“Go ahead and roll,” Tavis said. “You’ll drive the blade in for me.”
Odion wisely returned to his stomach. The firbolg’s blade was hardly more than a dirk to him, but a dirk was long enough to puncture a lung. “What is your intention?”
“I hope it isn’t to kill you,” boomed the second stone giant “I have not prepared myself to lose a son.”
Tavis instantly recognized the sonorous voice. “Gavorial!” The scout pressed the tip of his sword into the back of Odion’s neck, then looked up to see a familiar, grimly lined face. “I had thought never to see you again.”
“Nor I to see you-and both our lives would have been the better for it,” Gavorial answered. The stone giant opened his hand to display the shepherd youth he had snatched from the side of Wyvern’s Eyrie. The boy was battered and trembling with fear, but he was alive. “Yet here we stand, and now you must surrender-or burden your spirit with the weight of this boy’s death.”
Avner dived into the moldering grain, burrowing deep and fast. The oats and barley were damp and rank, but he tried not to think about what he smelled. The foul odor would keep anyone from poking around the heap, and that made it an ideal hiding place. He continued digging until he neared the other side, then cleared an eyehole so he could see the wrecked farmhouse and most of the rubble-strewn yard.
The giants had been little more than sticks on the horizon when Avner had stepped out of the spruce copse, but already they were close enough for the youth to see that they were frost giants. They had milky skin and bushy beards that ranged in color from dirty ivory to ice blue, and most were dressed in sleeveless jerkins and kilts made from some long-furred hide. They all carried double-bladed axes large enough to fell a mature spruce in a single swipe, and the leader wore a skullcap with two ivory horns.
When the giants reached the farm boundary, the leader thrust the heel of his hobnailed boot into the rock wall and stepped through the resulting breach. He stopped just inside the main yard, sending the other giants to inspect all corners of the farm. As they spread out, Avner counted fifteen of the milky-skinned brutes. The leader stomped up to the main house and began poking through the ruins, grunting angrily and kicking the stones in disgust.
One of the warriors called to him from the other side of the grain pile. Avner could not understand the words of the icy voice, since the fellow was speaking a racial dialect. This surprised the youth. The tribes of the Ice Spires had long ago embraced Common as their primary language, but he had heard that some giants still used their own tongues as a matter of pride.
When the frost giant leader circled around the pile to answer the warrior’s summons, Avner quickly retreated through the grain and opened a new spy hole. He found the two giants squatting beside the limbless torso of an old woman. The leader nodded in approval and slapped the flat of his axe blade down on the corpse. He bared his blue teeth in a cruel smile and rose.
“I didn’t think stone giants had the stomach for this work.” In contrast to his subordinate, the leader spoke Common.
The warrior snickered an answer, again in tribal dialect. Avner had no idea what the fellow was saying, but he had to bite his lip to keep from crying out in surprise, for he did recognize one word: Gavorial.
Gavorial had served in the Giant Guard, which had once protected the monarchs of Hartsvale. When Brianna had forced her father to abdicate, it had been Gavorial who carried the addled king away, and who had warned Tavis that the giants would not rest until they delivered the queen to the Twilight Spirit. If the stone giant was a part of this, then Brianna was in greater danger than anyone knew.
As Avner watched, the frost giant leader reached into his belt purse and withdrew a rumpled parchment. He unfolded it and stretched it tight, then slowly scanned the surrounding area. After a moment’s study, the leader pointed toward the back of the farm, where the mouth of a narrow canyon led to Shepherd’s Nightmare.
A cold, sick dread welled up inside Avner. Somehow, the frost giants had learned about the secret pass, and that spelled disaster for Tavis.
When the youth considered what he could do to help his friend, his jaws began to ache as though he were going to retch. He had to cover his mouth and pinch his nostrils shut against the terrible odor of his hiding place, and even then he feared his gagging would draw the frost giants’ attention to the grain pile. His best hope of survival lay in staying hidden, but then the giants would be between him and Tavis, precluding any possibility of alerting the scout to his peril. Unfortunately, the boy’s other options, such as drawing the giants away or trying to sneak into the canyon first, seemed almost suicidal. Still, the youth had to do something. He could not sit by and let the frost giants tromp up the canyon to kill Tavis.
Avner crawled back through the grain heap, then pulled his sling from inside his tunic and peered into the yard. He saw only two frost giants on this side of the farm. They stood about a hundred paces away, peering into a tangled stand of scrub pine beyond the boundary wall. The youth slipped out of his hiding place and grabbed two rocks. A hundred yards was a long way for his sling to hurl a missile, but he didn’t need to be accurate.
Avner fit a stone into the pocket and whirled the cord over his head, then released the rock. The stone arced high into the air, sailing toward the wood, off to one side of the giants. As it passed over their heads, the youth was already placing his second stone in the sling.
The first missile dropped into the forest, bouncing off a tree trunk with a sharp crack. The heads of both giants swiveled toward the sound. Avner hurled his next stone, angling it slightly away from where the warriors were now looking. As the rock reached the top of its arc, he jumped back into the moldering grain.
Avner barely had himself covered before the two giants yelled for their companions. The youth retreated through the pile, amazed to discover that the odor no longer sickened him. Now that he was doing something, he felt better.
By the time Avner reached the other side of the heap, the frost giant leader and all his warriors were tromping off to investigate the pine stand. Avner crawled from his hiding place, then took a deep breath and sprinted for Shepherd’s Nightmare.
Gavorial waited a long time for an answer, and Tavis knew he would continue to wait. Stone giants were a people of infinite patience, given to careful deliberation and long pondering, so it would seem only natural to one that the scout would consider his response carefully. But Tavis had known the instant he heard the ultimatum what his answer would be. Now he was considering ways to reconcile his duty to the queen with his compulsion to save the shepherd youth’s life.
The boy himself was the first to break the lengthy silence. “Don’t surrender, Tavis.” The youth’s cracking voice was a fearful contrast to his brave words. “You’ve done right enough by my mother and my sisters. All I ask is that you kill that one while you can-just like he and his father killed my brothers and father!”
Strictly speaking, the relationship between the two giants did not parallel that of the youth to his father and brothers. Blood ties were not as important to stone giants as philosophical and spiritual heritage. Odion was more an apostle to Gavorial than a true son, but the boy’s thirst for vengeance did spark an idea in Tavis’s mind.
“Gavorial can still catch your family,” said the scout. “They won’t be safe until he and I come to an agreement.”
“Agreement?” scoffed the youth. “Did you not see what these monsters did to our farm? How can you think he’d honor his word?”
“Because he’s a stone giant.” Tavis locked gazes with Gavorial, searching in vain for some hint of the stone giant’s thoughts. “He won’t have it written in the Chronicles of Stone that he broke a pledge.”
“Just so,” agreed Gavorial. “And I pledge to release the boy and his family if you surrender without harming Odion.”
Tavis shook his head. “You know I can’t do that, Gavorial,” he said. “My duty-”
“It is no longer possible for you to fulfill your duty,” the stone giant interrupted. “Even if you elude me, you cannot keep your promise to Brianna. As we speak, fifteen of my cousins from the snow are ascending the canyon.”
“Frost giants?” Tavis gasped. He almost allowed the tip of his sword to stray from Odion’s ribs.
Gavorial nodded. “We have lured you into a trap,” the giant said. “Accept your fate with grace. At least you will save this boy and what remains of his family.”
The scout felt his legs go icy and weak, though not because he feared the frost giants. To set their trap, the giants had to have known he was coming-and that meant they had a spy in the castle. Tavis’s thoughts leaped
