Frostfire (9 page)

“And the way that we support this lifestyle is with the changelings,” I went on. “I
wish there was a different way, a better way, but as of right now, there’s not. And
if the Markis and Marksinna didn’t get their money from the changelings, they wouldn’t
have anything to pay the teachers and bakers and farmers and shop owners. This town
would shrivel up and die. The things I do make this possible.

“I am part of what keeps this all together, and that’s why I became a tracker. That’s
why I do what I do.” I leaned back in my chair, satisfied with my argument.

Mom folded her arms over her chest, and there was a mixture of sympathy and disappointment
in her eyes. “The ends don’t justify the means, Bryn.”

“Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.” I shrugged. “But I love this town. I think you
do too.”

A smile twisted across her face. “You are mistaken again.”

“Fine.” I sighed. “But haven’t you ever loved a place?”

“No, I’ve loved
people
. I love you, and I love your dad.” She reached out, taking Dad’s hand in her own.
“Wherever the two of you are, I’ll be happy. But that doesn’t mean I love Doldastam,
and it certainly doesn’t mean that I love you risking your life to protect it. I tolerate
it because I have no choice. You’re an adult and this is the life you chose.”

“It is. And it would be great if every time I visited didn’t turn into a fight about
it.”

“Is it so wrong that I want something better for you?” Mom asked, almost desperately.

“Yes, yes, it is,” I replied flatly.

“How is that wrong?” She threw her hands in the air. “Every mother just wants the
best for her child.”

I leaned forward again and slapped my hand on the table. “This is the best. Don’t
you get that?”

“You’re selling yourself short, Bryn. You can have so much better.” Mom tried to reach
out and hold my hand, but I pulled away from her.

“I can’t do this anymore.” I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I knew coming over
was a mistake.”

“Bryn, no.” Her face fell, her disapproval giving way to remorse. “I’m sorry. I promise
I won’t talk about work anymore. Don’t go.”

I looked away from her so I wouldn’t get suckered in by guilt again, and ran my hand
through my hair. “No, I have stuff I need to do anyway. I shouldn’t have even agreed
to this.”

“Bryn,” Dad said.

“No, I need to go.” I turned to walk toward the door, and Mom stood up.

“Honey. Please,” Mom begged. “Don’t go. I love you.”

“I love you too,” I told her without looking at her. “I just … I’ll talk to you later.”

I yanked on my boots and grabbed my coat from the rack. My mom said my name again
as I opened the door and stepped outside, but I didn’t look back. As I walked down
the dirt road my parents lived on, I breathed in deeply. The cold hurt my lungs and
stung my cheeks, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I didn’t even put on my coat, preferring
the chill. I just held my jacket to my chest and let the fresh air clear my head.

“Bryn!” Dad called after me just as I made it around the corner past the house.

An errant chicken crossed my path, and when I brushed past, it squawked in annoyance.
But I didn’t slow down, not until I heard my dad’s footsteps behind me.

“Wait,” he said, puffing because he was out of breath from chasing after me.

I finally stopped and turned back to him. He was still adjusting his jacket, and he
slowed to a walk as he approached me.

“Dad, I’m not going back in there.”

“Your mom is heartbroken. She didn’t mean to upset you.”

I looked away, staring down at the chicken pecking at pebbles in the road. “I know.
I just … I can’t deal with it. I can’t handle her criticisms tonight. That’s all.”

“She’s not trying to criticize you,” Dad said.

“I know. It’s just … I work
so
hard.” I finally looked up at him. “And it’s like no matter what I do, it’s never
good enough.”

“No, that’s not true at all.” Dad shook his head adamantly. “Your mom takes issue
with some of the practices here. She gets on me about it too. But she knows how hard
you work, and she’s proud of you. We both are.”

I swallowed hard. “Thank you. But I can’t go back right now.”

His shoulders slacked but he nodded. “I understand.”

“Tell Mom I’ll talk to her another day, okay?”

“I will,” he said, and as I turned to walk away, he added, “Put your coat on.”

EIGHT

history

Books were stacked from the floor all the way up to the ceiling thirty feet above
us. Tall, precarious ladders enabled people to reach the books on the top shelves,
but fortunately, I didn’t need any books from up that high. Most of the ones people
read were kept on the lower, more reachable shelves.

The height of the ceiling made it harder to heat the room, and since Linus and I were
the first people here this morning, it had a definite chill to it. Disturbing dreams
of Konstantin Black had filled my slumber last night, and I’d finally given up on
sleep very early this morning, so I’d decided to get a jump start on acclimating Linus.
He had quite a bit to learn before the anniversary party tomorrow night, where he’d
be introduced to all sorts of royalty—both from the Kanin and from the other tribes.

I doubted anybody else would come to the library today, which would make it the perfect
place for studying. The halls in the palace had been chaotic with the bustling of
servants and guards as dignitaries from other tribes arrived.

Linus had very nearly gotten trampled by a maid carrying stacks of silken sheets,
and I’d pulled him out of the way in the nick of time. The upcoming party had turned
the normally sedate palace into bedlam.

The library was still a bastion of solitude, though. Even when everyone wasn’t distracted
by a hundred guests, it wasn’t exactly a popular place to hang out. Several chairs
and sofas filled the room, along with a couple tables, but I’d almost never seen anyone
use them.

“It’s okay that we’re here, right?” Linus asked as I crouched in front of the fireplace
and threw in another log.

“The library is open to the public,” I told him and straightened up. “But as a Berling,
you’re allowed to move freely in the palace. The King is your dad’s cousin and best
friend. The door is always open for you.”

“Cool.” Linus shivered, and rubbed his arms through his thick sweater. “So is it winter
here year-round?”

“No, it’ll get warm soon. There’s a real summer with flowers and birds.”

“Good. I don’t know if I could handle it being cold all the time.”

I walked over to where he’d sat down at a table. “Does it really bother you that much?”

“What do you mean?”

“Most Kanin prefer the cold. Actually, most trolls in general do.”

“So do all the tribes live up around here?”

“Not really.” I went over to a shelf to start gathering books for him. “Almost all
of us live in North America or Europe, but we like to keep distance between tribes.
It’s better that way.”

“You guys don’t get along?” Linus asked as I grabbed a couple of old texts from a
shelf.

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly, but we can get territorial. And most trolls are known
for being grumpy, especially the Vittra and the Omte.”

“What about the Kanin?”

“We’re actually more peaceful than most of the other tribes.”

After grabbing about a dozen books that seemed to weigh about half a ton, I carried
them back to the table and plunked them down in front of Linus.

Apprehension flickered in his brown eyes when he looked up at me. “Do I really need
to read all this?”

“The more you know about your heritage, the better,” I said, and sat down in the chair
across from him.

“Great.” He picked up the first book off the stack and flipped through it absently.
“I do like the cold.”

“What?”

“The winters back in Chicago, they were always so much harder on my sisters. Er, host
sisters,” he corrected himself. “But the cold never really got to me.”

“We withstand it much better.”

Linus pushed the books to the side so it’d be easier for him to see me. “How come?”

“I don’t know exactly.” I shrugged. “We all came from Scandinavia, so that probably
has something to do with it. We’re genetically built for colder climates.”

“You came from Scandinavia?” Linus leaned forward and rested his arms on the table.

“Well, not me personally. I was born here. But our people.” I sifted through the books
I’d brought over until I found a thin book bound in worn brown paper, then I handed
it to him. “This kinda helps break it down.”

“This?” He flipped through the first few pages, which showed illustrations of several
different animals living in a forest, and he wrinkled his nose. “It’s a story about
rabbits and lions. It’s like a fairy tale.”

“It’s a simplistic version of how we came to be,” I said.

When he lifted his eyes to look at me, they were filled with bewilderment. “I don’t
get it.”

“All the trolls were one tribe.” I tapped the picture showing the rabbit sitting with
the cougar, and the fox cuddling with a bird. “We all lived together in relative peace
in Scandinavia. We bickered and backstabbed, but we didn’t declare war on one another.
Then the Crusades happened.”

He turned the page, as if expecting to see a picture of a priest with a sword, but
it was only more pictures of animals, so he looked back up at me. “Like the stuff
with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages?”

“Exactly. You’ve noticed that trolls have different abilities, like how you can change
your skin.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not the only thing we can do,” I explained. “The Trylle have psychokinesis,
so they can move objects with their minds and see the future. The Skojare are very
aquatic and are born with gills. The Vittra are supernaturally strong and give birth
to hobgoblins. The Omte … well, the Omte don’t have much of anything, except persuasion.
And all trolls have that.”

“Persuasion?”

“It’s the ability to compel someone with your thoughts. Like, I’d think,
Dance,
and then you would dance,” I tried to elaborate. “It’s like mind control.”

Linus’s eyes widened and he leaned back in his chair, moving away from me. “Can you
do that?”

“No. I actually can’t do any of those things,” I said with a heavy sigh, and he seemed
to relax again. “But we’re getting off track.”

“Right. Trolls have magic powers,” he said.

“And during the Crusades, those powers looked like witchcraft,” I told him. “So humans
started rounding us up, slaughtering us by the dozens, because they believed we’d
made pacts with the devil.”

It was actually the changelings that got hit the worst, but I didn’t tell Linus that.
I didn’t want him to know the kind of risk our previous changelings had gone through,
not yet anyway.

Babies that exhibited even the slightest hint of being nonhuman were murdered. They
had all kinds of tests, like if a baby had an unruly lock of hair, or the mother experienced
painful breast-feeding. Some were much worse, though, like throwing a baby in boiling
water. If it wasn’t cooked, it was a troll, they thought, but no matter—the baby was
cooked and killed anyway.

Many innocent human babies were murdered during that time too. Babies with Down’s
syndrome or colic would be killed. If a child demonstrated any kind of abnormal behavior,
it could be suspected of being a troll or evil, and it was killed.

It was a very dark time for humankind and trollkind alike.

“Had we made a deal with the devil?” Linus asked cautiously.

I shook my head. “No, of course not. We’re no more satanic than rabbits or chameleons.
Just because we’re different than humans doesn’t make us evil.”

“So we were all one big happy family of trolls, until the Crusades happened. They
drove us out of our homes, and I’m assuming that’s what led us to migrate to North
America,” Linus filled in.

“Correct. Most of the troll population migrated here with early human settlers, mostly
Vikings, and that’s why so much of our culture is still based in our Scandinavian
ancestry.”

His brow scrunched up as he seemed to consider this for a moment, then he asked, “Okay,
I get that, but if we’re Scandinavian, how come so many of us have darker skin and
brown hair? Not to sound racist here, but aren’t people from Sweden blond and blue-eyed?
You’re the only one I’ve seen that looks like that.”

“Our coloration has to do with how we lived,” I explained. “Originally, we lived very
close to nature. The Omte lived in trees, building their homes in trunks or high in
the branches. The Trylle, the Vittra, and the Kanin lived in the ground. The Kanin
especially lived much the way rabbits do now, with burrows in the dirt and tunnels
connecting them.”

“What does that have to do with having brown hair?” he asked.

“It was about blending into our surroundings.” I pointed to the picture again, pointing
to where a rabbit was sitting in the long grass. “The Kanin lived in the dirt and
grass, and those that matched the dirt and grass had a higher survival rate.”

“What about you, then?”

“I’m half Skojare,” I told him, and just like every other time I’d said it, the very
words left a bitter taste in my mouth.

“Skojare? That’s the aquatic one?”

I nodded. “They lived in the water or near it, and they are pale with blond hair and
blue eyes.”

“Make sense, I guess.” He didn’t sound completely convinced, but he continued anyway.
“So what happened after we came to North America?”

“We’d already divided into groups. Those with certain skills and aptitudes tended
to band together. But we hadn’t officially broken off,” I said. “Then when we came
here, we all kind of spread out and started doing our own thing.”

“That’s when you became the Kanin and the Skojare, et cetera?”

“Sort of.” I wagged my head. “We’d split off in different groups, but we hadn’t officially
named ourselves yet. Some tribes did better than others. The Trylle and the Kanin,
in particular, flourished. I don’t know if it was just that they were lucky in establishing
their settlements or they worked smarter. But whatever the reason, they thrived, while
others suffered. And that’s really what the story is about.”