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“It’s not my fault,” Joy gasped.

“You’d make a good troll!” gloated the rocky one.

“Shut up,” she told him, diving between his legs.

“A
very
good troll,” said the clay one, getting in her way. “Now give up.”

She responded by kicking his outstretched arm.

It was not the simple attack she’d seen the trolls pester each other with but a worthy maneuver, leg pulled back and lashing forward for maximum force at the heel.

The arm came off.

She hadn’t expected that, nor the titanic wail emerging from the clay troll. Least of all she didn’t expect the chorus of laughter from the other trolls.

Ha, ha! Claymore took up arms and lost an arm, tra la! A girl can beat him and so we greet him, Claymore! Arm-gore! Mighty no-more!

Claymore wept and wailed, “It’s not fair! I’ll clip both her arms for that!”

As Joy raced ahead of the trolls, Claymore retrieved his lost arm and carried it like a club.

But it was the rocky one who grabbed one of the loose stones and threw, clipping Joy in the leg. She toppled, and Claymore was upon her, whacking her with the fallen arm.

“Stop!” bellowed the rocky one, and stony hands grabbed her. “She is not to be hurt, not until the Chroniclers can study her!”

“She hurt me, Mossbeard!”

“Shut up and eat your arm, so you can regrow it by tomorrow.”

And so they dragged her back into the procession. Miraculously Mossbeard and Claymore didn’t see the Runemark, or else thought it unremarkable.

When next she had to empty her bladder, she was surrounded by glowering stony faces.

At nightfall Joy was feeling hopeless as they left the red glow of sunset behind and descended into a glittering ice cave.

Walking Stick sometimes quoted an ancient poet, saying, “‘Life is thin ice, at the edge of a yawning gulf. Let us be prudent and circumspect, and kind to one another.’” Yet Joy did not feel prudent and circumspect; she felt terrified and angry. The natural ice tunnel curved upward into glittering red light, but the trolls turned right, into an ice-passage hewn sometime earlier by rocky fists.

Beyond lay a stone archway inscribed with glyphs Joy could not understand, and past it stone steps coiled down into darkness.

Joy could see nothing at first, not even walls and ceiling. All echoes vanished, and she intuited that they now entered a vast cavern. Little by little her eyes made out strange glints in the darkness—blue fires, green glows, sets of eyes in many colors—and reflections thereof, indicating spindly towers rising like crystalline renditions of pine cones, lotus flowers, thorns.

When the party of trolls had reached the bottom of the great stairway, Joy’s eyes had adjusted somewhat more, and she saw they were surrounded by a peculiar crystal city. The blue fires were three great enchanted bonfires in the midst of a plaza, while the green glows emanated from huge mushrooms scattered among the streets. In the mixed blue-and-green glow, Joy became aware that many of the towers lay shattered.

The many-colored eyes stood revealed as the eyes of trolls, hundreds of them, gathered in the plaza.

Joy was unceremoniously plopped down.

“Behold!” said a troll who seemed a hulking statue of fungus-covered soil and rotting wood, with one eye that was a bole and the other a gap writhing with worms. “A human girl, spying on our territory! She was found near a grotto of unquickened trollings! She kicked off Claymore’s arm! What should be her fate? Let’s let the Chroniclers judge!”

Joy rose. “My name is A-Girl-Is-A-Joy! I am a traveler from a distant land! I mean no harm to you trolls! I saw no . . . trollings. I fought only to escape.”

The troll-crowd parted like two, slow, sideways avalanches.

Two human figures in dark-gray cloaks stepped forward.

“Ah,” said Joy. “Hello?”

The two figures pulled the hoods from their faces. Two young women, in their late teens or early twenties, stared at Joy. They seemed almost as surprised as she was. One grinned and strode forward, saying, “Hello!” The other held back, wary.

The outgoing one was a powerfully built, energetic person, a head taller than Joy and sporting an impish smile. Golden hair curled around eyes of noonday blue and a thick clouding of freckles. “Well, what have we here? Not the foamreaver or castaway I might have expected.”

“I am indeed a castaway. But from farther away than you’d expect.”

Turning her head, the golden-haired woman said, “I think she’s all right, Malin.”

The one who’d hung back was also tall but willowy, with dark hair, green eyes, and a distant expression, as though any appraisal of Joy must needs encompass every troll and the whole cavern as well. The dark-haired woman nodded to Joy nonetheless.

“I am Inga Peersdatter,” the gold-haired one continued, “and this is my colleague Malin Jorgensdatter. We are folklorists.”

“Folklorists?” Joy chewed on the word, looking around at the assembled trolls. “As in, you study folktales? You’re serious?”

“Oh, very serious, A-Girl-Is . . .”

“Joy. You can just call me Joy.”

“Joy. All this constitutes research. We have already released a few pamphlets. Our plan is to engage one of those newfangled publishers in Svanstad, get them to print a gigantic book. A collection of folktales told around Kantenjord, much like that of the Sisters Darke in the Eldshore.”

“So . . . you’re not prisoners?”

“Well,” Inga said, “that’s an awkward matter—”

“Enough talk!” boomed a voice. It was the troll formed of boulders with the obsidian eyes, the first troll Joy had seen. It seemed to Joy the voice had a slightly feminine quality, if a landslide could be considered feminine. “This human threatened a grotto of trollings! What shall be done with her?”

The one called Wormeye called out, “That is what the Chroniclers must determine, Rubblewrack. They are of her people, at least in seeming.”

“Wait!” Joy called. “You keep talking about these trollings. Little trolls? I didn’t see anything.”

Malin spoke for the first time, “Did you find a place filled with boulders in one spot, all of similar size?”

“Yes.”

Malin looked worried. “Then you stumbled on a bunch of nascent trolls. They may or may not quicken if trolls spend time telling tales, fighting, and carrying on nearby. But the potential is there. Endangering trollings makes the trolls mad.”

“Not that it’s hard to make them mad,” Inga said.

“I didn’t know!” Joy said. “Surely it’s wrong to punish me for what I did not know. My teacher must despair of me, but he’s said that it’s better to rule by example and courtesy than by law and punishment, and that relentless control makes it difficult to govern.”

“I don’t understand this teaching,” the troll Rubblewrack boomed, lurching toward Joy. “A troll can only rule herself.”

“But I thought you had a king.”

“He rules himself so well, that Skrymir Hollowheart, that we all feel a need to obey.” Rubblewrack raised her fists.

“Let her be!” called Inga.

“Stop it!” shouted Malin.

“Skrymir has declared the primacy of trial by combat,” said Rubblewrack. “Let this one prove its innocence by fighting me!”

Joy willed herself not to panic. She breathed in, out, concentrating on the chi flowing through her body. It was depleted, but it was there.

Hearing the name Innocence reminded her there were friends out there, family, and that she had to survive to see them again. Running had failed. Fighting would have to do. She put her hands on her hips and stared down the troll-woman.

“I will fight you, Rubblewrack,” Joy said.

CHAPTER 12

ESCAPE

Persimmon Gaunt had once studied with Swanisle’s bards—which was to say she’d been kicked out of her once-prosperous family’s house and sent to those who could feed and tolerate her. In fact, her family had been only half-right. But she’d eaten well, for a time.

And she’d learned.

There was a tradition among bards of praising benefactors and besmirching patrons’ enemies. It was said bards of old crafted spite-poems that boiled the blood and pocked the skin. Gaunt had seen no evidence of that, but she’d heard many a stinging lampoon.

She came to the house of Muninn Crowbeard armed and armored, but her best weapon had no weight.

She knew it could not truly disfigure a man, so she gripped her other new weapon—a yew bow from Swanisle, with a quiver of birchwood arrows to match—as she sang in the moonlight. Her voice was rusty, and Kantening poems surely weren’t meant to be sung with bile on the lips, but one used the tools at hand.

By moon and sun I journeyed west

My wind-borne song from Vindheim sent

My poem-craft laden in bardic art

With word-prow sharp to spear the heart.

My praises, Sure-Hand, travel far

Not only stabbing where you are,

Clutching the straw of withered fame.

Shall I sound your newer name?

Once you sheltered my man and me,

Offered kindly hospitality.

I sang for our supper and our bed

Of heroes brave in battles red.

We thanked Sure-Hand at the dawn

And with his blessing we were gone,

Down to Gullvik to seek for one

Who’d help us find our missing son.

But Muninn was not the man he’d been

When Sure-Hand hounded glory’s den.

Palsy took his hand and mind

And sought the gold of slaver-kind.

“That woman’s man a heathen be,

And has no right to wander free.”

So Muninn Crowbeard to Yngvarr spoke

And gave my husband to the yoke.

The door of the house opened. Gaunt readied an arrow.

Break not my spell, but listen ye:

To all I tell the treachery.

A trap they set, with mournful wails

And children dragged to slaver-sails.

My mighty man, his own child lost

Sought their freedom at his cost.

It was a ruse—the children mocked—

The slavers meant him for the block.

Muninn Crowbeard stepped forward, axe in hand, cloak thrown over his nightclothes and wizened frame.

Weapons screamed and shields clashed.

Within the fray his dagger flashed.

Outnumbered he, and underarmed,

He let no slaver go unharmed.

When swords will speak, what man is free?

Who gets this point will surely see.

Men as sturdy as Orm’s own ash

May fall when hungry edges clash.

Muninn’s wife and wards appeared behind him, weapons raised.

O mighty Muninn, they gave him gold

For coward’s ways, betrayal cold.

No more I know my husband’s hand,

So praise I Crowbeard through the land.

He asked to sail, and they laughed him off.

His coward’s shivers made them scoff.

Wheezing and shaking he gave up war

His snores and farts heard shore to shore.

So now, my friends, you’ve heard my stave,

How ancient coward tricked young man brave.

My words are loosed, and I have shown

How Muninn Fartsnore earns renown.

In Gaunt’s mind she heard the song in Roil, but with the priestess Roisin’s help she had memorized it in Kantentongue.