by Troy Denning
“It doesn’t matter who raised him,” Morten said. “Tavis’s blood is firbolg. It’d freeze in his veins if he tried to sell those children into slavery.”
“There’s nothing I’d like to believe more.” The princess had to struggle to speak around the catch in her throat. “But we can’t ignore that verbeeg thief. If firbolg blood’s so important, how could Tavis lie to us about him?”
Morten scowled, unable to offer an explanation.
“I know how,” Brianna said. “He learned from the humans he grew up with. And when he joined the border patrol, he learned to do worse things.”
Morten shook his head. “No. Tavis was trained by Runolf Saemon, and I hear Runolf’s a good man,” he said. “The king relies on him.”
“My father relies on all his soldiers. That doesn’t mean he trusts them,” Brianna countered. “As for Runolf, I don’t know what to make of him. He seemed to be avoiding me.”
“He was nervous,” Morten replied. “Like most men when they meet you for the first time.”
“Perhaps, or maybe he was nervous because he knew Tavis to be a thief.” The words left Brianna with a queasy, empty feeling in her stomach, but the princess had learned long ago to trust her mind over her emotions. “There are plenty of humans who think little enough of stealing to look the other way when their friend is the thief.”
Morten considered this for a time, then shrugged. “You’d know better than me,” he said. “But if you’re so worried about the orphans, why leave them with Tavis in the first place?”
“Because Tavis Burdun has slain frost giants with that bow of his,” Brianna replied. “And getting ourselves killed would not save the children.”
Morten’s eyes flashed in indignation. “I’m every bit that runt’s match,” he growled. “I’d cleave his skull in a blow.”
Brianna grimaced at the image of her bodyguard’s huge sword slicing through the scout’s brain. “A moment ago, you were defending Tavis,” the princess observed. “Now you’re ready to split his head?”
“All I said was I could,” Morten said, his petulant tone betraying his injured pride. “There’s a difference.”
“I didn’t mean to insult your fighting skills.” It was as close to an apology as Brianna would utter. “But whoever won, it would do the children no good to witness the combat. Tavis is the only father they know, and the sight of him killing or being killed would be a heavy burden for such young hearts.”
“Dobbin Manor has fifty men. Not even Tavis would fight so many,” Morten said. “Why not demand the earl’s help?”
“Because I don’t want the lord mayor as a husband,” the princess explained. “And it’d be just like the ruthless swine to keep the children hostage until I married him.”
“How could he do that?” Morten demanded, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. “That would violate the law!”
Brianna rolled her eyes at the firbolg’s naiveté. “Earls know many paths around the law,” the princess said. “Which is why we must hurry. The only way to ensure the children’s safety is to send a company of father’s guards back before anyone—whether it be Tavis or Earl Dobbin—can take them from the inn.”
With that, the princess urged her mount forward.
Morten caught Blizzard by the mane. The horse swung her head around with teeth bared, but the firbolg stiffened his arm and held her steady. The mare’s mouth snapped shut two feet shy of his throat. She whinnied in anger and tried to jerk free of her captor’s grasp, but even Blizzard was not strong enough to overpower the bodyguard.
“I can’t let you enter the wood until I’ve had a look,” Morten said. “If you can’t wait, we’ll just have to go back.”
“Then make your search quick,” Brianna snapped. “If you let Tavis disappear with those children, I’ll replace you with a fomorian. He might not fight well, but he’d be better company.”
Morten chuckled at the ludicrous threat. Fomorians were the most hideous and wicked of all giant-kin, with deformed bodies and twisted, evil personalities. Comparing one to a firbolg was like comparing a turkey buzzard to an eagle; although they had descended from the same species, at heart the two were as different as could be.
“I’ll hunt the ambusher down fast as I can.”
The firbolg pulled his shield off his back and buckled his helmet, then strode forward. As he entered the aspen grove, the breeze rose and the flashing aspen leaves rustled more loudly, reminding Brianna of a sound she had heard a hundred times before: the tense murmur of the earls and their wives waiting for her father to enter the banquet hall. It was a sound as full of dread as it was of hope, for such gatherings were polite forms of battle, where the prestige of great families rose and fell on the slippery course of well-told jests or foolish slips of the tongue. But in the next few moments, she reminded herself, it would be lives and limbs that were maimed, not the reputations of pompous and vain men.
Brianna watched Morten creep deeper into the wood, his helmeted head swiveling back and forth in search of the ogre. The firbolg held his buckler high, so that it covered his flank from the chin down to the ribs. He waved his right arm slowly up and down, keeping the flat of his sword turned outward as if ready to slap away a flying dart or stone. Every now and then, he stopped and raised his nose to test the air for his quarry’s scent, but the princess saw no indication that her bodyguard smelled anything unusual. By the time Morten had advanced fifty paces into the grove, Brianna’s patience was at an end. If something dangerous was lurking among the aspens, the firbolg would have flushed it out, and now he was just wasting her time.
Morten suddenly stopped. He spun around and raised his buckler over his head. At the same time, Brianna heard a small bowstring strum from the forest canopy. A dark shaft streaked down from the quivering leaves and ricocheted off the shield with a sharp ping. The firbolg let out a shout that the princess could not understand, then swung his great sword at a nearby tree. His blade bit deep, but fell far short of cleaving through the thick trunk. Still holding his buckler over his head, he threw himself at the bole, slamming his shoulder into it so hard that the aspen shuddered from base to crown.
Brianna heard the bowstring throb a second time, and another arrow bounced off Morten’s shield. Searching the treetops for the firbolg’s attacker, the princess saw nothing but a lanky shadow lurking among the highest branches, its true shape blurred by flashing aspen leaves.
Morten jerked his sword free and swung again at the white bole. This time, yellow chips flew in all directions, and Brianna saw a wedge-shaped void appear in the wood. The firbolg smashed his shoulder into the trunk. A sharp crack rang through the forest and, as the aspen toppled, the shadowy figure in the high branches dropped out of the tree.
The ogre looked almost as large as Brianna’s bodyguard, with long shoots of leafy boughs sticking out from his body at all angles. As the princess screamed a warning, the dark shape slammed into Morten’s shield. The firbolg grunted and collapsed, his attacker still on top. A spindly arm raised a stone mace above Morten’s head and brought the weapon down. There was a sick thud, then a barbarous chortle tolled through the forest. The mace rose again.
Brianna hefted her bejewelled axe. Before she could spur Blizzard forward, her bodyguard smashed his steel buckler into his attacker’s bony face. A loud crunch shot through the grove, and the ogre pitched over backward. He rolled away, only to spring up as Morten clambered to his own feet.
The princess held her mount steady. The ogre stood with his back to her, ripping boughs of leafy camouflage off his body. His skinny torso was haggard and stooped, with hunched shoulders and gangling arms that ended in huge, gnarl-fingered hands. The brute was a striking contrast to the bloated churls that travelers from the south described when they spoke of ogres. And, judging by tales old earls liked to tell, he would also be much more dangerous. Unlike their oafish cousins of the warm lands, northern ogres were so vicious and cunning that even giants avoided them.
Brianna c
ould have charged the brute from behind, but knew better than to try. Any attempt to help now would only confuse and upset Morten, for her father had given them both very clear instructions regarding combat: under no circumstances was Brianna to join in battle. If the danger looked too great, she was to escape while Morten sacrificed himself. It was an arrangement that seemed perfectly reasonable to the king and the firbolg, but one the princess resented deeply. She was quite capable of holding her own in a battle. Not only had she been trained with axe and sword since childhood, she was also blessed with the supernatural strength of the Hartwick line, a mysterious legacy that made her almost as powerful as firbolgs.
Brianna heard an eerie, low-pitched rattle break from the aspen grove, then the ogre charged, at the same time hurling his weapon at Morten’s head. The firbolg raised his shield and sent the mace clanging away harmlessly. In the same instant, the ogre leaped into the air and flew feetfirst at the princess’s bodyguard, wrapping his legs around the firbolg’s burly thighs. The lanky brute gave a mighty twist, already reaching for a bone dagger hanging from his belt.
Had Morten been smaller or his attacker larger, the tactic might have toppled him. As it was, the bodyguard simply stepped back with one leg, bracing himself and at the same time breaking free of his foe. The ogre dropped to his back. Brianna heard a muffled crack as the firbolg stomped on the brute’s chest, then her bodyguard drew his sword across the ambusher’s throat and finished him.
Brianna nudged Blizzard forward. “That didn’t take long!” she called. “Perhaps my father’s guards will reach Stagwick in time to see Tavis off—”
“Stay there!” Morten ordered.
The firbolg scowled at Brianna until she stopped moving, then peered into the grove and sniffed the air. He stepped off the road and trotted deeper into the wood, fading into the white forest like a ghost. The princess sat listening to the irregular cadence of cracking sticks that marked his passage, until the muted popping and snapping grew so distant that she could no longer distinguish the sounds from the rustling of the aspen leaves.
Brianna waited with growing impatience, becoming more convinced with each passing minute that Morten was deliberately wasting her time. Coggin’s Rise stood in the center of Hartsvale, far from the dangerous borderlands where giants and their kin came to raid. It was almost unthinkable that one ogre had snuck so far into the valley; she could not believe a whole party had. Still, she resisted the temptation to go after her bodyguard, reminding herself that Morten knew far more than she about this particular adversary.
Normally, that would not have been so. The princess made it her business to know her kingdom’s enemies, potential or otherwise, better than she knew her friends. But in this case, it had been impossible to earn her knowledge firsthand. No ogre had entered the kingdom since the War of Harts, a three-year battle of succession in which her father had hired ogre mercenaries to vanquish the power-hungry forces of his evil twin, Dunstan. After the war, the new king had wisely paid his hirelings a generous bonus, in return eliciting a pledge that they would leave Hartsvale undisturbed as long as Camden reigned. Until today, no ogre had violated that promise.
Nor had Brianna had opportunity to study ogres outside the valley. Like most of her father’s subjects, she had passed her entire life without leaving Hartsvale. The kingdom sat in an alpine valley located in the heart of the Ice Mountains, known locally as the Ice Spires. The peaks were as huge as they were forbidding, enclosing the vale inside an immense rampart of glaciers and granite that could not be climbed. Even from here, near the center of the kingdom, Brianna could see the distant white crags looming in all directions, rising up to scratch at the sky like the jagged merlons of some vast citadel.
Of course, there were rifts in the wall: narrow passes that snaked their way through winding canyons and over treacherous glaciers before dropping into distant valleys. But, aside from a handful of adventurous traders with more greed than wisdom, few dared to travel such trails. The paths were as dangerous as they were long, crossing and recrossing raging rivers, traversing sheer cliffs a thousand feet above ground, and twining through endless marshes filled with water so cold a man’s lips would turn blue from drinking it.
Not the least of these hazards were the giants and their kin. They infested the Ice Spires in all directions, with the nomadic frost giants wandering the Great Glacier to the north and the fire giants plaguing the dwarves of Citadel Adbar to the south. To the west, the furtive voadkyn abided in the frigid depths of the Coldwood, while the ascetic stone giants of the east claimed the high cliffs overlooking the vast wastes of the desert Anauroch. And there were at least a dozen more giant tribes in the region, tilling the earth of the deep fertile valleys, hunting in the conifer forests on the mountain slopes, and lurking in the high desolate passes that were the only paths over sheer-faced ridges of solid granite. From Hartsvale, it was literally impossible to travel in any direction without crossing the territory of at least one giant tribe, and foolish adventurers who tried to do so without the aid of an experienced guide seldom survived the attempt.
Brianna’s wait came to an abrupt end when a distant thud sounded in the aspen stand. The noise was so faint that Brianna could hardly hear it, much less tell the exact direction it came from. There was a muffled scream, then another, and finally a chorus of rasping battle cries resembling the one the ogre had made before dying. The sounds were followed by several more thuds, then Morten’s deep voice bellowed out of the forest, full of bloodlust and anger.
The lady realized that her bodyguard had found what he was searching for, and from the sound of it he was outmanned by a fair amount. Though she knew her father would want her to return to Stagwick and demand Earl Dobbin’s protection, Brianna planted her heels in Blizzard’s ribs, urging the mare into the grove. As they passed the corpse Morten had left lying in the road, Brianna got her first close glimpse of an ogre.
Save for the tusklike teeth protruding from beneath his lower lip, the brute resembled a huge, loutish man with a jutting chin and floppy, oversized ears. From the septum of his crooked nose hung a bronze ring, while his eyes, glazed with death, had purple irises and white pupils. He wore a wolf-skull headdress that had slipped halfway off his lumpy head to reveal a mass of greasy hair pulled into a tight topknot.
Blizzard snorted, springing away as if to escape the disgusting ogre smell. Brianna guided the mare to where Morten had left the path and easily spied her bodyguard’s footprints, a series of deep depressions in the mossy ground. The princess urged the mare into a gallop, keeping her gaze locked on the firbolg’s trail and trusting her mount to pick a safe path. Soon, the sour smell of ogre filled the air. Brianna looked up, but the woods were so thick that she still could not see the battle.
Morten cried out in pain, then rasping battle cries rattled from several ogre throats and a series of loud blows reverberated through the aspens. First one, then a second, third, and fourth ogre howled in agony. The crack of a falling tree echoed through the stand, followed by a tremendous crash and an inhuman screech. Then the battle fell abruptly silent, and Brianna found herself listening to nothing but rustling aspen leaves and the crashing footfalls of her charging horse. She slowed Blizzard to a walk, knowing that the ogre survivors—if there were any—would be able to hear her coming now that the battle had quieted.
Morten’s voice rang through the wood. “It safe, Brianna.” Like his message, his tone was strained and almost incoherent, as if he were too exhausted to speak—or, more likely, was wounded. “You come …” The firbolg’s voice trailed off.
Brianna urged Blizzard into a gallop. “I’ll be right there, Morten,” she called. “And thanks be to Hiatea that you survived.”
Although Morten did not answer, the princess was able to follow the terrible smell of ogre bodies to the top of a rocky bluff overlooking the trail. As she approached, Brianna saw a wide band of black arrows scattered across the hillside and the bloody corpses of seven ogres strewn among the brown bo
ulders that lay half buried in the mossy ground. Like the first ogre she had seen, they had purple eyes and topknots of greasy hair.
Her bodyguard sat slumped against the broken trunk of a toppled aspen tree, his dented buckler lying at his feet. There was a long bloody rift in the side of his helmet, his eyes were closed, and his breath came in short, shallow gasps.
As she rode over to Morten, Brianna saw that he had done his work well. A couple of the ogres had lost arms or legs to the firbolg’s mighty sword and now lay in pools of foul-smelling blood so deep there could be none left in their bodies. The heads of two more lay several paces from their gaunt bodies, and a few bodies had been cleaved nearly in two. One ogre lay beneath the crown of the toppled aspen tree, his crumpled body twisted into an impossible shape.
Reaching Morten’s side, Brianna dismounted. She slipped her silver-handled axe into her belt and grabbed her waterskin off her saddle, then began to examine the firbolg’s injuries. A broken arrow shaft protruded from one of his massive thighs and his leather breastplate was gouged and slashed in a dozen places, but the armor had spared him any deep cuts.
Brianna unbuckled the chin strap and gently lifted off the bloody helmet. Morten’s red hair was matted with blood, but that did not in itself alarm her. All scalp wounds bled freely, even those that were only superficial. She poured water over the slash to wash away the blood. To her surprise, the cut was neither large nor deep, only about as long as her thumb and so shallow that she could not even see the white bone of his skull.
Brianna frowned. “What’s wrong, you great pansy?” she asked, half joking. “A little cut like that shouldn’t bother you.”
She placed her thumbs on his eyelids and drew them up. His pupils were both the same size and quickly retracted as if in response to the sudden daylight, but they were glassy and unfocused, like those of someone who had drunk too much wine. Brianna let his eyes close, then grabbed a nearby arrow to examine the tip. It was coated with yellow paste.