Stolen Songbird(77)

“It is indeed,” I breathed. “Tell me sir, what is your name?”

“Martin, my lady.”

“Martin, will you leave me with this book and seek out others that might be of assistance to me?”

“Gladly, my lady.”

Before he went, he set the ponderous book on a table for me. I started at the beginning, the morning of the Fall. Just before noon, all of Trollus was alerted of their impending doom by the echoing crack of thunder. As countless tons of rock spilled down the valley, tens of thousands of trolls lifted their hands and magic to protect themselves and, in doing so, created a collective shield that protected the city as the rock blocked out the sky.

I pored over the illustrations showing beautiful, terrified troll faces with their arms thrown skyward as the mountain poured down on them. The drawings showed humans, too, all of them crouched in terror at the feet of the trolls. Helpless.

The city was organized into shifts of trolls holding up the rock and trolls digging a way out. Bodies of those killed by falling rocks rotted in the streets and the human population was quickly stricken by plague, which was exacerbated by famine and lack of clean water. The humans began to die out, and only the favored few were given what they needed to survive.

Drawings showed emaciated humans on their knees begging, corpses littering the streets around them. And in the midst of them stood the trolls, their eyes focused on the rocks overhead, not on the misery surrounding them. I shuddered to think of what it must have been like: to be starving in the dark, to be shown no mercy because my life was considered worthless.

It took them four weeks to dig through the rock. King Alexis was the first to cross into the sunlight with his human mistress, Anushka, at his side. But as he turned to welcome his people to freedom, Anushka slit his throat and uttered the malediction binding the trolls to the confines of Trollus for as long as she drew breath. All the surviving humans walked into the sun, but no troll could pass the boundaries of the rock fall.

But why? Was it because she’d grown bitter over the way her fellow humans were treated during the crisis? That didn’t make sense – by breaking the mountain, she was the one who’d put both races in such dire straits in the first place. A personal vendetta, then? Revenge against the trolls for something that had happened to her? By all descriptions, she was treated even better than the Queen. What could Alexis have done to inspire such an enormous act of evil?

Martin reappeared and set a stack of books down next to me. “You may find these interesting,” he said.

I nodded and pointed to the enormous portraits lining the library walls. “Which is King Alexis?”

“The Third?”

“Yes. The one Anushka killed.”

Martin’s light flew along the portraits until he found the one he was looking for. I rose and made my way over to it. King Alexis was handsome, with strong, straight features, and black hair that fell to his shoulders, but his good looks were marred by his haughty expression.

“His son, King Xavier II, also known as the Savior.” Martin’s light moved over to reveal a grim-faced troll with the eyes of a man who has seen too much. “He ascended to the throne at age sixteen, but it was his genius that designed a way in for the river. Trollus would not have survived if not for the fish.

“He was succeeded by King Tristan I, also known as Tristan the Builder. He was the architect of the original structure of the tree. His work reduced the number of trolls required to maintain the ceiling by more than half. He was also responsible for the construction of the moon hole.”

Tristan the Builder was as grim-faced as his father, but as Martin continued his description of the Montigny line, I noticed a return of the haughty expression that Alexis had worn. Even King Marcel III, known to all as Marcel the Dimwit, had a look of self-entitlement.

“What do you suppose they will call His Majesty?” I asked, looking up at Tristan’s father’s portrait. Either it was from many years ago, or the artist had taken a great deal of liberty, because the Thibault in the painting was not the enormously fat man I knew. In fact, he looked eerily like a somewhat older version of Tristan.

“I don’t make a habit of speculating on such things, my lady,” Martin said, but I saw the corners of his mouth creep up.

My vote was for Thibault the Corpulent.

I turned back to the book and flipped to the portrait of Anushka. “Martin, why would she have broken the mountain while she was still in the city? Why risk her own death?”