When her full sight returned, Tzoja led the four silent Hikeda’ya guards down the cracked, discolored stairs onto the Field of Banners, anciently a place of triumphant celebration, currently the home of the so-called Animal Market. The air outside the mountain was painfully fresh and cold, but rich with smells from the nearby Sacred Grove, pine and lemony birch and honey-sweet daphne. Even the reek of the fermented fish, sold from jugs all over the market, was almost welcome, because it reminded her of her old, simple life in Rimmersgard before the Norns took her. And as always, simply being out in the light and air, even surrounded on all sides by her fellow slaves and their corpse-pale overseers, Tzoja was thinking about freedom. Even though she had conceded long ago that it would never happen, she still dreamed about escape.

As she made her way down the untidy rows of mortal vendors and mortal buyers, she stopped to look at some gloves offered for barter on a crumbled stone table while the woman who had made them squatted beside it to stay out of the wind. In the early years of her captivity, one of Tzoja’s fancies had been to keep hidden a set of cold-weather clothes in case the chance for escape ever actually came. A warm, sturdy pair of fur-lined gloves like this would be much better than the ones she had hidden away, along with the gold coins and clothes and other useful things. But Tzoja could no longer convince herself that she would leave the mountain even if she were given the chance; Nezeru’s birth had changed all that.

She set the gloves back on the stone. The Clan Enduya household guards fell in around her once more. The crouching woman did not even look up.

The Animal Market had gained its name because nearly all the buyers and sellers were mortals, and that was how the Hikeda’ya thought of Tzoja’s kind. The market sprang to life each year during the Wind-Child’s Moon and came back once each moon during the warm season. Mortal serfs and slaves from the outermost Hikeda’ya lands came to trade goods with their own kind, both those who lived in the mountain itself and those who sheltered in the new settlements outside it, a tumbledown collection of shelters tossed up in recent years on the bones of Nakkiga-That-Was, the long-deserted Hikeda’ya ruins outside the mountain’s gates.

Most of those who came to the market were overseers buying cheap blankets, clothes, and food for both mortal and changeling workers. A few of the more fortunate mortals like Tzoja herself, mostly body slaves and other pets of the Hikeda’ya nobility, came looking for luxuries—scents, drinks, and foodstuffs more suited to their human tastes than what was given to them by their masters. But although most of the goods were meant only for mortal slaves and the poorest Hikeda’ya—no Norn of any standing would be seen mingling with the human herd—Tzoja was still constantly reminded that she now lived among the fairies.

Mingling with the hundreds and hundreds of mortals (and the smaller contingent of armed Norn guards keeping watch over the market) were a large number of the only slaves the Norns considered lower than mortal men and women—the changeling Tinukeda’ya in all their weird variety. There were carry-men, of course, manlike beasts of burden almost as tall as wild giants, with immense, muscular shoulders and tiny, empty-faced heads that showed no alteration of expression even when they stumbled under their monstrous loads. But Tinukeda’ya came in many other shapes as well, from the small, scuttling hairy things that worked on the highest mountainside farms in other parts of the Nornfells to the slender, mournful-faced delvers, who, despite their spindly appearance, could not just dig faster than either humans or Norns but also shape stone with the delicate ease of a man carving soft wood. Tzoja watched a pair of these delvers with bleak amusement as they bargained almost silently with a gem-seller: the owl-eyed creatures’ flinching hurry to be out of the sun and back into soothing darkness was the exact opposite of her own desires. But body shape alone meant nothing, not here: her Norn captors themselves, although more manlike than any of the changelings, were as different from Tzoja as a wildcat from a rabbit.

She should have been used to it by now. How long can you live in such a place and still feel that you are caught in a terrible dream? But it was an empty question, because she knew the answer was forever. Or at least until she died.

Tzoja did her best to banish such dire thoughts so she could enjoy her scant time in the sun, but it was not easy. Pointless as it was, she knew that the dream of escape would never completely leave her—she had spent too many years under the open skies ever to be able to surrender. Still, all she had to do was look around to be reminded of how hopeless such thoughts were. The slave folk never looked up at the Norn guards, and barely raised their voices above a whisper even when they were bargaining with other mortals. Back in Rimmersgard, where she had lived so many years in such ignorant happiness with Valada Roskva, the Rimmersgard matriarch and healer who had given her a home, the noise of the entire market would have been suitably respectable from a crowd gathered for a funeral. Even so, inside the mountain that was now and forever her home, so many mortal voices at once would be considered an unbearable, traitorous clamor, and would be quelled by swift violence. So the slaves barely whispered even out here, beneath open skies.

What good is freedom that cannot be used? she wondered. Is the poor gift of life worth so much?

But of course it was not her own life that held her in thrall. And because she had given birth to that beloved life, Tzoja knew she was doomed to live and die among a people stranger to her than the beasts of the field, and would never know real peace.

Even Tzoja’s Hikeda’ya lord and lover Viyeki, who was unlike his kindred in so many other ways, and who had been more considerate of her than any other of his kind would ever have been, did not understand Tzoja’s restlessness. The magister seemed to consider it an endearing but inexplicable mortal oddity, as a child might laugh at a dog chasing its tail, seeing only the low comedy and not the horrible futility. And Viyeki was by far the best of them.

•   •   •

It took a long time to walk up and down the crooked rows, and snow was beginning to flurry before she had finished, but Tzoja was determined to stay in the light as long as possible. The market was large—the site had once been the Norns’ Field of Banners, a broad ceremonial ground in front of the mountain gates, last used for its intended purpose centuries past, when most of the north had been ruled by the Hikeda’ya. The Rimmersmen who had come to Osten Ard out of the lost west had changed that beyond all recognition, long ages before Tzoja had been born. The thick-bearded warriors had conquered all the way down through Erkynland, killing Norns and their Sithi kin in great numbers, and killing countless mortals as well. After the Northmen came, her mistress Roskva had taught her, the Sithi had deserted their old cities and fled to the forests, while the Norns had withdrawn here, to their mountain capital and last stronghold, swearing never to give it up, to fight until the last Hikeda’ya was dead. After living two decades amidst these fierce immortals, she did not doubt they would do just that.

And what if war does come again? she could not help wondering. Whose side will I be on? My own people’s? Or my daughter’s?

The guards were giving her hard looks now. It was clear they thought it time to go back to the mountain, but Tzoja knew the weather might turn again and the deep snows return, which would mean no more outdoor markets for several moons. She ignored their looks and continued to walk up and down the rows all the way to the market’s outermost reaches, bartering Builders’ Order scrip for hazelnuts and cloudberries, dried turnips, parsnips, and wild celery, even a selection of dried river fish, mostly perch and pike, all of them things that reminded her of her days in Roskva’s order, of her happy time as a free woman, now so long ago. At last, as the sun dropped toward the western peaks and the Dragon Guard began to close the market, she reluctantly signaled to her escorts that she was ready to return.