Chapter 31. The Gift

Not a second after my father’s order, the Pit came apart.

“THE AXIOM! THE AXIOM!”

“ARIDIS! ARIDIS! ARIDIS!”

“KILL IT, YOUNG LORD!”

I actually flinched. These were the same nine thousand who had greeted me in a single voice, who had gone silent the moment my father lifted his hand, and now they were on their feet screaming, stamping, whistling, hammering the benches, none of their previous discipline anywhere to see.

Then, across the Pit, directly opposite the gryphon doors, a second gate began to open.

Two men came through it. They wore the black of the house without the silver, sleeves bound to the forearm, and each of them held a chain. Between the chains, walking, was the thing they had brought me.

I flinched again, harder this time, as the roar of the crowd swelled around me.

I had never seen a troll before. I had read about them, certainly, but books had done little to prepare me for the reality of one. After sixteen years spent almost entirely among humans, the creature standing before me was so unlike anything I had ever seen that, for a moment, I could only stare.

It was grey like ash, and its hide was worked all over in a fine pebbled pattern while black hair grew in patches along the shoulders and down the outsides of the arms, coarse as wire. It stood taller than the men flanking it by a full head and a half, and it was wide, thick through the gut, with hands that hung to the knees and ended in fingers as long as my forearm.

The neck was so thick it looked like an extension of the muscular torso. The head sitting on it was big enough to take a man in two bites. It had pointed ears, like what I imagined elves to be. A crooked jaw, and red eyes.

“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” my father said. He had come closer beside me, and he did not raise his voice above the noise, so the words arrived just for me.

“This… is a troll?”

“One of the last of its kind, yes.”

Due to the noise, I looked back up at the stands, noting that they had not sat down. If anything they had gotten worse since the gate opened, leaning out over the tiers, shouting things I could no longer separate from each other.

“They are cheering quite a lot,” I said.

“Of course they are. Do you know what you’re looking at?”

“Uh… a troll?”

“You’re looking at a gift a king would go to war for.” He was smiling out at the sand, sounding pleased. “Ask me why.”

“…Why?”

“Start with the blood, since that much the ballads get right. Drink a troll’s blood, drawn fresh and kept properly, and your body takes one of two things from it. Either your skin begins to thicken and keeps thickening, year after year, until a blade coming at you bends against it, or breaks. Or you get the healing instead. It’s gradual as well, but eventually, cuts close while you’re still looking at them, and it costs you nothing at all. No mana, nor potions. Nothing but your own body healing itself at a rate few beings in this world could compete with.”

He glanced at me, as if expecting me to smile in excitement, so I obliged.

Below us, the handlers had reached the centre of the Pit. One of them said something, and the troll stopped walking, then stood.

“And whichever one your luck lands you, it grows,” my father went on. “Fifty years on, if it gave you the skin, you’re carrying a hide that will make a dragon envious. If it gave you the healing, you’ve long since stopped counting your wounds. Either way you might outlive everyone you started out with by a few years. Long life comes with the blood, you see. But even that pales in comparison to the true value of a troll.”

“There’s more?”

“Of course!” He laughed. “The blood is what you settle for when you cannot get the marrow.”

I looked at him, a bit perplexed.

“Bone marrow,” he specified. “Taken fresh and whole. It gives you both an impenetrable skin and a healing ability at a level the blood could not reach in a century of drinking. Skin that stops a blade sharp enough to cut through stone like butter. And under that skin, if anything ever does get through, a body that closes the wound in seconds. Wounds that kill men outright, you would get up from them annoyed about the ruined robes. Hahaha!”

He turned to face me properly.

“You would never fall ill. Not a fever, or even a cough. You would go to your grave never having sneezed once in your life. And you would live hundreds of years past your span, depending on how well your body takes to the marrow, and I have every confidence that yours will take to it well.”

The troll had not moved. It stood in the centre of the sand with its head down, its arms hanging, and one of its feet was set slightly ahead of the other as it swayed a little. As if… as if it had been standing there so long that even standing had become exhausting.

“…Father.”

“There has not been one taken alive in the eastern provinces for two hundred and sixty years,” he said. “The house has held this one for eight months, feeding it and keeping it healthy for you, my son, so that your reign may endure for centuries and our house may ascend to heights no man has ever dared dream of.”

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I kept looking at it, something not feeling right in my chest.

“Kill it,” my father said, “and take the marrow. That’s what today is.”

The crowd was so loud that I had to think about the words twice before I was sure I had them in the right order.

“…N-now?”

I did not want to.

“Now. And go all out, Howl. Do not be careful with it. A troll is not a beast you finesse. It is a great deal faster than it looks, it does not stop when it should stop, and if it gets a hand on you it will fold you in half without any particular malice about it.” He said this warmly. “Everything you claim to have learned on that mountain. Use it. Let us see it.”

Then he stepped past me to the rail and pulled the mana into his throat, and when he spoke it went out across the whole Pit and came back off the far wall.

“RELEASE IT.”

The two men were already working. One went for the left wrist, the other for the right, and the shackles came away in two heavy pieces that they let fall into the sand without ceremony.

“Make me proud, son.” Said my father as his hand firmly came down on my back, twice.

I gulped, my heart racing so much I felt like throwing up.

The troll did not react to being freed. Just stood there with its arms hanging, its head down, and neither of the handlers seemed remotely concerned about that.

“Unbind it,” my father called down.

The nearer handler raised one hand and cast something I did not recognize, and the other man was already walking backward toward the gate while he did it. A pale line of mana left his palm, hit the troll somewhere between the shoulder blades, and unravelled.