The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (62 page)

Malmury cursed, spat again, and tried then to rise from her chair,
but was held back by her own inebriation and by the barmaid’s firm
hand upon her shoulder.

The crone coughed and added a portion of her own jaundiced
spittle to the floor of the tavern. “They will
tell
you, Trollbane, though
the tales be less than half-remembered among this misbegotten legion
of cowards and imbeciles. You
ask
them, they will tell you what has
not yet been spoken, what was never freely uttered for fear no hero
would have accepted their blood money. Do not think
me
the villain
in this ballad they are spinning around you.”

“You would do well to
leave,
witch,” answered Malmury, her voice
grown low and throaty, as threatful as breakers before a storm tide or
the grumble of a chained hound. “They might fear you, but I do not,
and I’m in an ill temper to suffer your threats and intimations.”

“Very well,” the old woman replied, and she bowed her head to
Malmury, though it was clear to all that the crone’s gesture carried
not one whit of respect. “So be it. But you
ask
them, Trollbane. You
ask after the
cause
of the troll’s coming, and you ask after his daughter,
too.”

And with that, she raised her cane, and the fumy air about her
appeared to shimmer and fold back upon itself. There was a strong
smell, like the scent of brimstone and of smoldering sage, and a
sound, as well. Later, Malmury would not be able to decide if it was
more akin to a distant thunderclap or the crackle of burning logs.
And, with that, the old woman vanished, and her spit sizzled loudly
upon the floor.

“Then she
is
a sorceress,” Malmury said, sliding the dagger back
into its sheath.

“After a fashion,” the barmaid told her, and slowly removed her
grip upon Malmury’s shoulder. “She’s the last priestess of the Old
Ways, and still pays tribute to those beings who came before the gods.
I’ve heard her called Grímhildr, and also Gunna, though none among
us recall her right name. She is powerful, and treacherous, but know
that she has also done great
good
for Invergó and all the people along
the coast. When there was plague, she dispelled the sickness—”

“What did she
mean,
to ask after the coming of the troll and its
daughter?”

“These are not questions I would answer,” the barmaid replied,
and turned suddenly away. “You must take them to the elders. They
can tell you these things.”

Malmury nodded and sipped from her cup, her eyes wandering
about the tavern, which she saw was now emptying out into the
morning-drenched street. The crone’s warnings had left them in
no mood for tales of monsters, and had ruined their appetite for
the stranger’s endless boasting and bluster. No matter, Malmury
thought. They’d be back come nightfall, and she was weary, besides,
and needed sleep. There was now a cot waiting for her upstairs, in
the loft above the kitchen, a proper bed complete with mattress and
pillows stuffed with the down of geese, even a white bearskin blanket
to guard against the frigid air that blew in through the cracks in the
walls. She considered going before the council of elders, after she
was rested and only hungover, and pressing them for answers to the
crone’s questions. But Malmury’s head was beginning to ache, and she
only entertained the proposition in passing. Already, the appearance
of the old woman and what she’d said was beginning to seem less
like something that had actually happened, and Malmury wondered,
dimly, if she was having trouble discerning where the truth ended
and her own generous embroidery of the truth began. Perhaps she’d
invented the hag, feeling the tale needed an appropriate epilogue,
and then, in her drunkenness, forgotten that she’d invented her.

Soon, the barmaid—whose name was Dóta—returned to lead
Malmury up the narrow, creaking stairs to her small room and the
cot, and Malmury forgot about sea trolls and witches and even the
gold she had coming. For Dóta was a comely girl, and free with her
favors, and the stranger’s sex mattered little to her.

The daughter of the sea troll lived among the jagged, windswept
highlands that loomed above the milky blue-green bay and the village
of Invergó. Here had she dwelt for almost three generations, as men
reckoned the passing of time, and here did she imagine she would live
until the long span of her days was at last exhausted.

Her cave lay deep within the earth, where once had been only
solid basalt. But over incalculable eons, the glacier that swept down
from the mountains, inching between high volcanic cliffs as it carved
a wide path to the sea, had worked its way beneath the bare and
stony flesh of the land. A ceaseless trickle of meltwater had carried
the bedrock away, grain by igneous grain, down to the bay, as the
perpetual cycle of freeze and thaw had split and shattered the stone.
In time (and then, as now, the world had nothing but time), the
smallest of breaches had become cracks, cracks became fissures, and
intersecting labyrinths of fissures collapsed to form a cavern. And so,
in this way, had the struggle between mountain and ice prepared for
her a home, and she dwelt there, alone, almost beyond the memory
of the village and its inhabitants, which she despised and feared and
avoided when at all possible.

However, she had not always lived in the cave, nor unattended.
Her mother, a child of man, had died while birthing the sea troll’s
daughter, and, afterwards, she’d been taken in by the widowed conjurer
who would, so many years later, seek out and confront a stranger
named Malmury who’d come up from the southern kingdoms. When
the people of Invergó had looked upon the infant, what they’d seen
was enough to guess at its parentage. And they would have put the
mother to death, then and there, for her congress with the fiend,
had she not been dead already. And surely, likewise, would they have
murdered the baby, had the old woman not seen fit to intervene. The
villagers had always feared the crone, but also they’d had cause to
seek her out in times of hardship and calamity. So it gave them pause,
once she’d made it known that the infant was in her care, and this
knowledge stayed their hand, for a while.

In the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage, at the edge of the
mudflats, the crone had raised the infant until she was old enough
to care for herself. And until even the old woman’s infamy, and the
prospect of losing her favors, was no longer enough to protect the sea
troll’s daughter from the villagers. Though more human than not, she
had the creature’s blood in her veins. In the eyes of some, this made
her a greater abomination than her father.

Finally, rumors had spread that the girl was a danger to them all,
and, after an especially harsh winter, many became convinced that
she could make herself into an ocean mist and pass easily through
windowpanes. In this way, it was claimed, had she begun feeding on
the blood of men and women while they slept. Soon, a much-prized
milking cow had been found with her udders mutilated, and the
farmer had been forced to put the beast out of its misery. The very
next day, the elders of Invergó had sent a warning to the crone that
their tolerance of the half-breed was at an end, and she was to be
remanded to the constable forthwith.

But the old woman had planned against this day. She’d discovered
the cave high above the bay, and she’d taught the sea troll’s daughter
to find auk eggs and mushrooms and to hunt the goats and such
other wild things as lived among the peaks and ravines bordering the
glacier. The girl was bright, and had learned to make clothing and
boots from the hides of her kills, and also had been taught herb lore,
and much else that would be needed to survive on her own in that
forbidding, barren place.

Late one night in the summer of her fourteenth year, she’d fled
Invergó, and made her way to the cave. Only one man had ever been
foolish enough to go looking for her, and his body was found pinned to
an iceberg floating in the bay, his own sword driven through his chest
to the hilt. After that, they left her alone, and soon the daughter
of the sea troll was little more than legend, and a tale to frighten
children. She began to believe, and to hope, that she would never
again have cause to journey down the slopes to the village.

But then, as the stranger Malmury, senseless with drink, slept in
the arms of a barmaid, the crone came to the sea troll’s daughter in
her dreams, as the old woman had done many times before.

“Your father has been slain,” she said, not bothering to temper the
words. “His corpse lies desecrated and rotting in the village square,
where all can come and gloat and admire the mischief of the one who
killed him.”

The sea troll’s daughter, whom the crone had named Sæhildr, for
the ocean, had been dreaming of stalking elk and a shaggy herd of
mammoth across a meadow. But the crone’s voice had startled her
prey, and the dream animals had all fled across the tundra.

The sea troll’s daughter rolled over onto her back, stared up at
the grizzled face of the old woman, and asked, “Should this bring me
sorrow? Should I have tears, to receive such tidings? If so, I must admit
it doesn’t, and I don’t. Never have I seen the face of my father, not
with my waking eyes, and never has he spoken unto me, nor sought
me out. I was nothing more to him than a curious consequence of his
indiscretions.”

“You have lived always in different worlds,” the old woman replied,
but the one she called Sæhildr had turned back over onto her belly
and was staring forlornly at the place where the elk and mammoth
had been grazing only a few moments before.

“It is none of my concern,” the sea troll’s daughter sighed, thinking
she should wake soon, that then the old woman could no longer
plague her thoughts. Besides, she was hungry, and she’d killed a bear
only the day before.

“Sæhildr,” the crone said, “I’ve not come expecting you to grieve,
for too well do I know your mettle. I’ve come with a warning, as the
one who slew your father may yet come seeking you.”

The sea troll’s daughter smiled, baring her teeth, that effortlessly
cracked bone that she might reach the rich marrow inside. With
the hooked claws of a thumb and forefinger, she plucked the yellow
blossom from an arctic poppy, and held it to her wide nostrils.

“Old Mother, knowing my mettle, you should know that I am not
afraid of men,” she whispered, then she let the flower fall back to the
ground.

“The one who slew your father was not a man, but a woman, the
likes of which I’ve never seen,” the crone replied. “She is a warrior,
of noble birth, from the lands south of the mountains. She came to
collect the bounty placed upon the troll’s head. Sæhildr, this one is
strong, and I fear for you.”

In the dream, low clouds the color of steel raced by overhead, fat
with snow, and the sea troll’s daughter lay among the flowers of the
meadow and thought about the father she’d never met. Her short tail
twitched from side to side, like the tail of a lazy, contented cat, and
she decapitated another poppy.

“You believe this warrior will hunt
me
now?” she asked the crone.

“What I think, Sæhildr, is that the men of Invergó have no
intention of honoring their agreement to pay this woman her reward.
Rather, I believe they will entice her with even greater riches, if only
she will stalk and destroy the bastard daughter of their dispatched
foe. The woman is greedy, and prideful, and I hold that she will hunt
you, yes.”