The Great Troll War

‘You’re too small to be troubled with,’ said the Troll Wife in a dismissive manner. ‘It would be like you threatening a Dorito. How about it?’ she added, turning back to me. ‘For we will cross this trench eventually, make no mistake about that.’

‘No deal,’ I said without hesitation.

‘Then you shall be devoured,’ said the Troll simply, ‘and while alive. Probably raw as a snack,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘dipped in humus – no, wait, dipped in toejam. Jam, made of toes,’ he added, in case I mistook his meaning. ‘Nummy nummy.’

‘You do what you have to do,’ I said.

‘What she said,’ said the Princess, pointing at me.

‘And I’m not a Dorito,’ said Tiger.

‘Sorry,’ said the Troll Wife, whose mind had wandered, ‘did you say something? I was just wondering: do you have to use people called Frank to make frankfurters – or can it be anyone?’

I decided not to answer and we turned and walked away from the Trolls and the Button Trench.

‘Thank you for not handing me over,’ said the Princess once we were out of earshot. ‘I’m really not cut out to be a bony snack.’

‘We don’t do deals with Trolls,’ I said.

‘If I’d been the old me, the Princess me, the obnoxious me – would you have traded my freedom for your life?’

‘If you’d been in your princess body rather than the body of a malnourished servant with lank hair and skin complaints that don’t seem to go away no matter how diligent the cleaning,’ I said, ‘they would have asked you for me – and I’m sort of thinking you would have given me up.’

‘Without hesitation,’ said the Princess in a sombre mood, ‘and probably asked for a receipt to claim on my Princess Insurance. Goodness, I was so utterly obnoxious back then. Is royalty always this bad?’

‘I don’t think it’s being a royal that does it,’ I said. ‘Just the ridiculous abundance of wealth, opulence and levels of undeserved privilege that go with it.’

The Princess nodded her head in agreement. She had matured quickly during the search for the Eye of Zoltar as it had been an adventure that would have taught even the most narrow-minded and utterly indulged child a few things about teamwork and sacrifice. Perhaps the Princess’s ex-sorceress mother, who instigated the bodyswap and placed her in my care, sensed the Trolls were coming, and engineered the trip to not only keep her safe, but actually do her some good. Nothing like a bit of jeopardy and loss of prestige to make the overprivileged understand the important things in life.

We walked back to where I’d parked my Volkswagen Beetle, the only link with my parents. I had been left on the front seat when barely two months old late one December night, wrapped in a blanket, the engine running, the heaters on. Often, foundlings are left with talismans to identify them if their parents return to claim them. The Volkswagen was that talisman. If they had wanted me, they would have returned and presented the spare ignition key as proof.

They never did.

I opened the car door and took the sword Exhorbitus6 from where I wore it on a scabbard on my back and stowed it using the clips on the roof lining, then tried the glovebox for about the thousandth time. It was locked, and always had been.

‘You’ll eventually want to break into that.’

It was the Princess, who knew the strong bond I had with the car.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but what if it were empty, or just full of junk?’

‘What if it’s not?’

The Sisterhood at the Orphanage had tried to trace the owners of the car through the registration but that had only led as far as the owner before last, who had sold it on: ‘to a middle-aged guy’ who paid in cash, two months before I was found in it. The new owner had not reregistered the car in his name, so there was little to go on. Although the glovebox was locked it had never been forced as the Sisterhood saw this as damaging someone’s property, and, interestingly, the car had only clocked up seventy-two miles from when it was sold to when I was found in it. Wherever I was from, I was local.