why the silence? If only the mist would clear. Straining his ears, Kwimu begins to think he can pick up the muffled sound of voices. Men talking—or arguing, for the sound becomes louder and sharper.

  And then an appalling scream tears through the fog. Kwimu grabs his father. The scream soars into bubbling hysteria, and breaks into a series of sharp, yipping howls like a mad wolf. The morning erupts in shouts of anger and alarm, and a ring-ding, hard-edged clashing. Flocks of screeching birds clatter up from the forest.

  As if their wings are fanning it away, the mist thins and vanishes. At last Kwimu and Sinumkw see what is going on below them, down by the river mouth.

  The earth has been flayed. Instead of grassland, pits and scars of bare red soil show where the turf has been lifted. Two strange lumpish sod houses have been thrown up on a rising crescent of ground between the edge of the forest and the sea. They look like burrows, for the withered grass grows right over them, but smoke rises from holes in the tops. Between these houses—these burrows—men are swarming.

  Men? Their faces are white as paint, and they seem shaggy around the head, like a lynx or bobcat. These are not the Kwetejk, nor like any men Kwimu has ever seen. Are they the dead then, returned from the Ghost World? But some are pursuing others, hacking them with long axes, stabbing with lances. Some lie motionless on the ground.

  Sinumkw taps Kwimu’s shoulder. “Look!” His voice is awed, shocked. “In the river. Jipijka’maq!”

  Kwimu drags his eyes from the scene below, and the hairs rise on his neck. Floating in the wide shallows where the river meets the sea are two things—bigger than the biggest canoe—and surely they are alive. For each has a head, staring shoreward from the top of a long neck. Each head is that of a Horned Serpent.

  The smaller of the two is painted red, and the horned head snarls open-jawed from the top of a slender curving neck. The larger one is painted in red and black stripes, and it lifts a goggle-eyed head, beaked like a screaming eagle.

  “Grandmother’s story,” whispers Kwimu. “This is what it meant.”

  These people are jipijka’maq—Horned Serpent people, shape-changers. They come from out of the water and under the ground. Their whiteness is not paint, but the bleached pallor of things you find under stones. But why are they fighting, and why are they here? Kwimu moistens his lips, staring at the sprawled figures on the ground. Perhaps they’re not dead. Perhaps any moment now their feet and hands will vanish, their bodies will swell and lengthen, and they will slither off on their bellies into their dark earth houses?

  But they never move.

  “Hah!” With a cough of disdainful laughter, Sinumkw points suddenly. “See the coward there!”

  A man in a green cloak is escaping, running away from the fight. He’s dragging a child along with him, a young boy. Just past the end of the nearest house he stops, and pushes the child, pointing to the woods. The message is clear. “Run!” he’s saying. “Run and hide yourself. Go!” The child hesitates, and is sent staggering with a hard shove between the shoulder blades. The man whirls and goes racing back.

  Acknowledgements

  Warm thanks to Liz,

  for everything, and especially

  for uprooting the elder trees;

  Catherine,

  Michele, Jackie, and Carol,

  for being the best agents anyone could have;

  Phil Scott of Regia Anglorum,

  for firsthand advice on how to sail a faering;

  and once again to Alan Stoyel

  and Critchell Britten,

  for your help on water mills.

  My apologies to you all for any remaining

  mistakes.

  Last, but not least, thanks to

  Gillie, Sally, and Robin,

  my wonderful and understanding editors;

  to David, Christopher, and Mark

  for the exciting cover;

  and to everyone else at HarperCollins.

  About the Author

  Katherine Langrish grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, the hill country of northern England, where there are still strong Scandinavian traces (in place names, family names, and even dialect) from the Danes who settled the area a thousand years ago, and where a farming community with an emphasis on neighborly interdependence continues. She graduated with an honors degree in English from the University of London and has been writing stories for most of her life. Living with her husband and two daughters on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, thirty miles from Paris, she began storytelling to classes at the International School. Her family later moved to Corning, New York, where she joined Literacy Volunteers of America. Katherine Langrish currently lives in England.
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  Also by Katherine Langrish

  TROLL

  FELL

  Copyright

  Eos is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Troll Mill

  Copyright © 2006 by Katherine Langrish

  Title page and map illustrations copyright © 2004 by Tim Stevens

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04391-7

  www.harperteen.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Langrish, Katherine.

  Troll Mill / Katherine Langrish.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When fifteen-year-old Peer Ulfsson witnesses the disappearance of his neighbor’s wife, rumored to be a seal-woman, he must help protect the baby she leaves behind from trolls, a witch, and other creatures.

  ISBN 978-0-06-058309-5

  [1. Trolls—Fiction. 2. Babies—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Selkies—Fiction. 5. Neighbors—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L2697Trm 2006 2005003310

  [Fic]—dc22

  Typography by Larissa Lawrynenko

  First paperback edition, 2008

  First U.S. edition, 2006

  First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, in 2005.