The Rise and Fall of a Dragonking - By Lynn Abbey Page 0,19
the wagons that followed the army wherever it went. Then her luck ran out. Myron of Yoram, whose idea of a picket line was a man holding the thong of a sack of rancid broy, left his flank unguarded. Troll marauders nipped his ribs, and Dorean was an orphan.
The bailiffs brought her out of danger; they did that out of their own conscience—loading their empty wagons with orphans and the wounded and bringing them back where trolls hadn’t been seen in generations. Later, when the army was mine, I would remember what the bailiffs had done and reward them. But that day when I was ten and I looked beyond my father’s arms, my eyes beheld Dorean’s beauty for the first time, and the untimely vision of living torches was banished from my mind’s eye.
“I will stay with you, Manu.”
Surely Dorean had spoken to me before, but I had never truly heard her voice and, though I was young, I knew that I had found the missing piece of my heart.
“I will take Dorean as my wife,” I told my father, my tears and fears already forgotten. “I will build her a house beneath the cool trees, and she will give me children. You must tell Grandfather. He cannot handfast her with anyone else.”
My father laughed. He was a big man with a barrel chest. His laugh carried from one side of Deche to the other. Dorean blushed. She ran away with her hands held against her ears, but she wasn’t displeased—
And Father spoke with Grandfather.
I had six years to fall in love with Dorean, and her with me. Six years to build a tree-shaded house. Six years, too, to perfect my wedding dance. I confess I spent more time up in the troll ruins perfecting my dance to the tunes my youngest brother piped than I did making mud bricks for the walls of Dorean’s house.
In the way of children, I’d forgotten my cousin’s memories of trolls with flaming eyes. I suppose I’d even forgotten the tears that first drew Dorean to my side. But something of my mad cousin’s vision must have lingered in the neglected depths of my memory. I never followed the himali wagons down to the plains, yet the trolls fascinated me, and I spent many days exploring their ruined homes high in the Kreegills.
The script of my own race remained meaningless to me, but I deciphered the inscriptions I found on the troll monuments. I learned their names and the names of the gods they chiseled into the stone they’d quarried. I saw how they’d panicked when they saw the Troll-Scorcher’s army in the valleys below them, abandoning their homes, leaving everything behind.
Stone bowls sat on stone tables, waiting for soup that would never be served.
Their benches were made from stone, their beds, too; I was awed by what I imagined as their strength, their hardness. In time, I identified the tattered remnants of their blankets and mattresses in the dust-catcher corners, but my awe was, by then, entrenched.
Rock-headed mauls lay where they’d fallen beside half-cut stone. Their erdland-bone hafts had withstood the winds and weather of two king’s ages. I could guess the damage such things could do to a human skull. But the mauls weren’t weapons; I never found any weapons more deadly than a single-edged knife in the stone ruins.
In truth, the trolls were a placid race until Rajaat raised his champions and the champions raised their armies. Myron of Yoram taught the trolls to fear, to fight, and, finally, to hate the very thought of humankind. Yet, it is also true that Deche and the trolls could have prospered together in the Kreegill, if Rajaat had not interfered. Men did not quarry, and trolls did not farm. By the time I was born, though, there was no mercy left in either race. It was too late for peace, too late for anything but annihilation. Rajaat and the Troll-Scorcher had seen to that.
It was too late for Dorean. My beautiful bride remembered her life before Deche and could not bear the mention of trolls. To her, the gray-skinned trolls were evil incarnate. As the sun rose each day, she slipped outside the village and made a burnt-honey victory offering for the Troll-Scorcher. Her hatred was understandable: she’d seen trolls and their carnage. I’d seen only their ruins. My thoughts about trolls were whirling mysteries, even to me.
In Deche, boys became men on their sixteenth birthday. I could have taken Dorean into