Yes, I understand. The world is full of evil-evil that has arisen from the destruction of Ostoria. The task the gods have set before me is clear: I must save Toril. I must reestablish the Empire of Giants and restore harmony to the world.
But I cannot rule this empire myself. After my mistake-I did not hesitate to poison my brothers, but it was a mistake-I am not fit. The king must be someone destined to rule, in whose veins flows the divine right of dominion. It is my duty to ensure that he is born.
I know who the mother is to be.
“Bring princess here?” The question comes from Goboka, a foolish ogre who has come to my vale seeking the powers of a shaman. “What princess?”
Goboka stands before me: a tiny, loutish figure lost in the vastness of my audience hall. I sit upon my throne, cloaked in a magic mantle of purple shadow. I have forgotten why I started concealing myself from mortal visitors- perhaps it was shame over my fall-but the habit has served me well. The giants have come to think of me as a sort of sacred spirit, and they do my bidding as if by divine command.
“The princess will… be born next… year,” I explain, barely forcing the words out. I have managed to slip through time to the exact moment of Goboka’s visit, and I must strain to explain what I want. Time builds a certain momentum as it rushes forward, and changing its course-even when the moment is recent-is no easy matter. “You must… bring her here no later than… her nineteenth birthday.”
Again, your voices:
“Why us? What have we done…?”
“… she’s a beautiful filly, but for that price…”
“There are plenty of women who would…”
No! Only her. Only Brianna of Hartwick may bear the child! She is descended of Annam’s last son, who was ordained by the All Father to become king of giants and rule Ostoria with wisdom and justice. True, Othea robbed the child of his birthright-but she did not kill the seed. The seed lives on, awaiting but a wisp of divine breath to bring it to life again.
I will be that wisp.
“I beg your pardon,” says Julien, the ettin’s handsome head.
We are standing together, my servant and I, in the moments before they are to leave Twilight forever. Beside us bubble the black waters that once we called the Well of Health, but have since named the Pool of Despair. Goboka has failed-through the eyes of my eagle familiar, I have seen Brianna’s bloody axe and watched his headless body sink beneath a mountain mire-and I have just told my servant what I expect of them.
“You can’t ask that of us!” Julien insists. “Othea cursed us, too. If we go after the princess, we’ll die!”
I nod my head sadly. “Someday-but not until you grow old.” I give the ettin a suit of magical armor I have forged for their misshapen body, and also a vial of powder I have mixed to ensure their success. “The armor will disguise you as a handsome human prince, and the powder will make Brianna fall in love with you.”
“Why we need magic powder for that?” demands Arno, the ettin’s ugly head. “Any woman love us!”
Love.
Is it not love that licenses treachery? This is so, and for me more than others. Do you think it is for my own sake that I poisoned the Mother Queen? Or for myself that I abide this murky prison? I endure for the sons and daughters of my dead brothers.
The mother-murderer suffers for the good of Toril.
Lanaxis the Chosen perseveres so that the giants may set the world to rights-and the time is nigh when they shall. True, the ettin died, but it would be wrong to say that he failed. He did better than Brianna knows; better, even, than I should have expected.
Now I stand on my palace balcony, my vacant gaze fixed on the icy wastes beyond the balustrade. But it is not the dusk-stained snows I see, nor the wind’s cold hiss to which I listen. In the window of Brianna’s throne room-the princess has become queen, but it would be foolish to ask me when-in the window perches my pet, his keen eyes and sharp ears serving me as his talons never could.
The queen’s belly is swollen with child. Before her looms a milky-eyed firbolg with a mane of flyaway hair and a pelt of white beard.
“I have dreamed your birthing,” he says. “You will bear two sons, one handsome and one ugly. It would be better for the Ice Spires if the ugly one never has a name.”
Brianna’s knuckles whiten. The change is almost imperceptible, but the eyes of my familiar are too keen to miss it “I am to kill my child-on your word?”
“Majesty, I am sorry. If the ugly one grows to manhood, the giants will fill the Clearwhirl with the blood of ’kin and men.”
“I, too, have dreamed.” Brianna’s voice is sharp with anger. Good. “But not of twins and wars. I have dreamed of a land ruled by children-”
“But Majesty, you’re no seer! Your dream has no meaning!”
The queen rises, glaring. “In Hartsvale, my dreams are the only ones that have meaning!”
Your dreams and mine, Brianna. Your dreams and mine.
1
Tavis Burdun felt the detonation before he heard it: a faint quiver in the soles of his feet, followed instantly by a feeble shock wave breaking against his back. A muffled karumph rolled up the gorge from someplace far behind him, sweeping last night’s snowfall off the craggy precipices, and he smelled whiffs of some mordant, caustic fume. There was a slight lull, then a deafening crack as an enormous ice curtain broke free of its cliff and crashed down on the far side of Wyrm River.
“Halt the Company of the Royal Snow Bear!” Tavis boomed, addressing the long column of warriors ahead. Even without the roar of shattering ice, he would have had to yell. A fierce boreal wind had been howling down the gorge since dawn, filling the canyon with a whistling keen as eerie and cold as a banshee’s wail. “Halt the horse lancers! Halt the footmen and front riders!”
As the company sergeants relayed the commands forward, Tavis turned and looked back down the canyon, raising his hand to halt the elegant sleighs coming toward him. He saw nothing unusual, only the icy, rutted road that the queen’s entourage had followed into the dusky Gorge of the Silver Wyrm. To one side of the route lay the broad ribbon of Wyrm River’s frozen surface, with a sheer granite cliff looming above the far bank. To the other side rose a steep, craggy slope flecked with the stumps of a felled pine forest A web of precarious footpaths laced the barren hillside, stringing together the rock heaps that spilled from the mouths of the canyon’s fabled silver mines. Atop a few of the mine dumps stood a handful of tiny figures, weary miners who had crawled from their dank holes to watch the queen’s procession. If they felt any concern over the muffled blast, their motionless forms did not betray it.
The royal sleigh, the first in the procession, continued to come toward Tavis. It was drawn by the queen’s favorite horse, Blizzard, a white-flecked mare with a snowy mane and a disposition as fierce and unpredictable as her namesake. The beast did not halt until she reached Tavis’s side, where she cast an angry glare into his eyes and snorted sour-smelling steam into his face. He grabbed the horse’s bridle and pushed her head away, then fixed his attention on the sleigh’s fur-swaddled driver. The young man was a lanky border scout with a yellow beard, twinkling gray eyes, and a touch of larceny in his ready smile.
“Avner, keep a taut rein on the Queen’s Beast,” Tavis advised, calling the petulant mare by his favorite nickname. “I don’t like her look.”
Before the young scout could reply, a muffled voice sounded behind the fleece curtain that enclosed the sleigh’s passenger compartment. “Tavis? What was that horrible crash?”
“Falling ice, milady.”
A mittened hand drew the curtain aside, revealing the striking form of Tavis’s wife, Queen Brianna. She was a tall, big-boned woman with robust features and a chin as strong as a man’s. Even her white fur cloak could not
