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There would be a tomorrow. Her family probably would be in it. That was enough.

CHAPTER 43

CHOSEN

Arnulf Pyre-Maker, Ottmar Bloodslake, and Kolli the Cackling strode through the army of Free Kantenjord like mowing farmers, a dwindling trail of Spydbanen warriors in their wake. The devastation of their forces was unexpected, the earthquakes uncomfortable, and the trolls’ sudden petrification unfortunate, yet the Three Wolves slaughtered merrily on. They’d come too far to do anything but enjoy the mayhem. And who knew what a few ferocious men might yet accomplish?

Yet now, as they tore through a batch of Ostoland irregulars and hacked down a gaggle of longbowmen, time seemed to slow for the Wolves. The sky changed, showing a rich scattering of stars and an aurora rippling skyward like a bridge. Soaring through that sky was a spear-wielding girl riding a narwhal. Shadowy shapes followed, riding flying horses with far too many legs. Attending her were two ravens.

Fierce-eyed Arnulf said, “What apparition is this?”

“Do I see Orm himself?” many-scarred Ottmar gasped. “And Torden and Verden? Do they come to aid us or challenge us?”

“And who is with them?” laughed Kolli, for either possibility amused him.

The voice of the Chooser of the Slain rang out. “They are the ones I chose, Wolf, to defy this Wolf-Time! I was called from across the centuries by the Vindir to be the final Chooser, a daughter of a time-flow in which Fimbulwinter was foiled. For even as a young child I had an imagination for dooms and battle. A natural inheritance, you might say! As Chooser I claimed these spirits and brought them backward in time to join the Vindir. Now they are here to fight this would-be Ragnarok. Among them are Nan of Love and Grief, and Freidar of the Sunlight! There are Alder of the Earthquake and Vuk Horsemaster and Havtor the Brave! There are Erik the Bright-Eyed, Ruvsa the Rose, Tangletop the Trickster, and Taper Tom the Clever! There too is Yngvarr the Blazing! So many others. And watching all are Huginn and Muninn, raven servants of Orm himself!”

And the Three Wolves saw the gods, and as one they ransacked their memories. For a fleeting moment it seemed to them that not all these names were those they’d heard ’round the crackling hall-fires. The moment passed; they recognized all and knew their end was come. And Arnulf roared, and Ottmar grinned, and Kolli cackled. For they were as Kantenings of old that day, and even against gods they would fight on.

“You see, Rolf, old friend,” declared Kollr, Friend to Ravens’ Hunger, as the last Wolf toppled below the stars, “wherever your Swan keeps you. Our gods
are
violent.”

As screeching Charstalkers rose from the bodies and were speared and hacked by weapons full of starlight, Jokull the Vengeful said, “And now I am fulfilled.”

And Torfa the Wrathful smiled, and said, “But where is your friend? The Sabercat Warrior?”

“He sleeps in a blue sky above a green place,” said the god, “and may his days be as peaceful as our nights are bloody.” And he rode laughing after the Chooser toward the glittering place that was the past, and also home.

CHAPTER 44

THE MIDDLE

I remember how we arrived that noontime, amid the rock piles that once were trolls. Men and women were disassembling them to make barrows for their own dead. There were so many. Even the Spydbanen lords had fallen, though men whispered there was not a mark on them. So many cairns. Yet there was always more troll to go around.

They are now calling that promontory Trollhruga, by which I think they mean “troll-heap.”

But there was one troll who hadn’t perished from the sun, and one trollchangeling who had never feared it.

“Hello, Rubblewrack,” said Inga as I climbed down from her back.

“Hello, Inga Peersdatter,” said Rubblewrack, still chained. “Would that I could destroy you, and Princess Alfhild there. Your existence mocks mine.”

“There’s been too much destruction,” Inga said. “Listen! You and I may be the only trollish folk left in a thousand miles.”

“I have no troll blood! I am a mockery. Look at us! An uldra who took the shape of a troll. A troll raised as a Swanling human. A human raised as a haughty uldra. There is no true place for us.”

I surprised myself by moving into the middle of them all. I spoke. “There is a true place for us. It is with each other. I am human, raised human, yet many would consider me broken in mind. But I will not give up. Nor should any of you. Broken we may be, in a broken world—the middle world, between the godly and the hellish. But we can work together and put a little of it back together.”

I took Inga’s hand, placed it on Alfhild’s, and put both of theirs together on Rubblewrack’s. “Make this promise. Not to kill one another for a year. Give yourselves that long to become friends. Or if not friends, then peoplewho- will-not-kill-each-other.”

“Is that a word?” Alfhild sniffed.

“It should be,” Inga said. “I agree. What about you two?”

“Very well,” Rubblewrack said. “A year.”

“At best,” Alfhild said, “I will indeed become
people-who-will-not-killeach- other
. I think the uldra would do well to stay out of human business. But . . . we will see.”

I asked Walking Stick to undo the chains. He consulted Squire Everart, who looked suspicious but in the end gave his consent.

Together we joined the procession of rafts the army was making to take us to the monastery on the cold mountain, there in the middle of our isles.

For this reason, when Inga and I make our final book of stories, I will put this in the center. The stories should speak for themselves. The end is already written. But sometimes it’s good to know why people put stories together, why we need them so much. So we can meet in the middle.

CHAPTER 45

PEACE

Clifflion, Grand Khan of the Karvaks, looked with satisfaction upon the siege of Maratrace. These people, dwelling on the border between the Wheelgreen and the Efritstan desert, were said to revere both beauty and pain, and well could he see it, with their lovely adobe buildings amid the twisted towers made by the torment-worshipping Comprehenders. The Lady of Thorns, their young ruler, had a philosophy that braided the good and the bad in life, but Clifflion knew it was destined to be replaced by simple, clean Karvak rules. She and the other rulers would be purged, the population ravaged, and those who had useful skills taken as servants or slaves.

The Maratracians had good fighters, and they had magic—Clifflion’s army had been savaged by efrits and night angels and more disturbing things. The Grand Khan had long since put aside his scruples about retaliating with human sacrifices from among the captives. Indeed, their screams, greeting the purple dawn, had a certain music. Of course, unimaginative gods like Mother Earth and Father Sky had no love of such offerings, so he had to make them to such entities as his resourceful wife had made him aware of, the Herald of the Red Fountains, the Eye in Nightmares, or that which dwelled in the Pit Where Light Screams. Their services were even now in play. Above the city walls swirled heads severed from their bodies, singing sweetly eerie chants. A vast orb hovered above the largest tower, tendrils descending into windows, vaguely manlike shapes sliding gently up through the pulsing extensions to vanish into the eyelike mass. And now and then a warp in reality would open, dark like infinite space but with misty nebular teeth, to snap up one citizen or another. Clifflion sometimes wondered why Jewelwolf, to all reports, rarely employed these entities, preferring to let her husband practice the summonings. He also wondered why he never felt rested and could no longer remember his dreams.

When the strange, twisting shadow dropped out of the skies, Clifflion at first assumed it was something he had summoned, and so he paused upon his horse, squinting, raising his hand to forbid his bodyguard from loosing an arrow. Was it a mockskulk, a lostbeast, a reality scar?

He was disappointed to see it was only a magic carpet.

“You have my gratitude,” it said in the language of the Karvaks.

“How so?” the Grand Khan asked.

“Ultimately you are merely a pawn. But as a creature torn between good and evil, I have long sought a path in life. And now I have it, as a playing piece in the great game. You have my gratitude—for you are the first pawn I’ve removed.”

The voice was so chilling and yet so calm that Clifflion had no true sense of danger until the carpet engulfed him. Distant shouts of alarm reached his ears, but these did not prevent him from knowing sleep at last.

CHAPTER 46

SUMMIT

What Joy decided to call a “summit meeting” occurred one week after the battle at the Chained Strait, and one day after word came of the Grand Khan’s assassination. A rider had arrived bearing General Ironhorn’s message that he and his forces would withdraw to the continent, and that he would offer no battle if none were offered him. Steelfox had replied that when all the invasion force had either departed—or defected to Steelfox’s personal banner—Jewelwolf would be released.

Peace had come, but like many a peace, it was near to boiling into fresh conflict.

So Joy had invited them to the summit of the monastery’s mountain.

Here was a grotto just beneath a snowy peak, with little waterfalls of snowmelt from the fledgling summer. Standing in that peaceful place, Joy studied the Runemark upon her hand. It had not faded, though her dragonfueled powers had. Now she was just a pugilist with classical training. Yet it seemed the land still wanted her to play a role. Perhaps the dragons knew her now. Very well. She would decide for herself what it meant to be Runethane.

Meteor-Plum offered her a cup of tea.

“You don’t need to do this,” Joy said.

“It is my pleasure to serve tea to our guests,” he said. “It is my pleasure to do anything at all! By rights I should have ceased to exist. Yet by some miracle I now am corporeal. I have aches and pains! This tea scalded me! I am destined to become old and decrepit. Truly it is a time of wonders! Now I will leave you alone.”

The gathered leaders were Joy, Snow Pine, Steelfox, Corinna, Alfhild—and Hekla, lover of Huginn Sharpspear, robed in black, sent as a delegate from Oxiland.

Rubblewrack was an unofficial voice of trolldom. Eshe of the Fallen Swan was present as an observer for Kpalamaa. The team of Peersdatter and Jorgensdatter was there, Inga to keep the peace, Malin to record events.

“Well, here we are at last,” Snow Pine said, raising her tea, vapor rising from the cup. “Six leaders from East and from West, arranging the peace.”

Steelfox said, “Joy, where you see six leaders, I see five town-dwellers arrayed against a Karvak. Where you see East and West, I see nomad country ringed around by sea-going powers. We have hard matters to discuss.”

“Well,” Joy said, staring back at her, at the others, particularly Corinna and Alfhild, who’d so recently tried to kill her. “I see we have a lot of ground to cover.”

In the end no one wanted war. Not even when Steelfox announced her new khanate.

“I have made up my mind,” the Karvak princess said. “My father’s empire is in chaos. With the death of the Grand Khan we will have years of squabbling over succession and perhaps open war. But I want no part of that. I no longer wish to follow in my father’s footsteps. Yet to those Karvaks willing to join me, and to Northwing’s people, who’ve always stood by me, I have an obligation.” She made a fist. “So there will be a new realm, along the seas of the north. The Khanate of the Endless Ice. It will extend from Spydbanen to the Mirrored Sea, and beyond to the realm of the True People. It will be my realm, and I will guard it well.”

“You can’t simply carve Spydbanen away from us!” Corinna said.

“That’s Kantening country!” Hekla added.

“No longer,” Steelfox said. “Their jarldoms submitted willingly to the Karvaks, and I claim them. I think the surviving trolls will cooperate.”

Rubblewrack grumbled, “I think you’re right.”

“And,” Steelfox said, “Northwing is learning that the Vuos shamans in the farthest reaches of Spydbanen have much in common with the True people. An alliance seems only natural. No, respected Kantenings, much as you would like to see my people vanish, we are here to stay. In time you may be grateful. For my first enemies are likely to be fellow Karvaks.”

The rest was detail. The Karvaks would depart Svardmark and Oxiland. Alfhild announced the uldra would be disappearing from human affairs. Corinna’s standing as mightiest ruler of Svardmark was unchallenged, and Oxiland wanted a closer alliance, much as the idea pained Hekla. Corinna herself owed a great deal to Squire Everart and his peasant army. Much was going to change.

That led to Joy’s own announcement. “There is one more thing I would say. It is a thing Innocence Gaunt, Persimmon Gaunt, and Imago Bone have asked of me, and I owe them too much not to bring it to your attention. It is about slavery.”

“Thralldom?” Hekla said. “What of it?”

“It should end.”

“As I thought!” Corinna said. “You are imposing foreign ways on us. Soon you will have us kowtowing and reciting your Eastern classics morning to night. You should know, Runethane, that Soderland has led Kantenjord in diminishing slavery, and that process will continue.”