Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel Read Free

deteriorated. Her eye sockets grew dark and hollow. The boils on her skin multiplied. Her gums became withered and dry.
    Raf tended to her with great devotion, to the point where he had to hold food and water to her mouth just so she could eat and drink.
    One evening, Kira smiled weakly at him through her cracked lips. “I never … thought I would see … the day when you would dote on me .” Her little chuckle became a pained, hacking cough.
    That night, Raf stroked her hair as she fell asleep. He couldn’t stand this. With every passing day she was getting nearer and nearer to death, yet still there was no sign of Bader’s war party.
    The next afternoon—the sixteenth day after Bader and his warriors had departed—Raf made his decision.
    *
    That evening, Kira awoke from a restless sleep to find Raf kneeling by the fire filling a rabbit-skin pack.
    “Raf. What are you doing?”
    “I’m going to Troll Mountain. To get you the Elixir.”
    “Raf, no! You can’t! You can’t give yourself to the trolls in exchange for curing me. How can I live knowing you traded your life for mine?”
    Raf turned to her, and she saw a fire in his eyes, a gleam of fierce determination.
    “Kira, I didn’t say I was going to trade myself for the Elixir. I said I’m going to Troll Mountain to get the Elixir. I’m going to steal the Elixir from the trolls.”

Chapter 4
    Later that evening, long after the last fires in the camp had winked out, by the light of the full moon, Raf slipped away from the small collection of shanties that formed the village of the Northmen.
    As he crested one of the higher hills, he looked behind him and saw a glow on the distant southern horizon, far beyond his village: the settlement of the Southmen tribe.
    For many generations the Northmen had fought with the Southmen, but few remembered what had actually caused the rivalry. Perhaps it was their base physical differences: the Northmen were fair of skin and hair, while the Southmen had a darker complexion, with long beards, hairy forearms, and bushy eyebrows.
    As a child, Raf had been instructed to raise the alarm should he ever see a Southman anywhere near their lands. Sure, Southmen did not steal children in the night, but they were scum, untrustworthy dogs who would steal your crops the moment you turned your back.
    It was similar with hobgoblins. Smaller than a man but more cunning and sly, a lone hobgoblin could slip into your hut in the night and steal all of your allocated food from beside your bed. Acting alone, a hobgoblin was a troublesome thief and while its cackling in the night might give a child nightmares, on its own a hobgoblin was of little danger to a human—it would be quick to flight. Larger groups of hobgoblins, however, could be lethal: if a gang of them caught a man and pinned him down, they would eat his flesh while he was still alive. Hobgoblins did not build or make anything. They lived in caves in the mountains or in abandoned places built by others.
    Trolls, however, were another matter entirely.
    They did steal children in the night.
    And even a single troll was deadly.
    Any news of a rogue troll in the valley triggered great fear and panic. Fires would be lit and a night watch instigated if a rogue troll was known to be about.
    If Raf ever saw a troll he’d been told to run away as fast as he could.
    *
    The trolls lived to the north of the river valley amid some forbidding mountains that, by an accident of geography, sealed off the peninsula on which the valley tribes lived.
    The Black Mountains, they were called.
    The mountains dominated the landscape, jagged, dark and tall, and always within sight of the valley: a constant reminder to the Northmen, the Southmen and the other minor tribes of the strange foreign culture that held ruthless sway over their lives.
    For it was within those mountains that the trolls had blocked the river that flowed into the valley. And by controlling the flow of water to the peoples of the