“How did she get from there to our house so quickly, though?”
“I don’t know,” said the ring honestly. “Within Faerie, Aislinn can probably teleport freely, which means she can get from anywhere there’s a congruence to any other plane in almost no time at all. So she either knows where the entrance to the elven lands is, or she knows of another path through a different realm altogether.”
“And you said her teacher was from there?”
“Graylin was his name,” said Arrogan. “Well, that’s not his full name of course. They all have ridiculously pompous names that take way too damned long to say. Graylin is what he was called by those he was familiar with.”
Will stopped suddenly as a tall form stepped out from behind a tree. The troll’s shadow fell over him, and he felt his mouth go dry. “There’s one in front of me now,” he announced quietly.
“An elf?”
“A troll.”
“Oh, time to go to work.” The ring began issuing a long series of grinding barks and guttural coughing noises. “Hold your hands out to either side to show him you have no weapons.”
Will opened his arms and spread his fingers wide to show he wasn’t holding anything.
“Make sure to keep them balled into fists. Trolls use claws, so if you open them it’s an aggressive gesture.”
The troll was already beginning to growl, but Will quickly corrected his mistake. “I had them open for a moment.”
“I’ll apologize,” said Arrogan, beginning another sentence that sounded as though he might be trying to cough up a hairball. The troll responded, then leaned in to smell the air around Will’s head. After that, it straightened and turned away. “He says for you to follow him to their village. He’s going to let Clegg decide what to do with you.”
“Is that safe?” asked Will, his feet already moving him into a jog so he could keep up with the troll’s long stride.
“Clegg’s a good guy,” answered Arrogan. “You didn’t get to meet him last time, but I’m sure you’ll like him.”
“How can you like a troll?”
“Well, putting a clothespin on your nose helps. If you can get past the smell, they’re not that bad.” Will didn’t reply; instead he focused on keeping up with the troll, who moved with deceptive speed through the tangled underbrush. The exertion, along with his slowly diminishing level of turyn, made him feel as though he was suffocating. Fifteen minutes into the journey, Will had to summon his first elixir of turyn and take a large swallow.
His first trip to Muskeglun had all but exhausted his supply of the valuable elixir, though those potions had mostly been left over from Arrogan. Since then, Will had replaced them with elixir of his own making, which was both fresher and easier for his body to assimilate. This was the first time he’d had to use any of the newer potions, though, and he was pleased to find that they worked as well or better than the old ones.
“Are we there yet?” asked the ring, unable to see the world around them.
“Not yet.”
A few minutes later he asked again. “How about now?”
Will ground his teeth together. “Are you going to ask me every ten steps?”
“This is boring. You could dismiss the limnthal until we get there. Then I wouldn’t have to endure this eternal darkness I live in for the entire trip.”
“I might need you to translate for me,” said Will. “If I dismiss the limnthal, you wouldn’t hear what the troll said.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to keep asking questions.”
“What did I ever do to you?” said Will, exasperated.
“Besides being born? You cost me a lot of sleep, not to mention ruining my favorite tunic.”
“Huh?”
“Erisa was living with me when you were born, remember? I had to deliver your wrinkly red ass. You woke me up from a perfectly good dream because you just couldn’t wait until morning to be born. You were a very selfish baby.”
His mother had told Will that she had stayed with the old man until he was born, but he hadn’t ever really thought through the practical ramifications. “You helped with the delivery?”
“Yep. Worst thing I ever did. If you think you’re ugly now, you should have seen yourself back then. Your face was all squished up and distorted, and after you arrived I didn’t get a decent night’s sleep for months.”
“Mom told me she went to live with Uncle Johnathan after I was born,” countered Will.
“Sure, almost a year later, after you’d done your worst. Your uncle got the easy end of it. I had to deal with the crying and the puking. It was a relief when Erisa finally listened and got the hell out of my house. Now look at me—suffering the rest of eternity as a piece of jewelry—with you! There’s no justice in the world.”
Will had long since learned to see through the bluster and mock misery in Arrogan’s diatribes. The old man wasn’t likely to ever admit to having a soft spot, but Will knew better. He’d read some of his grandfather’s journal, which was considerably more honest.
He almost ran into the back of the troll leading them when it stopped suddenly, pointing with one gnarled and twisted arm to indicate they had arrived. Will saw a clearing ahead of them, and in it was a cluster of large shelters constructed of the limbs and the trunks of fallen trees. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting.
On one hand, he couldn’t see that trolls needed much protection from the environment, but on the other, building homes out of the rotting remnants of fallen trees did seem to fit them. If anything, it was sometimes hard to see where the moss-covered houses ended and the trolls standing in the doorways began, as they tended to blend together visually.
The fact that they built houses also made it harder for him to see them as simple monsters. “We’ve arrived,” he said quietly for Arrogan’s benefit.
The troll he had been following stepped into a central clearing between the homes and cut loose with a loud, guttural bark. Within moments the doorways filled as trolls large and small (relatively speaking) looked out to see their strange visitor. Over a span of minutes, a crowd grew around them, making Will feel ever more nervous. If things went badly, he wouldn’t be able to escape. There were at least a hundred trolls around him now, fanning out in every direction from the center of the village.
Despite the chaos, he could eventually tell that two of the trolls seemed to be more important than the others, though he had no way to identify them. His guide spoke loudly to those two, making sure everyone could hear him. “What is he saying?” whispered Will.