There are two ways to climb Yggdrasill: Bark-climbing, and crosslimb. There’s also flying, but this group wasn’t smart enough to be born with wings. Crosslimb we did already: leaping and climbing between twigs as we crisscrossed our way up the thickets, shooting grappling hooks to other branches. It’s a complex game, working out a path in a maze of countless, obfuscating twigs. Bark-climbing, meanwhile, is as simple as falling to your death.

“Hurry up, Crow! Pull out those pitons!” Njord was standing on the twig above me. He adjusted the belay cord as I climbed, shortening it so I wouldn’t fall far if I did.

As to what I was doing, down here: Have you ever struggled to get a nail out, and bent it? Well, have you tried to get a wooden nail out of a tree without breaking it?

“Were you trying to kill the branch?” I called back. This was a joke, as it would take Thor himself to kill the immense Spire-Branch we were scaling. It was like a child of Yggdrasill, a mighty tree in its own right.

Into this god-tree, Njord had hammered in the wooden pitons as if they owed him money.

Clamping the piton with vice-grip pliers, I screwed the vice on tight… then used a crowbar to try and lift it. It popped out like a cork, slipping out of my grip with my pliers.

“Better they’re in too tight than too loose!” Njord excused his incompetence. “And don’t drop them!”

“I got it,” I said. Or rather, the vice-grip pliers were tied to my klifrigg, so I just pulled those up; the wooden rivet tightly clamped in its jaws. …Except, the piton was cracked. I threw it at Njord.

“Do that again, and I’ll drop you!” Njord pulled hard on my belay… but I just used the force to leap to the next piton above me.

“There’s no use having wooden ones if you’re a trǫll with ox-horns who needs to hit things hard.” I was quite aware oxen are castrated, with that choice of words. Njord’s red face showed he was as well.

“Troll, am I?” Or maybe he didn’t? Was he acknowledging the accuracy of my second insult?

He started yanking on my belay cord, making me bounce all over the place.

“Wheeee!” It was very fun. “Why did you stop?”

“Come up here so I can kill you!” Njord demanded.

“Let me finish removing the pins, first.” For this one, I first took my climbing hammer and chisel and chipped away at the tree around the piton. After a long, boring minute… I had the piton, intact. “I think I could whittle new ones faster than I can extract your mess.”

“If you keep talking, I’ll cut this rope—princess or not!” Despite his threats and bouncing before, the rest of the time he was meticulous in maintaining the anchor line: never pulling it too short and tugging me or hurrying me, nor letting it be slack. This wasn’t out of kindness, but a well-trained habit.

“I can climb without a belay.” I grabbed on for dear life, stabbing my boots in fast.

“Just get the pegs!”

Hooking to the last piton I would extract, I began the tedious chore. While Njord had the end of my lifeline, you can still take part of the middle to hook onto things, giving you multiple anchor-points lest you fall. Working at the pitons, eventually I had them all including that last one; leaving my safety entirely in Njord’s gentle hands.

“I can’t believe tappers use wooden pitons. This is what the poorest karls use, like your parents.” I climbed towards the twig with Njord… but he didn’t look too friendly, so I decided to climb up, up, and away, bypassing his twig by a wide margin.

“Get back here! We have more work to do!” He tried to yank my belay… then realized I unhitched it already. “You galinn skiptingr, you mad changeling!” he scoffed, holding the belay cord in disbelief, as if he could still pull me in.

Sticking my spiked boots deep into the bark, I turned to him and shrugged with two hands. “It’s not that hard.”

He sighed contemptuously. “One day, you’ll wind up dead… and I’ll be sad I didn’t kill you.”

“It’d be your loss—like these broken pitons.”

“Stop being so impatient! You have to hammer them in well and take your time getting them out.”

“I can climb pretty well without them. And if you’re going to be that rough with them, we should just get iron ones. We reuse them anyway, so we don’t need more than a hundred—even for escaping at the end.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“Wooden pegs are lighter… it all adds up if you add a little weight here and there until you suddenly have too much. So the álfar find you and kill you.”

“Now that you’ve explained it, I’m glad we’re wasting all this time out in the open….”

“You better climb back to the others before I get my bow! I’ll get the other pitons myself, since it’s too hard for you.”

“You’d deprive me of drudgery?”

“I’ll stick an arrow in you, just you wait!”

He was going to get his bow… good thing I misplaced it earlier. I decided to climb away, all the same, lest he find something to throw.

Climbing up to a higher twig, I found the others crowded onto it; though they gave Stonebear plenty of elbow room. This twig was only about the size of a tree, not large enough for us and our packs to sit on. So, we hung the packs from it on ropes.

“You got the pitons already?” Erik asked, bouncing in his net-hammock. There was so little space on the twig, in fact, we set up some anchors and hung some of our gear and hammocks from them to sit on. The anchors, in this case, rather than bolts or the many other options, were large pitons nailed deep into the Spire-Branch. Each piton was more than enough to hold up Erik, really, but somehow he was still worth three of them, for contingency.

“I’m going to see if I can whittle one faster than extracting Njord’s mauled pitons.” I cut off a thick sprout, then sat on the hammock with Erik, tolerating his presence as my knife whittled away.

“Oh, having some trouble with them, are you?” Erik laughed, as always. If I walked up to him, kissed him, and said I had a deadly disease and just gave it to him… well, I think most people would laugh if you did that, actually. Try it, find out.

“Unfortunately, I was born with hands instead of a beak.” I already had a decent shape for a piton.

“You sure this hammock will hold up both of us?” Erik was uncharacteristically nervous. “I don’t know if I hammered them in deep enough… sometimes the bark frays and they slip out.”

“Go put some more anchors up, if you’re such a coward. But you can take them out.” Having finished my rough piton, Erik gaping as I examined it from one side to the other, I decided to show Stonebear. I tied a new belay from my klifrigg to one of Erik’s anchors, using a quick-release knot. Then, making sure to give no forewarning, I leapt off the hammock. Erik bounced in it, not quite falling off.

“Careful!” He called out between peals of laughter. We got along as far as we both found it funny when I tried to kill him. Though his belay would’ve saved him….

The Spire-Branch was like a great wooden wall. So, after leaping, I swung from the anchor using my belay and ran along that wall, landing on the twig where the others were. Asotall and Gunne, Stonebear’s lackeys, failed to suppress their oohs and ahs. Stonebear watched my run, his face stoney and unchanging… until he realized his match was burning his fingers.

“Fie!” Stonebear sucked his thumb. “Good trick… never seen someone do that on a slope like this.” The great branch leaned towards us by about ten degrees, overshadowing us slightly. So it was indeed quite a trick to run on it.

“What do you want, Crow?” Asotall’s moustache asked me. I have never seen his mouth, and am not convinced he has one.

“Nothing that concerns you, Axrotalus.” His actual name was ‘Axrotalus the Vallandi’, which I said with all the throaty accent I could muster. We called him Asotall, since his name is weird.

His eyes lit up as I spoke. I could see this, because he raised his bushy eyebrows. He had eyes, at least.

He spoke to me in Vallandska, his language. “Avez vos tasté le vin de Bordele?”

“Oh! Yes… yes.” I said, nodding wisely with a broad, confident smile. Gunne looked between us, wondering what was said.

Asotall’s moustache frowned. “Your accent is good, so I wondered if you spoke my tongue.” So he does have a tongue?

“What’s that?” He pointed to the piton, which I was carving at again.

“Oh, just something I carved in a spare moment.” I held up the piton to Stonebear. “Instead of wasting time reclaiming this... why don’t we just make new ones?”

Stonebear picked up the piton, examining it. “How long did it take you…?”

“Five minutes, perhaps? I could make a bunch with idle time, if left to my devices.” Imagine what mischief I could get up to with more free time.

He weighed it in his hand, then measured it carefully against his thumb. “We have to reclaim them anyway, or the cursed álfar might find them.”

“We could just saw them off, so they’re flush with the bark.”

He paused, becoming a wrinkled statue. “Did you make a living whittling pitons?”

“Anything to survive, in the upper reaches… but where’s Birger?”

Stonebear gave me back the piton, adding opium to his pipe in a hurry. “I sent that fífl ahead, to prepare the next leg.”

“By himself?”

“Can’t you count? By himself.”

“Would be a pity to leave that sour snake all alone. I’ll go up and assist him.”

“Stay here. I need you well rested. Birger will be fine—he likes hard work.”

“I’m rested enough as it is! I’ll put in as many pitons as you want if that dumb ox Njord is the one to pull them out.”

“Where do you get all this energy…?”

“Where did you lose all yours? The sun is shining and so is Crow. I’m not an old man yet.”

Stone bear glared at me… until his match burnt his fingers. “Fie!”

“That’s twice, now. You should stop doing that.”

“Go and help Birger! Get out of my beard for a while.”

“Will do! Thanks, Stonebear!”

Chipper as ever, I turned from a grumbling Stonebear… and thought about what to do with Birger.