pushed just inside the collar, with the crown of his skull pressed against the roof of the tunnel. “Bring out the queen and her twins.”
It was the queen herself who replied. “I have only… one child, and he is handsome… as handsome as his father.” Brianna’s eyes shifted to Thatcher. “Show him.”
Avner nodded his permission, then opened one of Simon’s healing potions. He poured half the contents directly over the seam he had sewn in Brianna’s womb. The blood immediately ceased seeping from the closure. The edges fused together, leaving an ugly red scar in the incision’s place, but the queen was not ready to move. Before his task was complete, the young scout still had to close a layer of membrane and another of flesh.
As Avner worked, Thatcher released the queen’s arm and lifted the baby into the torchlight.
Raeyadfourne snorted in disgust. “That child? Kaedlaw?” he scoffed, using the firbolg word for ‘handsome as the father.’ “A name will not disguise a hideous face. Bring him out, and our shaman will help you survive to raise the princely one.”
“But I have… only one child!” Brianna protested. “And he… he is Kaedlaw.”
The queen’s brow was furrowed in confusion, as though she could not imagine why Raeyadfourne insisted on calling her child ugly. Avner feared he knew the reason. The firbolg did not see the same face as Brianna; he saw the visage that had been upon the child’s face at the moment of birth. The young scout glanced at the torch holder. The man was gazing toward the tunnel mouth, his eyes tense with the strain of keeping secret the transformation he had witnessed.
“Pay attention,” Avner hissed. “Hold that light down here, where I can see.”
Raeyadfourne’s rumbling voice filled the tunnel. “Galgadayle’s dreams have never been wrong. You must give us K-Kaed-uh-law.” The firbolg’s voice cracked with the strain of speaking a name that was a lie to his eyes. “We demand this for the good of Hartsvale, as well as our own.”
“We’ll give you nothing,” Gryffitt growled. “And if you want to take this handsome boy from the queen, you’ll have to do it from the sharp end of a lance.”
As Gryffitt made his declaration, Avner was carefully moving into place the edges of the translucent membrane he had cut to reach Brianna’s womb. He allowed her abdominal muscles to slip back where they belonged, then poured the remaining healing potion over the area. Normally, the patient was supposed to drink the elixir, but the queen had said her insides would mend faster if the tonic was poured directly onto them.
From outside came the heavy footsteps of a second firbolg. Raeyadfourne turned away from the tunnel mouth to converse with his fellow. Avner motioned the front riders to their weapons.
“Gather your things quietly,” he whispered. “We’ll be leaving shortly.”
“Where we going, if you don’t mind my asking?” asked Gryffitt. “Getting ourselves trapped in the back of a mine seems no better than fighting it out here.”
“Earl Wynn said the veins in this mountain cross each other like a tangle of worms-and the tunnels follow veins,” Avner explained. “With any luck, we’ll connect to another mine and sneak out that way.”
As the front riders gathered their parkas and weapons, Avner began to close the cut on the exterior of Brianna’s abdomen. Without the front riders to pin her down, she flinched and jerked whenever the needle pierced her skin, but her motions caused him little trouble. The movements were not as severe as when he had been closing her womb, and even if his hand slipped, he was not likely to cause serious injury. He worked as fast as he could, spacing the stitches just tightly enough to close the wound. If the edges overlapped in places, he did not worry. There would be time to tidy up later.
Avner was only half finished when Raeyadfourne spoke again. “Running will do you no good,” the firbolg said. “Even if you escape us, the fomorians and verbeegs will be waiting at the other exits.”
“I never thought to see the day when firbolgs consorted with the likes of those scum,” commented Gryffitt. He and the other front riders had already slipped back into their parkas and gathered their weapons. “Have you taken a sudden liking to thieves and murderers?”
Raeyadfourne shrugged, and it seemed to Avner that the firbolg had changed somehow. The chieftain’s silhouette appeared somehow more feral and threatening.
“The verbeegs and fomorians are our brothers,” Raeyadfourne explained. “If you surrender the ugly child, you have nothing to fear from them.”
“Let me heal the queen, and give us the second child,” boomed a second firbolg, Munairoe. “He will not suffer at our hands.”
Avner saw a pair of green eyes peering around Raeyadfourne and realized what had changed. The chieftain’s beard now hung clear down to his belly. His hair had become a long, wild mane, and, most importantly, his huge shoulders no longer covered the tunnel mouth completely.
“He’s shrinking!” Avner gasped.
A guttural curse erupted from deep within Raeyadfourne’s throat. He threw off his bearskin cloak and pulled a four-foot hand axe from his belt, then scuttled into the tunnel. Although the chieftain still had to squat on his haunches, he was now small enough that his hands remained free to fight.
Blizzard went wild, filling the passage with ear-splitting shrieks. She whipped her head violently against her reins, drawing an ominous creak from the thick mining timber to which she was tied, and her hooves hammered the stone floor. The front riders ignored the angry mare and leveled their lances, moving forward to attack the chieftain.
“You men, wait!” Avner yelled. If the front riders attacked Raeyadfourne now, they would still be fighting when the rest of the firbolgs reached the portal. “Come back here!”
Avner pulled his hand axe from its sheath and hurled it at the post to which the Queen’s Beast was tied. The weapon tumbled straight to the timber and sliced cleanly through Blizzard’s leather reins. The angry mare hardly paused to gather her feet before springing up the passage. She bounded over Brianna and knocked the front riders aside as she barreled past to attack Raeyadfourne.
The firbolg’s hand axe rose and came down, burying itself deep into the mare’s flank. The wet snap of shattering bone echoed through the tunnel. Blizzard continued forward, bowling Raeyadfourne over and burying her teeth into his neck. She landed astride the chieftain, as a wolf might a man, and ripped a mouthful of flesh from his throat. Raeyadfourne bellowed in pain, a spray of blood erupting from the wound. He pulled his axe free and raised it to strike again. Blizzard lowered her muzzle to bite, and the vicious fight erupted into a bloody melee from which neither beast nor firbolg would emerge whole.
Gryffitt and the rest of the front riders returned to the queen’s side. Avner motioned for them to lift Brianna, then pinched together the unsewn edges of her incision.
“Let’s go.” The young scout used his chin to point deeper into the mine. “And someone grab my axe.”
The torch holder led the way, his light casting a flickering yellow glow over the craggy walls. The rest of the front riders followed close behind, carrying Brianna and Kaedlaw upon her cloak. Avner brought up the rear, with the queen’s knees locked around his waist and the edges of her incision squeezed between his fingers. His view of the tunnel floor was blocked by his patient’s makeshift litter, and he kept stumbling over loose stones and jagged knobs of rock.
The awkward procession had barely gone ten steps before a panicked whinny sounded from the portal. Avner glanced over his shoulder. Two firbolg warriors were dragging the queen’s mangled horse out of the mine. The beards of both warriors were extremely long, hanging almost to their waists, and neither of them looked much larger than Tavis. They passed Blizzard to someone outside, and the mare let out a shriek that sounded almost human.
The two firbolgs reached into the mine and grabbed their groaning chieftain beneath the armpits. Raeyadfourne was covered in blood from his jawline to his belly, and his body remained limp as the warriors pulled him through the portal. The pair passed their injured fellow to the green-eyed shaman, then entered the tunnel themselves. To fit into the passage, they only had to stoop over. “Faster!” Avner said. “Run!”
The torch holder broke into a trot, as did the men carrying Brianna. Their feet moved almost in unison, filling the tunnel with the martial cadence of tramping boots. Several times, Avner tripped and nearly fell into Brianna’s lap, and she soon volunteered to hold her own wound closed. For the first time, little murmuring sounds came from Kaedlaw’s mouth. He did not seem to be crying or groaning so much as calling the count.
The passage followed the crooked, winding course of a silver vein, and Avner quickly lost his bearings. They seemed to be traveling ever deeper into the mountain, but the young scout knew better than to trust his surface dweller’s instincts. For all he knew, the tunnel could be less than a dozen feet underground.
