Stolen Songbird

by Danielle Jensen

  “True,” I agreed, although I didn’t understand why the alternative – his father knowing he didn’t want to break the curse – had elicited his embarrassment. I frowned, mentally reviewing his words in my mind. He was acting strangely. I pulled the covers up around my chin and watched him unbuckle the sword at his waist, set it carefully on the desk, and then cross over to the closet. He took off his coat, hanging it carefully on a hanger, and brushed the fabric smooth. He untied his cravat with a quick jerk, but he folded it neatly and placed it on a shelf. There were dark circles under his eyes – all his sleepless nights were catching up with him.

  “Do you ever sleep?”

  “I try to, but I keep finding this girl in my bed.” He meant it as a joke, I knew, but I still felt guilty.

  “You can sleep in the bed if you want.” As soon as the words were out my face turned bright red. “I mean, I can sleep on the chaise and you can sleep in the bed. It makes more sense – I’m smaller. You’re really too tall to be sleeping on that thing. Besides, I get plenty of rest.” I clamped my teeth shut to stop my babbling.

  One corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s all right, Cécile. You can have the bed – there are other places for me to sleep.”

  Which wasn’t at all the answer I’d been looking for.

  Silence stretched long beyond the point of awkwardness. He was incredibly nervous, which was making me nervous. I plucked at the blanket, folding it into tighter and tighter pleats. Think of something to say, I ordered myself, but everything I came up with sounded stupid or boring.

  “I understand my father suggested you seduce me,” he said abruptly, the words tumbling over each other. “Apparently he considers me susceptible to such things.”

  “Or overestimates my skills,” I said, with a nervous laugh, glancing at the gown hanging across the room. “Perhaps your aunt can arrange for me to have lessons so that I can improve my chances of success.”

  “You don’t need lessons,” he replied. The light hanging above him flared brightly and he glanced up at it before mumbling, “I mean you don’t… I don’t know what I mean. I haven’t slept all night. Forget I said anything. I’m only here for a change of clothes and then I’ll be gone.” Our combined mortification made my toes curl.

  His fingers made small shadows on the wall as he unbuttoned his shirt, pulling it off and laying it across the back of a chair for one of the girls to launder. I stared at his naked back, the hard contours of muscle rippling as he reached into the closet for a clean shirt. A slow-burning warmth filled me that had nothing to do with the extra blankets he’d given me. He froze, sensing the direction my mind was going. Squeezing my eyes shut, I waited for him to make some snide comment that would make me look like a silly fool for admiring him.

  He was silent and seconds later, his light winked out. Instead of confidence and conceit, I felt discomfort and a hint of embarrassment. I heard the faint rustle of fabric and the closet doors clicked shut. I tried to think about worms, sluag, even chamber pots, anything to distract me from the thought that the most handsome boy I’d ever met was undressing across the room from me. I was the one that was supposed to be seducing him, not the other way around.

  There was a thud that sounded unmistakably like a collision between troll and furniture. “Bloody hell,” he swore under his breath.

  “Tristan?”

  I could hear him breathing; feel the soft edge of apprehension. “Yes?”

  “Can you see in the dark?”

  He laughed softly. “Given I just walked into a table, I would suggest not. I’m not a bat, you know.” His light winked back on.

  I buried my face in a pillow, embarrassed. “Forget I said anything,” I mumbled. He walked by the bed on his way to the door. “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “I’ve things to see to.”

  “The tree?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “What do you know about the tree?”

  “That it’s a magic version of what you plan to…” I broke off at the warning expression on his face. But if I was going to get him to trust me, I needed to spend time with him. “Will you show it to me?”

  He bit his bottom lip and eyed me thoughtfully. “I suppose we would only be following His Majesty’s orders.”

  “Only a fool would dare not to.” Scrambling out of bed, I snatched up the altered gown and wriggled into it. “Let’s go.”

  “So where is it?” I asked, peering down the cobbled lane while I hurried to keep up with his long stride. The dawn shone through the small hole above, but even the faint light was strangely comforting. It drove away the sense of never ending night that had afflicted me since my arrival.

  “I’ll show you soon enough, but first we must consult with Pierre.” He hesitated, then reached down and fastened up my cloak. “You’ll catch a chill showing that much skin.”

  Sighing, I followed him up a set of stairs and into a small home that was cluttered and in need of a good dusting.

  “Morning, Pierre!” Tristan shouted as we entered. “Any movement since yesterday?”

  “Quiet as a grave,” a high-pitched voice shouted back, and moments later, a badly crippled troll flew into the room, seated on what appeared to be a stool with wheels. He was very small, his back contorted in a strange s-shape, but worst of all, he appeared to have no legs. Without the stool and his magic, I doubted he would have the ability to move very far at all.

  “Or would have been,” he continued, rolling to a stop, “if the Barons Dense and Denser hadn’t gotten it into their skulls to have a rock-throwing contest outside my house last night.”

  Tristan sighed and looked at me as if it was my fault. “I’ll speak to them about it later.”

  “Bah!” The troll threw up his hands. “They’ll just think of another way to disturb the peace. Perhaps next time one of them will do us all a favor and drop a rock on the other’s head. But who is this that you have with you?”

  “This is the… I mean, this is my… Cécile.”

  “You mean, your lady wife, the Princess Cécile?” The odd-looking troll tsked and shook his head. His wire-rimmed glasses slid down his nose, and he absently pushed them up again as he inspected me. “And even lovelier than I had heard. The poets will write songs about her beauty that will be sung for generations.”

  Feeling strangely shy, I let him take my hand, which he kissed and then patted warmly with his gnarled and bent one. “The young ones have no sense of romance,” he said and winked. I giggled, despite myself.

  Tristan coughed. “Pierre monitors the motions of the earth.” He gestured around the room, and his orb brightened, revealing tables of equipment and charts.

  “I didn’t realize it moved,” I said, walking over to examine a chart hanging on the wall. A list of dates ran across the bottom, with an erratic line running horizontally above them. There were numbers and notations written all over it, and I tried to puzzle it out with little success.

  “Ah, but the earth, she is always moving,” Pierre said, and with a theatrical gesture of his hand, dozens of glowing glass balls of various colors lifted into the air and began to rotate around the large yellow one at the center.

  “The sun,” Pierre said, and the yellow ball blazed brightly. “The planets and their moons.” I watched with fascination as each glass ball lit up as he named it. “And here, this is us. Earth.” The blue orb brightened. “Always moving, always moving. But what young Tristan here is concerned with is the times it moves like this.” The blue ball shuddered violently.

  “Earthshakes,” I whispered, and I looked up, picturing the vast weight of the rock that hung over our heads.

  “Just so, my lady,” Pierre replied, and the glass balls settled gently back onto a table.

  Shivering, I wrapped my cloak around me tightly. The earthshakes came often. Sometimes they were hardly noticeable, but there had been times when I’d been knocked off my feet or seen our house and barn shake so badly I was certain they would collapse. I had always b
een afraid of the quakes – any rational person was – but my fear took on another level as I considered the implications of having a half a mountain worth of rock dangling over my head.

  “You shouldn’t worry, Cécile,” Tristan said from where he’d stood silently in the corner. “Not so much as a stone has fallen in my lifetime or even my father’s.”

  “I’m not afraid. Much,” I amended, seeing him roll his eyes. Blast this cursed connection between us. Nor did the sense of confidence radiating from him do much to chase away my fear. He hadn’t said that rocks never fell; only that one hadn’t fallen in a long time. That meant it was possible, and I didn’t have troll magic to protect my head from falling objects.

  With greater understanding, I examined the chart once again. “This line,” I said, “it shows the motions then?” Pierre nodded. I traced my finger along the line, noting the dates where the line spiked. Many of them were burned into my memory. “Our barn nearly collapsed during this one,” I murmured, tapping one of the spikes and remembering our panic as we ushered all the animals out. It was the highest one on the chart, which went back only thirty years, if I was reading it correctly. “Do you have one that goes back further?”

  “I have charts going back nearly five centuries, my lady. It is an old craft, and one made exceedingly relevant by the Fall.” Pierre’s stool rolled across the floor and he extracted another chart from the cabinet and smoothed it out on the desk.

  “How old is your father?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat at the sight of a spike in the line that eclipsed all the others.

  Tristan cleared his throat. “Forty-three.”

  The spike was fifty years ago. “What happened?”

  Tristan shrugged, but I could feel his discomfort. “We are better prepared, now.”

  “Did rocks fall?” I demanded. “Couldn’t they catch them?”

  “It happened in the middle of the night,” Tristan replied. “A portion of the city was lost – you walked through it when you came through the labyrinth.”

  I blanched, remembering the crushed rubble of homes on either side of the tunnels. “Did trolls die?”

  “Four hundred and thirty-six lives lost – crushed to death in their sleep.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. They wouldn’t have even seen it coming.

  “There are worse ways to go,” Tristan muttered.

  Uncomfortable silence stretched until Pierre broke it. “Perhaps she will feel better once you show her the tree.”

  “I somehow doubt that,” I muttered.

  Tristan smiled. “Have a little faith, Cécile.”

  We took our leave from Pierre’s little house. “You come visit me when Tristan starts to bore you, my lady!” he called from behind us. I turned to wave goodbye and had to hurry to catch up to Tristan.

  A laughing group of children carrying books ran by and we were treated to a chorus of “Good morning, my lord,” along with many curious glances in my direction.

  “Where are they going?” I asked, smiling at their antics.

  “To school,” Tristan replied. “We’ll start here.”

  He stopped next to a low, circular stone wall that stood in the middle of the street.

  I turned back around to watch the children, girls and boys, disappear into a stately building. “Truly? The girls, too?”

  “Truly,” Tristan replied, but his attention seemed elsewhere. “They all attend until they’re ten, and then they start learning their respective trades. But look here, Cécile. This is the tree. Or part of it, rather.”

  With a wistful backwards glance, I turned to see Tristan standing on the stone wall, staring at empty space. “Where?” I asked, looking into the circle. There was nothing but stone.

  “Here.” He clasped my hand and pulled it forward. Immediately, it was enveloped in liquid warmth. I jerked my hand back. “I can feel something, but I can’t see it.” My eyes searched the empty air, trying to find a glimmer of what he was looking at. Reaching into the magic, I ran my hand up as high as I could reach, even on my tiptoes, but I could not grasp what was in front of me.

  “No, I suppose as a human, you wouldn’t.”

  “But trolls can see it?”

  “See isn’t precisely the correct word – we can sense it’s there. Me better than most, because the magic is predominantly mine.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling more than a little let down. I’d thought he was going to show me something impressive, but all I’d done was warm my fingers in a column of magic. “I could see the magic girders in the mines – they were all lit up.”

  Frowning, he let go of my hand and cracked his knuckles. “Good idea.” Reaching out, he touched the magic and it burst into silver light.

  “God in heaven,” I whispered, watching in awe as light flooded in a stick-straight column up and up. It reached the rocks above and bloomed outward into arches that canopied across the sky. Column after column lit up until all of Trollus glowed and I could see that the rock was supported much like the ceiling of the throne room, just on a larger scale.

  My head tilted backwards, I turned in an awe-struck circle until the sound of shrieking children caught my attention.

  The troll children poured back out of the school, running in circles around us yelling, “Light show!” over and over again. Tristan laughed at them, and suddenly bursts of light in all different colors exploded in the sky, like fireworks, raining bits of magic over the city. Fantastical creatures made of light soared through the air, diving down to circle the children, who screamed in delight, jumping for cover and then crowing for more. They made their own little flying beasts and sent them chasing after Tristan’s red and gold serpent, which circled around and gobbled the children’s creatures down.

  He gave a flourishing bow to his little subjects and then, looking back at the glowing column, he snapped his fingers and the tree blinked out. I found myself clapping with delight along with the other children. “Bravo,” I said. “Most impressive.”

  Grinning, he bowed deeply, then motioned for the children to get back to their studies. “Light requires little effort, and they are fond of parlor tricks.”

  “Who isn’t?” Reaching out, I touched the magic again, allowing my hand to sink deep into the depths of the column. “How is it,” I asked, “that I can pass my hand through it, but it can still hold up all that rock?”

  “It knows the difference between the two.”

  “Knows?” I frowned. “Is it alive?”

  Tristan stepped off the stone wall and I watched his brow furrow as he considered how to explain. It struck me that for once I was seeing the real Tristan, not an act designed to disguise his true feelings or a few kind words that accidentally slipped through. Gone was the cold callousness, and in its place was a young man content to let the little trolls pull at his sleeves with the irreverence only children can get away with.

  “It isn’t alive, precisely,” Tristan finally said. “It is what I will it to be. I want it to hold up rock, but to let through the river and everything in it. The magic knows the difference, because I know the difference.”

  “I see,” I said. “And what is it that you do to it every day?”

  “Mostly, I fill it with power,” he said, unconsciously offering me his arm and just as quickly pulling it back. “Magic fades,” he added, sensing my confusion. “The tree constantly needs to be replenished. And when the earth shakes, it also needs to be adjusted to ensure the load is balanced correctly. That’s what takes the most time.”

  “And you do this every day?” I asked. For all the grandness of the tree, it seemed a more monotonous task than milking cows or slopping pigs.

  “Every day,” he agreed.

  “Can’t someone else do it?”

  He frowned at me. “Yes, but it is the duty of the king.”

  “But you aren’t the king,” I argued. Yet. “Why doesn’t your father do it?”

  “Because he entrusted me with it.” I could feel Tristan’s pride radiatin
g through our bond. “When I was fifteen – the youngest ever to take on the task. It is a very great honor.”

  I nodded gravely, although in my opinion, King Thibault’s delegating the task likely had more to do with him not wanting to drag his fat arse all around Trollus each day than trust in his son. “Is it hard?”

  “It is tiring,” he said, motioning for me to follow him down an empty side street. “It requires an immense amount of my power to maintain at the best of times. When it needs adjusting, I sometimes require assistance from the Builders’ Guild – which is my guild, by the way. But not often.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  He stopped in his tracks and looked back at me. “What, then?”

  “I wondered,” I started tentatively, “if it was hard knowing that everyone’s lives depend on your magic; if you worry about an earthshake coming like the one that wrecked the city.”

  He started walking again. “I cannot stop the world from moving. All I can do is be prepared for when it does.”

  Looking around, I saw we were alone and closed the distance between us. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  The only sound in the street was the roar of the waterfall. Finally, he spoke. “I used to have nightmares about it falling down. I’d wake up certain I’d heard rocks raining on the city streets. But not anymore.”

  “What do you dream of now?” I pressed, the desire to understand what went on in his mind like an itch I could not help but scratch.

  “I dream of other things.” Tristan’s face was unreadable, but my mind filled with the same intense heat that had seared through me when I’d watched him change his shirt.

  Desire. The word rippled through my thoughts, bringing a flush of heat to my cheeks.

  “I was to leave to go live with my mother in Trianon the day that Luc brought me here,” I blurted out, desperate to change the subject. “I was going to sing on stage, you see. It was my dream…” I broke off, expecting one of the many nasty comments he usually made to me in public.

  Instead I saw curiosity on his face. “It was your dream…” he prompted.