Chapter 2: The Troll

I grabbed Alex, pulling her down behind the rock. With this fog, the troll shouldn’t be able to see us in the dark, but I didn’t want to take the chance. Of course, if its sense of smell was any good, the rock wouldn’t help; but in the meantime I might as well sit here and hope while I thought about how I’d gotten into this mess.

            After the ship had made port in Fjordell, Alex – her full name was Alexandra, but she’d disguised herself as a boy to join our ship’s crew – had insisted we try some of the local food. I wasn’t going to argue; once you’ve seen one piece of hardtack, you’ve seen them all, and once you’ve eaten one it rather turns you off the rest. So we headed for a dockside tavern.

That was where we heard about the troll.

            As I started commenting on the food, Alex put a finger to my lips. “Shh!” She nodded to a nearby table, where a pair of brawny fellows – woodsmen of some sort – were talking. Speaking our language, thankfully, and not Fjordic; it looked like one of them wasn’t local.

            “What do you mean, ‘what troll’?” the Fjordic man was saying. “The one that’s been making life so bloody difficult for us out there this past month!”

            “Everyone knows there’s no such thing. They’re just monsters out of children’s tales.”

            “Then why hasn’t Hroki come back to town in two weeks?”

            “Who knows? Lazy? Eaten by a bear?” The man snickered. “Maybe he met a nice huldra and settled down.”

            “Oh, so you believe in huldras now?”

            “As much as I do trolls!” he laughed.

            “Bah! You’ll sing a different tune when the beast comes upon your camp in the night.” The speaker stood and stomped out of the room. Alex looked like she was about to follow, then stopped when she saw that I’d remained firmly seated.

            “Saffron! Come on!”

            “Come on, what?”

            “Let’s get that man to tell us more about the troll! Maybe we can find it!”

            I raised my hands. “Ohhh no. Not getting involved in that. No thank you.”

            She raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t this what you do? Hunt monsters?”

            “It’s what my father does. I’d never planned on following in his footsteps.” And dear old dad had made it perfectly clear what he thought of that decision.

            She crossed her arms. “You made a pretty good showing with that siren two weeks ago.”

            “That was different!”

            “Oh, really? Why?”

            “It had the crew under its spell! I couldn’t just let it get them!”

            “And what, just because we don’t know these people, they don’t deserve our help?”

            I wanted to object, but she was right. If I could help, I probably should. And bugger if the old man was ‘proud of me’ or not, I wouldn’t be doing it for him. I sighed and stood up.

            “Alright, fine. Let’s see if we can catch up to that guy.”

            ‘That guy’ turned out to be named Erik. Erik Yellow-Beard, actually, though I wasn’t sure how the epithet helped tell him apart from what were probably scores of other blond, bearded men named Erik (certain things are more common in Fjordell). We caught up to him as he stormed down the street, grumbling, and convinced him to fill us in on the area the troll was said to be roaming. After that, we’d made a stop back at the ship for me to flip through one of my old journals for my notes, then another at a local shop.

            And thus we found ourselves huddled in the damp moss, in the dark, behind a tall rock, in the middle of the foggy spruce forest of the Fjordic mountains, as the crashing sounds of a troll breaking through trees echoed around us.

            “Alex!” I hissed. “The bear trap!”

            She pulled it out of her pack, as quietly as she could, while I did the same with the chain. We got the two fastened together with some finagling, and then waited for the troll to move off a little. The trick to killing a troll lay mostly in preventing it from getting back to its cave by morning – if the sun shone on it, it would turn to stone. Forever, as far as we knew.

            Once the sounds had quieted down, I peered around one side of the rock, Alex the other, then we pulled back.

            “All clear.”

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            “Same here.”

            Steeling myself, I grabbed one end of the chain and ran around the rock, as fast as I could, looping it around the boulder. I crouched back down and breathed a sigh of relief – no troll hiding on the other side – while Alex deftly fastened the chain to itself. We shared a look.

            “Ready to bait the trap?”

            She gritted her teeth, set her jaw, and nodded. The bait was a chunk of moose meat, a few days old, wrapped in layers to hide the smell. Once I pulled it out of my knapsack, that proved to not be working well.

            “Ugh!” I muttered, holding a hand in front of my nose. “Everything in there is going to smell horrible. Alright, let’s be quick about it.” I unwrapped the meat while Alex gathered some dead branches to hide the trap. We set the trap, then I gestured for Alex to climb a massive spruce tree a few yards away. As she started up, I drew in a deep breath.

            “Hey! Troll!  We’re over here!”

            Alex gaped at me as I sprinted for the tree. “What the hell, Saffron?” She was almost drowned out by the crashing of the approaching troll.

            “Hey, it worked, didn’t it?” I followed her up the tree, perching next to her some fifteen feet off the ground.

            “So far! Won’t matter if the trap doesn’t hold it!”

            I scoffed, though actually I was pretty unsure of that myself. But no reason for both of us to know how worried I was. If I was wrong, it would only matter briefly anyway.

            The troll broke through the trees. It was massive, likely ten feet tall if it hadn’t been hunched over to walk on its knuckles, with large patches of moss and fungus clinging to its leathery hide and long, matted brown fur. It was gnawing on something. Its face was almost human, save for the heavy brow ridge, immense hooked nose, and large solid black eyes. Lank brown hair hung from its scalp, past its jaw. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, and didn’t particularly care to become that acquainted with it.

            My stomach turned. It was chewing on a human arm.

            “Saffron?” Alex whispered, as the troll began searching the area.

            “Yeah?”

            “You have a backup plan in case this thing figures out we’re up here and decides we’d taste good?”

            I hadn’t gotten that far. I made a mental note to do so next time. “You want the truth, or a lie to make you feel better?”

            She groaned.

            The troll had stopped. It turned – it had found the meat. It growled, bounding toward it, and with a clang, its’ leg was caught in the metal jaws of our bear trap. The plan had worked, though I had not accounted for the abject terror that would result from spending hours in a tree above an angry troll. It figured out where we were swiftly; several times, it actually dragged the boulder closer to the tree in its efforts to get to us, but luckily the chain was hooked on a rough patch in the stone and didn’t slip off. Alex and I probably still half-deafened each other screaming. Dawn finally came, and the thing turned to stone. I’d expected some sort of gradual petrification; but one moment it was howling in fury, and the next there was a mossy boulder lying on top of the bear trap. I nearly fell out of the tree in relief.

            It was a few hours before we made it back down to the town and found Erik in the tavern. I collapsed in a chair and let Alex take the lead. “Troll’s dead.”

            Erik stared at her. “What?”

            “We went and killed the troll,” she said, with a nonchalant shrug.

            “You two lads? All on your own?”

            “It’s kind of what I do.” As I said it, I realized that was the case. Looking back, I’d actually enjoyed the night, insane as that seemed. “My father hunts monsters. I inherited the trade, and Alex assists. We managed to keep the troll out of its burrow until the sun came up, and bang,” I spread out my hands, “turned to stone.”

            Erik looked us over, judging the dirt, scrapes, and the branches stuck in our hair, then nodded. “I believe it. You lads have made my job a good deal safer.” He rummaged in his belt pouch for a moment, then removed the whole thing and set it on the table, coins clinking. “You’ve earned that, and my thanks. I’m going home to tell my wife the good news.” He left, and Alex grabbed the pouch. Her eyes lit up.

            “You can get paid for killing monsters?”

            “It’s how my father supported us after Ma died.”

            She tossed me the pouch. “You know you’re never going to get rid of me now, right?”

            I grinned. “Counting on it.”

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