Part of you is always hungry, always thinking of knights in their gleaming armor: sweet-tasting, burnt, metallic crunch. You enter your cave in the evening, curl yourself around your glistening stash of gold coins, and admire the rise and fall of your scales in a thousand mirrored surfaces while you wait for your bait to lure in those who will be your next meal.
Arabella situates herself for the evening, gives you a grin and a thumbs up. She’s brushed her hair until it gleams, black beside gold. Despite being human, she reads you troll war poems. She’s three books into an epic series, and you find yourself wishing that trolls would find another occupation, or that Arabella would develop less violent taste. As the knights labor up the sides of the cave-cliff walls, intent on saving her from doom, she puts the book down for long enough to throw out pouty faces and kisses. The knights stick you with pathetic little pins they call ‘swords’ and that you call ‘skewers’: good for curling claws around, good for withstanding heat as you roast with your breath, good for allowing you to consume them like h'ordeuvres.
This winter, you’ve grown thin and hungry, and rot plagues your once beautiful scales. The stream of knights has thinned; it’s some rumor about Arabella (her friendship with you, Arabella says, but you’re pretty sure it’s her violent taste).
Tonight, only one knight braves the walls, and the stupid knight refuses to give up. Worse, Arabella is mad at you for having thrown her kid brother out of your cave (together with his book on how to spot magical creatures--as if you’re some sort of exhibition).
Little boys in Faery Worlds ruin everything, you tell her. Her brother’s nickname, owing to an incident with elves, is quite literally ‘Chaos.’
Arabella stamps her feet and announces her intention to return to her castle. Without her, the knight will go and leave you to wallow in hunger. So you promise her something else (Chaos being non-negotiable), something she asked for once, if only she’ll stay. If she does fall in love--it’s never happened before--you’ll let the knight live.
You expect to never make good on this promise, or, if you must, to do so in some long distant future. Certainly not tonight, when your hunger claws at your belly.
The knight removes the helmet to reveal a woman with soft curves and eyes with irises the color of raven feathers and, damningly, she announces herself as a poet. She is certainly a troll. Her height--not quite twice Arabella’s--and her unmistakable musculature give that much away. You suspect that she could pluck a tree as easily as Arabella plucks a flower. Knight, poet, troll. You wonder if she contributed to that collection of violent misery that Arabella has been subjecting you to, or if she merely embodies it.
Don’t eat this one, Arabella instructs you.
Something in Arabella has changed. She’s become happier, softer spoken (this is short-lived, you have no doubt), more beautiful, and, though you’re hungry, a promise is a promise. You know that she’s to whisk herself away, that she won’t be back, and you wonder how you will eat. You listen to them make love--heavy breathing in the corner of your cave. They don’t even have the courtesy to leave. Their love is the sound of your slow starvation.
You need some new bait.
For three days, as you contemplate this, you fail to find stray knights in the forests outside your cave. You know no other princesses, and so you opt for a new tactic. You gather quills and long scrolls and you post wanted ads (which you penned in black ink while feeling ill disposed toward trolls): For knights who survive, the ad proclaims, having battled you and lived to tell the tale can only help their reputations and prospects.
No knights come, and the gnomes fine you for illegal posting on their utility trees. You are made to give up a hefty pile of the coins that you use, together with Arabella, as your knight lures. You’ve had enough.
You make plans to venture from your beloved, comfortable, but nevertheless knight-less cave. And so you fly.
You follow a path of clouds that end up curling around the castle in the way that you curl around your gold. You enter in human form. If you can just get close to the knights, you will find a way to lure them out and eat them.
A fire spell, you decide.
You see Chaos first, chewing his thumb by the fountain: never a good omen. Chaos looks up at you with big gleaming eyes and you back away in well-founded terror.
“You have a tail,” he says. At first you think that an eight-year-old should surely have something more intelligent to say than that. Then what he says sinks in and thwarts your resolve to ignore him: In your glamour, you shouldn’t have a tail. It’s the starvation. It’s undone some of your magic. While you struggle to fix it, he swings from your tail and laughs. You tell him that it’s part of your jester costume and hope that the lie will prevent him from wreaking havoc on your plans.
You approach the dais where knights (sweet, metallic crunch) mingle with noblemen. When the guard questions you, asks about your strange clothes (had they really fallen out of fashion a few hundred years ago? an exaggeration, surely), you repeat your lie: you’re the jester. Chaos is brought forward, and he confirms that he saw your costume, and somehow (you suspect the guard is lazy) this is enough.
As you wait for your `act’ to begin, the boy says, “I know what you are. I read about you in my book. I won’t tell anyone.” He says this in a serious way, and despite your better judgment and your dislike of his stupid book, the sincerity gets to you. “You shouldn’t tell anyone either. Most people don’t like magical creatures here.” He nods toward the tapestry in which knights cut off the head of your great uncle.
You thank him. If he grows up and becomes a knight, you won’t eat him. But that ends your conversation because you are whisked away. You’re the jester, after all.
You juggle fire sticks because it’s your only jester skill: fire is what your people do. You inch close to the round table with all its knights and you recall how good they taste. Chaos--your boy savior--claps and cheers. Having decided to befriend you, he sits all but on your feet.
You weave your spell in flame. The fire rises and falls and the knights are so close (sweet metallic crunch), and the closest knights shift toward you as flames dance in their eyes. You take a small step toward a door that leads out of the castle, and the knights take the same small step to follow you. You take another, and again the knights follow you with that distant, hollow look in their eyes. On your third step, you crash to the floor. In your distracted state, you failed to remember Chaos by your feet, and now you have tripped over him. Your body and your fire sticks hit the ground.
From beside her distracted parents, Arabella cries out something you can’t hear (of course she’s here: it’s her parent’s castle) and pulls her arm free from its place around the waist of her poet-troll-knight. Chaos gasps, just once, and then his clothing bursts into a flame that catches, setting aflame tables and the swaths of dried grass that had been set out for comfortable sitting.
Screaming begins.
Knights scatter, free for picking. You’re hungry--beyond hungry--and you can think of nothing else. You ditch your vulnerable human skin, transforming and exploding into the room amidst the hysterical screaming. You pick up the closest knight with your teeth and swallow whole. You pick up a second knight, resolving to chew and savor. Arabella’s beloved, who by now you know to be named Catrin, brandishes a sword at you and Arabella throws the contents of a water pitcher over her brother. The water fails to put out the flame. Chaos clasps a hand over his legs as if in unspeakable pain but does not cry. Instead, he stares at you through a wall of flames with a look of stunned betrayal and that look stabs like your hunger.
Like a fool, you put the second knight down. The others scatter. Instead you lift the boy and deposit him into the fountain, where water quenches the flame.
Arabella throws you a dirty look. You’ve violated her friendship, hunted knights in her home, lit her floor on fire and, unforgivably, endangered her brother. She won’t encourage the next princess to keep company with you. You’re going to be hungry for a long, long time. A hundred swords pierce your scales as you retreat, fly back to your mountain and then crawl back to your cave hungry and ashamed, and watch blood trickle in the mirrors of your gold coins.
On your second night of misery (even troll poems would help), you open a bleary eye to find Chaos staring up at you.
“Why do you eat knights?”
Too stupid a question to answer. You put your head between your claws and wait for the end to come. You always knew your demise would be at the hands of a little boy.
“It’s the iron in the armor, not the knights you want,” he presses on, pointing to a page of that ridiculous book of his. “The iron has to be processed until it’s digestible. But the knights are just filling.” He shuts the book. “My sister’s not ready to talk to you. But she has dwarf friends who have lots of processed iron, and they need a guard to protect them from thieves.”
A few weeks later, you find yourself prowling the courtyard of a dwarf fortress, looking for thieves. You’ve mended things with Arabella, though you have to grit your teeth when Catrin shares her poetry. Arabella has even waged a small publicity campaign on your behalf, and her people agree to leave you in peace. The dwarves pay you in iron. Your scales have started to heal. Sometimes Chaos sits on your tail and reads to you and you think that maybe little boys aren’t that bad after all.
Sam F. Weiss (she/her) is an applied mathematician living in the Boston area and, fulfilling several stereotypes, is a servant to two fluffy predators. She's known for her lack of directional sense and indiscriminate consumption of fiction. Shortly after the 2016 election, she sold a short story to a post-Trump dystopian anthology (After the Orange, by BCubed Press), and she is simply awed that the collection does not live up to the true madness of mid-pandemic 2020.