by Jane Yolen
That’s not going to happen! she promised herself as she stitched the vein and bandaged the wound and no one stuck a sword through her.
Suddenly, there were no more wounded. The woods were dark and relatively quiet, the sounds of war and battle reduced to the whimpering and crying of aftermath.
Either all the Unseelie folk were dead—which was highly unlikely—or they were regrouping elsewhere. Snail stood creakily and looked out into the field where battle had interrupted the play. Bodies were scattered over the trampled grass, most clearly dead, some maybe just dying.
She’d come back and tend them later, but first she had to get to the wagon. She was worried about Aspen. She was worried about Huldra and Og.
The stage was still open to the field, and the curtains—while still hanging—were frayed and a bit scorched. She forced her stiff legs to clamber up onto the stage and checked the twins’ room first, where Aspen stayed. There was no one in there except the strange, animated rug.
Instead of showing its teeth, the rug moaned piteously, obviously frightened by the thunderous noises that had only so recently ceased. The dog boy at the castle had once told her how he hated thunder because all his hounds would try to hide underneath him.
Tentatively, she put out her hand.
“There, there,” she said as one would with a hound or a horse. “There, there.” The bowser wrapped itself around her legs. It was soft and somewhat cuddly.
“There, there,” she said a third time, keeping her voice low and soothing, not wanting the fey creature to even think about biting.
As if the third time was the charm, the bowser gave a little shudder, a soft sigh, then uncurled itself and lay back down on the floor. She reached over to give it a quick pat and felt it sigh under her touch.
Giving the bowser one last pat, one last There, there, Snail went back out onto stage. Crossing it quickly she burst into Odds’s office without knocking. It, too, was empty. Once onstage again, she looked out onto the battlefield, trying to make out individuals among the bodies, fearful she would see someone she knew.
There was something over to the right, hard to make out at first in the gloaming. Something large, something lying on the ground, something . . .
She felt her heart skip. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Huldra!” she breathed the name, and ran to the edge of the stage, leapt off.
It was only when she was halfway there that she realized she hadn’t seen baby Og in the wagon either.
And this was no place for a baby, any baby. Certainly not for a troll child she’d just delivered days earlier.
The thought of her newborn charge out here on a battlefield hurried Snail along, and she quickly came in sight of Huldra’s feet, then legs, then body, then—thankfully—her head, which was turned away, looking over the misty mountains.
Huldra lay on her stomach, baby Og strapped to her back, where he snored noisily each time he removed his gigantic thumb from his gigantic mouth.
“Huldra!” Snail called aloud. “Can you get up?” The ground around the troll was a bog, wet and rank. Snail put a hand down into the quagmire, brought it to her nose, sniffed blood not mud.
“Alas,” Dagmarra said, stepping around from the other side of the hill that was Huldra’s head, “she cannot. The wound is in her heart. She waters the ground with her blood.”
Snail suddenly noticed that Dagmarra was weeping silently, great globules of tears tracing down her cheeks into her beard.
“She isn’t . . .” Snail hesitated before saying more.
“Not dead,” Dagmarra said. “At any rate, not yet. But I doubt even the professor can save her.”
Nor, Snail thought miserably, can we turn her over so I can see if the wound can be staunched. But, by the size of the blood bog around the troll, Snail knew that such an endeavor would only hurt Huldra, not save her. And Mistress Softhands always said that sometimes the greatest kindness was to let the patient go.
“No!” Snail said, not sure if she was agreeing or disagreeing with Dagmarra. “The rest?” she asked fearfully.
“They were fine last I saw. Your prince . . .” Dagmarra paused and looked thoughtful for a moment. “He fought well.”
He’s not my prince, she thought, but didn’t say it. Nothing mattered at this moment but Huldra. And Og.
She prepared her most sensible midwife-trained voice. She could still hear Mistress Softhands saying, “No hysterics in the birthing room. And that is especially true for the midwives! No matter what happens, you maintain calm.”
“Why can’t the professor save her?” Snail asked.
Dagmarra sniffled. “She took too many arrows to the belly and heart, and some, I fear, may have been tipped with poison.”
Snail shook her head. “I’ve never heard of the Unseelie archers using poison,” she said, forgetting that just earlier that had been a worry to her. “It would be considered . . .” She thought hard to find the right phrase. Finally ended with “unsporting.”
“War isn’t sport,” Dagmarra said.
“It is to the Border Lords. Could the Seelie soldiers . . .”
“Never, it’s considered unhealthy.”
“But . . .” And then Snail remembered the poison on Jack Daw’s dagger, the dagger that he’d put in the ogre dungeon master’s back, the one she’d used by accident on the carnivorous merman.
“If there’s poison, I know who might have had a hand in this,” Snail said. “But if Huldra is truly dying, we have to take Og from her in case she turns over on him.” She doubted Huldra had any such strength left, though there were plenty of stories of trolls doing amazing feats when dying.
“I doubt she has the power left to turn, poor mite,” Dagmarra said, stating Snail’s thoughts aloud, just as the troll started to shudder.
Huldra groaned and said in a thunderous sigh, “Remember . . . promise me . . .”
Dagmarra hastened back to her head and Snail could hear Dagmarra saying, “I’ll honor what I promised, my dear friend. Dinna fash, dinna fash yerself. He will be told, he will give you all honor, he will be my boy as well as yours.”
There was another loud sigh, like a great wind puzzling through a forest. And with a final shudder, Huldra was still.
Snail untied Og from his mother’s back, wrapping him securely in the plaid diaper. She knew what Dagmarra must have promised. But wondered how a dwarf could possibly raise a baby troll.
She was rocking Og in her arms and still thinking this when Dagmarra came back around Huldra’s mountain of a body, and held out her hands for the baby.
“Are you sure?” Snail said.
“I’m stronger than I look,” Dagmarra said. “And a promise to a friend makes me stronger still.”
Snail handed Og to her, and Dagmarra didn’t even flinch when the heavy child was in her arms. She looked down at the baby, who was still asleep. “Mama Two loves you,” she said. “Your uncles will love you, as well.”
As if summoned, Dagmarra’s two brothers appeared from the darkness, along with an exhausted but apparently unwounded Aspen. He smiled at her, but the smile never reached his haunted eyes. Snail didn’t even try to smile back. Behind him loomed a multi-limbed spider, the professor riding in an odd carapace on its back.
“The battle is over,” he called down, as the machine kept marching toward the wagon, “but the war has just begun.” He pulled on several levers before him and two of the machine’s limbs reached out and began folding the stage back into the wagon. “We make for home as soon as . . .” he looked meaningfully at Snail, “humanly possible.”
I’m not human, she thought, but somehow her arguments, her anger, seemed shallow compared to the misery that had been inflicted on all the people she’d tried to save: Fey or human, Seelie or Unseelie, their races had mattered little in the end. What had mattered was blood and bone and shatt
ered hearts.
ASPEN HAS SOME ANSWERS
Aspen was willing to help pack up the wagon, but there was little he could do but get in the way. After the third time he’d been punched in the arm by one of the dwarfs for stepping on their toes, he took Maggie Light’s suggestion to go to the twins’ room and lie down. There had been other suggestions, most of them by the dwarfs, but they had nothing to do with packing up the wagon and were all anatomically implausible anyway.
He was so exhausted he entered the wagon from the wrong side and ended up having to travel the length of the wagon to get to the twins’ room. There were scorch marks on the walls, and much of what had been stowed carefully was strewn about from the violence of the battle. Nothing seemed broken beyond repair until he reached the dwarfs’ room and saw the birdcage lying in the middle of the floor, cracked and partially crushed, its tiny door hanging off its hinges. Beside it lay the bird, motionless.
Somehow, after all the death and violence, it was this small cruelty that finally made Aspen’s tears well up. He looked closer, hoping that the bird was only sleeping—On its side? he thought. Are you a child?—but when he got near he saw a great gash across its breast and its innards spilled onto the wagon’s wooden floorboards. But instead of blood and organs, the bird’s guts were angular and bright, and the lamplight reflected metallically off of them. He reached out a finger to touch the strange items and snatched it back quickly when a burning sensation hit him.
Cold iron!
He popped his burned finger into his mouth to cool it and his saliva helped soothe the ache.
At the same time, he realized that the bird was not a bird at all. It was some made thing. A simulacrum animated, he knew not how or for what reason. He peered at it blankly for a moment more, then realized it was all too much for his tired brain to handle and stumbled away.
Alone in the room, Aspen collapsed onto a bed and closed his eyes. His ears rang from thunderous spells, his throat was sore from shouting, his sword arm ached from the butcher’s work of battle.
I should feel better than this, he thought. We won!
Or at least, he corrected his mind, we did not lose.
But visions of the battle sprang into his head unbidden, and he wondered what victory was worth this price:
. . . fire takes a peasant girl as she steps between him and the Border Lord ranks just as he flings his spell . . .
. . . a sword cuts at his head, so he ducks and responds, sticking his borrowed sword into the stomach of a Seelie foot soldier who’d swung at him blindly . . .
. . . he is caught in the press and pushes an old brownie away to clear his sword arm, noticing too late that he has pushed her right onto the pike of a charging bogle . . .
He’d killed enemies in the short battle, as well. Lots of them, he thought, trying to feel proud of his courage and failing. Instead, all he could think of was the spilled blood, the crack of bone. All he remembered were the faces of the ones he’d killed, all bearing the same look of surprise and pain as the allies he’d inadvertently slain. The memories brought him no relief.
He thought about removing his blood-soaked clothes—or at least his belt—but his hands were shaking so badly he didn’t think he could manage.
So, he simply lay there trembling, all the while listening to the screech of the stage sliding back under the wagon, the whinnies of the unicorns as they were buckled into their traces, the creak and rumble as the wagon finally got under way.
Eventually, exhaustion and the rocking of the road got the better of him and he fell into a deep sleep filled with lightning, flame, and death.
• • •
HE AWOKE AT what he thought was dawn. But, when the sky kept getting darker and the sun lower, he realized it was actually sunset of the next day.
I have slept the entire day away and no one has tried to wake me. He wondered if that meant they considered him a prisoner—or a friend.
Maybe they thought I was dead. He pinched his left arm with his right hand. Nope! Still alive. Lucky they didn’t bury me. He tried a grin at his small joke, failed, and worried he might never smile again.
Even knowing he had slept an entire day did not make him feel rested. He wanted nothing more than to pull the covers over his head and go back to sleep. He tried to find a compelling reason to get out of bed, but could not think of a single one. His escape plan with Snail seemed ludicrous now.
His plan to stop the coming war even more so.
I am as useless as a bull at a birthing, he thought, and if I lie here forever, the world will likely be improved for it.
He shut his eyes tight and waited for oblivion to take him again.
• • •
IT WAS FULLY light the next time he woke. Someone had left waybread and a tankard of water by his bed. He felt no hunger—especially when he saw that the bowser had nibbled on the edges of the bread—but he ate it anyway.
I assume after an entire day and night, my body requires sustenance.
He did feel a little better after eating. Though not so good that he thought himself a useful member of the world. But good enough to get up and go outside. Legs weak from lying in bed so long, he staggered to his feet and left the room, only to find himself in Maggie Light’s quarters.
Much to his disappointment and relief, Maggie was nowhere to be seen. But a puff of orange-red hair sticking out of the blankets on Maggie Light’s bed told him that Snail was asleep.
“Sleep on, my friend,” he whispered as quietly as a lullaby. She might not consider him as such, but it suddenly occurred to him that she was truly the only one he could count on. The only one who cared that he was alive in the world.
The dwarfs had not been in their room, but he had expected that. Whenever the wagon was in motion, they were invariably in the driver’s seat. Perhaps they even took turns sleeping there.
He left that room and found himself in the professor’s quarters. He did not want to see Odds, much less talk to him, so he tiptoed through. Opening the door to the outside, he clambered up to see the dwarfs.
As if to mock his bleak mood, it was a fine, sunny day. The cart now rolled over a smooth track that wandered a short distance across a small, open plain before disappearing into the southwestern mountains.
“What mountains are those?” he said to the dwarfs by way of hello.
Dagmarra’s eyes twinkled up at him. “They are skaap,” she said, her voice a rumble.
“Skaap?” It was not a name or a word he knew.
“Not Seelie.” Annar growled the translation.
“Nor Unseelie,” Thridi added, his voice not quite as rough.
“Nor the shifting borderlands between,” Dagmarra said, twinkle all gone.
Perhaps both kingdoms claim them, Aspen thought.
“Have they a name?”
“Bonebreak,” said Annar.
“Or Stonebreak,” Thridi told him.
Aspen looked at Dagmarra.
She shrugged. “Or Heartbreak. Choose one. They will break one or all if you try to cross them.”
He looked at the craggy dark cliffs and snowcapped heights. The names could be Seelie or Unseelie. Or perhaps neither.
“Do we go there?”
“Be hard not to,” Annar called back.
“We’d go here but we already are,” Thridi added.
Dagmarra was strangely silent.
Aspen was about to restate his question when he noticed that they had company.
“What’s that?” he said, pointing to something a short ways ahead of them, shimmering in the sun. “Another wagon?”
“An odd question,” Annar said.
“Unless you’ve gone blind,” Thridi said.
“Or it’s an ogre in a very clever disguise,” they said together.
Dagmarra was still silent.
“Yes, well, it’s a wagon then,” Aspen said, feeling as stupid as he always did when he tried to talk to the dwarfs. But he gave it one more try. “And there are two others, as well. But what are they all doing here?” He held up a hand. “No wait! I know. They’re traveling. Getting pulled by horses. Fulfilling their purpose, you might say.”
Annar grinned up at Aspen, then poked Thridi. “I’m beginning to like him.”
“He gets us,” Thridi said, grinning as broadly as his brother.
Dagmarra spat spectacularly over the side of the wagon. The spit arced up, turned, and headed downward, its tail glistening in the sunlight like the trail of a flying snail, silver all the way to the ground.
Aspen saw now that there were people walking between the wagons as well. And a few people—a very few—were mounted on bony horses or mules.
He gave careful thought to his next question. “Why are we and all these others traveling to what seems to be—” He pointed toward the mountains ahead of them. “What seems to be awfully inhospitable territory?”
Annar looked at Thridi, who shrugged. They both looked at their sister, who once more spat over the side of the wagon. Then she shrugged as well.
“Odds is collecting,” she said.
“Collecting what?”
“Skarm drema.”
The dwarfs all folded their arms and leaned back, and Aspen knew he would not get another word out of them on the subject. He watched the mountains for a while, which seemed to be approaching the wagons rather than the other way around. It was mesmerizing for a few minutes. But soon enough he grew restless and went back to wake up Snail.
• • •
SNAIL WAS SITTING up in bed, yawning. Aspen smiled at her hair, which looked as if it was trying to escape her scalp. For the first time in days he felt the slightest bit happy.
That feeling lasted just as long as it took Snail to open her mouth.
“What do you know about changelings?” she asked without preamble.
Aspen cocked his head. “Same as you do, I imagine. Though not as personally, I suppose.”
