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The sun was distressingly high when she arrived at the copse of dead trees. The ground was covered in caked mud. A scree of boulders had fallen all around. It was a desolate place, but at last she’d found her firewood. She looked over her shoulder and saw the distant figure of Snow Pine starting to walk toward her. Expecting a scolding, she began breaking off branches.

Steel-gray clouds covered the sun, and a false twilight covered the land.

There came a great rumbling, and she feared a rockslide. The boulders were unmoving, however, as far as the eye could see . . . no. There was a collection or rocks to the north that appeared to be forming themselves into a larger shape, blocking the way back to Snow Pine.

It was like watching a collection of moths tumble toward a candle flame, only instead of singeing themselves they congealed into a larger mass, and instead of flying off they remained in that position.

Big as a barn, the humanoid figure thus formed looked this way and that.

Joy stood very still, a clutch of branches in her hand.

A long nose of granite peered from a face pale and moss-spotted, beneath hair of gray-white lichen. Mismatched slabs of obsidian might have been fist-sized eyes. The musculature of the entity would have driven Persimmon Gaunt, the amateur geologist, or Liron Flint, the armchair anatomist, to distraction. The left arm had ten smaller rocks in it, the right arm five larger ones. The left arm thus bent more smoothly, but the right arm looked to have a stronger punch. A similar mismatch prevailed with the limbs, with the left leg looking ready to stomp tall men flat, and the right looking spindly as an over-piled cairn.

Joy tiptoed behind a tree.

Nowhere on this assemblage did Joy see living tissue connecting the stones. But there was indeed living material, for a short, stubby evergreen tree twisted out of the stone-thing’s back, or what she took for a back.

She did not know what manner of creature this was, but she knew she didn’t want to attract its attention. Unfortunately, it lay between her and help. She would have to circle around. Carefully she set down her branches and crept away, before bursting into a run.

Her path took her into a rocky hollow that she hadn’t spotted before. Sliding down a slope of sand, she faced a collection of small boulders, set in a surprisingly regular matrix. She expected she would clamber over them, using the back row to launch herself up the far slope.

She had not counted upon several piles of rock and earth behind her rising and advancing. One, composed mainly of thin granite spars, was spindly enough to make the first one seem squat. Another looked like a humanoid pile of gray dust. A third entity much resembled the first, except that pale lichen wreathed it like a sash. A fourth was a rough-looking humanoid mass of clay, with agates for eyes. And a fifth seemed an agglomeration of scores of smooth river-stones, impossibly balanced; its rockfall of a head had empty spaces for “eyes” and a “frown.”

She had the impression they were all frowning as they approached her.

“Um,” she said in thin hope of conversation, “hello!” She repeated herself in Kantening. “
Morn?
”

“
Nei!
” said one, and “
Slem!
” said another, their voices like stones falling into a stream.

“I don’t understand,” she said, her heart feeling as though a rock pounded her chest. Kantentongue phrases babbled and echoed through her thoughts, but she’d never imagined first using them on monsters. She couldn’t think clearly enough to use them.

“
Jente! Dra!
” intoned another of the entities.

She thought they were commanding her to leave, and she devoutly wanted to. But she saw no path except through the garden of stones, or else back through the creatures of earth and rock.

Fear made her mind struggle for a solution. She remembered standing at a porthole of
Al-Saqr
, looking down at an expanse of red desert dappled with evening shadows. Beside her Walking Stick had been saying, “Enliven the chi within you, and you can float to the clouds, even as does this balloon.”

“Can you do such a thing?” she’d challenged. “I have never seen you.”

“Were I the stern disciplinarian you believe me to be, you would be smarting at your smart remark. No, I cannot truly fly, as the legendary immortals could . . . or perhaps can. Nonetheless you have seen me kick myself into the air and walk along treetops. That is the limit of my skill—but perhaps you have a small chance of surpassing me. If you work at it.”

That was to goad me
, she’d thought.
Never a word of praise, only a grunt if I get something right, never letting me be proud, always another level to attain. But if I attain enough, I can escape him forever, find another teacher. Or learn on my own. And Snow Pine, my mother? She can join me if she wants
.

The exchange, and her silent response, flickered through her mind in a moment, and a set of exercises uncoiled in memory like a gossamer stairway leading over the boulders. She ran and leapt.

Whereas before, the warm expression of vital breath always faded as she jumped, this time something changed. The palm of her right hand felt as though it had pressed against hot metal. Energy pulsed from the mark upon her hand and through her body. Pain wracked her, as though a series of muscles were simultaneously wrenched in the wrong direction. It was a dreadful sensation—

But she experienced it high in the air.

She landed on the slope of the hollow’s far side. From there she spun, forcing herself not to yelp from the aches within her. She’d done it! She could handle anything. Even facing down five (and now she guessed their nature) trolls!

It was surprisingly easy to glean the trolls’ reactions. Their stony or dusty or clay faces proved unnervingly malleable, as they all stared slack-jawed—if they could be said to have jaws—at Joy. She resisted the urge to mock. Some of her language lessons came back to her. Perhaps one of her basic phrases could help.

She raised her hands, but she was careful to keep them clenched. Something told her not to reveal the Runemark upon her right hand.

“Excuse me! I am a traveler! I do not speak Kantentongue! Do you speak Roil?” She almost said,
My friends are nearby
but thought better of it. Best to give nothing away. Was Mother walking into danger even now?

The trolls grumbled among themselves, and the one with the tree growing out of its back reappeared waving an arm and bellowing orders she couldn’t follow.

And scores more trolls appeared, approaching the hollow on all sides. Joy was surrounded by these walking hunks of the Bladed Isles. She shivered but refused to show fear. The trolls did not advance farther than a few yards, but the nearest pointed at her, and then inland. Clearly, she was meant to follow.

She considered leaping out of there. Yet having tried that trick once, it seemed her body rebelled against any further esoteric uses of chi.

Her heart pounded. Perhaps by accepting capture, she could save her companions from detection. It seemed she was going to have an adventure, like her mother before her. Curiously, she smiled.

At least they hadn’t tried to devour her.

Thus began A-Girl-Is-A-Joy’s sojourn among the trolls.

CHAPTER 7

MUNINN

At some point in her mad, scrambling, careening slide down the icy slope, Gaunt’s head met an inconvenient extrusion of rock. For a moment survival was forgotten, as she mentally flew to a distant blazing nebula upon wings of pain. When she again perceived her surroundings, she was hurtling down an icy slope with her thick Karvak deel acting as a sort of sled. Under other circumstances it might have been fun. Yet the current circumstances included a slide toward a rugged moraine of jagged rocks, itself sloping down into a beautiful, steep-sided valley blue with sheer-edged shadowed tarns, each looking eager to drown reckless poets.

Attempting to halt her descent with her hands, she couldn’t find purchase. Snow sprayed behind her in a powdery flurry every time she tried. Using her feet sent her tumbling. Her stinging hands next reached for the magic sword at her belt, for she hoped to spear the snow with her blade. But she couldn’t free it. She did manage to unsheathe a dagger, so she kicked and spun and stabbed.

The force of her descent sent the dagger flying wildly out of sight.

Her heart hammered. She didn’t try her second dagger. Instead she kicked and squirmed, and instead of sliding to her doom on her face, she once again descended on her back.

She loosed her sword-belt, forcing her fingers to take their time. Slow unknotting, slow unknotting, but soon enough swift action—Now!

She had the sword. But she still had no leverage to draw it. So she rolled wildly and stabbed the snow with the sheathed weapon.

Now she had purchase, and when it came it surprised her, nearly ripping the sword from her hands. She clung with a howl of defiance. In that moment the whole mountain range was the enemy of Persimmon Gaunt.

She was motionless for many seconds before her body believed it. She had difficulty distinguishing the receding thunder with the pulsing of her own blood near her ears. She lay sideways on the slope, staring at snowy peaks thick with black, oblong pools of morning shadow. She looked toward her feet and saw a precipitous edge ten yards downslope.

Deep breath. You’re alive. The rest is detail.

As she began digging into the snow with her remaining dagger—this time she didn’t lose it—a scream broke the silence.

The source of the bloodcurdling howl moved rapidly enough to change pitch. Abruptly it ceased. By now the scream sounded familiar.

“Bone!” she called out. “Bone! Are you there?”

“Gaunt,” came a weak and muffled voice. “Hello. I’m here to rescue you.”

She managed to wiggle enough to look in his direction. Bone lay spread-eagled upslope, one hand clutching a rope stretching to a grappling hook far above.

“That rope,” Gaunt called. “I assume it was meant to be attached to
Al-Saqr
.”

“Alas! The balloon did not agree with my plan.”

“It was a gallant effort! At the very worst it’s allowed us a final conversation, my love.”

“True, Gaunt! I propose survival as the topic of the day.”

“An old classic! Now, it seems to me a rope with a hook is a very useful asset . . .”

It took a long time, during which the storm clouds dispersed and the rising sun chipped away at the shadows of the mountains, but Gaunt was able to dig in sufficiently that she could at last rest her aching arms, and meanwhile Bone managed to ascend to the hook and with its aid shift his position sideways and down, until the rope could reach Gaunt.

At last they were together, and the plan became one of shameless kissing.

“The lengths you will go to,” Gaunt said, “to get me alone.”

“Clever, aren’t I?”

“Oh, that remains to be seen.”

“Well, if we’re not clever, no one will see our remains.”

“What I do see, good thief, is a rocky shelf, down that way.”

“Ah,” he said, before tasting her lips one last time, “to business. It will be good to stand on good, solid rock.”

“We’d best not delay,” she sighed, noticing a sheen upon the surrounding white. “The sun’s melting the upper layer of snow.”

“You mean,” he said, aggrieved, “this landscape is becoming
more
slippery? I already hate the Bladed Isles.”

They took their time and at last stood triumphantly upon the outcropping. The sound of the wind was like the world taking generations to intone the word
hush
.

“This,” Bone declared beside her, “would have been a magnificent place to die.” He gestured grandly.

It was as though she really saw it for the first time, and she had to agree. The land seemed absurdly vertical, fangs of gray stone with spittle of shining ice. Here and there meadow-covered plateaus sliced the lower heights above shadowed byways of forest and gorges echoing with frothing rivers. Gaunt had seen vaster mountains at the heart of the continent, but this terrain seemed so enamored of gleaming heights and forested plunges it made her eyes blink and her neck hurt.

That wasn’t all that hurt. Gaunt’s head still afflicted her with swirls of pain, probably the fruits of the violent descent. She rubbed her skull gently. All her wits still seemed to be in there.

“Alone again, on the road,” Gaunt said.

“It’s been some time,” Bone answered. “Not the road. The ‘alone.’”

“Ever since we fled to the East, there’ve been friends. There were some terrible times. Sometimes we were apart. But there was always someone to lean on.”

“I miss them too. And worry for them.”

“Well,” Gaunt said, “we won’t find them by staying up here.”

“We’ll have to take this descent delicately.”

“I don’t feel there’s anything delicate about me anymore.”

“Heh. Well, we’ll take it beautifully then.”

“
Ja?
” came a gruff voice from beyond a pine door.

“Uh,
morn?
” said Gaunt.