This one stood between Elora and her clothes. She thought of diving into the pond, but she had little faith in her own ability to tread water for very long. Worse, now that the troll had identified her as prey, it wouldn’t leave so long as she remained in sight. Nor would it mind waiting until she drowned. She considered casting herself back into the ground, escaping the troll as she had Carig, but rejected the thought almost as quickly. Magic took a fearsome toll on the body, she could move faster and farther on her feet.
She feinted for the pond, and when the troll followed her lead she broke for the treeline as fast as she was able.
Behind her sounded a hollow halloowoowoo and then the crash of a body through thickets as it gave chase. Size and agility were her advantages as she skated around every obstacle, but they were quickly negated by the troll’s tremendous strength as it simply bulled its way through everything in its path. She put some distance between them at the start but time would soon take away that edge as the troll’s endurance overcame her sprinter’s speed. She needed a weapon, and when nothing presented itself to her questing eyes, she began to search for somewhere to hide.
She almost missed the barrow.
It was framed by a guardian grove of oaks, so impressive a scattering of ancient trees that Elora’s first instinct had been to take to their branches, an opening tucked between a tangle of massive roots of such a size they could have been tree trunks in their own right reaching outward from the base of the senior member of the copse.
The angle and distance were all wrong. Realization and response came as one as she put a trunk between herself and the troll and pivoted to stand her ground. It thundered around the tree, to discover that she’d danced back the other way, keeping the massive trunk between them. It caught on quickly, though, matching her feint with a pretty good one of its own. It didn’t seem to mind missing her, content to use the momentary stalemate as an opportunity to catch its breath. As far as she could tell, the troll was actually enjoying the chase. Every element of its body language proclaimed its confidence in the eventual outcome of the hunt.
Wonderful! she thought, as the absurdity of the situation struck her. Elora Danan, Sacred Princess, savior of the Great Realms, and today’s lunch meat.
While moving back and forth, Elora scooped up a handful of fair-sized pebbles. She tossed the stones behind and away from her, making an intentional clatter as she scattered them down the boulder-strewn slope. They sounded just like a running figure losing her footing and starting a minor avalanche.
The troll fell for the deception and burst around the trunk to her right in the direction of the sound. She broke left. It caught her movement in its peripheral vision, but the lay of the ground wasn’t conducive to that kind of sudden stop. It staggered, tripped, should have fallen, but did an incredible forward flip that twisted its body all the way around in midair and put it on both feet facing her. By then, she’d reached the branches above, though the audacity of the troll’s acrobatics stopped her in her tracks, mouth forming a perfect O of astonishment and no little envy.
She had to leap a body length into the air and then haul herself up onto the branch. The troll reached it from where it stood in a single bound. Elora hadn’t waited. The branches of the trees had long ago grown in and around each other, forming a comprehensive canopy over the glade. The larger ones were broader across than her own body, which made it easy to run from one to the next. She changed levels as well, scampering monkeylike into the higher reaches of the tree. The troll eagerly accepted her challenge, supremely confident of its own ability to catch her no matter where she fled.
That was when she let him have it, right in the chops, with a branch she’d bent nearly double, a strain so great she was sure her joints would pop. The branch whipped around with the force of a catapult. It swept the troll right off its perch and out of the tree entirely. The creature looked almost comical, seeming to hang suspended in the air for a brief moment before it began its fall, so stunned by the impact that its feline reflexes didn’t begin to react to this new situation until just before it struck the ground. As Elora had planned, it landed on the slope and this time didn’t stop tumbling until it reached the bottom of the arroyo. The troll regained its feet immediately, of course, and put all its formidable strength into the scramble back to the top.
Elora dropped to the ground the moment her pursuer took flight, landing right in front of the barrow entrance. She cried an apology to the residents within and pitched herself forward just like the heroine of the story Thorn had told her, arms extended full-length as though she was diving into a pool of water. Right then, she thought all her stratagems had gone for naught as her shoulder caught a corner of root just within the portal and she found herself stuck fast. The sound of the troll’s hunting cry, the sight in her mind’s eye of her being yanked unceremoniously backward into its grasp, was all the impetus she needed for a wrench of upper body, coupled with a tremendous heave of her legs, to pop her past the obstruction and completely through the entry passage. As she pitched into darkness her hands stabbed out to either side to try to find the safety lines strung along the paths the brownies used. One line held, the other crumbled in her grasp, and with a yelp of fright, she suddenly found herself dangling by three fingers over a pit big enough to swallow a full-grown Daikini with room to spare.
She tried to close her fingers around the line, at the same time scrabbling for purchase with her other hand and toes.
The troll’s breath gusting through the entryway almost finished her as surely as its wildly flailing hand. The stench made her stomach heave, she barely managed to hold on to lunch and blessed the fates she hadn’t had that much to eat. Fortunately brownies planned their barrows well, keeping in mind every kind of predator that might pit itself against them, be it snake, badger, mountain lion—or troll. The access was too narrow to admit the creature and the passage itself was longer than its arm, even at its fullest and most painful extension.
The troll tried tearing at the portal to enlarge it, but again brownie engineering proved more than its match. The entrance was framed by the oak’s roots. Any decent excavation would have to involve removing them. The troll may have had the wit to realize that, and the will to give it a try, but it didn’t possess the tools. Its strength was of little use—this oak was too old, its body too massive—and the troll’s claws would break in fairly short order against bark weathered to the consistency of metal.
After a time, wherein it subjected Elora to an endless succession of cacophonous howls that left her as deafened as its breath had left her nauseated, there was no more scrabbling at the entry, no more shrieking, no more smell. The barrow lost even the pretense of light and the air took on a damp and earthen chill that made her wish for something more substantial than her shift.
Over the course of her impromptu incarceration, she’d succeeded in catching hold of the line with her other hand and finding an uncomfortable purchase on the narrow ledges that ringed the top of the pit. Like Thorn, she possessed a wizard’s NightSight, the ability to see in absolute darkness, but that proved no help whatsoever. Around her, along the track etched in the wall of the pit, were revealed the main tunnels of the barrow, a half dozen to her count: all had been intentionally blocked. Worse, when she looked down she saw that the floor of the pit had been filled with stakes, branches mostly, firmly emplaced in the ground, their tips sharpened to barbed and wicked points. She wouldn’t be the first to fall victim to the trap, either. There was a collection of bones piled at the bottom, and a carcass still impaled that would likely join them before the next spring.
“That’s very nasty,” she said to herself, brow furrowing as she considered the implications. She wasn’t surprised at the pitfall. Brownies fought like demons to defend their homes and loved ones and were rarely inclined to show mercy to those who threatened them. For all that ferocity, however, they weren’t by nature killers. Given the choice, they woul
d much rather strip a foe of pride and dignity than of life.
Actually, she thought—remembering the many occasions when she’d seen Rool and Franjean double-team some poor benighted soul, occasionally herself, more often Thorn—they don’t just enjoy tormenting and humiliating their enemies, they pretty much love tormenting and humiliating their friends.
To the brownies, life was the greatest comedy ever staged, and their role in it to delightfully butcher every sacred cow that wandered across their path. The more pompous the pretension, the more delight they took in cutting it down to size.
This deadfall wasn’t in character, it was the kind of snare a Daikini would set. And that disturbed her far more than the burrow’s evident abandonment.
Her fingers hurt, her arms hurt, her shoulders hurt, which she decided was a good thing. The moment to worry was when everything went numb. She put any concerns about the condition of the safety line firmly and irrevocably from her mind. If it held, it held. If not, there was precious little she could do about it.
She couldn’t stay where she was. The question was, how to go? And which way?
Elora reached out with her InSight, praying for the response of a sympathetic thought anywhere within mind-shot, a pair of eyes and ears she might briefly “borrow” to make certain the coast was clear. She made a sour face at the response. Nothing in the way of higher-order animal life, she had to content herself with insects and small lizards.
The bugs were the worst. Not only were their thought patterns rudimentary, their actions defined by the biological cues of scent and taste rather than any voluntary decision, but the construction of their bodies was frighteningly unlike anything Elora was used to. When she tried to gaze through their faceted eyes, it was akin to peering through a wildly distorted fun-house lens. More frighteningly, her attempts to meld perceptions so that she might properly interpret those images immediately stretched the link with her human consciousness nearly to the breaking point.
The link was possible, she knew that even as she sprang desperately back to her own mind, as daredevil and potentially deadly a feat as her tumble down the barrow’s entrance. She had the knowledge, she possessed the basic skill. What was lacking was practice.
“Serve me right,” she told herself over and over again, clocking her head back against the wall behind her, each gentle thump giving physical emphasis to her spoken rebukes, “serve me right, serve me right.”
Thorn had made himself plain from the start.
“Talent is a wondrous thing, Elora Danan,” he told her. “But it’s only raw material. Much like the molten ore in Torquil’s furnace. It has to be refined, then shaped into its ultimate form before it can serve its proper purpose as a tool. As you master the craft and art of iron, the same applies to that of sorcery.”
“Except I’m not a sorcerer,” she retorted sharply. It hadn’t been one of her better moods, nor their better days.
“Sorcery,” he said with a gentle implacability that made her suddenly think of Torquil, “at bedrock is the imposition of will on one power or entity by another. It is an exercise of might. The way given you to access magic—and make no mistake here, young lady, you can access magic—is different. In its own way, far more difficult. Even humbling. You must ask the powers involved, the entities involved, for help. Charm them, cajole them, inspire them, terrify them, whatever; there must be a give-and-take, whereas a sorcerer need only take. The tools you are given to work with are not sigils or spells or wands or any of the paraphernalia the likes of me take for granted. You have to work with things that live, and have a free will of their own. So, for your own survival, you treat them with respect. You’re bound together, like the Circles of Creation. Your survival is theirs is yours.”
He’d given her a list of exercises, and the creatures he expected her to work with. She’d always felt she’d done her best. There was just so much to do around the forge and the home, she found it easier to let herself be distracted.
She found a skink foraging through the empty tunnels, and her delight at the discovery of something she could work with almost brought disaster to them both. She forgot, until it was nearly too late, how small the lizard’s mind was compared with hers and in her eagerness to take control almost poured more energy into the tiny creature than it could safely withstand.
Her next approach was far more cautious, and attempted only after she’d sung a gentle song of healing to ease the shock of that brief contact.
The tunnels were empty, stripped bare, and not in any hurried or frantic evacuation either. Great care had been taken to leave nothing behind and then to seal the burrow by collapsing formidable stretches of passageway.
Likewise, she discovered after exchanging her underground companion for one scampering among the grass and flowers above, the dryads who would normally inhabit the hearts of trees as ancient and venerable as these had also fled. That couldn’t have been an easy decision on their part, Elora knew, because wood nymphs mated with their trees for life. Separation could only be accomplished with many spells and much preparation.
She took heart from the fact that she’d found a lizard on the surface. None would have shown itself if the troll was still lurking.
When she finally emerged from the barrow, the only sign of the troll was a lingering scent, the noisome residue of its presence.
It was still dusk, the air suffused with a magnificent twilight that would last well into the evening.
Her clothes and gear were gone, she discovered upon her return to the pond. She wasn’t surprised. Trolls understood the concept of possessions and, more important, the value of those possessions to their owners. More than one unfortunate wayfarer had met an untimely demise following the trail left by a stolen pack or garments.
Find the troll, find her stuff. But what then?
Her stomach growled, reminding her it had been a long and very active day. She’d lost her garland crown within a few steps of beginning her mad dash from the pool, but a breath of honeysuckle on the breeze led her quickly to where it fell. She plucked a brace of petals and sucked them dry, savoring the rich taste of their nectar.
Tired as she was, she still moved with a lithe and near-boneless grace as she closed on the troll’s den, so silent in every aspect she would put a ghost to shame. She recalled the sensation of her body melting and re-forming as she swam among the firedrakes and raised her hands before her to where she could see them. She took hold of a forearm, to find the flesh still firm to her touch, the bones comfortingly solid. She thought she looked the way she’d always been, at least since Angwyn, and yet she was just as positive that she’d changed.
She’d always measured herself against her companions, and chafed in silent frustration because every time she came up wanting.
Khory Bannefin was human, at least in form. Her soul, if the term even applied, was that of a demon. Ryn Taksemanyin was of the sea-dwelling Wyrrn. He was poetry to watch, on land as in the water. Khory was a warrior, with a grace to her movements that came from years of study. She was very close to a match for Ryn. Elora had never been so gifted.
Even though Ryn was extraordinarily patient with her as he demonstrated patterns of movement over and over again, Elora always hated the way her body tripped her up short. No matter how much she desired, how hard she thought she tried, she never came close. Thorn’s kind and understanding explanation—that she was still a child who hadn’t yet begun to properly grow, and moreover a child whose whole life to that point had been one of sloth and indulgence—provided no comfort. She wanted results and in those days was used to having every desire instantly gratified.
Perhaps, she thought amusedly, that, too, is one of the hurdles of my old life I had to overcome. Certainly one of the first things Torquil taught me.
She looked across her shoulders from east to west, wondering which direction would take her back to the halls of the Rock Nelwyns. She shu
ddered, just a little, with a flash of fear that if she undertook that journey, she’d find the Nelwyn stronghold as abandoned and desolate as this brownie barrow.
The world felt no different to her, and she wondered if she would notice if all its magic was stripped away?
I’m supposed to be bound to all the Realms, she worried. If the World Gates are sealed shut, if the Deceiver steals all that power for himself, what happens then to me? Or is that maybe why I’m so important to the Deceiver—because through me he can reach all the Realms? Am I the battering ram he’ll use to force the Gates open again? Was that what Carig was doing with me? Only he didn’t know it was me at first, he was genuinely surprised when he found out. She shook her head violently.
Stop thinking like that, she demanded of herself. This isn’t about you—not all of it anyway. If the Deceiver wins, what happens to everything? Maybe Carig was Summoning some force or other to fight him? From the way he talked, that would make sense. But it also sounded like he was ready to destroy his own people in the process. I’ve never heard of any Nelwyn acting like that.
She shook her head, only this time more gently and out of weariness. Folks always talk about fighting fire with fire, she thought. Can you defeat one evil with another?
A question for Thorn. Only there was no Thorn at hand, and precious few letters since he’d left her.
Focus, she told herself sternly, deliberately quashing the surge of anger she felt at her so-called protector, on the task at hand.
Troll dens were generally easy to find, you just had to be able to stand the awful stench. No rubbish tip could match it, nor any abattoir she’d seen.
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