The Lost City Read online

  When I had started as a live-in nanny working for Finn and Mia Holmes, they’d only had two children with another on the way, but already their cottage was rather cramped. Shortly after I moved in, Emma came along—followed by a promotion for Finn to the head of the Trylle royal guard—and Mia insisted a house upgrade was long overdue.

  This grand little house, nestled in the bluffs along the Mississippi River—cozy but clean and bright—had enough room for us all—Finn, Mia, Hanna, Liam, Emma, Niko, Lissa, Luna, and me. As of a few months ago, we’d even managed to fit in Finn’s mother, Annali, who had decided to move in with them after her husband passed away last fall.

  This home had been my home for years, and really, this family had been my family too. They welcomed me with open arms. I grew to love them, and they loved me. Here, I felt like I belonged and mattered in a way that I had never been able to in Iskyla.

  I was happy with them. But now I was leaving all of this behind.

  2

  Independence

  “But Mom, it’s not fair!” Hanna was shouting, her voice reaching the ear-piercing levels of indignation that only twelve-year-olds seemed able to master.

  When I walked into the kitchen, her mother was attempting to feed the twins, Lissa and Luna. A bright orange mush—presumably pureed carrots or maybe sweet potatoes—was slathered all over their high chairs and hands, and some had even gotten into Mia’s dark hair.

  “Hanna, we’ve already gone over this.” Mia’s tone was beyond exasperated, but Hanna stood defiantly in front of her, arms folded over her chest as she glared up at her mother. “Your grandparents see you so rarely.”

  “But it’s just turned June, and you’re sending me off! Me and my friends already made so many plans for the summer—”

  “Well, that was silly of you, wasn’t it?” Mia cut her daughter’s rant short with a gentle rebuke. “You’ve known about this trip for months.”

  “But I never wanted to do it,” she insisted with a whine. “At the very least you should let me stay for the party tonight.”

  “Ulla’s internship starts on Monday, and she’s not going to miss it for some party,” Mia told her firmly. “Besides, parties at the palace are always so stuffy and boring.”

  Hanna groaned and rolled her dark eyes dramatically. “You’re only saying that because you’ve been to so many.”

  I glanced over at the invitation tacked up on the corkboard—next to the calendar with reminders for the twins’ checkups and Liam’s camp schedule. Delicate filigree vines had been drawn along the edges, and at the bottom a rabbit sat front and center, flanked by a fish, a cougar, and a vulture.

  Her Royal Highness Wendy Luella Staad

  Queen of the Trylle

  and Her Husband Loki

  request the honor of your presence

  at the Quinquennial Jubilee

  of

  Linus Fredrick Berling

  King of the Kanin

  with His Wife Ariel

  on Saturday, the Eighth of June

  Two Thousand Nineteen

  at Seven O’Clock

  at the Trylle Royal Palace in Förening, Minnesota

  “Sorry, kid.” I tried to sound apologetic—and I was sorry that Hanna was sad about it, but I was not at all upset about missing the party myself.

  I had been to enough of these kinds of affairs to know that Mia was right. They were mostly boring and stuffy. This one was all about strengthening the alliances between the tribes—a shaky bit of peace that had been established during the Invasion of Doldastam that had ended with Linus’s ascension to the throne.

  Even though I’d grown up as part of the Kanin tribe, Iskyla was so far out and isolated we hardly followed politics, so I hadn’t known about all the bits and troubles that led up to the civil war in the capital of the kingdom. An heir apparent felt their place on the throne was unduly set aside, and they plotted a coup a decade in the making. Monarchs were killed, leaders were overthrown, and the Kanin eventually found themselves with a whole new dynasty in place.

  That meant the jubilee would be a room full of political frenemies saying nice things to one another and pretending that they actually meant them. It would be even less fun than it sounded.

  Especially for someone who stuck out like me. It wasn’t just that I was blond. Of all the tribes, the Trylle were the most renowned for their beauty, with so many of the men and women like slender models walking off a runway.

  Meanwhile, I had broad shoulders and wide hips with hardly a cinch of a waist in the middle, making my body type “rectangular,” as the magazines would helpfully declare, and not so much fat as I was wide, although I was a little pudgy, too.

  Like many Omte, my face had a slightly squished lopsided appearance. The skewed look on my face was mostly due to my mouth—the left corner of my puffy lips drooped a bit—and my eyes—the left eye was slightly larger than the right, and the left pupil was permanently dilated in a birth defect, making the eye appear darker and even larger than it actually was.

  It was only the Omte who were known for their asymmetric features, hulking bodies, and generally going against the grain of Western beauty standards in the twenty-first century. And that was me.

  While I still enjoyed putting on a gown and getting all gussied up for big events like the royal party at the palace, the pressure of perfection made my less-than-perfect self uncomfortable.

  “But none of the other kids have to go,” Hanna said, ignoring me on her unrelenting crusade to get her mom to let her stay home.

  “Liam has tracker camp, and everyone else is too young to be away from home for six weeks,” Mia reminded her. “Besides, I thought you would enjoy having a break from your siblings.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t mean that I wanted to get stuck in some boring old house out in the middle of nowhere,” Hanna muttered.

  When she was pouting like that, slouching and with her bottom lip sticking out slightly, she appeared to be even younger than she actually was. The smattering of freckles across her face only lent itself to her youth, and her bouncy dark brown curls didn’t help much either. Her thick eyebrows had started sprouting into a full-on unibrow over the winter—around the same time that I’d had to take her shopping for her first bra—and I’d taught her how to pluck and shape them.

  “Have you finished packing yet?” I asked her.

  “Have you?” she shot back, and her eyes met mine for a split second, long enough for me to see the hurt flash in them, and I realized that she was upset about more than being away from her friends.

  My internship lasted six weeks. On my way there and back, I was dropping Hanna off and picking her up at her grandparents’. When we got back, I was moving out to a little apartment on the other side of town. I already had the first month’s rent and security down. Mia and Finn were being kind enough to let me store most of my belongings here while I was on the internship.

  So this was my last official day working as a nanny and living with the Holmeses.

  “Come on, Hanna.” I smiled at her. “We’ve got a super-fun road trip ahead of us. I already have playlists made for the road.”

  “Yeah?” She lifted her head slightly.

  “Yeah, and how often do you get to be outside of Förening and see the humans in their natural habitat?” I asked, since that was something I’d heard her whinge about on more than one occasion.

  She stood up taller. “Yeah? Like we’ll be able to eat in a real restaurant with humans everywhere?”

  “Yeah, we can eat anywhere you want.”

  That wasn’t a total lie. We could stop at any restaurant, but in my experience, most food prepared outside of troll communities tended to make us sick. Since throughout most of our existence trolls had lived off the grid, hidden away and eating mostly what little fruits and vegetables we could get our hands on, we hadn’t adapted well to the rich diets of humans.

  “I pick . . . McDonald’s,” Hanna announced, causing Mia to let out a small lau
gh.

  “Well, if you wanna stop somewhere, you better get finished packing,” I told her. “I’d like to make it to your grandparents’ before dark, and since we’re driving fourteen hours, that means that we need to be on the road”—I glanced at the clock on the wall and groaned—“in fifteen minutes.”

  Now, bolstered by the promise of forbidden treats, Hanna ran upstairs to her room to finish packing.

  3

  Farewells

  We were running an hour behind. I don’t know how it had happened, but I was still loading up the Jeep at half-past ten in the morning. Finn had been kind enough to borrow the Jeep from the Queen’s small fleet of royal vehicles on the condition that I take Hanna to her grandparents’. It was a more-than-fair trade, so I had happily accepted.

  “Okay, I think that’s the last of it, then,” I said, after carefully stowing Hanna’s violin between our bags.

  Trolls tended to be hoarders, and I was no exception. One of the more obvious ways this presented itself was how much I over-packed. It didn’t help that all my stuff was essentially already packed for the big move, so why not just pile it in the Jeep in case I needed it during the next six weeks? Like literally all my clothing and jewelry. Would I need a winter jacket in June in Oregon? Probably not, but why risk it?

  I had finally stuffed the Jeep as much as I could without risking injury or discomfort to Hanna and myself, so I closed the gate and turned back to face everyone. Mia and Finn had attempted to gather the kids to see us off, but it was hard to keep them all together. Liam and Emma kept running around chasing each other, Niko wandered off after a butterfly, Lissa was asleep in a bouncer, and Luna was fussing, so Mia rocked her gently and sang to her.

  Hanna started crying when she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to her pony Calvin, so she darted off to do that.

  “I bet you’ll miss all of this,” Finn said as he scooped up Niko before the toddler tumbled into the ditch.

  “I don’t know if you’re kidding or not, but it’s definitely going to be bittersweet to be somewhere quiet.” I gestured vaguely around at the laughing and crying children who nearly drowned out the sound of the chirping birds and the warm breeze rustling through the trees.

  “We were lucky to have you as long as we did,” Mia said, and she gave me a pained smile with tears in her eyes. “It may be hard to tell right now, but we really are all going to be lost without you, Ulla. It won’t hit the little ones until after you’re gone.”

  “Come on, guys, this isn’t goodbye forever,” I said as I choked down my own tears. “When I get back, I’ll still see you around town.”

  “I know, and you can always come back and visit,” Mia said, and that was more of a command than an invitation. She hugged me then, with Luna letting out an irritated squawk as she found herself smooshed in the center of it.

  Niko squirmed in Finn’s arms, so I untangled myself from Mia and reached out for him. He let me kiss his chubby cheeks and hold him tightly to me, but only for a second. His attention was entirely focused on chasing butterflies, and he wouldn’t stand for being held for another moment, so I set him back on the ground to run circles around his mother.

  “We’re really going to miss you, Ulla,” Finn said, and the honesty of his words made tears spring fresh in my eyes. He wasn’t much of an emotional guy, speaking in cool, polite tones that bordered on formal, and he chose his words carefully. That’s when I realized: this wasn’t the first time I was leaving my home, but it was the first time that I would be missed.

  I wiped my eyes roughly with the palm of my hand and chewed the inside of my cheek to keep back the tears. “Yeah, well, thanks again for helping me out so much, giving me a roof and an education and now a Jeep and this internship. I don’t know if I ever would’ve gotten to Merellä without you.”

  “It’s the Queen that deserves all the gratitude for that one.” He waved it away like it was nothing, but we both knew the truth. If not for his friendship with the Queen of the Trylle, and her writing a recommendation on my behalf, it would’ve been near-impossible for a nobody like me to land an internship in Merellä.

  “And honestly, Ulla,” he went on, “it’s not nearly enough thanks for what you’ve done to help us. I don’t know how we could’ve managed with all the changes we’ve gone through over the years.”

  “You only ever get what you give, you know?” I said, awkwardly repeating something that Mr. Tulin used to tell me all the time when I was a kid.

  Hanna came running back from saying goodbye to her pony, wiping at her eyes in a hurry. “Okay, I think I got it all out of my system. We can go now.”

  After a few more tearful and semi-tearful goodbyes, we finally made our way over to the car. Hanna had hopped in, and I was reaching for the driver’s-side door, when I heard someone calling my name behind me.

  I turned back to see Bryn Aven. Standing at the top of the hill, looking like a vision in white in the bright sun, and I had to blink to be sure it was her. Her crisp guard uniform made her appear older and slicker than when I had seen her last, but the wry smirk on her lips was unmistakably hers.

  “You were gonna sneak off without even saying hello?” she asked.

  Without thinking, I raced over to her and threw my arms around her, embracing her in a bear hug that was probably a little too tight based on the grunts she made. It had been years since I had seen her, but my feelings of gratitude, friendship, and (a bit of) infatuation remained wholly unchanged.

  Once I released her, Bryn smiled at me and smoothed out her uniform. “Either I’ve gotten shorter or you’ve gotten taller.”

  “Maybe it’s a little of both.”

  “It looks like you’re all packed up. Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I have to be in Merellä by Monday morning, and it’s over a thirty-hour drive.”

  She let out a low whistle. “And I thought we had a long trip down from Doldastam. What’s waiting for you in Merellä?”

  “An internship at the Mimirin.”

  “The Mimirin? As in the Mimirin Talo?” she asked, and the awe in her voice made me blush.

  The Mimirin was about the only true neutral space in the troll hierarchy. It was an ancient institution, one that purported to house the entire history of our kind. The Mimirin served as a library, a museum, a university, a research facility, and an opera house.

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s the headquarters for the Inhemsk Project, and that’s really what I’ll be working on.”

  “The Inhemsk Project is that Vittra group that reassimilates the trolls of mixed blood, right?”

  Trolls of mixed blood. That was the new official term, replacing plenty of more derogatory terms, like halvblud, half-breed, and mongrel. I didn’t know how well it would take off, but it was definitely an improvement. Mr. Tulin had always told me that there was no shame in being the child of mixed tribes, but not everybody felt the same way he did.

  “The Vittra started it, but it has no true tribal alliance, like the Mimirin. They’re neutral and open to anyone.”

  When the Inhemsk Project had formed a few years ago, it was initially met with a lot of anger and protests. Historically, trolls of mixed parentage were shunned by proper society as punishment for their parents weakening the bloodlines, and by extension, the psychokinetic abilities in our blood that made us so powerful.

  Eventually, though, our society had been forced to accept the harsh reality. With tribes like the Vittra and Skojare experiencing record rates of infertility and infant mortality in recent decades, their populations had begun to dwindle.

  The Trylle—while not as plagued with medical issues as the others—had begun to suffer their own population decrease because of their heavy reliance on the practice of changelings. In recent years, many of the troll children left as changelings declined to come back, choosing instead to live among the humans.

  The Vittra were simply the first to realize how dire the situation had become. Queen Sara Elsing worried about the extin
ction of her tribe—not just the blood and their supernatural abilities but their way of life, their history, everything that made them the Vittra. It would all be gone if they didn’t find a way to boost their population.

  Now the Inhemsk Project worked at reaching out to all the children of mixed blood, hoping to bring them back into the fold to learn about their history and strengthen our society. Initially, the doors had only been open to mixed trolls—like half-Kanin, half-Trylle—but they’d widened their net to include even the ultimate taboo in our world—a child born of a troll and a human.

  The two tribes with the largest self-sustaining population—the Kanin and the Omte—had eventually decided on a stance of indifference. They didn’t fund the Inhemsk Project or openly use it, but they wouldn’t stop the others from welcoming trolls of mixed blood into their midst.

  “You’re going to find your family?” Bryn asked.

  “Well, I’m gonna try.” I shrugged, trying to appear more nonchalant about the whole thing than I actually felt.

  “I’d wish you luck, but I know you don’t need it. You always were one tenacious kid.”

  I laughed. “Well, we’ll see how far my tenacity gets me.”

  “I’m happy for you, but I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed you won’t be at the party tonight. I’m King Linus’s personal guard, so I’ll be working, but I hoped we’d have a little time to catch up.”

  “Still living the dream, huh?” I commented.

  “Something like that.” She smiled and lowered her gaze.

  “Ulla!” Hanna leaned out the window of the Jeep, looking at me over the top of her cat-eye sunglasses. “Are we going or what? Because if we’re staying longer, I’m getting out of the car.”

  I bit my lip and glanced back at an impatient Hanna. “No, don’t get out. I’ll be there in a minute.” If she got out, it would be at least another twenty minutes before I’d get her back in, and we were already running so far behind.