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The Vuos camp spread in either direction as far as Gaunt could see. It was as if several villages had been uprooted, except that instead of houses there rose conical tents. Reindeer, sheep, goats, and other animals roamed about, tended by herders. Small children chased each other, like kids on a holiday. There were hundreds of people here, and aside from a few guards, all were engaged in labor—herding, tanning, sewing, slaughtering, cooking, or, in the case of one group, gathering around a map sketched into the ice.

When the sleds stopped, it was toward this group that the wanderers were led.

Many people stared. Gaunt was fully aware she and her friends were true outsiders. They were introduced to a group of elders, including a few old men carrying flutes, sitting beside ornately carved drums.

An old woman in a deep-blue garment, fringed with geometric designs of many colors, nodded to them. “Welcome, travelers, on this bleak day. My name is Aile. The shamans warned of your coming.”

“I would love to speak with these shamans,” Northwing said, bowing in the direction of the old musicians and getting nods in return. “I sense we have techniques in common.”

“There are stories,” Aile said, “that in long-ago times we were able to travel to the continent, and that we learned things from the people there, and they from us. Now share a meal with us, and then we will speak.”

The travelers shared their meager stockfish and bread, and gratefully accepted fresh fish taken through holes in the ice. They also ate dried reindeer meat and a stew of potatoes and carrots, followed by a dessert of one cloudberry apiece. These resembled miniature strawberries and had a taste like sour and sweet apples mixed together.

The shamans sung a low-toned song that reminded Gaunt of the arctic wind. She studied their drums, whose skins were covered with pictograms. Gaunt recognized symbols for humans, reindeer, and the sun and moon, but the rest were mysterious. The symbols mostly treated the edge of the drum as “down,” although a good many figures seemed detached from gravity, floating in the middle.

A shaman noticed her looking and spoke to Aile. She said to Gaunt, “You are curious. The drums help connect one to the many forms of the universe. The ripples and creases that appear on the fabric also help foretell the future.”

“I also use a drum,” Northwing said. “Or I did, before it was lost in my travels. Do they send their souls to ride within animals?”

Aile relayed the question and answered, “Their method is to send forth their souls and spin temporary animal-bodies out of the elements. Or else to move spiritually beside animals but not inside them. The difference is interesting.”

Haytham spoke up. “I mourn the urgency that brings us. I wish Northwing could spend months discussing the fine points of shamanism. But you said there might be a way to respond to the destruction. I hope you did not mean simply running away.”

Aile frowned. “No one is running away. We migrate as best we can. We knew of the war in the south, and our far-traveled hunters and our shamans watched for any rumor. We experienced the cold that stretched through the reindeer’s calving time and beyond. We had some warning of the calamity. When the shamans saw the signs most of us came, as many as could be found. The Coastal Vuos, the Mountain Vuos, the Forest Vuos, the River Vuos, the Reindeer Vuos. We set aside all differences to survive, even as we have in the past, against foamreavers and trolls. Together we will cross the ice to the continent and find a way to survive. In such a journey there is no running away.”

Katta spoke. “My friend did not accuse you of cowardice, Aile. He speaks of us and our bitterness at having been removed from the struggle in the South. We took it as our task to contend with this war. If there is anything we can do, we would be grateful to know.”

Aile replied, “The shamans say there is a way to reverse what has happened. It comes at a price. A sacrifice of being. If you succeed, these past many days, with their deeds of courage, will vanish as ice disappears in the sun. For that reason we will not send any of the Vuos with you. All our energies must go toward survival. But we agree your quest is worth doing.”

Aile drew her knife and scratched out a drawing of a human figure beside a reindeer. “For whatever valor we manage in the future, whatever great tales, we will never see the lands of home again, nor the great rocks our ancestors worshipped beside, nor taste cloudberries once the last are gone. And too, you may call back to life many who have died, and this is no small thing. For this we are willing for these days to vanish, to exist, perhaps, as a half-remembered dream.”

She drew a line across her image.

“Hear me. What you call the Straits of Tid, our shamans experience as the Axial Tree, reaching up from the world through spirit country, to touch the North Star. The North Star represents time future; the great roots are time past. You must descend to the roots, you four. You may not like it there. The Tree will raise images of the dead to bar your way. Are you prepared?”

Gaunt and the others nodded.

Aile said a few words to the shamans and elders, then, “You will travel with the survivors of Larderland who managed to reach us. With luck, you may attain the nearest point that you may reach the Tree.”

“Where is that?” Gaunt asked.

Aile directed her dagger point to a sketch upon the icepack. It represented the landmass of Spydbanen and its merging with the ice. There were wedges upon Spydbanen, and Jaska tapped the metal to the largest of these. “It is the place Kantenings call the Trollberg. The great mountain of Skrymir Hollowheart.”

Gaunt was pleased to see the Likedealer Tlepolemus had survived the conflagration, along with some hundred of Larderland’s inhabitants. “We’d been on the move already,” he said. “That was lucky, in one sense. Our elderly will remain here. And the children are already becoming Vuos. How can it be otherwise? But for me, and some others, there can be no more discarding one identity after another. I am a man of Ma’at who became Amberhornish, an Amberhornish man who became a Larderman. I tire of change. A raid on the Trollberg sounds like just the thing I need.”

“We can oblige.”

They hauled the longship
Little Dragon
for hours, at last reaching a fissure like an ice-choked river. Carefully they lowered the ship and even more carefully got aboard.

They rowed. Northwing, seeing through the eyes of fish, assured them the way was open, but as the ocean neared a cold blast hit them. The shaman said, “Beware! The fissure is sealing up! The water at the mouth is freezing over! Row! Row!”

When they reached sight of open sea, the end of the passage had indeed been covered with a layer of ice. Gaunt joined Tlepolemus at the dragon prow, furiously hacking with axes.

“I will never again underestimate the strength of your arm,” Tlepolemus said as the ship broke free.

They raised sail and entered the iceberg-clotted waters called the Ocean of White Knives. Tlepolemus judged it unwise to sail directly among the new volcanic islands that marked the grave of Spydbanen, so they took a roundabout way.

After two days of difficult sailing they saw the peak of the Trollberg rising steep from the waters. The valley and settlement called Jotuncrown were drowned.

“See there?” Northwing said. “That cave used to be thousands of feet up. Now it’s just hundreds. We can climb.”

“No trolls,” Haytham said.

“They may have perished with the dragon-mind that formed them,” Gaunt said.

“I perceive no supernatural evil,” Katta said.

“The difficult part will be mooring,” Tlepolemus said.

In the end they had harbored a quarter mile from the cave. Roped together, Gaunt, Northwing, Haytham, and Katta, along with Tlepolemus and ten warriors, leapt onto a ledge. Gaunt feared for Katta, but a series of instructions and tappings gave him the information he needed to make the jump.

The Trollberg’s surface was full of handholds, crevices, and ledges, so the climb was not too difficult. A worse danger was the cold. Gaunt was having trouble feeling her fingers by the time they neared the cave.

Thus they were in a vulnerable position when the madman peered out and sent them a magical gale.

Two men slipped, and the whole line nearly gave. They hauled the victims up, and Tlepolemus bellowed a challenge. “Who are you, wizard?”

“I am cold itself! My heart is ice!”

Innocence
, Gaunt realized as soon as she heard the voice. She called out to him, but her voice was lost in a fresh moaning of the wind.

With great difficulty she readied her fiddle. As the fossegrim had taught her, she put all her sorrow into music.

The wind stopped. “Mother?” called the wild man.

Soon they reached him, clad in ragged furs and living amongst the bones of birds. He had a thin beard and countenance and wide, mad eyes. His forehead was still marked with the sign of intertwining dragons.

“Mother,” he said. “I killed you. I killed my father too. You are a shade.”

“No, I am real. And you are real.”

“Stay back! I hurt everyone who comes close.”

“Innocence, what happened?”

“I killed Joy. I killed them all. Steelfox. Inga. Jewelwolf . . . Father.”

“You didn’t kill your father, Innocence. He survived the quest for Skrymir’s heart.”

He sobbed. “He was with me at the Great Chain, when . . . Mother, I did it. I woke the dragons. I meant to save Joy, but I killed her, and everyone, everyone . . .”

“It can’t be all your fault. Young people sometimes think they are responsible for everything.”

His cackle frightened her more than his sobbing. “I’m not ‘young people.’ I’m Lord Gaunt. Dragonlord. So much power. The Heavenwalls and the Chain. Even with the Chain gone I’m still too strong for control. You don’t know. None of you understand. Only Joy could and she’s dead.”

“Innocence,” she said, pleading to herself as much as to him. “You must have hope. There is a way. The cave opening. We can open the gateway to time, change what happened.”

“You think I haven’t tried? When I go there, I see the dead! All my dead. Thousands of them!”

Gaunt saw the truth of it in his eyes. Yet she said, “I know you haven’t given up. You are still living here, beside this gateway. And this time you will not be alone. I will be with you.”

“And I, boy,” said Northwing.

“And I,” said Katta.

“And I,” said Haytham.

Tlepolemus and the other Lardermen simply shouted, “Aye!” and the cavern echoed with their voices.

Innocence did not look consoled. But he said, “I will try.”

He walked to the cave and reached out, closing his eyes.

The daylight vanished, and outside lay a moonlit world.

Gaunt peered out and did not see the Straits of Tid. Instead, a gigantic tree filled her view. Its upper reaches rose to the sky, and around it stars wheeled. Below, its trunk faded into silver mist. It was so large that its bark imitated the handholds and ledges of the Trollberg. They could climb it.

The trunk just below the cave was living, healthy bark. But at eye level and above it looked charred and dead.

Northwing stepped beside Gaunt. “The Axial Tree. Our discussions with the Vuos inspired us to see it as a tree. Who knows what we’re actually doing when we go out there.”

“Well, I recommend ropes, shaman and gentlemen.”

They descended through peculiarly warm, misty air, moving like ants down the tree.

After a long interval the slope bent and became walkable, like a mountain trail. They collected their ropes and carefully picked their way down.

Now shapes emerged from the mists, shambling corpses with moonlit eyes.

“No,” Innocence said. “No.”

Joy was there, a dagger sticking from her chest, her limbs moving far too freely, her face a travesty of burns. And now came a blackened skeleton in a charred Karvak deel, and a large woman with the skin half-melted from her bones. A monstrous troll figure loomed up, his thousand fragments seemingly held together by malice alone. After them, scores more.

“No,” Innocence said.

“Bone?” Gaunt called out. “Bone?”

But she did not see him.

“Innocence!” she said. “Your father is alive. Time would torment us with him if he weren’t! There is hope even now!”

“Oh, I feel so
very
hopeful!” Haytham said, sword drawn, voice shaking as he did. But now there came the corpse of Corinna, a mass of burns recognizable only by her crown.

“Yes, have hope, my dear,” said Corinna. “We’ll be together soon.”

Haytham stood as though turned to stone. He murmured something in the tongue of Mirabad and followed in Kantentongue: “May the All-Now grant me life if that is best . . . and death if that is best.”

“I have an opinion on the matter,” laughed Corinna, advancing with a bloody dagger.

“So do I,” said Katta, and blocked her thrust with his staff.

The start of combat broke Haytham free of his paralysis. But on impulse Gaunt drew not her daggers, sword, or bow but her fiddle. Why not? The odds were overwhelming, and the poetic precedents were good.

She played for the dead.