“Nope. We’re three hours away. Besides, you wanted to see the outside and the human world.” I gestured to the acres of farmland that surrounded us as we traveled down a mostly empty highway. “Distract yourself from your upset stomach by taking in the scenery.”
“This is not what I had in mind,” Hanna muttered. “The gas stations haven’t exactly been thrilling either.”
“I’m sorry to tell you that humans aren’t any more exciting than trolls,” I said, and she snorted.
I had never spent much time outside of the troll kingdoms, but Finn’s job had once been to go out and collect changelings from the human world, so he’d had to be an expert on their culture and way of life, and he thought it was important that we understood how the other half lived. But no matter how often he tried to teach Hanna that humans were usually just as boring as we were, she remained convinced that they were all jet-setting debutantes.
For a few moments, she sat in silence. I sang along to Sia on my playlist and tried to ignore her scowling and exaggerated sighs.
“You’re really gonna make me sit in the car for hours feeling like I might throw up?”
“We can pull over if we need to. But if you’re really worried, you can look in the back for a bucket or something.” I motioned vaguely toward the back of the Jeep.
She groaned but complied. The way she leaned back there—unmindful of her stomach squishing between the seats—confirmed my theory that she was playing up her sickness. But she kept rooting around anyway, sifting through a box behind my seat.
I watched her in the rearview and said, “If you haven’t found a bucket or anything yet, you probably aren’t going to.”
“What’s this?” She slid back into her seat, holding up a package that I was very familiar with.
It was wrapped in parchment paper and twine. The paper was torn and tattered from me reopening and reclosing it dozens of times over the past six months, nearly making the Nunavut postal code illegible.
Inside of it was a Moleskine composition notebook I’d gotten brand new after Mrs. Tulin had sent me the package. I bought it the day I decided to make an actual plan for finding my parents, instead of just wondering about them, and I had filled the first few pages with everything I knew or suspected about them.
The notebook just fit inside the envelope Mrs. Tulin had sent, so I stored it in there with all the other memorabilia from my childhood. Along with the notebook, there were my limited medical and school records, a few photographs, and a small painting that Mr. Tulin had done.
“Careful.” I watched her from the corner of my eye as she looked it over. “That’s everything I know about who I am.”
Hanna squinted at the return address. “Who sent it to you?”
“The old woman who took care of me when I was a kid,” I explained coolly. “Her husband saved everything from the night I was left with them. He died a few months ago, and she was clearing out the house and thought I ought to have it.”
“The old woman?” Hanna asked, crinkling her nose in confusion. “Didn’t you call her Mom?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t like that. We weren’t a family. We were more like flatmates.”
“So they never adopted you?”
“Not really. They gave me their last name, but that was more out of practicality.”
And even that was nebulous. I was almost certain that there was never any record of my existence in the human world, since trolls did everything in their power to stay off the grid and outside of human history. Other than changelings—who lived with humans after assuming the human identity of the baby they’d replaced—most trolls would never interact with humans, not in a meaningful way. We very rarely left the privacy of our tribes, except when traveling between our communities, and the governments as a whole—American, Canadian, Swedish, whatever—were never even aware of our existence.
And since I had been abandoned as a newborn in one of the most isolated communities in the five kingdoms, I didn’t think there was much of a trail in the troll world, at least before I moved in with Hanna and her family.
“You know I’m adopted. Kinda,” she said, then quickly added, “I mean, Mom is my real mom, but my real dad died when I was a baby. I don’t remember him at all, and Dad officially adopted me when Liam was born.”
She fell silent for a minute, staring thoughtfully at the barren landscape around us. What she’d told me wasn’t surprising—it wasn’t a secret, Mia and Finn had been up front about it from the start—but this was the first time Hanna herself had said anything to me about Finn not being her birth father, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.
But before I could come up with anything, she turned her attention back to me and asked, “What about you? Do you remember your parents?”
I shook my head. “No, I was only a baby.”
“And your mom just left you?” Hanna asked, sounding genuinely shocked.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” she echoed in disbelief.
“An Omte woman left me,” I said, elaborating what little I knew. “Mr. Tulin thought she looked like a guard or a warrior. When I was younger, I imagined that she was the guard for a Queen or a Princess, and that she hid me away on the orders of my parents—who I alternated between believing were star-crossed lovers who only wanted to protect me or were selfish snobs who got rid of me to protect their inheritances.
“But the truth is that the woman who left me that night might be my mother or her guard or maybe even a kidnapper,” I finished with a sigh. “The only thing I know for sure is that she’s the only connection I have to my parents.”
“Why do you want to find your parents so badly?” Hanna asked, and I had to look over at her to be sure she was serious.
“Aren’t you curious about your birth father?” I asked, incredulous.
“Not really.” She shrugged. “Grandpa Johan and Grandma Sarina always try to tell me stories about him, and I don’t mind hearing about him, but … I don’t know him. He’s a stranger to me.”
Her thick lashes landed heavily on her cheeks as she stared down at her lap. “When they tell me about him, he doesn’t sound anything like me. He liked math and chess and some boring game called hnefatafl. The only thing we have in common is that we both have freckles.”
“Maybe it’s different for you because you do know,” I said. “Even if you don’t personally know everything about him, that’s your choice. You can call your grandparents or ask your mom if you have any questions.”
“That’s true. And I already have a mom and a dad, so I don’t really feel like I need another one.” She paused, then looked up at me as if something just occurred to her. “But you didn’t even have one mom or dad.”
“Not really,” I agreed wearily.
“You know you’re a part of our family, right? No matter what you find out about your parents, you’ll always have us.”
I smiled at her. “Thanks, Hanna. That means a lot to me.”
5
Eftershom
By the time we finally reached Hanna’s grandparents’ house, it was after midnight and Hanna was sound asleep. My GPS stopped working as soon as I got to the edge of Eftershom—I wasn’t sure if that was because of the mountains or the cloaking magic causing interference—but Mia had handwritten the directions just in case.