Tired but not exhausted from her trip into the troll’s lands, she tried not to sleep, but rather to rest with one eye upon the cave from a perch upriver. Softened by her regular meals at Mossbell, she regretted her missed dinner as the moon rose.
She heard the troll breathing before she saw it. A snerk-snerk-snerk sounded from the cave, startling her into full awareness.
A face emerged in profile from the cave, if it could be called a face. A fleshy orb at the end of a long snakelike body no thicker than Wistala’s tail emerged and waved around. Whether the head smelled, heard, or saw the approaches to the cave mouth, Wistala could not say.
Wistala was just congratulating herself on not being afraid of the wormlike body when two giant limbs unfolded themselves from the cave mouth, gripping the rocks above with three-toed hands. They pulled out a stumpy body split by a wide mouth that reminded her of a frog, especially since its skin seemed wet with some kind of oily extrude. At the tail end, a pair of smaller, but still spindly, limbs steadied the body as long forelimbs did the work of climbing.
Wistala realized she’d been mistaken in her analysis of the tracks. The troll was almost all forelimbs—thick near the body and digits but bone-thin through the long middle part and joint. Its hind legs ended in the smaller graspers she’d mistaken for hands.
The troll’s body seemed featureless save for warts establishing a striped pattern back from the edges of its wide mouth. A snorting sound came from the troll. It shifted and stiffened, opened the huge mouth, and spat out a mass about the size of a large pumpkin. It splattered on the rocks below, and Wistala recognized the foul smell of troll waste even at that distance.
Wistala watched in wonder as the long arms folded against the stars; then it sent its snakelike sensing-and-breathing (she assumed) organ over the edge of the cliff to examine the ground. The snerksnerk-snerk sounded again, and it reached up with those tree-length arms and pulled itself up and over the ledge. As it breathed, its body expanded and contracted at the pale belly.
Then it was gone.
She argued with herself over exploring the troll’s cave. For all she knew, it was full of hungry young trollings or a she-troll, if such even existed. Then there was the danger of the troll coming back and squashing her the way she might burst a tick under her sii.
In the end, caution won. She trembled at the thought of an encounter with the thing. Her nerve wasn’t what it was when she explored the ruins of Tumbledown or outwitted bears with Auron. She crept back in the direction of Mossbell.
Rainfall’s eyes went agog: “Poison a troll? You might as well poison a stone,” Rainfall said. “They thrive on a month’s-rotten corpse.”
Wistala looked across the wide book table at him. Most of his library shelves held nothing but cobwebs, but a few volumes remained behind glass, and it seemed natural history was a favorite subject of his. If they could somehow get the troll to eat of a poisonous plant—
“He’s temporary,” Rainfall said. “The troll’s ruining the estate, but he won’t live forever. Mossbell was standing before he came; it’ll still stand after he dies.”
Gentle was a fine quality, but this, this, passivity vexed her. “It’s not a storm. There’s got to be some way to rid a land of a troll.”
“Yes. Starve it. But the wild pigs and goats have moved west of the road, and even if we hunted them down to the last piglet, the troll would just feed from the riverbottom. Or worse, come after my goats or Avalanche.”
“Apply to your thane—”
Rainfall grew so agitated that he interrupted her. “Tried and tried again.”
Wistala hated even to mention her final idea. “This Dragonblade fellow. If he’s able to kill dragons, I’m sure he could handle a troll.”
“An excellent idea, but I’ve no money to hire him. The only thing I have of value is the title to Mossbell. The Dragonblade can’t expect to profit from the small reward. And then a troll’s skin and bones yield little compared with—I beg your pardon.”
Yes, the odds and ends of a dead dragon bring a great deal of money. Neither here nor there.“You must have some weapons. Arm your crew that helps you maintain the roads.”
“What are we to do, snare it with the crane? Shovel gravel at it? While it’s been long since I’ve engaged in an argument, I’d wish we could engage over the merits of Swanfellow’s songs, or Alfwheat’s dramas. The troll! The troll! As if he doesn’t hang over this estate like a cloud, you have to bring the gloom into my library.”
Spring came.
Wistala feasted on the sun each day as she would on a slaughtered sheep. A wooded copse stood at the base of one of the twin hills, and there was an old half-blown-over walnut still fighting for life, judging from the buds upon the upper branches. Wistala liked to nap on the incline or watch the clouds go by, idly taking up bark beetles with her tongue as they explored the rotting underside of the walnut.
Sometimes she ventured up the easterly of the twin hills and watched the road that ran between, crossing a stream at two short stout bridges. There was little traffic, and as far as she could tell, her host derived no benefit from it. Carts, wagons, and passengers on foot hurried through Rainfall’s lands as though the ground were accursed—which it was, in a sense.
Traffic on the road went so far as to time their travel through Rainfall’s land. If headed north, the proper hour to step on the bridge seemed to be about two hours after sunrise. If heading south, one wanted to be on the road between the twin hills at about the same time. Each side would take some rest and water their animals at the walls and gates of Mossbell as the sun reached its zenith, but they’d admire its curious lines only from a distance as they ate preserved food out of bags and jars.
As far as Wistala could tell, Rainfall had all the duties of keeping a road open and drew none of the benefits. She explored just outside his lands along the road in the morning light and near dark and saw marketplaces and inns to either end of his lands, but thanks to the troll, no one dared set up so much as an applecart near the bridge.
Of course, need or ignorance or foolishness sometimes had messengers riding across the bridge at night. Rainfall showed her the effects of some combination of the three one morning—a pair of neatly bitten-off horse hooves and a dropped hat lying on the road with the stain and smell of blood on the gravel.
“Probably some young buck from Newcrossing trying to see his girl in Glenn Eoiye,” Rainfall said, picking up the hat. “That’s a new red feather in his hat, quill cut to write her love notes or a Letter of Intent. In a year, it’ll be a sad song, and in ten, they’ll have new names in the old tune.”
His Elvish fell effortlessly onto her ear with six months of practice. She responded easily: “I don’t suppose a company will be formed to kill the troll and avenge him.”
“Thane Hammar isn’t that energetic. Let’s see if we can learn more of the sad tale.”
They followed the tracks back to the bridge, and Rainfall gaped at what he saw. One whole side of the bridge’s superstructure had been torn away from the wooden repair in the center.
“Oh! I’d have an earthquake come if it would just seal that wretched troll in his cave. This is a month’s labor. I’ll have to hire timberers and see about chain and staples.”
Wistala checked the road for traffic before she ventured out onto the bridge. She crossed the arches, the high-running river filling both banks below, to closer inspect the damage.
“A rider comes,” Rainfall said, but Wistala already heard the hoofbeats and scuttled over the edge of the bridge on the downwind side. There was the briefest of ledges there so men might anchor themselves and inspect the stones at the bottom, and she could easily grip it with sii and saa.
She heard Rainfall call a greeting and recognized the Hypatian tongue used by men in these parts. The rider trotted on without reply. Wistala waited some moments as the elves reckoned time before climbing back up and employing her nostrils.
“Not so much as a wave of his hand,” Rainfall said. “And he wore the garb of a high tradesman. A man with an eye toward commerce is usually better mannered.”
“I found something under the bridge,” Wistala said. “I think it tells the tale of the young man with the red feather. The troll lurked under the bridge for some time, and had been there much before. Smears of droppings are all along the pilings.”
“It’s been a hard winter. Maybe it had trouble finding enough pigs and goats for its appetite. Ah well, the waterfowl return, and it’ll get its fill of them. I must get the bridge repaired. A bad storm now could blow the wooden span to bits.”
Birds and words! Wistala thought, with her tail as stiff as an icicle. He’s got the advantage of the troll, and he doesn’t even consider how to use it.
Wistala watched the labor for the next few days, from the felling of two great trees for lumber to the sawing, the ironmongery both in the barn and at the bridge, and then placing the new beams with the crane. The last fascinated her, and Rainfall attempted to explain it over dinner with a great deal of talk about fulcrum points and levers and counterweights and blocks, but as soon as she learned one working of the crane, it seemed to force the previous one out of her head.