Jeremias’s round face turned toward them, and what Simon could see of his friend’s features looked as bloodless as a split apple. Simon dragged Rinan in the chamberlain’s direction, but before he could cross the distance a group of strange, small riders leaped past him, almost knocking him sprawling, then went bounding up the hill—riders not on horses, but on bounding, long-legged sheep.
Something nudged the back of his neck. Simon spun, almost letting go of the wounded harper. A nightmarish, grinning beast face leered at him out of the darkness. The king had a moment of terror before he recognized the white wolf.
“Friend Simon!” Binabik bent down from his perch atop Vaqana. “Daughter of the Mountains, I am so happy you are still being alive! I feared for you!”
“This young man has been shot with a Norn arrow.”
Binabik slid down the wolf’s back and dropped to his knees beside Rinan. The harper’s face was so pale and slack that Simon was certain he was beyond hope, but Binabik pressed his head to the youth’s chest, then probed with his fingers at the wound around the arrow’s shaft.
“He has breath still,” the troll said, but before he could say more a ram came leaping back down the hillside and skidded to a stop beside him. Binabik’s daughter Qina had her hood pulled low over her face and a spear in her hand.
“Ninit-e, Afa!” she cried.
“A moment, daughter.” Binabik turned to Simon. “She is fearing for her mother and Little Snenneq, who are already up the hill and at helping your men.” The troll said something brisk and guttural to Qina in their own tongue. She scowled horribly, but turned her ram away from the hill and rode swiftly through the mêlée of soldiers pulling back from the slope. “She is now going to find you help. She is not happy with this. Like her mother she is fierce as windblown ice. Now, I go to help my wife and Little Snenneq. Be safe, friend Simon! Wait for Qina!”
He and Vaqana bounded away; within a matter of two or three heartbeats the troll and his mount had become only a fast moving shadow in the undergrowth.
The torches that still burned on the hillside had re-formed into a shaky noose of light that was slowly moving toward the summit. It had only reached the halfway point, yet there seemed less than half as many torches now. Simon wondered how many of his men had already fallen, and how strong the enemy truly was. He and Kenrick and the others had been too careless, and he cursed himself for it. What if they had bearded an entire Norn army?
Still, why would they be here if not to attack us? he told himself. Better we found them before we were surprised.
“Simon? Majesty? Are you still there?”
“Jeremias? Yes, I’m still here, with the harper. Come and help me.”
“I’m trying—my cloak is caught under the wheel of this wagon.” Jeremias’s voice was shrill, as if he had been plunged straight back into the horrors of his youth. Simon had suffered terribly in the Storm King’s War, but so had Jeremias, without the same measure of glory that had come for his friend.
Something had slowed the Erkynguards’ stumbling retreat from the center of the line; Simon heard shouting and cursing as voices from the darkness behind him tried to drive the soldiers back into place. But just as he was about to call to Jeremias again, another chorus of ragged cries rose from the hillside above, then a single, dreadful shriek split the thickening night. It was nothing so terribly ordinary as a soldier’s death cry, a thing made of pain and finality, it was the helpless screeching of a man seeing something in waking life that had previously been locked in the vaults of nightmare.
The scream lifted, grew ragged, and then was swallowed by a roar so loud and thunderously deep it might have come from the mountain itself; a moment later the hillside erupted in terrified cries accompanied by the drum-cracks of breaking trees. Even in a dark night lit only by torches, Simon could see a broad ripple moving down the hill as great trees fell, singly and in clumps, and as the ripple sped downward as a wave of screams raced before it. Simon could only imagine that somehow the entire crest of the hill had broken loose and was rolling or sliding down the tree-covered slope, sweeping all before it. He bent to pick up the wounded harper, hoping to drag him at least a little farther away from danger, then remembered his friend Jeremias, only a short distance away and just as helpless.
Simon didn’t see the shadow fly down from the hillside until it struck the ground before him. It was only luck that it landed well short of where he cradled the unmoving Rinan, because whatever it was seemed as big as a man. The great projectile, flung out of the darkness toward him like a sling stone, skidded with an odd, flailing motion until it stopped just before him. Simon saw a dim gleam of chain armor and a white hand thrust out at an illogical angle. It was man-sized because it had been a man.
The dead Erkynguardsman had been hit so hard that he had nearly broken in half; the body was folded on itself so that soldier’s legs were above the place where his head had once been—a head that was now only a bloody knob of raw skin, bone, and broken teeth. At the sight of it, for a long moment, Simon could pull no air into his lungs.
The sound of snapping trees grew even louder, and with it rose that deep, rumbling roar again: Simon felt it shaking his legs and arms and teeth, and thought it would turn his insides to jelly. This was not the first time he had heard such a sound so close by, and it terrified him.
Most of the torches were now gone from the hill above, the remaining few wildly scattered and moving erratically. Simon had just managed to lift the wounded youth off the muddy ground when something huge came tearing through the trees only a hundred cubits away from him, smashing its way through full-grown ashes and even oaks like a madman kicking through a pile of kindling.
Rinan’s unmoving form dropped from Simon’s suddenly nerveless fingers as the vast, manlike shape broke out from the edge of the forest, trunks splintering and leaping before it as if shot from bombards. For a moment the world seemed to spin, and he was plunged back into that terrible moment in the past, lost in the hills behind Naglimund, with Binabik dying and Simon and Miriamele caught between a desperate, wounded giant and its escape. It was as though time had turned and devoured its own tail.
Blessed Aedon, take care of Miri and be with me now, was all he had time to think.
The giant crashing down the slope toward him was the biggest one Simon had ever seen, a vast gray shadow that seemed taller than a house, its fanged jaws open and bellowing. It held an uprooted tree in one hand as a club, and when it saw Simon standing over the harper’s body it turned and lurched toward him. Its legs were stumpy and thick, but each was nearly as long as Simon was tall, and the rest of the creature towered above it, the muscles of its huge chest and arms knotting beneath pale fur as it lifted the trunk to smash Simon like a fly.
Then another shape came stumbling into the open space between Simon and the giant, an Erkynlandish soldier so dazed and bloody he did not even see the monster, but stopped, swaying, to peer at Simon as though he recognized him. Simon did not even have a chance to shout a warning before the giant swung the great tree, obliterating the upper half of the soldier in a wet burst of blood and flesh.
Simon placed himself between the monster and the wounded harper and lifted his sword. The blade trembled like a mariner’s compass too close to a lodestone, but that did not matter: Simon knew that no sword was going to stop such a thing, or even slow it. The giant thundered toward him, each flat-footed step making the ground shake so that Simon could barely stand. The sounds of terrified men, the many small fires blossoming on the wooded hillside, even the great, bone-shaking roars of the thing itself all faded away until he could hear nothing and see only the great shadow bearing down on him.
Like the dragon. His thoughts were swirls of dust, blown feathers. Like the dragon all over again. Again and again fighting, and never to rest . . . !
He lifted his sword. Better to die fighting, that was all—he and his blade would make no other difference. Everything that was him, that was Simon, would fly into bits before he could even pink the creature.
The great trunk swung toward him, a storm cloud, a whistling darkness. Simon was thrown sideways, and instead of a blow that would knock his bones to powder, felt only the blast of great wind. He fell down, down.
Is this what it feels like to die? Am I dead?