Annek was a trollish name. Torpor Peak was a trollish settlement in the north—not very far north, but north enough.

  “Annek! Leave it! You’ll wake the spiders! Tsk.”

  The stallholder straightened as she stepped down from the covered wagon. At full height, she was taller than Runa, though built on narrower lines. Her dawn-toned skin pinked further as she took in the sight of Runa standing bulky and awkward at her stall, and her amethyst eyes brightened. “Ah! A fellow countrywoman. Are you hoping to join the caravan north, before the skies light?”

  “Hoping to trade,” Runa said shortly. Too shortly. She cleared her throat. “Not traveling, I mean. I live here, I mean, I live up there, in Pothollow.”

  “Oh!” The cloth trader’s eyes flicked up and down again, and narrowed as she changed her judging parameters from solo adventurer hoping to join a caravan to potential customer. Some of the interest in her gaze faded. Runa’s ruggedness would make her a desirable travel companion; the roads might not have the sorts of monsters you found in the Cauldron, but there were always bandits to deal with.

  Customers were customers.

  But customers had their benefits, too, especially poorly clothed ones.

  The troll woman’s face broke out in a grin. “I’m Agetta,” she said. “My daughter Annek and I—Annek! Not the silverweaves!—travel this route every year before the sky lights, bringing exotic cloth from across the continent to the north.”

  “Let me guess.” A smile twitched at the corner of Runa’s mouth. “Most of what you have stowed away back there is reserved for your loyal customers in Torpor Peak?”

  Agetta laughed. “But for the right price, what they don’t know won’t hurt them?” she suggested. “You’ve been away from home a long time, then, to know the low country tricks.”

  Runa shrugged. The north had never been her home, though she knew she looked like it should be.

  “I’m Runa,” she said. “And this is Severine. We found ourselves separated from our belongings. We’re after the basics—wool, linens…” She turned to Severine, hoping to communicate through the desperation in her eyes that she needed someone else to pick up this part of the conversation, and found Severine staring starry eyed at Agetta’s wagon.

  “Silverweave?” she breathed. “I’ve only ever seen it once.”

  “You’re from the Peaceable Sea? I suppose you wouldn’t have seen much of it, after all that trouble you had with dragons.”

  “I thought it was only woven by trolls? How are you trading it from the south?”

  Agetta shot Runa a look that said here we are, trolls telling stories together, and Runa felt more out of place than she had in months of being the only troll in the village. Agetta’s amethyst eyes shone as she explained. Her voice lilted with music.

  “Silverweave is spun from the wool of the winter-wind goat, under the lights of the aurora. The yarn pulls in the light that fills the sky, and the cloth woven from such yarn is so beautiful it lures dragons from their starlit flight.” Agetta leaned forward. “But the magic lasts only as long as the aurora in the winter you weave it. To fix the magic within the cloth, you must hide it from the sky for a year and a day, and wash it in the seven great glacial rivers where they are deepest and clearest, before the aurora lights the next winter skies.”

  “Oh,” breathed Severine, spellbound. “That sounds very expensive.”

  Agetta’s grin widened. “Extraordinarily so.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d take a magical bastard sword for some?”

  “Planning to lure a dragon to your new home?” Agetta’s eyebrows quirked.

  We already have a dragon, Runa thought. Though she still wasn’t sure how secret Corvin’s true nature was. “Silverweave is only part of the luring,” she said.

  “We know that. Other people not knowing that is how the stuff got outlawed in the Peaceful Sea.” Agetta winked at Severine. “Or so I heard. And the silverweave is the one thing I really can’t trade outside Torpor Peak, I’m afraid. Is there anything else I can help you with? I have some silks…”

  “They wouldn’t last a week with me.” Severine’s shoulders slumped. “What do you have that’s boring and hardy and blends into whatever rocks I’m trying to hide behind? And is waterproof?”

  “Ah…”

  “And I can pay for with this.” Severine dumped a handful of random coins on the counter. “Plus whatever gold I can melt off a mouthy dagger—no, no that was obviously a joke, if I thought melting any of you down would actually help at all I’d have done it years ago…” She winced. “That was another joke.”

  “Spend a lot of time speaking to the voices in her head, does she?” Agetta asked Runa mildly.

  “Some.”

  “You get that, I suppose, this close to the Cauldron. What is it for her? Ghosts? Snorted a brain slug that hadn’t finished eating its previous host?”

  “Her has a name,” Severine snapped. “I mean—she—I mean I. And it’s swords,” she added abruptly. “Magic swords.”

  “My condolences.” Agetta turned to sort through rolls of fabric. “Here—are any of these to your liking?”

  “What’s a brain slug?” Runa asked as Severine looked at the cloth.

  Agetta shuddered. “Horrible creatures.”

  “It wasn’t that bad, Ma.” A younger trollish woman swung down from the wagon. “Silverweave’s fine, by the way.”

  “It would be more fine if you stopped messing with it! If even a glint of sunlight hits it—”

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  “It’s almost sundown, Ma, it won’t lose its magic.”

  “Almost but not quite. And I was going to say, if the singers up north think they’re not the first to lay eyes on the magic of the cloth, they won’t pay as much for it.” Agetta sighed. “And brain slugs are horrible creatures. One got into our old carthorse.”

  “We didn’t even notice until bits started falling off it,” Annek added.

  “Don’t say it like that! It was horrible! I’ll never be able to show my face in that town again.”

  “Because we left Spotty’s face there?”

  “Annek!” Agetta sighed and wiped a hand over her face. “The things crawl into dead creatures’ skulls and take them over, but it isn’t a true undeath, like with the veterans you see sometimes. They absorb what the body remembers about itself—”

  “That’s how come we didn’t notice Spotty was dead. She still pulled the cart alright, and tried to stomp her own shadow to death,” her daughter explained.

  “—but they don’t keep the body, you know, careful with their flesh and bones, like the old soldiers do.”

  She was talking about ghouls, Runa realized. A brain slug was something that could turn a creature into something like a ghoul?

  “Hence bits falling off!” her daughter added helpfully.

  “It was such a hot summer.” Agetta grimaced delicately. “But that was three years ago! None of the stock we have now was anywhere near it, of course.”

  “No discounts for dead horse smell?” Runa suggested.

  Agetta was all charming smiles again. “Precisely! Now, while your friend is looking at the wools, how can I help you?”

  Runa bartered for several generous lengths of lightweight wool cloth, and thread for stitching. Agetta had tried to talk her into some linen, as well, but Runa said it didn’t agree with her. She didn’t say the reason it didn’t agree was that it was easier to accidentally light it on fire. The wools were fine, anyway, and she was sure she hadn’t paid enough for them.

  Tam pounced the moment she turned away with her armful of fabric. “Finally!” he burst out. “Come on. This way. How can you spend so much time worrying about clothes?”

  Runa frowned. Tam was always well put together.

  “Tam Miller! I’ve your husband’s order waiting.” Agetta called.

  He waved at her, all smiles and haste to get on with whatever plan he’d hatched. “I’ll pick it up later!”

  “Don’t wait for me,” Severine said, still poring over options.

  Runa followed Tam. Her arm twinged with memory as they passed the street that led to the waystation, and she rubbed her palm absently.

  The first time she’d been down here, she’d been ready to leave. Now she couldn’t imagine it. Pothollow was her home in a way nowhere had been her home since she was a child, as Agetta had unintentionally reminded her.

  Still. If the traders were headed north, maybe she should leave a letter with Agetta and her daughter, to take to her father.

  Ugh.

  And, yes, ‘ugh’ was the reaction of a woman at least twenty years younger than she was, with the defense of being a teenager. Knowing that didn’t make her feel any better.

  At least she didn’t need to gnaw herself into a guilty nub over writing to her mother. Any letter that made it that far would go unnoticed until it had long since burned itself into a crisp.

  How long had it been since she saw her mother? Her father? Fifteen years—no, eighteen—no…

  More than half my life.

  She stopped dead in the middle of the street. What was making her think about this? Was finally settling down in one spot opening a new pot of worries that constant danger had kept firmly shut all these years?

  She hadn’t totally abandoned her parents. She wasn’t that bad a daughter. She sent gifts, and the occasional letter to her father and message to her mother to be shouted over the lava pits.

  And it wasn’t as though either of them had expected her to make a life with them.

  A faint, ghostly tingling in her palm distracted her as Tam haggled for little pots and bundles of herbs and spices. She recognized cinnamon, and the lump of salt, and the dried fruits that looked like the camp food she used to haul into the Cauldron.

  “No vanilla?” Tam asked the spice trader hopefully.

  The trader sniffed. He was a short, lissome man with the pointed ears that suggested nymphish heritage, and he’d been sneaking curious glances at Runa’s ears in a way that made her feel mulish.

  “No vanilla, no coffee. The ships ran late, and we couldn’t delay our journey any longer to wait for them.” The trader cursed. “There’s more demand each month, and that’s only in the city. Supply can’t keep up, even when the ships do show up on time. Nobody knows what’s keeping them this time.”

  Tam hummed. “No chocolate?”

  The spice trader sighed. “Next year. I’ll double my order, if the damn ships ever arrive.”

  Her purse was notably lighter when they left. Tam looked pleased with himself.

  “Was that a lesson in how I should let you cut my dough with ominous corn, because it’ll be cheaper?” Runa asked him.

  “No! Well, maybe.” He sighed. “Still feeling it in your arm?”

  She made an effort to stop rubbing the place where the curse had dug in the deepest. “It’s nothing. What’s chocolate?”

  He got the same look in his eyes that Severine did when she talked about coffee. “A food from across the ocean. I don’t know how it’s made. It comes in blocks for melting, or shaving pieces off, and if the gods are gone forever then at least they left chocolate behind for us.”

  Almost exactly like Severine with coffee, then.

  Runa raised an eyebrow. “You shave pieces off? Like cheese?”

  He shuddered. “Not like cheese.”

  They passed by the fabric stall again and picked up Severine, who looked content with her armful of fabric. “Not that I know how to sew it,” she admitted merrily. “Embroidery I could probably manage, still, but I honestly have no idea how a sleeve works.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Runa told her.

  “No, I’ve noticed you’re not a particular fan of sleeves.” Severine grinned.

  They caught up with Errant and Junilla and had just finished helping load the cart with sloshing barrels, and bottles which they were forbidden from sloshing, when a scream cut through the air.

  It came from Agetta’s wagon.

  Runa didn’t stop to think. She grabbed the first weapon she could lay hands on and sprinted back to the fabric stall. The sword was heavy in a good way, a way she could swing before whoever was threatening the other trolls could hurt them, before—

  —Death!—

  Her nostrils flared. No blood in the air. Not yet. It was late afternoon, the sun patchworked by the uneven town roofs into slashes of blinding light and deep pulsing shadows. She blinked. Someone staggered away from the fabric stall, shrieking. Agetta was swearing with all the eloquent passion of someone from a culture where kings are bards, and her daughter was flailing with something.

  “I told you to stop messing with it!” Agetta cried. “Now you’ve woken them up!”

  Two long, bristled, segmented legs appeared through the wagon’s open door. They clung a moment, then scuttled out—six more legs, a large, moon-white body, and eyes like pink sapphires.

  Giant spiders.

  She knew how to kill spiders.

  The sword vibrated in anticipation.

  —Death!—

  She leapt over the counter, sending fabric and money flying.

  —Death!—

  A savage joy pulsed within her. Maybe she couldn’t spin the stars into yarn, or sing a dragon from the aurora, or raise islands from the burning deep, but this she could do. An upswing that would cleave the first spider in two; use her momentum, swivel around, catch the two that were already scuttling down the side of the wagon’s wooden sides, dragging something with them.

  —Death! Death to them all, death in the hundreds, death in the thousands!—

  The voice was so loud in her head now, so huge and high and all-encompassing, that a space opened up beneath it, and her own thoughts gasped a breath.

  She’d told Severine she was more of a rolling pin person now.

  She could use an axe against a tree or a cursed beast. Machetes—but they were one-handed. And mostly good for vines.

  When had she ever been good with a sword?

  She hesitated, and the sword vibrated with a displeasure so intense it made Runa’s bones shake, but the pause was enough for Agetta to shout “Stop!” and for Runa to actually stop. She hauled back on her attack, and the broadsword completed its murderous arc by slicing a foot deep into the packed earth of the town square.

  Without killing anything.

  She let it go.

  The sword thrummed. The imprint of her hand was dark on the leather grip, as though she’d left a bloody handprint on it.

  And the rubies set into the stained and pitted greatsword’s pommel glared at her for not fulfilling their fate.