by Troy Denning
Tavis tucked his hand into his armpit to warm it, allowing Morten a chance to study the figures above. The bodyguard seemed more occupied with shivering than thinking and did not suggest any alternatives. When the scout’s fingers felt warm enough to control the bowstring, he nocked an arrow.
“No!” Morten hissed. “It’s t-too dangerous.”
“It’s the safest choice we have,” Tavis replied. He drew his bowstring back, then glanced at the massive hand on his shoulder. “I won’t hit Brianna—unless you throw my aim off.”
The bodyguard reluctantly took his hand away, then Tavis released the bowstring. The arrow shot toward the ogre on the far side of Brianna, the rustle of its flight muffled by the sound of the waterfall. The shot took its target under the jaw, slamming the brute’s head against the rock wall. His limp body slipped off its perch and fell into the chasm below.
The second ogre gave a startled jerk and leaned forward to see what had happened to his companion. Tavis’s arrow caught him in the mouth. The brute’s head snapped back, then he slumped down on the ledge. The swaddled figure next to his corpse did not even stir.
“It’s a g-good thing your aim is true,” Morten said, “If you had hit Brianna, I would have k-killed you.”
With that, the bodyguard started to climb.
“Wait,” Tavis said. He pointed at the coil of rope hanging from Morten’s belt. “Let me have that. I’ll t-tie a line around these two in c-case we must leave in a hurry.”
Without saying anything, the bodyguard took the rope off his belt and threw it to Tavis.
“Climb up to the glacier and keep watch,” Tavis suggested. He kneeled at Avner’s side to loop the end of the rope around the boy’s chest. “I’ll wake Brianna.”
“So you can c-claim the honor of rescuing her?” Morten scoffed. “I think n-not.”
“We haven’t rescued her yet,” Tavis snapped. There was a grain of truth to the bodyguard’s comment, but the scout’s main reason for sending Morten to the top was hardly selfish. “It’s time to prove all those threats you make aren’t empty. There are bound to be more guards outside, and sooner or later they’ll notice what’s going on down here. If you’re half the fighter you claim, you can hold them off better than I.”
“I’m twice the warrior I claim,” Morten snarled. He tugged at his battle-axe to be sure it wasn’t frozen into his belt, then resumed his climb. “But try to keep things quiet. There’s no use starting a battle until we have to.”
Tavis finished tying the two humans into the line, then fastened the other end of the rope to his belt and followed the bodyguard as far as the ledge. After pushing the dead ogre into the chasm below, he pulled himself onto the broad shelf and sat down. The figure beside him was so completely swaddled in furs he could not be certain it was human. The ogres had wrapped the occupant in several layers of bearskin, then tied a greasy rope around the whole thing to keep the bulky cocoon from unraveling. Altogether, the sheaf was close to eight feet long. The only opening was a small breathing hole, but the scout could not see inside it.
Behind this cocoon sat a crude heater that the ogres had made by filling the top of a firbolg’s skull with bear fat and lighting it. The resulting flame was orange and rank, exuding an oily smoke that had already stained much of the cliff above it with a grimy black soot.
Tavis started to loosen the rope, then thought better of it. If he startled Brianna, she might cry out in surprise and draw the ogres down upon them. He grabbed the bear-fat lamp and held it over the hole. Inside was a small mouth that appeared to be human—at least judging by what little he could see, which consisted entirely of two cracked, chapped lips. The rest of the face remained completely hidden, rendering it impossible to guess how the princess might react when he untied the bundle.
The scout glanced up and saw that Morten had reached his station. The burly firbolg sat with his back to the cliff and his feet braced against the glacier, holding him in place. His mighty battle-axe rested across his lap, and in his throwing hand he held his dagger. The bodyguard glanced down and waved an impatient hand toward the cocoon.
Tavis slipped his hand into the breathing hole, intending to keep Brianna from crying out in alarm. As she exhaled, he felt the hot, damp air of her breath against his palm, then a set of teeth clamped down on the delicate flesh between the thumb and first finger.
Stifling a scream, the scout tried to pull his hand back, but found it held in place by a pair of powerful jaws. The teeth began to work back and forth, cutting their way toward the delicate tendons of the thumb. To keep from smashing his free fist into the cocoon, Tavis had to remind himself that it was Brianna inside—though he was beginning to have his doubts.
The scout set aside the skull-lamp, then pulled his dagger, quickly cut the rope, and ripped the skins open. The face inside was gaunt and haggard, with wind-burned cheeks and dry, red skin. Glacier-glare had reduced the eyes to a pair of sunken, bloodshot pits, while the brilliant mountain sun had burned the nose to a deep shade of ruby. Despite its condition, Tavis found the face more beautiful than ever. It belonged to Brianna.
The princess opened her mouth, pulling her teeth away from the scout’s bleeding hand. “You!” she croaked.
Tavis smiled. “That’s right. I’ve come to save you.”
Brianna considered this for a moment, then began unwrapping herself. She moved slowly, as though greatly fatigued, her fingers trembling as she struggled to grip the filthy bearskins. Nevertheless, when Tavis reached out to help, she angrily pushed his hand away.
“How much is the reward?” she demanded.
“Reward?” Tavis echoed, stunned by the acid tone in the princess’s voice. “You think I’m doing this for gold?”
Brianna rolled her eyes. “Please, I know better,” she said. “How much is my father paying you for this?”
“Nothing!” Tavis snapped. “The king—”
The scout stopped himself in midsentence, realizing that now was no time to tell the princess about her father’s betrayal.
“What about the king?” Brianna demanded. If the haughty tone in her voice was any indication, the princess was recovering fast. “Finish what you were going to say.”
Tavis shook his head. “The king didn’t offer to pay me anything,” he said. The scout pulled Brianna’s amulet from his cloak pocket, then pressed it into her hand. “And you can have this back—free of charge.”
The princess’s mouth fell open. “Where’d you find it?”
“The same place you lost it,” he replied curtly.
Tavis turned away and untied the rope from his belt, then sat down on the ledge to pull up Avner and the earl.
“What are you doing?” the princess asked, peering over his shoulder. The bitterness had gone from her voice, but it had not been replaced by any hint that she felt sorry for how she had treated him so far.
“I’m hauling up two people who risked their lives on your behalf,” Tavis said.
As the scout fed the rope through his hands, slivers of fiery light began to flicker across the ledge. He glanced back and found Brianna clutching her talisman to her chest, the red glow of her goddess’s magic slipping from between her fingers.
“Save some of your healing magic,” he said. “These humans are dying of cold and need your help—if it isn’t too much trouble for Your Highness.”
“Of course not.” If the princess noticed the reproach in Tavis’s voice, she showed no sign. “Who are they?”
“Avner and Earl Dobbin.”
“Really!” Brianna considered this news for a moment, then asked, “And what did my father promise them?”
Tavis did not bother to answer, and before the princess could say anything more an alarmed war cry sounded from above. The scout looked up to see Morten flinging his dagger at something across the glacier.
“Morten?” Brianna gasped. “What’s he doing here?”
“He came with us,” Tavis explained.
The scout redoubled
his efforts to pull his companions up, but raising two humans over such a distance was not an easy task, even for a firbolg.
Brianna sat down beside him, then reached for the rope. “I’ll bring them up,” she said. “You help Morten.”
Tavis did not yield the line. “They’re too heavy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the princess said. She grabbed the rope about a foot below Tavis’s hands, then began to raise the humans almost as fast as the scout had been doing. “After all, I am a Hartwick.”
“So I see,” Tavis said, standing. Like almost everyone in Hartsvale, he knew of the supernatural strength of Brianna’s father and male ancestors, but this was the first he had heard that the princess shared the gift. “I wonder what other secrets you and the king have been keeping.”
Without waiting for a reply, Tavis climbed up to help Morten. By the time he reached the top of the chasm, the bodyguard had already disappeared onto the glacier. From the constant chime of clanging weapons, it sounded as though the firbolg was hard-pressed to defend himself against the ogre pack.
Tavis braced his back against the granite cliff and peered over the lip of the glacier. Directly ahead lay two dead ogres, one with a dagger through his throat and the other missing a head. Morten stood a short distance away, surrounded by the whirling clubs and darting spears of more than a dozen of Goboka’s savage warriors.
What the scout saw on the other side of the glacier concerned him more than Morten’s situation. The shaman’s huge figure was just cresting a ridge of moonlit snow. He was coming, with a large troop of warriors at his back, from the direction of the ice hut. Tavis didn’t understand how Goboka had reacted so quickly to his failed plan. The ice hut was on the far side of the glacier, too far away for the shaman to have heard the fight between Morten and the sentries guarding Brianna.
The scout drew his sword and thrust the tip into the soft snow, using it as a handhold while he pulled himself onto the glacier. A dozen paces away, Morten continued to battle the ogres, spinning first in one direction and then the other, his battle-axe slicing through the air in long graceful arcs. With their primitive weapons, his foes could not penetrate his whirling guard, but neither could the bodyguard assault them. As Morten tried to bring his axe to bear, three of the brutes moved forward to strike at his flanks, forcing him to redirect his efforts into driving them back. The ogres were locked into combat just as tightly as the bodyguard. Two of them lowered their clubs and reached for their poisoned arrows, only to have Morten assail them with a vicious series of cross-strikes.
Once he felt the glacier beneath his feet, Tavis hefted his sword and silently rushed across the snow, announcing his arrival by slicing into an ogre’s neck. The target’s head flew off and crashed into another warrior, who was so startled that he howled in alarm and dropped his guard. Morten took quick advantage of the brute’s surprise, cleaving him down the center with a single axe-blow. The battle turned against the ogre pack then, and the flashing blades of the two firbolgs made quick work of their enemies. Within moments, more than a dozen of the brutes lay motionless, their lifeblood draining out to form dark stains on the glacier’s milky surface.
“You’re no idle braggart,” Tavis said. He kneeled down to clean his bloody sword in the snow. “That was fine axe work.”
“You helped,” Morten grunted. He looked toward the horde of ogres approaching across the glacier, then said, “I wasn’t expecting them so soon.”
“Me either,” Tavis said. “It’ll complicate our escape.”
“What of Brianna?” the bodyguard asked. “Can she run?”
“The princess is well enough,” Tavis said, using snow to numb the painful bite she had left on his hand. “But her ordeal has certainly taken its toll on her manners.”
“I’m sure the king will show enough gratitude for both of us,” said Brianna’s voice. “But I have no intention of growing maudlin just because I’m free from the ogres. I’m hardly fool enough to believe that you—or Earl Dobbin—saved me out of the goodness of your hearts. And why you brought Avner along, I’ll never understand. This is no place for a child!”
The scout spun around in time to see the princess crawling out of the nunatak hollow. She had wrapped a foul-smelling bear skin around her shoulders, securing the improvised cloak in place with a small piece of rope. Tucked into this makeshift belt was the dagger Tavis had left beside her on the ledge, and from one hand dangled the rope to which the humans were tied.
Morten rushed to her side. “Milady, are you well?”
“Better than you were when I last saw you,” she replied. “But you look fine now. What happened?”
Morten looked away, as though ashamed that he had not died in the battle with the ogres. “Tavis and his thieves took me to the castle,” he explained. “Simon healed me.”
Brianna glanced toward Tavis. “My gratitude.” For the first time, there was a hint of warmth in the princess’s voice. “I’ll see to it that Father rewards you.”
“I doubt that will be as easy as you think,” Tavis replied. “But right now, we have more pressing concerns.”
The scout pointed across the glacier. Goboka was now so close they could see the moonlight gleaming in his eyes, and his horde was close behind. Most of the ogres seemed to be armed with clubs or spears, but those running closest to the shaman’s immense form carried their bows in their hands. Apparently, the shaman hoped to ensure Brianna’s safety by allowing only his most trusted marksmen to fire arrows.
When Brianna saw the charging pack, she handed the coil to Morten. “Pull that up,” she ordered. “Fast.”
“How are the humans?” Tavis asked. “Are they well enough to run?”
Brianna raised her brow, regarding the scout as though he had lost his mind. “It was all I could do to save their lives,” she said. “They were practically ice blocks.”
“We’ll carry them,” Morten said.
With an effortless jerk, the bodyguard pulled the two humans onto the glacier. Brianna had swaddled them both in furs, so that Tavis could tell them apart only by the relative size difference between the boy and the man. The princess cut the rope binding them together, then passed Avner to Tavis and Dobbin to Morten.
“What about Basil?” Morten asked, throwing the earl over his shoulder.
“We won’t save him by waiting here,” Tavis replied, hefting Avner onto his own shoulder. “He can catch us later.”
“Who’s Basil?” Brianna asked.
Tavis turned away from the ogres and started to run, at the same time explaining, “The verbeeg you saw in my barn.”
“He’s a part of this?”
The princess had hardly finished her question when a tremendous shudder rumbled up from the heart of the glacier. Tavis’s feet slipped from beneath him, and he dropped to his side, his fall cushioned by the soft corn snow on top of the glacier. Brianna and Morten also fell. The bodyguard landed atop his burden, drawing a muffled cry of anger from Earl Dobbin.
“Did Goboka do that?” Morten gasped.
Tavis looked back and saw a great crevasse opening across the glacier, more or less above the ice cave through which they had crawled. Dozens of ogre warriors had already disappeared into the rift, and more were spilling into it as the abyss widened.
“It wasn’t the shaman,” Tavis reported. “My guess is that Basil’s rune caused that explosion.”
Morten stared at the growing crevasse in awe, then shook his head and picked up the bundle containing Earl Dobbin. “We can’t tarry here.”
As Tavis considered Basil’s absence, a growing knot of concern formed in his stomach. Nevertheless, he gathered Avner’s bundle and rose to his feet, then started across the glacier. Whatever the verbeeg’s fate, they could not help him anyway.
The scout quickly realized that he and his companions would never escape by trying to outrun the ogres. To survive, they had to make their pursuers slow down—and he knew just the place to do it. He angled up toward the great i
ce wall that had stopped the ogres in the first place.
“Are you trying to get us killed?” Brianna demanded. Her eyes were fixed on the sheer ice cliff ahead, which loomed like a bank of clouds rolling down from the valley above. “We’ll be trapped. We can’t scale that wall!”
“I don’t intend to. I’m just trying to get us into that ice fall.” The scout pointed to the base of the ice wall, where the glacier tumbled down a hundred paces of steep slope in a jumbled heap of mansion-sized blocks and jagged spires. “If we can’t escape the ogres in there, we aren’t going to.”
Tavis continued up the glacier. When he reached the bottom of the ice fall, he pulled Bear Driller off his shoulder and glanced back to check on the ogres. They were still out of range, but wouldn’t be for long. The scout turned uphill and began to climb, probing the snow ahead with the tip of his bow.
“Follow my trail exactly,” Tavis said, panting from the exertion of running through snow. “Ice falls have lots of crevasses.”
The scout was counting on that. Ice, like water, flowed faster on steep slopes, which caused more crevasses to open. These rifts were smaller than those on gentler grades, and therefore were more easily concealed beneath thick layers of snow. With any luck, the scout had more experience than his pursuers at negotiating such mazes of hidden danger, so the ogres would be forced to follow in his footsteps in a snakelike column—at least until he decided it was time for them to scatter.
Within a few steps, Tavis began to see long, faint shadows ahead. He twined his way around each of these areas, for the differences in color marked sagging surfaces where the snowpack hung suspended over the unseen maws of hidden crevasses. Often, the scout stopped running long enough to push Bear Driller into the snow ahead. Usually, the tip struck a solid surface of ice, but every now and then the bow would sink as though he had plunged it into water. When that happened, the scout would retrace his path a few steps down the mountain, then carefully probe his way around the end of the concealed chasm until he could resume the climb.