The Ogre's Pact

by Troy Denning

  “But he was visiting the king,” Morten reminded her. “It only makes sense to be nice to the princess.”

  “That’s my point,” Brianna said. “If he values my father’s friendship, what better way to earn it than by saving me?”

  Tavis groaned, thinking of what the chieftain would do if he knew of the king’s bargain with Goboka. The prospect was not as unlikely as it seemed. As the leader of a hill giant tribe, there was a good chance Noote would know the Twilight Spirit wanted the princess. In that case, the chieftain would certainly turn her back over to the ogre shaman—or take her to the Twilight Vale himself—and earn Camden’s gratitude for doing it.

  “What’s wrong, Tavis?” Morten demanded. “You look like you’ve seen a storm giant.”

  The scout could only shake his head. Looking at Brianna, he said, “We can’t trust Noote to help. You must believe me.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “What do you know?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” he said.

  “Perhaps not, but after that incident in Stagwick, you’ve hardly earned the right to demand my blind faith,” Brianna countered. “You’ve nothing to lose by speaking.”

  Tavis took a deep breath and stepped out of Morten’s reach. “Your father gave you to the ogres,” he said, “in payment for their help in winning the war against his brother.”

  “Liar!” Morten boomed.

  The bodyguard reached for his sword, but Brianna restrained him. “Don’t be so rash,” she chided. Looking back to Tavis, she demanded, “What game are you playing now? If you’re worried about splitting the reward, let me assure you Noote’s help won’t cost you a silver.”

  “There isn’t going to be any silver—at least not from your father,” Tavis replied. “As outrageous as it seems, what I say is true. Runolf told me.”

  Brianna glared at Tavis reproachfully. “I warn you, such ridiculous stories will accomplish nothing.”

  “It’s not a story,” said Avner. “Runolf’s head told him. I heard it myself.”

  Brianna kneeled in front of the boy, taking his face between her hands. “You don’t have to lie for Tavis anymore,” she said. “He won’t hurt you.”

  “I’m not lying!” the boy protested. “And neither is Tavis.”

  “Goboka was taking you to someplace called the Twilight Vale,” the scout explained. “To mate, either with himself or some giant.”

  Brianna rose, her expression growing hard. “Are you saying that my own father would have me raped by an ogre?”

  Tavis fixed his eyes on the ground. “Or something worse.”

  “You must think me a terrible fool,” she snarled. “How can you think I’d take the word of a thief over that of a king?”

  “Runolf was no thief,” Tavis insisted. “He was a loyal scout.”

  “Runolf was a traitor, but he wasn’t the one I called thief.” The princess snatched Earl Dobbin off the ground and threw him over her shoulder. “We’re heading west, toward Noote’s lands. You have my permission to go find your friend, but don’t bother to rejoin us if you intend to keep disparaging my father.”

  Frustrated, Tavis let his chin drop. “I’ll make you a bargain,” he said. “You continue west until I find Basil. Once the ogres pick up your trail and think you’re heading toward the hill giants, they may grow careless and leave a path open to the south. Then, after Basil and I rejoin you, I’ll say nothing more about your father and we’ll turn down the valley.”

  “And if the way is not clear?” Brianna asked. Her face remained angry and tense, but the princess’s voice betrayed her relief that Tavis showed no real inclination to abandon them.

  “We’ll have no choice except to risk the hill giants,” the scout allowed. “And you’ll stand a much better chance of reaching Noote’s lodge with me as your guide.”

  To Tavis’s surprise, it was Morten who spoke up to accept the agreement “That sounds fair enough, except for leaving us alone,” he said. “If the ogres pick up our trail, your place is with the princess.”

  Tavis raised his brow. “Can’t you look after her?”

  “Of course, but that doesn’t relieve you of your duties,” Morten insisted.

  Tavis studied the bodyguard’s bearded face and was surprised by what he saw there. Instead of peering down his nose with his customary sneer, Morten met the scout’s gaze evenly, his expression one of hope and need rather than disdain.

  “You’re afraid!” Tavis burst out.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Morten replied. “Death means nothing to me.”

  “But failure does,” the scout surmised. “You’ve lost the princess once, and you’re afraid it’ll happen again.”

  Morten’s cheeks reddened, and he inclined his head in acknowledgement. “I can only kill our foes,” he said. “You can avoid them.”

  Tavis silently cursed the bodyguard’s deficiency, but said, “I’ll stay.”

  The princess furrowed her brow. “What about your friend?”

  “Basil can look out for himself.” Morten said. He spoke too quickly, frightened Tavis would change his mind. “The life of a verbeeg thief is of no importance.”

  “It is to me,” Tavis said, his voice bitter at Morten’s callous attitude. “But don’t worry, I know where my duty lies.”

  In accordance with the plan, Tavis led the way west. Though he probably could have persuaded Brianna to turn south right away, traveling toward the giant lands would misdirect the ogres. It would also put some distance between the scout’s company and their pursuers. Just as important, this was the direction in which Basil was most likely to flee. As Morten had pointed out, Tavis’s primary duty lay in protecting Brianna, but he also had a secondary obligation to the runecaster. If he happened to run across the verbeeg’s trail while guiding the princess, he might be able to meet both responsibilities at once.

  The forest floor remained flat and open, save for the scattered heaths and waxy carpets of kinnikinnick. Every now and then, when a thicket looked too dense or they came across a crag of rock jutting up from the ground, the scout would stop and listen, slowly creeping up on the suspicious terrain until he was certain none of Goboka’s warriors had circled in front of them.

  Tavis did not even try to hide their trail. Had he been alone, he could easily have passed through the forest without leaving any spoor the ogres could follow, but his companions were hardly capable of traveling over even open ground without leaving traces of their passage. As inexperienced trackers, they probably couldn’t name even half the many marks a creature left as it moved across the ground, much less avoid leaving those signs themselves.

  Eventually, the ground developed a slight upward slope, and the looming white wall of a snowy ridge began to peek over the treetops. The breeze grew damp and fresh, the heavy scent of pine displaced by the chill touch of faraway ice fields. Soon, the distant roar of rushing waters rose among the lodgepoles, and the scout knew they were nearing one of the cold rivers spilling down from the Gray Wolf Mountains.

  Tavis brought his small procession to a halt. “We’ll use the river ahead to make our break south,” he said. “It’s time to convince the ogres that we’re heading for hill giant country.”

  “How?” Morten asked.

  “You’ll carry Avner,” Tavis said. “He’s light enough that he won’t make a difference in the depth of your tracks; the ogres will think he’s suddenly taking care to leave no spoor.”

  “What about the rest of us?” Brianna asked. “Morten can’t carry us all.”

  “You and Morten try to avoid leaving tracks. Stick to solid ground and walk on rocks when you can. Stay away from thickets and dust,” Tavis said. “There will still be plenty of signs, but it’ll look like you’re trying not to leave any, and that’s what’s important. My own trail will all but disappear, and we’ll take a crooked path, laying a false trail heading northwest. The ogre trackers will think we’re trying to lose them.”

  “And how do we really lose them when
the time comes?” Avner asked, climbing onto Morten’s back.

  “We’ll lay another false trail on the other side of the river, then float away,” Tavis explained. “There won’t be any signs for the ogres to follow.”

  “Good plan,” grunted Morten.

  “Of course,” said Avner. “Tavis will get us back to Hartsvale. He knows everything.”

  “Not everything,” Tavis corrected. He didn’t know how to make Brianna trust him, and until he could do that, nothing else mattered. “I know the mountains, but that’s not everything.”

  With that, Tavis turned and resumed the journey. Moving more slowly now, the scout led the group on an erratic course that took them more or less northwest. Whenever the mood struck him, he would make a sharp turn, sometimes heading east, sometimes west, and occasionally even back the way they had come. Always, he kept a sharp eye out for any disturbance caused by the large, flat foot of a verbeeg, and he listened carefully for the sounds of someone clumsy moving through the forest.

  Tavis did not confine his steps to hard ground or rocks as he had advised Brianna and Morten to do. Nor did he take a pine bough and brush away his tracks as foolish humans sometimes did, for such nonsense only made it easier to follow quarry. The sweeping action wiped the actual footprints away well enough, but it also left the ground so disturbed that the trail became as easy to follow as a deer path.

  Rather, Tavis moved with careful, light steps, keeping to the pine needles covering the forest floor, placing his feet down as slowly and gently as he could. With each step, he listened intently to the sound of his supple boot soles settling on the ground. Every now and then the soft crack of a snapping twig or the muffled crackle of crumbling pine needles came to his ears. Whenever he heard such a sound, he stopped to retrieve the object that had made the noise, slipping it into his cloak pocket. Then he would look over his back trail to see if he had left any other obvious signs of passage. Occasionally, he would spy a small dip where his foot had rested too long in one place, but these depressions did not worry him. The pine needle carpet was spongy enough to return to its normal state long before their pursuers came.

  Soon the scout’s wandering path came to a steep bank that descended to the river’s refuse-littered flood plain. Solitary boulders, carried ashore by winter ice, lay interspersed among jumbles of old weathered logs strewn over the small flat. Here the forest’s regal lodgepoles gave way to trees more suited to the boggy ground, shabby black spruces carrying as many tangles of dead gray branches as they did live green boughs.

  The river itself was close to a hundred paces wide, racing down a broad, cataract-strewn channel lined with driftwood and round, moss-blackened stones. Where the waters were not a churning mass of froth and foam, they appeared dark and cold, moving with a strong, steady current that would carry the group swiftly down the valley and, if their ruse was successful, away from the ogres.

  The scout sent Morten and Brianna directly down the bank to a log pile that, via a tangled network of crisscrossing boles, led to the river’s edge. After wiping his soles clean, Tavis descended the slope by climbing down the barren trunk of a fallen lodgepole and, upon reaching a place where the dead bark still clung to the bole, he jumped to a nearby boulder. That was where, in the wet ground at the rock’s base, the scout saw the track.

  It was a hoofprint. The horse’s leg had sunk close to a foot in the black mud, leaving a round, postlike hole half filled with water. A long line of similar craters led to the river’s edge. By the slow rate at which they were filling with seep water, Tavis estimated the tracks were between thirty minutes and an hour old. Given the harsh terrain of the surrounding mountains and the proximity of a clan of hill giants—who prized horse meat as a delicacy only a little less desirable than halfling flesh—the scout did not think it likely a wild horse had left the print.

  Tavis scampered across a network of stones and toppled tree trunks to the rocks on the river’s shore. Here, the prints no longer sank deep into the ground, but on the stones he saw several rusty red streaks where an iron horseshoe had scraped over the surface.

  Brianna and the others peered over his shoulders. “What are you looking at?” asked the princess.

  “Your mare’s trail.” Tavis pointed to the signs he had discovered. “She seems to be moving upstream.”

  “Blizzard?” Brianna gasped. “Here?”

  “She’s the one who led us to Morten in the first place,” Tavis said. “And she’s been following us since. We saw her on the Needle Peak glacier shortly before we rescued you, and here she is again.”

  Brianna’s face lit up. “Can we catch her?”

  Tavis hesitated before answering. Recovering the horse might help him win Brianna’s favor, but it would also increase the ogres’ chances of tracking them downstream.

  “Finding Blizzard right now wouldn’t be wise,” he said. “As intelligent as she is, I don’t think we could convince her to float down the river with us. And if she starts following us along the shore, the ogres will spy her in an instant. That would ruin our whole plan.”

  “We can change plans,” Brianna suggested.

  “No,” Morten said. The bodyguard cast a wary glance at the raging river. “This is the best plan. The ogres will never expect us to float down that.”

  “I’m sure there are other ways,” Brianna insisted. “Blizzard’s a very special mare.”

  “Not that special,” Morten objected. “I won’t put you in greater danger for the sake of a horse.”

  “You’re not putting me anywhere,” Brianna snapped. “This is my own choice.”

  “That may be, but what of the danger to Avner and Earl Dobbin?” Tavis asked. Although he was thinking more of the princess’s welfare, he knew Brianna would find this objection difficult to overcome. “Are you also willing to risk their lives on behalf of your mare?”

  Brianna fixed a cold glare on the scout and did not answer. Her icy expression suggested she understood Tavis’s strategy, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen the validity of his point. She searched her mind for a suitable alternative, finally lowering her gaze when it became obvious there wasn’t one. Without speaking, she turned away from Blizzard’s trail.

  Tavis wanted to offer her some reassurance about the horse’s welfare, but to do so would have been to lie. Even if there had not been hundreds of murderous ogres in this valley and a clan of horse-eating giants in the next, Blizzard had to be close to starvation by now, and montane forests were not good grazing grounds.

  The scout went over to a log tangle and snapped eight-foot sections off three treetops. He handed one of the makeshift staffs to Brianna and Morten, keeping the third for himself.

  “We’ll wade upstream until we find a safe place to cross,” he said. “Use these to brace yourselves, or the water will sweep your feet from beneath you.”

  Morten examined the thick end of his staff, then looked toward the broken treetop from which it had come. “Won’t the ogres find the fresh breaks and know we’ve gone into the river?”

  “That’s right,” Tavis said. “When they see we’ve made staffs, they’ll know we’re wading upstream—they might even think we’re following Blizzard.”

  The scout walked into the river until it was about knee-deep. Although the snow-fed waters were cool, they were not as bone-chilling as the streams of the Needle Peak glacier. He was not a good judge of how well humans tolerated cold, but he hoped that they would be able to endure the frigid currents for a short time.

  Nevertheless, he took the precaution of turning to Brianna. “You and the other humans will grow cold after we get wet, and we won’t be able to stop and start a fire.”

  The princess nodded. “I was just thinking that.”

  Brianna took off her amulet and uttered an incantation. The silver spear began to glow. Once it had turned fiery red, she touched the talisman first to her own forehead, then to Earl Dobbin and Avner’s, raising a spear-shaped welt on each brow.

  Ignoring t
he boy’s yelp of pain, the scout started upstream. He moved quickly and carefully, using his staff to brace himself each time he moved a foot over the round, slick rocks of the riverbed. Occasionally, one of the stones shifted or turned over, but he did not bother to stop and return it to its original place. The ogres might notice a void or change in color that told them it had been moved, but such signs would be few and far between. The swift current would destroy most of the other marks of their passage, so the scout doubted that his foes would realize he was deliberately leaving a trail for them.

  After about two hundred paces, they reached a pool of slow-moving water. Tavis told his companions to cross the river, then continue another hundred paces upstream. There, Avner and Earl Dobbin were to remain in the water while Brianna and Morten traveled into the forest, carefully trying to leave no signs of their passage. After about ten minutes, the princess was to return to the river walking backward. Morten would continue on for another five minutes, then do the same thing.

  “Just be careful not to step on your own tracks when you back up,” Tavis said, finishing his instructions. “That’s the only thing that will let the ogres know what you’re doing. Otherwise, as long as you avoid soft ground, you won’t leave enough prints to make them realize you’ve passed over the same place twice.”

  “What will you be doing?” asked Morten.

  “Get something to hold as we go down the river,” the scout said. “The current’s too fast to swim on our own.”

  “Then perhaps I should wake Earl Dobbin while I’m waiting for Morten,” Brianna suggested, eyeing the churning waters in the center of the channel. “It could be difficult to hang on to him.”

  Tavis nodded. “Do what you can to keep him quiet.”

  Morten did not move to cross the river. “All this will take time,” he complained. “The ogres will catch us.”

  The scout shook his head. “Not likely. That’s why we laid a crazy trail. It’ll take the trackers a few minutes to find our path each time it changes direction—especially if they have a lot of their own warriors trampling the signs.”