6
Night had fallen; though the boreal lights bathed the canyon’s ice-draped rim in a rainbow curtain of dancing reflections, their ghostly rays could not pierce the abyssal gloom deeper in the gorge. The landslide at the bottom was cloaked in a mantle of dark, swarthy purple, and Tavis could hardly see the rocks beneath his feet. He had to climb by feel, testing each step carefully before trusting his weight to the slick stones, and even then he often braced himself on his bow to keep from falling.
Everything hurt. His shoulder ached so much he could hardly move it; each breath filled his chest with a swell of dull pain. His frozen feet burned with the dubious blessing of renewed circulation. The constant throbbing in his head felt no worse than having a battle drum pressed to his ear, and he could not string two thoughts together without a conscious act of will. In his belly, he felt the warmth of Simon’s healing elixir working its magic-but that was little comfort now. Tavis found his fist inside his cloak, grasping his second healing potion. He forced himself to withdraw his hand empty. It would be foolish to use the second vial before the first had finished its work.
As Tavis climbed the landslide, he remained alert for clues as to where his foes had taken Brianna. The fallen fire giants above were mere silhouettes, barely distinguishable from the huge boulders heaped along the crest of the slide. Beside some of the bodies flickered the orange glow of guttering fire swords, suggesting that the battle had ended less than an hour ago. The high scout saw no human corpses at all.
Tavis’s heart began to hammer. If the fire giants had left their dead in the canyon, perhaps Brianna had escaped after all.
About halfway to the crest, Tavis heard rocks clattering nearby, then an anguished cry too deep and resonant to be human. He dropped into a crouch, then crept toward the sound. A short distance ahead, a bushy-maned profile rose above a big rock. Though the head was little larger than the high scout’s, it had the wild mane of hair and beard typical of firbolgs. The figure groaned again, then pushed an arm over the boulder and clutched at the cold stone. It turned a pair of milky white eyes toward Tavis.
“Over… here.” Strained as it was, the deep voice sounded chillingly familiar. “Help me!”
Tavis neither showed himself, nor drew his weapon. “Galgadayle?”
The seer looked toward Tavis’s voice, then groaned in disappointment. “You?” He slipped lower behind his boulder. “Tavis… Burdun?”
“What are you doing here?”
“They didn’t… find… after battle,” the seer croaked. “Couldn’t yell… too much… pain.”
Suddenly, Tavis understood why the fire giants had left their dead behind. They had lost the battle. “The Meadowhome Clan is here?” he asked. “You killed the fire giants?”
“We… had to come,” the seer replied. “Must protect the tribe. The law… demands it.”
Galgadayle lost his grip on the boulder and slipped out of sight. Tavis crept up the slide, confident he was not being lured into a trap. The pain in the seer’s voice had been genuine, but more importantly, firbolgs were incapable of such treachery. They might wait in ambush or sneak up on a foe, but the same instinct that made it impossible for them to lie also prevented them from enticing an enemy to his death.
Tavis slipped around the boulder to find Galgadayle sitting in a hollow between several stones. The air was heavy with the reek of urine and fresh blood. The seer held one arm twisted behind him, pressing his hand against the small of his back. He was only about two-thirds as large as when he had visited Castle Hartwick.
The size change did not surprise Tavis as much as it might have. His mentor, Runolf Saemon, had once known an entire tribe of firbolgs to grow two feet in a single day. For a time, Tavis had pleaded with every firbolg he met to show him the trick, but they had all refused. The scout had finally given up, concluding that their law forbade sharing the secret with an outcast.
Tavis knelt at Galgadayle’s side and reached out to move the seer’s hand. “You’re smaller than I remember.”
“I’ve lost blood.” Galgadayle pushed Tavis’s arm away. “Finish me quickly… nothing to gain with torture.”
Tavis half-smiled at the attempt to change the subject. The seer was more afraid of breaking the law than of dying.
“I won’t torture you-or kill you.” The high scout did not blame Galgadayle for trying to capture Brianna. The seer was acting on his conscience. As wrong as he might be, that did not make him evil, and Tavis was not in the habit of killing people for their mistakes. “I’d rather help you, if you’ll allow me.”
Galgadayle glared at him with one white eye. “I have brought harm to your… family,” he said. “Why show me mercy?”
“Because you’re no longer a threat,” Tavis replied. “Killing you would make me a murderer.”
“Perhaps,” Galgadayle groaned. “But the law does not require… nowhere is it decreed you must help an enemy.”
Tavis shrugged. “I have learned a different kind of law with the humans,” he said. “It comes more from inside than out, and it can be as nebulous and shifting as a cloud, but I must obey it nonetheless.”
Galgadayle considered this, then took his hand away, revealing a large, mangle-edged hole in his cloak. Though it was too dark to see more, Tavis smelled fresh blood. It was heavy with the scent of urine, a sure sign the seer would die without help.
“You’ll have to lie down so I can reach the wound.” Tavis gently guided Galgadayle onto his stomach.
“This changes nothing.” Despite Galgadayle’s words, there was a note of gratitude in his strained voice. “When the child is born… Raeyadfourne must still-aarghh!”
Tavis began to probe the wound, bringing Galgadayle’s sentence to a harsh end.
“What happened to my wife?” Tavis continued to work. His fingers came across the stub of sword blade that had been broken off just below Galgadayle’s kidney. “Who has her?”
The seer shook his head. “That I will… not tell you,” he groaned. “Leave me, if you wish. I’ll probably die anyway.”
“No, you won’t,” Tavis said. “I have a healing elixir.”
Galgadayle craned his neck to glance up at Tavis, his eyes flashing with a brief hope that quickly vanished behind dark clouds of despair. The seer gave Tavis a wry smile, then shook his head. “Keep your potion,” he said. “The cost is too dear.”
“I’m not trying to buy your knowledge.” Tavis had watched Brianna deal with her earls often enough to know there were more effective ways than bribery to learn a person’s secrets. “The potion is yours, but it won’t do any good unless I pull that broken blade out of your back. To do that I’ll need light”
“All-all I have is a sparking steel.” Galgadayle sounded forlorn. During the time it took to start a fire and make a torch, the seer could well bleed to death.
“I have a magical light,” Tavis said. “But I don’t want to attract fire giants.”
Galgadayle sighed in relief, and when he spoke, he sounded like a dead man to whom the gods had given a second life. “You won’t,” he said. “There’s no need to worry about that.”
“How do you know?” Now that the seer’s thoughts were on saving his own life, Tavis could try to draw out the information he needed. “If a straggler attacks while I’m pulling out the steel, there won’t be much I can do.”
“There… aren’t any… stragglers.” Galgadayle sounded as though the frustration of trying to reassure Tavis would kill him long before he bled to death. “Our warriors… killed them… all of them.”