It was particularly interesting that she hadn’t sent Smooth Guy right to the academy, but dropped him off a day’s ride north. Why had she not had her dragons deliver him right to the door? Had she meant to hide the fact that she could commission such assistance? One might wonder if the truth was that she had meant to slip the man through a closing net, which could only be the case if she knew of the assassins’ presence.

Havec had opened his mouth to probe at this stunning revelation when the furor rose. In the distance, there came a rumbling that began as a sound but almost immediately swelled into an all-encompassing thunder that shook the ground beneath their feet and made the building groan. An almighty bellow, too low to be a human voice, tore the air. They met one another’s eyes, then both of them were running for the door.

***

Qanath had taken a walk about town after lunch to clear her head. She needed to escape from Amril: the man tied her stomach in knots and made the syncopated rhythm of her heart drop beats. He had done so much with his life, and it was fascinating to hear him talk. He had a graduate degree from the Collure and the familiar at his shoulder to prove it; he’d spent five years in Ay, on the most restive border in the Empire, working alongside its soldiers. Sorcery was rarely used in battle for a number of reasons, but this wasn’t to say it had no place in warfare. The ranks of the army’s sappers contained as many sorcerers as masons and engineers.

If it was becoming increasingly clear to Qanath how she felt about the man, how she ought to feel remained a matter of debate. She could see why he would be guarded, since he still barely knew them. She could see why he would react with instinctive hostility to Havec, too: Havec could scarcely turn around without inspiring admiration and being handed privileges. Amril had had to scratch and claw every step along the way for years to get where he was, and in the final estimation, it wasn’t all that far from where he had begun.

Whether he was to be distrusted for his understandable bitterness was the real question, and Qanath couldn’t see how to answer it without taking the plunge and giving him her trust. Knowing he was resentful gave them little insight into what he would do because of it. Havec had urged her to take note of each piece of evidence, and so far, nothing she knew suggested he wouldn’t readily sell her out given the right recompense.

But Havec was also the person who told her a week ago that letting herself become too much like her mother was just another way of letting the woman win. Her mother had written the man a letter of recommendation that acknowledged him in one breath and disavowed him with the next. Maybe it was wiser to be cautious, keep even your allies at arm’s-length, but she couldn’t shake the niggling worry that Havec had been right: maybe you lost a few hands when you let yourself make decisions with your heart. But when you ignored it, you could get suckered into playing a completely different game.

These circular arguments were as close as she had gotten to making a choice. It had been so much easier to follow Havec, letting him make all the decisions and rolling her eyes when she thought them wrong. This time around, he had refused, not only to tell her what to do, but to judge her decisions. At some point, it would fall to her to choose.

When the rumbling filled the afternoon, so intense and all-encompassing that it was like a solid mass of sound clogging the air, she took off for the inn. She had to slow down, as the ground trembled underneath her feet. The shout that followed was so loud she clapped her hands over her ears, ducking instinctively. As she hit the square, Havec and Amril spilled out the inn’s door. Arandgwail was in the form of a chocolate-pelted mustelid, standing upright on his master’s shoulder with his forepaws tangled in the man’s hair. Fearful, baffled people were pouring out of buildings all around the square.

It was Havec who pointed east. None of them could think what they were looking at: there were massive shadows half-glimpsed through the softly-falling snow, miles distant, storm clouds stirring around them like soup around a spoon. “Giants,” he said. “Two of them.”

Then he gasped, and although the sound was swallowed by the distant cacophony, all of them had one eye on him and saw the horror hit him: he swayed, his pale skin gone white. One of the soldiers came up behind him, placing a hand on either shoulder as if to steady him, and he didn’t shake the contact off. His eyes went to the lieutenant, who had joined them, along with his entire garrison, the inn’s staff, and what looked to be every proprietor who had a shop fronting the square.

He had to raise his voice to make himself heard. “Is there another town? Over those hills?” He pointed toward the huge, shambling silhouettes still shifting behind the snow. “There was a crossroads south of here and one of the roads led northeast.”

The lieutenant blinked at him several times, struggling to assimilate the question. “Yeah. Yeah, Petron. There’s a,” he held his hands out about six inches apart, “a narrow slip of land between the mountains and the sea, it’s where the bigger garrison is.”

“What is a giant, though?” Qanath asked him. “Other than something big.”

“They’re the shepherds of glaciers, who tend to the mountains and make gardens of ice.” A pause, then he added, soft enough they almost couldn’t hear him over the din, “They’re bringing the mountain down on that town, can you not see them swinging their clubs?”

For a moment, that turn of phrase felt poetic and Qanath envisioned spritely creatures blowing into pipes as snow danced obediently to their whims. Then another tremendous rumble staggered her and she realized what ‘bringing the mountain down’ actually meant. She squinted into the eastern horizon again, eyes narrowed against the sting of snowflakes. Now she knew what to look for, she could make out two vaguely humanoid shapes, as vast as any building she had ever seen, smashing the ground beneath their feet.

For a further few minutes, all of them stood united in their horror, rendered immobile by their shock. Then, with a suddenness that was disorienting, the worst of the noise died off. They could hear nothing but the softer thunder of a few aftershocks as the avalanches the giants had created slid to a stop. The giants themselves were already moving north, so tall their heads were hidden in the clouds.

Into the stunned silence left in their wake, someone breathed one terrible question: “Why?”

No one reacted for an instant, then the lieutenant turned to Havec wearing a troubled frown. “You know of these creatures, Avat. Do you have any idea why they would venture down from the high places to attack those as never troubled them?”

“They wouldn’t,” Havec whispered, and even his lips were unnaturally pale. “Not unless someone told them to.”

The lieutenant definitely understood what he was hinting at. “I want to send a relief force to Petron, see if there’s anything we can do to help. If I strip our garrison…?”

Slowly, Havec murmured, “I do not think this is the preface to an attack. My people may not like yours, but they know next to nothing about you and what they do know makes them afraid. Why do you think they sent giants in their place?”

“You think they’re afraid to provoke us? They’ve been provoking us this last five years.”

Havec looked at him, and fleetingly Qanath saw him surface from beneath the shock. “Well, if there is an attack here, I’ll tell them I’m King Ammon’s long-lost son. It should create enough confusion to keep them at bay for a while.”

It took the man only a heartbeat to come to a decision, then he was turning away. His soldiers scattered in response to his shouted commands, and in a matter of seconds, the tense tableau in the town square had transmuted into purposeful action. The townsfolk who had joined the vigil returned to their shops to get out of the way, the soldiers all headed back to the barracks, or to the stables and storerooms beyond the inn to the west.

Qanath couldn’t help but notice one man remained with them, though, and now she saw it was the soldier-priest. “Have you eaten?” he asked Havec, adding, “You look ill.”

Havec allowed himself to be steered toward the inn, but his eyes sought Qanath. When they found her, he said, “We need to talk.”

Once More Unto the Breach

The five of them secluded themselves in a private parlor Qanath hadn’t known the inn possessed. They had been herded there along with the innkeeper by the soldier-priest, who had become a member of their party by putting himself in charge while the rest of them remained dithery with shock. It became clear almost immediately that he was there for Havec, and Qanath didn’t think he was hanging around her friend like a second shadow in either of his professional capacities. His eyes rarely left the man slumped in an armchair looking dazed, and she never once saw them turn green. It was the person looking out of his face, not the goddess.

Havec didn’t stir until each of them had been served a fortifying tot of brandy and the innkeeper had closed the door on his heels. Then he turned to her, the dreaminess falling away. “We need to go back.”

“Where?”

“Moritia.”

“What? Why?”

“That guy who’s in charge—”

“Lieutenant Pannus,” the priest supplied.

“He said my people have been ‘provoking’ yours along the border. At that inn further south, Pointy Finger picked a fight with me for having blue eyes. But you remember Erl.”

“I thought you told me he was upset about you having a Tabbi ‘witch’ at your side,” she pointed out.

Havec let out a sigh as if this had annoyed him. “So? His real grievance was my death. Which isn’t just a misconception, it’s a deliberate lie.”

“She would have wanted to cover up her crime…”

“I don’t think that’s true.” He sat up and set his drink aside untasted. “Or at least I don’t think it’s that simple. I think she’s goading your people to come across the border in numbers and in force.”

All of them were staring at him save Arandgwail, who had turned into a kitten in order to pounce on the tassels of the rug. “That… seems like a risky move,” Amril said finally, and she was surprised by his carefully inflectionless tone. She would have expected him to say it with scorn.

“She left my uncle in charge in Callon, the largest settlement, and it’s less than twenty miles from the border, in a straight line up the coast. It’s the first place your armies will go when they come raging across the border to retaliate. She’s spent all the time since I disappeared stirring up patriotic anger in my people, who responded by making themselves enough of a nuisance your people were aware of it. Even if I hadn’t been here to explain, someone would have guessed who was to blame.”

“You think she’s luring them into a trap,” Qanath breathed.

The priest laid a hand on his arm, and Havec didn’t jerk the limb away. “You think she intends to lose.”

Havec twisted in his seat to face the man. “I’m certain of it: she’s halfway across the kingdom in the middle of nowhere in the most isolated house we have with a handful of picked men and her heir.”

“To what end?” Amril asked doubtfully.

Her friend shook his head even as he thrust himself to his feet. “I don’t know, but I’m not letting it go on. Your country is a thousand times better than mine, but we still have a right to be.”

He made for the door, and the rest of them rose with varying degrees of uncertainty. Qanath knew him best and she was the one who said, “What exactly do you propose?”

“I let it go when she threw me away,” he told them as they chased in a pack at his heels down the hall. “But she just destroyed a town to instigate a war. I’m going to tie her up and throw her over the back of a horse and carry her back to someone who can make her account for her crimes.”

At the foot of the stair, he began to climb, but the soldier-priest stopped. “I’m going to inform them of this,” he called, raising his voice a little. “They will insist on sending a guard to protect you on foreign soil.”