Here's another excerpt from my next soon-to-be-released novel, The Boyar's Curse. This one is the closing from Chapter 8: The Troll.

The setup is that the old man, Rik, and his companions have sought shelter in a lost valley. A place where old stories, from the gods that his father followed but Rik left behind to follow a different path, still yet walk. Old legends; old monsters haunt this valley.

And Rik, Lian, and Katie have found one barring their path...

Excerpt from The Boyar's Curse, Chapter 8: The Troll

He didn't take a stance, simply moved around the troll. Circling, not engaging. It rotated to follow him, but didn't move from the stones. "You dance. Slowly, as befits your age."

"I don't challenge a thrall."

"I'm not a slave," it growled, and swiped a thick fist toward Rik.

Rik stepped back to let the fist pass, and noted the troll kept his claws buried in that fist. "You say you were chained here, by the gods."

"The god, the one-eyed one," it replied, and punched out, a jab testing the range. "But he did not enslave me."

"And how is this different?"

The troll opened its fists, showing the claws longer than Rik's forearm. Then it swiped again, and Rik dodged again, just, before those claws that gave it full reach. "I do no god's bidding." And it punched, fingers and claws open and solid, and Rik rolled in the dirt to avoid the lances.

"Just a troll, minding its bridge. Are you sure you built it, and not the god?"

The troll roared, anger and shame intermingled, thrashed and ran out in a full charge at last.

Rik stood, in the face of the charge, that ended with the troll, now fully twice his height, looming over him to block the sun, caught on the ball of its foot by the last cobblestone. Calls of rage echoed from the mountain faces too far away to see; birds screamed in pain, and the horses echoed them.

Rik's ears rang with the noise, but he stood fast against the troll's anger. And noted that it didn't answer his question.

And, he felt something else, besides the anticipation of the fight still to come.

Pity, echoing the far-too human eyes he saw before him, pools of brown too soft, and too filled with tears, for what should have been a monster's face.

The old man sighed, and his shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. The troll extended further, against the force that held it to the stone in the face of a challenge, so that only claws gripped the river stone, and grabbed for the man one more time, hissing and spitting and screaming now in full battle rage.

And the old man leapt one more time into battle. The warrior's song sang in his blood.

This wasn't a dual, formal and elegant and clean. Nor was it the vicious fight of equal warriors.

This was a bar brawl, or the wolf versus the buffalo, overlong, bloody, nasty. The troll shattered the spear shaft, carved new wounds in Rik's shoulders and legs, long gashes paired and torn.

But Rik held the spear by the smallest fraction of remaining haft. The blade bit the troll, slashed tendons in the legs and arms and left it crippled. And falling. Age, and cunning, and Rik knew the boundaries the troll couldn't cross.

It fell to the stones. In the end, he crawled over the crippled arms, dragged himself up the troll's chest, set the spear blade against the troll's eye. "What is your toll?" he asked.

He looked into the troll's eyes for the answer. A memory swam there.

A boy, naked shivering, covered in blood, led by another old man, limping one-eyed spear-carrier, to a stone face. There was a shallow carved niche in the face. The old man not-a-man chained the boy to the wall, and called to the stones until they rose up to cover the child.

And the god stepped away, leaving stones fused into troll-shape and a new thing born. With the brown doe-eyes of the sacrificed boy.

"Release," the monster-who-wasn't whispered.

The warrior who had been Boyar gave him that release, sliding the spear point home. He felt the boy's spirit as it passed; the spirit whispered "He wrought more than you know. All exchanges here must be equal, and you will have more than passage. Take strength, though you don't want it."

Rikard felt the spirit's curse settle on him as the body of the monster that wasn't faded. It took his father's spear with it, and left him bloody, wounded, and weeping for the boy and the weight of consequences left behind.

"Papa, why are you crying?" She touched his shoulder, one soft hand looking for answers. "Wasn't it just a monster?"

The empty stones swam, then cleared through the tears. "Katie, run get me a waterbag, please?"

She did that, and Lian, giving up on the horses, came with her. "Here, Papa."

He doused his head and face with the water, glad for the shock of it. Lian clucked over his wounds while he thought about how to answer the child's question.

What ran through his mind over and over again was the memory of the boy, the sacrifice. He'd have been just barely older than the girl beside him.

Just old enough to know what was happening, if not why. Rik remembered the troll's confusion over the lack of challengers for the bridge that he'd been set as guard over.

The images stirred echoes in his own memory, of his father and mother, and the places he'd carved for himself. He let those memories run free as something to think about besides the needle and thread Lian was pulling from her pack. And the alcohol she used to clean the wounds.

He waited, through gritted teeth and minor agony, for the cleaning and suturing to end before he told the boy's story.

Lian stood over him, now with a clean rag and a bar of soap. "Here, now that you're done with your story, wash up as best you can without tearing the stitches."

Easier said than done; in the end, she only had to redo a little of her surgery, and he was close to something like clean again. "There, only the memories, and the story."

"Do you believe it?" Lian asked. "That that troll really was a captive of his god, and not just a monster?"

"How many trolls have you ever met, Lian? I've been nine times 'round the world, and I've never actually seen one until today."

"You didn't answer my question."

"I don't know," he said, finally. He crawled over to the bridge post, and used it to pull himself up. "Maybe I'm just telling myself a story to cover up the fact that I killed it."

Katie looked over the ground where the troll had fallen at the last, and found a piece of something metal, winking in the sun. She picked it up and brought it to her father. "Here, Papa. I believe you, and the troll boy's story."

She gave him a tiny silver spear, carved in minute detail that his fingers told him matched his father's old spear. It hung from a silver chain, links of a cunning style he'd never seen. He held the amulet up to the light, and wondered.

Lian stepped over, gave the tiny spear a touch to set the amulet swinging. "That chain's too short for you to wear. Or me."

"I know." He didn't want to. Something about the amulet pulled at him; he felt the troll-boy's curse, a tragic last gift.

But when he put the chain over Katie's head, and she patted the amulet into place underneath her shirt, that tragic gift settled, the weight a little lesser, quiescent.

He held Katie at arms length for a moment, just looking at her. Then he hugged her, close and tight. "Maybe it's time we went and got the horses, before they decide they're better off finding people who pay more attention to them."

Lian turned around, cursed, and ran off to chase down her ride.

The mule nickered amusement while allowing Rikard and Katie to gather in his lead. The mare they rode joined them, though she rolled her eyes and shook her head when Rik picked up her reins. "I know, I know. I look like a bad stretch of road. Let's just agree to not let it destroy our relationship, hmm?"

The horse butted him with her forehead, stomped one hoof, and then settled in to let Katie pat her neck. "Finished, Lian?"

The doctor had come to an agreement with her gelding; one that didn't involve a trip to the boneyard, apparently. She was leading the horse back to them. "Yeah, we're finished. Can we just cross the damned bridge now?"

He boosted Katie into the saddle, but thought better of following her. Instead, he pointed to the bridge, and the other side of the river. "Your lead, doctor."

She nodded and led them across. The horse hooves thumped on the wood, the bridge humming and alive with sounds of the river and the travellers.