Or so that cynical little bit of me was thinking. The rest of me was having a complete panic. Because my darling baby sister was gone!
“Goblins?” said Gerrold, sounding puzzled. “Goblins?”
But the word was taken up with increasing certainty and wrath by everyone else in the room, and before I knew it, people were shoving me out of the way again as they headed—somewhere. Probably even they didn’t know where. All they knew was that they had an answer, that Goblins had taken Aurora and that they were going to get those Goblins.
And a tiny sane voice in the back of my head said, Goblins? But… why, exactly? And—how? How did they even get as far as the palace without being noticed, much less inside it?
Because even though I might have ruffled their proverbial feathers by having a dragon face them down in their own market, Goblins didn’t indulge in revenge. They were absolutely pragmatic about that sort of thing—because they knew that eventually I’d want information from them again and they’d make me pay for it in a much more satisfying and lucrative way. There was nothing the Dark Fae could do to them to force them to take Aurora. They certainly would never do the Dark Fae’s dirty work for them for any amount of pay. Not only was there no profit in it, they already knew by now that doing anything to Aurora would bring the wrath of the entire kingdom down on them and possibly even the wrath of the Light Fae. They’d have to give up their market forever, and it would be unthinkable to lose that much profit.
Aurora would be of no use to them.
And that little piece of me remained calm and grew and grew until it took over as I stood there while the palace healer and Gerrold tried to revive the fallen guards and everyone else hared off into the darkness in search of Goblins. It tamped down the panic and sent me running for my room to change, then I leapt down the stairs and raced out of the palace into the garden. But I wasn’t going to the forest. I was going to try to get the door in the oak to take me to Brianna’s little “kingdom.”
I hadn’t gone there for an awfully long time, but I hoped Brianna hadn’t locked the door against me.
I put my palm on the tree and concentrated, and for a moment, I could feel the spell resisting me. But then I let my panic flow into it, and the door sprang open, and I dashed through.
It was night in Brianna’s little corner of the world too, but so much of her garden glowed in the dark that it was easy to race from the oak to her front door, where I stopped and pounded on it, sobbing a little.
What am I going to do if she’s not here? Was there some way of contacting her from here that I didn’t have in the ordinary world? Maybe.
But that question was quickly resolved as every window in the place lit up and the door opened so quickly that I almost fell through it.
Before Brianna could say anything, I was blabbering. “Something stole Aurora! It knocked the guards out and took her!” I clutched my hands together to keep them from shaking. “Gerrold did some sort of spell and said it was Goblins!”
“Goblins?” she exclaimed. “But that doesn’t make any sense! They wouldn’t take Aurora just for revenge on you, and they have never allied with the Dark Fae!”
“But what if they—”
But Brianna kept speaking. “They are immune to Fae powers. They have no interest in human politics. The only way they would be interested in Aurora is if she were a fully adult woman. A baby is of no use to them.” Which just confirmed what I had thought.
“Take me to her room!” Brianna demanded. “And to the guards who were watching her.”
We fled back to the door in the tree and went into the garden. I was running and Brianna was flying at about head height until we got to the palace, where we both ran as quickly as we could.
Taking her to the nursery was easy enough; it was totally deserted and even Melalee had been taken off somewhere. Brianna spent some time in it muttering under her breath about human magic muddling everything up and humans not being able to tell an aufhocker from a kelpie. Finding the guards was more problematic since there was no one to ask where they had been taken, but my first guess—the sick quarters attached to the palace healer’s rooms—turned out to be correct.
The healer hovered over one of them as we entered, and his face was a study in conflict as he realized I’d brought Lady Brianna. I could only assume that he was one of those who didn’t quite trust any Fae but who was far past his ability to actually do anything for the men. “Lady Brianna!” he exclaimed. She brushed past him and bent over the unconscious guard. I watched her weave spells that I didn’t understand in the least, but this time she didn’t say anything. Finally, she straightened up, her mouth a hard, thin line.
“It’s not magic,” she said, confirming what I had thought. “It’s a powder, a drug that was blown into their faces. They may or may not recover since it was never intended to be used on humans. Tend them and spoon-feed them broth twice a day; they’ll either wake up or they won’t. There’s no antidote.”
The healer’s face fell at this harsh news, but Brianna waved to me and we left the rooms before he could say anything.
“Trolls,” she said succinctly once we were out of hearing. “That’s stone-sleep dust, and only Trolls can make it or use it. And that makes no more sense than Goblins. Trolls can’t be magically coerced. And there are hundreds of tribes of them. I have no way to tell which tribe took her.” Then she gave me a stern look. “And don’t even think of using your amulet to find her. You’d find yourself deep in some inaccessible cavern surrounded by Trolls with no way to get help. You might not even be in Tirendell; depending on how much energy you put into that talisman, you could end up halfway across the world. Do you want to deprive your mother of both her children in a single day?”
I wanted to scream at her that I was going to do it anyway, but she was right. What could I do for Aurora if I was dead or a prisoner myself?
Brianna made a gesture in the air and suddenly her arms were piled with books. “Here,” she said, thrusting them at me, and I staggered as I took the weight of them in my own arms. “Go study these. See if you can find something. I need to talk to the King and Queen.”
And with that, she was gone, leaving me standing there, my arms encumbered with books and my emotions in complete turmoil.
I did as I had been told. Since there was no way I could have gone back to sleep, I took the heavy load of books back to my room. Anna and Elle were fully dressed and waiting for me. Of course they were; no one could have slept through all that racket, and surely someone had told them that Aurora had been kidnapped.
I knew from just looking at them that they already knew most of the story. Except for the fact that the villains weren’t Goblins but Trolls—Lady Brianna and I were the only ones who knew that. I made short work of that explanation and handed some of the books off to Anna and Elle. “Brianna said to search these for anything useful.”
They didn’t argue with me, and we lit every candle in my room, got more from the linen closet, and went to work until well after dawn. Anna used my little desk, and Elle and I worked cross-legged on my bed, using whatever book we weren’t reading as a makeshift desk. Ink on the bedclothes was not a concern at this point. It felt as if I had a fever, and I was terrified and angry and grief-stricken all at the same time.
One of the maids brought us something to eat—I don’t even remember what it was—and we read while we ate with one hand and took notes on parchment with the other.
We read until we all three eventually fell asleep over the books about midmorning. We woke up with stiff necks and raging appetites. I found a maid crying quietly in the stairwell and asked her to bring food from the kitchen for us, and we all bolted it down when it came. I got dressed, then we took everything down to the library and enlisted the help of the secretaries and clerks. By this time, the word had spread as far as the clerks that we were looking for Trolls, not Goblins.
No note, no mention, was too small for us to jot down. And the chief secretary took over the
notes himself, organizing them by category, and making fair copies on good parchment according to his tables of organization. Habits, known lairs, magic, weapons and warfare, interaction with humans, interaction with Fae—those are just the ones I remember. Known lairs were obviously the most important, and as soon as we were through our first passes of the books, he sent those to the King immediately.
The problem was… there weren’t any known lairs in Tirendell. Or at least there were no lairs that still had Trolls in them. Trolls are huge, much bigger than humans, and have gray skin. They live underground—not exclusively, but they can’t come up during daylight because the sun turns them to stone. Unlike Dwarves, who prefer to live underground but are perfectly comfortable above it. And according to the books, Troll lairs are much less sophisticated than Dwarven cities. There hadn’t been any Trolls here for generations, although there were cave complexes that were said to have housed Trolls in the remote past. Papa quickly sent messengers to the rulers of the kingdoms around ours where Trolls were known, to ask for permission to search for Aurora, but it was going to take time for them to get there, get responses, and get back. In some cases, we’d have to negotiate for permission, and we might have to give something in return for that permission. I tried not to think too hard about any of this. There wasn’t anything I could do except scour Brianna’s books—and all the books in the library—for information about Trolls. The boys had joined us by this point, even Rob, who had once complained about how much he hated reading.
We went through Brianna’s books again, this time much more slowly and with our old notes beside us, to see if there were any nuances that we hadn’t picked up on the first time.
And all the while, time sped with no sign of Aurora, and the certainty grew that her captors were far away.
Brianna had decided to be an emissary to the Goblins just to put paid to that possibility, and she brought back messages from the Goblin Market to the effect of What would we want with one of your mewling, useless larvae?—messages that were rude enough to sound genuine even to Papa. Finding Trolls, any Trolls, was far more problematic. Because it appeared that the Trolls did not want to be found. There were no sightings, no rumors of their recent existence, and even the Light Fae of other kingdoms had not seen or heard of them for many years.
So why had they taken Aurora in the first place? What could they possibly want with her?
Mama stopped eating and took to her bed and seemed to fade more with every passing hour. Papa seemed to have forgotten my existence.
And it seemed that there was nothing I could do as my own grief and rage built to the breaking point.
Since we hadn’t garnered any clues from the books, we were all taking out our frustrations on one another when we resumed our weapons training, this time in Brianna’s cottage. But tempers were flaring all around, and finally I broke after missing counters three times in a row and getting painful whacks on the shin and shoulder. “That’s it!” I shouted, throwing my wooden sword across the room and alarming Nat. “I’m not going to sit here and do nothing. Not anymore!”
At this point, everyone in the room was staring at me, Brianna included. But it was Anna who asked reasonably, “What can you do that everyone else isn’t already doing?”
“The Trolls didn’t just appear out of nowhere in the nursery, take Aurora, and vanish again,” I pointed out from between gritted teeth. “They had to have gotten in somehow! And we might still be able to track them!”
“But the palace was warded!” Nat argued. “On all sides!”
“But…” We all turned to Giles. He was white. “Not from below.”
Brianna rounded on him as if he were the one who had let the Trolls in. “What do you know?”
“Just—I was the kitchen boy who was sent most often down into the cellars for odd ingredients. And those cellars go a long way. I never went down as far as I could have, but there were cellars under the cellars under the cellars. The dungeon is locked and guarded—but the kitchen cellars aren’t, and there’s no one in the kitchen in the middle of the night.” He rubbed his hand fiercely across his eyes. “What if they got in that way?”
“Or tunneled in,” I said. “According to what we’ve read, they’re not as good at it as Dwarves, but then no one is. And if they did come in that way, they had to have passed through the kitchen. That’s where we can start.” I turned to Brianna. “Lobo should still be able to pick up a scent if they did, shouldn’t he?”
“Let’s ask him,” she replied, and the two of us went out to the little garden. She plucked a small silver hunting horn off her belt and blew on it. And it seemed an age before Lobo and Clarion came bounding into the garden from two different directions.
“Could you track Trolls in the palace?” Brianna asked, with absolutely no preamble. But Lobo didn’t seem taken aback or even mildly surprised by her abruptness. Then again, he must know about Aurora’s kidnapping by now.
“After all this time? Maybe. It depends on how many people have been trampling over things,” he replied, tongue lolling out and brow furrowed. “I’ll try my best!”
By this time, all of the others had come crowding out and had heard him. “I think we should all come,” Giles said.
“I think we should all get our armor and real weapons.” I straightened up to my full height and stared at Lady Brianna in a challenge.
But I needn’t have bothered. She was nodding.
Armed and armored, we walked into the kitchen with Lobo in our midst, much to the consternation of the cooks and helpers. But they didn’t stop us when Giles led the way to the stairs to the first of the cellars. In fact, they all cleared away so we could move freely when they saw where we were headed. A few of the brighter souls must have figured out why we were going there because I saw looks of alarm and urgent whispering. I wonder if Papa’s going to face a kitchen revolt if he doesn’t put a guard in the cellar now.
Just inside the door were lanterns and flagons of oil to replenish them. “Should we…” Rob gestured at the lanterns. But Brianna and I both shook our heads. I answered for both of us. “We can make stronger lights than those, lights that won’t run out of fuel.” And suiting actions to words, we created little balls of clear light that bobbed above our heads and lit up the first of the cellars. There was a faint scent of vegetables and a slightly stronger one of bacon. This cellar held barrels, sacks, and bales of stuff—flour, grains, vegetables, some fruits, things that couldn’t be stored in the deeper cellars because they couldn’t take the damp and would mold but were sturdy enough not to need the pantry. There was meat hung here too, and now that I knew how to look for it, there was a faint haze of magic on the walls, spells meant to retard spoilage rather than stop it altogether the way the spells did in the pantry. I could tell now that these were very old spells and probably dated all the way back to when the palace had been built.
Brianna gestured to Lobo, who began to sniff all over the cellar. And it wasn’t long before he gave a yip to alert us that he’d found something.
“I’ve never smelled Troll,” he said as we gathered around him. “But whatever I’ve found isn’t human and isn’t one of the things I’d expect in a human cellar.”
“The trail’s heading in the right direction,” Giles confirmed. “That is the way into the next cellar. Lead on, Lobo.”
Lobo led the way, nose to the stone floor, moving slowly and inhaling deeply so as to not miss anything. We went down a dozen stone steps into the next cellar, this one the home of preserved fruits, preserved meats, salted fish, cheeses, and vegetables that could be stored for months at a time.
I’d never been down here before. But now that I was here, it was obvious that the cellars had been cut out of the rock the palace stood on. Presumably so had the dungeons—which I also had never been to. It must have taken decades to cut these rooms out of the granite underneath the palace. I could not imagine how Trolls or anything else could burrow through this rock.
But Lobo was on
the trail of something, and we followed him down into what should have been the last cellar, which held wine, beer, and spirits. He led us all the way to the back behind a barrel that was taller than I am—and there it was.
A tunnel.
We stared at it, then at one another.
It was definitely a tunnel, and it was new. The rock inside the tunnel was a different color from the walls of the cellar, and there was a scattering of pebbles around the entrance.
Giles spoke up. “There’s no one here except the regular guards and a handful of squires. Everyone else is out there”—he waved his hand at the surface—“looking for Trolls or trying to get the Goblins at the market to give them information.”
“But we can’t go down that hole without telling someone,” I said firmly. “We’re not going to act like the children the King thinks we are. We don’t go rushing into something thinking we’re immortal because our cause is good. We—I—did that twice, and the only thing that got us in the end was a lot of trouble.” Granted, it also got us Serulan as an ally, but that happened because of plain, stupid luck.
And I hated to say this because I was dying to charge down that tunnel and find Aurora and do unspeakable things to the Trolls who had taken her. She was just a baby! How were they keeping her fed? Were they keeping her warm? It was cold down here, and it would be even colder in Troll caverns.
I didn’t ask myself if she was still alive. She had to be. Why would they have taken her instead of smothering her in her cradle?
The unspoken question was whom we should tell. Not the King, because he’d be enraged that we had reformed the Companions even though we’d figured out where the Trolls had come from.
I knew the answer to that. “Sir Delacar, of course. He’s the only one still in the palace with any authority except the seneschal, and a fat lot of good the seneschal will do. He’ll only dither about sending page boys to find the King. They’ve had Aurora for days.” I almost choked when I said that. “The time it will take to tell—no, show him—won’t matter that much.” And before anyone could object, I ran off. Not that anyone would. Sir Delacar was our friend, after all, or at least as much of a “friend” as a teacher and mentor could be.
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