Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [74]
The doors opened and an especially hideous troll woman in a scarlet gown swept into the room. She had a tall pile of unnaturally yellow hair surmounted by a crown that was more diamonds than gold. Her eyes bulged and her nose drooped down almost past her lips. There were so many gold rings in her ears that the lobes touched her shoulders. Her skin was the exact color and texture of unpolished granite.
Stories about trolls said that the females had noses more than three yards long and breasts that hung to their knees. The lass thought that this was not much of an exaggeration: the queen’s nose was alarmingly long, and her wrinkled bosom threatened to burst free of her gown at any moment.
The queen surveyed the room with her glaring, scum-green eyes and sailed past her bowing subjects to take her seat on the golden throne. The centaurs—that was what the servants were, the lass remembered reading of such creatures once—blew another, shorter fanfare to herald the entrance of a second troll lady.
This, the lass thought with a gasp, was surely the troll princess. Her nose was even longer than her mother’s and had a great wart on it besides. She wore a gown of sapphire-blue velvet, to match her throne, and her hair was a gleaming arrangement of flame-red tresses and diamond hairpins. She swayed across the room with the air of a woman who knows all eyes are upon her, and stopped to plant a kiss on the cheek of the human prince before sitting on the silver throne.
The troll queen clapped her hands—her ring-encrusted fingers appeared to have another set of joints—and music began to play. The lass could not see the musicians from her vantage point, and she wondered what sort of odd instruments they were playing. There was a lot of banging, a deep echoing hoot that made the bones behind her ears vibrate, and rising over it all a shrill sound that made her cringe.
“It sounds like a rabbit being killed,” Rollo said, disgusted.
“Ugh, you’re right,” she agreed. “Oh, they’re going to dance.” The lass and the wolf pressed their noses closer to the window to watch.
The trolls were dividing into pairs and taking up positions on the dance floor. The lass noticed that the mossy, fur-wearing trolls did not join in the dancing, but instead stood aside with disapproving expressions on their faces and large goblets of wine in their fists. But the finely dressed trolls began to dance to the music with great delight.
Not even Rollo could think of a comment to make about the trolls’ dancing. It was horrible and fascinating at the same time. In time to the beat of the thumping, wailing music, they hunched their shoulders and stamped their feet, lurched from side to side, and slapped their heavy hands on their bellies to make a counterpoint to the musicians’ drumming. It was like a macabre parody of human dancing. Something about it sent a curl of terror up from the lass’s stomach and into her throat, and she thought she might scream. She had three days, three days to free the prince and get far away from this awful place and these nightmarish creatures.
“Hide!” Rollo sprang down from the windowsill and began tugging at the lass’s parka with his teeth.
“What? Why?” Startled, she slipped on the icy snow and one of her boots punched through into the softer snow beneath.
“A troll saw us!”
The lass yanked her foot free of the hole in the snow and flattened herself against the side of the palace to one side of the window. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
“Yes!” Rollo crouched directly below the window, trying to make himself as small as possible.
There was a scraping sound, and the window swung outward. It nearly hit the lass in the face, and she managed to put one hand