'I'm not hungry for hay!' Newt protested. Nevertheless, after he listened to the bellowing for a moment, he popped into the air and flew off toward the barn.
Finally, still hearing nothing from within the house, the High King stepped through the door and looked around a simple but comfortably furnished room. A stone fireplace occupied most of one wall, with a pair of wooden benches facing away from the hearth-a summer rearrangement, no doubt. But what most intrigued him was the table.
He saw dirty plates scattered among half-full goblets and hastily scattered eating knives. One plate had fallen to the floor and shattered, the pieces left where they lay in the family's haste to depart. Crossing to the cookstove, he placed his hand carefully against the burners. Cold.
Feeling a growing sense of urgency, Tristan stalked from the house, taking only the time to latch the door behind him.
'Newt!' he called. 'Let's go!' Looking toward the barn, the king saw a number of brown shapes lumbering eagerly into a pasture.
'The hay was too heavy,' Newt explained, 'so I let them into the grass instead.'
'Good idea.' Tristan praised him sincerely. 'It doesn't look like these folks are going to be back anytime soon.' In fact, the hastily abandoned house had sent a real jolt of alarm through him. For the first time, the fact became glaringly apparent-something was terribly amiss in his kingdom. His bemused reaction thus far now struck him as a shameful lapse of rulership.
Climbing back into the saddle, he cursed the awkwardness caused by his missing hand. Quickly the High King urged Shallot into a trot, and the horse paced like an eager colt along a path through the increasingly open woodland. The hounds coursed nearby, no longer ranging through the woods. They, too, sensed their master's tension, responding protectively.
Only Newt remained unaffected. 'I don't smell any fish yet,' he discoursed petulantly. 'How much farther do you think it is, anyway?'
When Tristan continued to ignore his prattle, however, even the flighty serpent began to sense that something had changed. He ceased his noisemaking and raised himself high on the pommel, sniffing the air and peering around like a watchful sentinel.
Then they reached another farmstead, like the previous settlement except that this one was more than abandoned. It was destroyed. Grim fury took hold of Tristan as Shallot cantered past a smoking ruin that had once been a large house. Dead cattle, many cruelly gutted, lay outside what had once been a barn. That structure, like the house, was now a smoking pile of charred timbers.
Yet the heat was not so great that it held Tristan or the dogs at bay, so he deduced that the damage had been done the previous day.
'Go!' the king cried suddenly, kicking Shallot sharply in the ribs. Anything he could do now, he knew, he couldn't do here.
The great war-horse sprang into a gallop, swiftly carrying the king back onto the track that had grown into a narrow forest road. The hounds flew along at the horse's heels, tongues flapping and legs pumping from the effort to keep up. Newt, after bouncing off the pommel several times, took to the air, arrowing along with his wings buzzing frantically a foot or two over Tristan's head. He was too busy flying even to talk.
A scent came to Tristan that he well recognized-the salt air of the sea. Then forest opened away from them, breaking into scattered clumps of trees dotting a broad expanse of pasture and grainfields. Before them, they caught sight of a gleaming surface through the trees, and the High King knew that at last they approached the Strait of Oman.
Then something closer caught his attention as the hounds flew past the horse in a frenzy of barking and snarling. The dogs leaped into a thicket lying directly beside Tristan's path, and the king immediately heard deeper, more unnatural snarls.
In another moment, several large shapes sprang from the underbrush, sending the steady war-horse rearing backward in fright. They were already too close for his lance, so the king discarded the long shaft and grimly his sword, facing the onslaught of no less than a dozen trolls.
The Princess of Moonshae finally approached the two enclosing peninsulas, preparing to depart Codsbay- admittedly somewhat less gracefully than she had entered. Nevertheless, Thurgol and his firbolgs had finally begun to, if not master, at least comprehend the art of propelling the sleek vessel through the water.
Also, the giant chieftain had thought of another precaution, one that gave him a somewhat smug sense of satisfaction. Before they sailed from the harbor, he had ordered his crew of giants to paddle to each of the fishing boats floating in the placid bay. They had kicked several planks out of each hull, so by the time they reached the mouth of the bay, every ship of the tiny fleet rested on the bottom.
With the threat of pursuit thus minimized, Thurgol concentrated on getting his villagemates to propel the longship with some modicum of control. By limiting the oarsmen to a pair on each side, the chieftain found that the giant-kin could row with a reasonable chance of striking the same cadence-at least, a good part of the time.
Thurgol himself stood in the stern, holding the long rudder pole. At first, he had tried to help by swinging this pole back and forth, but he soon concluded that the ship progressed better if he just let the rudder trail into the water behind them. It was a lot less work that way, too.
'Row!' he called, his bass voice rumbling across the smooth-watered bay. 'Row again!' In this way, he tried to synchronize the pace of the oarsmen. Once these laboring giant-kin had learned to lift the blades out of the water on the return strokes, they actually made pretty good progress.
As the proud longship emerged from the bay, the haze of the strait parted as if by magic. There before them, breathtaking in its majesty, sweeping above the lowlands with snow-covered peak and jagged, rocky slopes, loomed the Icepeak. Though the mist still cloaked the bulk of Oman's Isle, the mountain summit itself stood out in clear relief, outlined by the late afternoon sun into patches of shadow and stupendous, rose-tinted light.
'It seems so close,' Garisa said. The old shaman sat upon the stern platform, resting her weary bones, the Silverhaft Axe across her lap. Now that they had seized a ship and embarked onto the water, the withered hag felt a sense of profound wonder.
'Won't get there before dark, though,' Thurgol mused, with a rough approximation of their speed thus far. 'Row… row again!' he shouted as a pair of oarsmen clanked their bladed shafts together.
'But we'll get there,' the shaman declared, her tone soft with amazement.
'Didn't you know that?' Thurgol asked, surprised. After all, this had been her idea.
'There was a time when I wasn't so sure,' Garisa admitted. Of course, she well remembered her incantation in Cambro, designed to draw the band out of that dwarven stronghold before disaster struck. At the time, she hadn't really considered the goal of the Icepeak an attainable one, practically speaking, but now good fortune, perhaps even the will of the gods, had set her misgivings aside.
'Baatlrap won't be happy,' the chieftain remarked with a deep chuckle. Then he shook his head in regret. 'Still, I only wish he'd stay dead. When we get back, he'll be trouble.'
Garisa looked intently at the sturdy firbolg who was the chieftain of her lifelong village. He still seemed a callow youth in some ways, but she had to admit that his leadership had been steady and forthright in bringing them this far. She honestly liked Thurgol-liked him enough that she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she didn't think they'd ever be going home again.
That feeling had been growing steadily in her mind, solidifying, it seemed, with each night's sleep, each day's progress in their march to the north. It wasn't a feeling that she sought or desired. More to the point, as they had left Myrloch Vale behind, she had been possessed by a sense of melancholy, as if a powerful voice within told her that she looked on the trees and blossoms of that favored place for the last time.
Now, as the coastline of Gwynneth itself fell away, as she took the first waterborne voyage of her life, Garisa couldn't suppress this wistful conclusion. Of course, if she was right, that meant that Baatlrap wouldn't be a problem for them at any time in the foreseeable future, and that was a fact she could welcome with something like genuine enthusiasm.
'Trolls are no good for us anyway. More trouble than they're worth,' she observed. 'They make the humans too mad. You wait. Soon comes an army to chase them down.'
'What army?' growled Thurgol, looking at the shore behind them. He had begun to assume that his force was the greatest army in the Moonshaes, but Garisa's reminder made him remember that was not the case.
