by Troy Denning
“In the name of Hiatea, no!” He could think of only one thing that would plunge the queen into such a state. “Don’t let him be dead!”
Avner snatched the clothes and scuttled to the foyer, then climbed up beside Brianna. She was shivering violently, and her flesh had the pale, blotchy appearance of someone profoundly chilled. Though her gaze followed his movements, she did not speak or otherwise react.
The young scout steadied himself on her shoulder, then leaned over her leg to look at the child.
Avner did not know whether to be relieved or repulsed. Kaedlaw’s chest pulsed with rapid, shallow breaths, but his skin had turned pale blue, and his pupils were dilated. His face was that of the ugly child: fat and round, with a double chin, pug nose, and brown eyes sparkling with dark ire.
Avner braced himself with his head next to the queen’s feet, then reached around her legs and pulled Kaedlaw into his arms. He slipped the frigid baby under his own cloak and held the child for a long time, hardly able to believe Brianna would let her own son freeze. Something had snapped inside her mind. If he had crawled out of the chimney later than he did, the infant would have frozen to death, and perhaps the queen, as well. As it was, Kaedlaw showed no sign of warming. His skin remained as clammy and cold as it had when the scout found him.
Avner pressed the baby into Brianna’s arms. “You must feed Kaedlaw, Majesty. Your milk will warm him and give him strength to fight the cold.”
Brianna’s eyes remained blank, but she accepted the child and cradled him in her arms. Avner draped her fur cloak around her shivering shoulders.
The queen shrugged it off, then placed her son between her feet and pulled his swaddling away. She did not look at Avner or acknowledge that he was by her side.
“Brianna, you don’t know what you’re doing!” Avner protested. “You can’t let your own son freeze!”
When the young scout reached for the child again, Brianna’s hand grabbed him by the collar. Her vacant eyes drifted to his face.
“L–Leave us alone.”
Avner shook his head. “I helped this child into the world. I won’t let you kill him.”
“That is n-not your ch-choice.”
Brianna jerked his collar, and Avner found himself flying off the foyer alcove. However despondent she was, the queen’s strength remained as incredible as ever. The scout sailed halfway across the room before slamming into the floor, then he tumbled down the oak planks to smash against the wall.
He tried to gather himself up immediately. Every moment carried Kaedlaw closer to death, but there were a hundred forge hammers battering inside Avner’s skull. When he stood, the pounding grew to thunderous proportions, and such a wave of nausea rolled over him that he fell back to his knees.
A heap of cloaks sailed off the foyer alcove and landed on Avner’s back, knocking him to his belly.
“You knew!”
Avner crawled from beneath the cloaks and saw the queen, still on the alcove, glaring down at him. Her eyes had paled from their normal violet to a fiery silver.
“That’s what you wouldn’t t-tell me!” Despite her anger, Brianna was so cold she could not keep from stuttering.
“I saw Kaedlaw’s second face, if that’s what you mean.” The pounding in Avner’s head was subsiding. “And I also know you’re making a terrible mistake, Majesty. You can’t kill the ettin’s child without killing your husband’s.”
“Then I must k-kill us all,” Brianna replied. “The oath I swore as q-queen is not so different than the one Tavis swore as first d-defender. I must guard Hartsvale at any p-price.”
“Against what?” Avner scoffed. “An infant?”
“Infants do not have secret f-faces,” Brianna said. “This is a fiend’s spawn, and I will have n-none of it!”
Brianna grabbed her son from between her feet and raised him over her shoulder, as though she were going to hurl him at Avner.
“No, Majesty!” Avner jumped up to catch the child, his shoulder slamming against the wall as the tower rocked. “I forbid this!”
Brianna’s face clouded with fury, but, without appearing to realize what she was doing, she lowered the child. “You what? ”
“I forbid you,” Avner repeated calmly. Regardless of her oath, Brianna did not want to kill her son-or the infant would be dead by now. To save Kaedlaw, the young scout had only to keep her distracted until he found an excuse to spare the child. He reached inside his cloak and withdrew his sling. “I won’t allow you to kill your son.”
Brianna’s eyes widened. “You would assault your q-queen?”
“To save her from herself, milady.” The young scout plucked a fist-sized stone off the floor and slipped it into his sling’s pocket. “Now, feed your baby-or I’ll knock you senseless and do it myself.”
“What of your s-scout’s oath?” Brianna demanded. “You vowed to defend and obey me!”
“What of your oaths, milady?” Avner shot back. “As a priestess of Hiatea, didn’t you vow to protect and nurture all the children of your kingdom?”
Brianna’s face blanched, and Avner knew he had found the excuse he needed.
“Kaedlaw is dif-f-ferent.” This time, it was not the cold that caused the queen’s voice to quiver.
“Why?” Avner demanded. “Because he has two faces?”
“Because he is evil!”
Avner raised his brow. “Really? How do you know that? Has Hiatea sent you a sign?” “No, but G-Galg-gadayle-”
“Galgadayle is no priestess of Hiatea,” Avner insisted. “And even if he’s right, who says that makes Kaedlaw evil? Maybe Hiatea wants your son to be king of giants. Which oath should you honor then-the one you swore to your people, or the one you swore to your goddess?”
“Hiatea would never f-force me to make such a d-decision.”
“But she would ask you to murder your own child?” Avner scoffed. “The goddess of parental love?”
Brianna shrank away as though Avner had struck her. She closed her eyes and screwed her face into an anguished grimace, then remained silent for many moments. Finally, she laid Kaedlaw in her lap and looked up.
“Throw m-me your water,” she said. “I let mine f-freeze solid.”
Avner took his waterskin from beneath his robe and tossed it up, then gathered the cloaks and made his way across the rocking tower. By the time he clambered up onto the alcove, the queen had taken the flaming spear amulet from her neck and dipped it into his waterskin. The liquid inside was bubbling and steaming from the heat of Hiatea’s blessing. Kaedlaw’s eyes were closed, and his skin was as blue as a tourmaline. Only the sporadic rise and fall of his chest indicated he was still alive.
“Open a c-cut on his arm.” Brianna motioned Avner to lay the cloaks aside.
The young scout hesitated to obey. He had seen the queen heal the injured often enough to know what she was doing. When she poured the blessed water on the cut, it would cleanse the infant’s blood of wicked thoughts and emotions. If the child was truly evil, the process would cause an endless black froth to erupt from the wound.
“What are you w-waiting for, Avner?” Brianna demanded. “Are you afraid of Hiatea’s j-judgment?”
“Only for myself, Majesty.” Avner pulled his antler-hilted skinning knife and drew the blade across the infant’s forearm.
A thin line of blood welled up beneath the steel, and Brianna poured the bubbling water onto her son’s arm. The blue flesh turned rosy pink. Kaedlaw’s eyes opened wide, and he let out a pained growl that rumbled through the chamber like a bear’s roar. A single bubble rose in the center of the cut.
It was white as snow.
“Hiatea, forgive me!” The queen snatched the child into her arms. “He’s pure! He’s as innocent as any newborn!”
Brianna lowered her collar over her shoulder, then held her son to her breast. The feel of his icy flesh filled her with a guilty burden heavy enough to crush the titan’s heart. Kaedlaw reluctantly began to nurse, and Avner covered them both wit
h the cloaks he had brought up.
“Avner, I’m grateful,” Brianna said. The first silver rays of dawn were beginning to stream into the tower. “Your impertinence prevented me from committing a grievous sin against Hiatea-and it spared me more anguish than I could bear.”
“Then he’s going to be all right?”
“Thanks to you.” Kaedlaw was already suckling eagerly at her warm milk. “And I would ask you to make a new oath to me-one you won’t break this time.”
“I didn’t break the last one!” Avner objected. “At least not much.”
“I doubt Tavis would agree,” Brianna replied. “But he wasn’t here, and you were right to stop me. Now I ask you to pledge that you’ll always protect Kaedlaw-against anyone who would harm him.”
“Brianna, I’ve already made that vow.”
“I mean the lord high scout in particular,” Brianna clarified. “If we can’t convince Tavis to ignore Galgadayle’s prophecy, can you kill the man who raised you?”
Avner bit his lip and looked away. “If it comes to a fight, I doubt Tavis will be the one who dies-but I’ll give him a good battle. I can promise that much.”
“Thank you. I’ll need you at my side,” Brianna said. “I hope I’m not making traitors of us both. If Kaedlaw grows up to lead the giants, we’re committing a terrible crime against our kingdom.”
Avner shrugged. “Crime is a relative thing. Besides, the time hasn’t come to give up. My guess is that Hiatea wants us to escape, especially when you consider the kind of uncle Lanaxis would make.”
Brianna grimaced at the thought, then glanced at the pale rays streaming through the shattered arrow loop.
“I think Lanaxis will stop when it gets light, but he’ll be ready for an escape,” she said. “We can’t expect to succeed.”
“You’re right, we can’t escape.” Avner smiled. “But he might accidentally leave us behind-if he doesn’t realize we’ve slipped away.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Brianna demanded. “After your escape attempt at Wynn Castle, Lanaxis must know about the sally port.”
Avner nodded. “He saw me climbing back into it.”
“There aren’t any other secret doors in this tower.”
“But there might be a thief’s gate,” said Avner.
“A thief’s gate?”
“On the first floor, in the bottom of the chimney,” the youth explained. “The water collects down there and rots the mortar. I used to sneak into buildings all over Stagwick by scraping the mortar out and pulling a big stone loose.”
Brianna scowled at this idea. “I’m hardly small enough to climb down through the chimney.”
“Sure you are. In a tower like this, the chimney is huge-well, big enough anyway,” he explained. “It’s squeezing through the damper throat that can be tight-but Lanaxis has already solved that problem for us. The throat is smashed to pieces. You can practically walk into the flue.”
Brianna eyed the battered fireplace on the high side of the room. The lintel was four feet above the hearth.
“I think I’ll have to crawl,” she said. “What can I do to help you?”
“Do you have any way to dissolve mortar?”
Brianna shook her head. “Not without my spell satchel,” she said. “And even then, not quietly.”
Avner grimaced. “Then I’ll have to scrape it out.” He fingered the antler hilt of his skinning knife. “I’m glad Tavis won’t be here to see how I treat his gifts.”
“I’m sure he would understand.” Brianna motioned toward the fireplace. “You’d better get busy. After the titan stops, I’ll feign an escape. It won’t work, but Lanaxis will get suspicious if I don’t try.”
“Good-but be careful.”
Avner scrambled up the floor and climbed into the fireplace. He hoisted himself past the smoke shelf, then entered the flue and started his descent to the first floor. Once he had disappeared, Brianna tore a woolen cloak into strips and began to braid it into a rope. Kaedlaw was suckling hungrily now, and she could not help wincing at his enthusiasm. The blue tint had vanished from his skin, which now felt warm and pleasant against hers, but his head remained plump and ugly. The queen could not help wishing that it was Kaedlaw’s other face she saw.
Brianna was still making her rope when Lanaxis stopped and kicked his heel into the frozen ground. The strike sent such a jolt through the floor that the queen’s teeth clacked together. A few moments later, the shocks ceased and her stomach suddenly rose into her throat. A weary groan reverberated from the tower foundations, then the building tipped toward the fireplace and steadied itself.
Brianna stuffed her half-finished rope beneath her cloak and went across the room to the smashed arrow loop. The air outside was so crisp it sparkled and so cold it stung like a wyvern’s breath. At the base of the tower lay a short expanse of virgin snow, gleaming blue in the pale morning light. At the edge of the field rose an enormous drift, the stubs of three battered chimneys poking above the wind-crusted surface. Dozens of smaller mounds lay beyond the largest hillock, some with smaller chimneys or splintered beams showing above the snow. Beyond the buried village rose the black wall of a dense conifer forest, where the barbed tips of spearhead spruce and bloody tamarack scraped at the cloudless belly of a violet sky. In the center of the wood, the sun was poking its yellow crown above the horizon, kindling embers of golden fire in a small crescent of dark boughs.
Brianna placed their location somewhere near Hartsvale’s northern border, for the forest was typical of the groves in the Cold Marches. The village itself was certainly one of the many manors that had fallen earlier this year when a tribe of frost giants had slipped across the frontier and gone on a month-long rampage.
A long boom, deeper and louder than any sound Brianna had ever heard, rose from the other side of the tower. Stones began to rattle in the walls. The snow lifted off the field outside, whirling around the building in a whistling white funnel. Kaedlaw howled in protest, but the queen could not hear him. She merely felt his body quivering with the effort.
Brianna rushed across the chamber and peered through an arrow loop, where she found her view blocked by Lanaxis’s gloom-shrouded form. As the sun rose behind the tower, a tide of yellow light slowly crept down his robe. The purple murk rose from the cloth like steam, exposing the dingy, tattered linen that lay beneath. Though she could not see past the loop’s upper sill to examine the titan’s face, one hand dangled within her view. The skin was slack and wrinkled, and covered with scaly liver spots the size of platters.
Lanaxis fell to his knees beside the queen’s tower, and the floor jumped so hard that Brianna nearly fell. She found herself staring at the titan’s profile. His white-bearded chin was tipped up, with his mouth open and bellowing at the sky. His eyelid, still pinned shut by a crossbow quarrel, was baggy and wrinkled. The crow’s-feet at the corner of his eye were as deep as planting furrows, and all that remained of his hair was a sparse fringe of coarse gray strands.
As the growing daylight swam over his body, Lanaxis dropped his head and fell silent. At first, Brianna thought the pain of his first sunrise in three thousand years had caused the howl, but then the titan’s voice came crashing down as though it had echoed off the sky itself.
“Sons of Vilmos, I summon thee!” it boomed. “Answer the call of your ancient uncle, I command it!”
A southerly wind came howling out of the still air and tore across the field, driving before it a blinding wall of snow. The pounding gale hammered the foyer door against its jamb. Tongues of ice whipped through the arrow loops, lashing at Brianna like the strands of a torturer’s flail. Distant peals of thunder erupted in the south. The tower shuddered so violently that it would have toppled had Lanaxis not thrust out a hand to hold it steady.
Brianna pulled up her hood and fastened her cloak tight, then retreated across the chamber to look through the arrow loop Lanaxis had shattered the night before. A line of snow clouds had appeared on the southern horizon.
They were racing northward so fast it looked as though the gods were drawing a curtain across the sky. Inside the churning mass flashed a constant flicker of silver lightning, and the howling wind carried a musty, rainlike scent.
Storm giants.
It had been centuries since their last visit to Hartsvale, but Brianna knew the signs well enough. As a young girl, she had listened in heartbroken captivation to the tales of their gloomy visits, when rivers spilled over with tears and mountains thundered with grief. Simon, her father’s high priest, had once told her they were the noblest of all giants, but also the most dangerous because even their huge hearts could not contain all of their ancient sorrows.
With a makeshift sling, Brianna fastened Kaedlaw to her chest, then tied her rope to one of the crossbar brackets on the foyer doorjamb. She opened the door and ran the line across the small hall to the gaping hole that had once connected the queen’s tower to its stair turret. She dropped the end over the side. The wind caught it and whipped the long cord against the tower wall.
Brianna sat down and dangled her legs over the doorjamb, then took the homemade rope in hand. The clouds already covered half the sky, and the thunder was so loud she felt it in her bones. In the dark forest, the trees either bowed to the wind or snapped. Great white plumes of snow billowed off the drifts where the village lay buried, and the field below was concealed beneath a raging ground blizzard. The queen hoped Lanaxis would catch her soon, for she did not relish the thought of struggling through a thunder-snow with a heavy baby tied to her chest.
Brianna slipped off the doorsill and slid down the rope. The distant village and forest vanished behind a curtain of wind-driven snow. When the titan did not immediately recapture her, she uttered a prayer beseeching Hiatea’s protection and struck out in the approximate direction of the hamlet. The snow was so deep she sank to her hips, and she had to swim more than wade to make progress through the powdery stuff. Her face quickly went as numb as a rock, and her breath came in gasping wheezes. The queen struggled onward. For Avner’s plan to work, she had to convince Lanaxis this was her only hope. She would not accomplish that by turning back.