by Kevin Hearne
“The potions,” Poltro mumbled. “Got to…drink the potions? Yeah, that’s good. Drink ’em.”
“Poltro, no!”
The troll’s bulging eyes flicked from Poltro to Fia at the sound of her voice, which was just as well, as Poltro made quick work of the sleeping potion and recollapsed bonelessly on top of a stack of books.
“And what are you doing in my private demesne?” the troll asked Fia as he pulled a heavy wooden club from where it rested against the wall and rose from his long-suffering chair. He, too, pronounced it “deh-mez-nee,” but Fia knew that those who learned from books frequently mispronounced words that weren’t spoken often. She herself had thought picturesque was pronounced “picture-squee” until she was sixteen.
“Do you mean domain?” she asked, trying to buy time, worried about the sword twitching in the sheath strapped to her back, demanding a meal. At least the troll was concentrating on her instead of the insensate Poltro, but that wasn’t the strongest “at least” Fia had ever considered. As he approached her, step by ground-shaking step, her eyes darted all over the troll’s figure, hunting for Mathilde’s wand. Ah! There! In his front vest pocket beside a carved pipe and a selection of quills.
“Well, actually,” the troll began, “since its etymology originated in the late thirteenth century in another part of the continent, it can be pronounced in a variety of ways, and HOW DARE YOU COME INTO MY SPACE AND CORRECT MY SPEECH!”
The troll swung his club straight down, and Fia leapt nimbly aside, feeling a whoosh of air as the wood thundered into the cobbles, cracking them to pebbly shrapnel.
“My mistake!” she shouted, her quivering sword calling for trollish blood. “What an interesting custom of social behavior you have. My name is Fia. What’s yours?”
The troll paused, clearly trying to regain control. His breathing slowed down, and he straightened up and fiddled with his hat.
“Well, m’lady, you can call me Holden.”
“I thought troll names were all about…”
“Murdering people? I know. So obvious. I like to think I’m a different kind of troll, a gentleman troll. Sure, my surname is McBonecrunch, but I’m nothing like my father. I’m more worldly—cosmopolitan, if you will. Tell me, Fia,” he said as he picked up a book and rubbed a splotch of dried blood off the cover. “Are you a reader?”
“Um.” She heard feet pattering up the alley, and a half-invisible marmoset waved from the shadows, pointed at Poltro, and made a “keep going” motion with her teeny little marmoset hands. “Sure. I love books. Especially romances.”
“Paugh!” the troll scoffed. “Romance. Kissing and folly. Where’s the story, where’s the philosophy? I’m a troll, and even I can’t rip a bodice. You should read real literature. The classics.” He held up a book called Ye Olde Clubbe of Fisticuffs. “This is one of my favorites. It’s all about, like, rejecting capitalism.” He held up another, the spine as yet uncracked, called Alliance of Nincompoops. “Or this one, about a misunderstood genius. You should read it. I’d love to chat about what the true meaning of success is when we’re living in a world that values looks instead of substance.”
Fia wanted to point out that the world generally valued trolls only as paid muscle because they were giant, terrifying man-eaters with questionable hygiene and terrible fashion sense, but she figured this would merely incense him further. Arguing with trolls only ever served to make them more horrid. As much as it pained her to consider it, she would have to use something other than her intellect or brute strength to get that wand. Stepping into the light, she held out her hands.
“Gosh, that book looks fascinating. Intelligence is so much better than whatever you just said.”
Holden nodded eagerly and stepped toward her, right past the unconscious and half-visible Poltro, and a thin rope of drool escaped from the corner of his mouth in his excitement to talk about his own brilliance.
“I had this girlfriend up by Mudskip Ferry. We were pen pals, but she just didn’t seem to understand that the male is naturally superior to the female. I kept trying to explain my genius to her, and I told her my IQ several times, but in the end, it didn’t work out. I couldn’t get her to read anything good.”
He put the book in her hands, and as it was a giant-sized book, it took everything the muscular warrior had not to fall over. “Oh, yeah. This looks great. What’s your favorite part?”
The troll loomed down over her, taking back the book and flipping through it. “Oh. Um. My favorite part. Where is it?”
While his attention was entirely focused on the book that he clearly hadn’t read, Argabella darted in from the shadows, grabbed Poltro by the shoulders, and dragged her back out of the alley. Holden startled as if he might look up at one point, but Fia leaned over, giving him a fantastic glance at her cleavage, and he completely forgot everything else.
“This book, whatever,” he finally said, tossing it onto the pile. “There’s much better stuff. I’m writing my own book, you know. It’s about the struggles of an intelligent but misunderstood young troll fighting the kleptocracy as he stumbles through failed relationships on his quest to become a best-selling author. Let me read you the first chapter. Hang on.”
As he bent over to paw through the pile of fallen books, Fia sidled close and snatched Mathilde’s wand from his pocket. Her heart beating in her throat, she kept waiting for him to notice, but he was too busy hunting for his book. A flicker of motion behind her suggested that Mathilde was ready, and Fia held the wand behind her back, sighing with relief as tiny fingers plucked it from her grasp and the sound of scampering faded up the alley. With the wand safely recovered and Poltro out of danger, all Fia had to do was extricate herself from the troll and get out of the alley without dying.
Holden McBonecrunch found his manuscript, attempted to flourish it gracefully but rather flailed it about instead, and cleared his throat thunderously before beginning to read: “Alisdair von Murderknuckles sat on a stump, pondering the many colorful facets of his life. It was a normal day, and his mother had already urged him to follow his dreams…”
As the troll read, infusing every sentence with nuances of wounded angst, Fia winced. It was terrible. Truly terrible. Alisdair thought about the proletariat, then mused on how foolish and flighty women were, then had a dream about conquering the world as a renowned barbarian despite his poor social skills and lack of actual fighting experience. And then, of course, he became a Chosen One, but not by Staph the pixie, of course. By winning a downhill skiing race. As the moments of her life ticked by and her sword again began to whisper to her and beg for succor and/or silence, Fia felt the rage of battle fall down on her shoulders like a holy mantle from heaven.
This troll had to be stopped.
She didn’t mind fighting. She understood that larger creatures had to eat. She was even, on some level, understanding of Ol’ Faktri’s tender taste buds.
But listening to a troll read his narcissistic screed cut right through the metaphorical twine holding together her patience.
“So what do you think so far?” Holden asked, a thick and greasy finger marking his page in the leather journal. “I feel that it hearkens back to the great—”
“No!” Fia shouted, drawing her sword and pointing it at his book. “Anyone who told you that book is good was trying not to get eaten, but I’m not scared of you, so here’s what I really think. It’s terrible, it’s derivative, the prose is more purple than an eggplant at sunset, and there is literally no story. It’s just a dude sitting around, thinking about being great instead of doing anything about it, and I have no respect for it. If you understood anything about greatness, nobility, or altruism, you would eat that and crap it out where it belongs: in the sewers.”
Holden tenderly put his book on a crate. He removed his hat and placed it carefully on a ragged nail on the brick wall. Unbuttoning his vest, he folded it and
gently draped it over a book. He turned to Fia, his shoulders hunched and his mouth curled into a ferocious snarl, all pretensions of courtesy gone.
“YOU’RE JUST A JEALOUS HAG!” he howled. “A FAT, UGLY WITCH WHO DOESN’T UNDERSTAND HOW THE WORLD WORKS!”
Holden made a lumbering, troll-like swipe for her, but Fia danced back.
“No, I’ve got a pretty good handle on how the world works, having lived in it,” she said. He grabbed for her again, but he was easy to dodge, telegraphing every clumsy move. “And insulting my personal appearance is simply a waste of your bad breath, because why would I care what a troll thinks about my looks? Trolls always attack that way, though, and honestly, it’s pathetic. There’s nothing for me to be jealous about. If I wanted to sit in a dank corner of nowhere and write books about how hard I’m struggling to do nothing, I could.”
“OH, AND OF COURSE YOU’RE GOING TO TROLLZONE ME,” he howled, fists swinging impotently. The predictable pattern of troll attacks would be sad if they weren’t so often destructive.
“If by ‘trollzone’ you mean ‘avoid,’ then yes. Everyone does that. The only people who could possibly stand you would be trolls with similar views who were similarly trapped by their own inability to accomplish anything of value. The thing is—”
He grabbed for her with both hands, and she finally gave in to the bloodlust singing in the sword, slashing the troll right across the chest, a deep cut through the muscle layered over his rib cage. Black blood welled and sheeted down his torso.
“The thing is that there’s a reason nobody likes you, and it’s that you suck.”
The troll grunted, staggered back, and pinched at his pecs like he could press them whole again, trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood. “Well, actually…”
“Will you just shut up and die?” Fia thrust her sword beneath his hands, found a gap in the ribs, and punctured his liver or perhaps even a lung.
Holden gasped and toppled over among his books.
“Magic…wand…” he wheezed, reaching for his vest.
“Yeah, magic can’t fix dead. Ask me how I know.”
As the troll coughed up bubbles of blood and shuddered his final breath, Fia yanked out her sword and cleaned it off on his velvet vest. Normally after such an affair, she felt guilty for having given in to her sword’s yen for gore. This time, however, she felt satisfied. “You won’t be eating any more innocent delivery people,” Fia said to Holden’s corpse. “And thank goodness you’ll never finish writing that book. Not that you ever would have, probably.”
Fia walked back up the alley feeling almost as if she’d leveled up as a person. Instead of immediately solving the problem with violence, she’d worked to reach an understanding, then faced off with a bully. She’d spoken her truth, even though it made her feel vulnerable. And in the end, after exhausting every other option, she’d slaked her sword’s thirst for destruction while ridding the world of a creature that delivered nothing but negativity and strife. And think of the countless literary agents and editors who would never have to suffer that prose.
For a monster fight, it had truly been an enlightening interpersonal experience.
“You’re alive!”
Argabella ran for her, and Fia barely had time to hold out her arms before she was being hugged within an inch of her life.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
Fia melted into the hug, feeling pretty darn good about herself. A few moments later, they broke apart, and Fia blushed to find everyone staring again.
“Is Poltro okay?” she asked.
“If you mean, is Poltro asleep and probably as stupid as ever, then I would say definitely yes.” Gustave nudged the rogue with his horn, and she snorted and rolled over on the garbage-strewn cobbles, snuggling a confused rat.
“S’nasty chicken,” she mumbled. “An’ that troll. Cor, what a biggun! Roast him up good. Stuff the goat inside. Maybe stuff a duck in the goat. Trollgoaduck. Mmm.”
Gustave turned his back to her and let a volley of pellets fly to surround her like tiny chocolate chicken eggs.
“Hey, did you see the missing person posters, Fia?” he asked.
“I did. Where’d the rest of them go? Weren’t they all around this alley?”
If a goat could smile, Gustave did. “I just decorated Poltro with their remains. That farm boy wanted to eat me, but I guess I ate him! Or at least ten copies of his ugly mug. Now the pooboy really is poo. I wish he was alive again so I could tell him about that.”
Before Gustave could talk about the dead farm boy any more, Fia looked around for the other missing part of the troll puzzle. She found Mathilde squatting on the ground by Grinda’s feet, furiously polishing the wand against her fur and occasionally spitting on it.
“Uh, how’s that wand polishing working for you?” she asked. “Or is this, like, a private thing?”
“It has to be clean to work,” Mathilde explained, annoyed. “Do you know how hard it is to get troll tooth glob off a wand? It won’t work if it’s sticky.”
“It’s true,” Grinda added. “Nobody likes a scabby wand.”
“Ah, there we go.” Mathilde held up the stone wand, an equal in beauty to the glass one Grinda had lost and then remade. The sand witch, in fact, had a covetous and almost Toby-esque glow about the eyes that made the marmoset skitter a little closer to Fia and Argabella.
“Perhaps I could be of service, Mathilde?” Grinda sidled a little closer. “Help you tidy it up?”
“Torner guman!” Mathilde shouted, and a bilious white vapor spurted from the wand to coat her in a sickly glaze. As they watched, the marmoset expanded up and out, and then the white mist popped like a bubble, revealing a feisty looking middle-aged woman with brown skin, bulging biceps, and…well, nothing to hide them.
“Bit cold without fur,” she noted. Fia blinked, because even though Mathilde was now fully human, her voice was still as tiny and squeaky as it had been before.
“Wait here!” Fia called. She jogged back down the alley, grabbed an armful of clothes from the troll’s discards, shook out the bones and discount cards, and returned.
She needn’t have bothered. Mathilde tapped her bare shoulder with her wand and said, “Gunna mec!” and a dress appeared on her figure, simple but well fitting in a charming indigo.
“Show-off,” Grinda muttered, feigning interest in a snail on the brick wall. “But now that you’re back to normal, perhaps you’d care to hold up your end of the deal.”
“We had a deal?” Mathilde’s innocent face was as bad as Grinda’s.
“Tell us how to kill Løcher,” Argabella said.
“Ah. Yes. That. Well, if you want a chance, you’ll need a billy goat and a jar of pickled herring.”
“And?”
“And what? That’s it.”
Fia stepped forward, her sword beginning to whisper about how lovely blood was on a summer morn. “You said you’d tell us how to kill Løcher, not name two unrelated objects that are generally ignored during political assassinations.”
Mathilde shook her head, and her stomach audibly grumbled. “You’re misremembering. I said I could get you through his outer defenses, not that I knew how to kill him. A goat and some herring will get you inside, where you’ll have a shot at Løcher. I can walk you through that much. Killing him is up to you, and I frankly don’t know how you’re going to manage. You’ll probably all be dead by morning. But at least you already have the goat! All you need is a jar of pickled herring. And I know where to get one, along with a nice growler of beer and some seriously tasty toasted fairy wings. There’s this dwarvelish inn just a bit out of town, and I suggest we go there to talk it over. Like, now.”
“Why now in particular?”
Mathilde sighed and began walking, the wand disappearing into her pocket. “Now, because I’m hungry, and marmosets mainly eat sma
ll fruits and insects, which I’m desperately sick of and also can still taste from breakfast. And now because if you didn’t notice it, my return to human form set off the itty-bittiest magical alarm.”
Fia looked to Grinda, who was patting her hair and straightening her own costume.
“The thing about magical alarms,” she said, “is that much like bells, they cannot be unrung. We might as well go where Mathilde suggests and do whatever it is she wants to do.” When the sand witch’s eyes roved to the pocket containing Mathilde’s wand, Fia realized that magic wielders were all terrible people obsessed with wands and towers, and she wanted nothing more to do with any of them.
Fia shrugged. “To the dwarvelish inn, then.”
“Just one more thing,” Gustave said, trotting past her. He pawed at a bit of paper on the ground, finally managing to uncrumple it with his cloven hooves. There was Worstley, yet again looking all innocent and pure, his mother begging for news of the foine ladde. Gustave began nibbling the corner, and the entire flyer disappeared into his weirdly small mouth.
“Ah,” he murmured happily. “It’s the little victories. I never dreamed I’d get to crap on him even after he was dead. But you know what’s weird? Pooboy had himself a billy goat and a jar of pickled herring at the beginning, before Fia crushed him. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think? Makes you wonder if Staph the pixie wanted us to take out Løcher from the start.”
“What are you on about?” Grinda said.
“Well, people always want more stuff, right? It’s a bit of a pattern I’ve noticed. Like wizards and wands, say. Y’all are just driven to possess and consume. This Løcher guy is next to the king, has himself a nice spread, lots of power, and hot ex-marmoset ex-girlfriends, and he still wants more. Not surprising, then, if Staph wants to get a little bit for herself. She’s got one blue sock, for crying out loud, and if I remember her breath correctly, a taste for cheap halfling spirits. Maybe that suits her fine, but I suspect she wouldn’t mind an upgrade, and if Løcher’s calling the shots and using her to get around others, she probably took a page from his book and decided to try the same thing on him.”