with Talon. The joys of both were amazing.
Grrr’s ears pricked up suddenly. Hyden sensed the alarm in him immediately. Oof and Huffa rose quickly, while Urp sniffed at the air. Without warning, Urp let out a low growl, and then darted off into the forest.
Hyden nudged Mikahl awake.
“What is it?” Mikahl asked sleepily. He had fallen asleep leaning against the tree.
“SHHHH!”
The urgency and warning in Hyden’s tone brought Mikahl fully awake. Silently, he took Ironspike’s sheath rig from his lap and looped it over his shoulder. When he had it buckled in place, he looked over and saw his chain mail shirt lying on his blanket. Too late now, he decided regretfully, as Urp’s distant bark caused Grrr and the other two wolves, to charge off towards the sound.
“At first, I thought it might be Vaegon returning,” Hyden whispered. “It’s not. The wolves feel threatened. There’s something out there.”
Mikahl looked up through a small break in the forest canopy. The sky was a deep, dusky blue. Not much daylight left above, even less down there under the trees.
One of the wolves suddenly let out a long, angry series of snarling barks. Another wolf, Urp, thought Hyden, echoed the sentiment. The first had been Grrr. Something unknown was upon them. Something, that the wolf wasn’t sure he should attack or not. Grrr’s uncertainty was a good sign. If it had been some dark, evil thing, Hyden figured that they would already be attacking it. Talon was gliding into the trees, above the wolf pack now, and Hyden closed his eyes so that he could see.
Mikahl saw Hyden close his eyes, and huffed out a frustrated breath. He didn’t wait for his friend’s explanation. Vaegon might need them. He charged off in the direction the wolves had gone. He drew Ironspike as he ran, and noticed that its magical glow was noticeably dimmer than it had been when he had used it to kill Duke Fairchild. The sound of its magical symphony was still in his head though, only it was as if it was coming from a great distance. Through his grip on the leather wrapped hilt, he could feel the power of the blade slowly fading away.
“It’s all right!” Mikahl heard Hyden call out to him from back at the camp.
He hoped that it was all right, because all he saw as he came crashing into the clearing was snarling great wolves, dozens of angry yellow eyes, and a whole bunch of razor-sharp arrow tips, trained on him and his four four-legged friends. It wasn’t until after he had blinked his eyes several times that he realized that all of those yellow eyes staring back at him belonged to elves.
Chapter 43
It had taken Shaella most of the night, and had cost the Staff of Malice all of its power, to undo the magical barrier that King Balton had created around the island of Coldfrost, but the deed was done. Once the boundary’s soft, static hum finally ceased, the breed giants came stampeding off of the island like the half intelligent, half feral beasts that they were.
Straight across the deep and sluggishly powerful river channel they came, with little to no regard for the freezing temperatures and the deadly current. More than a dozen of the hairy man beasts ended up floating stiffly out to sea, trampled, drowned, or frozen solid by the icy-cold water. The smartest of them, the older males, and the naturally protective mothers, waited on the other side with their children. They came across in the sunlight, at a safe, shallow ford. There was a narrow place, a few miles upstream from where Shaella had vanquished the barrier. There, one of the younger, brighter males boasted that he could make a bridge. It turned out that one wasn’t needed. The water there never reached more than knee deep.
The wildest of them, the toothy, crazed males, driven by rage, and testosterone were already ravaging the nearby villages and towns, and we’re slowly working their way south in small packs. The biggest and meanest of them though, the smarter, more terrifying self-proclaimed leader of all of the Breed Giants, was leading a band of his kind to Locar, to complete the bargain they had made with the Dragon Queen.
Bzorch was nearly ten feet tall, and like all of his kin, his body was covered with a thin, yet course fur, everywhere save for his face and palms. Bzorch’s fur was light brown in color, and still thick enough for him to be considered young; but the grayish white patches along his spine and chest, showed his maturity.
A lot of the breed giants were born with white or silver fur. It was much harder to tell the ages of those beasts. All of them were large, had wide, wet snouts, and jutting lower jaws. Their mouths were full of ferocious looking teeth that tore into raw flesh easily, sometimes the flesh of their own kind.
Bzorch had fought ruthlessly with dozens of contenders to become the alpha male. Lately though, the challenges had ceased. His hard, and violent victory displays, where the loser was dismembered and consumed before those that chose to watch such combats, had gone far to dissuade further attempts to take over his role.
The breed giants hadn’t been cannibals until King Balton had imprisoned them on the island. Up until then, they had hunted the northwestern arctic for bear, wolf, and lazy tusked seal. They eventually ranged far enough inland from the icy coast, to stumble upon some of the true giants’ herds, and some of Westland’s northern most villages. Herds were devoured, women were raped, and men and giants were killed. Eventually, the breed started eating the flesh of the two-legged creatures they had killed. This wasn’t cannibalism yet, for they were neither men, nor giants, and the taste of man flesh was succulent. It drove them mad for more.
Lord Brach and his hearty northern troops, hunted, tortured and did everything they could to dissuade the beasts, but the Breed eventually lost all fear of humans. They were the hunters, and the men were their prey. That’s when King Balton stepped in.
The kingdom folk thought the Breed were half-bears, or the fabled Yetin. The fact that they were obviously two-legged, mannish creatures that were capable of semi-intelligent thought, was the only reason that King Balton and King Aldar had agreed to spare them from complete annihilation.
The giant king claimed that they were a mutated form of a race called the Wedjakin, which hailed from beyond the other side of the Giant Mountains. What had caused them to turn so violently feral was unknown to the Giant King though. There was a hope that the wildness would eventually breed out of them.
Bound to the island of Coldfrost, the beasts couldn’t kill, rape, and savage the good folk of Westland, or plunder the giant herders’ flocks any longer, and that was all that really mattered to the two Kings. On the island, there was little to hunt, and the bitter climate made growing anything impossible. Soon, the Breed beasts were forced to resort to eating each other to survive. The transition from human and giant flesh to the flesh of their own kind was easy to make, but the fact that they had been forced to that extreme wasn’t easy for any of the sentient ones to forget. Especially Bzorch.
The Breed had been hunted, killed, captured, and tortured, by Westland’s King, his Northern Lord’s. Like animals, they had been herded out onto the island of Coldfrost and imprisoned there. Until then, the Breed hadn’t understood the idea of borders and property lines. The beast in them, the instinct that drove them, was to feed, to claim territory by way of scent marking, and to mate. There had been no evil intent to their raiding and marauding. There were no greed driven designs of conquest involved. They were just creatures migrating and feeding.
Now all that had changed. Now, they were driven by hatred and vengeance. Now, they knew what it was like to be caged and forced to eat each other to keep from starving. The imprisonment had only lasted a few years, but what, to a half wild animal, is time? Especially in a place that is bitter cold and icy white year round; a place where the changing of seasons is a barely conceivable notion.
The Breed giants were loose now and they were having their way. To the people of Northern Westland, this was a most terrible thing. There was no one left to protect them. Almost all of their capable men had gone off to war. The rampaging groups of huge wild creatures left a trail of blood and death in their wake. As for the more intelligent group, led by Bzorch, who had a specific mission to accomplish, the savaging was no less horrible. In fact, it was worse.
After gathering his chosen, and leaving the Isle of Coldfrost, Bzorch led his band eastward, through the town of Riverbend. They stopped, only to feed on a few of the townsfolk there. No women were raped, no children pulled apart piece by piece, but only because Bzorch had more meaningful victims in mind.
The group of chosen consisted of thirteen of the most brutal of their kind. Bzorch had chosen them, not only
