Frostfire (4 page)

“I always knew I was different.” He stared down at the floor, the crease in his brow
deepening. “Even before my skin started changing color. But when that happened, I
guess I just thought I was like an X-Men or something.”

“Sorry, we’re not superheroes. But being Kanin can still be awesome,” I tried to reassure
him.

He turned to look at me, relief relaxing some of his apprehension. “Yeah? How so?”

“Well, you’re a Berling.”

“I’m a what?”

“Sorry. Berling. That’s your last name.”

“No, my name is—”

“No, that’s your host family’s last name,” I said, cutting him off. The sooner he
started severing mental and emotional ties with his host family, the easier it would
be for him to accept who he was. “Your parents are Dylan and Eva Berling. You are
a Berling.”

“Oh. Right.” He nodded, like he should know better, and then looked down at his lap.
“Will I ever see my host family again?”

“Maybe,” I lied, then passed the buck so I wouldn’t have to be the one to break it
to him that he’d never again see the people he’d spent the past eighteen years believing
were his mom and dad. “You’ll talk about it with your real family.”

“So what’s so great about being a Berling?” Linus asked.

“Well, for starters, you’re royalty.”

“I’m royalty?” He grinned at that. Being royalty always sounded so much better than
it actually was.

“Yeah.” I nodded and returned his smile. “Your father is a Markis, and your mother
is a Marksinna—which are basically Kanin words for Duke and Duchess.”

“So am I a Markis?”

“Yep. You have a big house. Not quite as nice as the palace, but close. You’ll have
servants and horses and cars. Your dad is best friends with the King. You’ll go to
lavish parties, date the prettiest girls, and really, just live happily ever after.”

“You’re saying that I just woke up in a fairy tale?” Linus asked.

I laughed a little. “Kind of, yeah.”

“Holy crap.” He leaned his head back against the seat. “Are you a Marksinna?”

I shook my head. “No. I’m a tracker. Which is almost as far away from being a Marksinna
as being human.”

“So we’re…” He paused and licked his lips. “Not human?”

“No. It’s like a lion and tiger,” I said, using my go-to analogy to explain the difference
to changelings. “They’re both cats, and they have similar traits, but they’re not
the same. A lion isn’t a tiger. A Kanin isn’t a human.”

“We’re still, like, the same species, then?” Linus asked, sounding relieved.

“Yep. The fact that humans and trolls are so similar is how we’re able to have changelings.
We have to pass for human.”

“Okay.” He settled back in his seat, and that seemed to placate him for a few minutes,
then he asked, “I get that I’m a changeling. But
why
am I a changeling?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t my real parents just raise me themselves?” Linus asked.

I took a deep breath. So far, Linus hadn’t asked that, and I’d been hoping he wouldn’t
until we got back to Doldastam. It always sounded much better coming from the parents
than it did from a tracker, especially if the changelings had follow-up questions
like,
Didn’t you love me?
or
How could you abandon your baby like that?
Which were fair questions.

But since he’d asked, I figured I ought to tell him something.

“It started a long time ago, when humans had more advanced medical care and schools
than we did,” I explained. “Our infant mortality rate was terrible. Babies weren’t
surviving, and when they did, they weren’t thriving. We needed to do something, but
we didn’t want to give up our ways completely and join the human race.

“We decided to use changelings,” I went on. “We’d take a human baby, leave a Kanin
baby in its place, and then we’d drop the human baby at an orphanage.”

Other tribes brought that human baby back to the village, believing it gave them a
bargaining chip with their host families if the changeling decided not to return.
But that rarely happened, and we thought the insurance policy—raising a human child
with intimate knowledge of our society—cost more than it was worth, so we left the
human babies among other humans.

“Our babies would grow up healthy and strong, and when they were old enough, they’d
come back home,” I said.

“So you guys still have crappy hospitals and schools?” Linus asked.

“They’re not the best,” I admitted. “But that’s not all of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

I sighed but didn’t answer right away. The truth was, the main reason we still practiced
changelings was money.

The Kanin lived in small compounds, as far removed from human civilization as we could
manage. To maintain our lifestyle, to live closer to the land and avoid the scramble
of the humans’ lives with their daily commutes and their credit card debt, their pandering
politicians and their wars, we refused to live among them.

We could be self-sustaining without living with the humans, but truth be told, we
did love our luxuries. The only reason we ever came in contact with humans was because
we wanted their trinkets. Kanin, like all trolls, have an almost insatiable lust for
jewels.

Even Linus, who otherwise seemed to be an average teenage boy, had on a large class
ring with a gaudy ruby, a silver thumb ring, a leather bracelet, and a chain bracelet.
The only human man I’d ever seen adorn himself with as much jewelry and accessories
as a troll was Johnny Depp, and based on his looks, I’d grown to suspect that he might
actually be Trylle.

That’s where changelings came in. We’d place the Kanin babies with some of the wealthiest
families we could find. Not quite royalty or celebrity status, but enough to be sure
they’d leave hefty trust funds for their children.

When they were old enough to be collected, trackers like myself would go retrieve
them. We’d earn their trust, explain to them who they were, then get them to access
and drain their bank accounts. They’d return to the Kanin community, infusing our
society with a much-needed surge in funds.

So in the end, what it all came down to was tradition and greed, and when I looked
over at the hopeful expression on Linus’s face, I just didn’t have it in me to tell
him. Our world still had so much beauty and greatness, and I wanted Linus to see that
before showing him its darkest flaw.

“Your parents will explain it to you when you get back,” I said instead.

Linus fell silent after that, but I didn’t even bother trying to sleep. When the train
pulled into the station, I slipped my heavy winter boots back on. I hated wearing
them, but it was better than losing my toes to frostbite. I bundled up in my jacket
and hat, then instructed Linus to do the same.

I grabbed my oversized backpack and slung it over my shoulders. One good thing about
being a tracker was that I’d been trained to pack concisely. On a trip I expected
to last three or four weeks, I managed to get everything I needed into one bag.

As soon as we stepped off the train and the icy wind hit us, Linus gasped.

“How is it so cold here?” Linus pulled a scarf up over his face. “It’s April. Shouldn’t
it be all spring and flowers?”

“Flowers don’t come for another couple months,” I told him as I led him away from
the train platform to where I had left the silver Land Rover LR4 parked.

Fortunately, it hadn’t snowed since I’d been gone. Sometimes when I came back, the
SUV was buried underneath snow. I tossed my bag in the back, then hopped in the driver’s
seat. Linus got in quickly, shivering as I started the SUV.

“I don’t know how much I’ll enjoy living here,” Linus said between chattering teeth.

“You get used to it.” I pointed to the digital temperature monitor in the dash. “It’s
just below freezing today. That’s actually pretty warm for this time of year.”

Once the vehicle had warmed up enough, I put it in drive and pulled out on the road,
heading south along the Hudson Bay. It was almost an hour to Doldastam from the train
station, but Linus didn’t say much. He was too focused on watching the scenery. Everything
was still covered in snow, and most of it was unsullied, so it all appeared pure and
white.

“Why are the trees like that?” Linus asked, pointing at the only vegetation that grew
in the winter.

Tall evergreens dotted the landscape, and all of them were tilted slightly toward
the east, with all their branches growing out on only one side. To people who hadn’t
seen it before, it did look a bit strange.

“It’s called the Krummholz effect,” I explained. “The strong wind comes from the northwest,
making it hard for branches and trees to grow against it, so they all end up bending
away from it.”

As we got closer to Doldastam, the foliage grew thicker. The road narrowed, becoming
a thin path that was barely wide enough for the Land Rover. If another car came toward
us, we’d have to squeeze off the road between the trees.

The trees around the road seemed to be reaching for us, bent and hunched over, their
long branches extending out toward the path. They had long viny branches, like weeping
willows, but they were darker green and thicker than any willow I’d seen. These were
actually hybrids, grown only by the Kanin people. They were made to help conceal the
road to the kingdom, so humans would be less likely to stumble across us.

But no other car came. The empty road was normal. Other than trackers, no one really
left the city.

The wall wasn’t visible until we were almost upon Doldastam, thanks to all the trees
hiding it. It was twenty feet tall, built out of stone by Kanin over two centuries
ago, but it held up stunningly well.

The wrought-iron gate in front of the road was open, and I waved at the guard who
manned the gate as we drove past. The guard recognized me, so he smiled and waved
me on.

Linus leaned forward, staring up through the windshield. Small cottages lined the
narrow roads as we weaved our way through town, hidden among bushes as much as they
could be, but Linus wasn’t paying attention to them.

It was the large palace looming over everything at the other end of town that had
caught his attention. The gray stone made it look like a castle, though it lacked
any towers. It was a massive rectangle, covered in glittering windows.

I drove through the center of town, and when I reached the south side of Doldastam,
where the palace towered above us, I slowed down so Linus could get a better look.
But then I kept going, stopping two houses away, in front of a slightly smaller but
still majestic stone house. This one had a pitched roof, so it resembled a mansion
much more than it did a castle.

“This is it?” Linus asked, but he didn’t look any less impressed by his smaller home
than he did by the castle.

“Yep. This is where you live.”

“Wow.” He shook his head, sounding completely awed. “This really is like a fairy tale.”

FOUR

stable

It was dark by the time I pulled the Land Rover into the garage, narrowly parking
it between another SUV and a full-sized Hummer. I clicked the button, closing the
garage door behind me.

Technically it was a garage, but in reality it was a massive brick fortress that housed
dozens of vehicles and all kinds of tracker supplies. To the left of the garage were
the classrooms and the gym where trackers trained, along with the Rektor’s office.

I hadn’t bothered to put on my jacket or boots after I had gotten Linus settled in
at the Berlings’ house, because I knew I was coming right here. The garage was heated,
as were most things in Doldastam. Even the floor was heated, so when I stepped out
of the SUV, the concrete felt warm on my bare feet.

I’d just gone around to the side of the car to get my bag out of the back when I heard
the side door close. The Rektor’s office connected to the garage, and I looked over
to see Ridley Dresden walking in.

“Need a hand?” he asked.

“Nah, I think I got it. But thanks.” I slung my bag over my shoulder and went over
to the storage closets.

He wore a vest and a tie, with his sleeves rolled up above his elbow. But like me,
he was barefoot. His dark hair was kept short, but it still curled a little. In that
way, his hair fit him perfectly. Try as he might to be straitlaced, there was just
a part of him that wouldn’t completely be tamed.

I dropped my bag on the floor in front of the shelves and crouched down to rummage
through it. I’d pulled out a couple fake passports—both for me and for Linus—when
Ridley reached me.

“You don’t look that bad,” he said with his hands shoved in his pockets.

I looked up at him, smirking. “And here I didn’t think you liked blondes.”

As far as I knew, his last couple girlfriends had been brunettes, but that really
wasn’t saying much when it came to the Kanin. Like all trolls, the Kanin had certain
physical characteristics. Dark curly hair; brown or gray eyes; olive skin; shorter
in stature and petite; and often physically attractive. In that regard, the Kanin
appeared similar to the Trylle, the Vittra, and, other than the attractive part, even
the Omte.

It was only the Skojare who stood out, with fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.
And it was the Skojare blood that betrayed my true nature. In Doldastam, over 99 percent
of the population had brown hair. And I didn’t.

“Come on. Everyone likes blondes,” Ridley countered with a grin.

I laughed darkly. Outside of the walls surrounding Doldastam the world may have shared
that opinion, as Ridley would know from his tracking days. But here, my appearance
had never been anything but a detriment.

“I was referring to your run-in,” Ridley said.

I stood up and gave him a sharp look. “I can handle myself in a fight.”

“I know.” He’d grown serious, and he looked down at me with a level of concern that
was unusual for him. “But I know how hard dealing with Konstantin Black had to be.”