The Brave Apprentice (23 page)

The bulk of the troll had kept the portcullis from dropping all the way to the ground. It looked as if there was enough room to crawl under. But those long, dangerous arms could reach across the width of the passage, if Gursh still had the strength. Patch edged along the wall, cautiously advancing. Gursh made no apparent move, but Patch saw those silver eyes narrowing and the long arm drawing back just a bit, and he knew the troll was trying to deceive him into wandering within reach.

“Fine,” Patch said. “I’ll wait for you to die.” He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. He tried to act as if the delay did not concern him, but in truth he
felt a growing panic inside—he had to get out, in case Cecilia needed his help.

Patch looked over Gursh’s prone form and saw Milo and Addison’s group running across the courtyard. It seemed to Patch that their number had shrunk a little. Five trolls were in pursuit, and Patch’s heart twisted in his chest when he saw more trolls coming at the men from the other direction, cutting off their escape.

Patch stared at Gursh, willing the creature to die soon. Gursh tried to lift his head off the ground, but it dropped again a moment later. The black dots in his silver eyes had been focused on Patch, but now they wandered across the orbs.

Patch took another cautious step forward, but the eyes suddenly revived and locked onto him again. It was no use; he needed to find another way out.

The wooden bar that braced the door was thick and heavy, but he was able to shove it up and out of the way. It fell to the ground with a thud. Patch pulled the door open a crack, and cursed when he saw yet another obstacle immediately before him. How could he have forgotten? “Hey, up there!” he cried, toward the winch-room above.

The stomping and celebrating slowed overhead, and the same happy face peeked down. “What is it, lad?”

“I need you to lift the outer portcullis—just enough for me to crawl under.”

“Well raise it so you can walk tall, troll killer!”

A different set of chains rattled and the portcullis,
groaning, began to rise. Just on the other side was the drawbridge, raised up to form a vertical wall of wood. There was enough room to squeeze his thin body through on one side. Patch looked out into the fields, and his fists tightened as he saw Giles Addison out there, just beyond the range of arrows, with Murok pacing back and forth nearby.
Coward,
Patch thought. The sound of the rising portcullis seemed to have caught Giles’s attention. He had been sitting idly on the cask of poisoned wine that he meant for Patch and Milo to drink, but now he stood and directed his gaze Patch’s way.

Patch headed for the collapsed portion of the wall. Giles’s head was inclined to one side as it turned to follow him.

The undermined wall looked like the entrance to the underworld. The smoke of the smoldering fire still seeped up through the blocks of stones and the mortar, flint, and rubble that once filled the walls. Patch picked his way up and over the pile, back into the courtyard.

He ran as fast as his wounded stride would bear him toward the kitchen. There were urgent cries on the walls above from the archers. Patch glanced up and saw that a troll had somehow climbed to the top of the outer walls and was stalking along the parapet, whipping his club through the air and driving the men before him. Ahead of the archers was the gap where the walls had tumbled down, and nowhere else to run.

Milo and Addison’s group faced an equally grave plight. The trolls had spread into a half circle and were driving them toward the wall of the keep. The men walked backward, with their long pikes radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. As Patch hobbled by, he saw the grim look on Milo’s face and the resolute glare on Addison’s as he called out instructions to the rest. More trolls were coming from other corners of the courtyard to join in the slaughter. One of them, Patch realized with a shudder, was the towering red-brown monster that had killed Gosling.

Patch ignored the mayhem. The kitchen was drawing near and he kept his eye fixed on the door, hoping Cecilia would emerge. He was not even certain she’d made it that far—but he refused to entertain that thought, not after everything they had gone through.

So many fates unknown,
Patch thought. Ludowick and Simon, somewhere in the fields, alive or dead. Mannon, last heard bellowing on the wall. And what about all the others Patch had seen and met since he’d arrived at Dartham?

He and the queen nearly collided as he arrived at the kitchen door. Her cheeks were flushed and her wide eyes glittered with hope as she thrust the skep into his arms.

“Oh Patch,
listen,”
she said. And he could hear it well: a frantic humming from inside the woven dome. The skep was as warm as a new loaf of bread, and he could feel the tiny insect bodies inside pelting angrily against
the walls of straw. Cecilia had stuffed a rag into the hole at the base of the skep that the bees used to enter and leave their hive.

“Pray it works,” Patch shouted, and he ran back toward the trapped group of men.

The trolls could have killed them by now, Patch realized as he came closer, but the soulless creatures were taunting their prey first. They tightened the circle, laughing and jeering. The soldiers and peasants stabbed at them, but the trolls reached out and plucked the pikes from their grasps one by one and snapped the shafts over their knees. Addison had lost his spear and had drawn his sword. Some of the men began to weep.

“Hey, you devils!” Patch shouted. A few of the trolls turned to look, and one of them stepped away from the rest, wielding a heavy club. It was the red-brown troll, Patch was pleased to see, coming at him with that chilling smile on his face. It was the same smile that had horrified Ludowick on the day that Gosling fell, a smile with one long fang jutting crookedly from the corner of his mouth. Patch pulled the top off the skep and hurled it toward the beast.

It was only a guess,
Patch thought, watching the skep break into two separate halves and tumble at the troll’s feet.
A guess built on meager evidence, the word of a fool, and a leap of faith.
He could very well be wrong.

The troll looked down, not recognizing this thing, puzzled by what danger such a flimsy object could
hold. As the pieces of the skep rolled to a stop, the bees flew up, lazily at first in the mild air. The troll saw them. His eyes seemed to double in size. Patch heard him gasp and watched him go rigid, paralyzed with fear for a fatal moment.

The bees sensed something, because a humming cloud of them rose toward the troll’s head. At first they spiraled up slowly, but as they neared his face, they suddenly sped arrow-straight toward the troll’s eyes. The beast screamed and slapped his head with both hands. A hundred more of the insects flew from the skep, swarming upward. The troll staggered and dropped to his knees in front of Patch, and now he could see through the madly slapping hands that dozens of the bees were writhing in the yellow ooze at the corner of his eyes.
That horrible sweet smell,
Patch thought.
It’s drawing the bees in, driving them mad….

The bees were in a frenzy now, and some disappeared into the troll’s nostrils and mouth. The troll howled all the while, a more terrified and high-pitched shriek than seemed possible from such a mighty creature.

And then there was a strange silence at Dartham. Every troll—those in the courtyard, those climbing up the keep, those on the parapet—heard the shrieks and knew something was wrong. They turned to stare at the death throes of the mud-red troll. Even the knights and soldiers and archers turned to look, as the dying troll crumpled to the dirt with a swarm of bees still orbiting its ugly head.

Patch turned to the circle of trolls, pointed a finger at them, and shouted, “You’re next!”

And the ground rumbled as the trolls fled, shrieking with fear. They ran across the courtyard and over the smoking tumble of rocks, climbing across each other when one of them fell in his haste. The trolls that surrounded Milo and Addison’s men went by first, and then the rest of them, climbing down from the walls and crawling out from the holes they had punched in the keep and the other buildings.

It was quiet again for just a moment. Then the men who’d been trapped against the wall rushed at Patch, and more people spilled out of the keep and ran down from the walls. They surrounded him and pounded him on the shoulders.

Then a tall man with a great smile pushed through the crowd. It took a moment for Patch to recognize him, but that smiling face belonged to Lord Addison. Addison laughed and seized Patch and lifted him high, and a hundred jubilant people shouted, “Troll killer! Troll killer!”

Cecilia ran up, and she and Patch breathlessly told the king what had happened as soldiers, knights, and villagers alike strained to hear every word.

A rumbling, familiar voice shouted, “Your Highness! Your Highness!” And the crowd parted to let a filthy, exhausted Marmon approach the king. “I was on the walls—thought you’d want to know about Giles,” he said.

“Of course—where is he? We can’t let him escape.”

Mannon snorted. “No chance of that, sire. Murok was out there, keeping Giles safe. When the trolls came running out like chickens, Murok ran off as well. Except he made a point of stepping on Giles along the way. And then a few of the others trod on him for good measure.”

Milo shook his head and smiled grimly.

“Er—what did happen? What scared the trolls off?” Mannon asked. He looked at the prone form of the mud-red troll.

“Ask the apprentice. He’s the one who did it,” Addison replied, gesturing toward Patch. Mannon seemed to wince as he turned toward Patch with his eyebrows raised.

“Bees,” Patch said, grinning.

“Bees, eh?” Mannon said. He scratched at his beard. “Well, good work, Patch. Always knew you had it in you.”

stood at last at the lip of a pit, in a cavern in the Barren Gray. The summer air was warm outside, but in the heart of this mountain it was cool and dry. A handful of men stood behind him. They were a curious band, all dressed in garments with broad horizontal stripes of orange and black. Their clothes had been stitched with care by a prosperous tailor from the village of Crossfield. And all of the men bore shields with the same emblem: the silhouette of a bee, with broad wings and a stinger jutting from its bottom with a teardrop of venom at the tip, against a background of yellow-brown interlocking octagons.

Patch—or Sir Patryck the Brave Apprentice, as the king had knighted him—held a large box in his hand, a simple wood-framed cube with a handle on top and thin white fabric stretched across its sides.

Directly before them, broad stairs were hewn into the stone, leading to the pit. Each step was as high as a man’s
chest. Down there, just beyond the reach of their torchlight, dark shapes moved among the shadows. There was a new sound here as well, a wailing, high-pitched and wanting, from perhaps a dozen separate sources in the gloom.

Patch tossed his torch into the pit. It fell like a comet through the dark and clattered onto the flat stone bottom. Some of the men gasped when they saw the creatures nearby—naked infant trolls that crawled away from the light, screeching with their eyes squeezed shut.

“The Cradle of Trolls,” Lord Addison said.

“Finally,” grumbled Mannon.

Another, much larger shape skirted the light of the flame and crept toward the stairs, climbing with its hands as well as its feet, as stealthily as its bulk would allow. As it rose toward the men, its pale face came into the light, and Patch saw the first she-troll any man had seen for ages: as tall as the males but even thicker, with sharp daggers for fingernails instead of shovels, and tangled, filthy hair that swept the ground as she crouched.

“That,” Patch said, “is close enough. Stop where you are, or I may drop this fragile package.” He shook the box, and from inside came the angry drone of bees. The she-troll stopped. Her lips curled back from her fangs and she hissed.

“I want you to understand something!” Patch shouted. His voice echoed back from the depths of the pit. “The days of trolls prowling in the lands of men are over. We
have found your weakness, and the word has been sent forth. Now everyone knows.” The pit was silent. Many pairs of baleful silver eyes watched from below.