She took a big gulp and, with her eyes watering, she forced a smile. “Yummy!”
The trolls chuckled, then talked excitedly to one another.
“They like you.” Silas’s smile turned into a grimace. “And they’re wondering if they could persuade you to marry the chieftain’s son.”
“What?” She gave Silas an incredulous look.
“Over my dead body,” he ground out through a smile of clenched teeth.
Her mouth twitched. “Are you worried?”
“Should I be?” His eyes narrowed when she pretended to think it over.
The young woman brought them two more bowls, and Gwennore sighed with relief when she saw they contained some sort of soup.
She tasted it and was pleasantly surprised. “This is excellent. Thank you!”
The young woman grinned.
Soon everyone was eating and chatting happily. Gwennore glanced around, admiring how colorful the tents were. The clothes worn by the troll women were equally colorful, with beautifully embroidered caps and belts.
She leaned close to Silas and whispered, “When I saw them before, they were dressed in dirty rags. But now, they seem well-dressed.”
“When the men hunt, they try to blend in with nature,” he whispered back. “They probably consider this a special occasion, so they’re wearing their best clothes.”
“Do they always live in tents? Are they nomadic?”
He nodded. “They travel far to the north in the summer, following the great herds of elk and caribou.”
When everyone finished eating, a young man approached Gwennore and bowed. She spotted the bandage wrapped around his leg and realized this was the troll she’d treated in the river.
“Can you ask if his wound is healing?” Gwennore asked Silas, and he talked to the young man for a moment.
“He says he’s fine and he’s made a gift to show you his gratitude,” Silas grumbled as the young man handed her a parcel wrapped in leather.
“Oh. Thank you!” She opened it to find a piece of wood carved into the likeness of a horse. “This is amazing.” She lifted it up to admire it. “Goodness, you’re so talented!”
With a blush, the young man replied, then all the trolls chuckled as he ran back to his pillow.
“What did he say?” she asked Silas.
Silas clenched his fists, then relaxed them. “He claims to have other talents as well.”
“Other…?”
“He’s the chieftain’s son,” Silas muttered.
“You mean the one they want—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think about it.”
She grinned as she ran her fingers over the smooth wooden horse. “I have to admit, the trolls are not at all what I expected them to be.”
He gave her a wary look. “You’re not planning to run off with them, are you?”
“Well, they do seem very friendly. Why did Torushki make them out to be such monsters?”
“That was four hundred years ago. Things were different back then. Whenever the trolls had an infant who died, they would steal a Norveshki baby to replace it. Thankfully, they stopped doing that about two hundred years ago.”
Gwennore snorted. “Now the Norveshki are doing it.”
Silas winced. “I’m trying to put a stop to it.”
She glanced around and noticed there weren’t many children in the village. “They must have suffered from the plague here.”
“Everyone has suffered from the plague. We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, mostly children and the elderly. The adults who survived are infertile, so it’s very difficult to increase our population.”
“Did you have the plague when you were young?”
“Are you worried I might be infertile?” He leaned close. “We could put it to the test.”
She shoved him back.
“Rejected again,” he muttered.
The trolls stood and motioned for them to follow.
Silas rose to his feet. “At last, we’ll find out what they want.”
They were taken to a pen that was surrounded on four sides with a tightly boarded fence. A man set a covered cage in the pen and whisked the cover off.
Gwennore winced. Inside the cage was a large rat. It was frantic, gnarling at the wooden slats of the cage and throwing itself from one side to the other in a frenzy to escape. “What’s wrong with it?”
An older woman talked to Silas for a while, then he turned to Gwennore. “This woman is their healer. She says she has spent the last twenty years studying the plague, and this is how it begins.” He pointed at the rat.
A man leaned over the fence and used a hooked spear to lift one side of the cage. The rat immediately escaped from its cage and ran across the pen, where it slammed against the boards. Then it darted to the other side to crash into the fence there.
“The plague causes the rats to go mad?” Gwennore asked.
Silas listened to the troll healer explain, then told Gwennore, “The plague changes the rat’s behavior, making it frantic and aggressive. It will bite humans, passing the plague on to them, or it will attack animals that it would normally run away from.”
Two troll men lowered a larger covered cage into the pen. When they whisked the cover off, Gwennore was shocked to see a wildcat inside. The typical Norveshki wildcat was no bigger than a lamb, but they were known to be ferocious little hunters. The second the wildcat saw the rat it reacted, baring its teeth and hissing. The cat’s spotted fur bristled as it arched its back.
The rat would have been safe if it had stayed across the pen, for the wildcat was still in a cage. But the rat dashed straight for the cat, squeezing between the slats so it could attack.
With a screech, the cat retaliated.
Gwennore had a quick and horrifying glimpse of gnashing teeth and ripping claws from both animals before she looked away. But she could still hear the awful sounds.
Silas wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close to his chest. “You don’t have to watch to know what will happen. The rat will die. The cat will win, but also lose, for now it will be infected with the plague.”
Gwennore shuddered as one of the trolls used a spear to kill the wildcat. “They could have just told me.”
“They wanted
