The Troll King (The Bowl of Souls Book 9)

by Trevor H. Cooley

  “Yes, Steff. I know you want me to ride. Just be patient a little while longer,” he said. John glanced over his shoulder to find his face just inches from the base of its chitinous tail. He turned away with a grimace. “Ugh. Stop that! You know I don’t like it when you do that.” He gave Tarah an exasperated look. “Cats. Come, Tarah. No more standing around.”

  The six-legged cat meowed an entreaty, but the Prophet started down one of the Jharro root pathways, using Esmine’s staff like a walking stick. He used long strides and Tarah hurried to join him. The cat padded along sullenly and quietly behind them.

  “I have been wanting to ask you,” Tarah said, gesturing back at the strange animal. “What is that thing?”

  “Steff is a rogue horse,” he replied. “As you may have noticed, I use them as mounts from time to time.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Tarah said, looking at the cat with greater appreciation. “You were riding that gorilla one that I was tracking over the winter. What ever happened to him?”

  “Rufus? Ah, well I left him to find the bonding wizard who best suits his needs. I was reluctant to part with him but it’s one of the tasks I set myself centuries ago. That was their original purpose after all.” He let out a bittersweet sigh. “There are very few left now. Sooner or later they will all be gone. It will be a sad day when I give the last one away.”

  Tarah nodded thoughtfully, looking at the staff he held as he walked. “So if Esmine hadn’t been killed, would you have found her a bonding wizard too?”

  “Esmine was a special case.” He followed Tarah’s eyes and held the staff out towards her. “Are you ready to take her back yet?”

  “Well . . .” Tarah reached out, but hesitated to grasp it.

  He lowered the staff and continued using it as a walking stick. “She frightened you with her behavior, didn’t she? When I picked her up she was furious that you intended to leave her behind.”

  “She put me through something I had no wish to go through again,” Tarah admitted. “I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore.”

  “An understandable reaction,” he said.

  “Why did she do it?” Tarah asked. “She tell you that?”

  “As I was saying, Esmine is a special case. She is different from the other rogue horses, you see.”

  “How?” Tarah asked. She certainly seemed more horse-like than the other rogue horses she had seen.

  “Well, Stardeon designed the rogue horses to be the perfect mounts. They were meant to be strong, long-lived, powerful, and eager to serve. In fact, he made them eager to a fault. They grow very unhappy if they aren’t serving their purpose,” he explained. “Esmine, on the other hand was designed with stealth in mind. This made her sly and more than a little feisty. Sometimes those personality traits override the more basic emotions he built into her.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Tarah agreed.

  “I first noticed this myself on the day I tried to round them up after Stardeon’s fall. Esmine didn’t want to follow along with me. She ran off on her own,” he said. “She wasn’t the only one. The majority of them were captured by dwarf smugglers or wizards. I feared that Esmine would perish like the rest of them, but she managed to keep herself free for all these years.”

  “She is a survivor.” Tarah said with more than a little pride in her voice. “She grew real independent over that time. I guess that’s one of the reasons she has become so difficult to deal with.”

  “Yes. Independent and perhaps a little delusional,” he said. “I imagine she was already difficult to deal with before you picked up that dark dagger from the dead wizardess.”

  “Yeah,” Tarah said. Esmine had been restless and pushy from the beginning, but now that Tarah thought about it, the rogue horse had gotten a lot worse after she picked up the knife. “Are you telling me that what she did to me today was because of that thing?”

  He shrugged. “In part. The magic of the grove increased the strength of the dagger, which projects feelings of anger or misery, so that certainly couldn’t have hurt. But I believe there are several factors that led up to her little outburst today. Remember she spent a thousand years as a free creature, roaming the land at her will. Imagine how you would feel if you were suddenly trapped in a staff, unable to go anywhere unless you were carried there by your master.”

  Tarah frowned. She hadn’t thought about it like that. Considering it from that angle, Esmine’s anger made a lot of sense. “I guess by binding her to that staff I made her pretty unhappy.”

  “Don’t feel guilt over that,” he said, reaching out to pat her comfortingly on the shoulder. “You made the best choice available, Tarah. You kept her out of the hands of that gnome warlord.”

  “I suppose,” she said. The fact that the Prophet thought so did help her feel a little better.

  They reached the outskirts of the grove and walked down the last root path. The Prophet paused at the edge just before the root plunged into the lush black soil. “May we sit? There is one more thing we must discuss before I take leave of you.”

  He sat on the edge of the root, and rested Esmine’s staff across his knees. Tarah glanced around before sitting on a nearby rock that jutted out of the ground as if made for the purpose. “Where are you headed from here?” she asked.

  “I’m still trying to decide that.” A troubled look passed through his eyes. “I feel torn, Tarah. There are several large, possibly world-changing, events that are building right now and I cannot personally deal with all of them. The reason I have been here in the grove is that it is one of the few remaining places in the known lands where I can fully communicate with my master.” He sighed. “The choice has been left up to me.”

  The Prophet had a master? Tarah had never heard that before. He seemed like such a power unto himself. She wondered why he was opening up to her of all people. “Uh, which one of these ‘events’ needs you most?”

  The cat-like rogue horse stretched and laid on her back next to the Prophet and placed her large furry head on his lap. He let go of the staff and scratched under her chin while he thought. “Therein lies my difficulty. Every one of these battles involves places and people within the realm of my responsibility and I fear that no matter which one I choose, major players, people that I care for, will die.”

  “Isn’t one of those places here?” Tarah asked. War was coming to Malaroo, she was sure of it.

  “It is,” he admitted.

  “Then why not stay here and help?” The choice seemed an obvious one to her. After all, she had just learned for herself how important the grove was.

  “I would like to,” he said. “But much of the responsibility in this event belongs to someone else. Besides, I have already placed a great deal of pieces here to deal with the problem. I must trust in the people here, including you, to protect this place.”

  That seemed incredibly irresponsible in Tarah’s mind. “But didn’t you say that some of us are going to die if you leave?”

  “There is no guarantee that everyone would survive even if I were to stay. No, I must choose one of the other areas of danger.” A weight lifted off of him as he made the decision. “I shall go west from here. Perhaps doing so will only delay the inevitable, but sometimes sacrifices must be made for the betterment of all. Thank you, Tarah. Speaking with you helped.”

  Tarah frowned. That statement didn’t make her feel any better.

  Steff tired of being rubbed under the chin and rolled over so that he could scratch behind her horse-like ears. A rumbling purr echoed from her large body.

  “My next destination is not what I intended to speak with you about, however,” John said. “It has to do with your father and grandfather and why you are so reluctant to take back this staff.”

  “Did Esmine tell you what she did?” Tarah asked.

  “She was a bit too stubborn to do so,” he said. “However, I did speak to both Rolf and Gad.”

  Tarah blinked. “You can do that? Speak to the dead?”

  �
�It is not usually something I do. The dead are quite busy. But this is a special case.” He stopped scratching the rogue horse and leaned forward. “You, see, their souls are still partially tied to this staff.”

  Tarah’s face paled and she licked her lips a few times as she tried to think how to reply to that. “How?”

  “As you heard earlier, Rolf’s blood was absorbed by the staff years before you received it. Your father’s was absorbed some time later. It’s not clear to me when, only that you were holding the staff at the time.”

  Tarah felt her throat tightening up. “The bear trap.”

  It had happened a year before he died. They had been hired to hunt a bear near the outskirts of Pinewood. Gad had become well known for his fearlessness in tracking down large animals. Only the logger that had hired them hadn’t told them about the traps he had already laid out.

  The one that grabbed Gad was a heavy iron monstrosity and it had cut him to the bone. There had been so much blood. Tarah had tried frantically to pry it open with her staff. Finally her papa had used the Ramsetter to cut the trap off himself. Then he had insisted that they kill the bear first before he let her stitch him up. Tarah had always been suspicious that the bear trap had been the reason he had caught the rot. The wound had never been properly cleaned.

  “Then all this time . . . they’ve been trapped,” she said.

  “No,” John replied. “A blood staff doesn’t bind souls on its own. It merely creates a connection to make it easier for the wielder to complete the binding process. However, since that process was never completed, they remained linked to you in a real, but intangible way. That’s why you were finding it so hard to let them go. I saw this when I first touched the staff.”

  “But why are they still connected to it. When I bound Esmine to the staff and the blood drained from it . . . weren’t they released?” Tarah asked.

  John ran his fingers down the runes in the wood. “When Esmine was bound to this staff, she saw into your mind and she recognized that their two souls were important to you. So she used her considerable power to keep those links active. This allowed her to communicate with them even though you could not.”

  Tarah’s lips trembled. “Then that’s why she knew all those things about them. Things I never remembered learning.”

  “Yes. But please consider this. As misguided as her approach was, she wanted to make you happy,” the Prophet explained. “That’s why Esmine continued using their forms to talk to you even after you asked her not to.”

  She placed her face in her hands. “What do I do about this, John?”

  “About your father and grandfather? There’s nothing you need to do,” the Prophet said. “I have spoken with them and they wish to have the link between them and the staff removed. I told them that I would do so.”

  “They want it gone?” Tarah said.

  “They do. Not because it causes them any pain or discomfort, but because of the pain it causes you. They are glad that you remember them, but they don’t want you to be haunted by those memories.”

  “They said this to you?” Tarah said, a knot rising in her throat.

  He shrugged. “Well, your father did. Rolf mainly just grunted in agreement and said things like, ‘Tarah Woodblade shouldn’t cry’ and ‘Tarah Woodblade don’t need no man.’ I believe that statement was referring to your attachment with Djeri. Your father disagrees, by the way. He quite likes him.”

  A laugh escaped Tarah’s lips and she wiped tears from her eyes. “I thought they would feel that way.” She sniffed. Now that she knew that they were there, it felt like she was losing them all over again. “John, what if I’m not ready to let them go?”

  “I am afraid that you don’t really have a choice in the matter. Both of them have asked me to sever the connection and I am going to honor their wishes.” The Prophet gave her a kind smile. “I can, however, let you say goodbye to them one last time. Would you like that?”

  Tarah nodded. “Please.”

  He reached out to her. “Give me your hands.”

  He grasped her hands in his and Tarah was no longer sitting at the edge of the grove. She was standing in front of her old home built over the entrance to a cave. It wasn’t as she had last seen it, burned down and smoldering. It was the way it had been back when she was twelve.

  Grampa Rolf was sitting on the front porch, carving a piece of wood and her papa was standing to the side, scraping down a bear hide that he had laid over a workbench. Both of them looked up as she approached.

  “Tarah!” said Grampa Rolf, leaping up from his chair to greet her first. He pulled her into his wiry embrace. “I’m proud of you, girl. You’ve become even better than I imagined you would be. And you know I imagine big.”

  “I missed you, Grampa Rolf. I . . .” Her brow furrowed.

  “Yeah, I ain’t too proud about what I done in my past,” he said, pulling back, his gaze regretful. “I wasn’t too happy about it when John told you.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking about,” she said. “It’s just that when you were dying-.”

  “Hey, don’t you worry about what that Esmine showed you. It weren’t never your fault. Old men die of old man stuff.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “What I want you to remember when you think of me is just stuff I taught you. I know it weren’t all good, but pick the good ones.”

  “Okay grampa,” she said.

  He gave her one more quick squeeze and kissed her cheek, then stood back, letting Gad take his place. Her papa’s embrace was firmer and longer. “You know, we had lots of last hugs when I was sick, but I like this one better.”

  “Oh papa!” Tarah said, tears rising in her eyes once again. She held him tight and let go of all other thought. This was how she wanted to remember him. This was her papa, strong and vital, not frail and weak like he had been when he was ill.

  “Tarah, I wanted you to know that I’m glad the Ramsetter didn’t just stay buried with me. That dwarf . . . friend of yours is a good choice for my sword.”

  “John said you liked him. Is that really true? I was worried that you wouldn’t like me being with a dwarf.”

  “I don’t like it!” Rolf barked.

  “Shut up, Rolf. This is my time,” Gad snapped, then looked back at Tarah. “I don’t see how him being a dwarf matters. He’s strong. He’s an academy graduate, which definitely helps.” He smiled. “But more importantly, he cares for you and he sees you for who you are.” His smile faded slightly. “Though I do wish you had waited until you got married.”

  “Papa!” she said, her cheeks turning red. She hadn’t considered that he would have known about that.

  “I should have gotten around to talking to you about that kind of stuff, but I don’t know. It wasn’t easy. That’s a talk for a momma to have, you know.” He cleared his throat. “The important thing is that he makes you happy and all that.”

  “He does,” she said, though his focus on the subject made her slightly uncomfortable. They were talking like she and Djeri were all but married and honestly, Tarah hadn’t given it much thought. She had too many other things to worry about. Like the rebellious soul of a rogue horse and a gnome warlord that needed to be stopped.

  “Well, the main thing, Tarah is that you know I’m proud of you,” he said. “Don’t worry about the rest.”

  She pulled back. “I love you. The both of you.”

  “We know,” her papa assured her. “And hey, this isn’t goodbye forever.”

  “Just make sure I don’t see you again until a long time from now,” added Grampa Rolf. “Tarah Woodblade has too many legends to make.”

  “I . . .” Tarah’s breath caught in her throat. They were gone. The house faded away too, until there was nothing left but milky white.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Prophet dropped her hands and gave her a sad smile. “It’s done. The connections are severed.” He lifted the staff. “Esmine is the only soul attached to this staff. The question now is do you want h
er back?”

  Tarah blew out a long slow breath. She wasn’t ready to deal with that yet. Papa and Grampa Rolf were gone. For real this time. No more voices in her head. She swallowed. “Would she still try to speak to me as them?”

  He shrugged. “I told her not to, and she says she is sorry about what she did, but she’s still Esmine. She no longer has their souls to gather information from and without the presence of that dagger to stir her up, things should be better.”

  Tarah nodded and reached out her hand. This time the Prophet paused before placing it in her fingers. “You should know that you don’t have to wield her. I know you feel that she is your responsibility, but the kind of power she is capable of in this form may not be the kind of power you want.”