Fantasy Magazine, Issue 88 (February 2023) by Arley Sorg

Author:Arley Sorg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adamant Press
Published: 2023-01-31T22:16:06+00:00

©2023 by S.L. Harris.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S.L. Harris is a writer, teacher, and archaeologist who can often be found digging in gardens, libraries, tea cabinets, and ancient houses. Originally from West Virginia, he currently lives in the Midwest with his wife, two children, and many books.

A Princess With a Nose Three Ells Long

Malda Marlys | 4300 words

In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores.

The queen did her daughter the very great service of forgetting her, vanishing for months or years, and the princess grew solitary and strange in her absence. The princess was polite to her servants, who served only nominally (being trolls themselves). She took her turns with the many, many chores that even a magical and desolate castle required so as not to disintegrate into nothing but drafts and mice. She held fine feasts on days of trollish note. She had never once ordered anybody’s head cut off. She was, therefore, beloved, as princesses go. Trolls have little use for centralized government, only a great fondness for pomp and ceremony, and they lack the instinct to resent the solitary and strange.

The princess lived in a tower, which the queen had reason to believe was fashionable. Dagrun—in her tower she could think of herself by name, while in the world outside she was always the princess—kept her own council and laid her own plans in her curving chamber beneath the stars.

She sat one winter’s day with a rare map of troll country and the stranger lands beyond. Her thoughts were far afield, and her mother had no part in them. The queen’s returns usually came with a number of trumpets and speeches, but on this cold, quiet morning, she appeared like smoke in the doorway.

“You have ink on your nose,” she snapped, by way of greeting.

“Usually,” Dagrun agreed, as she had long ago learned it mattered very little what she said in her mother’s presence.

The queen—if she had ever had another name, it was forgotten now—pulled Dagrun by her elbow to the window. A ship sat in harbor, its decks bustling with the inscrutable tasks of sailors. If she was supposed to intuit anything from the sight of it, she failed.

“Your husband is aboard,” her mother told her when the silence stretched too long. “You’ll marry him on the Longest Night.” Without waiting for a response, she swept out of the room.

Dagrun weighed her feelings dispassionately, as befitted a princess whose passion had never made much mark upon the world. She had no interest in a husband, and less in pleasing a mother who could never be truly pleased. More importantly, she had plans for the Longest Night, only a week hence.

She was, however, at least somewhat beholden to the relations of trollish lands to the other realms.

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