Chapter 21
Moerrven
The walk to the bridge had become a regular activity.
I carried a basket of hand pies, because Sky had declared that a ritual without snacks was merely walking.
It was a clear day, the early summer sky scrubbed bright, and Bryndala’s bridge stood at the far end of the path the way it always did.
I’d reached the point where I could see it without flinching.
Where seeing it meant her, and meant Sky, and the two things sat in my chest together without fighting.
“Okay, but hear me out,” Sky was saying. “If trolls live five hundred years, and you spend, what, the first forty being a kid—”
“Twenty. Childhood runs much the same as yours. It’s young adulthood that goes long. Twenty to eighty, or thereabouts.”
“Sixty years of being a hot young thing. That is wild, that is an entire human lifetime of being twenty-five—”
“I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
“—then you’ve got like four hundred years of being a boring middle-aged adult, with middle-aged adult hobbies like birdwatching and knitting—”
“I love birdwatching!”
He laughed, bright and cheerful. “And that means you’ve read a truly unhinged number of books, which means—” He spun and walked forward again, falling into step, his shoulder bumping my arm. “You have favorites, and I want all of them. Ranked. Especially the smutty ones.”
“That would take the rest of your life.”
“So?” he said, and grinned up at me, and I had to look at the road to keep from processing the implication into something it wasn’t.
We came to the pillar at the edge of town where the road forked toward the heights.
It was an old waystone, squared off at the top, where people nailed up notices.
There were a few, a livestock auction, a notice about the well.
And lower down, curling at one corner, a fresh sheet of paper with a drawing on it.
I saw the drawing before I understood it. A face, rendered in a competent official hand: a young man, narrow, sharp-jawed, the eyes tilted up at the outer corners.
It was Sky.
It was not a good likeness. The nose was wrong, and the artist had made the mouth too solemn, missing the grin the real mouth was always about to break into. But the bones of it were his, and the wrongness only made it worse, like seeing him reflected in bad water.
“Hey,” Sky said, all the chatter gone out of him. “That looks like me.”
I read the lines beneath the drawing. They were in plain Common, the blocky official script of the Crown’s clerks, and they were brief.
SOUGHT: A young man of the description above, believed to have arrived in the kingdom by uncommon means. Any sighting to be reported to the Queen’s Grey Guard. He is awaited at the Court of Feravael. Reward for true word.
“You’re sought,” I said. The word came out wrong in my mouth. “By the Guard. They want you brought to Feravael.”
But Sky wasn’t reading the Common. He had reached past it, to the bottom of the page, where someone had added a few lines by hand in a cramped, looping script that was nothing like the clerk’s, a script I couldn’t read at all.
The letters were foreign, rounded, slanting.
They might as well have been the tracks of a bird.
Sky read them. I watched it happen: his eyes moving along the strange letters, his whole face breaking open like a window thrown wide.
“Oh my god,” he said. “Oh my god.” He grabbed my arm. “Moerrven. Moerrven, it’s Pip. He added this, in English.”
“What does it say?”
“It says—” He laughed, and the laugh had tears in it.
“It says he’s okay. He’s okay, he’s at the palace, he says they’re amazing, he’s with the Queen’s people and they’re treating him well and he’s been looking for me, he’s been looking for me this whole time and he says—” His voice cracked.
“He says find a guard post and tell them Pip sent me. He’s coming to find me. ”
“And he says—” He laughed again, wiping his eyes.
“He says ignore the scary summons part. It isn’t a real royal summons.
The Queen only worded it that way so people would take the flyer seriously, because Pip asked her to.
Because Pip is friends with the Queen now.
” He shook his head, glowing. “Of course he is. Of course he is. He’s Pip. ”
“Wait. How is his handwriting on a printed flyer?” Sky turned it over, like the back might explain. “Did he sit there and write this on every single copy?”
“It’s part of the plate. Our presses print from a single plate: an iron elemental takes the master page, drawing and script and all, and shapes a metal plate from it by magic. Whatever the page holds, every copy holds.”
“So somewhere in the palace, a very serious iron elemental faithfully forged the words tell them Pip sent me into official Crown metal.” He laughed again, wet and bright. “God, I hope Pip watched.”
He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. He read it again, mouthing it, and I stood there holding the basket and could not read a single word of the thing that was undoing him.
I had forgotten, somewhere in these soft weeks, that there was an entire Sky I had no access to at all.
A language that was his and not mine. A best friend with handwriting he’d recognize on sight.
A whole life, written in letters shaped like birds, and I could only stand outside it and watch it light him up.
“He’s alive,” Sky said, turning to me, radiant.
“Moerrven, he’s alive, and he’s at Feravael, and the Queen wants to — we have to go.
We have to go to the palace. If Pip got there, then they know about the portal, they might know about the Order, they might know how to…
” He was talking faster than I could hold, his hands moving, the whole bright engine of him spinning up.
“Kethilda said Feravael, the requisitioned texts went to Feravael, it’s all Feravael, it’s been pointing there the whole time, and now Pip’s there, and we could just go—”
My stomach had gone to stone.
This was the door. Sky was already leaving in his mind, already on the road, already gone, lit from within with a joy I could not begrudge him and could not survive.
I opened my mouth. I don’t know what I meant to say. I wanted something steady, something that did not sound like a man watching the floor of his life tilt toward the sea.
I never got the chance to say it.
The light changed first, a shadow swallowing the sun, far too fast for any cloud, and the temperature of the day dropped. Sky’s joy froze on his face as he looked up at something behind me, over my shoulder, and his eyes widened into saucers.
I turned.
It came down out of the bright sky like a piece of the sky had caught fire.
It was massive, wider than the bridge, with a deep, red-orange scale that didn’t catch the light so much as throw it.
It was deep crimson down the long, spiked ridge of the spine and brightening to molten gold at the trailing edges of wings the size of sails, the whole vast shape of it glowing from somewhere inside, a furnace wearing the shape of a beast. The wind off the first downstroke flattened the grass in a spreading ring and tore the basket out of my hands.
A dragon, here, in the clean afternoon, descending on the road out of Frostholm with its fire-bright eyes fixed on the small, brilliant person beside me.
“Sky—” I got my arm out. “Get behind—”
The dragon took him.
It was not violent, which was the most horrible part.
There was no snap, no rending, none of the carnage the size of it promised.
One massive foreclaw closed around Sky the way a hand closes around a moth, almost gently, swallowing him to the shoulders.
The wings came down once with a sound like a sail filling, the ground dropped away beneath him, and he was rising, fast, into the air I couldn’t follow him into.
I ran after them. It was the single stupidest thing I have ever done and I would do it again without a heartbeat’s pause. I ran after a flying dragon. I sprinted up the road and out onto the open shoulder of the gorge with my arms reaching for a thing already forty feet above me and climbing.
Of course I couldn’t fly. I am a troll. I am the most earthbound thing there is.
Above me, dwindling, Sky twisted in the dragon’s grip, alive, whole, his head turned back and down toward me, and his mouth moved, shouting something I had no chance of hearing over the thunder of those wings, and the awful thing, the thing that undid me, was that he did not look only afraid.
He looked back at me with his whole stricken face and shouted, and the wind took it.
The dragon banked toward the high peaks, and then he was a bright speck against red-orange scale, then the scale was a coal against the blue, then there was nothing but blue.
I went down in the road on the open shoulder of the gorge, with Bryndala’s bridge standing pale and useless behind me.
I could not feel him, and I did not know if he was breaking apart in that grip a thousand feet up, did not know if dragons crushed the things they carried, did not know anything except that he was gone and the day was still, somehow, obscenely bright.
The flyer had slipped from Sky’s hand in the wind. It had skidded down the road and fetched up against my knee, face-up, Sky’s bad likeness staring its too-solemn stare at the sky that had taken him.
I picked it up. My hands were not steady. I smoothed it against my thigh and looked at the looping foreign lines at the bottom, the ones that had lit him up like a struck match, the message from the friend who was waiting for him at Feravael.
I lay there, staring up at the sky, realizing after a minute that something was missing. The warmth I usually felt in his presence. Was that coming from his mind? From our connection?
It couldn’t be, could it?
I don’t know what made me reach further, focus my mind. It was the kind of connection that required a true trolgar bond, and I didn’t even think it was possible with a human, much less one I’d only known for a few weeks.
But I shut my eyes against the obscene blue of that sky and reached with the part of me that has no name in any tongue he would know, acting on pure, ancient instinct.
And he was there. At first all I felt was an echo of his fear, and my throat went tight.
Then, I wondered if I was making all of this up, if I was imagining I could feel him to soothe myself.
But then, the strangest sensation washed through me, coming from far off, a thread pulled so thin it should have torn, stretched over the peaks.
A craving for hand pies.
It should not have worked. Which meant the bond between us had already grown far past anything I had calculated for. I was in deeper than I had thought, deeper than I had planned, and there was no time at all to be terrified of that. He was alive, and he wanted hand pies.
I got up off the ground, because a troll does not stay down, and turned my back on the bridge, and started walking fast toward the only thing I could think to do, which was to get my horse, get my cat, and go rescue Sky.
I was going to get him back. I didn’t have the first idea how.