The Misadventures of Annika Brisby (37 page)

troll house cookies

Finally there came a clearing in sight, a welcome reprieve from the endless carpet of looping roots that threatened to take down anyone who wasn’t carefully watching their step. A bloodwood hadn’t been seen in a good hour or so, much to everyone’s relief. It was growing to be late afternoon and the sun was starting to be stingy with its light. Hilda and Runa swung up onto their deer and took off running, glad to finally be out of the flesh-eating forest. They raced each other out of sight, and no sooner than they had left, Zaven turned to Finn with a wary expression.

“Something’s not right. I don’t know what it is, but I can smell something in the wind…I don’t recognize it.” Finn looked around in every direction, sniffing the air along with his cousin, but he seemed baffled for the first time in his life.

“I don’t know either…I only smell sheep,” Finn replied, but Zaven shook his head.

“It’s not sheep. It’s something else; something I’ve never smelled before.” He and Finn looked around curiously and heard a terrified shriek coming from the direction that Hilda and Runa had disappeared. Everyone immediately raced ahead through the trees until a large shadow crossed their path. All of the animals’ ears swiveled to the front and left simultaneously, and Midas reared so high that Annika was half expecting him to sprout wings and fly away. The wolves were growling as Justinian and Sariel dismounted and drew their swords. Talvi sniffed the air and sneered as he whipped out his bow and held a blue tipped arrow against the sinew.

“I know what it is,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “It’s a troll.”

“What do we do?” Zaven asked nervously. “I’ve never seen one face to face; I’ve only read about them in books. He’ll eat little Runa in two bites!”

Everyone listened again for Runa and Hilda’s cries of fear, but they never came. They neared the massive shadow and were stunned to see a giant green-skinned troll, over eleven feet tall, with huge fanged teeth jutting up from his lower jaw, covered in woolen clothing, with a giant axe lying on the ground next to him. But the most puzzling aspect of the sight before them was that Hilda was sitting in his hands, showing off her green sash. Runa was sitting on his shoulders like a child, listening intently and nodding her head. It didn’t seem she had any fear of being eaten.

“I dyed this with ragweed. There’s a lot of it around here,” Hilda was telling him. “I’m certain it wouldn’t be much trouble for you to gather enough.”

“And you get this brilliant shade of green with that nasty weed?” the troll demanded in his deep growl of a voice. “I’ve only used fiddle ferns, but they taste so good, I end up eating them before my wife can prepare a dye.” Runa giggled and looked up, seeing the others had come into their view.

“Zaven, look what we found,” she laughed. Hilda turned around in the troll’s large hands and flashed a smile.

“Ohan, this is everyone. Everyone, this is Ohan. He’s a troll,” Runa announced.

“Thank you for making that perfectly clear,” Finn said, still unsure of what to make of her and Runa sitting so calm in the presence of a massive creature.

“His house is in the direction that we’re traveling,” Runa chirped happily. “He invited us for dinner tonight. Can we go, please? I want to meet his wife. I want to see his little sheep. Won’t it be fun? Please, can we go?” Talvi turned towards his brother and cousin, and mouthed the word ‘no’, but Zaven ignored him and glanced at Runa.

“Come now, Talvi; who could say no to her?” he asked with an affectionate smile. The decision was made.

They came to a clearing where a large house made of giant stones and a thatched roof stood. There was no grass immediately surrounding the house; it was all trampled down to nothing, only bare dirt showed. It looked like someone had attempted fencing off a large area for a garden, but the fence had been torn apart and built into a flimsy fort instead. Three enormous troll boys darted out from the fort, swashbuckling with wooden swords, screaming like banshees, and then ran to the back of the house. Six large broken chairs lay against the house beside a pile of flagstones that would have made a pretty pathway. A gong hung not too far from the door, with a mallet attached by a rope.

“I’ve been meaning to fix those. Just haven’t had the time,” Ohan said and pushed the heavy door open for the travelers. Annika was shocked by what she saw. After her stay at the impressive and stately Marinossian home, this place was the exact opposite. It was everything that Talvi’s home was not. The words filth and squalor had never jumped into her head as quickly as they did upon entering this home. She’d seen plenty of bachelor pads with their milk crate coffee tables overflowing with beer bottles and take out containers piled on top of pizza boxes, along with the ashtrays crammed full of cigarette butts, not to mention furniture covered in wine and whiskey stains. This place was so much worse.

There were cobwebs on every rafter above, the stone hearth and all of the walls above and around it were thick with soot, and nearly every surface was sticky with the residue left by fourteen grubby troll boy hands. Stacks of dirty dishes surrounded the sink, some with mold growing inside the cups and bowls, and piles of dirty clothing lay nearby on what must have been the dining room table, desperately awaiting their chance to be laundered and mended. There were even a few spots on the wall that held evidence of a food fight or two. Or ten…million.

“Hello my love!” Ohan called to a muscular yet matronly blue troll in a brown wool dress hunched over the sink, washing silverware while a very large green-skinned baby played at her feet. The woman turned around to reveal a pregnant belly.

“This is my wife Aghavni, and our youngest son, Sedem. Aghavni, this is everyone.” The group greeted her and introduced themselves. The woman smiled tiredly, throwing a dark purple braid of hair over her shoulder. She had larger pointed ears and an elegant pointed nose. Her pointed teeth were smaller and only the tips showed over her upper lip. Her horns were the same light blue as her skin, with black tips. For being a troll, she was quite attractive. She didn’t look that old, but she looked exhausted.

“How many extra mouths are we feeding tonight, dearest?” she asked, resting a hand on her belly.

“Oh, let’s see, three, eight, thirteen? And then the boys and you and I, that makes, oh, hmm. Twenty-two it is, my love,” he declared with a grin.

“You won’t have to worry about me,” Konstantin said, trying to be helpful.

“We won’t eat a lot either!” Dardis and Chivanni chimed.

“Alright, so that makes…” He counted on his fingers, and then counted again. “Well, I keep losing count, but it’s a lot.”

Aghavni smiled weakly and began to rummage through the cupboards and pantry, but Chivanni buzzed over to her in his tiny form, whispering something in her ear. She squinted at him, as if she hadn’t understood what he had asked.

“What do you mean?” she asked him suspiciously. “You honestly
want
to cook for all of these mouths?” He said something else and she held up her hands, as if to surrender, still not convinced he knew what he was getting himself into. Suddenly he burst into his larger self, and she jumped back.

“Oh, that startled me!” she exclaimed. “I haven’t been around fairies in a long time. My boys unfortunately scare them away with all their noise and roughhousing. What a little fairy magic wouldn’t do for this place…” she said with a sigh.

“Where are the other children?” Hilda asked curiously. Ohan gave an affectionate chuckle.

“It’s best to leave them outside until dinner is on the table,” he said with a wave of his hand.

Are they children or pets?
Annika wondered. Nikola stifled a laugh, turning it into a cough, while Talvi only rolled his eyes. He wasn’t the biggest fan of children or trolls to begin with, let alone seven combinations of the two.

Aghavni cleared the piles of laundry from the table so that it could be sat at, and those that couldn’t find room on the crude, temporary benches took seats in the huge chairs around the hearth, unoccupied by the children. Annika folded her hands on the table, and then regretted it. She pulled them away but they were already coated with a sticky, somewhat slimy residue. She tried not to look like a snob, but it seemed everyone except Ohan felt some degree of awkwardness. Aghavni didn’t know what to do with herself, so she grabbed a shirt and began to sew up a tear, glancing at Chivanni nervously every now and then as he and Dardis worked in the kitchen. Ohan threw another log onto the fire that was as large as Annika’s leg.

“So you made it across the Sea of Forneus, then? Did you see any sirens?” he asked.

“Yes, you could say so. Some of us saw them better than others though,” Justinian snickered, and Sariel elbowed him in the side. Ohan snorted a laugh.

“So who dove in after them?” he asked, looking around the group carefully. “It was you, wasn’t it?” The troll pointed at Finn, but he shook his head. Ohan frowned and kept glancing around. Nobody said a word. Nikola kept his mouth pursed a little too much, looking just a little too interested in his surroundings than the subject being addressed.

“Oh, you’re the one, eh?” Ohan said to him. “Well, it happens to the best of us. I wouldn’t be that upset about it, being that you’re alive.”

“I’m not upset,” Nikola said a little sharply.

“Did you see any other monsters?” Aghavni asked, delicately changing the subject. “Did you see Forneus himself?”

“Maybe from a distance. It was hard to tell. There was a giant tentacle, but it disappeared right away and gave us no trouble,” Justinian said. “Captain Kovachev told me that only a few days earlier, Forneus had eaten an entire pirate ship. He was probably still digesting while we sailed.”

“How lucky for all of you, that he ate the entire ship,” Aghavni chortled. “And where, pray tell, did you travel from?”

“Srebra Gora, farther south,” Finn informed her, and she set her sewing down in her lap.

“You wouldn’t know Anthea Marinossian, would you?” she asked excitedly. “I know she was from an elven village in Srebra Gora.” The elves were just as surprised as she was.

“Anthea is our eldest sister,” Yuri said with curiosity shining in her eyes. “How do you know her?”

“She’s your sister? Why, you
do
look very much like her,” Aghavni said with a smile. “She and I studied healing arts together…oh it was ages ago! She was such a pleasant creature. She was so kind and compassionate, especially when the other girls in the class were so rude to me about my size. What has she been up to?”

“She’s got the sweetest little girl and a baby boy now,” Yuri told her. “They’re really adorable.”

“I’m sure they are,” Aghavni said, smiling at the thought. “Do they look like her or their father? I met Asbjorn once. He has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“Stella looks more like Anthea,” Hilda answered. “But Sloan has his father’s yellow curls…and his eyes.”

“Asbjorn’s actually part of the reason we’re traveling this direction,” Finn explained. “He’s trapped somewhere on the other side of the broken portals and we believe it’s the Pazachi who are responsible. If we can locate them and determine the extent of their involvement—”

“The Pazachi?” Ohan growled, cutting him off. “I know about them. They’re the ones that killed half of my sheep earlier this year!”

“Ohan, you don’t know that for certain,” his wife said delicately, but Ohan had renewed a latent anger buried deep within himself.

“Oh, it was them alright,” he asserted. “If it had been wolves, there wouldn’t have been much left to discover. When I saw my sheep in the field, they had no visible injuries whatsoever. They were just lying on the ground, dead as a doornail, but they were completely intact. That is dark magic if I ever saw it, and such a despicable waste! They didn’t even take the wool or the meat! I heard a rumor that they thought I was using too much of the land for my sheep, and they wanted to make a point. Hurrumph! I am a steward of this land! I plant three trees for every one I fell, I compost the manure, and the stream is definitely far enough away from the barn to not be a concern.” Ohan’s eyes twinkled brightly as an idea crossed his path. “What I wouldn’t give to find those Pazachi and make things square between us!”

“Yes dear, you are very good about planting trees,” Aghavni said. “But you know, you could do a little better with that garden of ours. Perhaps next harvest, our cellar will be bursting full instead of looking like it presently does.”

“Oh, you over exaggerate things so,” he chuckled dismissively. “You’re provided for, aren’t you?”

“Just scraping by and living abundantly are two very different lifestyles, Ohan,” she said in a voice that exuded practicality. “What if the price of your precious wool goes down? What will we do then?” Ohan started to get irritated by his wife when an idea struck him. His toothy jawline curled into a grin.

“Then let’s make a deal, my darling,” he said. “You write up a plan for running our farm the way
you
see fit, and if I agree, you will concede to let me take my revenge on the Pazachi. My axe has grown dull from felling trees…perhaps I should sharpen it for felling Pazachi heads!”

“What?” his wife replied, as though he had proposed the idea to grow another head. “Do you honestly think I would agree to your leaving me here with the children while you run off and play in the woods without me? You must be mad! There’s no telling when you will be home! Why, if you’re not here when this child comes…”