“I will tell you as we climb,” Snenneq said. “Come.”
If Morgan had feared some deathly scramble up a sheet of solid ice, he need not have feared. The path became steeper, and the spikes on his feet did help him not to slide, but even though they seemed to be climbing an endless slope he never felt he was in serious danger of a fall. Dying from a burst heart, though, seemed a definite possibility.
“Now hear me, Morgan Prince,” Snenneq told him, slowing down just enough that Morgan could hear him if he worked hard to stay close. “Here is something I wish to be saying about your unhappiness.”
“My . . . unhappiness? What unhappiness?”
Snenneq waved his hand. “I will one day be Singing Man of Mintahoq. Such things are clear to me as icy mountain water. Now, have you seen my ram that I ride? Big, is he not? He is called Falku, which in Qanuc speech means the tasty white fat. Not because I would eat him, but because he has much of it. Biggest of the rams, he always was.”
Already Morgan had lost the troll’s point, but he only had the strength to groan, which did not slow Snenneq at all. As far as Morgan knew, his only current unhappiness was that of being stuck in the breathless heights of the mountain with two tiny mad people who liked to climb icy slopes.
“But because my ram was biggest,” Snenneq continued, now actually turned around so he could face Morgan and climb backward as he talked, “all the others must test their strength against him. Always, he was fighting. On his horns are the marks of many battles. So it always must be, I am thinking—the one who stands tallest cannot live the life of the small ones. Do you see some meaning there?”
Morgan had been scowling in discomfort so long his mouth was almost frozen into that shape. “The only meaning . . . I see . . . is that you . . . are meaning to kill me.” He paused, trying to make sense of the troll’s words. “Do you mean to say you hate me because I’m taller than you?”
“Ha!” Snenneq now added thigh-slapping to his backward maneuvers. “You see, you too can make jests almost as well as mine.” He shook his head. “No, as good as mine. Almost.”
“Snenneq-henimaa! Not so talk now!” Qina’s firm tone surprised Morgan, who sometimes forgot she was only child-small, not an actual child. “Let Morgan Prince reach the top before you make more words.”
Snenneq frowned, but turned around and resumed climbing, this time with what was clearly intended as quiet dignity.
A time passed in silence but for Morgan’s noises of discomfort. Finally Little Snenneq called back, “We are now where we should be, and the time is still fresh—but we must hurry!”
Morgan did his best to pick up the pace, and at last, with an assist from Qina in the form of her small shoulder pushing against his hindquarters, he half-climbed, half-fell forward onto the hill’s wide crest, nothing before or above him now but a sky bespattered with stars, and at its center, like a great wheel with which to steer the ship of the firmament, the pale, full moon. Morgan fell to his knees in relief, then quickly adjusted his position until he was not poking himself with his own spikes.
“Is that it?” he asked when he had regained his breath. Even with his scarf around his head his ears were so cold it was hard to keep his voice calm. “You brought me up here to look at the moon? I’ve seen the moon. We have the same moon in Erkynland, you know.” He was so tired he almost felt like crying—not that he would have, especially in front of these small near-strangers.
Qina sat down beside him and Little Snenneq settled in on the other side, so that they all looked out together across the snow-shrouded foothills. To Morgan’s right, the dark Dimmerskog stretched away like the rumpled pelt of an immense animal, the tips of its trees silvered by moonlight.
“It is fine to see all this, is it not?” asked Snenneq. “Others are wishing they could see so far, but only those who have climbed high can have this seeing.”
Morgan huddled deeper in his cloak. “Nobody is wishing they could see so far, because nobody with any sense wants to be sitting on top of a mountain at night, freezing.”
“Is so bad, for true?” asked Qina softly. “What you see, Highness Morgan?”
He swallowed a snappish reply. He had to admit that the moon looked astoundingly large from this vantage, and felt close enough to touch. All of creation seemed laid before him like one of the paintings on the chapel wall back home in the Hayholt. “No, it’s not so bad, I suppose,” he said. “But I still didn’t need to climb so high just to see it.”
“But you did, yes, with certainty,” said Little Snenneq. “Not just to understand what others wish they could see, others who cannot climb so high as princes, but also because of what tonight is being.”
Again Morgan bit back cross words. Something about the trolls was so different that he could not treat them as he did his other friends, whom he mocked and was mocked by in turn. Well, except for Porto, he thought, who never mocks me. This reminded him that the old soldier was still waiting for them down below, on the cold hillside. Whatever the trolls had planned, it would be cruel to the poor old fellow to drag it out any longer by arguing. “Very well. Tell me what is tonight being, Snenneq.” He laughed despite his chattering teeth. “I mean, what is tonight?”
“Sedda’s Token,” the troll said promptly. “That is what we Qanuc name it. Sedda is being the moon, and if you see the biggest great-belly moon of springtime—what you call ‘full moon’—from the top of a high, high place before it starts its journey down into the dark again, Sedda will give to you a token of the truth.”
Morgan looked at him for a long moment. “Your pardon, but I didn’t understand a word you just said.”
“Here on this night, in this high place, we will cast the bones. You know how a Qanuc Singing Man casts the bones, do you not? Surely your grandfather has told you, after his long traveling with Qina’s father, Binabik.”
The idea sounded dimly familiar, but Morgan could not bear another long explanation with the cold scraping at his ears and nose and fingertips. “Yes,” he said. “Casting the bones. Of course.”
“Good.” Snenneq produced a leather-wrapped bundle from of his heavy jacket, then brushed away the snow that lay before him on the rocky summit to make a bare patch. He tumbled several small, pale objects from the pouch into his hand. “The moon has a full belly and we are in a high place. We shall ask Sedda for a token for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are in need of guidance, I am thinking. Qina and her father agree.”
Morgan bristled a little at the idea, but reminded himself that cold didn’t care who thought what, and asked instead, “Why would this Sedda bother with someone who isn’t a troll?”
“Because she is the Mother of All People, who wants only to keep her children safe.”
While Snenneq began a whispered prayer in his own throaty tongue, Morgan thought briefly and a bit sourly about his own mother, whose desires seemed a great deal more complicated than those of Sedda the Moon-Mother. After some moments, Snenneq tossed the bones as if they were a handful of dice, then squinted with keen interest at the way they fell. “Patience, my prince friend. Two more times must I cast them,” he said.
When he had finished, Snenneq slowly gathered up the little bones and tipped them back into the leather pouch. “The Black Crevice and Clouds in the Pass, those were the first two. But the third was one I have not seen to fall before—I wonder if Qina’s father has even cast it, though he taught it to me. Unnatural Birth, it is called.”
Morgan was shivering again, despite the presence of small, solid people squeezed against him on either side. “Oh, that’s charming. Are your bones calling me a bastard?”
The troll shook his head. “That is not what the words are meaning—or do you joke again? No, by what I have learned, they signify that something you expect, something you have long expected, will not come to you. Or will come, perhaps, but in much different form than you had been thinking.” He frowned and weighed the sack of bones in his palm. “I think I should be speaking with Qina’s father about this, because even I, clever as I certainly am, perhaps do not understand everything about this.”
“Clever you am, yes,” said Qina. “And full of humble.”