The staff was nowhere near the caliber of the Staff of One the Ancient One had given Tina. The craftsmanship was mediocre, and the only embedded spell was a Light cantrip. That was it.
Still.
Bella gripped it, gave it a couple of practice swings, and found it solid enough. One good strike and it could shatter stone.
She decided to keep it for self-defense. A Fifth-Circle Soul Traveler without even a staff to her name would be embarrassing to admit out loud. It would do for now.
The staff also had a bit of decoy value. If an enemy assumed her real weapon was the staff, they'd be in for a nasty surprise—because the cross-hilted sword at her waist was the real blade.
She bundled the rest of the weapons back up in Father Christmas's sack, ran the staff through the center, and shouldered the whole thing. Then she kept walking toward the White Witch's castle.
Jotunheim had not originally been the Frost Giants' sole domain. Calling it an "era of a hundred clans" would be an exaggeration, but the land had once hosted a considerable variety of races. As Bella walked, she passed the remnants of lost civilizations—stone carvings, crude murals, furniture of hewn rock, broken walls and ruined foundations. All of it spoke of a vanished prosperity. All of it was now buried under snow.
Odin, wanting to showcase his war trophies, had exiled every last Frost Giant to Jotunheim. The Ancient One had dumped the White Witch here like so much garbage. The land had been forced to absorb too much that did not belong to it. Its civilization was about to be extinguished entirely.
Reading the air, the water, and the surviving structures, Bella picked up nothing but negative signals.
This land was sick. It was dying.
She followed the dry bed of a river north, correcting her course now and then, and soon arrived at the mouth of a shadowed valley. The White Witch's castle sat near the valley's northern exit.
Once, this had been a dense, living forest. Now only a handful of half-dead trees remained.
Corrupt, chaotic magic had done profound damage to the land. Unlike Bella, who filled her own heart with good things to keep herself anchored, the White Witch had made no attempt at concealment whatsoever. Her magic's evil had warped and twisted this valley into a place of pure dread.
The dead silence on all sides was bone-chilling. Bella's pace slowed despite herself.
"Who's there?" She caught the sound of footsteps behind her and turned.
The scene in front of her could have been lifted straight out of a horror film. Two grotesquely crooked trees leaned at impossible angles. A scatter of strange, unsettling rocks dotted the ground. The rough path was coated with layer upon layer of frost, and her own reflection—distorted at different angles—stared back at her, as though this land had begun to warp her too.
Her nostrils flared. Everything around her carried the scent of strangeness and cold.
Her Hawkeye Vision flagged several hostile targets. She immediately stepped back. As she did, figures popped up from behind tree trunks, behind rocks, out of snowbanks—one after another.
"Thief! Die!"
With a single roar, the count jumped past ten. The lead figure skated across the ice with astonishing speed, charging her like a furious boar.
A dwarf.
Bella spotted it instantly—not because her eyesight was particularly sharp, but because the approaching figure was about three feet tall (a meter), wore a face twisted with rage, had a stocky, powerful build, and radiated a ferocity that made your skin crawl.
This one was clearly not messing around.
She tapped the ice with her toes and slid backward, drawing up a curtain of snow and ice between them. But the furious dwarf did not retreat. He pressed forward instead, smashing through the curtain before it could fully set.
"You're going this hard? Over what? Have we even met?" Bella cast Spider Climb on herself and, like a ninja out of Naruto, ran straight up a nearby tree she couldn't name.
The dwarves charged out in a pack. Could dwarves climb trees? Certainly—just not gracefully. To save face, the mob simply gathered around the base of her tree and started shouting.
"Thief! Get down here!"
"If you've got any guts, come face Kíli himself in a straight fight!"
The lead dwarf bellowed up: "If you beat me, I'll let you go! Dare come down?"
They kept yelling, fierce as could be, but none of them actually moved to attack. Bella looked closer. Hm. None of this crowd was armed. Not so much as a pocket knife among them.
Dwarves as pacifists? Arguments only, no action? That wasn't the dwarf archetype in any story she knew. Hot-tempered, forge-loving, excellent miners, insanely reckless in a fight—that was a dwarf. And from the bearing of the ones below her, these were warriors. Blooded warriors.
She looked at the weapon-stuffed sack in her hand. She looked at the crowd below—bare-handed, spit flying a yard. She felt a sinking suspicion. That old Father Christmas wasn't setting me up, was he?
"These weapons are yours?" she asked, casually pulling a hammer out of the sack.
"That's my hammer! Thief! Burglar!" Sure enough, a long-bearded dwarf jumped two yards straight up in the air, roaring.
Bella's mortification was indescribable. She called down, "So, uh—would you believe me if I said this is all a misunderstanding?"
"No!"
"Rubbish!"
"Despicable outlander!"
Fair. I wouldn't believe me either.
She pushed on. "I'm not lying. An old man handed these weapons to me. I had no idea they were stolen. Think about it—why would one person want this many weapons? Don't you think this sack is heavy? I've been hauling it around precisely because I was trying to find the owners!"
Nine parts truth, one part lie. She was doing her level best to extract herself from the situation.
As a show of good faith, she started handing the weapons back.
"Whose axe is this?"
"Mine! Mine!"
"Catch."
"Whose broadsword?"
"That'd be mine!"
"Hold onto it this time. Try not to lose it again."
"Whose bow and arrows? Nobody? Then I guess it's mine now—"
As it turned out, dwarves weren't that straight-laced. The moment all ten-plus of them had their weapons back, they started chopping down her tree.
Bella wasn't going to stick around for that. She spun an ice bridge between the treetops and leapt from one to the next, disappearing from the dwarves' line of sight.
"What a setup," she muttered, trudging alone through the snow, silently cursing the Ancient One and Father Christmas both.
Most of the weapons had gone back to their owners. What she kept: one cross-hilted sword, one shield, one staff, a bow with a quiver, a small vial of Fire-Flower juice, and a horn.
The Fire-Flower juice, the horn, the bow, and the shield all went into her pocket dimension. She kept the sword at her hip and the staff in her hand—the wizard look, more or less.
She was still walking when she heard a flurry of footsteps behind her. She turned—and there was the whole mob of dwarves, charging after her with blood in their eyes.