Ror scowled. “Huh? What if Tavis say don’t kill-”
“Ror, Tavis is a firbolg,” Orisino said. “If you can’t trust a firbolg, who can you trust?”
A glimmer of understanding flashed in the fomorian’s eye, then his lips curled into a larcenous smile. “Oh, yeah,” he snickered. “Ror trust Tavis, sure thing!”
Across the moonlit snows I trudge, half-crippled by the slashed tendon in my heel, each step a battle of will against my own mutinous foot. I crash through the thick spruce forests like a dragon in delirium, leaving a crooked swath of toppled and splintered trees to mark my hobbling trail, and I tramp over the frozen fens, where my lurching feet break through the permafrost to press ponds deep into the steaming mud; when I cross the tiny granges where peasants graze their goats and swine, the stone fences erupt beneath my lame foot, and as I lumber by the manors of highborn earls, even the lofty keeps tremble with the fear that I will stumble against them. Thus does Lanaxis the Chosen pass, not with the great strides of an ancient and mighty titan, but with the scuttling limp of a vile, ragged beggar.
This taste of mortality I could have done without.
Understand, it is not the pain I speak of-hardly so! after three thousand years of the Twilight Vale’s cold numbness, any sensation is a welcome one-rather, it is the idea of the pain that offends me. To be injured by a mortal-by a mere firbolg runt! — it is an affront almost more than I can bear. Is it not enough that I have forsaken the Twilight Vale? Cruel Ones, I have sacrificed eternity for the glory of Ostoria. Why must you insult me as well?
“Damned fool! We told you where to look…”
“… you must do it, my darling; do it for me…”
“… now! You will kneel before your betters or I’ll have your…”
Ah… you wish to humble me. My hubris was my downfall-and the ruin of Ostoria. I must learn humility before I may ask forgiveness, and until I am redeemed, the empire of giants will not rise again.
Very well, I shall endure your burden; though it be a thousand times heavier than this tower I carry, I shall bear it without complaint. You have chosen well, for I was firstborn of Annam the All Father, and my long eternity of cold contemplation has made me naught but stronger.
Brianna sat braced in the splayed sill of a second-story arrow loop, holding a crimson ash leaf in her hand and uttering the mystic syllables of her spell. Kaedlaw, tied to her stomach in a makeshift sling, fidgeted and growled, clearly unhappy with the scratchy bundle into which he had been stuffed. Avner was on the floor above, with the five guards who had been in the tower when Lanaxis pulled it from the ground.
Brianna finished her incantation, and the ash leaf vanished in a puff of pink smoke. A long blade of scarlet flame shot through the arrow loop to slash across Lanaxis’s breast. The fiery tongue did not burn the titan so much as sear away the dusky gloom clinging to his person.
The queen angled the flame toward Lanaxis’s face. He instinctively raised one hand to cover his eyes, leaving the tower to swing free and nearly dislodge Brianna from her perch. A series of booms echoed through the ceiling as several men tumbled across the floor above, then the titan lowered his hand to catch his slipping burden.
Brianna raked her flame over Lanaxis’s jaw and up toward his eyes. The fire caused no actual harm to his flesh, but merely burned away his purple murk to expose the pale, aged skin beneath. The titan lowered his eyelids and tried to twist away from the fiery blade’s advance, but he could not turn far enough to keep the queen from combing the crimson shaft across the corner of his eye. The lid turned instantly white and baggy.
The clatter of firing crossbows echoed down the chimney, then a trio of dark shafts streaked toward Lanaxis’s face. One bolt caught him in the purple murk beneath his jaw and passed harmlessly through his body. The second lodged itself in his wrinkled cheek, causing no greater injury than a splinter would cause a man. The final bolt struck home, catching the corner of the titan’s eyelid and sinking clear to the butt.
Amazingly enough, Lanaxis did not roar or bellow or thunder his pain. He let out a long, exasperated sigh, which blustered over the tower like a gusting blizzard. Then he carefully stooped over to let his burden slide gently to the ground.
Brianna slipped out of her arrow loop. She heard her soldiers’ boots reverberating across the floor above. The clack of two firing crossbows echoed down the chimney, followed by Avner’s command, “Reloadreloadrelo- jump!”
In the next instant, a deafening clatter sounded from the floor above. The entire tower shook. Fragments of stone fell past the arrow loop, and Brianna knew the titan was demolishing the third story. A man wailed in agony, and a second and a third, their voices fading as their bodies plummeted groundward. Another crash and more screams followed, then something fell into the chimney, muffling the terrible sounds.
The tower stopped shaking.
Kaedlaw fell silent and motionless, but Brianna could feel his breath, damp and cold, beneath her cloak. She thrust her hand into her satchel and fumbled through spell components, hoping to come across one that would spark a workable escape plan.
An enormous fingernail appeared in an arrow loop, then pulled away a section of wall larger than a door. Lanaxis’s eyes appeared in the opening, one lid still pinned shut by the crossbow bolt. The milky pupil of the other slowly searched the room. In desperation, Brianna pulled a glass rod from her satchel and pointed it at her captor. The motion caught the titan’s attention, and his gaze locked on her.
“You have already made me dispose of my nephew’s servants.” Lanaxis’s rumbling voice seemed to reverberate from the walls themselves. “Do not force me to destroy his mother as well.”
Brianna lowered her hands. She had guessed correctly about the titan’s defenses-once a bright light burned away his murky armor, he could be injured by normal weapons-but she knew better than to think she could utter her incantation faster than he could pull his head away.
“Waiting would be a wise decision. A dead mother will be of little use to my nephew.” Lanaxis pulled his eyes away from the window, then held an enormous hand beneath it. “Now toss out your bag. If you test me again, I fear the gods shall be disappointed in my humility.”
Brianna did as Lanaxis ordered. Her satchel fell into a palm crease and disappeared from sight, then the titan pulled his hand away from the chamber.
“What do want with my son?” she demanded. “Why do you keep calling him your nephew?”
“That should be obvious,” Lanaxis replied. “He was fathered by my brother-the ettin.”
“You’re wrong!” Brianna wrapped her arms around her baby. “Kaedlaw isn’t your spy’s child. Kaedlaw looks like Tavis.”
“The one you call Kaedlaw looks like Tavis.” The titan’s milky eye appeared before the opening. “It’s the other child I want-the child whose face you refuse to see.”
Brianna’s heart suddenly felt as heavy as lead. “A child can’t have two faces!”
“We see what we expect to see,” Lanaxis said. “You see your husband’s child. I see my brother’s. They are both there.”
Brianna felt a snake of ice slithering through her intestines. The titan’s explanation accounted for too much: the secret Avner had refused to tell her, why her own husband and the firbolgs kept insisting that the child was ugly, and-most importantly-the strange visage she herself had glimpsed in the silver mines.
Brianna stepped forward and pulled Kaedlaw from the sling on her belly, but the thing she lifted into the light could not have been her son. He had a fat, round head with bloated pink cheeks and a short pug nose. Beneath his jaw hung two rolls of double chin, and in his brown eyes there sparkled an intelligence as malicious as it was precocious.
When the child twisted his blubbery red lips into an impish smile and let out a low, brutal cackle, Brianna’s hands turned to liquid.
She did not mean to drop him.
11
