Page 16 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

“Of course they are. We are headed directly toward them.”

I stared at the mountains, which did not appear to be getting closer. “Are you sure? Where I’m from, vehicles move quite a bit faster.”

The joke made my chest tighten. Because if the wagon was this slow, everything was this slow. Pip had come through hours ahead of me, and every one of those hours was a road I couldn’t see. There were no phones here. No internet, no missing-persons hotline, no gas station counter where you slid a photo across and asked if anyone had seen this face. There was me, a wagon traveling at the speed of a bored horse, and a country that seemed too vast to cross at such a pace.

“He could be days away,” I said, and the words came out small. “Wherever he is. He could be weeks away, and we’re walking. Oh god. I’m never going to find him, am I? One person, in all of this.” I waved at the beautiful, enormous, indifferent scenery.

Moerrven was quiet for a moment, and it was not his grumpy quiet. When he spoke, it was level and slow. “You will not find him by searching. A blind search would take months, or even years.”

“Wow. Okay. That’s so much worse than comfort.” I slumped against the low backrest.

“I was not finished. We need to first discover where it is that you landed. Because he is likely looking for you, too. And if we can get back to the start of things, we’ll find your answers.”

“You believe that?” I asked.

Moerrven flicked the reins, unhurried. “Answers will lead you to Pip, I am sure of it. Every mile of this slow road is a mile toward the Archive, and the Archive is where the answers live. Once we have all of the information, we can ask the right questions. And then we shall find him.”

“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. But you don’t think we should be actively looking, too?”

“We can do both, can’t we? We can ask each person we pass if anyone has seen a man in improbably short trousers. Rumors spread like wildfire in Qoksmere. Have no fear, we’ll attack from both angles, and it’ll give us the best chance of locating Pip.”

I sat with that for a while. The mountains stayed where they were, and Clover kept her funeral pace, and the frantic thing in my chest, the one that had been running since the club, sat down for the first time and caught its breath. It was the first thing anyone had said about finding Pip that sounded like a plan instead of a prayer.

My grandfather had a saying for this. Find the calm while you’re moving, and you can find it… no. Find the moving inside the calm? That wasn’t quite right either. He’d said it a thousand times while I stood in horse stance hating him, and now I couldn’t put the pieces back in the right order. But sitting on a hard bench behind a slow horse, I was pretty sure I finally knew what he meant.

“Okay,” I said. “Answers will lead us to Pip.”

“Maybe you could read a book. Pass the time.” He shot me a pointed look. “Distract yourself from thinking too much about your worries.”

“Are you bored, too? I could read out loud.”

“We have been traveling for fifteen minutes, Sky. This is some of the most beautiful country in all of Qoksmere. There is much to enjoy.”

“I did enjoy the mountains! They’re gorgeous. But like…”

“Read a book, Sky. You packed the crate of them under the bench, didn’t you?”

I reached for the crate I’d packed, one that included ten books Moerrven had said he couldn’t do without, plus a pile of his own novels that I was desperate to read. I dug until I found one with his name on the spine. His eyes darted to the book.

“That one? There’s also a treatise on the fascinating science of mycology in there.”

I eyed him. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“The study of mushrooms, of course. The book covers exhaustive research on the origins of fungus. I found it quite engaging.”

“Yeah, no, I think I’m going to stick with The Stonewall Bride, a torrid affair between a beautiful troll and the prince she’s forbidden to touch.”

Moerrven harrumphed, eyes darting to the book, then back to me, then back to the book, with such intensity that he almost veered the wagon off the road.

I opened the book and started reading, ignoring my urge to tease him for that. It was about a woman named Kethara who fell in love with a fae prince who was absolutely off-limits. He was on a diplomatic mission to broker peace between the fae courts and the troll clans, and she was the general assigned to escort him through hostile territory. Neither of them was supposed to look at the other with anything other than professional courtesy. Naturally, by page forty, the professional courtesy had developed a serious crack.

Made me wonder what it would take to crack Moerrven.

It was so good I forgot I was sitting on a wagon crawling toward distant mountains, because the sentences pulled me forward like a current. Moerrven wrote tension with an effortless grace, the space between two characters humming with everything they wouldn’t say.

The sex scene arrived, and it had a level of enthusiasm for women’s bodies that I respected but did not share. I skimmed. Kethara’s body was lovingly described, and I’m sure she was having a great time, but my attention drifted through the passage like a student scanning a textbook for the highlighted parts.

“You don’t like sensual scenes? I thought you were excited to find those,” Moerrven said, watching me flip a few pages in rapid succession. He almost looked relieved.