Had Morten been smaller or his attacker larger, the tactic might have toppled him. As it was, the bodyguard simply stepped back with one leg, bracing himself and at the same time breaking free of his foe. The ogre dropped to his back. Brianna heard a muffled crack as the firbolg stomped on the brute's chest, then her bodyguard drew his sword across the ambusher's throat and finished him.
Brianna nudged Blizzard forward. 'That didn't take long!' she called. 'Perhaps my father's guards will reach Stagwick in time to see Tavis off-'
'Stay there!' Morten ordered.
The firbolg scowled at Brianna until she stopped moving, then peered into the grove and sniffed the air. He stepped off the road and trotted deeper into the wood, fading into the white forest like a ghost. The princess sat listening to the irregular cadence of cracking sticks that marked his passage, until the muted popping and snapping grew so distant that she could no longer distinguish the sounds from the rustling of the aspen leaves.
Brianna waited with growing impatience, becoming more convinced with each passing minute that Morten was deliberately wasting her time. Coggin's Rise stood in the center of Hartsvale, far from the dangerous borderlands, where giants and their kin came to raid. It was almost unthinkable that one ogre had snuck so far into the valley: she could not believe a whole party had. Still, she resisted the temptation to go after her bodyguard, reminding herself that Morten knew far more than she about this particular adversary.
Normally that would not have been so. The princess made it her business to know her kingdom's enemies, potential or otherwise, better than she knew her friends. But in this case, it had been impossible to earn her knowledge firsthand. No ogre had entered the kingdom since the War of Harts, a three-year battle of succession in which her father had hired ogre mercenaries to vanquish the power-hungry forces of his evil twin, Dunstan. After the war, the new king had wisely paid his hirelings a generous bonus, in return eliciting a pledge that they would leave Hartsvale undisturbed as long as Camden reigned. Until today, no ogre had violated that promise.
Nor had Brianna had opportunity to study ogres outside the valley. Like most of her father's subjects, she had passed her entire life without leaving Hartsvale. The kingdom sat in an alpine valley located in the heart of the Ice Mountains, known locally as the Ice Spires. The peaks were as huge as they were forbidding, enclosing the vale inside an immense rampart of glaciers and granite that could not be climbed. Even from here, near the center of the kingdom, Brianna could see the distant white crags looming in all directions, rising up to scratch at the sky like the jagged merlons of some vast citadel.
Of course, there were rifts in the wall: narrow passes that snaked their way through winding canyons and over treacherous glaciers before dropping into distant valleys. But, aside from a handful of adventurous traders with more greed than wisdom, few dared to travel such trails. The paths were as dangerous as they were long, crossing and recrossing raging rivers, traversing sheer cliffs a thousand feet above ground, and twining through endless marshes filled with water so cold a man's lips would turn blue from drinking it.
Not the least of these hazards were the giants and their kin. They infested the Ice Spires in all directions, with the nomadic frost giants wandering the Great Glacier to the north and the fire giants plaguing the dwarves of Citadel Adbar to the south. To the west, the furtive voadkyn abided in the frigid depths of the Coldwood, while the ascetic stone giants of the east claimed the high cliffs overlooking the vast wastes of the desert Anauroch. And there were at least a dozen more giant tribes in the region, tilling the earth of the deep fertile valleys, hunting in the conifer forests on the mountain slopes, and lurking in the high desolate passes that were the only paths over sheer-faced ridges of solid granite. From Hartsvale, it was literally impossible to travel in any direction without crossing the territory of at least one giant tribe, and foolish adventurers who tried to do so without the aid of an experienced guide seldom survived the attempt.
Brianna's wait came to an abrupt end when a distant thud sounded in the aspen stand. The noise was so faint that Brianna could hardly hear it, much less tell the exact direction it came from. There was a muffled scream, then another, and finally a chorus of rasping battle cries resembling the one the ogre had made before dying. The sounds were followed by several more thuds, then Morten's deep voice bellowed out of the forest, full of bloodlust and anger.
The lady realized that her bodyguard had found what he was searching for, and from the sound of it he was outmanned by a fair amount. Though she knew her father would warn her to return to Stagwick and demand Earl Dobbin's protection, Brianna planted her heels in Blizzard's ribs, urging the mare into the grove. As they passed the corpse Morten had left lying in the road, Brianna got her first close glimpse of an ogre.
Save for the tusklike teeth protruding from beneath his lower lip, the brute resembled a huge, loutish man with a jutting chin and floppy, oversized ears. From the septum of his crooked nose hung a bronze ring, while his eyes, glazed with death, had purple irises and white pupil's. He wore a wolf-skull headdress that had slipped halfway off his lumpy head to reveal a mass of greasy hair pulled into a tight topknot.
Blizzard snorted, springing away as if to escape the disgusting ogre smell. Brianna guided the mare to where Morten had left the path and easily spied her bodyguard's footprints, a series of deep depressions in the mossy ground. The princess urged the mare into a gallop, keeping her gaze locked on the firbolg's trail and trusting her mount to pick a safe path. Soon, the sour smell of ogre filled the air. Brianna looked up, but the woods were so thick that she still could not see the battle.
Morten cried out in pain, then rasping battle cries rattled from several ogre throats and a series of loud blows reverberated through the aspens. First one, then a second, third, and fourth ogre howled in agony. The crack of a falling tree echoed through the stand, followed by a tremendous crash and an inhuman screech. Then the battle fell abruptly silent, and Brianna found herself listening to nothing but rustling aspen leaves and the crashing footfalls of her charging horse. She slowed Blizzard to a walk, knowing that the ogre survivors-if there were any- would be able to hear her coming now that the battle had quieted.
Morten's voice rang through the wood. 'It safe, Brianna.' Like his message, his tone was strained and almost incoherent, as if he were too exhausted to speak-or, more likely, was wounded. 'You come…' The firbolg's voice trailed off.
Brianna urged Blizzard into a gallop. 'I'll be right there, Morten,' she called. 'And thanks he to Hiatea that you survived.'
Although Morten did not answer, the princess was able to follow the terrible smell of ogre bodies to the top of a rocky bluff overlooking the trail. As she approached, Brianna saw a wide band of black arrows scattered across the hillside and the bloody corpses of seven ogres strewn among the brown boulders that lay half buried in the mossy ground. Like the first ogre she had seen, they had purple eyes and topknots of greasy hair.
Her bodyguard sat slumped against the broken trunk of a toppled aspen tree, his dented buckler lying at his feet. There was a long bloody rift in the side of his helmet, his eyes were closed, and his breath came in short, shallow gasps.
As she rode over to Morten, Brianna saw that he had done his work well. A couple of the ogres had lost arms or legs to the firbolg's mighty sword and now lay in pools of foul-smelling blood so deep there could be none left in their bodies. The heads of two more lay several paces from their gaunt bodies, and a few bodies had been cleaved nearly in two. One ogre lay beneath the crown of the toppled aspen tree, his crumpled body twisted into an impossible shape.
Reaching Morten's side, Brianna dismounted. She slipped her silver-handled axe into her belt and grabbed her waterskin off her saddle, then began to examine the firbolg's injuries. A broken arrow shaft protruded from one of his massive thighs and his leather breastplate was gouged and slashed in a dozen places, but the armor had spared him any deep cuts.
Brianna unbuckled the chin strap and gently lifted off the bloody helmet- Morten's red hair was matted with blood, but that did not in itself alarm her. All scalp wounds bled freely, even those that were only superficial. She poured water over the slash to wash away the blood. To her surprise, the cut was neither large nor deep, only about as long as her thumb and so shallow that she could not even see the white bone of his skull.
Brianna frowned. 'What's wrong, you great pansy?' she asked, half joking. 'A little cut like that shouldn't bother you.'
She placed her thumbs on his eyelids and drew them up. His pupils were both the same size and quickly retracted as if in response to the sudden daylight, but they were glassy and unfocused, like those of someone who bad drunk too much wine. Brianna let his eyes close, then grabbed a nearby arrow to examine the tip. It was coated with yellow paste.
'Poison!'
Brianna took Morten's dagger and pushed the blade into his thigh. When she felt the point slip past the
