Free The Strange Maid by Tessa Gratton Page B

mouth, revealing square molars, and he moans. His breath is sweet like rotten bananas.
    “This is wrong,” I say, thinking of the rune sacrifice in Malchai Elizabethson’s iris. I will know my martyr when I see him.
    Big yellow eyes creak open and the troll cries out, pushing away from us, but he’s chained to the floor and can’t go anywhere.
    Unferth lowers his sword and says tentatively, “Wrong?”
    The troll is at least a meter taller than me, thick and shaped like a giant gorilla. He winces from the light, one wide yellow eye on me. He’s awkward and broken and how can his heart possibly mean anything to the Alfather?
    I spin and stalk away, kicking a dusty mead bottle. It skitters across the floor and shatters against the far wall. “It’s not right! I could never sacrifice a half-broken animal or man to my god. What honor could he bring to Odin? What could this heart possibly prove?” I jam the seax back into its sheath. “Rag me.”
    The troll groans loudly enough to shake the shards of glass that litter the floor. I have a devastating urge to feed him.
    “Here, stop.” Unferth thumps the troll on the chest, and the troll swipes at him with his one good hand. Unferth touches his sword to the troll’s stomach and presses lightly, but enough that the tip cuts in. The troll howls as tiny streaks of violet blood drip down his belly.
    “This sword is unhallowed blade and made to kill the likes of you, so behave,” Unferth says to the troll, then turns his back. The beast leans down onto his haunches, curls his only arm around his belly pathetically.
    I stare at Unferth as he limps toward me. “Unhallowed? What does that mean?”
    Eyes tight and leaning onto his good leg, Unferth wipes a smear of purple blood off his blade and onto his pants. “Cursed. A blade that has been used for ill. You have an imagination, little raven, use it.”
    “How was it cursed?”
    Unferth’s mouth opens, but for once he remains silent. There is no sudden mean cut of a smile, no disarming poem. He doesn’t want to tell me.
    “How, Truth-Teller?”
    His lips tighten. “I killed my brother with it.”
    Like a hammer thrown down, the words hit hard.
    Kinslayer.
    Unferth goes fast, ungracefully, toward the stairs.
    Something like anticipation thrills through me, hot and melting. I hug myself and take deep breaths; I turn to the troll. “Red Stripe,” I murmur, naming him for the strip of scarlet lichen. “Do you think it’s not you or me but Ned Unferth who has a heart of stone?”
    The troll sings a low note to agree with me.
    Unferth stomps back upstairs with a stained and many-times-folded map to lay out our new options for the winter. He says Red Stripe was probably alone only because he was thrashed out of his herd for being puny or for this groaning he does. We need to find safe ground because if this troll knows of the place, so will his mother. Unferth’s refrain is the same as it was at the ruins of Montreal: we want to be the hunters, not the hunted. We should leave the troll here and continue up the coast as was the plan. But I can’t shove Red Stripe back out into the harsh wilderness to face his tormentors already missing an arm.
    Reluctantly, Unferth says we might find a safe haven among the northern homesteads, except there’s no certainty that other trolls, other herds, wouldn’t find us. We’d have no chance against an entire herd. If I insist on caring for the beast, he thinks it’s better to wait through the coldest, iciest months and go hunting again with the thaw. I’ve already waited this long, what’s four more months?
    An eternity.
    “You can always change your mind about this one,” Unferth says as he thumps his fist against Red Stripe’s solid belly.
    But I know better. This troll’s gentle, needy gaze is too innocent, too simple. He’s nothing like the trolls in the stories, and it’s difficult to imagine him razing a city to the ground. More like he’s a doe-eyed cow or pygmy