by Peter Plasse
“Never mind that now. Tell me about that day.”
“Stupid Jubra,” he muttered.
“Who is Jubra?” she asked.
“Gall’s little sister. It was all perfect. Ubri and I were brothers. Best friends. We did everything together. Then she was born and ruined everything. Jubra this. Jubra that. Stupid Jubra. I should have killed her. I would have, too.” He stared off at the Inam'Ra moons. She noticed he seemed to look very sad. Barely audible, he whispered, “I almost did.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“She died.”
“How did she die?”
“I don’t know, she died, that’s all. Gnomes die. Everybody dies.”
“Did you and she get along well?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, did you fight a lot?”
“No.”
“Did she and your father fight a lot?”
“Never,” then, “Never, never, never. They never had a cross word.”
“What happened after your mother died? To your father, I mean?”
Jebwickett snapped his head towards her, his face suddenly contorted with rage. “Too many questions,” he said. “Go now. Go away before I kill you.” He put his hand on his sword. She ignored the gesture and reached up to pat him gently on the head. “Go,” he commanded, pointing away. “Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do. I don’t want to hurt you. But I would if I had to. I am a soldier.”
She stood up and backed away from him. “No,” she said. “You are a boy.”
She turned and retraced her steps to the campsite. Had she turned to look back at him, she would have seen that he was feeling his head, where he could still feel the warmth of her touch.
She walked down the trail, which turned into a pathway, which turned into a small road. She couldn’t remember getting separated from Diana and Jared. All she could recall was that vicious storm as they had approached the border of the Enchanted Northland. “So much for that theory,” she thought. She considered calling out for them, but rejected this as more dangerous than smart. Best to keep on walking and see if she could pick up their trail.
“Where are they?” she thought. She fought hard to keep from getting angry. Somebody had often said to her that emotions are not problem solving tools, but she couldn’t remember who it was. This was all so strange.
What was stranger was the fact that she felt clean, and when she stopped in about an hour to check and see if she had anything left to eat, not only was her backpack full of food, it was very odd food. Nothing like what she remembered having had on her when she became separated from her companions. Come to think of it, she didn’t recognize the knapsack.
There was the same dried meat, but in addition, there was a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, not the dried, shriveled stuff that she had gotten used to. There was a large loaf of flat bread. She sniffed it. It was fresh. Baffled, she continued to unpack. There was a fresh set of clothes, complete with clean undergarments similar to those … of … somewhere she had been, a heavy waterproof cloak, a set of rugged gloves, and a tiny metal pot-for-one, clearly designed for boiling water over an open fire.
There were several pockets and fasteners on the top of it, and two front pockets on the bottom, each secured by buttons, one white and one black. In the pocket held fast by the white one she found containers of tea and sugar. Such a treat. She hadn’t had sugar since … well, she couldn’t remember when. There was also an extra flint-and-steel, a match to the one she carried in her vest, a small sharpening stone, and a spare compass.
She opened the other. In the tips of her fingers she noticed a potent tingling sensation as she worked the button that held it shut. It was painful enough that she hesitated in her efforts, quickly withdrawing her fingers, which she instinctively placed in her mouth. The sensation subsided, causing her to think that perhaps she had imagined it, but, no, when she reached out to lift the flap, there it was again. Undeterred, she flipped it open. A warm breeze caressed her face, causing her hair to lift slightly off of her shoulders, and she thought for sure she heard voices calling to her from far away, voices she could have sworn she knew.
Whereas the lining of the first pocket had been perfectly plain, this one was covered with a soft, velour-like material. She tipped the pack slightly to peer inside and saw a stout gold chain. Reaching in, she withdrew it. As soon as she touched it, that strange tingling sensation reappeared, but this time it did not surprise her. In fact, it felt almost pleasant.
It was around eighteen inches long, and fastened to it was a biconvex, elliptical, amber-colored amulet. She held it up to look closely at it and the color faded away, only to be replaced by that of a grim-faced Elf who appeared to be looking her directly in the eye. She gasped and sat back, putting her free hand to her mouth in surprise. She knew this Elf. She knew she knew her from somewhere, from sometime, but she couldn’t remember where or when. The Elf smiled slightly, more with her eyes than with her mouth, nodded, and disappeared. Her image was replaced by color again, this time a soft purple. She shook it. Nothing happened. “Come on, come on,” she said out loud, as if by speaking to it she might get it to do something. She tapped it softly on the ground a few times and held it up in front of her. Nothing. “Hmmm,” she mused. Because she was more than a little afraid of it, and didn’t really want to put it on, she reached forward to replace it in the pocket from which she had withdrawn it. But when she did, she got a terrible shock that hurt something fierce, causing her to cry out. The image of the Elf reappeared and she muttered, “I take it you want me to wear it.” She wasn’t surprised when the image nodded again, offered the same smile, and faded.
“Here goes,” she sighed, as she stood and slipped it over her head, paying close attention to any odd feelings that might arise over this simple act, but... no, she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, except maybe that it felt like it belonged on her, that she had worn it before. But perhaps she was imagining that. She couldn’t be sure.
As it hung there, she looked at her body-armor vest. It was then that she finally noticed she was wearing a completely different outfit than she remembered, this one clean and in good repair. None of this made any sense. Taking a bite from a juicy red apple that had fallen out of the pack when it was first opened, she sat down to think on it, to try and figure it out.
“Oh, this is all too much,” she thought. “How could any of this be?”
She remembered distinctly the day that they had made it to the border, the howling winds tossing them violently around in the snow. Then, that’s right, she remembered now, it had gone precipitously calm… and there had been something else, something that, if she could remember it, might explain these oddities. But she couldn’t.
She finished her apple, tossed the core, and continued along.
She walked for the remainder of the afternoon, setting up a crude lean-to well off the main trail as dusk approached. Flopping down on her bedroll, she was about to drift off when she heard the screams.
It was a woman’s voice, crying out in desperation. She sprang to her feet and listened carefully to determine the precise direction from which it was coming.
“ Noooo, please … ” the voice pleaded. “Take the cow. Take the goats. Leave my children! Please! No! N … ”
As the last word got cut off, she knew that the woman doing the screaming had suffered some sort of terrible ill fate. At least she had a good fix on the direction. She knew if she went straight back out to the roadway she would find her, assuming she was among the living. She crouched low and slowly made her way back in the direction from which she had come, checking her sword more than once on the way to be sure it was free in its scabbard. It was night now, but bright with the illumination of the two Inam'Ra moons, both of which were full, and she had no trouble finding the young woman that lay facedown in the dirt alongside the road. She listened for a long time before she did anything, to be sure that whoever had done this was no l
onger about. Hearing nothing, she dragged her out of the ditch and ten feet up into the surrounding woods. She noticed she was breathing, and her skin was warm. So far, so good. She tried shaking her, but did not call out to her for fear of being overheard. Creeping back to the area where she had set up her little camp, she gathered up all of her things and then moved silently back to where she had left her. She had intended to soak the woman’s head with cold water from her waterskin in an attempt to get her to wake up, but when she got back to where she had left her, she was already sitting up, her back against a tree, holding her head and groaning loudly.
“Shhh,” whispered Doreen, squatting down beside her and putting her arms around her. “Hush now. If they hear you, they’ll come back. Shhh. Quiet now. It’ll be alright. We’ll get them back for you. Shhh.”
The young woman, obviously beside herself with anguish, started noticeably at Doreen’s approach, but calmed down quickly, enough to take a sip of water from the waterskin.
“My name is Doreen,” she said quietly, offering her hand.
“Crystal,” said the other, accepting it limply.
“What happened?” asked Doreen, “Who took your children?”
“Towners,” said Crystal. “To sell to the Trolls. I might have known it would happen. Towners are rotten, clean clear through. I hate them.
“They would sell their own mothers for a promise.” She reached out and took Doreen’s hands, squeezing them hard. “We have to get them back,” she said. “We have to.”
“How many children are there?” asked Doreen.
Crystal seemed detached, disconnected, almost as if she didn’t hear her. “Oh … two,” she finally answered, lucid for a fleeting moment and then slipping quickly back into her impassive state.
“Keep it simple,” thought Doreen. “Keep it simple.”
“How old are they?”
It took Crystal several seconds to answer her as she rolled her head all this way and that, chewing at her fingertips and looking wildly all around them in terror.
“How old are they?” Doreen repeated.
“The boy is eight, the girl, nine.”
“Tell you what,” said Doreen, “first we’ll have something quick to eat. They’ll be watching for you to come after them. We’ll give them a little time to let their guard down. Don’t worry. We’ll get your kids back, and your animals too. How many of them are there?”
“Animals?”
“No, Towners.”
“Not many. Four or five.”
She seemed to focus a little better at the mention of something to eat.
“Are they armed?”
“No. Knives maybe. No swords or bows or anything. They are scrappers, though. We’ll have a fight on our hands, that’s for sure.”
Doreen opened her pack and began placing food out. Crystal helped herself without waiting for Doreen to finish, immediately cramming her mouth full of anything in front of her. She ate more like an animal than a Human, smacking loudly and grunting the entire time. Doreen raised her eyebrows slightly. “Go slow,” she cautioned her. “It looks like maybe you haven’t eaten much lately. We can’t have you getting cramps.”
Crystal ignored her and continued to gorge, forcing Doreen to repack anything she had not already eaten.
Cinching her pack back up, she walked back out to the road. With the two Inam'Ra moons, it was easy to make out the trail the Towners had left.
They began to follow them. Doreen figured that at some point they would camp and bed down for the night, and that’s when they would take them. Sure enough, in a couple of hours, they heard the Towners whooping it up ahead of them. In a few more minutes, they could see the light of their campfire. Doreen pulled Crystal off the roadway, and they came up with a plan. They would wait until the Towners had settled in for the night, when they would undoubtedly post guards. Doreen would take care of the guards. Crystal would circle around to the back and cut her children free. If they were able to sneak away without waking the rest of them up, that would be best, but if not, Doreen asked her if she was capable of killing if she had to. Crystal assured her that she was, but only if she absolutely had to.
Doreen mulled this over. It was one thing to offer a helping hand. It was another to put her life on the line, and if this young woman couldn’t do what was necessary …
Doreen made sure she understood that this was a case where they certainly might have to, and while the thought of killing wasn’t something that she relished, if it happened in the course of rescuing a child that a Towner had kidnapped to sell to the Trolls, it really wouldn’t bother her, either.
So they waited, the early spring warmth fading quickly to the chill of a late winter evening. Just as they had thought, soon after the hollering and hooting stopped, two guards appeared in the moonlight. They didn’t look to be much more than children themselves, but by the way they were positioned, with their arms folded tightly against their chests, and scanning constantly up and down the road, it was clear they meant business. Doreen drew her sword as she waved for Crystal to start moving in. She never got a chance to use it as a huge set of arms wrapped themselves around her, and the deepest voice she had ever heard warned her that if she struggled, she would die without ever seeing the sun come up again. Two more Trolls appeared in front of her, one dangling Crystal out in front of him like a rabbit. Her head hung in front of her at an awkward angle. The brute had snapped her neck!
Doreen’s eyes widened in terror as the Towners strolled over from their camp.
“Wow,” said one. “We were trying for one, and we ended up with two. That should earn us some more, yes?” He looked expectantly at the Troll holding Doreen.
“Same price,” he said. “Not a mark more. Don’t ask again.”
He fastened irons around Doreen’s wrists behind her back, removed all of her weapons, and tossed them into the woods. Her sword in his hands looked more like a toy than a weapon. He pointed down the road, saying, “March,” and gave her a swift kick in the thigh to let her know he wasn’t about to wait too long.
The blow landed with a heavy thud and propelled her along, but it surprised her that it didn’t hurt much. At all, really. She decided it must be because she was badly shaken.
They walked for the rest of the night, stopping into a crude roadside shelter as the sun’s early morning rays were starting to streak the dawn sky with bands of color. She was given some water to drink and some thick gruel in a crude bowl. Then she was allowed to relieve herself, after which she was shoved roughly into a barred enclosure equipped with irons into which she was fastened, and loops, through which four of the Trolls passed long carrying-poles. She was hoisted onto their enormous shoulders and carried for the next several days, now stopping only in the evening, where the ritual of the day before repeated itself. She was allowed to drink her water, eat her gruel, and relieve herself, only to be shoved back into the box and chained in.
Despite the fact that she could easily peer through the wooden poles that made up the walls of her cage, it surprised her that she recognized nothing of the countryside through which they traveled. The mountains were completely different in appearance than she remembered when traveling north with Jared and Diana. She began to wonder if her mind was failing.
On the morning of her sixth (or was it her ninth?) day of travel, she awakened when her cage was set down at the front gate of a walled facility of some sort. In a few minutes the gate opened, and she noticed that it looked like a fort, or maybe a prison. Trolls in dirty, shabby uniforms wandered all about, most appearing as though they were looking for something to do. Her cage was once more heaved skyward.
She was carried through a small courtyard and set down again at the corner door of a building of rough-sawn lumber. While she was being hauled out of it, the door to the building opened. A Troll, whose uniform was slightly less dirty and tattered than those of the others, approached. Squinting in the bright midmorning sunlight, he eyed her up and down while her four handle
rs snapped to attention.
“This is she?” he asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
“And you’re sure she is the one?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Very well,” said the captain. “Take her to her cell in the back. She is still in irons. Good. Lock her in her cell and leave them on her. We will take no chances with this one. That’s it. Good. Careful now. She is not to be injured or roughed up in any way.”
“Excuse me,” she said, as two of her handlers grasped her by the arms, and the other two took up positions in front of and behind her. “What is your name? Where are we? Where are you taking me, and why?”
The Troll in front of her raised his hand, looking like he was going to slap her down. She braced for the blow that never landed.
“Stay that arm,” ordered the captain, who walked stiffly over to her. Then, out of the side of his mouth, he breathed, “Are you out of your head?
“So this is the one,” he muttered, looking like he was trying as hard as he could to not make eye contact with her.
“Never mind my name,” he answered. “You will not be alive long enough for it to matter to you. Suffice it to say that I am a captain, and ranking officer of this garrison. We are taking you to a holding cell pending your execution in the morning.”
Doreen started to panic. “Why are you executing me?” she cried. “What have I done to deserve that?”
“Done?” he asked. “Done? What do you mean, done? You haven’t done anything. You are Human. We are Trolls. We eat Humans. You are here. We need food. That is all. Take her away.”
They led her to a cell in the rear of the garrison. It was in another building much like the first one she had seen, although smaller. She was thrown inside, arms in irons behind her. The large oak door was slammed behind her and locked. She peered out through a grate and noticed that two of her escorts had stayed behind with her, standing guard right outside of her door. Something was very strange about all of this. First of all, why had she been allowed to live at all? Why hadn’t they killed her back in the woods with the Towners? Well, that much was simple. She was meat, and fresh meat was better than spoiled. Secondly, why had they carried her all this way? Lastly, why did they need two Trolls to stand guard over her? She was shackled and locked securely in a cell. They seemed almost afraid of her. She was sure of it. The captain, anyway. But why? And what was that business about her being, ‘the one’? The one what?