“Why not?” Duncan asked. “I’m a tracker.”
“You’re my tracker,” I said. “I need you with me.” Before he could argue, I turned my attention to my brother. “Matt, we’re looking for books that have anything in them about the Vittra. We need to find their weaknesses.”
“Okay.” He looked around at ceiling-high shelves filled with books. “Where do I start?”
“Pretty much anywhere,” I said. “I’ve barely made a dent in these books.”
Matt climbed one of the ladders to reach the books at the top, and Duncan dutifully went along to start collecting books for himself.
While the history of the Vittra was interesting at times, it was irritating how little we knew about stopping them. So much of the Trylle past had been about avoiding them and making concessions. We’d actually never stood up to them.
By all accounts, Oren was the cruelest King the Vittra had had in centuries, maybe ever. He’d slaughtered the Trylle for sport and executed his own people for simply disagreeing with him. Loki was lucky to even be alive.
“What’s this say?” Matt asked. “It doesn’t even look like words.” He was sitting on one of the chairs on the far side of the room, and he pointed to the open book on his lap.
“Oh that?” Duncan was nearest to him, so he got up and leaned over Matt, looking at the book. “That’s Tryllic. It’s our old language to keep secrets from the Vittra.”
“A lot of the older stuff is written in Tryllic,” I said, but I didn’t get up. I’d found a passage about the Long Winter’s War, and I hoped it would give me something useful.
“What does it say?” Matt asked.
“Um, this one says… something about an ‘orm,’” Duncan said, squinting as he read the text. He didn’t know very much Tryllic, but since he spent so much time researching with me, he’d picked up some.
“What?” I lifted my head, thinking at first that he’d said Oren.
“Orm,” Duncan repeated. “It’s like a snake.” He tapped the pages and straightened up. “I don’t think this will be helpful. It’s a book of old fairy tales.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“We grew up hearing these stories,” Duncan shrugged and sat back down in his chair. “I’ve heard that one a hundred times.”
“What is it?” I pressed. Something about that word, orm, stuck with me.
“It’s supposed to explain how trolls came to be,” Duncan said. “The reason we split up in different tribes. Each of the tribes is represented by a different animal. The Kanin are rabbits, the Omte are birds, the Skojare are fish, the Trylle are foxes, and the Vittra are tigers, or sometimes lions, depending on who tells the story.”
The Kanin, Omte, and Skojare were the other three tribes of trolls, like the Trylle and Vittra. I’d never met any of them. From what I understood, only the Kanin were still doing reasonably well, but they hadn’t thrived as much as the Trylle or even the Vittra. The Skojare were all but extinct.
I’d only heard of five tribes, and all of the tribes were accounted for, yet Duncan had mentioned the orm.
“What about the orm?” I asked. “What tribe does that represent?”
“It doesn’t.” He shook his head. “The orm is the villain of the story. It’s all very Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I can’t tell it with the same flourish as my mom did before I went to bed,” Duncan said. “But the basic idea is that all the animals lived together and worked together. It was peace and harmony. Orm, which was this big snake-like creature, had lived for thousands of years, and he was bored. He watched all the animals living together, and for fun, he decided to mess with them.
“He went to each of the animals, telling them that they had to watch out for their friends,” Duncan went on. “He told the fish that the birds were plotting to eat them, the birds that the fox had set traps to ensnare them, and the rabbits that the birds were eating all their clover.
“Then the orm went to the tiger and told him that he was bigger and stronger than all the other animals, and he could eat them all if he wanted to,” he said. “The tiger realized he was right, and he began hunting the other animals. None of the animals trusted each other anymore, and they scattered.
“The orm thinks this is all funny and great, especially when he sees all the other animals struggling without their friends,” Duncan continued. “They had all been working together, and they couldn’t make it on their own.
“One day, the orm comes across the tiger, who is starving and cold,” Duncan said. “The orm begins to laugh at how pitiful the tiger is doing, and the tiger asks him why he’s laughing. When the orm explains how he tricked the tiger into betraying his friends, the tiger becomes enraged, and using his sharpest claw, he cuts off the orm’s head.
“Usually, the ending is told more dramatically than that, but that’s how it goes,” Duncan shrugged.