Nearby, the king saw another familiar knight. The Earl of Fairheight, wielding his huge, two-handed sword with deadly precision, stood between two large oaks, anchoring a good portion of the line. The sister knight of Synnoria fought at his side, making certain two razors of sharp steel met any firbolg or troll foolish enough to try to press through.
Finellen moved back and forth along the line of battle, at times lunging forward to help out one of her hard-pressed countrymen, or else carrying flaming brands of dry timber to stack on the temporarily slain corpses of the trolls.
"Need some fire here?" grunted the stalwart dwarfwoman as Tristan carved a deep wound into the leg of a troll, crippling the beast. The monster dropped like a felled tree, scuttling crablike away from the fight.
Gasping for breath, the king shook his head. Already half a dozen troll corpses lay motionless around him, and in the lull, Tristan grinned at Finellen's look of astonishment.
"Good sword," was all she said as the High King raised the weapon to face another push, this time three trolls rushing him together.
Fortunately the tangle of trees kept two of them from coming fully to bear, and the third one danced quickly backward to avoid a thrust from Trollcleaver. As one of the others darted in, Tristan's blade chopped into the beast's arm and Finellen's axe carved a deep wound into its thigh. The monster fell, and Tristan stabbed it once in the skull, driving the tip of his blade deep into the fetid brain; the creature wouldn't menace them further. Ranthal, meanwhile, held the third troll safely at bay.
"Nice work," grunted the dwarfwoman as the ebb and flow of battle momentarily gave the pair a berth of space.
But then came a deeper sound, a growing roar of hoarse triumph from firbolg throats. At the same time, dwarven voices hollered in alarm. The scene of the commotion was perhaps twenty or thirty paces to their right, though the humans could see nothing in that direction because of the screening forest.
Finellen, however, didn't need to see in order understand the significance of the alarm.
"That's bad news," she said, starting toward the noise at a jog. "It means that the giants have breached the line!"
The sounds of fighting came to Brandon and Koll through the trees, and their ragged force of northmen and Ffolk broke into a jog, quickly emerging from the forest into a field of trampled grain. Across the broad expanse, they saw the source of the noise-a seething chaos of bloody melee, where the army of the trolls and firbolgs attacked some foe concealed in the woods across the field. The backs of the humanoids faced Brandon and Koll's men, and that was all the incentive that the two veteran warriors required.
"It's them-the trolls, I mean!" barked Knaff the Elder, pacing at his prince's side. "But who are they fighting?"
"Whoever it is, they can use our help!" Koll barked.
"Charge!" the two captains bellowed in unison, and the men who had been driven from the battlefield of Codscove loped steadily into the field. Voices rose in lusty courage, and many an axe and sword blade gleamed in the midday sun as its wielder brandished his weapon overhead.
To an onlooker who purported neutrality, their onslaught seemed like madness. Though they couldn't know what force they aided, their own numbers equaled but a fraction of the foe's. Yet their defeat on the field at Codscove had branded all of these men with a burning desire for vengeance.
As the humans sprinted and shouted and jeered, dozens of trolls broke from the mass of the attackers, drawn by the sounds of the fresh attack. Many firbolgs, too, hoisted their clubs toward the new threat, lumbering at the heels of their green-skinned comrades.
Loping back into the field with their deceptively speedy gait, the trolls met the men of Brandon and Koll's force with savage tooth and rending claw. The human charge stopped immediately as a dozen men were slain in the first shock. In another moment, the courageous warriors found themselves fighting for their lives against an overwhelming press of savage, hulking humanoids.
Brandon chopped hard into the forearm of a troll, sending the creature reeling backward, but another stepped in to take its place even as the wound began to mend. At the same time, a man beside the prince screamed as a pair of trolls ripped his torso in two.
Furiously the Prince of Gnarhelm slashed one troll in the side, but the creature whirled with deceptive speed, knocking Brandon flat onto his back. He lay immobilized, gasping for breath and trying unsuccessfully to move. The monster picked up a longsword, dropped by another slain northman, and thrust it down, straight toward the prince's unprotected chest.
A wiry body blocked out the sun, and Brandon blinked, knowing that he stared death in the face. The troll stabbed, and the muscular shape-a human shape-took the piercing blow intended for the Prince of Gnarhelm. Brandon's strength returned in a wave of energy, and he sprang upward, hacking the troll's chest open with his great axe. He chopped again and the monster fell.
Only then did Brandon turn to see the man who'd given his life for him. Knaff the Elder lay upon the ground, blood emerging like a fountain from the puncture wound in the chest.
"No!" gasped the prince, dropping to his knee beside his trusted helmsman and mentor. Desperately, fruitlessly, he tried to stem the flow of blood.
With gentle pressure, Knaff pulled his hand away. "Go and fight, my prince-for Gnarhelm and the Moonshaes!"
And as the warlike gleam in his eyes faded for the last time, Knaff's jaw remained set in a grimace of battle.
Shaking his head in a failed attempt to dispel his numbing grief, Brandon lurched to his feet and chopped savagely at a nearby troll. Sir Koll of Codscove fought nearby, but the prince saw with dismay that most of his loyal fighters had been driven from the field or slain. A sea of the enemy surged around him, and everywhere he saw the fallen bodies of his friends.
He heard a bullish battle cry and saw the armored figure of Koll, bashing several firbolgs back with his great sword. Brandon limped to the knight's side, driving back a troll that lunged at the Ffolkman's back.
Finally Koll and Brandon stood back to back in the center of the field, using sword and axe to hold a seething ring of trolls at bay. Bleeding from a dozen wounds, gasping and staggering from exhaustion, each gave every shred of his mind and muscle to the effort to prolong the fight for just a little longer.
For beyond this battle, both veteran warriors understood, there would be only the eternal peace of death.
The Moonwell looked much the same as Robyn remembered it, thought the last time she saw it seemed more than a lifetime ago. Cool white water glowed with health amid a setting of bright lily pads and brilliant, dew-glistened flowers. Nearby, through a gap in the trees, the crystalline waters of the Myrloch sparkled like diamonds in the sun.
Great, flat-topped arches of stone surrounded her, for this Moonwell had a special significance. Once, for a period of many centuries, it had been the well at the center of the Great Druid's grove. Then, during the Darkwalker War, this well had been corrupted. As the Darkwell, it gave birth to the Darkwalker itself, the young king's mightiest foe.
Now vines of ivy climbed those stone obelisks, some of which had toppled during the intervening years. The druid queen found a stone bench where she remembered it would be, though she had to clear it of fallen leaves before she could use it to rest.
When she had made herself comfortable, she sat there for a very long time. The sun slipped below the western horizon, and the stars broke into the sky. Then the full disc of the moon came into sight, rising into the night and spilling its creamy rays across the waters of the Moonwell.
For a time, Robyn's mind drifted across the people she loved, those who had given her joy and to whom she had tried to return happiness and affection of her own. Tristan … Alicia … Deirdre … The images and faces began to swim together in the waters, and then they grew indistinct, muddied by the Moonwell into a vague blur. The water… the moon.. the earth beneath her … all these images swept across her conscious mind. They did not supplant the memories of the people, but they took
on a life of their own, and in that life, they demanded her love every bit as jealously as any member of her family.
Slowly, over a tranquil period of several hours, Robyn felt the waters of the Moonwell grow warm, powerful. At first, the glow within them was something like a pearly luster, a vague illumination originating somewhere deep within the well, viewed as if through a thick, translucent filter. The sensation grew stronger, the warmth turning to a solid heat so definite that the queen half expected the liquid to bubble into steam.
Yet this was not that kind of heat.
Instead, she saw the whirling turmoil of anger, even of killing rage. She sensed that the goddess recoiled, under siege, surrounded by menace and incapable of fending off those threats with her innate power. The druid queen opened her heart and her soul, and the might of her goddess mother slowly began to concentrate, to gain focus.
Robyn's heart slowed to a calm, steady cadence, and she felt the pacing of her life slow to match. And as she watched and meditated through the long night of the full moon, the will of the goddess began to appear.
Thurgol led his band on the course he had chosen for them, and as night fell and moonlight washed their mountaintop vantage, his mind was occupied by one overriding thought: It was unbelievably, unthinkably, cold up here!
They had marched up such a barren ridge that they could find no stick of wood for a fire, though it hadn't been until nearly dark that this thought occurred to any of the giant-kin. Naturally, then, it had been Garisa to acidly make the observation.
But there was nothing to do but curl up in their furs and wait for the dawn. Outlined in a clarity of moonlight that astounded him, Thurgol even spent much of the night staring in awe at the vista of the island below him, or the icebound, aloof grandeur of the peak that still loomed high above.
When he finally slept, it was fitfully, as if he understood that his life had reached the edge of the future. Tomorrow they would reach the summit and, if the legends were true, the icy bier of Grond Peaksmasher. Garisa still carried the Silverhaft Axe, and the firbolgs remained willing and determined to chop their immortal founder from his icy prison.
Then, Thurgol mused, everything would fall into the hands of the gods.
By nightfall, Tristan knew that the battle was lost, but the knowledge only infused him with a greater will to resist. He fought with a small knot of fighters-Hanrald, Brigit, and Finellen among them-anchored in a crude bulwark formed by four stout oak trunks.
He had seen the brave charge of a few humans into the grainfield, though he hadn't known who they were. It had been a courageous gesture, but the men had been too few to make a difference in the battle's outcome. Now, out there, only a few survivors of that valiant band stood amid the trampled crop, courageously facing the doom that must inevitably claim them. Two warriors in particular stood back to back, outlined in brilliant moonlight, surrounded by a ring of trolls and firbolgs. The pair wielded battle-axe and sword so effectively that they held the horde at bay for long, desperate minutes.
In this spirit of bleak despair, the High King raised his sword and charged out of his rude shelter. Three trolls felt the fatal kiss of Trollcleaver before the monsters even realized that one of the humans had been so rash as to abandon his shelter. They swarmed around him like bees, but when Finellen darted out to cover his back, the king and the dwarf were able to fight their way back to the clump of trees.
Then, when the humanoids closed in once more to attack, the braying of silver trumpets sounded across the field. Looking up with renewed hope, the warriors of Finellen saw fresh banners unfurl over the muddy terrain. Some two dozen riders appeared off to the left, charging into the field and smashing into the flank of the attacking humanoids' formation. As Tristan stared in disbelief, watching the eerie attack unfold in the moonlight, he saw-or did he imagine? — a familiar, golden-haired head above the charging troops.
"Hail the Princess of Moonshae!" shouted four hundred hoarse voices. Banners of Corwell and Llyrath, of Dynnatt and Koart, waved overhead as rank upon rank of armed men marched toward the horde of monsters.
"For the kings of Corwell!" they added, shouting the standard battle cry of that venerable kingdom until their voices could shout no more.
Arrows filled the sky overhead, the missiles appearing like sleek ghosts against the full moon, until they fell among the monsters like the stinging, deadly darts that they were. Tristan heard sergeants-major bark profane commands-was that Sands' voice? And Parsallas, too! He recognized his two veteran leaders, and when the sharp crack of a lightning bolt sizzled into the ranks of the beast horde, he knew that Keane was there as well.
The monsters, this time struck in the flank by a force that was much larger than their own, howled and milled about in confusion, a confusion that proved fatal for many of them as Alicia led the men of Corwell in a vigorous charge. Firbolgs fell before the lances of the horsemen, while trolls, slain in melee combat, were quickly doused with oil and set afire. Within a few minutes of Alicia's arrival, the entire horde was reeling in confusion that verged upon panic.
Tristan's heart swelled with elation. In the instant of their deliverance, he charged once more out of the sheltered clump of oaks.
Then one lanky humanoid moved in front of him, snarling in venomous hatred, looming like a stout but misshapen tree before the tip of the High King's blade. Tristan recognized the brute by the monster's own sword. This was the troll the king had attacked earlier, only to be thwarted when many other monsters had swarmed to this one's aid. Then, as now, Tristan felt quite certain that this was the monster commanding the whole ravaging horde.
Raising its massive, saw-toothed sword, the troll blocked Tristan's path, holding the blade ready to parry any attack the king made. The surge of charging Corwellians rushed closer, and the troll's attention wavered for just a moment as the monster turned its black, emotionless eyes toward the rank of Alicia's charging troops.
Seeing his opening, Tristan lunged in a quick, savage attack, chopping downward with Trollcleaver and aiming for the beast's momentarily unprotected chest. Sensing the attack, the monster whirled back, raising its forearm and that massive, serrated blade to block the charge.
The High King twisted his attack, missing the troll's weapon but also missing the black, corrupt heart. Instead, the keen sword blade bit into the beast's arm at the elbow, slicing through skin and sinew and bone. The monster shrieked-a hideous, bellowing sound of awful pain and agony-and then, still holding its great blade in the other hand, the troll turned and bolted into flight.
Deirdre reached a hand outward, touching the smooth, pale surface of ice. At that moment, the moon crested the towering ridge of the Icepeak, washing the vale in the cool light of the silver orb in all its summer fullness.
The illumination imparted a magical glow to the imprisoned giant, spilling through the valley and washing the princess in a warmth that was the lightness of the gods.
Her past was gone now. A vague part of her mind remembered her murder of the guard at Corwell with a certain sense of curiosity. It was insignificant, that death, except that it clarified for her the stakes, tied her destiny to the battle of the gods.
Reverently, knowing that she served the masters who would grant her ultimate, undreamed of power, Deirdre sat down to wait for that destiny to take shape.
Yet she could not sit for very long. Impatient, she glanced at the sky and rose to stalk across the shallow vale. It was time now! She was ready to act, but the pieces of the puzzle were not yet complete. Angrily she cursed, and studied the horizons. They should be here by now, and yet they were not.
Where were the firbolgs-the giants who would bring her the Silverhaft Axe?
The Earthmother beheld her great druid through the window of the Moonwell, and the goddess found the mortal wanting. For too long Robyn had dwelled among men. No longer did her heart beat the deep, fundamental pulse of her faith. The goddess feared that Robyn now lacked the passion, the keen understanding and self-sacrifice
that would have blazed a trail of, if not triumph, at least hope.
Instead, the High Queen had enjoyed good food, company, and drink. . she had languished within the protection of stone walls, used the fire of a rock-walled hearth to negate the winter chill. Could she muster the strength required for this desperate, final battle?
Whether she could prevail or not, necessity forced the choice, for the druid queen was the only weapon that the Earthmother possessed.
14
The Rockbound Ways
"Incendrius!" cried Keane, pointing his finger toward the target of his deadly spell. The lanky mage stood on his feet, his loyal mount having fallen to a firbolg rock early in the attack. A deceptively small pebble of glowing light drifted outward, angling toward the knot of green-skinned humanoids before him.
In moments, a searing globe of fire erupted amid the rank of fleeing trolls, and when the crackling flames dissipated, it revealed columns of thick, oily smoke smudging upward from nearly a dozen charred corpses. In the moonlight, the smoke resembled solid pillars of dark rock.
Alicia, on Brittany, surged back and forth. Inspired by her leadership, the men of Corwell had attacked with courage and uncharacteristic savagery. The first rush shocked the lumbering humanoids, and the valiant militia never gave them time to recover their balance or their fighting spirit.
Exhausted but elated, the princess rode up to Keane, swinging down from the saddle to seize him in a bear hug of fierce triumph. He hugged her back, flushed with his own sense of victory.
"Look!" called a grinning Parsallas, pointing across the field.
"There's Father! He's got prisoners!" shouted Alicia, elated at the outcome of the sharp, sudden attack. She saw the king and recognized Hanrald and Brigit among a company of bearded dwarves. The group prodded a half-dozen surly firbolgs before them, the entire group limping toward the wizard, the princess, and their company.
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