“All that you really need to know is that today is a Royal Hunt, and our quarry is asking if you would willingly take her place. Would you?”
What, be hunted down and slaughtered by you and your knights? I think not.
“Wise choice.” She hesitates, then adds, “Although, you know, if you were to succeed in eluding my hunting party, you would win your freedom, as will she.”
Is he being baited or is she telling the truth? How many have eluded you? He studies the miserable troll.
“Oh, perhaps one in one hundred. But they know, you see. The hunt is something they understand. It can snatch them up at any time, which knowledge keeps them . . . in their place.”
But if there’s a world full of them beyond your . . .
“Our sovereign state? Ailfion?”
Why not use them for your teind? Why take from our world?
“The short answer is, they’re of no use because they’re impervious to glamouring.”
And taking my kind is easy, I suppose.
“It was, before you came along.” She stares a moment longer into the cage. “We only hunt them for sport. They are wild and clever and elusive, difficult to capture. Nor are they immortal. They wear out, the same as you, a little faster, in fact.”
Nicnevin returns to her throne. He is drawn along as if on a lead.
“So, if you won’t take her place, then you are hunting her along with us, mayfly. Which is why you’re costumed as a beater. Can’t have you running about naked—that’s for my entertainment alone.” She touches one sharp finger to his cheek, and even that contact makes him thrum with lust. She taps the stone at his throat. “Your choker is reconfigured to allow you to roam today. But as you’ve already contemplated this, don’t take encouragement from that news. Your range is limited. And I would so hate for those twinned jewels to compress.”
He is presented with a long, polished staff, tipped at both ends with gold caps, and ushered over to the group of young Yvags dressed in the same blue-green outfits as his. They regard him with scorn. Their conversations buzz and drone in a collective sneer. He studies the changelings: They are smaller versions of the white-haired, golden-eyed knights, dotted with budding spikes but mostly not the sharper spines adorning their seniors. They have wider, rounder faces, too, that he assumes will stretch and narrow over time, but right now still express their former humanity. None resembles Innes or Baldie at all. When he moves in for a closer look, one of them smacks him with their staff. He leaps back, and they laugh at him. Needle-sharp teeth grin at him.
Whatever signal is given, he misses it. All at once the clear wall dissolves into the plaza stones like melting ice, until the female troll is separated from her captors by nothing but air. The elves move aside, creating a straight line across the plaza, up a series of steps and toward a distant hill covered in some sort of purple heath.
Something like a trumpet sounds, its note echoing off the towers and spires. Who knows where it originates? The troll struts into the lane they’ve opened up for her. The Yvags watch like a pack of dogs beholding a wounded doe. He half expects them to fall on and devour her right here, but they don’t. The troll reaches the edge of the plaza, climbs the steps; then with one final look at her enemy, she charges straight for the distant hill. The Yvags all cheer. The hunt, it seems, has begun.
The crowd do nothing. They return to eating, drinking, buzzing excitedly until another trumpet blast sounds. The troll has vanished over the hill.
The changeling beaters turn as one and march off across the plaza. Thomas watches. Then Nicnevin’s voice rings in his ears, You’d best keep up, mayfly. Your choker will punish you for avoiding your duty, too.
The pressure at his throat is mild, but a compelling threat.
He runs after the other beaters. Before they’ve reached the crest of the hill, he has to stop. Hands on knees, he wheezes, his lungs straining at the heavy air. Without the choker filtering it, he can’t imagine how he would ever get very far. He would suffocate.
Reaching the top of the hill, Thomas pauses to catch his breath again and looks back.
From here in the dusky light he can just make out the ambit of their city—counts eighteen plazas like the one below between the towers, including the one with the bright circlet of Hel at its center; there’s an outer ring of fifty sparkling spires, and between them, everywhere, more of those curious eel-like pipes that rise out of the ground in humps. They dot the landscape all the way to the horizon. The towers suggest a population a thousand times greater than the throng amassed below for the Royal Hunt. Did the Queen lie about their numbers or are these spiral towers the abandoned shells of a dying race? He wonders when they invaded this world, if they somehow brought the city with them.
The most distant towers seem to wink in and out of existence. He once beheld an island that floated on the horizon of the ocean and wasn’t truly there. It likewise came and went. Are these towers like that—existing somewhere other than where they appear to be? In two worlds at once?
With a savage cry, the beaters race down the farside of the hill, drawing his attention back to them. Behind him, the Yvag horde in their finery at last pour out of the plaza and begin the ascent. Thomas rushes down after the changelings.
The landscape ahead and below is covered by midnight-blue gorse or something very like it—leathery leaves growing knee to waist high out of pale blue sandy soil, reminding him again of Alpin’s blue desert.
The beaters spread out wider across the landscape and begin thrashing back and forth while ululating—a sound that would terrify anything. When he catches up, the nearest one points for him to take up a position beyond their far right flank. Silently, he falls in line, imitating them, whirling the staff and slapping the waist-high plants, though without the weird wordless calls and with far less energy. The nearest beater gestures for him to move even farther away. He finds a narrow path going in his direction and follows it.
Overall, their line must stretch for miles now. Soon he can just barely make out the next one over. The Yvag hunting party is nothing but a distant tumult.
Wherever the troll has gone, Thomas doubts it’s lying on its belly in the night-blue heath.
He wanders down and up two more ridges with nothing much higher than the dark heather anywhere—no sign of the troll. Given what Nicnevin described, he wonders if it hasn’t gone straight for a cave somewhere. Thus far neither caves nor caverns have appeared, and no forest of any sort, either.
When next he glances at the beaters, they’ve spread out so wide that he can’t see the next one over now. The sound of the Yvag horde has faded as well. For all he knows, one of the changelings successfully rooted her out; then again maybe not, since the choker hasn’t recalled him. How cunning is a troll? Surely at least as cunning as a fox. It’s her land, her world, or was.
The next ridge is more like a broad butte or escarpment, a stony hill with a nearly uniform top to it. He circles down around the side, thinking that now he’s finally going to find caves and caverns.
The far side of the escarpment is a sheer drop from above. He would never have been able to climb down. Beyond it the landscape is different. There are pockets of forest ahead. Nothing like the expanse of the Þagalwood—most of the trees are short, with blue-black needles and lighter trunks. In the wan light of the shriveled sun, it’s like peering at a landscape cast in moonlight, and the path he’s on appears as a pale meandering line through it. Once he’s rested again, he descends the silty slope, crosses a small meadow of golden whin, thicker than the heather was. With all the rocky heights around him, for a moment it’s as if he’s wandered out of Elfland and back home. He stands at the edge of the meadow and takes it all in, before picking up the path again, and soon climbs yet another steep and craggy hill, this one topped by a tor, like some giant’s cairn, and pocked in places by depressions, maybe even caves.
On the far side of that, the path leads straight to a broken, crumbling ruin of some earlier civilization: great stone pillars, some still supporting portions of roofs, buildings that were once five- and six-sided before parts of them collapsed, some foundations in rows like the orderly properties of Ercildoun, but two that were obviously larger and might have been palaces or temples. A civilization far closer to his own than to the shining towers of Yvagddu. It reminds him of Roman ruins he’s encountered below the broken stone wall that separates parts of Scotland from the south. Those had similar sunken floors and pavings, too. This suggests Nicnevin lied about how advanced the trolls were.
If he were a troll, this is where he would go. The definable path suggests that some have.
The craggy descent from the tor is full of dark spaces that might be cave entrances, or caverns, or deep recesses good for hiding, places where Yvag hunters might not catch their prey.
Down the rocky slope he goes with one idea: to find the troll and somehow help her escape her hunters. He keeps such a close watch on the ruin, he doesn’t even glimpse the thing that strikes the side of his head, dropping him in his tracks.
Moments or minutes pass—he can’t be sure. He sits up, dizzy for an instant. Touches the side of his head, which stings, finds wet blood on his fingers. Looks around.
In a shadowy crevice he’s passed, the troll stands motionless, watching. A simple leather sling dangles from its fist, fitted with a rock. The wonder is the last one didn’t split his skull open. Thing is, it’s not her. Not the hunt’s target. It’s an even larger, hulking male troll with a prognathous jaw and enormous yellowish lower teeth arranged in an expression that’s not pleased to see him.
It says something, gestures at him—at his uniform in particular. Of course, it sees a beater wearing a glowing purple sash, an agent of the elves, and nothing else. But where is the troll he thought he was following?
Even as he wonders this, he becomes aware of a distant rumbling. It is the same sound he heard with Alpin the night they entered the Þagalwood, and he knows it now as he knew it then.
