At that very moment, in a dungeon beneath a fortress, a boy laughed as he threatened to kill the witch who stood before him. The potion in his hands was swirling as black as night, as black as death.
“It’s just you and me now—no one else to interfere. You aren’t so powerful now that you’re alone.” He gripped her by the throat.
“You’re wrong,” she whispered.
“How’s that?” said the boy. He uncorked the bottle, letting a single drop fall into the witch’s open mouth. At once, a dark, swirling fog poured out, choking her even as she tried to escape.
She gasped, struggling for breath. “She will come.”
“Who—that child who was with you? You think that somehow she will save you—from this?”
Moreg closed her eyes as the smoky vapor entered her veins, and the boy’s triumphant grin faltered as death didn’t come. Not for her. He should have known that she would fight, that she would be able to cling to life long after anyone else would have given up.
16
Calamity Troll
TROLL COUNTRY LAY in a somewhat dented and bruised corner of Starfell that few dared visit. Not surprising when its inhabitants saw carrying a weapon studded with nails and spikes as part of their national identity. It certainly wasn’t your top choice for a holiday destination.
In fact, very few people aside from trolls ventured to Troll Country unless they were rather desperate, or very stupid, or, like Willow and her friends, desperate but also in the company of a dragon. Even if he wasn’t really the dangerous sort, the trolls wouldn’t know that, or so Willow hoped.
The journey to Troll Country was a long one, and they’d managed to get a few hours’ sleep on Feathering’s back. Nolin Sometimes had worried that it would be dangerous to sleep in case they fell off, unless they had a bit of rope. Of course, no one did, but Essential had mentioned that she’d once lost an old jump rope, which was rather lucky. A few seconds later, it had come hurtling across the sky into Willow’s outstretched hands, and they’d managed to strap themselves securely to Feathering.
In the morning their stomachs started to grumble with hunger. Oswin passed around a loaf of bread and cheese he’d pilfered from the RV when no one was looking. “Wot?” he said innocently, scratching behind his ear with a rusty claw. “I knows we’re saving the world and everyfing, but body’s got to eat, don’t it?”
Just before noon, they arrived at a barren wasteland of rocky hills and bleached sand. Any plants or grassland had long been flattened beneath large flat feet, and the landscape looked dented, like holey cheese. Feathering explained that this was a result of the trolls’ daily club-throwing contests. As they flew, they saw tented villages and trolls of all kinds walking about dragging their knuckles, and their clubs, on the ground. Luckily none of them looked upward and spotted Feathering and his passengers.
Even from high in the sky Willow could safely say, based on the smell alone, that these were the sorts of creatures who might benefit from a great deal of soap and water. They made Oswin smell like a rosebush, which was saying something.
Following Sometimes’s directions, Feathering landed on a hillside.
“From what I saw of your mother’s memories, there’s a cave somewhere close by,” said Sometimes, slipping off Feathering’s back, “and from there, once you get inside, you’ll exit into a little valley leading to Parsnip Lane.”
“Why would she choose to live here?” asked Essential, pushing her glasses up on her small nose, which wrinkled in puzzlement.
“I have no idea,” said Sometimes, his eyes wide.
“It certainly can’t be for the peace and quiet,” said Feathering, as the distant sounds of clubs and fists rumbled through the hillside.
“Or the smell of the country air,” agreed Willow, stuffing her sister’s horseshoe scarf under her nose as they made their way inside a damp, moldy cave, which was just wide enough for Feathering. As they entered, they heard a dripping sound, followed by something that sounded like a waterfall. A waterfall, however, that was sniffling every few seconds.
Willow’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. On the ground were the littered remains of bleached bones, and as she stepped farther into the cave, she heard the sniffling sound again. “Did you hear that?” she asked.
The others shook their heads.
From within the bag she could hear a faint “Oh no. . . . Oh, me greedy aunt. . . .”
She swallowed. That was never a good sign.
Willow heard the sniffling again and paused. “This way,” she said, beckoning, and led her friends deeper into the cave. Up ahead they could hear the sound of gushing water, and in the gloom they could see large stalagmites and stalactites.
From one of his many pockets Nolin Sometimes produced a small lantern, and Feathering obliged by puffing a tiny bit of fire into it. Through the flames they saw that they were not alone after all.
Someone was crying. A rather big someone who looked to be made of stone, except for the part of it that had very red hair in two long braids down its back.
They approached very cautiously.
“Are you all right?” asked Willow, kneeling beside what looked a bit like an enormous stone ear the size of a small dinner plate.
The figure snuffled and turned a very large, very wide face toward Willow; it was marked by two long tracks of tears. It blinked enormous green eyes that were filled with water, which spilled over and splashed Willow’s shoes.
“I—I thought I was alone up here,” said the stonelike figure.
“Is that why you were crying?” asked Willow, realizing that it wasn’t a person made of stone; it was a troll. She’d never seen one up close before. In fact, the only time she’d ever seen one was on a “Beware of the Troll” sign, which usually showed a big figure with wild, matted red hair, sloping shoulders, missing teeth, and a club. But the troll crying in front of Willow had all its teeth and very neat red hair, and didn’t seem to have a club. Still. It was a female troll. Definitely a troll.
The creature shook her head. “No . . . I was crying because, well . . . I can’t remember what happened. And I can’t go back until I do.”
Willow handed the troll her horseshoe scarf to mop up her tears, which the troll took gratefully in her big stony fingers, dabbing rather delicately at her eyes.
“Can’t go back where?” asked Willow.
“Home,” said the troll.
“And why can’t you go home?” continued Willow, jumping aside as more tears rained down.
The troll sniffed. “Well, I was supposed to fight the great Verushka.” She paused for emphasis, then stared at their blank faces. “You know who she is?”
The friends shook their heads. This seemed to stop the troll’s crying temporarily, at least.
“Well, Verushka is the greatest warrior in all the troll tribes.”
“Wot, and you were supposed to fight this warrior?” blurted Oswin, who was eyeing the proceedings as usual from a hole in the hairy bag. At the troll’s look, the bag started to shake a little. “It’s jes’, I means, well . . .”
The troll sniffed again, then hung her head. “No, you’re right. I don’t look like a warrior, do I?” she said. Willow noted her neat hair and rather clean and fresh scent, like limestone, and couldn’t help nodding in agreement.
“Well, surely that’s not the end of the world?” asked Willow.
The troll shook her head. “You see, you may not know this, but most trolls aren’t very sensitive.”
“Really?” said Willow, giving the bag a small shake as the kobold started to giggle.
The troll continued. “Well, ‘Fierce’ is my family’s motto. All my brothers have necklaces made out of human bones that spell F-E-E-R-S.” The troll gave a woeful smile. “They aren’t good spellers either,” she said with a grin.
“My father was the chief, my mother was his general, but that was before she defeated him and made him her slave,” she said with a bit of a nostalgic sigh.
; At their shocked expressions she shook her head. “Oh, that’s normal in troll marriages. She built him a cage that she keeps right under her throne, which is also built out of bones. It’s somewhat of a theme, bones. She lets him out every few months when she’s feeling a little sentimental. . . .”
At their gasps she continued, “That’s considered quite a healthy troll relationship. Most troll wives eat their mates when they get too disagreeable, generally some time within the first year of marriage. . . . See, troll females are often the strongest and most vicious. They’re quite a lot bigger and hairier than the males, so they are much more valued. Well, usually. I’m the only girl in my family. As the chief’s daughter I was the pride of the clan . . . until I became their biggest calamity . . . which is funny, really, because that’s actually my name,” she said with a deep sigh.
“Anyway, my mother tried her best, but I just didn’t take to being a troll. Trolls live by the maxim ‘Club everything that moves once and club things that don’t twice.’ Only, of course, I didn’t like clubbing things. I was supposed to go out every day and learn how to use my club. Which seemed like a monumental waste of time. You pick it up, you conk somebody—it’s not hard to grasp,” she said.
Suddenly Sometimes keeled over backward in a dead faint.
“Oh no, not again!” cried Essential and Willow at the same time.
“What’s happened?” asked the troll, peering into the gloom.
But before Willow could explain properly Sometimes sat up, his eyes white. “You used to hide away from your family pretending that you were practicing the club, but you actually went to the woods beyond this cave, where you kept a garden no one knew about . . . and had a rabbit,” he whispered.
The troll’s eyes widened, and she gasped. “How does he know that?”
“He sees the past,” explained Willow.
The troll looked away, her face twisted in shame. She nodded. “He’s right. I did. He wasn’t even, you know, for food. . . . I just liked him. I even gave him a name. But when my mother found out, it was the worst day of my life,” she said, hanging her head.
“Trolls don’t have pets?” guessed Essential, pushing up her glasses.
Calamity frowned. “Well, no. I mean, I suppose Dad is a kind of pet . . . but no troll has ever kept a pet rabbit before or grown daisies just because they were pretty. But my mother . . . she did try to understand, in her way, after she sent my brothers to destroy the garden . . . and Jawbone.”
“Jawbone?” asked Feathering.
“The rabbit.”
Feathering gasped. “The beasts!”
Calamity nodded. “He ran away, thankfully. But that’s when the crying started, because I thought they’d killed him at first. The crying was the last straw, my mother said. I didn’t know what was happening to me; no one else did either. They had to send for the dwarf from across the valley. Dwarves are wise, you know. Anyway, he explained that crying was something that humans did.” She looked mortified.
“Don’t trolls cry?” asked Sometimes.
“No,” said Calamity. “Well, you can just imagine my family’s reaction. My brothers wanted to build me my own cage . . . right next to Dad’s. But my mother decided to give me one last chance. She’s a thinker, my mother—rare in trolls—but I think she knew that unless I pulled myself together, I’d forever be a scar against her name. So, under my own mother’s guidance, my training began. It was horrid,” she said with a shudder.
“But finally she said I was about as ready as I ever would be, and last Tuesday I was supposed to fight the great Verushka. But I don’t remember it.”
“You don’t remember anything?”
She shook her head. “And neither does anyone else, which some people thought was a bit suspicious. There were some who thought that maybe I had other human traits that I’d used.”
“Human traits? Like what?” asked Willow.
“Like magic—and maybe I’d made them forget somehow. I saw my brothers working on a cage in secret. So while they were sleeping, I ran away, but I still can’t remember what happened, and until I do, I can’t go home. So I’m stuck, perhaps forever.”
Willow shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
At Calamity’s look of surprise Willow told her what had happened to the missing Tuesday.
“So that’s what happened to me? The day was taken and with it my memories?” asked Calamity, her eyes wide.
Feathering nodded. “We think so,” he said, telling her about the baby dragon that should have hatched.
The troll’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s happened to all of us,” said Willow, swallowing as the purple hat with its jaunty feather—Granny Flossy’s hat—swam before her eyes, Granny’s face turned away from her. “And I think the thing I can’t remember from the missing day has something to do with my grandmother. . . . Maybe . . . something bad.”
Essential touched her shoulder. “It might not be.”
“We have to find out what happened,” said Willow, squaring her shoulders. “Even if”—her eyes filled—“even if maybe I’d rather not know. . . .”
Calamity sniffed, then nodded. “You’re right. It’s better to know. I might have been defeated. I probably was—but at least I would have proven that I was a troll, even if I was beaten. So how are you going to find the missing Tuesday?”
Willow told her about their plan and how they needed to find Moreg’s house. “It’s on Parsnip Lane,” she explained.
The troll nodded. “I know the way—I’ll show you,” she said, standing up and making the cave shudder. Willow blinked as the young troll towered over them at a massive eleven feet. Seeing their looks of surprise, Calamity shrugged, so that a neat red braid fell over her shoulder. “Yup, shortest troll you ever saw? I get that a lot,” she said with a woeful smile that was even more surprising for its row of perfect white teeth.
Willow shook her head. Calamity was the only troll she’d ever seen.
As they exited the cave into the valley beyond, Willow couldn’t help thinking that they were the oddest ragtag group of creatures ever seen, from the pearly indigo-blue dragon, Feathering, to the stony troll, Calamity, not to mention short Essential Jones, skinny Nolin Sometimes, herself, and her monster, Oswin. And for about a second, as she stepped into the warm sunshine, she felt a sense of pride at the small army she had assembled to rescue Moreg and the lost day.
Well, until she saw the storm of trolls waiting for them on the other side.
From within the hairy carpetbag came a small gasp. “Oh no.”
17
The Troll Army
THERE MUST HAVE been close to twenty trolls, though it felt like more, as each one of them was over fifteen feet high, stinking to high heaven, and wearing what looked like bits of human bone and teeth like odd, misshapen jewelry.
Willow took an involuntarily step backward as the biggest and hairiest troll was carried forward on a large throne made of bones. This troll was wearing what looked like an old vest and a leather skirt, her gray stonelike body covered in lichen, and when she opened her mouth, she gave a pitying sort of grin, full of lots of mossy teeth. “Humans, Calamity? What have we told you about playing with your food?”
Calamity bit her lip. “Um, Mum, I can explain.”
The troll chief sighed in a way that Willow recognized—she’d seen the same sort of look on her mother’s face enough times in the past.
“Really? We’ve been looking for you. . . . It’s not very troll to run away.”
The trolls around her started cracking their knuckles and pounding their clubs on the ground in agreement.
“I told them you were young, scared, not ready yet for your destiny, afraid to follow in your father’s noble footsteps,” she said, pointing to a giant cage beneath the throne in which a smaller troll was squashed. He raised three stony fingers to wave woefully at his daughter.
“But I never thought it was true . . . that you ha
d really gone to the witch beyond the cave for help. Except here you are.”
Calamity twiddled her long red braid nervously. “It’s not like that,” she told the ground.
Willow stepped forward. “It’s the witch who needs your help.”
The troll chief blinked enormous moss-colored eyes. “Did that little ant just speak to me?” she asked in shock. There were guffaws all around.
Feathering took a step forward, his head lowering menacingly, golden eyes gleaming.
“Oh, I see the humans brought along a pet,” the chief said. “Kind of you to consider us like that—a bunch of skinny humans doesn’t really go too far for dinner. This, however, should do nicely.” She eyed Feathering’s considerable size.
He snarled, smoke curling out of his nostrils.
“Seize them,” said the troll chief.
A nearby troll grabbed Willow and lifted her up. Willow’s mind whirred, and then she did something that was rather brave and rather stupid.
“Verushka!” she shouted.
Everyone around her gasped. “She dares to speak the name of our greatest warrior! Did she just call the great Verushka by her name?”
Suddenly an enormous thirteen-foot troll powered to the front. Her skin was like granite, her red hair a collection of knotty coils like serpent’s tails, and her anthracite eyes glinted with cold fire.
Willow swallowed. “You want to know what happened that Tuesday, right? What happened at the battle?”
“I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!” she roared.
Willow shook her head, swallowed, then summoned up all her courage and the air in her lungs and shouted. “NO, YOU DON’T, AND NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE!”
There was a deafening silence all around, and then the trolls started to murmur among themselves.
The troll holding her squeezed her painfully around the middle. “Squelch it? Can I squelch it?”
There were murmurs of agreement all around.
“Dimsrat likes to squash,” said the troll, referring to herself in the third person. “Best squasher.”
Starfell: Willow Moss & the Lost Day Page 12