“Hide behind the brewing vat, both of you.” She pointed to the hallway outside. “I’ll deal with the troll.”
Soon, there was a noise like thunder, and the troll entered, a six-headed monster this time, larger than the first. It roared its displeasure, three or four of its voices speaking at once. “I smell human blood.”
Strangely, the second Princess told the same story: “Yes, dear. Don’t be angry. A crow dropped a human bone, with flesh still on it. Everything is tainted. When I threw it out, the crow dropped it back. I had to bury it at last.”
The troll sniffed and growled suspiciously, but she persuaded it to rest its heads in her lap, then let her scratch them. When the brute was asleep and snoring, she carefully bolstered its heads against a pile of pillows as she freed herself. The first Princess and I watched anxiously, having entered the chamber to finish the task. It was no use trying to lift the troll’s sword until both Princesses kissed me on the lips. Although the sword was even heavier than the first troll’s, I swung it mightily, cutting off the six heads in one bloody stroke, like harvesting stalks of wheat. I leant on the sword then, panting, before I lowered the engine to the floor beside its former master. Beneath its hair, the troll’s body was half flesh, half stone; the heavy, razor-sharp blade had sliced right through the stony parts of its necks.
Then the second Princess remembered the third sister. “She is the youngest. We’ll take you to her.”
They led me across another gardened courtyard, through still more corridors, to the largest chamber yet, where the youngest of the King’s daughters sat spinning golden yarn. “Get out,” she said, looking around her. “The troll will kill you all.”
When we insisted on saving her, she ordered us to hide behind the brewing vat just outside. Soon, the troll came in, and I peeked at an angle from the vat to the Princess’s chamber. This troll was a nine-headed beast the size of a house, far bigger than the first two. At its side was a sheathed sword larger than a rowboat, and it dripped with icy water as it walked and grumbled, hooted and howled, growled and roared, all of its voices speaking in unison. “I smell human blood.”
She told the same story as her sisters, and soon persuaded her troll to unloose the scabbard from its belt and let her scratch its heads till it slept. After one kiss from each of the Princesses, I could swing the troll’s sword easily. And yet, I am a warrior; perhaps it was honor that marred my stroke. Perhaps.
“I smell human blood,” each of the trolls had said.
What about the Princesses? What sort of blood did they have?
Closing my eyes, I swung the sword. My blow cleaved eight heads from the troll but missed the ninth, whose bleak eyes opened at the same moment as mine.
The troll lumbered to its feet and it rose far above me, like a storm nimbus, howling at me — a strangely plaintive howl, full of loss, full of anger, pain, and sorrow — and something changed inside me, something shifted. My unnatural strength was gone, and I dropped the huge sword, leaping aside where it fell. For the first time, I knew terror.
As the chamberlain told me the story, the Queen bore the King a girl-child one year after his encounter with the witch-woman. The year after that she had another, and the third year also. The King rejoiced, but never forgot the crone’s words. He kept the Princesses locked within the keep, with a watch of soldiers at the doors.
As they grew up, the three daughters became as I saw them, beautiful, tall, and clever. The King provided them with tutors and playmates, but always these must come to the keep, and the daughters’ only sorrow was that they were not allowed to play under the wide heavens, not even to stand in the open air upon the citadel’s ramparts. For all that they begged and wept, the King resisted: he would never allow evil to fall upon them. Until even the youngest was fifteen years old, his beloved Princesses would never stand in the open air.
Only weeks before I arrived in Tromsdal, mere days before the fifteenth birthday of the youngest Princess, the King was out riding, and the Princesses stood at a window in the keep. Spring had come early. The fields were green and beautiful, alive with thousands of tiny wildflowers, and the three daughters felt they must go out and play beneath the sky, come what evil may — they begged and entreated and urged the seneschal.
“On no account,” he said.
At least, they said, he could let them stand on the highest rampart, under the open sky, where they could best view the sea, the fields and flowers, the rugged coast, the woods and mountains of the kingdom. “Surely,” said the youngest, “no harm can befall us here in the center of my father’s stronghold. Please be reasonable.” It was such a warm and pleasant day, the Princesses were so beautiful and spoke so sweetly, and it was so palpably safe. The King need never know.
“For one minute,” he said. “Only one minute. You must be quick in case your father returns.”
They looked about the kingdom — the dark sea and darker forest, the fields and meadows, the mountains with their distant caps of white-blue ice — safe, as it seemed, from all the dangerous world, and the seneschal congratulated himself. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there came a great drift of snow, hard enough to fling him off balance, so dense that he could not see. In that moment he knew and repented his mistake. The snow swirled, and time seemed to stop. When he regained his footing, the snow had carried the Princesses away.
So I was told it by the beetle-browed chamberlain. Such are the pretty stories they tell in Tromsdal.
“What happened to the Queen?” I said.
But he gave a papery laugh. “They executed the seneschal. The King demands obedience.”
We are pawns for the Bright Ones, human and troll alike; we are merely pawns.
The stumps of the troll’s necks bled icy water, some of it descending on me like bitter rain, while scabs of ice formed about the edges of its wounds, not quickly enough to prevent the outward gushing of life. “You’ll pay for this,” it said. There was darkness in its voice. Imagine a sharp-toothed wolf, like the demon Fenrir who will eat this world. Imagine that a wolf could talk.
The enchantment had fallen from us, but that was of no comfort, for the troll lunged with leathery hands that would have snapped me like a dry twig. I drew my broadsword from its scabbard, but I might as well have used a hairpin. Then the troll howled again, as it staggered and fell, crumbling like a cottage beneath a fallen oak tree. I stepped well back, the Princesses behind my stiffly outstretched arms, as the gargantuan creature went through its death throes. When the troll was finally still, I examined it. Beneath its long, coarse hair, the naked body was more ice than flesh, and the ice began to melt, pooling on the crystal floor of the chamber. The Princesses smothered me with kisses; but it meant nothing, for my heart had frozen against them.
I needed to get out of there, but my terror had gone, and my cunning returned. In one of the rose-scented gardens I found a wooden bucket, three feet high, held together with iron bands — this I filled with as many gold nuggets as I could carry. To haul me up with these, the lieutenant would need all his strength. The Princesses tried to amuse me with sweet talk, but I was silent as we returned to my climbing rope where it still hung in near darkness between two worlds. The first Princess placed her ruby-colored slipper through the knotted loop, we tugged the rope three times, and the captain and lieutenant pulled her up to the surface far above us. We repeated this for each of her sisters, but then I became afraid. I realized that my companions now had the Princesses but no reason to rescue me from the troll world. To test them, I attached my bucket of troll gold to the rope. I scraped handful after handful of damp, loamy-smelling soil into the bucket, adding to its weight, then stepped aside and tugged the rope thrice more, wiping my soiled hands against my leggings as I waited for what might happen.