Page 217 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
Waden used to make the same promises, that awful wretched voice hissed in my mind.
I closed my eyes and fought against it with all my might. Waden wouldn’t have even risked dirtying his clothes to save me, let alone his life, like Ryker had done multiple times.
So far.
“The trolls sounded upset,” I said to hear something, anything except for those ugly thoughts. “Or is that just how they talk?”
“Both. The most powerful are the loudest. But they seemed upset, indeed.” He leaned back, jaw clenched. “Trolls suffer gatherings among their warring tribes only when there’s a dire situation. And they never come this close to the city.”
“We’re hours away from any human.”
Ryker shook his head. “The trolls avoid us as much as we avoid them. They know we have sled paths through here and stay close to the edge of the crater, where they’ve built dwellings in the caves. Yet, they approached.”
“What does that mean?”
Ryker looked at the crater’s rim in the distance, now looming closer and casting a shadow on the realm in the sunset.
“It means something is scaring them away from the border.”
Chapter
Forty-Seven
ALLIE
While Ryker and the warriors scouted the area, Nadya, Geryll, and I tried to get the fire to behave and swell.
The night sky still hadn’t decided if it wanted to be purple or orange, but Ryker decided to stop for the night. These strange wolves still had enough energy to probably circle the crater twice, but they’d gotten spooked and he didn’t want to take any chances.
The news of the trolls wandering so close to the human paths had worried the warriors as well. I didn’t know how Vylkor’s constant frown could possibly deepen, but it had.
“I can’t believe you saw a troll gathering.” Geryll whistled as he took out two flint stones from his satchel. “That’s the stuff of fairytales.”
“Dark fairytales.” I pushed the final stone into place, my back screaming at me to stop. The evening chill didn’t help. “The trolls look more dangerous than I thought.”
“They are more dangerous.” Nadya dropped another pile of dried branches next to the makeshift stone pit we’d quickly put together near a huge slanted rock. “They drink human blood any chance they get.”
“Those are just rumors,” Geryll said. “No troll has attacked a human in generations. They keep to their side, we keep to ours.”
“They don’t anymore, do they?”
“We don’t know that. They could just have their gatherings there and we didn’t discover them until now, because we avoid each other.”
A good theory.
A pretty lie in disguise, meant to soothe the mind even as reality screamed the truth.
I didn’t know much about this realm, but if Ryker was concerned, so was I.
Nobody other than the two of us knew about the fallen star or that the Northern Clans were ready to nip at our heels for access to more power.
The wells were drying up, the trolls were moving, and danger clung in the air.
Something was boiling underneath Solkar’s Reach.
We needed to be ready for the moment it exploded.
“I don’t understand why this isn’t working.” Geryll scraped the flint stones together like he wanted to smash them into oblivion.
