Chapter 12
Rainfall was a fountain of information about everything but his Rown misfortunes. Only through numerous questions could she piece together his story. She tried asking Avalanche, but he was a simple, literal fellow, and at the slightest head-bob, griff-rattle, or harsh syllable would become enraged and threaten her with a stomping. And most of what Avalanche did know related to the quality of the hay, or displeasure at not being put out to pasture with the chance of meeting females.
So she spent most of her time with Rainfall, his diverting conversation limited to lighter topics.
Other than his grandsire, the only time he talked about his family was in the portrait gallery. Elves, evidently, had a “study” done of themselves once they reached maturity.
A study didn’t use paints or inks, but instead bits and pieces found outdoors—tree bark and colored sands being the two most common media. Done in life size, the “portraits” were remarkable once you got away from the odd textures. Rainfall’s certainly captured his gentle expression, warm eyes depicted with carefully polished and carved stones.
“And at the end we have my wife, son, and granddaughter,” her host said.
Did elves not keep their family about? “I’d like to see them in person to compare with these likenesses,” Wistala finally said. “Will I meet them?”
“An impossibility with Nyesta and Eyen, my wife and son. They are dead.”
His wife had a softness to her features, done in colored sand and painted shell. “I hope she had a peaceful passing,” Wistala said.
“Age and infirmity took her too soon, as it does all humans. But we had many years of comfort together. I met her when she passed through with Old Nightingale’s Circus, now under Ragwrist—though, like everything else these days, much reduced in scope and splendor. She left me comfort in my son, transitory though it was; he had something of his mother’s temperament and my father’s courage.”
She looked at his portrait. Some manner of sash was woven about the harness that held his sword. His eyes challenged, as if daring the portraiteer to capture him.
All that served to remember his granddaughter was a sketch. A simple charcoal depicted her; Rainfall apologized that he had no skill with formal portraiture. The girl-child had overlarge eyes compared with the others, but perhaps hominid youth accounted for that, for if the sketch was life-size, she was a good deal younger when drawn than the others. The elf blood came through strong in her cheek-bones and delicate ears.
“She still lives?” Wistala asked. Curiosity about her host made her stop in front of the drawing.
“Yes, but Lada’s been away from me these eight years.”
“With her mother?”
“We never knew her mother. Or I should say, I never knew her. Some sport of her father in one of the taverns of Quarryness or Sack Harbor, I expect. She arrived on my doorstep as an infant, bearing a note my son burned rather than show to me. She was my comfort after her father’s death. Since—since—please excuse me.”
Rainfall turned his face to the wall, and after a last look at the charcoal portrait, Wistala crept out of the room.
As the leaves turned color and dropped, Wistala explored the broken houses at the base of the two hills, pulling nails and hinges from the ruins to satisfy her hunger for metal. She’d come terribly close to stealing a small silver candleholder from a side table on one of her passes through the house and decided to hunt metal on her own.
When she returned, all her claws counted thrice worth of horses were standing in the field beyond the barn under the care of two boys who occupied themselves by throwing rotten apples at each other from opposite sides of a stone wall that held the saddles.
She circled the house to get downwind of it and found a yew tree to climb, where she spent an uncomfortable night. The riders left in haste the next morning—she saw only the backs of cloaks and a few gamboling dogs of the ordinary sort, not the huge savage brutes she’d pulled over the ledge.
Somewhat stiffly she climbed down from the tree to hear Rainfall calling:
“Tala Tala Comeoutfree! They’re gone, and it is safe.”
He hurried to meet her as soon as she extended her neck above the bushes.
“More of the thane’s men?” she asked.
“Better and yet worse, at least for you. It was the Dragonblade and a party of hunters.”
Breath and death, the Dragonblade! Wistala couldn’t help but crouch at the name.
“He said a young dragon had escaped him, blamed the miss over the loss of his beloved pack in the summer. He has to go back to training pups for a while.”
“You fed him and his horses, then?”
“What could I do? He carries a Hypatian Knight-Seal. I’m old fashioned enough to bow to any who carries it, even if he hunts a friend. Though I felt no need to disclose your presence, especially as his line of questioning allowed me to keep my honor and your friendship.”
“What do you mean?”
“The description he gave was laughable. He got your size right, but had the color wrong—lots of talk of wolves’ hides and such. I could honestly say I’d not seen anything like that about the road.”
“Why the road?” she wondered. Of course, they first came upon my scent on the same road near Tumbledown.
“I gave his dogs as vast a meal as I could manage so they’d sleep rather than sniff around the barn. Same with the men. I fear our dinner tonight will be their leavings, little though there are.”
Wistala was grateful for a moment that she hadn’t been hidden in the barn or somewhere closer. There would be danger, yes, but temptation. Men were vulnerable when they took off their armor to sleep. She’d learned the knack of walking silently through the home without letting her claws touch the flooring to save Rainfall’s woodwork.
“Have they gone for good, or will they be back?”
“They’re hurrying south. They believe you to be heading in that direction, but on what evidence, I can’t imagine.”
“I may have left southbound marks crossing it from the old hovels beneath the twin hills.”
“Or perhaps the Dragonblade makes guesses to impress his men. A right guess is long remembered, and there’s always an excuse for a wrong one.”
Wistala spent another cold night in the yew tree that evening, just in case the Dragonblade doubled back.
Rainfall had her observe him carrying out his duties on the road, more as a mental diversion for her than anything else. For two active weeks as the temperature dropped, he and a dozen men went along the road, filling in holes; then they applied pitch to the timbers of the bridge to proof them against ice and snow. This part of the north saw frequent freezes and thaws and snow, thanks to the air currents of the Inland Ocean a few horizons to the west. Even once the labor was done, he bargained with the men a little extra to dig up vegetables and bring in hay and slaughter and salt some goats.
Payment was a problem, for Rainfall had little money. He gave away odds and ends from the vast house in return for their work, anything from candlesticks to cooking skillets. Wistala understood now why the place seemed so bare, save for his high room of books and basement of wine.
Then they settled in for the winter.
Wistala had been installed in what had once been what Rainfall called a “health-room,” a wooden enclosure of fragrant cedar wood, where stones heated in the furnace would be brought so that water might be dripped on them. It had a gutter in the center that made for easy cleaning, and she was happy to find hatchling scales on the floor each morning, with new ones coming in fast and thick owing to a supply of tarnished brass plates and drinking vessels she smelled out buried in the dirt floor of one of the abandoned houses.
Wistala asked about hominid commerce one night over dinner, and Rainfall did his best to explain it. “A dwarf would make it simple, I’m sure. I’ve not much of a head for additions and subtractions and excises and taxes.”
The last in the list seemed to be his chief worry. As she understood it, twice a year he owed his thane an amount of money that had been set at a time when the estate was prosperous, and though Mossbell had the misfortune of having a troll appear and pillage the lands, he was still expected to produce the same sum. No amount of pleading with the thane could alter it.
“What do you get in return for these taxes?” Wistala asked.
“The thane’s protection.”
“But not from trolls.”
Rainfall poured himself a little more wine. “He has posted a reward, in the form of a small sum and relief from all taxes and excises for five years. But few are willing to take the challenge. What happened to Eyen is still fresh in many minds.”
“Your son tried to kill the troll?”
“His death is my fault. The bundle containing Lada had just arrived, and I’d engaged a wet nurse. He and I argued about his scattering bastards around the thanedom. Elf blood passes down an alliance of aspect and tongue that human females find pleasing, and he took advantage of manner and countenance. I . . . I challenged him to perform some useful duty. I meant that he seek gainful employment to defer the cost of his daughter, but he rode out on Avalanche, the last of his grandsire’s line of mighty warhorses, to solve all our difficulties on the point of his lance.” Rainfall struck the table with his elbows so hard, the plates and goblets jumped. Then he concealed his face with his long-fingered hands.
Wistala stood still, never having seen a violent move from her host before.
“I beg your pardon,” he said when he collected himself. “You’ve finished your salmon already. Would you care to dispose of mine? Having a drakka about so simplifies the clearing up.”
Wistala learned the cloudsign for snow, sleet, and rain that winter—what weather Mossbell saw depended on the direction of the wind. It blew mostly from the west, and if it veered farther south for a while, it grew warmer, but when it came out of the north, it became bitterly cold and made her alternately ravenous and torpid.
Father had hunted in this winter wind a year ago to feed his hatchlings?
Being indoors frustrated her, and on the first sunny day after the sun turned south again, she set out to walk the grounds of Mossbell.
It wasn’t an accident that she walked west, crossed the road, and plunged into the broken forests covering old grazing land. The ground was still snow-covered where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach, and what wasn’t snowy was wet. She found sign for wild pigs and roaming goats.
Finding troll tracks took a little time.
She found several troll-traps easily enough. It took a good deal of ear, nose, and eye-work to establish what they were. The troll would dig holes in the ground, perhaps her full body-length deep, and then cover them with a lattice of slight branches and growth, with fragrant berries in the center. It lined the bottom with flat rocks chipped and broken in the hope that a sheep or pig would blunder in and injure or trap itself.
She found bones at the bottom of one.
Then she cut across its tracks. The troll had huge three-toed feet, though the toes didn’t point in the same direction as they did with elves and dragons. Something like the mark of a horse hoof stood in the center, with the digits stretching out not quite in opposite directions, like widely spread bird toes. Here and there, similar, smaller versions of the tracks could be seen that she guessed were its hands.
She found a heap of droppings close to the river-cliff edge. They were like a rotten melon filled with little white worms left on a hillock. Her nostrils closed in disgust.
The ground here had a trodden-on look like a cattle wade, with a profusion of tracks and divots, and grubby prints on the rocks at the edge of the cliff.
Wistala couldn’t see her host’s bridge from this part of the river, and the twin hills near his estate were just bluish lumps. The river canyon stood so wide here that objects on the far side couldn’t be distinguished from each other.
White birds crisscrossed the river, looking for food. Another variety, gray with yellow beaks, poked around the rocks at the base of the cliff under all the marks.
Wistala craned her neck out as far as she dared, digging her tail into the crevice between two sturdy rocks like one of Rainfall’s fishhooks buried in a trout’s jaw.
A cave marred the fluted sides of the canyon wall, closer to the top edge than the base.
She could imagine what the birds at the base of the cliff were feeding on.
Instincts older than she took over as she evaluated the troll’s home. Fresh water would never be a problem. Enemies couldn’t reach it without a good deal of difficulty, it would take a huge climbing pole or ladder to reach the cave mouth from the river, and anything that walked on two feet would risk its neck climbing down from above. A dragon might like it even better: you could fly in through the river canyon at night, skimming the surface, and escape observation. She imagined there was usually food of one sort or another to be had near a big body of water as the Inland Ocean, just a horizon downriver.
Wistala examined the cliff until she found a ledge thick with mosses and ferns, downwind from the cave. She wanted to get a look at this troll. She climbed down and settled between the branches. It was cool, with the wind whipping up the river valley, but she’d spend nights in worse spots.
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.
It wasn’t until she watched it at work the next day that some of his discourse made sense. After the workmen had gone—few dared labor long past noon, as they had to travel home on foot, save for a blacksmith or two who lodged with Rainfall at Mossbell—she stayed up and asked a few more questions about the crane.
“Ah, you’re getting it. You’ve no mind for theory, but when you see it in practice, you learn like lightning. I’ve noticed that with your Elvish, as well. Just when I thought you’d never get the hang of the extrafamilial oratory, you—”
“Bother oratory forms for now,” Wistala said. “The crane looks like it can go to a great height, above most treetops. Could it lift a tree upright?”
“Easily. Vertical, horizontal. Vertical is actually easier to maneuver; you don’t have to have stabilizing cables, as the shape of the tree works for you.”
“I’ve got an idea for your crane. But it would have to happen soon. And I expect you’d have to get a group of men willing to brave a shot at the troll.”
“Whatever can you mean, Wistala?”
“Get a piece of paper. You shall draw as I speak.”
Four nights later, with the bridge still unfinished in its repairs, so excited was Rainfall by her idea, Wistala walked Avalanche back and forth across the bridge.
Nerve, Wistala, where is your dragon courage? A drakka should be firebellied on the night of such a hunt, such a challenge.
The crane stood at the north end, hidden in the trees by the hard climb of stairs leading up the side of the cliff. It held a long, thin, straight pine, shorn of many but not all of its limbs. The wider bottom end had been sharpened, and ax-heads, saw edges, spear-points, and knife-blades stuck out from the bottom in a ring, like porcupine quills, though all had been blackened by soot so as not to catch the light. If it weren’t for the intermittent drizzle, she’d be able to see Rainfall atop the crane. But she wanted bad weather for this job to help mask sounds and smells.
Avalanche wore a thick blanket of quilted leather folded and tied across his back and neck, and grumbled a good deal about being out in the wet and not being near the mares of some of the men—only a handful had been willing to take up with Rainfall, mostly friends and relatives of the snatched young man. Not that Wistala had met any of them; her role in all this would hopefully remain secret.
Wistala walked again to the south side of the river, and thought she saw a bulge in the river, but it was hard to tell. She pulled on Avalanche’s reins—
“Careful!” Avalanche objected.
—and walked him to the side.
Yes. A dripping arm clung to the side of one of the stone arches. It moved, pulling up a sodden shape.
Her hearts pounded.
Father always said this was the worst moment. The moment before action was inevitable, that there would be no further delay, and from the next beat of your wings you were committed. The moment of choice.
She stood frozen. So big. It will be fast if it can run.
If she could commit herself with words first, maybe the rest would come easier: “It’s time, Avalanche.”
There. I’ve said it.
“Now for battle?” His tail flicked up, a white battle banner.
“Now for battle. All you have to do is run from the troll.”
“Brave Master Eyen rode battle. Troll came. Brave Master Eyen fell. I ran then.” His ears drooped a little, but maybe it was because of the wet.
“This time I want you to run,” she said, jumping as lightly as she could onto Avalanche’s broad back. Even with her scales, she couldn’t weigh as much as a young elf warrior arrayed for battle. “The best thing you can do is run. Faster you’re out of its sight, the better. Now walk on.”
Avalanche walked, but she could feel him holding himself back at every step. According to Rainfall, the stallion had spent his colt-hood and youth in training, learning to run at other horses and enemies, and the old instincts were coming back with action in the air, though there were wiry gray hairs mixed in with his softer ones on his mane and tail these days.
Wistala was grateful to ride Avalanche. She wasn’t certain her feet would be as sure as the stallion’s, walking along a bridge toward the spot—just across from the repaired timbers—where she knew the troll lurked.
But she was committed. Avalanche would walk her into peril whether her feet were willing to go or not. She felt her griff extending and contracting nervously, she tried to hold them tight against her neck hearts to stop the rattle.
They clomped across the wooden timbers, a dragon-length expanse covering the fallen arch. She felt certain her hearts were on the verge of quitting.
The snake-head orb at the end of its tendril lay on the side of the bridge, motionless, looking like a forgotten drinking gourd left by some traveler. Though she could smell the troll now, as could Avalanche. But he moved on, stepping faster if at all, with sure-footed courage.
Wistala’s claws set themselves into the leather quilting.
She heard the troll shift weight.
“Now, Avalanche!” she squeaked, in Drakine, but she slapped his muscular rump with her tail.
Avalanche let out a cry and leaped forward onto the stonework, hooves slipping just a little in the wet. Wistala hung on for all she was worth, but far better than the excitement of the run was the absence of fear.
The troll’s dreadfully huge three-digit hand just brushed Avalanche’s tail as it came down, and she felt no fear. The body, all gaping mouth and terrible stench, heaved itself onto the bridge behind them, and she only looked with amazement at the length of its forelimbs illustrated against the familiar width of the bridge.
She urged Avalanche on with another tail-slap.
The troll began to run after them. It used its long front legs and short back limbs in pairs long-then-short, long-then-short, in a strange unbalanced sort of run that made her think of a goose taking flight across a still lake, with wings beating strong and feet frantically working.
Avalanche was almost at the far end of the bridge when Wistala jumped off, giving him a last flick of her tail. She skidded to a stop on the wet bridge stones.
The troll came, Wistala thought its gait ungainly compared with that of a horse—even a dragon-dash was a thing of beauty compared with the troll’s careen.
She jumped to the east rail of the bridge, where her rope was tied. This wasn’t part of her original plan, but an addition of Rainfall’s, who didn’t like the idea of her belly-flopping into the river, even with the banks in spring flood.
Now to attract a troll!
She stood on her hind legs and extended her neck as far as she could. Her griff bristled, and she rattled them against her scales for all they were worth.
Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-TCHK!
Her ears rang with the sound. The troll pulled up, confused by the sound, its waving orb-topped tentacle turning her way, backside expanding and contracting as it breathed.
Avalanche disappeared into the distant rain.
The troll set its arms and legs, ready for anything, battle or flight.
“Here’s a mouthful for you!” she shouted. She gripped the leather wrap on the line and dropped over the edge.
She felt the heat of her passage even through the protective grip—again, no fear in her hearts but the odd words friction heat crossing her mind, even with the troll gaping over as she dropped away.
It reached for her and missed, but caught up the line. By the time its slow brain made the connection and it began to draw up the line, Wistala was almost at the river.
She dropped into the water.
A hominid wouldn’t have been able to make it to the cut stairs, but drakka were strong swimmers; they could clasp their limbs to their side and put their whole body into the effort, sucking air through the nostrils. Wistala was bothered by the cold more than by the current—it brought back awful half-memories that took the courage out of her.
She reached the landing and pulled herself up, weary as though from a long dragon-dash.
The troll marked her movement, and it reached out with one long arm for the stairs and swung itself down.
“That’s right,” Wistala croaked, a puny vocalization that didn’t even disturb a stalking bird three rocks away. She drew breath and roared her best battle cry.
The orb turned down on her, and the troll hurried its climb. When the troll filled the view between her landing and the suspended pine trunk above, she called on her flame.
She didn’t aim her sole effectual weapon at the troll. She loosed it out, as far out into the river as she could. It struck the water and formed a pool there, floating downstream with the current.
She could never be sure what happened next, save that Rainfall saw her orange-red signal and cut the tree trunk free.
Perhaps it was the number of camouflaging branches left on the trunk that made a sound. Perhaps the tightly stretched cable’s parting at Rainfall’s ax-blow—it made a crack like a nearby lightning strike according to her host, who was in a position to know. Or perhaps the troll’s sense-orb could see in all directions, rather than only one—no one had ever lived long enough in the company of a troll to conduct any studies.
Wistala’s brain had no time for perhapses—as soon as she gave the signal, she jumped into the river.
The troll shifted as the tree-trunk fell. Rather than hitting it squarely, the projectile opened a gash in its side. This just enraged the troll rather than skewering it. Luckily for Wistala, it took its temper out on the tree, which had lodged itself in the shallow water of the riverbank. The troll picked it up and cracked it against the cliff side, again and again until only a shard remained in its grip.
Only then did it notice the arrows and spears from above.
Brave or foolish, Rainfall’s gang flung spears and fired hunting arrows down at the troll as Wistala made it to the first pillar of the bridge. She saw a spear lodge in the troll’s back. The sense-stalk stood straight up, and it began to climb.
The next thing Wistala knew, she was climbing. Using the deep crevices between the joined stones, a skilled man could make the long climb, but it would take him ten times the effort it took Wistala, with her four shorter limbs and thick muscles. She crawled up the bridge’s support like an ant hurrying up a grass stalk, her pace not greatly reduced from what she could achieve on flat ground.
But she was only halfway up when the troll reached the men.
One, a lumberman, judging by his broad leather girdle, tried his axe on the troll’s hand as it came to the cliff top. She heard the sharp thwack of the blade as it bit into the troll’s fountain-size hand even from her distance. The troll’s other hand came up and struck the lumberman such a blow, he exploded into pieces.
She passed over the bridge-rail to find the troll standing on the cliff top, searching the tree line for the fleeing men. It flushed a man and ran him down on the road, where it smashed and then swallowed him. A group of horses fled screaming from the woods, one or two pulling men along.
Wistala wasn’t sure what she could do, but she hurried toward the north end of the bridge anyway. She had one good gout of flame left in her fire bladder, if not two; she’d eaten heartily for months, and there was still an angry liquid ball inside her, waiting to get out.
She’d diverted the troll before; perhaps she could again, long enough for it to lose track of the men. . . .
A white flash on the road ahead. Wistala, gulping air as she ran, recognized the shape.
Avalanche!
The stallion—with blood in the air, even on a rainy night, and the frightened calls of mares behind him—had given in to instinct and stood his ground, eagerly pawing at the road.
The troll rounded on the stallion.
“Come on! Beast!” Avalanche neighed. Then he screamed and reared up, front hooves cutting the air before him. “Try to take of mine. I’ll kick your teeth out!”
Wistala dragon-dashed, her vision red with lost breath. The troll’s air sacs bulged from its behind; she could see flaps of raised skin like a pinecone opening and shutting as it tried to catch its breath—or was it damaged in some way? No matter—she homed in on the deep whooshing sound.
Then the troll lunged forward, its gait even stranger because of cradling its wounded hand. . . .
The troll reared up and reached for the horse as Avalanche charged. But the stallion danced sideways, and lashed out with a hind leg, kicking one of the thin forearms. Avalanche reared up and struck the troll in the mouth-without-a-face that constituted the front of its body.
The troll backed up and lifted itself.
The sense-orb hung over all like a watchful bird. As the troll’s mouth dropped open, seemingly with the idea of swallowing Avalanche whole, Wistala slid to a stop and spat her fire, as though trying to get an extra few tail-lengths of distance into it by letting momentum carry the contents of her fire bladder up her throat, accelerated by ring after ring of throat muscles.
The sense-orb whipped around, and Wistala caught one glimpse of a wide-open eye? nostril? ear? in the center of a wormy fringe—
The fire struck the troll in its breathing sac.
It spun, tucking its hindquarters and covering the breathing spicules with its rear legs. An elbow knocked Avalanche aside, and the stallion crashed down, as though tripped. The troll jumped awkwardly away like a spastic frog, stomping on Avalanche in its flight, beating at its hindquarters with its rear feet where Wistala’s flame clung and dripped and burned.
It made for the river, by plan or blind flight of instinctive pain. The troll hurled itself into the trees along the roadway and fell in ruin, its limbs no longer capable of supporting the mouth-body. The sense-orb looked this way and that at the twitching limbs before it, too, collapsed.
Wistala couldn’t stand and gape—she hurried to Avalanche.
Avalanche fought for breath, his tongue extended and bloody foam on his lips and the roadway. At her approach, the stallion raised his head a little.
“Beast?”
She realized it wasn’t an epithet, but a query. “It’s dead. You killed it.”
“Kicked its head in. Warned it.”
“Yes, you did. I heard.”
The head fell back to the ground. “The mares. Hear them?”
Wistala couldn’t hear anything but the soft rainfall.
Avalanche let out a friendly nicker, sightless eyes rolling this way and that. Then his struggling body ceased to move, and the horribly lolling tongue went still.
Wistala flung herself across her old stablemate, determined to fight off wild pigs, crows, bears, and set Bartleghaff himself ablaze if any but Rainfall came to claim the body.