The Prodigal Troll (21 page)

he air outside the cave blew wonderfully cold in the short daylight. In the summertime, cool air inside the cave refreshed her; now it felt warm compared to the winter wind, almost enough to make her feel sluggish. Windy longed to run out and roll in the snow to wake up, but the last wings of daylight still feathered the cave's entrance.

Some of the other trolls walked up from the deeper recesses of the caverns, rubbing their eyes. "Is he back yet?"

Windy opened her mouth and thrust out her tongue.

The trolls frowned, but not much. One of them chewed on a bigeared bat that had fallen from its perch high up in the cave. Sometimes the trolls threw stones at the bats to knock them down. Thousands hung upside down on the tall ceilings of the caverns, night creatures like the trolls and hard to catch in the summer when they flitted around too fast for the eye to follow. But they seemed to sleep all winter long and were easy to capture. One in the mouth melted away to nothing like snow. A whole pile of them didn't add up to a decent meal, though it was something crunchy to snack on.

Windy sighed. Winter was the best time of year for a troll. It was easier for her to stay active in the cold, and the nights were so long that there was enough time to eat and play. Best of all, it was the season of meat: weaker animals succumbed to the harsh temperatures and foundered in the deep drifts, leaving plenty of carrion for the trolls. She scratched the back of her neck, then her elbow. Scales of gray skin floated through the air like snow. That was the only problem-their thick skin dried up and came off in big flakes that left the skin beneath pink and raw.

She thought of Maggot's thin skin, no longer so white, scorched brown by the sun, rubbed raw by the wind, with so little fat beneath it that she wondered how he stayed warm at all. In comparison, her own itchiness didn't seem like such a big problem.

The last trolls straggled up from their day's sleep. There were no children in this band-the last had been killed by a cave bear during the summer-and none of the females were pregnant. Yet these seventeen individuals constituted the largest remaining band of trolls in all the eastern mountains. Windy knew of nine at Blackwater Falls, and seven each in the bands at Deep River Gorge and Sulfur Springs. There were some farther north, in the Black Rock country, some said, or toward the Big Deep Water. The Piebald Mountain remnant from way down south had moved north a few winters before, looking for a place without people. It was believed that there were many far to the west, in the mountains beyond the sunset, but no one living had ever seen them.

A shadow fell across the cave's entrance. As the trolls surged toward the promise of darkness, a thin, almost skeletal figure entered.

One of the girls gasped. "What an ugly troll!"

"He's beautiful!" Windy snapped. The girls dissolved in giggles, and she realized she'd been had.

Maggot was still short, not even six and a half feet tall, and painfully thin at a little over two hundred twenty pounds, but he had grown as big as could be expected. He was eighteen or nineteen winters old now-Windy had lost count of the years. His pale skin was covered with more scars than she could count or remember. The new and fading marks overlapped each other, from the numerous deep scratches left by the nails of other trolls to two long purple worms across one thigh left by a bigtooth lion. Some of them he'd never explained to her, nor had she asked him to.

Ragweed snorted. He was the biggest male in the band, grown boulder-bellied with age and presumably wise. He stood next to his current mate, a pretty young girl named Cliff, and glared balefully at Maggot. His nose wrinkled, and he shouldered his way forward.

Windy sniffed and smelled the same odor, of many people, but no one stood there except her son. "Maggot?"

He stepped out of the light into the dark, and she saw him clearly then. He wore something on his feet, not just wrapped animal skins but things shaped from the forelegs of deer. They had the people scent on them, as did the skin across his shoulders.

"Showing his true odors," Ragweed said, looking over to Windy. "And this is the troll-I use the term loosely-you want to be First?"

Before she could answer, one of the younger trolls called out, "Got any ripe meat, Maggot?"

Her son inclined his head toward the cave entrance. "Part of a humpback."

The other trolls looked expectantly to Windy. She lifted her lips, like someone with her mouth full, to say "go on," and they all shoved past her to pour out of the cave. Exclamations and the sounds of small squabbles followed as they divided the carcass of the humpback.

Windy looked at Maggot, brushing his new skins with her fingertips. "Where did you get those?"

"I scavenged them, how else?" He held out the old metal knife he'd used for the past three years-something else he'd scavenged. "You take it."

He had a new one in a sheath, hung on a string about his neck.

"Thank you," she said. Her fist enclosed it.

"Keep this one with you," he said.

"This time I will." He'd given her such gifts before, but in truth it wasn't as sharp or as effective as her own clawlike nails. And it was always hard to remember where she'd left such things when she went outside. If she could hold onto it through the night, she'd take it deep into the cavern when she went to sleep at dayrise. There she'd add it to the piles of similar baubles the trolls had accumulated over tens of lifetimes, counted beyond memory. She gestured to his covering skins. "Why tonight?"

He crinkled his nose, signifying uncertainty. "Because," he said. Then, "I was cold. These were warm."

"But tonight you're supposed to challenge Ragweed for First of the band! You've worked so hard to make the others accept you as one of them. This just reminds them of the differences."

He ran his hands over her skin, as if picking for parasites. There weren't any in this cold. She did the same for him. They sat like that a long while, touching each other without speaking another word.

"I am different," he said finally. "If they accept me, it'll be because of who I really am."

She didn't know what to say to that, so she rose. "We should go. The vote will be at midnight."

"I'm ready."

"Aren't you thirsty? Don't you need to go down to the lake inside the cavern and get a drink?"

"No, I'm fine."

They stepped outside. A waning thorn of moon pricked the horizon. Nothing remained of the humpback except the poles Maggot had carried it in on and a few stray bits of fur and bone. A new pole, with a pointed leaf of metal on one end like those stored in the deep caves, lay propped against the stone. Maggot picked it up to carry with him. A tramped-down trail led across the deep snow to the vale. It passed through several miles of forest filled with pinecones and acorns for anyone willing to dig them up.

"Let's cut over the hills to join the others," Windy said. She'd eat something later, when her stomach settled.

"That smells good," Maggot replied.

Fluffy flakes of snow swirled in the air. There was no trail to follow this way. Windy's broad flat feet buoyed her up across the deep drifts, and her wide hands helped support her weight. She moved along quickly on all fours. She still expected Maggot, as thin and small as he was, to glide across the surface, but his narrow feet continually broke through the crust of snow. As they crossed the naked ridge, Windy heard wolves howling.

Maggot looked over his shoulder. "I should've brought my snowfeet," he said.

Windy paused for him to catch up. "Are they something else you scavenged, with all the rest of this?"

He smiled at her. "I scavenged the first ones years ago. I've been hiding these things from you, and the others, for years. Mostly caching them in the trees, like carrion."

She didn't know what to say except, "Good. That's smart."

The wolves howled again, much nearer. Windy sniffed the air, but scented nothing upwind. She hoped they were timberwolves-she'd never learned to tell one wolf's howl from another. Dyrewolves could be deadly. "They sound hungry."

Maggot grunted. "The winter's been long and hard. Much of the meat I've taken for you would've fallen to them."

Windy glimpsed the pack gliding through the distant trees like wisps of brown-gray fog. A canny old female led three, no, four males. Another handful-plus-two trailed behind. They had the blunt snouts and broad shoulders of dyrewolves, just as she'd feared. A pack could easily bring down a single troll or even a pair. It had happened to Bones and her mate a few winters past.

The snow cracked, and Maggot sunk to his knees. Windy went back to help pull him free.

"They're slow," he told her. "They tire quickly. You should run ahead and join the others. You'll be safe."

"I can't do that!"

He stopped in his tracks and turned toward the trees. "I can climb; they can't. Neither can you-you're too heavy for those branches. Eventually they'll go away."

"I've always stood beside you."

He snorted, troll fashion. "Now's a good time to change your habits."

Before she could run or Maggot could bolt for the trees, the baying dyrewolves bounded across the snow. They almost appeared to be swimming, the way they paddled their paws to stay afloat on this cold white lake.

She shoved her son toward the trees. "Run! Save yourself!"

Maggot laughed and placed his back against hers, his knife in one hand, spear in the other. "It's always been the two of us against the world, huh, Mom?"

A smile shadowed her mouth. Before it faded away, the dyrewolves closed in, spreading out in a circle. She smelled uncertainty on them, and hunger, but no fear, neither from them nor Maggot. The only fear she smelled was her own.

The wolves scented it too. Two of them dashed in and snapped at her, but stopped short when she bared her own teeth and snarled back.

She'd never been this close to a dyrewolf. Their bodies were stocky, with short, powerful legs. They had thick ruffs around their necks, and fur streaked gray, white, and brown. But it was their massive heads, all out of proportion to the rest of their bodies, that made her most afraid. They had shorter snouts than the timber wolves or wild dogs, with teeth like sharp stones in their bone-crushing jaws, and wild, intelligent eyes.

As the two wolves stopped short of her, three others attacked Maggot. The old female lunged at him first, but it was a feint. He swung his knife at her in counterfeint, and when the old male made the real attack, Maggot thrust the spear through his neck. Blood gushed out, turning the snow pink. Maggot twisted the spear and pulled it free to jab it at the third beast while the wounded one yelped and crawled away.

The dyrewolves withdrew a short distance. "Let's go," Maggot said. "Down this way, toward the vale."

Windy smacked her lips in assent, and one of the males dived in to fasten on her arm. "Aiieee!"

Others leapt in at Maggot. She heard him shout as he drove them back, but all she felt was pain as the dyrewolf's teeth sank right through her flesh. She drove her fist down onto the soft snout. The wolf snarled, and its yellow eyes squeezed shut, but it didn't let go, so she pounded again and again as the wolf shook its head, dodging the blows, and when that failed to free her arm she thrust one of her long sharp fingers deep into a yellow eye. It popped like a grape under her nail, squirting its warm juice across her hand, so she thrust farther into its brain. The dyrewolf shuddered and died, but still it didn't let go.