Once I was ready, I went to the main room. Pan stood over the hot plate, the pan sizzling and snapping as he scrambled something in it. His dark curly hair was still wet from a shower, and he wore jeans with a white tank top, revealing the tattoo on his bicep. It was a large clock, drawn with raw Nordic edges, and the numbers were actually various runes. The hour was pointed at the rune Raido—an R-like symbol that stood for “journey”—and the minute hand pointed at the Kaun rune—an < meaning “knowledge.”
He’d been whistling an old Nina Simone song, but he stopped when I came in and greeted me with a big smile. “Good morning! Are you hungry? I was trying to make a root vegetable frittata with vulture eggs, but it’s definitely turned into more of a breakfast hash.”
“No, thanks,” I declined, in part because it smelled like burnt leather.
“Suit yourself.” He turned back to his cooking, then pointed over his shoulder with a spatula. “I left the tea on the table, and there’s mugs by the sink.”
“You really made yourself at home,” I commented as I poured iced sun tea into an old Dat Dog plastic tumbler.
He shrugged. “I try to make myself useful. Rikky’s outside feeding the various wildlife she’s adopted.”
“That explains all the splashing and hooting I heard while I was getting dressed,” I muttered.
“Yeah, she apparently rehabbed a couple turtles and vultures and I don’t know what else. Now they hang around, so she feeds them and makes sure they’re doing okay,” he explained.
“That’s very nice of her.” I sipped my bitter tea and looked up through the skylights at the trees blotting out the bright blue sky. “So, are we heading out when you’re done eating?”
“If you’re not eating, you can probably head out once Rikky is done,” he said.
I looked at him in surprise. “You’re not coming with us?”
“Yeah, I talked about it with Rikky, and we thought a two-pronged approach would be best.” Pan clicked off the hot plate and dumped his mushy vegetable/egg scramble into a bowl. “Since you’ll have someone at the Postkontor to help you look into info on your parents, I thought Rikky and I would focus on trying to find out more about Áibmoráigi and where Eliana went.”
Áibmoráigi is the oldest troll establishment on earth, so it’s sometimes called the First City, but its exact location has been lost for over a thousand years. Various trolls have tried to find it over the years, all unsuccessfully, and stories of it blurred the lines of fact and legend.
“And since the only info I have about my maybe-birth-mother is that she was last seen in Áibmoráigi, you’re thinking that our investigations will dovetail,” I inferred.
Pan gave me a lopsided smile. “That is the hope anyway.”
A few minutes later, Rikky and I headed out on the airboat she kept off the back of her dock, which she assured me was the best way to navigate the swamp that encompassed Fulaträsk. The trip took twenty minutes. It was loud, but surprisingly smooth, with me gripping the bench unnecessarily tightly as she weaved us through the trees.
In Fulaträsk, the office where all the records were stored was called the Postkontor, and it was a squat stone building sitting atop a small hill. Mossy vines grew up the side, and the vulture gargoyle perched on the stone shingles of the roof made it look like a mausoleum.
Inside, it was cool and damp, and it smelled vaguely of wet paper, which could not be a good sign for a place that stored records. The Gothic flourishes of the exterior continued on the inside, juxtaposing with practical touches like fluorescent lighting, file cabinets, and dividers to create small office cubicles in the large space.
A woman stepped out from behind a divider, moving slowly because of her stocky legs and a belly that appeared to be swollen with a late-term pregnancy. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her attire was a lot less than business casual, with a loose flannel shirt left unbuttoned over an alligator T-shirt and a pair of leggings.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I called this morning about an Omte orphan looking for her parents,” Rikky said uncertainly.
“Oh, right, of course.” She walked over to us. “You must be Rikky Dysta.”
“I am, and this is Ulla Tulin. She’s the one that needs your help.”
“Hi, I’m Bekk Vallin.” She shook my hand brusquely. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll see what I can help you with?.” She pointed to the right, toward a small sitting area, where bland pleather furniture was surrounded by several wilting potted plants.
“Is it okay if I head out now?” Rikky asked me while Bekk grabbed a pad of paper and a pen off a nearby desk.
I nodded. “Yeah. I can handle this.”
“Great. Just call me or Pan when you’re ready to be picked up.” Rikky gave me a small wave and left.
After I sat down, Bekk chose the chair across from me. Once she got settled in, with her pen in hand, she rested her serious brown eyes on me. “So, tell me everything you know about your birth mother.”
And then I launched into the fragmented story of my parents, which was really a story of myself. What little I knew or suspected about my parents came from what I had stumbled upon or guessed at.
I told her Mr. Tulin’s version of the night a woman abandoned me at a tiny inn in a frozen troll village, and I glossed over my lonely childhood. I’d gotten to the part where I finally hitched a ride with a traveler who came through when I was fourteen and how she took me to the Trylle capital.
“Why did you decide to go with that troll?” Bekk interjected. “You lived and worked in an inn. There had to be other tourists who came through that you could’ve left with.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really left about as soon as I felt old enough to, and she was nice, and it seemed like she understood what it was like to not fit in, since she was a blond Kanin.”
“Really?” Bekk looked up sharply. “I used to know a blond Kanin. She fought in the Invasion of Doldastam.”
Her expression was hard for me to read, and I hesitated before answering.
The Invasion of Doldastam had only been five years ago, a bloody conflict that had ended the Kanin Civil War. But while the war had started as an internal conflict within the Kanin, all the other tribes had eventually been pulled in by varying degrees, and only the Omte had backed the losing side. Once it was all over, treaties had been signed and a peace declared, but I had to imagine that the war was still a sore spot for many of the trolls who fought in it.
I finally decided to answer with the truth. Bekk was here to help me, and I didn’t want to withhold anything from her. Even seemingly insignificant things might help me find my parents.
“Bryn Aven,” I said.
Her eyes widened, and she leaned back. “I know Bryn.” Then she shook her head. “Well, I did know her. We fought beside each other, when our Queens forged an unworthy alliance.”
“It was a complicated time,” I replied carefully.
Bekk nodded once. “It was.” She blinked, then looked back up at me with a strained smile. “Were you connected with Bryn in any other way?”
“Not that I know of. We only met because she was in Iskyla looking for someone else.”