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Taken by the Troll

The story of my childhood was left half told.

Last time, I ended it shortly after young Jules began providing jewels for the duchess, bunking with Yudit, and hating both of those things beyond measure. Then there was a bit about kidnappings that mostly got skipped.

I’ve never been fond of talking about it. But since it’s come up in conversation, I suppose it merits an explanation.

Once upon a time, a child named Jules was condemned to a life of shared bedrooms and constant esophageal bleeding. But things were about to get much worse.

Duchess Gruoch did her best to conceal the magical talents of her siblings and her child. She was well aware that they would serve her best as secret weapons—the more people who knew about the children, the greater the likelihood that someone would attempt to neutralize, eliminate, or abduct them.

Small children, however, are not known for their discretion. Soon enough, rumors abounded of the child who liked to eat rocks, or the boy who could turn into a fish, or the girl who ran a surprisingly well-organized business enlarging windows in exchange for candy.

The duchess, however, took extra care to ensure that the source of her newfound wealth remained a mystery. Jules was only allowed to leave the castle grounds under controlled conditions, surrounded by guards—which meant that Yudit, of course, had to suffer the same restrictions, a burden she dealt with by churning out endless volumes of poetry. For Jules, some relief from the constant surveillance could be found by sneaking away to ride Sunbeam, outrunning the relentless flowers on horseback.

Every day, Gruoch would cajole, berate, or threaten Jules, always with the same tiresome refrain: no one outside the family must learn the secret of the gemstones. Not that Jules was even fucking capable of telling anyone about it, with a throat scraped so raw that talking felt like gargling with lye. The duchess’s lectures on secrecy were met with a silence that grew stonier by the day.

In the end, it was Gruoch’s own fault that the story got out. Although she put the blame squarely on everyone else she could think of.

As has been pointed out before, Gruoch’s hiring practices prioritized menace over qualities like competence, loyalty, or sanity. It may come as no great surprise, then, that as soon as one of her servants unraveled the mystery, he betrayed her immediately.

The first time Jules was kidnapped, the perpetrators were a brutal sutler and a subtler butler. The butler chanced to see Jules spitting up a sapphire one evening, and hatched a simple yet effective plan. He contacted his friend the sutler to be the brawn to his brains. They weaved their way through the twisting halls using the butler’s knowledge of the castle. Then, while Jules and Yudit slept, the sutler broke into their bedroom.

“Tell me which of you is Jules!” the sutler sputtered, for the children were near-identical. “Tell me now, or I’ll murder you both.”

The terrified Jules raised a trembling hand. Quick as a wink, the sutler snatched Jules up and ran, Yudit’s screams echoing behind them.

The villains spirited Jules to an abandoned hut that stood nearby, and there they paused to debate how best to get the gemstones out.

“We should slit the child open from gullet to navel,” the sutler muttered. “We’ll surely find the treasure within.”

“How very shortsighted,” the butler tutted. “That would work only once. Whereas if we cut off the child’s arms and legs to forestall any chance of escape, we might gain an endless supply.”

“I still vote for disembowelment,” the sutler rebutted.

“Well, I vote for dismemberment.”

“Disembowelment!”

“Dismemberment!”

“Disembowelment!”

“Dismemberment!”

“Disembowelment, and I’m the one with the knife!” the sutler uttered with an air of finality. “Hey, where did all these black-eyed Susans come from? Were they here when we came in?”

He pulled against the flowers twining around his ankles, ripping them from the earthen floor. More grabbed at his legs as he crossed the room, but while they slowed him, they could not stop him. Jules had not yet learned how to bind a foe securely. The sutler approached the frightened child with his knife raised high.

Then he sneezed.

And sneezed again. And again.

For Jules had foreseen the possibility of being abducted, and together with Nicki and Alexandra had concocted a plan. The door burst open and a small girl in a nightgown leapt at the convulsing sutler. Before he could recover, she ate his knife. The butler and the sutler ran off in terror, never to be seen again. Jules peered out the door to find the hut surrounded by furious girls. Jules’s sisters had come to the rescue. Roused by Yudit and following Jules’s plan, they’d tracked the trail of flowers to the hut.

After this incident, Gruoch tripled the guard on the castle and forbade Jules and Yudit from venturing outdoors at all, save for occasional stints in the gardens to freshen up the flowers or kill off patches of weeds. Gone were any rambles through the countryside, visits to the town, or lazy days sailing on the firth, however carefully watched they might be. Secret horseback rides became almost impossible. The children chafed at the new restrictions and complained of boredom, so the duchess hired performers to keep them entertained.

Unfortunately, two of her new hires proved to be spies. A neighboring jarl had become curious about how freely the duchess was spending her money, and sent his most careful and trusted henchmen to infiltrate her castle. One was a wary and guarded bard; the other was a wiry and bearded guard.