Frostfire Page 7

  “Runa, maybe now isn’t the time to have this discussion.” Dad reached out, putting his hand on her arm. She let him, but her eyes stayed on me, darkened with anger.

  “I’m not condoning the stealing,” I told her.

  “But you are,” Mom persisted. “By working for them, by helping them the way you do, you are tacitly agreeing with all of it.”

  “The Kanin have a way of life here. I’m not talking about the Markis or the trackers or the changelings. I am talking about the average Kanin person, the majority of the ten thousand people that live in Doldastam,” I said, trying to appeal to her sense of reason and fair play.

  “They don’t have changelings,” I reminded her. “They work for their money. They’re teachers and bakers and farmers and shop owners. They raise families and live quietly and more peacefully and closer to nature. They’re allowed to leave, yet time and time again they choose to stay. And it’s a good thing too. You don’t know what the world is like outside the city walls anymore. You haven’t been anywhere except Storvatten and Doldastam.”

  Mom rolled her eyes at that, but she didn’t say anything, letting me finish my speech.

  “The life for the humans, outside in the real cities, it’s not like this,” I said. “The drugs, the violence, the excessive commercialism. Everything is a product, even people themselves. I know that things here are not perfect. We have our problems too, but the way we live as a whole, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  “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?”<
br />
  “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.”

  “What?” Linus glanced down at the book, then back up at me. “I feel like you skipped a step there.”

  “Each animal in the story represents a different tribe.” I tapped the picture of a cougar, his eyes red and fangs sharp. “The cougar is the Vittra, who were starving and suffering. So they began attacking and stealing from the other tribes, and soon the Omte, who are the birds, joined in. And it wasn’t long until everyone was fighting everyone, and we’d completely broken off from each other.”

  “Which one are the Kanin?” Linus asked as he stared down at the page.

  “We’re the rabbits. That’s literally what kanin translates into.”

  “Really?” Linus questioned in surprise. “Why rabbits? Shouldn’t we be, like, chameleons or something?”

  “Probably, but when the trolls named themselves, they didn’t know what chameleons were. Not a lot of reptiles in northern Canada. So we went with rabbits because they burrowed deep, ran fast, and they did a good job of blending in with their surroundings.”

  Linus stared sadly at the books in front of him. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to remember all this stuff, especially not with all the different tribes.”

  “Here.” I grabbed a thick book from the bottom of the pile and flipped through its yellowing pages until I found the one I was looking for.

  It had a symbol for each of the tribes, the actual emblems that we used on flags when we bothered to use flags—a white rabbit for the Kanin, a green flowering vine for the Trylle, a red cougar for the Vittra, a blue fish for the Skojare, and a brown-bearded vulture for the Omte.

  Next to each emblem were a few short facts about each of the tribes. Not enough to make anyone an expert, but enough for now.

  He grimaced and stared down at the page. “Great.”

  “It won’t be that bad,” I assured him.

  As Linus studied the page in front of him, his brown hair fell across his forehead, and his lips moved as he silently read the pages. The freckles on his cheeks darkened the harder he concentrated—an unconscious reaction brought on by his Kanin abilities.