Avner took his waterskin from beneath his robe and tossed it up, then gathered the cloaks and made his way across the rocking tower. By the time he clambered up onto the alcove, the queen had taken the flaming spear amulet from her neck and dipped it into his waterskin. The liquid inside was bubbling and steaming from the heat of Hiatea’s blessing. Kaedlaw’s eyes were closed, and his skin was as blue as a tourmaline. Only the sporadic rise and fall of his chest indicated he was still alive.
“Open a c-cut on his arm.” Brianna motioned Avner to lay the cloaks aside.
The young scout hesitated to obey. He had seen the queen heal the injured often enough to know what she was doing. When she poured the blessed water on the cut, it would cleanse the infant’s blood of wicked thoughts and emotions. If the child was truly evil, the process would cause an endless black froth to erupt from the wound.
“What are you w-waiting for, Avner?” Brianna demanded. “Are you afraid of Hiatea’s j-judgment?”
“Only for myself, Majesty.” Avner pulled his antler-hilted skinning knife and drew the blade across the infant’s forearm.
A thin line of blood welled up beneath the steel, and Brianna poured the bubbling water onto her son’s arm. The blue flesh turned rosy pink. Kaedlaw’s eyes opened wide, and he let out a pained growl that rumbled through the chamber like a bear’s roar. A single bubble rose in the center of the cut.
It was white as snow.
“Hiatea, forgive me!” The queen snatched the child into her arms. “He’s pure! He’s as innocent as any newborn!”
Brianna lowered her collar over her shoulder, then held her son to her breast. The feel of his icy flesh filled her with a guilty burden heavy enough to crush the titan’s heart. Kaedlaw reluctantly began to nurse, and Avner covered them both with the cloaks he had brought up.
“Avner, I’m grateful,” Brianna said. The first silver rays of dawn were beginning to stream into the tower. “Your impertinence prevented me from committing a grievous sin against Hiatea-and it spared me more anguish than I could bear.”
“Then he’s going to be all right?”
“Thanks to you.” Kaedlaw was already suckling eagerly at her warm milk. “And I would ask you to make a new oath to me-one you won’t break this time.”
“I didn’t break the last one!” Avner objected. “At least not much.”
“I doubt Tavis would agree,” Brianna replied. “But he wasn’t here, and you were right to stop me. Now I ask you to pledge that you’ll always protect Kaedlaw-against anyone who would harm him.”
“Brianna, I’ve already made that vow.”
“I mean the lord high scout in particular,” Brianna clarified. “If we can’t convince Tavis to ignore Galgadayle’s prophecy, can you kill the man who raised you?”
Avner bit his lip and looked away. “If it comes to a fight, I doubt Tavis will be the one who dies-but I’ll give him a good battle. I can promise that much.”
“Thank you. I’ll need you at my side,” Brianna said. “I hope I’m not making traitors of us both. If Kaedlaw grows up to lead the giants, we’re committing a terrible crime against our kingdom.”
Avner shrugged. “Crime is a relative thing. Besides, the time hasn’t come to give up. My guess is that Hiatea wants us to escape, especially when you consider the kind of uncle Lanaxis would make.”
Brianna grimaced at the thought, then glanced at the pale rays streaming through the shattered arrow loop.
“I think Lanaxis will stop when it gets light, but he’ll be ready for an escape,” she said. “We can’t expect to succeed.”
“You’re right, we can’t escape.” Avner smiled. “But he might accidentally leave us behind-if he doesn’t realize we’ve slipped away.”
“And how are we going to do that?” Brianna demanded. “After your escape attempt at Wynn Castle, Lanaxis must know about the sally port.”
Avner nodded. “He saw me climbing back into it.”
“There aren’t any other secret doors in this tower.”
“But there might be a thief’s gate,” said Avner.
“A thief’s gate?”
“On the first floor, in the bottom of the chimney,” the youth explained. “The water collects down there and rots the mortar. I used to sneak into buildings all over Stagwick by scraping the mortar out and pulling a big stone loose.”
Brianna scowled at this idea. “I’m hardly small enough to climb down through the chimney.”
“Sure you are. In a tower like this, the chimney is huge-well, big enough anyway,” he explained. “It’s squeezing through the damper throat that can be tight-but Lanaxis has already solved that problem for us. The throat is smashed to pieces. You can practically walk into the flue.”
Brianna eyed the battered fireplace on the high side of the room. The lintel was four feet above the hearth.
“I think I’ll have to crawl,” she said. “What can I do to help you?”
“Do you have any way to dissolve mortar?”
Brianna shook her head. “Not without my spell satchel,” she said. “And even then, not quietly.”
Avner grimaced. “Then I’ll have to scrape it out.” He fingered the antler hilt of his skinning knife. “I’m glad Tavis won’t be here to see how I treat his gifts.”
“I’m sure he would understand.” Brianna motioned toward the fireplace. “You’d better get busy. After the titan stops, I’ll feign an escape. It won’t work, but Lanaxis will get suspicious if I don’t try.”
“Good-but be careful.”
Avner scrambled up the floor and climbed into the fireplace. He hoisted himself past the smoke shelf, then entered the flue and started his descent to the first floor. Once he had disappeared, Brianna tore a woolen cloak into strips and began to braid it into a rope. Kaedlaw was suckling hungrily now, and she could not help wincing at his enthusiasm. The blue tint had vanished from his skin, which now felt warm and pleasant against hers, but his head remained plump and ugly. The queen could not help wishing that it was Kaedlaw’s other face she saw.
Brianna was still making her rope when Lanaxis stopped and kicked his heel into the frozen ground. The strike sent such a jolt through the floor that the queen’s teeth clacked together. A few moments later, the shocks ceased and her stomach suddenly rose into her throat. A weary groan reverberated from the tower foundations, then the building tipped toward the fireplace and steadied itself.
Brianna stuffed her half-finished rope beneath her cloak and went across the room to the smashed arrow loop. The air outside was so crisp it sparkled and so cold it stung like a wyvern’s breath. At the base of the tower lay a short expanse of virgin snow, gleaming blue in the pale morning light. At the edge of the field rose an enormous drift, the stubs of three battered chimneys poking above the wind-crusted surface. Dozens of smaller mounds lay beyond the largest hillock, some with smaller chimneys or splintered beams showing above the snow. Beyond the buried village rose the black wall of a dense conifer forest, where the barbed tips of spearhead spruce and bloody tamarack scraped at the cloudless belly of a violet sky. In the center of the wood, the sun was poking its yellow crown above the horizon, kindling embers of golden fire in a small crescent of dark boughs.
Brianna placed their location somewhere near Hartsvale’s northern border, for the forest was typical of the groves in the Cold Marches. The village itself was certainly one of the many manors that had fallen earlier this year when a tribe of frost giants had slipped across the frontier and gone on a month-long rampage.
A long boom, deeper and louder than any sound Brianna had ever heard, rose from the other side of the tower. Stones began to rattle in the walls. The snow lifted off the field outside, whirling around the building in a whistling white funnel. Kaedlaw howled in protest, but the queen could not hear him. She merely felt his body quivering with the effort.
Brianna rushed across the chamber and peered through an arrow loop, where she found her view blocked by Lanaxis’s gloom-shrouded form. As the sun rose behind the tower, a tide of yellow light slowly crept down his robe. The purple murk rose from the cloth like steam, exposing the dingy, tattered linen that lay beneath. Though she could not see past the loop’s upper sill to examine the titan’s face, one hand dangled within her view. The skin was slack and wrinkled, and covered with scaly liver spots the size of platters.
Lanaxis fell to his knees beside the queen’s tower, and the floor jumped so hard that Brianna nearly fell. She
