“Well, that is certainly true.”

“And you’re supposed to have great hoards of it.” I thought about the half-bloods toiling day in and day out to extract the golden metal from the mountain. And they’d been at it for centuries.

“True,” he laughed, “but I’ve also noticed in myself the tendency to hoard pocket lint and scraps of paper.”

I smirked. “The stories don’t mention pocket lint.”

He sighed. “Dreadfully inaccurate, these tales. Perhaps I should write my own in order to clear up these misconceptions. Or create new ones?”

“Pointed teeth?” I asked, pretending to growl at him.

“Perhaps hoards of human bones.”

I laughed. “I think that one already exists – trolls are supposed to boil human children in their cooking pots.”

He grimaced. “That one came into existence after the Fall – I’m sure you can speculate as to why.”

I blanched. “It’s true?”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said, solemn expression at odds with the amusement I knew he felt.

“You’re horrible,” I grumbled, then thought for a minute. “The stories also say that accepting troll gold will cost you more than you think, and that it can get you into a great deal of trouble.”

“True. If the human is greedy, the trouble is far worse. Anything else?”

I hesitated and his brow crinkled. “Well?”

“Trolls,” I finally said, “are supposed to be ugly.”

He looked away, cheek pressed against the ground and eyes fixed on the wall of a house only a few inches from his face. “I suppose to you humans, many of us are.”

My thoughts turned to Marc, who was always kind to me when no one else was. “They aren’t ugly.” I bit my lip, trying to find the right words. “More like beautiful things that have had the misfortune of being broken.” Tristan turned his face back to me. I saw the sorrow in his eyes and felt it in my heart. “Why are you always so unhappy?” I asked.

“I think it is our nature to believe evil always has an ugly face,” he said, ignoring my question. “Beauty is supposed to be good and kind, and to discover it otherwise is like a betrayal of trust. A violation of the nature of things.”

“Do you think trolls are evil?” I asked.

“Do you?” His eyes searched mine as though he might find the answer there.

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

He exhaled softly, reaching up and stroking my cheek with one hand. “From your lips I can almost believe it’s true.”

My breath came in short little gasps. The desire for him to touch me, to kiss me, was so strong, it felt like another entity had taken over my mind. And maybe it had. Maybe he had. I could feel his need like it was my own. It was my own. Whatever boundaries existed between our minds fell away in that moment, making it impossible to differentiate between my emotions and his. But that didn’t matter, because we both wanted the same thing.