The Great Troll War

Book 4: The Last Dragonslayer Chronicles

by Jasper Fforde

Genres: YA Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The final instalment of the Last Dragonslayer Chronicles, demonstrating that with a small band of committed followers, a large tin of resolve and steely determination, almost anything can be achieved . . .

Sixteen-year-old Jennifer Strange and her sidekick and fellow Orphan Tiger Prawns have been driven to the tip of the UnUnited Kingdoms - Cornwall - by the invasion of the Trolls. Their one defence is a six-foot-wide trench full of buttons, something which the Trolls find unaccountably terrifying (it's their clickiness).

Worse than being eaten by Trolls is the prospect of the Mighty Shandar requisitioning the Quarkbeast and using him to achieve supreme power and domination - an ambition that has been four hundred years in the planning and which will ultimately leave the Earth a cold cinder, devoid of all life.

Nothing has ever looked so bleak, but Jennifer, assisted by a renegade vegan Troll, a bunch of misfit sorcerers, the Princess (or is she now the ruler?) of the UnUnited (or are they now United?) Kingdoms, and Tiger, must find a way to vanquish the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, and along the way discover the truth about her parents, herself, and what is in the locked glovebox of her VW Beetle . . .

(P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: September 9, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

Trolls. I was staring at one just then. He was about twenty feet tall, dressed in a loincloth, a pair of leather boots and on top of his unusually small head was a dead goat. I’m not a massive expert on Trolls, but apparently they wear rotting animals in the same way as humans wear perfume: to disguise their smell and make them more attractive. To each other, obviously. I like to think myself fairly broad-minded but even I would have to admit Trolls are pretty loathsome in manner, looks and eating habits.

So who am I? Jennifer Strange. S-T-R-A-N-G-E. Rhymes with ‘Grange’. Y’know, the sixteen-year-old who was running Kazam, the House of Enchantment?

No?

Then how about this: I was the Last Dragonslayer.

Right, her. The kid with the Dragons.

The Troll was holding a large club that was once the rear axle of a truck, and it looked as though he not only knew how to use it, but already had. His skin was rough, had the colour of mouldy bread and boasted an impressive display of intricate tattoos. Some were geometric and purely for decoration, but others were more practical: owing to a long mistrust of pen and paper, the left Troll leg is reserved for a part of their written history, and the right for recipes, to-do lists and bawdy limericks. But no fools when it comes to data integrity, Trolls back themselves up, just in case – they have often been observed with identical tattoos.

That the Trolls were here at all was due to Troll War V, which had been going for only two weeks but already had a clear winner: the Trolls. They had flooded out of Trollvania and rampaged rapidly southwards with little resistance from the various Republics, Duchies, Social Collectives, Fiefdoms, Principalties and privately run City States of the UnUnited Kingdoms. The rapid invasion was due to a favourable tactical advantage: they were indifferent to us. Hating humankind would have been easier to counter as at least there could be some sort of debating position between our species. What led you to hate us so much? How do we arrange some sort of peaceful coexistence? Will you please stop eating us? None of those questions meant much to the Trolls. They can’t be swayed by reason or compassion or compromise for they regard humans as little more than vermin: an annoying pest that can outgrow the boundaries of their own environment in as little as nine centuries. Some humans think of rabbits in the same way: nuisances who damage the land, breed without conscience and are good only for the pot. The only difference between rabbits and humans as far as Trolls are concerned is that they can’t wear us as a hat – although many have tried with varying degrees of success. In any event, there’s little sense arguing with a Troll.

I had been in the Cambrian Empire when they invaded, searching for the Eye of Zoltar,1 a fiery jewel with magical properties that the Mighty Shandar had tasked us to obtain in return for not killing the last two Dragons, something he had been contracted to do several centuries before. You’ll hear more about Shandar later. All you need to know right now is that he’s the most powerful sorcerer that has ever lived – and also turning out to be the least scrupulous.

I’d returned with the Eye and also Once-Magnificent Boo, who we had rescued from being ransomed. Addie, who had been our guide in the Cambrian Empire and in which capacity we owed her our lives, saw us safely to Cornwall, and made good on her promise to protect the Princess on the journey. She then returned to her village to fight the Troll. She had been reluctant to leave us, but the Princess had insisted.

‘What’s the Troll doing?’ asked Princess Shazine of Snodd, who was standing next to me.

‘Imagining us both inside a pie,’ I replied.

‘With white sauce, asparagus and badger’s paws, I imagine,’ said Tiger Prawns, who was also present. He was an orphan like me, only younger – ten, I think – and had a Moral Worth Index that was certainly in the top ten per cent. He had been due to take over from me the running of Kazam, the last house of enchantment, which is a sort of home for barely-sane sorcerers. But all those plans were upset by the Troll invasion: in what was likely a preemptive measure to stop us using magic against the Trolls, the head offices of Kazam at Zambini Towers were destroyed by a single and very powerful thermowizidrical blast, killing several dozen sorcerers, destroying countless volumes of spells and reducing the building to rubble. As soon as it was safe to do so, the dragons and surviving sorcerers headed to Troll-free Cornwall with Tiger Prawns among them. We’d joined him in Penzance a week later. That was five days ago and we’d spent the time trying to figure out a strategy of resistance and had so far not come up with much – I was due to convene a meeting later that morning.

Today’s post-breakfast visit to the Button Trench was to ensure that it was holding firm – and to welcome any human stragglers who had crossed under cover of darkness.

‘Badger’s paws are hideously out of fashion,’ said the Troll, whose ears, although only small holes in his head, made for surprisingly good hearing. ‘We prefer a garnish of week-old goat entrails.’

‘Two weeks,’ said his wife, who was also on guard duty at the Button Trench. ‘Goat entrails aren’t nearly putrid enough in a week.’

They stared at each other angrily and both went the colour of a radish, the veins in their temples standing out like tree-roots. A Troll’s temper is short and explosive and usually accompanied by extreme violence.

‘It’s warmer this far south,’ said the Princess, who always spoke her mind, even to Trolls. ‘You’re probably both right regarding goat putrefaction rates when seen as combination factors of temperature against time.’

This was likely, as all Trolls lived until recently in the far North of the Kingdoms where the weather is disposed towards the inclement.2

‘I can put it in a spreadsheet if you like,’ she added.

‘I like spreadsheets,’ said the Troll Wife thoughtfully; like her husband, she was quick to temper yet quick to lose it. ‘I have one that calculates the correct cooking rates for humans based on their Body Mass Index.’

‘Undercooked humans present numerous health hazards,’ explained the Troll Husband helpfully. ‘It’s a bit of a worry. Spending a day in bed after eating a dodgy human is rarely agreeable.’

‘It’s not a worry I share,’ said the Princess, ‘but if you’re going to eat us, why haven’t you done so?’

It was a pointlessly dangerous remark to make to a Troll, but the Princess was always forthright, even for a princess. She was the same age as me but we could not have been more different. While she grew up in a palace wanting for nothing and with forty rooms of her own, I was in an orphanage with nothing but my dignity and forty other girls in the same room. She had joined us on the quest3 for the Eye of Zoltar because her parents, the King and Queen of Snodd, felt she was too horribly obnoxious to successfully lead the Kingdom if the need arose, and a slice of real-life experience would be good for her. Her mind was switched into the body of a lowly royal dog-mess clearer-upper to further her lesson in humility, and after several high-jeopardy adventures and a few interesting digressions into the knotty question of supply-side economics, the Princess had transformed from a hideously spoiled princess into a confident young woman of considerable courage. She was also, following the death of her parents at the hands of the invading Trolls, the rightful heir to the wealthy and influential Kingdom of Snodd on the Welsh Borders.

She was also now permanently residing within the royal dog-mess clearer-upper’s body, her own lost during the invasion – ringlets and dimples and royal birthmark and everything.

‘Once we find a way to cross that trench,’ said the Troll Husband, eyeing the glittering collection of buttons nervously, ‘we will definitely eat you.’

‘Without the badger’s paws,’ added the Troll Wife, who must have felt the issue had not yet been resolved.

‘Right,’ said the Troll Husband.

The trench ran for nearly four and a half miles along the route of the railway line from Penzance in the south of Cornwall to Lelant Saltings in the north, just to the east of St Ives. The ditch was barely ten feet wide and only a foot deep – humans could wade across it with ease. But the Troll, whose cunning, appetite and violent ruthlessness made the worst despot of the Kingdoms look like little more than an enraged infant,4 had several unaccountable fears: swimming, a certain shade of cerulean blue, and buttons. And that’s precisely what was protecting us now – millions and millions of buttons. They had been pulled from coats, shirts and blouses, or liberated from haberdasher’s shops throughout the Kingdoms, then carried in bags, buckets or wheelbarrows by those fleeing the Trolls and dumped in the trench dug wizidrically by Wizard Moobin, who had given everything to his last and greatest spell, the years piling on to his weary body as he sacrificed his remaining life-force to create a final line of defence against the invaders.

‘Where would you place a human on the tasty scale?’ the Troll Wife asked her Troll Husband.

‘Somewhere between stoat and seal pup,’ replied the husband thoughtfully, ‘but they’ve never been my snack of choice, to be honest. Too stringy past the age of twenty-six. Some say their tendency to escape can offer up good sport, but I just think it’s plain tiresome, myself.’

‘A good sauce is key,’ added the Troll Wife, ‘and we’d best get used to them – it’s about all we’ll be eating for the next ten years.’

And they both laughed, a soft, galumphing, you’re-so-trashed-as-a-species kind of laugh.

Magically digging the four-and-a-half-mile trench that now cut off Land’s End, St Ives and Penzance from the invading Trolls had been the easy part. Spreading the ‘bring every single button you can find to Cornwall’ message on the low-alpha-suggestive telepathic bandwidth was actually what drained Wizard Moobin’s power and ultimately took his life-force from him. The telepathic message was powerful enough to be heard by almost everyone in the Kingdoms, but only as a ‘a vague idea that should be put into action’, and only a small proportion responded. Luckily, the message was also picked up by magpies, who, as natural thieves, may have contributed at least a million buttons to the defences before falling, exhausted, from the skies.

It was a bold yet timely construction. The Button Trench kept the Trolls from crossing over into the last bastion of the UnUnited Kingdoms where lay encamped the free. The ones who had been the quickest to react to the threat, the ones who could run the fastest, the ones with a death-by-devouring promise on their heads, and those with specialist skills who had also been drawn here by a call on the same telepathic wavelength – specifically: expert fencers, keen-eyed marksmen and warriors.

‘Tell you what,’ said the Troll Husband, who had been staring at the Princess for some time and drooling in a truly unpleasant manner – great gobs of sticky saliva that fell from his upswept tusks like melted mozzarella, ‘hand over the scrawny one and we’ll guarantee that once we find a way across this trench, you’ – he was pointing at me – ‘will not be killed and eaten. You shall be spared. It is a promise.’

Oddly, the Troll would be as good as its word. Although murderous in nature and utterly dismissive of a human’s right to life, they could still barter effectively with the ultimate bargaining chip: they would promise to spare your life. It was a gesture that was particularly effective for negotiating the surrender of the UnUnited Kingdoms as they swept through the island.

Offer resistance? Be killed and eaten.

Bow to your new overlords and follow their every demand? Be spared.

Guaranteed.

‘How could they promise such a thing?’ asked the Princess, whose schoolwork had centred more around deportment, strategic tantrums and estimating a prince’s net worth and marriageability at a glance, rather than learning about the other inhabitants of our island.

‘They have several active strands of Hive Memory,’ said Tiger, knowing quite a bit about Trolls, as not learning which fork was which at a state banquet really freed up some time. ‘It’s thought that memories are shared by the same familial affiliation – and once shared, they effectively have the same memories. If you want all Trolls to have the same memory, you’d only have to share it with all the tribal affiliations, so it never takes long.’

‘A Hive Memory could be useful,’ said the Princess.

‘Yes and no,’ said Tiger. ‘Within each memory-sharing tribe there are no secrets, double-dealing or lying. On the downside, card games within the Hive Memory affiliation are almost impossible, telling jokes pretty much pointless, and they have to binge-watch a TV series all at the same time to avoid spoilers.’

‘That’s true,’ I added. ‘When Bergerac came out on DVD, a Troll named Urgry watched it the night before they planned to do so and ended up being stoned to death by those in her affiliate for filling their heads full of spoilers.’

Trolls were particularly fond of crime TV shows from the seventies and eighties, with Murder, She wrote, Columbo and Bergerac being their favourites. They watched them again and again, as the aforementioned Hive Memory discouraged them from watching anything new because of the whole ‘spoiler stoning to death’ issue.

‘I’ve not heard of Bergerac,’ said the Princess, ‘but that’s easily explained: Mummy said TV was for the dull and uneducated – a princess’s place is on the telly, not watching it.’

The Princess’s upbringing had been horribly sheltered, but had lent her a very peculiar skillset. She could quote Tacitus, differentiate seventeen bottles of expensive mineral water by clarity alone, was able to guess the value of a tiara at forty paces and could skilfully project shallow indifference into a room long before she’d entered. All this, but she didn’t know how to open a window, use a telephone kiosk or boil an egg.

‘Bergerac was actually a really good TV series,’ I mused, ‘but well before my time. The series seven set were the only DVDs we had in the orphanage. We played them hundreds of times until they got scratched, then just re-enacted the stories from memory. I got to play Bergerac’s ex-wife Debbie, which was kind of fun. We performed episode three at the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford.’

‘That’s the one where the diamonds got stolen,’ said Tiger, something of an expert.

‘And,’ I added, ‘John Nettles sent us a nice note when he found out and donated a new minibus to the orphanage.’

‘Who’s John Nettles?’ asked the Princess.

Tiger and I looked at one another. As far as anyone in Mother Zenobia’s orphanage was concerned – nuns, children, everyone – there was no greater star than John Nettles.5

‘He’s the—’ I began, then: ‘Never mind.’

‘So how about it?’ asked the Troll Husband, who was still waiting for an answer. ‘The skinny handmaiden or your life?’

‘Looks a bit bony for a snack,’ said the Troll Wife, sizing up the Princess expertly, ‘unless you like your humans crunchy and lacking in nourishment.’

‘Not for a snack, silly,’ said her husband, ‘as a pet. They can be quite adorable – although sometimes you have to pull their tongues out to stop them squeaking.’

‘Okay,’ said his wife, ‘but remember to feed it this time – oh, and you must keep the males and females in separate cages or they’ll breed. And – yes, agreed – the babies can be very cute but before you know it some fool will give them names and we’ll be stuck with them, like, for ever.’

Trolls were, dismayingly, quite happy to keep humans as pets and, equally dismayingly, weren’t very diligent when it came to looking after them.

‘Hang on, what about me?’ said Tiger indignantly. ‘Why is Jennifer’s life threatened and not mine?’

‘You’re too small to be troubled with,’ said the Troll Wife in a dismissive manner. ‘It would be like you threatening a Dorito. How about it?’ she added, turning back to me. ‘For we will cross this trench eventually, make no mistake about that.’

‘No deal,’ I said without hesitation.

‘Then you shall be devoured,’ said the Troll simply, ‘and while alive. Probably raw as a snack,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘dipped in humus – no, wait, dipped in toejam. Jam, made of toes,’ he added, in case I mistook his meaning. ‘Nummy nummy.’

‘You do what you have to do,’ I said.

‘What she said,’ said the Princess, pointing at me.

‘And I’m not a Dorito,’ said Tiger.

‘Sorry,’ said the Troll Wife, whose mind had wandered, ‘did you say something? I was just wondering: do you have to use people called Frank to make frankfurters – or can it be anyone?’

I decided not to answer and we turned and walked away from the Trolls and the Button Trench.

‘Thank you for not handing me over,’ said the Princess once we were out of earshot. ‘I’m really not cut out to be a bony snack.’

‘We don’t do deals with Trolls,’ I said.

‘If I’d been the old me, the Princess me, the obnoxious me – would you have traded my freedom for your life?’

‘If you’d been in your princess body rather than the body of a malnourished servant with lank hair and skin complaints that don’t seem to go away no matter how diligent the cleaning,’ I said, ‘they would have asked you for me – and I’m sort of thinking you would have given me up.’

‘Without hesitation,’ said the Princess in a sombre mood, ‘and probably asked for a receipt to claim on my Princess Insurance. Goodness, I was so utterly obnoxious back then. Is royalty always this bad?’

‘I don’t think it’s being a royal that does it,’ I said. ‘Just the ridiculous abundance of wealth, opulence and levels of undeserved privilege that go with it.’

The Princess nodded her head in agreement. She had matured quickly during the search for the Eye of Zoltar as it had been an adventure that would have taught even the most narrow-minded and utterly indulged child a few things about teamwork and sacrifice. Perhaps the Princess’s ex-sorceress mother, who instigated the bodyswap and placed her in my care, sensed the Trolls were coming, and engineered the trip to not only keep her safe, but actually do her some good. Nothing like a bit of jeopardy and loss of prestige to make the overprivileged understand the important things in life.

We walked back to where I’d parked my Volkswagen Beetle, the only link with my parents. I had been left on the front seat when barely two months old late one December night, wrapped in a blanket, the engine running, the heaters on. Often, foundlings are left with talismans to identify them if their parents return to claim them. The Volkswagen was that talisman. If they had wanted me, they would have returned and presented the spare ignition key as proof.

They never did.

I opened the car door and took the sword Exhorbitus6 from where I wore it on a scabbard on my back and stowed it using the clips on the roof lining, then tried the glovebox for about the thousandth time. It was locked, and always had been.

‘You’ll eventually want to break into that.’

It was the Princess, who knew the strong bond I had with the car.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but what if it were empty, or just full of junk?’

‘What if it’s not?’

The Sisterhood at the Orphanage had tried to trace the owners of the car through the registration but that had only led as far as the owner before last, who had sold it on: ‘to a middle-aged guy’ who paid in cash, two months before I was found in it. The new owner had not reregistered the car in his name, so there was little to go on. Although the glovebox was locked it had never been forced as the Sisterhood saw this as damaging someone’s property, and, interestingly, the car had only clocked up seventy-two miles from when it was sold to when I was found in it. Wherever I was from, I was local.

We drove the mile into Penzance, the Quarkbeast sitting in the back, staring at his paws mournfully. He didn’t like Trolls any more than the rest of us, but stayed well hidden as Trolls didn’t look at a Quarkbeast and see the most terrifying creature on earth: a three-way split between a labrador, a velociraptor and a liquidiser with all the safety features removed; a creature with razor-sharp fangs, a coat of carbide-tipped steel scales that could explosively detonate off his back and embed themselves in concrete. No, the Trolls saw a Quarkbeast as a sporting opportunity: put them in a ring with three bears, two rhinos, a hyena and six dozen enraged, adrenaline-fuelled badgers – then take bets on how long the Quarkbeast took to despatch them all.7 Despite their fearsome looks, Quarkbeasts only ever attacked when they, or a loved one, were threatened. They usually felt guilty about it for years afterwards, with lots of sighing, mournful looks and overwhelming feelings of self-loathing. There were never any winners when it came to Quarkbaiting.

On the way back into Penzance we chatted about recent events, and Tiger related his escape to the Princess, w. . .