The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [91]
"Now do you see?" Newt persisted, popping into sight beside the king's ear.
"I think I do," he said softly, not entirely certain he could believe what he saw.
Once more Tristan looked around the scene of the skirmish. The two headless trolls lay still. Though the gaping neck wounds had ceased to bleed, they showed no sign of healing. Another troll lay dead nearby, killed by a sword cut through its neck and into the chest. That wound, too, showed no sign of regeneration. On the contrary, it had clearly been the mortal blow. And there was the one he had stabbed in the face, the tiny wound belying the severity of the thrust that must have plunged all the way into the evil brain.
"Hsst! Over here!" said Newt, in an exaggerated whisper. The faerie dragon hovered over a dense patch of underbrush, pointing down with a tiny claw.
A furtive movement beneath a screening bush drew Tristan's eye. He dismounted, more and more curious, wondering what prevented so many of the slain trolls from returning to life. Shield raised protectively, sword held at the ready, he approached the dense thicket. Ranthal, hackles standing on end, snarlingly advanced beside him, while Newt remained in his bouncing hover.
Before they reached the cover, a troll bounded upward, startling the king with his looming height. Though the creature towered several feet over the human's head, it whirled away in apparent fear, darting from the brush and sprinting, panic-stricken, into the woods.
Tristan called to Ranthal, who had started after the monster, and as the moorhound returned to his side, the king stared after the fleeing troll. The beast's hands flopped loosely at the ends of its arms, where the wrists had been almost chopped through. Now he remembered: This was the first troll the king had fought, the one that had leaped from the underbrush only to meet the keen edge of that gleaming sword.
The sword… There was no longer any doubt in his mind, but just to be sure, he looked at the last troll to die, the broken body that had been smashed by Shallot's crushing hooves. The beast was nowhere to be seen. While Tristan had examined the place where the fight had started, the creature had apparently regenerated to the point where it could skulk away.
Only the wounds caused by this sword had failed to heal. What was it that the Exalted Inquisitor had told him? That the blade had been blessed by the gods, and their will would be shown in its use? Standing here amid the gore of trollish corpses, Tristan admitted to himself that that will seemed pretty clearly displayed.
"That's some sword!" said Newt, settling to the earth for a moment. The dragon was too agitated to rest for long, however, quickly springing back into the air to drift around Tristan in a circle.
"It is, at that," the king agreed. As the fighting tension slowly drained from his body, he found himself possessed with a deep sense of wonderment.
"I will call it 'Trollcleaver,'" he said quietly.
Once again Tristan tried to imagine the creature leading these monsters onto a path of destruction. The sword in his hand tingled, as if eager to kill again. Why had that faceless monster broken the peace of twenty years? The question had begun to lose importance as the fact of the violence became indisputably apparent. All that mattered to the king now was that one day soon that creature would die.
But then a more dangerous thought occurred to him, made doubly menacing by the fact that it posed questions he couldn't answer. He remembered the madness that had sent him off on this quest by himself. And indeed, even with such a sword, it still seemed like madness to confront an entire army of trolls and firbolgs.
Yet why had he been given this weapon? Could it be that madness was exactly what the gods expected of him?
* * * * *
Once the Princess of Moonshae broke onto the rolling swell of the strait, Tavish remembered her cramped, frightening confinement dockside as a