Valiant (20 page)

She laughed, a lovely sound, even though I saw the fear in her eyes. “Go find a way to defeat this duke and his giants. I refuse to feel sorry for myself. And if you show me a crumb’s worth of pity, Galen Verras, I’ll chase you down the halls with a poker like I did when I was seven.”

Lord Verras chuckled.

“Go! And bring me news when you return.” She shooed us out the door.

When Lord Verras and I reached the ramparts below the eastern Guardian, I couldn’t even look toward the camp. I needed a few moments to stitch myself together so that nothing I heard or saw could shake me.

I pulled in a steadying breath and turned to the cliffs, staring up at the Guardian’s face. I’d never been so close to the great figure. It reminded me of standing before the scouts—feeling small as an ant, but somehow not minding because what you looked at was so grand.

“I wonder what the giants think when they look at the Guardians …,” I whispered.

“Hmmm?” Lord Verras looked downriver, where the Kriva flowed away from us, strong and smooth.

“It was nothing. Do you see something down there?”

“Nothing important. I swam there as a child, that’s all.”

“Did you?” I tried to imagine him near Will’s age, laughing and splashing in the Kriva, but couldn’t picture Lord Verras ever being so carefree. “Near the island?”

He squinted at the small island over a league away. “Rarely that far.”

His eyes lingered on the river as if he was looking for something he’d lost. Or, perhaps, he’d never had in the first place. The princess had said he was used to being alone. Had he felt that way even as a child? I imagined a young boy with the same serious gaze, brushing wet hair out of his eyes. He had freckles. For some reason, I imagined young Lord Verras with freckles.

He pointed to a tumble of boulders on the far bank, between the city and the island.

“We’d go out to the rocks there, Torren, Eldin, and I. Then we’d swim beyond them. Tor and I would see who could dive deep enough to pull up a fistful of gravel from the river bottom.… What are you
looking
at?”

He’d caught me studying him.

I felt reckless standing so high above the city, so near the Guardian. “I’m wondering what you looked like as a boy—whether you had freckles or not.”

He smiled, and I was glad I’d risked the question. His smiles—the real ones—had a comfort about them.

“Shorter.” He chuckled. “I was shorter.”

His smile faded as he looked toward the plains. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.” And somehow, I was.

Every step took us closer to the camp and to the mobs below that shouted and wailed. The noise grew louder as we neared the gates: fear given voice until I could feel it in my body and blood.

Lord Verras and I stopped above Reggen’s gates, looking out over the bridge across the Kriva. I rested my hands on the wall, not wanting to believe what I saw. The giant camp began near the horizon and ended on the banks of the Kriva, a tide pressing up against the river. Against us.

The fields and crops, the road to Reggen—all of it—were buried under tents. The land swarmed with giants. And at the center of it all stood a magnificent crimson tent: the duke’s.

“Sky above,” breathed Lord Verras.

Giants hauled provisions. Most carried tools, but some bore massive weapons: battle-axes or swords as long as several men. Those giants had something around their necks. I leaned over the wall to better look, though I knew it wouldn’t help.

“What do you see?” asked Lord Verras.

“Some of the giants—captains, maybe?—are dressed differently.”

He pulled a tube from his pocket and expanded it. “It’s a spyglass. Look through this end.”

It took a moment to focus, but when I could see clearly, my stomach rolled. The captains wore collars of bones.

“Take it.” I shoved the spyglass at Lord Verras. I didn’t want to see any more.

His jaw clenched. “Bones.”

“It doesn’t mean they’re human bones.…”

“Don’t!” he bit out. “You
know
they are.”

I did.

“They’re really going to attack Reggen, aren’t they?”

Lord Verras turned to me, incredulous.

“Don’t look at me as if I’m stupid, Lord Verras. I’m the one who spoke to the scouts! I can’t believe they’d just—” I shook my head. “We don’t even know why the giants are here. What could they possibly gain if the duke takes Reggen? Why are they helping him?”

“I don’t know,” he shot back, “but it doesn’t mean that they won’t attack. Sky above, Saville! The duke said his captains executed your precious scouts.
Those
giants beheaded them! And you think, somehow, that they won’t try to pull these walls into the Kriva?”

I had no answer—nothing I could wrap words around, at least. Death and violence clung to the bone-wearing giants. I could feel it across the Kriva. And the giants without the bone collars didn’t seem to hate the captains. Perhaps I had met the only two giants with a spark of kindness in them. And yet …

“It’s important that the scouts were kind, that they worried
about
Oma
,” I said finally. “Please believe me.”

For a long while, all I heard were the roar of the wind and clamor of the mob.

“I do, Saville. Can’t you see how much I’ve—?” Lord Verras stopped and looked at me in that way of his, as if he were trying to see to the center of me. “I’m not saying they’re monsters, but they’ve willingly followed the duke hundreds of leagues. He’ll lead them over these walls, and they
will
kill us if we don’t stop them. Help me stop them. Please.”

Please
. It was the second time Lord Verras had asked something of me as if I was an equal. It wasn’t just that he used the word. He meant it. Leymonn might say
please
until burlap grew soft as silk, but I would never believe him.

I’d never trust him the way I trusted Lord Verras.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

He waved an arm toward the camp. “I’m going to make a map to study when I get back to the castle. But I need to watch the camp, too. Tell me what you see, just like you did with the bone collars.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.” He pulled a small book from his coat and an artist’s pencil.

Trust Lord Verras to find a way to write without dragging the inkwell with him.

“Let’s see,” he murmured. “The camp is divided into squares.…” His mouth moved as if counting off the dimensions of the field. “Each square must have at least ten tents.
Let’s say two giants per tent … that would be twenty per square. There are—”

There were more squares than I could easily count. Lord Verras began scribbling a rough map in his notebook. I looked off to the left, upriver along the Kriva. A group of giants felled trees with one or two ax strokes. Other heaped them into great piles for campfires, I supposed. And still others …

“Lord Verras,” I said. “Upriver.”

Other giants waded far into the Kriva—the river that was supposed to protect us from invaders. They were plucking up boulders and dragging them ashore.

“How deep is the Kriva there?” I asked.

“It’s fairly shallow. The center must be two or three times as deep. But, even so … I don’t think it’s enough. I always thought the river would protect us. That invaders would be forced to cross the bridge to reach the city.” He turned to me, eyes wide. “This army could cross the Kriva. They could attack our walls from any direction.”

“Can we stop them?”

“We might hold them off for a short while with fire or burning oil.” He looked out over the plain, and I could almost see him watching a battle play out, wondering what would happen if the oil was positioned right at the gates or along the wall where the Kriva was the narrowest.

“One of the giants caught a cannonball,” I reminded him.

He raised his brows as if to say,
You didn’t think they’d attack
. “It would still make crossing the Kriva more difficult.”

“You don’t believe a word of that,” I said.

“I don’t believe it would work forever—a week at most. But I think it would give us time. I hope it will.”

“Time for what?”

“For help to arrive from the other River Cities. Yullan is less than a week’s ride.”

“And how would any rider sneak past the giants?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Yet.”

We walked farther along the ramparts to better see the giants collecting rocks upriver. The warm wind roared up around us, buffeting my ears, tugging my hair from the scarf and beating it around my face. I welcomed it. After the clamor of the mob near the gates, the wind seemed a gentle companion.

After a while, though, I heard something else.

I put a hand on Lord Verras’s arm. “Do you hear that?”

He rested his pencil in the crease of his notebook. “What?”

“Listen.”

His expression changed the moment he heard it, too. “Singing.”

We listened for the scraps of song that the wind tossed up to us. The melody was wild and strange, the notes strong and solid and as if other songs would break to pieces against them like ships on hidden rocks. None of the words sounded familiar, but the meaning was. I closed my eyes and saw hearth fires from a distance—a long distance.

Homesickness, if ever I heard it
.

I glanced at Lord Verras.

“Longing?” he suggested.

“That’s what I hear.”

The song was soon replaced by one that was more warlike. I would have sworn I heard marching in it—and destruction. The first song had comforted me—surely creatures that missed home so much couldn’t attack us. But perhaps Reggen had to be overthrown before they could return home.

Perhaps they didn’t expect to return home at all.

I shivered and was glad for the distraction when Lord Verras pointed to an open area near the duke’s crimson tent. “For military exercises, I expect. He’s good. The entire city will be able to see what his giants can do. We’ll be lucky if the people aren’t ready to surrender after two days.”

He raised the spyglass to take a closer look. I scanned the back edge of the camp and saw something that looked like pens. Had the giants driven cattle with the army for food?

I pointed them out to Lord Verras. “The far corner, near the horizon. What do you see?”

He focused the spyglass on the pens. “I see some of your captains—”

He stopped. “Men … women … babes, even. They don’t seem to have much shelter. They—” He lowered the spyglass.

I wanted to protest that the giants couldn’t be using humans for food, but I knew it was a lie. How had I been so simple? So stupid? This army would attack Reggen, and we had no defenses.

Without a word, Lord Verras collapsed his spyglass and
put it away. He tucked the notebook into his coat as he turned, striding back toward the castle.

I jogged to catch up. “Where are you going?”

“There’s no point holding them off if no help comes. We can’t send riders out across the bridge, but maybe someone can reach the cliffs behind the city. It would put the Kriva and Reggen between them and the giants.”

“How? They’re too steep to climb. And the giants would see.”

“The caves,” he said. “We need to search the caves.”

I
knew the way
to Lord Verras’s room almost as well as he did. He reached for his keys, but the door swung open a handbreadth when he touched it.

He put a finger to his lips. When I nodded, he pushed the door open and I followed him inside.

Leymonn sat in the chair closest to the fire, his boots propped up on a low table. Lord Verras slammed the door closed behind us, letting its crash announce our entrance.

Leymonn jumped, then nonchalantly adjusted his boots on the table. “Ah! I’ve been waiting for you. What did you see, Lord Verras?”

“I’m surprised you asked. I thought you were more interested in a way
out
of Reggen.”

“And I thought my question was clear enough: tell me about the giant camp.”

“What do you really want?” asked Verras.

Leymonn tilted his head. “I want to make sure the king survives.”

And his advisor, too
, I thought.

“Your concern for Reggen is touching.”

“I will not ask again,” said Leymonn. “What did you see? What are we facing?”

I turned to leave, but Lord Verras caught my arm. “Stay, Saville.”

Any other time, I would have been offended by the command, but I sensed it was more for Leymonn’s benefit than my own.

Leymonn smirked. “I didn’t expect you’d be so taken with the champion, but I don’t mind as long as she doesn’t distract you. Don’t worry, Verras. I won’t tell Lady Farriday when she comes to Reggen.”

Lord Verras did not reply for one breath, then two. Finally, he answered, “I am not distracted, and if we survive these next few weeks, I’ll tell Lady Farriday about Saville myself. The truth is that I see better when I’m with her.”

Leymonn’s eyes narrowed. If they had been swordsmen, I’d have awarded the match to Lord Verras … Lord Verras, who was never lavish with his praise, but still praised me. Who argued with me, but listened when I argued back. Who didn’t smile—truly smile—half as much as I wished he would.