The problem was that the options in the Trylle kingdom—or any of the kingdoms—were so limited. I’d been homeschooled since I got to Förening. (Finn had initially hired a private tutor to catch me up because my Iskyla education had been severely lacking.) But I had still made a few friends around my age, and I saw the choices they made with the hands they’d been dealt.

Sybilla Janssen and Alva Lund had become trackers, the same as their older siblings and parents had before them. But those jobs were drying up, both because the royal families weren’t having children at the rates they once were and because the Queen was trying to stop the reliance on the changelings. Fewer changelings meant fewer trackers.

There were still plenty of spots open on the Queen’s guard, which served as the military and the police. My friend Isak Vinstock had joined, hoping to get on the detective track, but the competition was so steep, he’d been languishing in Oslinna for years, working on the recovery, rebuilding homes and facilities.

Isak wasn’t the only one who went to Oslinna either. I knew of several other kids who had gone there for the construction work.

But most of the trolls I’d been friends with stuck around Förening, with many still living with their parents. A few were going to Förening Tertiary Educational Center, getting education degrees to work in the grade school, and another was apprenticing at his mother’s organic specialty bakery.

And there were the others that got married right out of high school and were already starting families. Even in 2019, it wasn’t uncommon for Trylle to marry young, sometimes even as young as sixteen or seventeen. Non-royalty were faring better with fertility, but Finn and Mia’s well-populated home was an outlier these days.

That basically covered all the options for someone like me in Förening—soldier, teacher, baker, wife. There was nothing wrong with any of them, of course, and they were all fine pursuits in their own right. But I wasn’t sure that any of them were what I wanted to do. I mean, marriage someday, ideally, but I wanted to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life first.

My reason for going to the Mimirin institution was that I had hoped to find out where I came from. If I knew where I came from, I’d know where to go, right? Besides, I had to put all of Finn’s linguistic lessons to good use.

But the more I learned, the more questions I had, and the more uncertain I felt about myself, my future, and my place in the world. And I had the big black hole of the Lost Month hanging over me.