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Before long, the bard and the guard sussed out that the duchess’s hoard of gems increased whenever she had a private visit with Jules. They took care to learn how to tell Jules apart from Yudit. And one night when the guard was on duty outside the children’s room, he let the bard in and they carried Jules away, bound and gagged, while Yudit slept on.

Soon enough, Jules was immured in a prison cell deep within the jarl’s keep.

“I know not by what magic you increase the duchess’s coin,” the jarl snarled as he paced outside the prison, “and nor do I care. All that matters is that I have stolen you, and the duchess wants you back! In noble circles, that’s what we call a competitive trade advantage.”

He promptly dispatched a messenger to the duchess, bearing a demand that she hand over a considerable portion of her landholdings in exchange for Jules’s return.

This worried Jules greatly, for it seemed doubtful that the duchess would comply, and though the cell was stone, the purplish-pink blooms of rockcress were already sprouting from cracks in the mortar. Sleep would have to come sometime, and Jules had not yet learned how to use roots to break apart a wall. Death by floral strangulation was imminent.

The jarl’s keep was stout and well defended against assault. As night fell, however, something peculiar happened. The windows of the fortress stretched and widened until it was left with more window than wall. For Jules had foreseen the possibility of being imprisoned, and together with Winifred and Drusilla had concocted a plan.

The windows were now large enough for an army to march straight through. And just such an army appeared to surround the keep, seemingly out of nowhere. Despite the patrols the jarl had set to warn him, someone had led troops through his lands so stealthily that neither bird nor beast could have noticed the tracks of their passage.

“Call off the soldiers,” parleyed the jarl, “and I’ll give you the child. But this hardly seems fair. My only crimes were treachery and extortion. Since when are those punishable offenses for a nobleman?”

Once again, Jules’s sisters had come to the rescue. Rather than lose his own territory in battle, the jarl handed Jules over to the collection of angry young girls at the head of the enemy army.

After that, several years passed without further incident. The duchess had learned enough to change her employment practices slightly, and she made sure that everyone she hired was too dense to notice anything unusual. This proved to be an effective strategy, although it had unfortunate consequences for the already low quality of life in the castle. While the laundry might accidentally get washed in the soup, the duchess thought it a small price to pay for fiscal security.

Jules, however, was growing ever more discontented. Gruoch’s restrictions increasingly felt like a personal insult. It was irritating to wear clothing that smelled like soup and eat soup that tasted like laundry. And Yudit had switched from writing angsty, anguished lyric poetry to writing extremely graphic love poems, which came as no improvement. (She has a booty I could bite, / Of flawless flesh and perfect size; / And all that’s best of dark and light / Meet in her ass-crack and her thighs. Ass-biting would become a repeated motif in her work.) The others spent as much time as they could away from the castle and away from Gruoch—Lulach to the sea, Drusilla to the wilderness, Winifred to her window business, Alexandra to the quarry with the tastiest rocks, and Nicki to a futile search for an effective antihistamine.

In such circumstances, the lonely teenaged Jules sought companionship elsewhere. And found such companionship, whenever it was possible to get away from Yudit long enough, in a pair of Gruoch’s newer employees—a serving maid and a hired blade. They were great fun to be around and hated Gruoch as much as Jules did. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the maid was bad and the blade was mad.

It’s difficult to say what provoked their suspicions. Whatever it was, though they were as inattentive and oblivious as any of the duchess’s recent hires, they managed to piece together something that approached the truth. So when Jules next visited them, it didn’t end up being as fun as it usually was.

“Hi, guys!” Jules chirped upon seeing them. “You wouldn’t believe what an absolute fuckwit Gruoch is being today…Uh, what are you doing with that suspiciously teenager-sized metal box covered in strange mystic sigils?”

“Get inside, please,” the bad maid bade, helping Jules along with a cordial shove. “I’m very sorry, but we’ve sold you to the troll king of the western isles.”

“It’s nothing personal!” the mad blade brayed. She slammed the lid down over Jules’s head. “We just want you to suffer.”

“That seems personal!” Jules pointed out.

“We want everyone to suffer,” the blade relayed. “You’re not special.”

“You’ll get in trouble for this!”

The maid, unswayed, was not at all dismayed. “Brace yourself. This might be a bumpy ride.”

As Jules inhaled to yell for help, the troll king’s magic took hold of the box, sending it tumbling end over end through the spaces that exist between spaces on the pathways found only in dreams. Jules was tossed like a ragdoll from one side of the box to the other and was bruised, groggy, and extremely nauseous when the motion finally ceased.

Someone wrenched the box open. Jules tottered upright and came face-to-face with a lanky creature whose arms were so long they reached nearly to the ground. He was covered in warty gray-green skin and had an upswept shock of bright purple hair threaded through a copper crown.

“I am the troll king!” the troll king boomed. “And you—”

Jules threw up on the troll king’s foot.

“Sorry,” Jules gasped.

“Eh, not your fault.” The troll king scraped his foot against the side of the box and peered inside. “They didn’t put in any packing material to keep you from bouncing around? No blankets or anything?”

“No.”

“Jerks.”

“Yes.”

The troll king drew himself back up. “I am the troll king!” the troll king roared. “And you are my prisoner. If you do not spin straw into gold for me by morning, you shall die!”