I clutch his arm. “Last night. Vertmont. The north part? That’s … near Montreal.”
“I have the bags from your truck in the backseat.”
The urge to throw my arms around him, to kiss him or drag him into an impromptu dance, is nearly irresistible. But all I do is hold out my hand. “Take me, Bearstar,” I say, pitching my voice low and flirty.
Soren glowers down at me until I laugh. This is it; we’re going after her, and nothing can muffle the violent thrill spiking around my heart.
SEVENTEEN
LONG SALT IS a walled town in Vertmont kingstate, situated along the North River about forty kilometers southwest of the ruins of Montreal. We arrive midmorning the day after leaving the Mad Eagles. Pain stabs the back of my eyes, since I woke up again and again last night, despite the completely decent hotel room Soren bought for us with a fancy credit card he sheepishly admitted had been supplied by Baldur the Beautiful.
In my dreams the troll mother raked her claws across my eyes, her tusks hooked into my ribs as she buried her face in my chest, tearing me apart, until all that remained was my bright, beating heart. Soren dragged me up after midnight to run laps around the hotel parking lot until the sun rose. We piled into the SUV then, with Styrofoam cups of bad lobby coffee, and I leaned my head against the window, eyes shut, while Soren kept me barely awake with stories of the Berserker Wars. He’s no poet, and his voice faded into the gentle rumble of the engine more often than not, but he knows more grim details about the five-year back-and-forth between berserkers and the last of the frost giants. He almost manages to distract me from all my worries about whether this troll mother they saw in Vertmont is my troll mother.
The walls of Long Salt are four meters tall and at least one thick, meant to deter most types of trolls or at least slow down a greater mountain herd. We roll slowly through, though there’s no guard, into a charming town that bustles with life. Early spring flowers burst from long boxes lining the main street, and colorful prayer flags flutter from the tall light posts. A handful of temples raise the only skyline, their white steeples reaching toward the perfect cotton-ball clouds. Children run through the school yard, mothers push strollers along the sidewalks, and every block has its own crossroads shrine strung with plastic beads and incense sticks.
As we reach the whitewashed downtown with its antiques stores and coffee shops, a long banner stretches across the road, bright yellow with green and pink daisies, that reads: WELCOME TO LONG SALT GARDEN FESTIVAL.
There’s nothing here to indicate the presence of trolls. With the national troll alert so recent, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have reacted even more strongly than usual.
“You’re sure this is where the report came from?” I ask.
“It was an anonymous caller who claimed to be fishing out by the old locks and saw her rooting around near the northern wall of town.”
“Who’d he call? The militia?”
“The Mjolnir Institute.”
I don’t know much about the institute except that it’s funded through efforts of Thor Thunderer and tracks all kinds of troll information. They aren’t the first responders in an attack, and so it’s odd this tipster would’ve called them. But I heard about it so fast probably because it went through Thor’s institute and straight to Baldur’s ear.
We stop for brunch at a bistro with outdoor seating, and Soren does his best to hunker down and not draw attention while I flirt with our waitress for information. I pretend to be interested in the history of the town and ask about the garden festival, about how the population did during Baldur’s disappearance, and with the troll alert if she thinks they’ll get as many out-of-town guests as usual. I bring up trolls at least three times, giving her ample opportunity to tell me about any actual sightings, but the nearest she offers is an anecdote about a place out by the river the kids call Troll Spot, where they can look toward the system of locks and some drowned cities called the Lost Villages. They go up there to smoke leaf and make out, and pretend to see trolls in the water. Since the anonymous fisherman mentioned the locks, too, I guess it’s our best bet. I give Soren a sidelong glance and say to the waitress, “A good make-out spot, you say? How do we get there?”
Soren, bless him, ducks his face, which is as good as a blush.
Full of caffeine and sandwiches, we get back into the SUV and follow her directions out the east gate, then north on a dirt road through a lovely forest. Spring leaves turn the light chartreuse as the road climbs over a slight hill and stops. The land slopes away toward the river, a quick-moving, wide-banked waterway here, glinting brown in the sun. Soren stops the car and we climb out, armed with troll-spears and our swords. The view north stretches over flat fields and groves of green trees, and to the east the river narrows and we can see the concrete rectangles of abandoned locks. Farther east the horizon slides into a haze of clouds, but it must be where the Lost Villages were.
I pick my way downhill to the river. West where the water slows, a handful of motorboats laze in the current, and a couple of kayaks, too. Nobody here is worried about trolls. The couple who spot us give our spears a surprised look, though.
My boots sink into the mud. A few drowned trees cling to the bank. Insects buzz at my face and I swat them away. I shuck off my coat, wishing I’d left it in the car. We’re not on a glacier island anymore, obviously, and spring is in full bloom. Behind me, Soren sneezes.
For an hour I walk along the bank toward the locks, eyes down for troll-sign. There’s absolutely nothing. Frustration has me slashing with the spear at the thin branches that hang in my way, stomping down on grass that did me no harm. We get to the locks and I push easily through a hole in the rusty chain-link fence. The locks are huge rectangular chambers built into the river, with mechanisms for raising and lowering the water level in order to help boats get upriver. These are drained and defunct, because there’s nothing north since Montreal fell.
I climb the crumbling old stairs up to the top and look down into the first lock. Moss darkens the low, stagnant water, and it smells like rotten plants. The river flows free on the other side, splashing resentfully at the concrete.
Soren touches my elbow and points to the bottom of this first lock. Huddled down in the sunny corner are three small oblong stones. The water has them only partially hidden.
“Skit,” I say. Lesser trolls. There’s a broken and rusty old ladder beside them, missing several rungs. Fine dining for an iron wight. I don’t know if that makes it more or less likely the troll mother is here. Conventional wisdom would say they avoid their larger cousins, but the wights appeared on Vinland only when there’d recently been a herd moving about. If mine is the first mother, with Freya’s charm in her heart, there’s no knowing what effect she might have on the lesser trolls.
I hurry along the side of the lock, heave up onto the next one, and keep going. There’s evidence of claws and chewing on some metal drums lined along the land side of the locks, and one spillway has been torn out enough that water trickles slowly through, making a perfect little drinking fountain. But I spy no broken trees, no boulders of any size, and there’s nothing but flat farmland for kilometers. No caves, no veins of granite near the surface of the earth.
“There’s nowhere for her to hide,” I exclaim when the sun is at its apex, wiping away any shadows. “Unless she’s underwater.”
He squints against the glare off the river. “You aren’t about to propose diving, are you?”
“A few more sleepless nights and I might be.”
“We can come back when the sun is gone, and until then go interview the fishermen. Maybe find our anonymous informant.”