Archive of Our Own

-----------------------------------

Sing to us, O Muse, of that ingenious hero

who traveled far and wide

after she had sacked

that most famous town of Troy.

~~~~~~~~

In the before

When nothing yet was and all was darkness

The flame that dwelt in the heart of the world issued forth;

fire and rime conjoined.

...

From heavens came Hrimthursar

Whose forms were silver and gold

They looked upon disorder; nine rivers flowing

Fire they cast into the Sky, Water they separated from Stone.

Hrimthursar pulled their teeth and planted them in the earth,

And from them were enkindled the first Unnamed

Of the likeness of Hrimthursar but without lustre

Who were all alike in form and mind

And had no voices.

...

Old Mother looked out from her hiding place upon Hrimthursar

And the forms they had enkindled

And felt great pity.

Stole from Hrimthursar the Unnamed

By secret ways.

...

Old Mother plucked out eye, tongue, and organ

Imparted upon them; for she was multitudes and could not be diminished.

Voices they now had, eyes to see

Their forms she subdivided once, and then a thousand times more

So no two were identical in form and mind.

With voices they now had and minds to comprehend she spoke

And told them: "Take up names."

...

Hrimthursar looked upon the Named and were afraid

For they no longer obeyed their words.

Prepared war upon the people.

Old Mother told the Named to hide themselves

In the dark places of the world

From the coming desolation.

Some chose to stand beside her, for they were no longer

Of singular thought; and for this she was glad

...

Hrimthursar called down their thunder

Cracked the Sky; opened the earth and let flood

the whale-roads upon the land

Many were washed away; or surrounded by flames.

...

Old Mother weathered the star-fire of Hrimthursar

Virtue was in her heart; peerless warden

Swaying-spear in hand

She struck the neck of Hrimthursar

Blood flowed, muscle slipped bone

Never again would they trouble the Named;

Hrimthursar fled the world

...

Old Mother was spent; hard had she fought

Swaying spear laid to rest

"Peace reigns upon this world, chaos stilled

I appoint the mightiest among you to guide the Named

Inheritors of all before you

Now I take this road alone."

And so did Old Mother, wisest one

pass away into the night, sight unseen

Until the time when she returns

Swaying spear in hand

To bring victory to the Named

By the sign of Fire and Rime.

-From the Woluspa, the primary saga of the vrykul peoples (wryjkul, meaning "Named") concerning the creation of the world, the coming of Hrimthursar, their liberation by Old Mother, and the defeat of Hrimthursar.

~~~~~~~

Sandraudiga was the first

Found the secret of Old Mother's Making

From her born Gerdr, Grofn, and Hel

Consubstantial with her and her alone

Like her they had no need of aid

Could spin the wheel by will alone.

…

Sandraudiga,

Slew Bragi, High Jarl of all Named

"I am armor-breaker and jaw-ripper

Throat-tearer and blood-gusher;

Eater of the dead and of the living alike

We alone honor the glory of Old Mother, peerless foe-killer

Who led the Named from bondage

All who would be Dauntless

And learn the secret of Old Mother's making

Follow me."

…

When at last they had come to a high place

Nestled nearly in reach of the firmament above

From which they could see the country all around

Sandraudiga declared it Hyldnyr,

And upon that spot they built a mighty hall

In which the Dauntless would endure

Until the End of Days

And the return of Old Mother

And the final winter

And the dissolution of this world

And the coming of the next.

-From The Lay of Sandraudiga, the primary saga of the wryjkul people who call themselves the Dauntless and are without men.

~~~~~~~

1.

She is blue.

She is glacier-blue, pack-ice blue. She is blue the way people believe bodies turn blue when they die of the cold. That is not true. For one thing, her kind cannot die of the cold; secondly, when the southron bodies die, they go pale.

She is waiting with her kindred. They are all blue. Icicles hang like pine lichen from their noses, ears, helms. Their eyes are white on white. They are twice as tall as any southron and much stronger.

They are hiding inside a snowbank on a rise above a fortress before the pines. The forest surrounds the field where the fortress has gone up. High wooden palisades surrounding a stone keep the southrons have made. Three hundred yards of open ground on every side.

The southrons are pink and green and brown and more. Some of their shapes seem familiar to her, others are new. Humans. Orcs. Others. The southrons have come from across the sea to fight the man who calls himself King of the Dead.

The North has fought them both.

In the field before the fort outside of the range of arrows and muskets the Dauntless have assembled, her kindred. They are hewing wide ladders out of the trees. All the clans of Hyldnyr have come together for this occasion, pushing down out of the mountains and into the river-lands to ransack the southron lines. The southrons claim all wrjykul are servants of the Dead King; this, more than the invasion itself, insults the Dauntless.

The bearskins in their namesakes are working themselves into the battle-frenzy, punching, shouting; they quaff their vile alcohol which they claim makes them invulnerable.

She hides beneath the snow. Her name is Sygemund, daughter of Var.

From the assembled steps out Jarl Angrboda, who has been elected marshal of this campaign. She is taller and broader than all the rest; her armor black and her shadow long upon the snow, huge and harsh she towers above all others. Her face is hard and stone-carven and her blonde hair falls feathered around her face. The assembled Dauntless fall silent, and as she speaks they stamp and clatter their weapons and offer reply in the hiss-howl chant which has lost its original meaning; now only an invocation calling fortune to favor them, and disaster to befall their enemies.

"Before you is a cage. What cowers in that cage?" Her voice is strong and clear and without vibrato.

"Southrons!"

"For five seasons they have helped themselves to the spoils of the North. For five seasons they have struggled against the Dead King. But the North has rebuked them." 

"How, how, how, how--" they chant and stamp. 

"Who alone drove the dead from the mountains?"

"How, how, how, how--"

"Who alone stood against the giants, and cast them down from the heights?"

"How, how, how, how--"

"Who alone fought a hundred years against the spiders? Who drove them to the shore and fed them to the sea?"

"How, how, how, how--"

"Who are these southrons to believe they could stand against the Named?"

"How, how, how, how--"

"Who are the Dauntless?"

"How, how, how, how--"

"Who are the Dauntless!?"

"How, how, how, how--!"

"WHO ARE THE DAUNTLESS!?"

"How, how, how, how, how, how--!"

In the forest the drummers and pipers strike up the tune. The assembled clans fan out in overlapping lines. It looks like bedlam, but they have practiced this before, have practiced for millennia. The signal is given--just a gesture--and it goes down the line and from out of the masses push the shield-pods. Twelve in each pack, shields interlocked, huge and black with fireproof hides. They plunge across the snow field.

They are at the wall before the muskets can reload. The pods shuffle, collapse and expand: those closest to the walls stand tall with shields above their heads, the next group kneel and present theirs, and the last crouch low and sling them on their backs. Bearskins burst from the depths of each pod as they shift and they are up the makeshift stairs and over the wall; a dozen of them turning the battlements into mayhem.

Sygemund leaps the snowbank holding one side of the ladder they hid there the night before. From the main lines come the rest of the ladders, and yet more from the trees opposite. The rest of the bearskins take the shield-stairs; the first dozen are in the yard and lousy with arrows, but they fight on. Sygemund is first up the ladder. She leaps the palisade and is met by a man who tries to break her knee with a blow of his hammer, but she drives her spear down the neck of his armor and he dies there.

The first squads are over the wall and into the yard to join the bearskins. Three of the great-shields are passed over, and they leap down by the gate and cover a woman as she kills a soldier and winches up the gate. Those ordered to enter that way are sprinting through before it is halfway raised, and the rest of the masses stream inward behind them.

Walking among them is Angrboda, the only one who walks. She wears her helm in the likeness of Old Mother, horned and featureless save for the embossment of a single great eye. Her retainer carries by her side something massive in thick swaddling. She sees the commander of the southrons, a bull-man in shining armor, and he sees her.

Her retainer presents the handle and she pulls; the swaddling falls away and she holds her greatclub: eight feet of meteor steel plundered from the storehouses of Hrimthursar, wrapped tight with hundreds of antlers and jaw bones, wrapped so thick that the bluegrey steel is invisible beneath the whiteness gone redbrown from stains. A thick cloud of flies rise up from the recesses of the greatclub. They stride out to meet one another in the center of the yard as yet more Dauntless stream into the fortress.

The bull-man swings and she blocks; he swings again and she steps away. She is nimble, Angrboda, twirling the greatclub one, two, three times round herself in figure-eights, confounding the bull. It is no heavier to her than a branch. She is Dauntless, daunting. Behind her helm she is inscrutable. Once more the bull swings and she twists away and knees him hard and sweeps the greatclub low at his shin. The jaws and antlers clatter. She passes the greatclub round her back and strikes his shield-arm hard enough to stun it for a moment; she passes it again and he raises his sword to block the swing, but she drives the pommel into his brow. He staggers back. She brings the greatclub up and over and it drives him to the ground. She brings it down again, and his armor buckles and he is breaking up inside. The last blow she delivers to his skull, because it must be marred, because all southron things must be marred, and when her huscarls see this they let out a mighty roar, and the bearskins take up the howl in the midst of their besieging those still alive within the keep, and all the Dauntless cry out in glory and the defenders know they are without hope.

The survivors they eat.

2.

That was during the war.

3.

The war ended when the southrons destroyed the Dead King. The Named had fought them both, the animate dead and the southrons, and now the dead were destroyed and their destroyers fled as fast as their ships could carry them. In those months of upheaval following the fall of the King, Angrboda had taken them west to the high glacial escarpment where the dead army had mustered to see those still left. A host of hosts gone deaf and mute. Standing stock still in the glare. Frozen, forever.

Some of the women rolled boulders down the hillside at them for sport, but grew bored when it became clear that no reaction would come of those lifeless fronds now sealed in place for all time. They had been the adversary; now, they were less than nothing.

Angrboda said only: "The North has consumed them."

4.

The two of them went silently down the mountainside and across the valley under an aurora borealis that glimmered green all across the sky above them.

She was called Sygemund once, when fighting with the southrons began in earnest. She was called Half-Dead now. Only two others still called her Sygemund.

Qalpalik was wheezing, but not out of frustration. She was always breathy. Qalpalik came to them in the closing years of the war, an outcast from the whale-hunters that dwelled on the distant ice flows to the northeast. She was not Dauntless by birth, but the Dauntless welcomed all women who would turn away from the rest of the Named who did not honor Old Mother. What she did to earn her exile she did not share, and was not asked. She stared with blank white eyes from behind a lank and greasy mop of dark black hair. Her teeth were too numerous and her mouth was too wide. Her nose weirdly blunted and broken years earlier, leaving it flattened, like two slots. Her appearance recalled something dredged up from deep, dark water. She stank and muttered and spat and contained an unmeasurable yet unmistakable reserve of violence within her. Even the bearskins would have no part of her, though when brought to war she was deployed alongside them and fought just as ferociously. When it became clear her propensity for insults and epithets was nearly reflexive, none would entreat with her. She writhed at all times, body coiled.

"Where are we going?" she demanded. When she spoke it was like croaking.

"First, we're getting away from Hyldnyr."

"Where then?"

"South. To find someone. Who can help us.”

Sygemund was called Half-Dead now because she had been trapped in a burning southron citadel a year before the southrons brought low the Dead King. A roof collapsed on her. The clan deemed her missing and moved on. Three days later she pulled herself out and could not remember who she was. She wandered amnesiac across the southern flats until she came across a group of Lowland Named who were thankfully still friends of the Dauntless then. The fire left her skull completely hairless. Her whole head was covered in waxen whorls.

When at last she returned to Hyldnyr and greeted her kindred they thought she was one of the dead. Seers and doctors were called upon to prove that she was alive, and they vouched that she was. Her memory returned soon after. But still they called her Half-Dead, and those who had been her friends became distrustful of her, and she was alone.

But there was Qalpalik, the whaler, who, seeing their shared otherness, latched onto Sygemund, and for lack of all else, Sygemund had become cordial with her, predicating what would later transpire.

"No." Qalpalik stopped. She sat down. "Tell me where we are going."

"I can't."

"You don’t know where we going."

Sygemund unslung her pack and sat down. "Why'd you come?"

"You asked me."

"If she catches us, you'll die, too."

Qalpalik sneered. Her face was taut and sinewy. Still she dressed in the manner of her upbringing, seal fur and minke whale-hide that concealed her big arms and big hands that Sygemund once watched strangle one of the gigantic cats some southron rode in the manner of horses. "Angrboda is a rancid shit." She twisted the grip of her spear, a single piece of polished whale bone made hard as steel by methods unknown to to the mainland.

"Angrboda is my jarl. Yours, too."

"Not my jarl. I pledged only to obey the clan in wartime. It is no longer wartime."

Sygemund rubbed her head. The pattern still felt strange. She was taller than Qalpalik, and broader, though not as broad as she had once been; the citadel had taken not only her hair but also her appetite, and she ate little more than she required to sustain herself. She wore her scouting leathers, a lamellar hauberk she’d filched in the bunk hall, and a hooded hide coat. She had with her a longsword and what rations she could scrounge and flint and nothing else. From the valley floor they could faintly see the watch-fires of the towers that encircled the Dauntless lands of Hyldnyr miles above them.

"They do not chase with torches yet.”

"They wouldn't light any. With any luck they won't know we've been gone until morning."

Qalpalik stood, hitching up her belt. "We go then, with speed."

"You didn’t answer my question. Why did you choose to come with me?"

"What, you think I plan to sell you out to the jarl?"

Sygemund shrugged. "Would you?"

Qalpalik rolled her neck and smiled her wide smile. "When Angrboda comes after us, Sygemund--promise--you let me kill her."

5.

They ran for days, tireless, without food. They had little need of water and less of nourishment by their nature. They passed unmolested through the holdings of lesser clans, the buffer zone the Dauntless had built around themselves by friendship and intimidation which had helped them become the most powerful hegemony among the Highland Named. There were eight Dauntless clans altogether, three-thousand strong--five hundred had perished or disappeared in the war--all occupying the fortress-city of Hyldnyr and the surrounding heights. Angrboda would give chase, Sygemund was sure. The matron council--the sixteen old grandmothers who stood outside clan affairs and held judicial oversight--would not intervene in a desertion by two malcontents. Not when they'd run from Angrboda. The Dauntless had no High Jarl, as did the Lowland Named of the south, or the lesser Highland Named of the west--but if there was any jarl who was worried about above all others, it was Angrboda.

If they were pursued, it was late in coming. But still they did not slow--they spoke little as they stormed another week down out of the mountains, following the glaciers. They slept seated back to back for a few hours each night, exposed to the elements. They were Highland Named, and Dauntless, and had no need of bivouac or protection. Their breath left them as cold as the wind and traced no vapor or condensation before their lips.

They made the treeline where krummholz grew twisted and scabrous in the wind. The lobe of a glacier spilled down onto a white-brown plain, and down in its undulations they found their first sign of southron.

There were seventeen in total. They had been walking in a line when a blizzard came. They were waist-high in it when they froze. Sygemund scrutinized the line.

"There's no sign of any of them circling around one another."

"So?" Qalpalik jabbed at one with the butt of her spear.

"So they all just slowed, and stopped. Polite, almost."

Qalpalik tried to remove the helmet of one. It was frozen. When she wrenched it free the head came with it.

"Ha!" she bit into the neck, spat it out, and threw the head away. "No taste."

"Let's go."

Qalpalik ignored her, and began to kick the heads off. She went down the line and kicked every one of them as hard as she could, shattering some, sending others flying. Sygemund waited. When Qalpalik had finished she removed her hood and pushed back her hair and stood laughing breathlessly at the streaks of blue-red brushstrokes spread across the snow and the heads stopped at the ends of them.

"What was the point of that?" Sygemund said.

Qalpalik looked at her with a crimped expression. "I needed to see what would happen."

6.

They pushed on into alpine greenery, fields of willowherb and cowberry and milkwort, blue and white and purple clinging to the rocky ground.The way south out of the mountains was terraced steppes, each many miles wide, so that it always seemed like they were reaching a cliff that dropped off to the tundra below, only to find another steppe below them, on and on. The skies were overcast and threatened rain that would not come.

Qalpalik was withdrawn and seemed bored of the whole affair for lack of stimulation. She had been on a sort of probationary standing within the clan by the time of their departure: her constant aggrievements had boiled over into a real fight with a hot-headed young huscarl from another Dauntless clan who, it turned out, was a jarl’s daughter. Qalpalik had broken the girl's leg in such a manner that she would never walk without a limp.

Previously her mischief had been confined to the harassment of animals, the burning of cast-off material, and the rumored sabotage of certain architecture and crafts around Hyldnyr, in addition to her constant haranguing of anyone within earshot. The general unease inspired by the uncleanly whaler who lingered vulture-like at the edges of public life came to a head. The pointed nature of the girl's injury confirmed the suspicions of many: that Qalpalik was more trouble than she was worth. Pending an inquiry by the matron council, huscarls had been openly shadowing her movements through Hyldnyr. Their conduct was less that of jailers than of watchwomen corralling a stray animal for the public well-being.

The day before they fled Hyldnyr, Qalpalik had come to Sygemund in the clan's messhall.

"I am being followed," she said, crab-walking up beside her. It was not dining hours, and they were alone; Sygemund was eating a piece of jerky and stared off into the middle distance.

"So everyone has noticed."

"Why do Angrboda's dogs follow me?"

"You broke a jarldottir’s leg."

Qalpalik sat down across from her. "That girl was shit-brained."

"You hobbled her for life. On purpose."

Qalpalik scratched at the table with her thumbnail. "They follow me everywhere. You, speak to her."

"Angrboda is all done speaking to me." 

Qalpalik cocked her head. "What did you do?"

Sygemund leaned across the table and whispered, "Would you leave Hyldnyr with me if I asked you?"

Qalpalik sucked in through her teeth. "Yes."

"Tonight. Down by the tarn, below the south road. Don't let them see you go."

Sygemund stood up and walked out of the mess. Qalpalik finished the jerky she'd left behind.

7.

Two years after they first fought the Dead:

She was alone, a dozen miles from the main force, winnowing south along the concourse of a frozen river. They had been down out of the mountains fighting the dead. She was scouting for a new and unknown enemy.

They learned from the lesser Named that foreign armies had come across the sea to make war upon the Dead King. That the High Jarl of the Lowland Named had made treaty with the Dead King to oppose them. Angrboda called this a coward's betrayal.

They slew the Lowland Named they learned this from, and staked them along the road with their tongues pulled through the bottoms of their jaws. "Dead King Slaves," the Dauntless wrote on wood, which they strung about their necks.

She walked slowly beneath a protrusion of limestone that hung in a long eave above the river. She saw them before she heard them, and was surprised by this.

"Don't move," a voice said from above the limestone. A woman's voice; slightly muffled. On the far shore, five strange creatures pointed sticks at her. Alien things. "Or you'll be shot."

She stayed still. "They are not close."

"They're good shots. Believe you, me," the voice replied.

"Black-powder guns."

"I didn't think you frosties had firearms."

"We know of them. They're unreliable."

"The kind your warm-blooded cousins have tried to make, yes. You'll find ours are of a better fashion."

The wind whipped up and the snowdust along the frozen river began to carry, tidelike, around her feet.

"How fast can they reload?"

"Fast."

"There are only five of them."

"Five to ten shots before you get to the other side. And they do have personal weapons, mind you."

"I've been shot."

"With arrows, probably." She paused. "I know your kind don't die all that quick. I've seen the way you blue ones bleed. Slow, like tar. You'll kill some of them, but they'll kill you. And I might have more than five."

"You might not."

She heard movement above the limestone, voices whispering.

"If you wanted me killed, you wouldn't have bothered speaking," Sygemund said.

"Now she gets it."

"So, talk."

There was a shower of pebbles and a person landed in front of her. A small southron, dark-skinned, with a sheaf of black hair, wearing a brown-grey overcoat.

"I am Sergeant Livilla of Joint Operations Task Command."

"Sygemund, of clan Gurtr, of the Dauntless."

"Dauntless--the all-woman nation, correct? How exactly do you do that?"

She thought about it for a moment. "One wills it, and one does."

"Incredible. But that's not why I'm talking to you."

"What, then?"

Livilla smiled. "How would you like to help me finish this war as soon as possible?"

8.

As they came off the steppes into the tundra, the skies cleared. Something about the air and the mountains behind them filled Sygemund with foreboding, and they pushed on and across the white-brown plain, winding around kettle-ponds of water that stretched out in every direction. Some as small as a wheel, some as wide as lakes, clear and reflective, like blots of dye dropped onto the plain. On the afternoon of the third day among the kettles they saw a heap on the horizon, and when they came closer they saw that it was lone mammoth that had died beside a kettle. A saddle lay off to one side; whoever had owned it--or some other person--had gutted it long ago, and the flaps of skin upon its ribs flapped in the wind like a tarpaulin.

They stood staring at it.

"Want to try kicking its head, too?" Sygemund said.

"No," Qalpalik replied. "It is no longer a happening."

They went on.

9.

Two months after first contact with the Dead:

They had fought them twice already; heard word from the other clans that the Dead moved east from the uninhabitable escarpment they called "Skrael." An ugly rumor that Clan Ymrim had pledged themselves to this new enemy. Chatter from a group of tvanka they passed that fog moved along the southern tundra and into the fjordlands, and with it black ships and winged things unnatural flying in the night. Angrboda wanted answers. She ordered the next batch taken alive, or as alive as could be.

They stood in a ravine at the base of a long-dead volcano powdered over, sluices of ice forming sheets along the walls. They had ambushed a column of the Dead and smashed their bodies apart; the more pious women who especially viewed them as an affront to Old Mother's tally-keeping made sure they were battered beyond recognition. They had learned that most Dead were mindless, except for the ones they'd taken to calling "in-betweens"--like the man in dark armor they saved for last.

He was chalk white and hollow-faced. He stood surrounded by fifty women--the shortest of whom was twice his height--arranged in circles around the ravine.

"It is not afraid," someone said.

"It has been trained to ignore emotions," Angrboda said, stepping out of the press. "It is smarter than its slaves."

"I am beyond emotion," the man said, his voice clear and proud and cold. He looked into Angrboda's eyes. "I am the will of the King."

"Yes," Angrboda said, almost genially, sitting on a chunk of ice facing the man. She flicked her thumb and two Dauntless pushed the man to his knees. "Tell me about this Dead King."

"His Highness offers immortality to those found worthy. You--all of you," he said, looking over the women, "may yet be found worthy."

Angrboda chuckled. "Immortality? There is no such thing as immortality."

"I have gone beyond death in the service of my King. He is inevitable."

"Why have you come here?" Angrboda said, sounding bored. "Why has this southron conjurer of puppets come to these lands that will swallow him whole?"

"He is King Everlasting!"

"He is King of Nothing, and no-one," Angrboda said. "We are the Dauntless. We have no King. How old is this fool king who comes from across the sea? He is not of this land. Ten thousand lifetimes the Named have been tested, and ten thousand lifetimes we have endured."

"Already the wise among you have vowed themselves to him," the man said, "Already, they see the glory of the gifts he can offer."

"Many seasons I have laid low the enemies of Old Mother," Angrboda said, rising up, now towering over him, enveloping him in shadow. "You are not immortal. Look around you," she said, indicating the remains of his retinue. "This not-death--this immortality--is a lie. You delay that what none can escape."

"Slay me then!" he demanded, "Slay me, and another will take my place. We will not stop."

"You and your King are a mistake, belched upon these shores. You have been sent to test not our might, but our patience." She turned to the clan. "I have fought giants! I have fought the slaves of Hrimthursar! What mockery brings a pauper king and his flock of rotting corpses to the domain of the Named?"

The Dauntless chanted assent.

"The King will destroy every one you," the man spat.

Angrboda knelt down before him. Sygemund had never seen such contempt written across her face. "The North will consume him, first." She reached out and crushed his head in her hand.

10.

The tundra ended abruptly; there it was, and suddenly it was not. They passed over a promontory and into a conflux of hills, through low juniper forests that obscured their view and had them scrambling through thin burns and murky brushwood.

On the second morning they were confronted by the dessicated exoskeleton of some thing made by the Dead King's slaves. Whatever it was, it had been large, and many-limbed; it had died--or rather, died once more--alone in the middle of a hemlock boscage and rotted away at great speed.

"There'll be a southron encampment nearby--or a whole base," Sygemund said. She drew her longsword. "Quietly."

South of the exoskeleton they discovered that they were on the very northern lip of the wastes. The bone-lands. There at the edge of the frozen plains they saw a smoldering southron fortress-town behind high walls.

"We'll go around," Sygemund said, but Qalpalik was already ambling toward it.

"Go on then. I go see."

"It could be dangerous."

"Then stay here," she said, cantering down the slope.

"Old Mother's gash," Sygemund said, following her.

The southrons were an amalgam. Sygemund knew they were loosely congregated in two separate factions that were wracked by infighting. They had warred with each other before, had come north chasing the pauper King and his dead puppets, hostilities still simmering between them.

The fortress-town had been half of each, and so the seeds had been sown. Sygemund could tell. The gates were merely ajar, not blown open as though by siege, and southrons locked in combat with one another lay dead around it. She slipped through the gates, sword first.

She saw that the town was divided, the buildings of either side reflecting the sensibilities of each faction, and the ground was littered further with southron. Qalpalik was there, her spear resting upon her shoulder, crouching forward as though prepared to spring.

"What is it?" she whispered. Qalpalik flickered her spear just barely, and Sygemund's gaze followed it to what had startled the whaler so.

A figure was arranging the bodies in the yard. Dozens of them, row by row. Their arms she crossed reverently and their eyes she closed. She was southron and human, or had once been southron and human; now, she was something else. She wore a sort of fishmonger's apron, and her hands and feet were black with soot. She was raggedy-man thin and white as chalk, with still-whiter hair clinging stuck-on like doll’s hair to her skull, and she wore a mask: rust-green and decorated with a symbol, like a cave painting of a bird.

"Hello there!" she called, waving. "Morning, morning."

Sygemund slid into stance beside Qalpalik. The woman kept on at her work. The battle had  taken place no more than three days past; bodies hung across fences and sagged in open doors. From a tree hung a dozen bodies more decayed than the rest. Even older bodies in a ditch. Whatever had sparked it all was now unidentifiable among the disaster. Everything around them had been reduced to rubble. Organic and inorganic. Irreducible chunks. Smoke still trailed weakly through the highest windows of the keeps.

"Come up,” the woman said. Her voice was high and fluttery. “I don't bite."

"She's Dead," Qalpalik said.

"Not-Alive, my dear," the woman said. "Dead's relative."

"Are you southron? Servant of the Dead King?" Sygemund said.

“Well these distinctions don’t matter much now, do they?”

“Answer!” Qalpalik snarled.

"What do you girls think of all this?" the woman said, indicating the slain. "I'm just cataloging them. Putting them in order. You have to wonder--will all of this go away when the last ship leaves? Was all of this... just a figment of our imaginations?"

"Back away," Sygemund whispered to Qalpalik.

"You know what I think?" the woman said, still sifting through the bodies. "I think he was never dead. The King, that is. I think he feared death. Because of what he discovered. That the dead can be returned. Most of us were brought back dumb and deaf, just automatons--but the thinking ones? Dead, and then snap!" She clapped her hands. "Returned. You know what I saw, in-between? Nothing. You ask the rest of them--nothing. You ask the ones in charge and oh!--they said the 'trauma of reassessment' had wiped clean our memories of the afterlife. The torment of the other side."

Qalpalik's shoulders rolled as though she was preparing action, but Sygemund stilled her with a hand on her shoulder, still inching back. "Did you do all this?" she asked.

"You flatter me, dear. I'm just setting them straight." She pointed at a wide cesspit on the far side of the yard the size of a pond. It was filled with thick brown sludge. Fighting southrons had fallen into it and died, the morass locking them in place like amber. "See that? They used to burn everything in those pits. Bodies, poison, gunpowder, shit and piss, metal, slag--they just covered it in oil and let it burn. Breathing in the fumes of it, day in, day out. The ones who made it out of here will go home across the sea, and they'll cough and cough until they die. Killing themselves in the middle of a war."

"She's dead," Qalpalik said again.

"You two are Dauntless," the woman replied. "I can tell. Not like the rest of those vrykul. Excuse me, wryjkul. Not at all."

"What is your name?" Sygemund said.

"I'm nobody. You, her, me--we're all just waiting. I saw it. I know, now. He was never dead. None of us have ever died. We're just cheap impersonations. Only the dead are dead. And they aren't coming back."

Qalpalik surged forward. "What is behind that mask?" she roared. The woman stood impassively before the charge. Sygemund stood transfixed; could not reach her fast enough, could not look away.

Qalpalik ran the woman through. She drove the spear through her ribcage and then drove the spear-point into the ground behind her. The woman sagged, arms lolling, head back. Qalpalik ripped the mask from the woman's face.

There was no face. There was a hole, rotted at the edges, and it gave way to blackness. A wound like a doorway. Qalpalik made a choking noise and stamped her foot down on the woman's chest, driving her off the spear. She took five quick steps back. The woman did not stir. Both Dauntless stood side by side, weapons raised.

"Get what you wanted?" Sygemund said quietly.

"That was not..." Qalpalik trailed off.

"Are you satisfied? Damn you, are you satisfied?"

"She gave me a knowing," she said, looking down at the woman's remains. Her voice fearful in a way Sygemund had not before heard. "That is enough."

They did not take their eyes from the faceless form as they left the town and closed the gate behind them.

11.

They migrated east, following basalt ridges shot up here and there across the bone-lands, keeping in the shadow of the rocks. Day after day upon the vast whiteness of the waste. On clear days the glare off the ice was so bright they could only put up their hoods and trudge downcast. As Sygemund was left-handed and Qalpalik right, they walked with dominant side-by-side, so that they would not drift from their direction as they went, often with eyes shut to the sickening brightness. At night they roamed beneath aurora borealis that stretched across the whole dome of the sky in bluegold ribbons. The roads, the stories said, of those heroes fallen who now roamed the heavens awaiting Old Mother's return.

On the fifth day the wind picked up and great spirals of ice dust rose off the wastes and encrusted their clothing; when night fell the wind became a blizzard of foul temperament that seemed called up solely to resist their progress. They wrapped themselves in their coats and hunkered down in fetal positions.

When morning broke, a drift had formed six feet high around them. They shook free and dusted themselves and continued on.

The snow lived in dunes upon the bone-lands, a fact which had confounded both the Dead and the southrons during the war and sent to their ends more of them than any other region of the North. They saw sign of southron all across the wastes as they proceeded east. Another frozen van, this time, orcs; the first of them frozen to his knees, the second to his waist, the third merely a head and shoulders, the fourth only a shadow in a vast snow dune, so that they all looked like the afterimages of a single man coming from inside the whiteness. They skirted the edges of a huge battlefield, bones and armor banded in translucent ice that told them it had been three seasons or more since it had transpired.

 Most outlandish of all was the catapult. It was the size of a small house, armor-plated and adorned in the holy golden eagle, believed to be the chief deity of the southrons called humans. Blue banners hung plump and frozen from it. They'd seen such weapons before, had come under fire from them before. The whole contraption was a kind of wheeled chute which propelled a projectile by explosion.

It had been driven onto the wastes and there it had stayed. Four southron huddled near the furnace compartment, frozen so tightly that when Sygemund pushed them with her foot they wobbled as one. Heavy ropes had been attached to the front of the machine as though some effort had been made to pull it.

Qalpalik climbed onto the top of the chute. "Why is this out here?"

"Probably they were ordered to bring it someplace, and didn't make it."

"Southrons too dumb to know they would freeze?" she said, fiddling with her belt.

"Whoever gave the order must have told them they'd be fine. Or scared them into it." She heard a pattering noise and looked up to see a dark stream running down the chute. "You'll lose your balance doing that up there."

"Get up here and lend me your piss. Thaw this out. See if it will fire."

"You're full of piss. Should be more than enough," Sygemund said, stepping off the furnace platform and proceeding on across the snow.

"Come up here and start pissing!" Qalpalik howled. When Sygemund showed no signs of returning, the whale-hunter scuttled down the catapult and out across the ice, holding her spear in one hand and her pants in the other.

12.

They reached the low, foggy mountains that held back the wastes from the east. They crossed one of the great roads that Hrimthursar's slaves built in the before and began to follow a series of deep valleys until Sygemund turned from the trail and started up into the heights.

"Wrong way," Qalpalik said.

"I know someone who lives around here. She can offer us some shelter."

"Should not wait."

"These mountains were thick with southron in the war and are still thick with their leavings. If you want to cross them alone, go ahead."

Qalpalik muttered something and pulled her furs up over her face. They were in the shadow of a lonesome peak driven up out of the line like a dark fingernail. They moved diagonal up the snowpack and through a treeline of alpine spruce and white birch, doubling back once at Qalpalik's insistence to plant a false trail of footprints in their wake. The sun had reached its most prominent point in the sky behind a foam-grey overcast that made the land around them appear dull and worried at the edges.

Near a sliver of a brook they were startled by a commotion and ducked under  the snow-covered eave of a spruce only to watch a herd of rangy shoveltusk elk jog past. They waited a little while longer to see if anything was in pursuit, and when nothing materialized, they continued up the peak.

They spent the night beneath the eave of a fallen evergreen and the sky let loose with a steady snow that made the night brighter than it seemed. In the southwest they saw vaguely the smoketrails of fires burning. The southron had come with settlers who had attempted in vain to embed themselves upon the land and were met with metal and fire for their efforts.

The next night they waited in an overgrown ditch beside a small stream, and in the darkness heard some great winged thing flap overhead that was gone come morning.

They ran further and ate sparingly of their few rations, and after a time came to the heart of those low mountains. Sygemund led the whaler through a forest of alder and emerged beside a strip of ground that looked like it had once been used for growing but had lain fallow for many years. Qalpalik jabbed her spear-end into the dirt.

"Nothing growing here," Sygemund said.

"I am hungry."

"We'll get some food if you can just keep yourself composed."

"Can we just kill them?" She pulled an obscene face the sort a child might pull when describing something gross, eyes screwed-up, tongue out. "Take their food, and go."

"Uhepono is my friend. She was a friend of my mother's, too. Conduct yourself like a reasonable bastard, and we'll get fed."

"Reasonable?" Qalpalik barked, sounding taken aback.

"That means don't curse. Don't scratch yourself impolitely. Don't make idle threats and taunts the way you do."

Qalpalik tipped her head back. "I don't understand."

"Yes you do. Let's go."

They walked another mile or more across a slope where an avalanche had discharged a long sweep of rubble, and back along the mountain's eastern face into a depression shaded by the treeline.

Sygemund pointed out the inkblack smear of a cave opening some twenty feet high and less than half across that looked like nothing more than a shadow. Qalpalik began to stride forward but Sygemund grabbed her by the arm.

"Let go--"

"Wait. Don't go any closer."

"Why?"

"We wait until she invites us in."

Qalpalik snorted and crossed her arms.

"Uhepono," Sygemund said, her voice loud enough to echo off of the rocks. They waited.

The voice responded without any indication of anyone having moved within, as though the voice had been waiting there, or the cave itself was speaking. "Is that you, Sygemund?" It was a subdued voice that seemed to cover a deep and brasslike reverb.

"Yes."

"You look different."

"A roof fell on me."

"Who is the other one?"

She was interrupted before she could reply: "She is Qalpalik!"

"Let me talk--" Sygemund hissed.

"Qalpalik?" the voice said. "She is a whale-hunter."

"Yes, Uhepono."

"Will she cause any trouble?"

"No, Uhepono."

"I want her word, Sygemund. Qalpalik, will you be a good guest in my house?"

Qalpalik squirmed on the spot, bouncing on the balls of her feet. "Fine."

"Well now," Sygemund said.

"Come in."

They went in, Sygemund first. The cave was blacker still, and they moved by guiding themselves along the wall. The tunnel twisted back and forth, turned sharply to the right. "Left up ahead," they heard the voice say. They made a sharp turn and felt a slight draft coming from somewhere as the tunnel sloped upward.

"Where are we being led?" Qalpalik whispered. "I will not be killed in darkness."

All at once the tunnel banked once more and opened up into a vault filled with firelight.

"Ah, fuck," Qalpalik said.

Reclining against the back wall was a magnataur of such volume it seemed impossible to believe she could have gotten there from the cave mouth. She was covered in a thick coat of greywhite fur except for her face and on the bottoms of her arms, her skin a kind of cobalt grey gone greyer with age. Below the waist she resembled nothing less than a wooly mammoth. Two horns extended tusklike from her temporal bones, and were they not cut and sanded to less than an arm's length, their girth made clear they would have been more than two meters long. Though her prodigious gut spoke to a fighter gone to seed, her arms were still large enough to be called tree trunks without embellishment. Her face was hard and flat and apelike.

"Sygemund," she said. Her voice spoke now deep and without restraint. "I'd stand up, but I've already stood, and I'd prefer not to be stoodened any more than I need."

"Are you in pain?"

"No. Just old."

They heard a shuffling. The far side of the cave was stacked with southron furniture for burning. Two faces peeked out from behind the pile.

"Come out, you two. They're fine."

Out shuffled two children in rags: a tvanka girl, gangly, with wide horns, and a Drakkari troll boy, not old enough for tusks, even thinner than his counterpart. They eyed the visitors with severe apprehension.

"You didn't tell me you had twins."

"Funny. No, just a few stragglers I picked up." She turned to the children. "Go fetch some rabbits from the storeroom and get them spitted for the fire; we have to feed our guests."

The children left by a smaller crevasse and came back swiftly with five rabbits, already skinned. They spit the rabbits over the fire and sat down side by side, in front of Uhepono.

"Now then," Uhepono said. "Either something terrible has happened at Hyldnyr to send the Dauntless fleeing--and I very much doubt that--or you did something that jarl of yours didn't like, so you ran."

"Angrboda believes I collaborated with the southrons during the war."

"Did you?" Uhepono asked. Sygemund felt Qalpalik's eyes practically rolling over in their sockets to look at her.

"No."

"Well, if you did, I wouldn't blame you. They came with halfway good intentions--some of them at least. Made a mess of everything and now they've just up and left."

"For a warmongering people, they seem to have little backbone for it."

Uhepono chuffed. "A fortnight ago, one of my spidery friends paid me a visit." The children bunched up their shoulders. "You've seen the Dead, out in the west?"

"Slowly rotting to the ice."

"She told me the southrons did something. To the Dead King. Didn't destroy him, that is. The ordinary way. Locked him up somehow. Put out his eyes and tongue and heart. Broke the strings to all his puppets. Just like that. Have you heard this?"

"We have heard the southrons did something peculiar, but not that." Sygemund rubbed her head. "We've heard little from the west since it ended. A lot of rumors."

"These are bad times. Hasn't been this bad since--well, you wouldn't remember when." She waved a hand. "This is what the southrons call victory."

"I've been all over this country," Sygemund spoke solemnly, "And I've seen nothing that resembles victory."

"Are you Dauntless?" the troll boy interrupted. His voice was high and crumbly. The tvanka girl hissed through her teeth and pushed down on the back of his hand.

"Yes," Sygemund said. The boy rocked on the spot.

"Well?" Uhepono said. "Go on. What have I taught you? If you have to ask something, ask it."

"Is it true you kidnap boys and keep them as slaves?" the boy blurted out.

Sygemund tried to speak, but Qalpalik interrupted. "Yes," she said, grinning, all her teeth bared. "We steal them from their beds, and pluck out their eyes, and put them in chains--"

"She's just trying to scare you," Sygemund barked. "We do not do this." Qalpalik laughed hoarsely.

"Then… how do you make more of you?" The girl said.

"Ones wills it, and so it happens."

The girl blinked furiously. "That sounds… very efficient."

"If we could all be so damn blessed," Uhepono said tartly.

The rabbits cooked through quickly and the children passed them out. Uhepono waved one away when the girl offered. "I'll go fetch myself something if I'm hungry."

Sygemund tried to eat with some level of composure, but Qalpalik tore her rabbit to bits and was crunching down the bones in under a minute. The children watched in a sort of rapt awe.

"Where do you intend to go?" Uhepono asked.

"There is--I know someone who can help us. Someone who can help us get away."

"There's nowhere in this land a woman like Angrboda won't chase you. You know that as well as I do."

"She doesn't know these lands as well as I do."

"Who do you think will help you? Is it a southron? They came calling for my allegiance once, you know. Told me that they would help should my activities be uncovered. Said they'd take me away across the sea if anyone came for my neck."

"Are you being chased? Is she gonna come here?" the troll boy quailed.

"No one's coming here, so hush up," Uhepono said, tapping the child very, very gently on the crown of his skull with one gigantic finger. "So, Sygemund, do you want this old woman's advice?"

"Wouldn't have come all this way just for the rabbit."

"When she catches up with you, either you'll have to kill her--and then all of Hyldnyr will have a price on your head until the end of your days--or you convince her what you say is true."

"She's already convinced herself of my guilt."

"Know that for a fact?"

Sygemund cleared her throat and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

"Look here," Uhepono said, "You know Angrboda--she loves her people, but not as much as she loves herself. Never have I known a woman so eager for fame. If you can find that place in the middle, you might be able to sneak your way out of this one."

"Or I can kill her," Qalpalik said.

Uhepono frowned. "Of all the sorts you could have picked to help you on this, Sygemund."

"What sort am I, grandmother?" Qalpalik asked sweetly. The children tucked themselves up against Uhepono's bulk. "Do you know of me? Do you know what is Qalpalik?"

"Leaving. Sygemund, if you have Angrboda's huscarls on your tail, I'd prefer you be scarce should they show up here. I can't exactly explain you away if you're present."

"Yes, Uhepono," Sygemund said, grabbing Qalpalik by the arm and hauling her to her feet.

"We thank you for your hospitality."

"You know the way. Old Mother watch over you."

Sygemund practically pushed Qalpalik into the tunnel. When they emerged in the grey light the whaler turned on her. "That old mammoth insults me."

"That old mammoth just fed you under her roof."

"She does not know Qalpalik!"

"That old mammoth knows more than you or I will never know. That old mammoth saved my mother's life! I wouldn't be alive if not for her!" Sygemund pushed her to the ground. She tensed, expecting explosive reaction. But Qalpalik only looked up at her with something like renewed curiosity.

"You happen because of her? Your happening flowed out of her?"

"If you mean--yes, I'm here because of--yes."

Qalpalik bounced to her feet and brushed herself off. "Then I am sorry, Sygemund. I did not know this. Now I am knowing it," she beamed, crooked and still greasy with the fat of the rabbit she had eaten. They resumed their concourse east, the cave mouth disappearing into the trees behind them.

13.

Eventually, the Dead War had become the Southron War, too:

They fought southrons five times before they came across one of their newly-raised fortresses. Angrboda was so disgusted by its presence she broke down the gate herself.

These southrons were different than the kind they'd seen previously; greens and blues now, not pale. The ones they fought before were little mockeries of the Lowland Named, pigflesh-colored. Not these. They had dug a wide pit for their wolves; the Dauntless threw eight of the nine survivors in it. They'd killed all the wolves in the siege. Two of the bearskins had gone in, Gitri and Logi, and the rest of the women started betting on who would kill the larger number of southron.

They dragged a long table out into the yard--which was now no more than a morass of blood and mud and snow--and set the commanding officer on it. She was an orc, with black-red armor fluted reedlike and a band of black hair. Her stoicism amused the jarl. Angrboda sat on her right and Sygemund on her left. Sygemund was called to sit there because she had found the fortress and led them to it. Angrboda watched the violence in the pit with disinterest. If the orc commander was disgusted, she hid it well.

"Your soldiers fight bravely," Angrboda said. The Dauntless cheered as Gitri snared a southron in a lock and broke an arm in three places.

"This is a savage way to treat your prisoners," the commander said.

"I am giving them a fair chance. Eight versus two, no weapons. If any of them live, they will be free to go."

"We are not here to fight you," the commander said. "We have come to defeat the undead."

"We were doing just fine before you and yours arrived. What makes you think we need help?" She peered over at Sygemund. "Sygemund, do you believe we need the help of southrons?"

"No, jarl."

Angrboda shrugged.

"The Dead King," the commander continued. "He has committed countless atrocities against both the Alliance and the Horde--and he has fled here to seek refuge."

"Refuge?" Angrboda said, sounding amused. "Do you hear that, everyone? The Dead King came here for refuge!"

"I'll eat his fucking heart!" a woman shouted. Various vulgarities flew in assent.

"Have you fought the dead?" the commander said. "Have you seen what they're capable of?"

"We have seen, and we are not impressed. Are we impressed, Sygemund?"

"We are not, jarl."

In the pit, the eight survivors were rapidly diminishing. A second ring of observers and betters had formed alongside the pit, around two women engaged in a boxing match over their shared interest in the attentions of the bearskin Gitri.

"Should we break those two up?" a huscarl asked Angrboda.

"No, let them sort it out themselves."

"Please," the commander said, grabbing Angrboda's arm. Her huscarls drew their weapons; Angrboda waved them down. "We are not here to quarrel with your people," the commander said. "We want the same thing that you want."

"Then why are the tuskar fleeing inland? Why are firbolga villages being torched from here to the Klaralven? Why do the wolvar tell tales of deprivations visited at the hands of invaders from across the sea? Have you come to make war upon the Dead King, or upon the North?"

There was a howl from the pit. Logi had been stabbed through the eye with a piece of wood; she responded by biting out her attacker's neck. The commander slumped forward and stared at the ground.

"You southrons have no stomach for war," Angrboda said.

The huscarls had uncovered a barrel of liquor inside the fort and were distributing it among the women. Angrboda accepted a cup and tasted it before pouring the rest on the ground. "And your drink is bad, too."

"I have no stomach for torturing prisoners, is all," the commander said. "This is not the conduct of war; this is barbarism."

"Conduct of war?" Angrboda said, her eyes wide. "How am I to conduct myself in a war to which I did not consent?" She leaned forward so that she was closer to the commander's ear and spoke softly. "I have seen the way you southrons do war. Like children playing at it. You arrive, you tussle a little while, you leave. You fight for the petty grievances of boy-kings and prophets."

The Dauntless roared in adulation as the last survivor died. Logi, half-blind and with a wound to her right leg, had to be helped out of the pit. Though Gitri killed five southrons to Logi's three, there was bubbling disagreement over how to mete out the bidding pools that threatened to ignite a larger brawl. The huscarls moved to intervene; Angrboda stirred in her seat and muttered something to a retainer.

The fracas was extinguished when Gitri sliced out the heart of the largest southron she'd beaten and offered it to Logi. This most cordial gift-giving had the effect of miraculously resolving the outstanding bidding disputes; women who had just been ready to come to blows over what was either the best or worst display of pugilism they had ever seen were unanimously in agreement as to the wholly gratifying match they had witnessed, though they would have done such-and-such differently. Logi, being the younger of the two bearskins and the one more injured, had to be restrained from joining the revelry so the doctors could tend her eye; Gitri, her two admirers under each arm, was already whipping the assembled into a bawdy song, being the sort of woman mothers warned their daughters about, as the saying went.

The commander sat up. "Do you always celebrate the execution of unarmed captives?"

"They fought well. Did they not fight well, Sygemund?"

"They fought well, jarl."

Angrboda put her hand on the commander's back. "I am going to let you run back to your kind. Tell them they should get back on their ships and sail away. The Named do not need your help. The Dauntless do not need your help. As the Dead King is my enemy, so too are the southron my enemy, and I will crush them both. Go," she said, and pushed her indelicately from her seat. Many eyes turned to see what was happening.

"She goes," Angrboda said. "To tell the southron of our might." This was enough for the clan, there was a cheer and the interlude was over and the celebration continued.

"Sygemund, see her down the hill."

The commander was silent and rigid as they left the fortress. Some Dauntless had occupied the watch towers, thrown off the walls and roofs and started a game of catch with big burlap ball.

When they were out of sight of the fortress, Sygemund said. "I am sorry you were offended by my jarl's decision."

"She's a bloodthirsty warmonger," the commander said scornfully. "I've met the type. I have to serve with some of them. They're all the same."

"I don't think there is any southron like Angrboda."

The commander stopped. "Let me guess: she fights like hell, she's generous with her plunder, and she's brilliant--but cruel."

"You know very little of us, southron."

"I know her kind. They have no love for their people. They are motivated only by their prestige." A light snow was beginning to pick up, blown down off the mountainside, and so they were both clouded in mist beneath a clear noonday sky.

"You should leave this land. Leave this war to us."

"We'd leave sooner if you'd help us," the commander said, turning away. "The other people of the North say you Dauntless are the most powerful fighters in the world. This war could be over in a few months with your help. But no--you've already given the enemy what they want."

"We do not serve the Dead."

The commander walked into the mist. Sygemund stood there until the air had cleared, and she was alone.

14.

The southron worship Hrimthursar. They pay tribute to those who kept us in bondage and scorn Old Mother, who gave us the gifts of speech, thought, gender, and the creation of new life. What kind of people would honor those who made them as slaves? They ruin the world in Hrimthursar's name. This is why the southrons are our enemy. This is why we go to war.

-A Dauntless mother to her daughters

15.

Three days they spent crawling through the wreckage of the eastern front. On the first morning after they left the cave, they went up along a collection of bluffs and found the shell of another southron fortress-town. Before the walls a great fan of long-frozen footprints and a train of abandoned wagon-carts were the only sign of flight. The wheels had been stripped of metal in haste.

They posted up beside the gate and waited ten minutes for signs of movement in the section of the town visible to them, but there was nothing. The town was two-tiered, a small barracks above and a motley collection of tall houses clustered together in curving rows down below. A strip of three houses had been burned, but apparently with little relish, as nothing else had been torched. Half of the rest were mostly rubble from old fighting. There was garbage everywhere--weeks and months and years worth putrefying in layers, pushed up beside buildings and into holes and spilling into the streets. Without war as purpose everything became waste. As though trash was the only thing the place had ever produced.

The barracks doors had been punched outward by some great force, scattering the ground with twisted fingers of iron and carbonized wood, the guts of some smoking effigy blown over the snow.

"I check," Qalpalik said, and plunged into the barracks. Sygemund did not follow. She heard clanging of doors struck open, echoing footsteps; the footsteps receding, growing again, and a minute later the whaler came back out slightly grungier than before.

"Nothing."

"Well enough."

"Why they abandon all this so fast? This not more than…" Qalpalik squinted at the burnt houses, tapping her thumb and forefinger together.

"A few weeks at most."

"Pigskins kill them?" The unseemingly term for Lowland Named.

"Other southrons, probably."

"They on same side."

"Tell that to the ones we saw in the wastes. They still think we're on the same side as the Lowlanders. And the Dead King."

Qalpalik laughed. "We need find some tinder."

"Why?"

"Should burn the rest."

They sheltered the night in a thicket to the east of the fortress-town and thereafter descended from the low dividing mountains and toward the great taiga of the east. They followed abandoned game trails through scraggly woodlands for days, interrupted by torrential freezing rains that came and went. They walked beneath bare trees encased in ice, their branches hanging low in translucent shells that Qalpalik swung at gleefully. They saw once off the trail three starved-looking horses with rotted saddles hiding amongst the trees that ran when they caught sight of them, disappearing like apparitions into the fog.

Eventually the game trails became overgrown and cloysome and they gave up trying to follow them. Passing in the evening over a brook they saw to the north of them clear ground beyond the treeline. The creeped up a small hillside and saw wheat fields, some fallow, some burned, stretching away for more than a mile to a turret-like bluff upon which stood another fortress-town. This one smoked with thick, black fires. They watched and listened.

"Dauntless?" Qalpalik said.

"Would you set fires if you were tracking fugitives?"

"No."

Just then they heard two pops of musket-fire from the town. At such a distance they were little more than clicks. Sygemund felt an immediate and unspecific dread.

"Let's away."

Sygmund slid back into the forest and moved off at a trot. She crashed over a log that splintered under her boot, but kept moving, going faster.

Qalpalik caught up after a few minutes. "Hey! Why the running?" She shouted in agitation.

Sygemund slowed to a halt. "I had a bad moment."

"You sick?" Qalpalik twisted her head and stared at her with one eye. "Something wrong with you?"

"I think--have you ever felt like you didn't know something, so suddenly you were aware of all the possibilities?"

Qalpalik's whole frame shivered. She had a noise halfway between a giggle and a cough, and then she was still. Sygemund had never seen her so stilled, unless battle or subterfuge demanded it. And when she spoke, her voice was without tremor. "Yes. Always." And she went on into the trees in her bandy-legged way.

16.

They rolled onward for the rest of the day downslope, the vegetation changing, becoming squat agathis evergreens, their wide trunks salt-banded and the ground thick with pine needles and boot-sucking detritus. They moved as scouts did when silence was not necessary or convenient--never planting their feet long enough for the murmur of their tread to catch up with them; always ahead of the passing glance that might seek them. They breached a deep trench of dry river filled with fallen, still-green trees and passed beneath a thicket of agathis and came into a clearing, and what they saw there made them halt.

The ground was frozen, and too hard for graves; this, Sygemund knew, when she saw the way they had lined up their fallen comrades in a neat little row. There were seven alive, little humans, kneeling before a shield propped up against a rock.

Sygemund drew her sword and Qalpalik stamped the ground, shaking her spear. None of the seven moved.

"Southron," Sygemund said.

Qalpalik did the little laugh she did when something unanticipated became manifest, face joyous, but the laugh strange and foul. "What dream is this?" she said, and crept forward.

They were tattered, drawn-out; sticks and broken bones draped in skin. They wore tabards of red and gold filigree bearing the symbol of an orange bar divided with a circle. The symbol was on the shield, too. Four men and three women who knelt with hands clasped or draped by their sides. Sygemund could see one woman bobbing slightly on the spot.

They walked around them, between the seven and the shield, at first keeping distance, then closer; then Qalpalik stepped forward and nearly touched her face to the back of the tallest man's head, smelling. She jumped back, prepared for reaction, but he would not stir. Two of them prayed with their lips moving. All their eyes were vacant and focused on something the Dauntless could not see. The bobbing woman whispered imperceptibly and the rest moved barely at all except for where the wind touched their hair and the shredded edges of their colors.

"What sleep is here?" Qalpalik asked, seemingly to neither Sygemund, nor any of the assembled.

"Fire-worshippers," Sygemund muttered.

"Can you hear me?" Qalpalik shouted in the man's ear. "Southron!" The man did not reply.

The sun had gone down over the mountains and the purple pall of the evening had gone, but they were still in the brief interim of lighted not-light that precedes the night, when everything is dark but yet visible. "Southron!" Qalpalik shouted again, and she pushed the woman at the end of the line, who fell face-first into the snow and did not move. Sygemund pushed the man closest her, and he bobbed in place.

"Are they alive or dead?" Qalpalik demanded. "Are you alive or dead?" she hissed into the tall man's ear.

"He does not hear you."

Qalpalik set down her spear and hurriedly peeled off her hide jacket. From a fold, she pulled one of her whaletooth knives. One of many. Dull bleached yellow with rawhide handles. Massive sharpened teardrops. Qalpalik stepped in front of the man and crouched on the balls of her feet and grabbed his face. "Do you hear me? Can you hear me?" The man looked at her and through her. She laughed a joyless laugh and stuck the knife into his chest. "Can you hear me?" He coughed and bent forward. The whispering woman pressed her hands against her forehead and prayed audibly in a language they did not understand. "Why do you refuse me? Why do you spit on me with inaction? Why do you not react?"

"Either slay them and be done with it or haunt them no more," Sygemund stammered.

Qalpalik cradled the man's head against her diaphragm. She twisted the knife unseen and he made a gurgling noise. "Why do they not act?" She pushed the man away disgusted and stood. She pulled one of the women out of the line, kicked away the shield, pressed her head against the rock and held the knife aloft.

"Get up and save her!" she snarled. "Get up and slay Qalpalik!" The woman against the rock began praying in the same language as the other woman, and their prayers asynchronous were an unbroken line of pleading to unknown powers, and for a brief instant Sygemund felt the depths of her ignorance stretching out across the snow fields and the ice and out across the world; but the instant was gone and she returned to the clearing as Qalpalik slew the woman with a blow to the back of her skull. She then dove upon the kneeling woman still praying aloud and dashed her brains three times with the butt of her knife.

The whaler pushed herself up on her palms and looked around, blood-stained red-on-blue, huge and sacrilegious in the line of the remaining congregationalists, back turned upon the woman slew upon the rock, the shield askew and red-stained beneath her. One man covered his face and began to weep as though the thing was now a more potent rite than any he had ever witnessed.

"Get up," Sygemund said through clenched teeth. "You are not some bearskin; get up, what do you prove by this?"

"I must know them; I must have the knowing why," she said, looking down at the man beside her. She pressed her bloody hand over his face and pushed it and he would not respond. "Why? Why do you do nothing?" She stabbed the man in the stomach and hauled him to his feet. "Even the Dead act. Why you not act?" She tugged the blade free and threw the man. He tumbled in the snow and was still.

"Are you going insane?" Sygemund said, shaking her sword. "What incites you about them? They're just damn sun-worshippers; we've fought their kind before!"

"I must know… why they will not act." She lunged at the closest and last woman; before she could strike a blow, the woman fell over and they saw around her midsection a thin strip of bandages half-covering a gangrenous hole in her ribcage.

Qalpalik snarled and turned upon the two remaining men and grabbed them by the collars. "I must have the knowing of this thing! What hides inside you that does this? Why will you not move?" She fell silent and glanced back and forth between them, the crying man and the silent man, breathing heavy, her expression one of both profound frustration and mourning. The men would not look at her; only through her, and at the darkness behind her. She killed them both.

With clean snow she wiped the blood from her limbs and face and knife in silence. She retrieved her jacket and spear and sat down and stared at the bodies. Sygemund stood in shock.

"Why?"

Qalpalik looked up at her. "So no Not-Qalpalik will know more of Qalpalik... than Qalpalik will know of all Not-Qalpalik."

Sygemund stormed off into the evergreens. Two miles later she heard Qalpalik catch up to her and fall into step some twenty paces behind her, and she would close no further and say no words as they walked all through the night.

17.

The next day brought a soft but relentless rain. They moved through long strands of sitka spruce and came finally to the mighty river Klaralven. The water was cold and the current strong, but they swum it without incident and hauled themselves sopping onto the opposite shore several hundred feet downstream. And so they marched toward the great taiga of the east.

The world was foggy and leaden around them. It was not until midday that Qalpalik marched up beside Sygemund and addressed her.

"You not like what was done to the fire-worshippers."

"I don't like leaving a big, bloody trailmarker for Angrboda to follow."

"The southrons are all dying. How would she know it was Qalpalik who did this?"

Sygemund stopped. "I know you're eager for a fight. But if she comes, she'll come with all her huscarls, her shieldbearers, maybe even some of the bearskins."

"More for me," Qalpalik laughed.

"I told you what the stakes were when we left. If it isn't to your liking, you can go on your way." She pushed in on Qalpalik's space, glaring down at her, the perpetually hunched one, crooked beneath the weight of whatever secrets she kept. "I asked you to come because Angrboda means to do harm to us both. You've been among the Dauntless long enough to know she's serious. I promise you that she is more dangerous than you believe."

"Angrboda does not know me," Qalpalik said, slowly.

"She is a jarl with a clan. We're two poor sods."

"You still have not said where we are going."

Sygemund rubbed her head. "We're going to break north, through the pines, back into the mountains. Swing past the very edge of Hyldnyr and go east."

"What is east?"

"A way out of this," Sygemund said. "Someone… there is someone I know. After that--I'm not sure."

"The mammoth-woman--she say southrons offering traitors passage off this land. Is this what Sygemund seeks?"

"No," Sygemund said forcefully. "I just--need you to trust me. For a little while longer." She pointed eastward, up the slopes, to where the first big evergreens marked the borderland of the great forest. "Are you still with me?"

"Yes. We run now!"

Sygemund did not scoff at the impulse; together they tore onward to the taiga.

18.

The taiga was not as Sygemund remembered.

There had been widespread felling at the start of the war. The damage extended out in either direction as far as they could see. At the vast delta where the Klaralven fed the sea, the southrons had assembled a huge lumber yard, and all along the borders of the forest the redwoods were dragged down to the water and sent on great barges to feed the war effort. The lumberyard burned at the end of the war--whether by violence or subterfuge or accident, the Dauntless did not know. So much lumber had been stolen that it was months in burning, thick black smoke rising over the delta, the coals still hot long after.

At the precipice of the forest proper Qalpalik stalled. She had her spear gripped tight and would budge no further.

"What is it?"

"Never been inside," she said.

"I didn't think anything scared you."

"Qalpalik is not afraid. Qalpalik will know what is inside," she said, shaking her spear at the gloom.

"Try not to trip."

Qalpalik hung close to Sygemund as she led her into the taiga. The trees were thick with hornwort whiskers that time of year. The redwoods quickly became so massive that they became less trees and more like columns around which grew tree fern and hazel. The world around them was a mosaic of feathered green and roots that crashed and separated and seemed to have no beginning or end.

"They say Ishiguk dwells in this forest," Sygemund said.

"Who? Who is this?"

"Ishiguk is the old woman of the forest whose head is an elk's skull. Some say she was the wife of the First Jarl of all Named. Or that she's Old Mother's daughter. She baits her traps with sweet berries and catches dreaming children with them. And her hands are long claws that she uses to reach through your ears and pick out your memories."

A tree kangaroo whistled in the distance. Qalpalik went crab-legged, spear raised. "I will tear her skull off!"

Sygemund laughed. "I'll keep you safe from the children's stories."

For days and days they wandered beneath the trees. In the deep reaches, night and day became fragmentary and they were governed only by the illumination that moved from half-light to pitch darkness and back again.

On the fifth night they waited in a mossy channel beneath a fallen redwood, and when at last it was fully dark the fungus around them flared into being; blue-white ripples in void around them. They slumbered fitfully for a few hours, but were roused when they felt a rumble in the ground. Something huge came and went just above the channel, so close that branches snapped above their heads. They held their breaths and waited until it receded into the distance, but did not sleep the rest of the night. When morning came, they saw how a stretch of forest twenty feet across had been bent and trampled by its passing. Sygemund clucked her tongue.

"So there's still some thunder in these woods."

They came across firbolga villages, long abandoned. There were no bodily remains, and in several their sacred totems had been cast down or burned.

Endlessly they stalked beneath the taiga with only the wild as company. They were out of rations and so they tracked and killed a deer and ate the better part of it raw. They saw only one black bear in woods that used to teem with them--nothing larger than tree kangaroos and fishers, it seemed, persisted in great numbers. In the damp interior they began to hear frogs at night, and in the day saw their forms splayed behind the fronds of tree ferns, and gliding silently through empty space. Golden yellow slugs the size of yams. Salamanders, bulbous, poisonous yellow-on-black and black-on-orange, some larger than a grown woman's arm, plodded across the moss and over moist logs, daring the foolish predator to try.

The old stories called the taiga, "The First World," for reasons now lost.

Qalpalik was quieter than Sygemund had ever seen. She no longer startled at the forest sounds, but seemed perpetually disquieted by the absence of open space. "How do you know the way?" she finally asked. "These trees--are all the same."

"Scouted this before the war. During the war," she said, bounding a tiny, trickling creek. "And I came here when I was young."

"Tell me of this."

"Tonight," she finally replied.

19.

That night they came across an open clearing the size of a large city square. Here grass grew thick and looked somehow strange after weeks of nothing but moss and mud beneath their boots. There were old remains of a firepit in the center. They saw that it attached to a game trail, and decided to sleep nearby and check for quarry in the morning.

They deposited themselves in a small depression that abutted the clearing by an incline shaded by trees and bushes. Frogs called high overhead in their various fluting harmony.

"You came here when you were a child?" Qalpalik asked.

"Many times."

"I do not like this place. It keeps its…" she puzzled for a moment, "its wantings hidden."

"I think I like this place better than Hyldnyr, to tell the truth." She sighed deeply. "Did you ever come in off the flows, before the war?"

"Only once, and only into the high mountains."

Sygemund leaned back and closed her eyes. "It wasn't the way it is now. There wasn't peace--I don't think true peace is even real--but it was closer than this."

"How can this be?"

Sygemund was silent for a time as she collected her thoughts. And then she began: "I remember the trading seasons. We started in the spring. I remember when we'd load the wagons with winter's haul: starsteel and mammoth ivory, whale oil and auk hide, sulfur and soapstone. And more. I was a girl, then. My mother was one of the caravan leaders. We'd wind south and west out of the peaks and across the plateaus and through the valleys, down into the bull-folk lands. I loved how flat and wide that country was. The water that shoots from the ground in plumes. Geysers, they call them. The tvanka children told us they were the spirits of the earth expressing their frustration at their wind-siblings, who could go wherever they pleased. We traded with them for meat, metalware, squash and corn. Deerskin and pottery. At night there was music and the bow-priests blessed us and we danced to celebrate the reaffirmation of ties between Dauntless and tvanka."

"From there we went east into hills. We'd camp along the road, and every night, my mother and the clan leaders would check the trees for some sign I never learned. When they found it, we would wait there for the day, and in the pre-dawn hours the wolvar would come out. Small and covered in birchbark cloaks. I was taller than the tallest of them even then. I wanted to speak with them but it was not permitted; they were easily frightened, and would only conduct trade in that weird way. My mother would debate the chief, and some wolvar would go and they'd bring parcels wrapped in linens. Wildflower and dried berries and insect parts--things the doctors and the seers need. Remember when Higri died of that blackened wound a few months ago? I heard the doctor say, 'This would not have happened before the war."

"And then we'd descend: first through a wide valley, and then deep into gullies beneath tall trees. The first time they came out of the woods, oh, did I wail. The other first-timers wailed, too. But the other children who'd been on caravan before just laughed at us. We were safe. Only the spider people."

"Servants of the Dead King?" Qalpalik interrupted.

"Not back then. They led us to a cave mouth. I had never been so afraid. It looked like the mouth of... some animal. My mother put her hand on my shoulder and she said, 'They are our friends.' I had to stay brave. I was Dauntless, after all. They took us inside. There were… lights, on the walls. Fungus, maybe. Strange light. We went down this spiral. If you looked over the side you couldn't see the bottom. They brought us through tunnels and out upon a terrace."

She drew lines in the air. "There was a chasm. It was a cave--but it wasn't a cave. It was the biggest cave in the whole world, I swear. A world beneath the world. Their city on the other side. We couldn't go there. Old laws forbade it. At first all you could see was the lights. Orange and amber and bronze in the dark. Purples and blues. Even after your eyes got used to it, and you could see the black stone spires of the city--you could just unfocus your eyes, and see nothing but the light. There was music coming from the city. Maybe I just imagined it. They brought us plants from the underground, rare metal, jewelry so finely crafted you'd think it would break just to touch it. I wanted to cross the bridge. I wanted to walk to where the music was. But we had to leave. I was very sad when we stepped back out into sunlight. My mother said to me, 'I always feel the same way, too.'

"By then it was fully spring in the southlands, and everything was greener and filled with birdsong. Some of the women would fashion nets out of long willow branches. Fit the ends with twine. I and the other girls would follow them out onto a high hill with forest all around. They hushed us and told us to lie in the grass and watch. They'd swing at the birds and check the nets until they got the right kind. If they were right they'd kill them and pluck the feathers for ornament. One of the women made me a circlet with blue feathers so pure and bright, you'd swear they meant this world could never end for all the beauty it contained.

"We'd keep on the old coast road, the one Hrimthursar's Unnamed built in the beginning. Sometimes you could see dragons flying in the distance. My mother said that very old agreements ensured that we wouldn't bother them, and they wouldn't bother us. That was the long leg of the trip. Spring on the wane. Weeks on the road. Longer if a mudslide had swamped out a portion of the road and the rhinos had to be coaxed through the mire. You'd think an animal mean enough to take into battle wouldn't mind a little mud on their toes, but, there you go."

"We followed the road past foaming Klaralven to the shores of the tusk-people. Hundreds of longhouses on the strand. Fishing-huts and piers stretching out into the shoals. All of it burnt up by the Lowland Named and the southrons by now. The tuskar always greeted us as old friends, with singing. Gave us necklaces of seashells. We traded them for fish of every kind, woolcloth and fat, blown glass, cheeses and salt, brocade fabrics, tar, and dried fruit brought from across the sea. That was the first time I ever had an inkling that there was anything beyond the ocean. We played stick-and-ball games on the ice with their children. Chased seals on the sand. At night they brought us into the longhouses by the fires and told tales of their heroes. A tuskar girl once said to me: 'My great-grandmother says when she was young, all the heroes in the stories were men. But then your foremothers came and made friends of us, and now they tell the stories with both.' Her great-grandmother said this was good and true.

"By then it would be summer, and we'd hike northeast back into the country and into the taiga. Not so far from where we are now. But we'd keep on east, way into the woods, where the oldest trees are. Even taller than these. The ones the bear-folk say hold up the heavens. Their most sacred temple is somewhere deep in the redwoods. The Mouth that Spoke the World, they call it. I've never seen it. It's probably gone, now. My mother and the caravan leaders were beloved by the firbolga. Gave freely the finest goods we had, knowing they'd return the hospitality twicefold. Leather and rare timber, porcupine quills and vermilion, bangles and copper, tobacco and spices, obsidian and dried gooseberry. They'd take us into the meadows and find beehives, and they'd show us how to smoke out the bees and collect the honeycombs." Sygemund inhaled deeply. "Nothing has ever tasted as good as that honey did. If there's one thing that makes me regret everything that's happened--it's that I'll probably never taste it again."

"We'd stay among the bear-folk for weeks. I made many friends. Many of them are probably dead now. And then it was summer and would be time to take the wagons north into Zhul."

"The Drakkari are enemy," Qalpalik said. "The Dauntless been at war with the trolls a long time."

"In those days, war meant a different thing. It meant fighting in the cold months, a few deaths here and there, and then reconciliation in the summer. Sure: some of the other clans had deep enmity with them, but the Dauntless, as a whole, were on better terms. The caravan leaders always brought tithes to settle outstanding blood-debts. They would be paid out to the families and kriels of trolls killed in the winter's fighting. Sometimes my mother would even pay the debts of clans outside the Dauntless, because she knew the value of peace."

"I've always thought their temple-cities were homely. In their own way. For the last of our wares and a selection of what we'd gathered that season, they offered us baskets of grass and barley, jerky and walnuts, pipestone and ochre, bow-wood and cotton cloth. They made robes out of the scales and feathers of their flying-serpents that blurred when they moved. At night the children would take us up the aqueducts and we'd run along them for hours. They showed us the place where the aqueducts started. A little hideaway of mountains in the farthest corner of Zhul, beside the ocean. The Headwaters of Creation, they call that place. The sky was so clear. Seems like there are less stars out, these days. Not then. Stars beyond counting. You could see so clearly." She paused. "I got my first kiss atop the aqueducts. Drakkari. Scandalous, I know. Would she recognize me? She is--" she cleared her throat. "I have not seen her for some time."

Fireflies were beginning to emerge from the undergrowth, and the glade was beginning to resolve itself into a black canvas upon which single dots of illumination emerged and receded.

"And then we would go back north, back into the mountains with our earnings. To dream of the next summer." Qalpalik had lain down in the grass and Sygemund could not see her face.

"If I had ever collaborated," she began, halting and quiet, "If I ever went against Angrboda, and against the clan… I would have done so only because I didn't want all of this to disappear. Thought--maybe I thought I'd take the south road with wagons again, as my mother had. Maybe someday."

"Is it too late?" Qalpalik said, hushed.

"I don't know." She fell asleep with the fireflies growing fewer and fewer in her eyes, and night birds calling far away.

20.

She dreamed of honeycombs that caught the light.

21.

She awoke to the sound of laughter and the smell of woodsmoke.

She saw that Qalpalik was already awake and had been lying on her side, listening. The sound was coming from the clearing. She rolled onto her stomach and tilted her head. After a minute of listening, Qalpalik held up four fingers. Five, Sygemund mouthed.

They crawled up the incline, moving twigs and pebbles out of their path as they went. It took several minutes for them to reach the edge.

Five Lowland Named, pale of skin, had started a fire and were roasting what was visibly the remains of a southron over it. They had with them a collection of saddlebags filled to bursting and what appeared to be a bureau of southron manufacture lying flat on its back and affixed with rope forming a makeshift travois. It was filled with animal furs and a motley collection of metalware and castoffs. There was one woman, red-haired and with sharply hawklike features wearing fine polished armor that suggested she was, or had been, a huscarl. One of the men had a black pleated beard and tattoos that indicated he was a smith. The second man, bare-chested and with a shock of bright blonde hair, was chopping wood for the fire. The last two were younger, possibly brothers or even twins, with short brown moustaches and matching leather armor of the sort outfitted to junior soldiery.

Sygemund nudged Qalpalik to lower themselves back onto the incline. As they tried to disappear her foot unloosed a rock that rattled as it fell. The Lowland Named grabbed weapons and posted up in an arc, and the bare-chested blonde stepped forward.

"Who goes there?" He waited. “We know you’re there! Who is it?”

Qalpalik flared her teeth and gave a hand signal to attack, but Sygemund shook her head.

"Ho," she called, "I am Skadi, daughter of Jot, of the Named."

"Kunik, daughter of Amarok, of the Named," Qalpalik said, after a moment of trepidation.

"What clan?"

"Clan Orvar, Thane Torleik," Sygemund said. Qalpalik boggled her eyes at her. I know not, she mouthed. Sygemund pressed her thumb against her lips.

"We fought with Orvar at the Battle of Gjalerbron," the speaker said. "I am Ulfr, of Clan Vidarr, as are my kin. Come out, and sit with us."

They passed over the incline and into the clearing and approached. The others introduced themselves in turn: the woman was Grid, the black-haired man Agni, and the the twins were Bjartr and Brokk.

"Does Vidarr still pledge fealty to the High Jarl of Utgarde?" Sygemund asked carefully. Their expressions grew chilly.

"To High Jarl Halmar, and may Ymiron rot!" Agni spat, and stamped his foot.

Ulfr bowed his head. "Many of ours were weak, and followed the traitor Jarl into service of the Dead King, but they have been brought low."

"Halmar leads the clans in rooting out the last of the traitors," Grid said.

Qalpalik pressed an nostril shut and blew a nougat of phlegm from the other. "Fuck the Dead."

Grid laughed. "I like this one! Come, sit, Skadi and Kunik."

They were offered wineskins and invited to pull meat from the spits over the fire, and they sat down together, Sygemund next to black-haired Agni, and Qalpalik beside Bjatr the twin.

Qalpalik wasted no time tearing into the fatty limb she'd claimed. "Dwarf?" she asked.

"Better than usual, eh?" Grid said. "I prefer the elves."

"If there's one good thing about this war, it's the eating," blonde-haired Ulfr said. He and Brokk had gone back to sorting through the bureau-travois.

"Ran into some southrons?" Sygemund asked.

"Village a mile or so from here," Agni said.

"Just a few left. Barely anything worth claiming. It was already picked over by the time we arrived."

"What brings two Highlanders down out of the mountains in times such as these?" Ulfr asked. His eyes did not smile as his lips did.

"We've been hunting southron stragglers and Dead since winter," Sygemund said. "Jarl Torliek sent fifty of us into the dragon-lands. Ours are back across the river. They're trying to dig a little pack of those southron bull-folk out of a citadel. We were sent east, to scout."

Agni nodded. "It's good you ran into us; these woods are full of scavengers. Deserters, southron worshippers of the Dead--"

"--And the firbolga; they've all gone out of their minds. Some kind of curse." Grid said, and made a warding sign over her face. The twins mimed her.

"That's a shame."

"Old Mother's judgement is fair," Agni said. "This land is for the Named, and none else."

Qalpalik stopped chewing, a strand of fat hanging from her chin. "Only the Named?" she asked.

"Who else?" Agni said, but Qalpalik had gone back to chewing. Sygemund helped herself to a hand from the fire, ripping off a piece and placing the rest on a lukewarm stone.

"How many others are out scouting?" Ulfr asked. He sat down opposite her with a bright green apple from the travois. "In case we run into any of your kin. You have to be careful in these times."

"Eight," Sygemund said. "Groups of two. We were worried when we first heard you. So many Lowland clans--well."

"Well?"

"Both High and Lowland Named went against Old Mother in this war," Grid said. "It is only fair that you'd be worried."

Sygemund lifted her wineskin. "I feel safer knowing that clan Vidarr roam these woods, and I am glad for their hospitality. I know I speak for both Kunik and myself when I say we hope to raise shields alongside Vidarr in battle someday."

"Weren't you at Gjalerbron?" Ulfr said, tilting his head.

"Sadly, no. We had to hear the skalds sing of it; we were in the west, beating back the Dead."

"I thought every Orvar sword-arm was present at Gjalerbron," Bjatr said, speaking for the first time. "Or so they said so, themselves."

"We were not there," Qalpalik croaked before Sygemund could respond. "Were you?"

"I took twenty heads that day--" Bjatr stammered.

"Just twenty?" Qalpalik smiled crookedly behind her oily locks. "Did your arms tire?"

Sygemund held up her hands. "I apologize--my cousin is not one for words."

"Cousins?" Agni said. "Had an uncle run off for the whaling life, eh?" He shot Sygemund a sympathetic glance.

"There's no accounting for family," she japed, rubbing the back of her head.

"How many did you come here with again?" Ulfr asked.

"Fifty."

"Hey," Bjatr said, "Agni, tell her what I said was true--"

"Were there any more southron back in that village?" Sygemund asked. "We might have to take a bit of them for the road."

"There's at least one more, but wolves might have come for it--"

"Agni! Will you let my honor go called into question like this?" Bjatr's words echoed around the clearing and set a flock of starlings to chirruping in the trees above. Brokk looked over from the travois, startled.

"Bjatr," Agni said. "A joke is a joke--"

"I have a joke," Qalpalik said. She was holding a tibia she'd picked clean an inch from her nose, eyes crossed, watching it as she turned it over with her fingertips. "Want to hear it?"

"Kunik…" Sygemund said.

"Joke: a pigskin boy who says he's taken twenty heads."

The silence in the clearing was so immediate and so oppressively tactile it seemed as though any movement would have caused ripples in the air. Qalpalik kept spinning her bone. Bjatr stood up, his face beet red.

"Get up. Now," he hissed.

"How dare you," Agni said.

"She's--my cousin is simple--I apologize," Sygemund said emphatically. "We'll go--I'll take her now. I am sorry for such a slander."

"Get up and fight me!" Bjatr shouted.

"No," Qalpalik sighed. "I do not fight boys who cannot defend themselves."

Everyone was now on their feet except for Qalpalik; Agni and Brokk pulled Bjatr away. Ulfr guided Sygemund a few yards out of the circle. "Bjatr is an impetuous boy, but that was too far."

"My friend--my cousin is dim-witted. I'll take her away."

"How does a woman like that get picked for scouting?"

"They saddle me with her; expect me to control her ravings, please--"

"--Get up! We will have it out, right here!" Bjatr hovered over Qalpalik, balling and unballing his fists. "Get up, you stinking seal-hunter!"

"Hey, Sygemund," Qalpalik said, looking up from the bone. "What do you think... Angrboda would want us to do?"

"Angrboda…" Ulfr said, and his eyes went wide. "Dauntless!" he cried, pushing Sygemund away. "They're fucking Dauntless!"

Qalpalik blurred; her legs clinched Bjatr's, her arms whipped up and around. He was standing up, and then he was face-down in the firepit, screaming. Qalpalik bounced up and scuttled backwards, shaking her spear. She laughed hugely and obscenely, pointing at Bjatr as he struggled in the fire. His brother Brokk ran to help him, and Agni drew his axe and ran toward her.

Sygemund twisted her longsword out of her holster, barely catching Ulfr's stab just above the guard. The knife was long and thick, and as he thrust again he drew from his boot another knife and was upon her.

Qalpalik danced aside as Agni charged, swiveling with one palm flat on the ground. He swore and turned and ran again and once more she dodged, this time rolling longwise on the grass, and up she came laughing wild. Brokk broke away from Bjatr as Grid threw a blanket across the burning man; he drew his short sword and ran up behind Qalpalik. She did not turn, did not look; she spun the spear in one hand and pricked him in the thigh and he cried out and strafed oddly off to one side. She could have speared him to the artery, but did not.

Ulfr and Sygemund wove back and forth over the grass, pulling and parting from one another with weapons sounding hoof-like reports. Ulfr was fast. Sygemund had been trained to repel knives by means of buckler, shield, and half-sword; she now regretted taking the longsword when she fled. She sliced his cheek and threw an elbow. He tried to plunge a knife into her armpit, but she dodged away. He was furious, breathing through clenched teeth, whether at her misleading or at her allegiance or both, and kicked her back against a tree and struck with both knives high.

"What is inside of you?" Qalpalik said, moving serpentine toward Agni. "What will come of this? What rivers of happening will run out from this moment?"

"Bastard!" Agni cried, charging forward. He leapt on the approach, but arc ended still aloft; Qalpalik threw herself flat-back upon the ground and dug the spear-butt into the dirt--Agni tried to turn away but ran himself through below the ribs. He opened his mouth to scream, but Qalpalik thrashed herself upright and flicked him off the end of the spear and he rolled away. Brokk came at her swinging big Xs in the air. She screwed up her face in a dolesome frown and speared him through the ankle.

Sygemund thought only of the knives before her, remembered one of her weaponmaster's suggestions to see the opponent as a collection of blots--brains, eyes, ears, heart, guts, groin--with deadly weapons attached. She tried this and was rewarded with a kick to the arm that nearly dislocated something. He was a dueler, that was certain. Ulfr opened a vein on her wrist and blood slicked her handle. She switched hands and backed away, looking for an opening, finding none. Ulfr clattered his knives gamely against the sides of her sword, his mouth curling up in silent laughter.

They stopped up when a sound cut across the clearing; a loud and unfamiliar wheeze. They both turned.

Bjatr had rejoined the fight in spite of his burns, and Qalpalik had speared him through the eye. The wheeze was the sound of Brokk who watched Bjatr collapse into a pile of metalware beside the bureau-travois. She turned to Brokk. "What will you do now?" she said, inquisitive.

"Grid, take this one!" Ulfr shouted. He peeled away from Sygemund and leapt the firepit in a single bound, and was upon Qalpalik in a whirl of knives.

"Why have you done this?" Grid demanded, advancing upon Sygemund behind a shield painted to resemble Old Mother's eye.

"It's not me," Sygemund said. "It's her."

Qalpalik answered Ulfr's knives with spearpoint, holding him at length and flicking them away with gentle flourishes of her shaft. Sygemund and Grid slackened where they stood, transfixed by the dueler and whaler.

Brokk had made it to his feet again and tried to flank Qalpalik, and for his valor she sliced his other thigh on the backswing deep to the bone and on the foreswing opened his throat and he fell. Agni had tried to walk but his wounds had him confused somehow; first he went to the treeline, and then he turned and saw Ulfr fighting that loathsome thing in furs and hide. He held his sword high above his head and shouted and oath upon his father's and grandfather's names. Qalpalik turned and threw her spear at him.

She and Ulfr both bounced back and crouched. She started to take off her coat. "It is more fair, this way."

"I'll blind you before I kill you," Ulfr said. "Cut out out that damned tongue."

"Why you think he say his father's name, and his father's father's name before he died? Was his own name not good enough?" She drew a pair of whaletooth knives, squeezing the handles.

"What ghost of the before is she?" Grid said.

Qalpalik grinned sidelong at them. "I am Qalpalik. All else is Not." She looked back at Ulfr.

"You are Not-Qalpalik. You are good with those knives. I will have the knowing of it."

"This is an Unnamed beast of Hrimthursar!" Ulfr cursed.

"I will have your name, too. Come closer, undo your breeches--and I will unname you first!"

The knives whistled together and they began to strike so quickly that the whistling became an even hum in the air. Every counter became a counter, and soon they were moving so fast it was impossible to follow. Brokk writhed in diminishing fits a few meters away; Angi had fallen so that from where Grid and Sygemund stood, they could only see a pluck of tall grass and a spear stuck out of it like a waymarker.

"You need to run."

Grid spun on her, sputtering disbelief. "Raise your sword, Dauntless. If I have to die, it will be with your your brains on my axe."

"If you run now, she won't chase you."

"When I was a girl--damn you, my mother told me the Dauntless were just," Grid said, choking up. "Is this justice?"

Sygemund lowered her longsword. "I can't protect you from her. Run. Back to your clan. Please."

"What the hell did we do to you?" she said, raising her axe. She stayed that way for a long moment, the hum of the knives surrounding them, the starlings long departed, all life departing that place, and she threw down her shield and dashed off into the trees.

Ulfr had opened a gash on Qapalik's forehead, and the dark-blue blood that foamed over her face made her look like something that had just swum up from lightless depths. Ulfr fought with the skill of someone drilled and practiced, but Qalpalik was improvisational, more fluid and yet more automatic.

Back and forth they careened, learning in every moment a weakness and meeting a response, back and forth. He slashed her knee, she grazed his ear; he nicked her across the nose and she sliced a knuckle to the bone. Their chests worked like bellows.

She might have stepped on a root, or just stepped wrong; she was too slow for a second and he saw an opening and braided his knives around one whaletooth and wrenched it clear and hurled it away. She held her remaining knife with one palm against the pommel, and he came on with renewed vengeance. One knife she blocked, and the other hand she grabbed and bit down as hard as she could on his wrist.

Ulfr roared in pain and pulled away. The spot was pink down to the ligaments. Qalpalik swallowed and stuck out her tongue.

He tackled her. If she expected this, it was not apparent; they spilled and rolled in the grass. When they came to a halt Ulfr held one knife over her and she had none. All of his weight was suspended in the knife. She held on by his unbitten wrist as it pressed downward, the steel trembling towards her heart. She grappled with his other hand and he drove his forearm into her throat. An inch away, she spat in his eyes.

She kicked up and there was a blur of motion and a whaletooth sprouted out of his guts. Ulfr looked down at it and let out a keening noise of disbelief. She smiled and pushed him off. He grabbed her arm and tried to say something but could only sputter. She took the handle with both hands. "Qalpalik always has more knives than you," she said, and wrenched it out.

She stood and pulled her hair back and held it in place. She tried to rub her face clean with her elbow but it only smeared the blood around. She looked down at Brokk. "I was going to see what that one thought of his brother," she said, pointing. "Take turns putting their feet in the fire."

"Why?" Sygemund said. She would not cross the clearing yet. "What was this for?"

"They were servants of the Dead King," Qalpalik said noncommittally. "We defended ourselves."

"I should have never asked you to come."

"You will not kill Angrboda," Qalpalik said. "You need me for that. This, I know."

"Got the 'knowing' of it? Like you say? Like you know them, now?"

"Where did Grid go?"

"She ran off."

"You let her run," Qalpalik said, rolling her jaw. "But I understand. You care about the Not."

"Is everything that is Not-you forfeit?" Sygemund said. "Is that how you see it? Will you drown the whole world just to see what would happen?"

A misty rain began to fall through the skylight above. Qalpalik looked up, mouth hanging open, eyes rolling with silent laughter, unheeded.

22.

They went north through the taiga. They followed a spiderweb of brooks that hitched back and forth through trenches between the trees. They came across an abandoned logging camp that stretched for miles into the east. The lumber mill's waterwheel still churned slowly against the current with an even clipping sound. The automata of abandoned conquest.

Where the taiga ran up against the first contours of the highlands the crags became steep abutments against the trees. They struggled over loose rock and slick lichen to escape the forest's embrace. Days later they were back upon the tundra that spanned in greater and smaller striations the whole of the continent. They moved northeast in running fits, having progressed so slowly and meticulously through the forest. Back into the mountains.

They sat in darkness in the night upon the huge flatness of the tundra, nothing taller than themselves marking any horizon, themselves like two monoliths planted there, the axis upon which the world churned impossible-slow around them, facing one another.

"Why go south," Qalpalik asked, "Only to go back into Named-land?"

"Angrboda would have first assumed we'd gone east or west, not south. By now she's realized she was wrong, and sent  searchers into the heart of the bone-lands and dragon-lands after us. Or has gone there herself."

Qalpalik had her hood drawn up and her coat pulled tight. Only her eyes were visible, dull reflective slats behind the mask of her hair. "What if she second-guess you? 

Sygemund rubbed her head. "Then we hope for luck."

"Luck is not real."

"Then we hope Old Mother's intervenes on behalf of our fates."

Qalpalik curled herself tight on the spot. She looked like a shabby black mound dropped there long ago. "Old Mother is dead. There's no fate. There is only happenings. Happenings leading into happenings. Everything flowing out of other happenings."

"So everything we do is predetermined."

"No," Qalpalik said, her growl becoming quieter and quieter. "There is only the cause, and after that--we wait, and see what happen."

Sygemund looked west, to where the faintest trace of violet light lingered vanishing on the mountain peaks. "Does that frighten you?" she asked.

Qalpalik would say no more.

23.

They had come back to the homeland of the Named.

They moved fast. They were practiced in that terrain. What took the southrons years to advance upon they moved through in days. They struck northeast and kept to the shadows to avoid outposts of some lesser clans. At night, if they could not find suitable habitation, they simply buried themselves beneath the snow.

Several days thereafter they scaled a peak and to the southeast in the evening light lay the country of Zhul, the ground barren and treeless going on and on. On the horizon they could see the black triangular beads of ziggurats, and the air above that whole forbidding corner of the world was smeared with steely smoke that would not disapparate. The road that ran out of the west and into that country had been bombarded into rubble, a great band smashed to pieces, retreating into the vanishing point.

They'd heard before the close of the war that some great calamity had befallen the trolls; the lesser clans whose lands they now crept through reported strange lights and distant thunder as the southrons and the Dead both encroached upon the Drakkari. "Killed and et their gods," an outrider of Clan Hraeslung told them. "Trapped them in bod'ly forms, so say the seers. Killed and et their gods."

Angrboda said if it was true, it was because the trolls were weak. Their fear overpowering reason. For all the good it might have done them, word came after the Dead King's defeat that Zhul was a place now haunted, and that no good would come of going there. It seemed like a whole piece of the world had been sequestered, declared too catastrophic even for its suffering neighbors, left to sweat out or succumb to whatever contaminant was within it.

Sygemund and Qalpalik sat and watched that place until the sun went down and it disappeared, and then moved on.

24.

Northeast, always northeast. A week after they left the vision of Zhul they came around a mountain and there embedded in the side of it was one of the Storehouses of Hrimthursar. A bronze disc more than a mile high, the entryway. Giant metal realms underground.

Before the war, the Highland Named sometimes made forays into the Storehouses where the Unnamed slaves of Hrimthursar still toiled in their dumbness. Seers had long debated some means of imparting Old Mother's Naming upon those cursed individuals, but with no cure manifesting itself the only course of action was to destroy them.

The Dauntless above all else had commodified the activity of Storehouse-plundering, selling the metalcraft found within to the other peoples, but it was solemn, dangerous, and frightful work that few Named wished to partake in and fewer returned from. In the farthest reaches of the northernmost mountains the Storehouses were not vaults but whole cities, frozen in time when Hrimthursar departed, and at the height of the war, the southron had delved them seeking whatever daft goal they believed waited inside.

If they ever found what they were looking for, they did not stay to claim it.

25.

The day before she took the whaler and fled:

A year after word came that the southrons had cracked the pinnacle and brought low the Dead King. Two years since the burning citadel collapsed upon her and gave her the name Half-Dead. Three years since Qalpalik came stumping out of the east and installed herself as whatever Qalpalik considered her vital function in society to be. The Dauntless would not refuse a Named woman, no matter how ominous they seemed.

Hyldnyr was in lockdown: they had been throwing sorties at the southrons for months, but desperate western clans were harrying their borders and had even attacked an outlying settlement. Another jarl led a retaliatory strike that threatened to open a new front; the grandmother council decreed the Dauntless would hunker down and wait out the storm. The jarls agreed. Fires burning in the distance, far below. Terrible thunder, returning parties said, out in the Skrael, the Dead-lands, and in the plains beyond. Lowland clans from the southeast, where the High Jarl sold them into service of the Dead King, torn apart by catastrophic infighting, the survivors disappearing into the wilderness.

Angrboda had called upon Sygemund. She found her in the amphitheatre, lounging in the seats with her two most senior huscarl lieutenants, Beyla and Suttung. The former was extensively tattooed, nearly nothing left untouched except her forehead, while the latter was marked by the rare Dauntless quirk of pure fire-orange hair. A pack of children were playing a game of kickball down in the stage.

"We should be out finding food for the stores," Beyla was saying. "Not waiting here for a hungry winter."

"Look at you," Angrboda said, "A decade of the Puppet King and his southern admirers, and you think we're doomed. Sandraudiga fought the giants for a hundred years."

"Beyla, have you forgotten you are Named?" Suttung said.

They fell quiet and stared as Sygemund came up the stands. "Sygemund," Beyla said, in a tone of voice that told her what she was really saying was Half-Dead.

"Beyla, Suttung. Jarl Angrboda."

"Where's your hanger-on, Sygemund?" Suttung said, glancing around. "Your fishy little wife?"

"You'd have made a fine skald, Suttung. Might need more than the same three or four jokes, though."

"You--" Suttung began, almost rising out of her seat, but Angrboda cleared her throat.

"Beyla, Suttung. Dismissed." They shot back withering looks as they trounced out of the amphitheater.

Down on the stage, one child had thrown the ball through the goalposts with her hands. She claimed she'd simply kicked the ball with her fingers, and had sparked a fierce philosophical discussion for the moment.

"You shouldn't tease Suttung like that, Sygemund."

"When they're as rigid as her, that's asking a bit much."

"Sit."

She stretched out beside Angrboda as the children returned to the game at hand. From the amphitheater they could see woodsmoke coming up from the tall houses next door, and hear the bustle of the main thoroughfare and the sounds of rhino honking in the kennels. Angrboda yawned and crossed her arms. "Was your mother religious?"

"Not especially."

"Nor was mine."

"Haven't been listening to the seers, have you? Finding your faith?"

Angrboda snickered. "No. I was just thinking about it. Old Mother and Hrimthursar, Fimbulvetr--"

"The winter that will supposedly precede Old Mother's return and the final battle at the end of the world," Sygemund said.

Angrboda nodded. "Half the seers called the Dead War, the Southron War--whatever the hell they decide to call it--they say it was Fimbulvetr."

"They weren't very public with this revelation."

"The grandmothers cautioned against it, for fear of inciting a panic. And look what happened."

"No Fimbulvetr, no Old Mother."

Angrboda turned towards Sygemund, resting her chin on her fist. "No Old Mother, but perhaps this was Fimbulvetr."

"I thought you said you hadn't found faith."

Angrboda rolled back and let her head loll against the stand behind her. "If there was ever a time for Old Mother's return, that time has passed. Either she is dead, or she never was, or she no longer loves us. Perhaps she even despises the Named for what they have become."

"And what have we become?" Sygemund said.

"A rotting body. Half of the Named joined the Dead King either out of fear or stupidity or the belief that they could profit off it. Is this what Old Mother led us from bondage for? Is that what the metal gods from the sky had hoped their slaves would become? Is this why Sandraudiga killed the Jarl of all Named and became the First Dauntless?"

Sygemund shuffled uncomfortably in her seat. "If what you're saying is, we are all alone, then--" she gestured at the children. "What will we tell them?

"We'll tell them what our mothers told us, and their mothers before them," Angrboda said, suddenly stern. "They say I love nothing, Sygemund. I hear them whispering in the taverns. They say I have only blackness in my heart. And they are right. You have been my scout all these years, Sygemund. What kind of jarl do you think I am?"

Sygemund rubbed her head. "I'd say you are--magnanimous, and--"

"I'm telling you to speak freely, you bald bastard."

"I'd say you'd throw any of us to the wolves if it meant you'd come out ahead for it," Sygemund blasted. She tensed, anticipating immediate and excessive retaliation. Angrboda only smiled at her.

"That was lurking in you a long time. Good. The others hide behind flattery. You never have. Even when you wouldn't say it--your eyes would."

"Would you have had anyone else scouting for you in this war?" Sygemund asked.

"None."

"So why did you call me here?"

Down on the stage the smallest girl had scored a goal, and her teammates were cheering. Angrboda waved her hand over them. "I have love in my heart, Sygemund. My heart is cold and dark and full of love. I love every hair on their heads. I love every word from their mouths. I love what will alone has given us. We are the Dauntless. This war has shown us what this world would do to us. Puppet-kings and scavenging multitudes. Slow, poison death. And we have rebuked them." She sat up and pushed the hair from her eyes. "I would snuff the life out of every southron, burn their homes, tear down their monuments, and erase every echo of them from history. I would do all this, if I knew it would keep them safe," she nodded at the children down on the stage. One of the girls saw and ran into the stands.

"Angrboda! Angrboda!" she shouted, clambering up to them, "Did you see me? I scored a ball!"

"Yes, I did," Angrboda said, mussing her hair.

"I ran right through Narvi's legs!"

"Yes, you used your size to your advantage. You are small, but you made that your strength. You make me proud to have such mighty Dauntless here today."

The girl was beaming as she ran back down to the pitch. Sygemund chewed her thumbnail absently. "You didn't answer my question."

Angrboda stood up. Her shadow loomed long even in the midday sun, draped across Sygemund's legs. "Do you love your people, Sygemund?"

"More than anything."

"Would you ever betray them?"

Sygemund sat up stiffly. "Never."

"You would never collaborate with the southrons?"

"Never, on my mother's name, and her mother's name."

"Not even if you believed it was right?" Angrboda said. "If you believed what you did was for the good of Hyldnyr?"

Sygemund was on her feet. "I would never betray my people. I would never collaborate with the enemy. In the eye of Old Mother, I swear this. Damn you, I swear it!"

The children halted their game at the commotion, save for a skinny girl who used the opportunity to score a half hearted goal. They watched, still and birdlike. For a long moment neither of the women moved except for breathing.

"That is all I need to hear." Angrboda threw open her arms. Sygemund prepared to spring away, but she was grappled. But her back did not break and her lungs did not pop; Angrboda merely embraced her. She kissed her upon her scarred brow and then she released her. "You are dismissed."

Sygemund left the amphitheater. She did not look back. She walked until she reached the clan's messhall, went around to the alleyway behind it. She climbed behind a small hillock of barrels, sat down in the mud, removed a square of cloth from her collar, and pressed her face behind it.

26.

She had been keeping track of time and surmised that several months had passed since they first left Hyldnyr, but could not be certain. If Angrboda had not caught up with them, could that mean she was not following them--and then what had their route been for? Who could have  been spared the attentions of the whaler had she not gone south? Who could have survived had she faced the judgement of the jarl alone?

She wondered if the person she was looking for could still be waiting for her at all.

Days past the vault they found themselves shadowed by a pair of yeti. Melanistic grey-black, they stood stark against the snow and crouched like rough-hewn statues at a distance of no closer than a hundred feet behind them. That night they did not break camp but went ahead in the night and did not see the yetis again.

27.

The watchtower had been abandoned by the Named.

It was just a high stone wall surrounding a yard in which sat a squat stone tower. It stood in the shadow of a peak and at the edge of a precipice that fell away to mist and rocks miles below. The sky was clear and the air was thin and the tower sat alone and exposed in the eyes of whatever cosmic impulse had dumped it there. A single southron flag flew tattered from the single window upon the tower. It pointed and fluttered in the wind, the only moving element of the tower, like a stunted appendage beckoning them.

They stood silent before the doorless gate. When nothing came of it, they went inside. The yard was empty. There were not even remains or remains of remains. Just ancient bootprints fossilized in the ice. The flag was all the more profane for its jostling in absence of any old horror to mark.

The tower door was gone, and inside nothing remained but a spiral staircase of about twenty-five flights of stones, leading to a wooden ladder with most of the pegs rotted. They climbed the ladder to the second floor. The trap door at the top of the ladder would permit only a single body, and the roof was cramped and inaccessible except for a fist-sized hole for smoke to escape from and a small square window.

They did not speak for a long while. Qalpalik took off her coat and laid out all of her whaletooth knives upon it. There were eight in all. She set to sharpening them with a stone.

"When I was young my mother takes me seal hunting," she began. "We wait for one beside the hole it cut in the ice. We catch and bleed it and wait for the pup to come. But then three polar bear come and menace us. On one side water, and the other the bears. My mother tell me she draw them while I run. But then we hear sound behind us, and there she was." She pulled back her foot and moved her hand through the air as though trying to clear smoke from memory. "Akhlut, All-Mother of Whales. A mile long."

"No whale is that big."

"At first I think she will breach, but no. She only rises. The water comes up to our necks and the bears run across the flows afraid. My mother is afraid. But I am not afraid. Her eye is as big. The biggest eye ever seen. I can see myself reflected in it. And then she sink away. My mother say to never speak of it. I cannot forget. Then I know. This world is full of knowings and happenings. I must find them. All-Mother Akhlut gives me this gift of knowing. Knowing that I am Qalpalik."

Sygemund had lain her longsword on the floor in front of her. Qalpalik skipped the sharpening stone to her. As Sygemund set to work with it, Qalpalik selected a knife and began to shear hair from her head.

"Why did they banish you from your clan?" Sygemund asked.

"I tried to know too much."

They had nothing with which to start a fire. When Qalpalik had finished chopping, her hair was close-cropped against her skull. Patchy as though she had been struck by mange. Without the mask of hair it seemed that all obfuscation had been shorn away, and what she was became unmistakable. As the light died behind the mountains, the room was plunged into darkness and they fell asleep with their weapons in their laps against either wall and facing one another.

28.

She dreamed of aqueducts.

29.

Someone was calling out to her.

Qalpalik shook her awake and pointed at the window.

"Sygemund!" the voice called again. They crept across the floor and peered out.

Dawn had broken over the mountains and the snow was sweat-slick with sunlight. Beyond the watchtower was a small abutment of rock and arranged along and below it were eight of Angrboda's huscarls, and Angrboda herself. They came decked for war and Agnrboda bore her one-eyed helm of Old Mother. Beyla and Suttung flanked her. She bellowed again. "Sygemund!"

"She didn't bring the bearskins," Sygemund said in a hushed voice. "Thank Mam."

"Sygemund!" Angrboda's voice echoed off the mountainside.

"Jarl!" Sygemund called.

"Are you in there, Sygemund?" Angrboda said. Her voice carried clear and deep through the wind. "Is Qalpalik with you?"

She looked to the whaler. "Yes."

Angrboda removed her helmet and set it down in the snow. She looked no different than she had when Sygemund last saw her. "I am unarmed. Will you let me come up and speak with you?"

Sygemund pulled Qalpalik away from the window. "Can you do this for me? Can you do this one last thing?"

"What thing?" 

"If you try to take her life, they'll kill us. If you have any care in the world for me, you'll stay your hand until some other time. Can you do this?"

Qalpalik clapped her hands on Sygemund's shoulders. "This I do."

Sygemund stepped to the window. "Come up."

Four huscarls stayed outside the walls and the others took up positions within the yard.

Angrboda left her greatclub in the yard and stepped inside.

They listened as Angrboda came up the stairs. The ladder groaned beneath her bigness. She threw open the trap door and peered into the gloom.

"There we are," she said, squeezing herself inside. Immediately it seemed that the chamber was too small. Her presence swamped the space. She sat cross-legged like a huge and militant idol. They crouched alert beside the window and stared at her.

"Sit."

They complied. "You're here," Sygemund said. "So talk."

Angrboda tapped her knees. "Why did you run?" she said inquisitively.

"You were going to kill me."

Angrboda looked confused. "I issued no such order. Put out no decree, did not order your arrest. Made no threats against you. Why do you believe this?"

"In the amphitheater."

"You told me that you did not collude with the southron. You are not a lying woman, Sygemund."

Sygemund wagged her finger at her. "You told me that you'd do anything to safeguard Hyldnyr. Even kill your own. I know you would."

"Why would I want to kill you?" Angrboda said sardonically, throwing out her arms. "You have no aspirations at jarldom. You performed your duties to the fullest extent. You did not boast or brag or demand tribute beyond your worth. You never pretended. You told me the truth when I was surrounded by boot-kissers and psychophants."

Qalpalik scoffed. "If she is innocent, why you come armed for war?"

"Because she is in the company of a dangerous whaler who is wanted by clan Brynhyldr for crippling Jarl Drauphir's daughter."

Qalpalik laughed scornfully. "They want tithe for her injury? I will shit in Drauphir's helm and she can see if it turns to gold."

Angrboda shook her head. "Always so righteous. If you swear to apologize in person, Qalpalik, I will pay your tithe from my own coffers."

Qalpalik spat on the floor. "That is my tithe."

"Of all the spiteful women in the world, Sygemund, you had to make a friend of this one."

"You still believe I am a traitor," Sygemund said, rubbing her hands together. "I'm not a fool, Angrboda. Maybe I am a fool--but not that kind of fool."

"Do you want to know? I've seen you go out to the bluff below the south road. Seen you wait there in the night." Sygemund stiffened. "Waiting for orders that never came. Or perhaps they did, and I'm just too unwise to see it."

Sygemund tried to speak but rasping came out. Qalpalik was stone-still.

"I--I was not… I was not waiting for--for orders," Sygemund stammered. She kneaded her knuckles against her thighs. "I did not collaborate--"

"I believe you did this because you wanted the war to end sooner, Sygemund. I believe that in your foolishness you went against your people because you believed it to their betterment." Angrboda shrugged. Sygemund jawed and her eyes seemed drawn to some impossible distance. "The only others who know of this now sit in this room. And I will forgive you, Sygemund. I will let this chase sit as punishment enough. Exile across the sea is no longer necessary. I'm sure your southron handlers will not mourn you. You helped me win this war. You are Dauntless. Come back to Hyldnyr."

"Is is a lie," Qalpalik hissed. "They will hang you by the neck and pull out your organs."

Sygemund rubbed her face. "Angrboda--"

"It is as it is," the jarl said, standing. "We shall await you no more than an hour. If you return with us to Hyldnyr, all is wiped clean. Should you refuse, I will bring you by force and air your crimes to the grandmothers." She looked to Qalpalik. "You--have wanted to kill me since the moment you first laid eyes on me. If you return to Hyldnyr and change your ways, I believe the Dauntless still have a place for you. Otherwise, I believe we shall never have need of you again, and you should be on your way." The jarl bowed slightly.

Sygemund stood up. "Thank you, jarl."

Angrboda stepped onto the ladder. Qalpalik looked back and forth between her and Sygemund all her teeth bared and clacking in disbelief. "This is a lie. They mean to kill you."

Sygemund shook her head. "This is what must be done--"

"No!" the whaler cried out. In one step she cleared the room and drove the butt of her spear into Angrboda's mouth. The jarl was nearly through the trap door and could not get her hand up to ward the blow and a second came and a third and her jaw was bloodied. Qalpalik kicked her in the temple and then grabbed the trap door and slammed it against the back of her head. The ladder cracked beneath her and she disappeared and fell to the bottom floor with a wet-sounding crash.

Sygemund gaped in horror. "What have you done?"

"The jarl is yours--the rest are mine!" she said, and in one vault cleared the window, spear raised, and disappeared. A moment later came a sickening thud and shouting.

Sygemund grabbed her longsword and dropped onto the staircase. Angrboda splayed prone and bleeding at the base of the tower. A terrible commotion outside. She raced down the stairs and out the door and knew now how the southron had felt so many times before when the Dauntless surrounded them and ushered them to their doom.

One of the huscarls had been Qalpalik's landing. She had driven the spear down through her neck and out the back of her ribs. Before any of the huscarls understood what was happening, she wrenched the spear free and ran the closest woman through below the eye. That woman sat mutely in the yard, her helmet askew, her arms hanging inert, as though something vital had been annihilated. The huscarls guarding the tower were gone, and through the open gateway she saw Beyla plunging out of view in the direction of yelling.

She ran through the gate and stopped short when someone shouted, "Half-Dead!" Suttung was upon her with a heavy bearded axe. She caught the first blow with the tip of her sword, but reeled when the lieutenant punched her squarely in this nose with her buckler. Another huscarl joined the fight, and she backed away, parrying axe blows.

Atop the abutment of rock one of the huscarl lay bleeding with Qalpalik's spear crammed in her guts. Qalpalik had thrown off her coat and squared off with the remaining three a little ways off, patterns of blue blood marking her trail from the gate. Beyla fought with two swords and the others with axe and shield, and Qalpalik lashed about whaletooth knives in hand, turning their blows again and again. When she lost a knife to a shield she simply drew another and continued. Tumbling and cursing, demanding the knowledge of their interiors that she must know, that no one else may know. One of the shieldbearers swung too wide, and she stepped in under her guard and dragged her knives in an x across her neck. She fell backward and expired upon the snow, and Qalpalik laughed her mirthless animal laugh because what had happened was done by her.

Against their heavy axes Sygemund struggled. Suttung fought enraged, perhaps believing her jarl already slain by the Half-Dead and the whaler. Suttung and the other huscarl coordinated their blows and the axes came down in a rhythm to drive the feeling from Sygemund's hands. She saw an opening when Suttung struck and let the axe fall too wildly; twisting the longsword, Sygemund pushed the tip behind the axe's beard and wrenched Suttung into the other huscarl's swing. The other huscarl cried out as the axe lopped off her two smallest fingers and tore her hand down to the wrist. Before either of them could react, Sygemund twisted her grip and ran the other huscarl through the neck. Suttung roared vengeance. Weapons still entangled, she pulled Sygemund to the ground and started hitting.

Qalpalik disarmed the second huscarl and slashed her repeatedly across the face, and that woman staggered away and fell. Qalpalik now fought Beyla alone. Beyla was the fastest swordswoman in the clan, and had taken her first head at eleven. They whirled around one another, great plumes of snow thrown up in their step and counter-step; Beyla with her teeth clenched and Qalpalik's mouth open and tongue lolling heinously.

Sygemund and Suttung rolled, once over the fallen huscarl and back again. Suttung punched and kicked and bit her on the cheek. The snow around them was blue chunks mashed up like watery corpuscles, and they were soaked through as they rolled and fought. Finally, she wrapped Suttung in a clinch and struggled to maintain the hold as a shape filled the open gateway of the yard.

Angrboda marched forth. She was bloodied and beneath her brow boiled a fury Sygemund had never seen her betray. If she saw Suttung in Sygemund's grasp, she did not care; she strode past them with her greatclub of antler and jaw dragging behind her.

"Jarl!" Qalpalik cried out when she saw her. Beyla glanced for only a second, but that was a second too long, and Qalpalik pressed a whaletooth knife through the visor of her helm and another into her ribs. She left them there and pushed her away with a look of derision and drew two fresh knives. She started to say something but Angrboda would not allow her this and charged.

Suttung's struggling slowed as Sygemund held the clinch. The huscarl bit her on the arm and held tight and punched wildly behind her head for Sygemund's face. Out of the gate came walking the huscarl whom Qalpalik had stabbed below the eye. The woman looked down at them blankly through her one intact eye before she sank into the muddy snow.

Qalpalik fought Angrboda. The whaler was fast, but the jarl was fast, too. Killers of giants both. Seperately they had cultivated their heaps of slain in pursuit of endgames known only to them and them alone. Now those heaps ran together. Bloody and beaten they swam in Sygemund's vision as they clashed and seemed like two black suns colliding. When Suttung went slack  in her grip, she let go of her clinch. Threw herself off the huscarl and tried to stand.

Qalpalik no longer made faces or screeched or cussed. Her face was as stern as Angrboda's. She ducked and bobbed around her, knives probing. Angrboda's greatclub tore chunks of snow and dirt free as she twirled after Qalpalik, antler and jawbone grazing the whaler again and again. A huge swing forced her to dive aside, and she rose, hurling one of her knives which bit deep into Agnrboda's shoulder where the armor was only a join. The jarl tore it free and came on again.

"You will not know me!" Qalpalik snarled, and leapt upon Angrboda. She slashed her across the forehead and cheek, and when the jarl put up her hand the knife plunged through her palm. She caught Qalpalik by the neck and threw her to the ground before her. Qalpalik rolled as the greatclub came down, but the antlers tore a chunk of flesh from her ribs. Howling, the whaler drove a knife into Angrboda's hip and it disappeared to the hilt. The jarl went down on one knee and the other knife she pushed through her chainmail and buried halfway in the side of her abdomen. With one final heave, Angrboda brought her greatclub around and it connected full against Qalpalik's side and hurled her away.

"Jarl," Sygemund croaked, staggering, half-crawling toward her. "Jarl."

The jarl ignored her and shuffled to where Qalpalik lay. The whaler sat up. Her whole side was rent open and flecked with jaw and antler bits from the great club. She pulled a tooth out from her exposed flesh. When she spoke it was a rasp. "Oh," she said. Her expression was one of far-away bemusement. "Is Sygemund alive?" she asked.

"Yes," Angrboda replied.

"Good." She looked up into the shadow of Angrboda. "You would not have won without your dogs."

Angrboda raised her club, but Qalpalik held up her remaining knife and tried to laugh, but she choked on it.

"No. This knowing is not for you." She grimaced. "You... will not know Qalpalik."   

Calmly she pushed the knife through her chest and into her heart. She slumped over and at last she was gone.

Angrboda let out a great sigh of exertion and relief and dumped the greatclub from her hands. She stumbled back a few feet and sat heavily in the snow. "She's right."

"Jarl," Sygemund said. "I didn't mean for this."

"Neither did I."

The huscarl whose face had been slashed so terribly was feeling her way across the snow toward them, temporarily or perhaps permanently blinded by her injuries. "Jarl, Jarl," she implored.

"Laufey, I am here. It is done."

Suttung had roused herself and was advancing on Sygemund drunkenly, holding the broken handle of an axe. "Suttung, stand down," Angrboda commanded.

"I will--kill her--"

"Suttung, your jarl commands you!" she said, doubling over in pain.

"Jarl!" Suttung dropped the axe handle and stumbled past Sygemund to support her.

"I am fine. Help Laufey."

The sun had broken over the mountains and it cast in stark relief the disaster that had transpired there. Hanging across the valleys and peaks below them the mist now caught the daylight and it swirled purple and gold like an inlet sea made of some substance lighter than air and more priceless than all the wealth accumulated heretofore by all the peoples of the world.

She had never seen the jarl look so tired.

"You cannot go back to Hyldnyr," Angrboda said.

"I know."

"These women had families. This is a blood debt you cannot repay. If you return with us, I will not be able to save you, now."

"Save her?" Suttung spat. She cradled Laufey's head and daubed her wounds. "Look at what she's done! There must be recompense!"

"The whaler did this!" Angrboda shouted, and Suttung quailed. "Sygemund is no traitor. She slew in self-defense, and spared you when she knew it was within her power to do so. Your sisters lie dead of the whaler's knives, who now lies dead before you."

"They'll hunt me down," Sygemund said. "All the clans will come after me."

"No, they shall not. Beyla herself slew you in the battle. She threw you from the precipice yonder. The whaler--Suttung and Laufey killed her in my defense. That is what transpired here."

Sygemund blinked back tears. "Angrboda…"

"If you love the Dauntless, you will do this for me. Never come back to Hyldnyr. You fell under the spell of the whaler and repented in your death. That is what the people shall know. You were my finest scout and a true daughter of Sandraudiga. This is my final command of you, Sygemund, daughter of Var, of the Dauntless."

"No," Suttung said weakly, "Jarl--"

"It is finished, Suttung. You are witness to it. If you love me as your jarl then you will bury the truth of this here. Your sisters wait in glory beside Old Mother, now."

"Yes, jarl," Suttung replied, and huddled wounded Laufey up in her arms.

Sygemund wiped her face. "Where did it all go wrong."

"We are born to a world that despises us. And so we struggle." Angroda gestured along the mountainside toward the east. "Go. You must--"

"--take this road alone."

Angrboda nodded once. "Fimbulvetr is done. The rest--only Old Mother knows."

The scout went out along the ridge and did not look back.

30.

There is a place where the mountains reach the sea and where those mountains run up against the plains of Zhul. On one side is the ocean and on the other the plains of Zhul which still lie under a steel-colored pall. Here is where the snowmelt collects and becomes gullies and becomes streams, and where it feeds the aqueducts that begin here and go out into the west. Here is where, when she was a girl, the local children brought the caravan children to see the place their people called the Headwaters of All Creation. She is waiting at the spot where they brought them.

The plant is still here. It is a single plant that grows green and thick and and flat and soft across the ground. It winds all through the rocks here upon this open place high above the world. When she lies upon it it is softer than anything she has ever lain upon, and she remembers the stars innumerable above her and she remembers how they all lounged upon it marveling. Beneath the plant she hears imperceptibly the first tricklings of the Headwaters that will grow and make for the aqueducts that lead to untilled fields.

She is waiting for someone. She is Dauntless and is Named and cannot be Unnamed. There is no soul there save for her. This is where they would meet should everything go wrong. She has not seen her since before the War. At night sometimes she would go out of Hyldnyr alone and sit atop a certain bluff and look south. When the jarl learned of this she kept it secret and suspected her of misdeed. Suspected she was waiting there for orders.  It was merely where she sat when she thought upon the memories. Years past the southrons had approached the scout to parlay her collaboration and she refused. They let her go with a seed of doubt within her.

She is waiting for someone. She met her atop the aqueducts in summer. Her hair was the color of redwood. She brought her honeycombs from the great taiga, gemstones from the underground, and seashells from the far shoals and met her in the summers. She could not come with her to Hyldnyr because she was not of the Named. She had not seen her since before the War. She is lying upon the Headwaters and in the starless sky above her she knows behind the pall are stars innumerable. Before the Dead King and before the southrons and before she was burned, they had sat upon the aqueduct both now grown, and had promised to go to the Headwaters should it all go wrong. She kissed her and fled across the tundra and into the War. She is Dauntless born of Var who spun the wheel by will alone. Old Mother cursed them with mind and speech and in their hearts the folly of love. She is lying upon the Headwaters of All Creation. She is waiting for someone.

END