“No. But few of our mortal enemies would have been shooting from behind us, so I still have trouble understanding how so many arrows in the line of our downhill charge would have missed their target—unless the trees were the target.”

The mortal’s face was a mask, as blank at that of any Hikeda’ya at his or her duty. “Do you have a point, Sacrifice?”

“Call me Nezeru, please. I think we have passed that stage of formality, don’t you? After all, we have fought together, killed mortals together, and now we ride together. And I will call you ‘Jarnulf’. Or is that not your true name?”

“As true as any.” He looked at her with what she gauged to be a little more respect than previously. “But you still have not answered my question. Who gave you your mortal blood?”

She considered for a moment. “My mother. She is of Rimmersgard, like you.”

“A slave also, like me and the rest of my family?”

“Not exactly.” And that was true—there really was no precedent for the relationship between Nezeru’s noble father and her outlander mother. “But I think she would recognize much of your life.”

“I hope not, Lady Nezeru. Because I would not wish my life on anyone.” Suddenly, surprisingly, he spurred his horse ahead and did not slow until he had reached a position halfway between Nezeru and leaders of the company.

Yes, she thought, not without pleasure. It will be a long, slow game with this one.

His earliest memories were of the cold, of huddling in the slave barracks with the other children. The winds that descended from the Nornfells and swirled around great Stormspike seemed always to be in motion, always searching for a way into the crude buildings, and their whistling song haunted his childhood. Even crushed in with other shivering children, thin bodies pressed together like mouslings in a nest of rags, Jarnulf was never warm.

He remembered the cold, and of course the hunger. The Hikeda’ya did not consider children fit for any but the lightest of labors until they had reached a certain size, usually at about ten years of age, so they did not concern themselves overmuch with feeding the slaves’ offspring. Those who showed themselves strong enough to survive would be worth keeping, but those that did not were a waste of good grain, so children were given just enough thin gruel to keep them alive. If some of the larger took food from the smaller, it only proved the stronger were more worthy of life and would bring their owners more value. The sickly were left to die. For centuries, that had been the way among the Hikeda’ya with their own children—why should the spawn of mortal slaves be treated any differently?

Jarnulf had known his mother Ragna for only a few years of his young life, and although he felt certain he still remembered her face, he could never be quite sure. What he did remember was her voice, one of the few gentle things of his childhood, lovely, soft, and sweet as birdsong. Her quiet words, as they huddled together at night trying not to wake the others, were his only memories of comfort. She told him stories of her family and of his people, and even taught him the rudiments of reading and writing in the old runes their ancestors had brought across the ocean to Osten Ard. But when he was only eight years old—his brother Jarngrimnur a year younger, and his sister Gret barely four years of age—another female slave died, and their mother was moved into the castle to replace her. Jarnulf and his brother and sister never saw her again.

For the younger ones, Jarnulf did his best to take her place, especially for little Gret, wrapping the child in his arms as the long nights crept past and the wind tugged and probed at the cracks in the cold stone buildings the Hikeda’ya called the “slave barns.” Some nights Gret shivered for hours, even in her sleep. His brother suffered too, and in the first winter after their mother left, Jarngrimnur died of the sweating sickness and his body was carted away to the Field of the Nameless to be burned.

The slave barns and the slaves themselves belonged to White Snail Castle, one of the last great estates still remaining in Nakkiga-That-Was, the city outside the mountain, which had once spread far beyond the base of great Stormspike. The old city had been a miracle of fluted stone and wide causeways, of great stone houses and walls, but now it was largely fallen into ruin. Still, a few of the older families had refused to withdraw inside the mountain; they kept to the old ways, living in the ancient gyrfalcon castles perched on the mountainside, supervising their own slaves and Bound farmers instead of leaving the work to overseers who were slaves themselves. The masters of White Snail Castle and the other outside estates raised sheep and cattle and horses on the terraced hillsides of Stormspike’s eastern foothills, living the way their ancestors had when they first came to this land of exile they called Do’sae né-Sogeyu—the Shadow Garden.

Jarnulf had gained more from his mother and his long-lost father than merely his slender, strong build, his height, and his knowledge of the old runes. His mother had also taught him to watch and to think, had showed him that the way to defeat strength was not always simply to be stronger.

“Do not mistake me,” she had told him more than once. “We are strong too, even though we are slaves. Remember, we come of the Jarn clan—the Iron clan—and the fairies have always hated iron and feared its power.” Again and again Ragna had insisted he learn to keep his temper, reminded him that there were other ways to fight, even to win. “Cleverness can save you where strength or size cannot,” she had told him, illustrating it with the story of how the fire god Loken once tricked the king of the ogres. “Patience can do it, too, because Time can do what men cannot.”

Jarnulf had liked that story in particular because he knew about giants. He often saw the massive creatures at work—the Hikeda’ya called them Raoni—moving heavy rocks and beams for their masters, because the giants were slaves just like Jarnulf. Seeing them, he had realized that there were some enemies he would never be strong enough to fight, and it was a lesson he would not forget. Thus, when their mother was taken away to be a house slave, instead of attacking the Hikeda’ya overseers who came for her, young Jarnulf had held in his anger until he felt scorched inside, but had said and done nothing.

Cleverness can do it, he had told himself over and over, though his blood seemed to boil inside him. Patience can also do it, he had thought, clutching the favorite saying of Ragna’s even as she was led away, not even allowed to look back, because Time can do what men cannot. But it had been a bitter day and the wound had never healed.

As he had grown older he had begun to be chosen for the sort of jobs that the Hikeda’ya gave to young slaves, cutting black barley on the steep hillsides until his skin itched all over, and carrying water to the harvesters, rubbish to the midden, and nightsoil to the fields. In this way he began to come into contact with the children of his Hikeda’ya masters. The estate that surrounded White Snail Castle was like a little city, and housed many kinds of people. The giants and the changeling creatures called Pengi seemed little more than animals, and were considered lower even than Jarnulf and his mortal kind, but several castes of Hikeda’ya lived in the castle as well—the Bound, the Pledged, and the Recognized. The Bound were the farmers, who had only a little more freedom than the slaves, but were still Hikeda’ya: even the meanest and lowest of them had life or death power over any mortal. The Pledged were the master’s soldiers and other important servants and functionaries. And of course the master and his family were of the Recognized, the caste of those who had been confirmed in the ranks of nobility by the queen herself.