Jarnulf had seen many giants, had even fought a few and survived, but the superstitious horror never entirely went away. The beast’s shaggy, powerful limbs were far longer than his own, but it was old and smaller than most of its kind. In fact, only the giant’s legs and arms were full-sized: its shrunken body and head seemed to dangle between them, like those of some hairy crab or long-legged insect. The Njar-Hunë’s fur was patchy, too: even by moonlight Jarnulf could see that its once snowy pelt was mottled with age.

But though the beast might be old, he reminded himself, it was still easily capable of killing even a strong man. If those grotesque, clawed hands got a grip on him they would tear him apart in an instant.

The giant was making its way across the platform toward the corpse when Jarnulf spoke, suddenly and loudly: “What do you think you are doing, night-walker? By what right do you disturb the dead?”

The monster flinched in alarm and Jarnulf saw its leg muscles bunch in preparation for sudden movement, either battle or escape. “Do not move, corpse-eater,” he warned in the Hikeda’ya tongue, wondering if it could understand him, let alone reply. “I am behind you. Move too quickly for my liking and you will have my spear through your heart. But know this: if I wanted you dead, Godless creature, you would be dead already. All I want is talk.”

“You . . . want . . . talk?” The giant’s voice was nothing manlike, more like the rasping of a popinjay from the southern islands, but so deep that Jarnulf could feel it in his ribs and belly. Clearly, though, the stories had been true: some of the older Hunën could indeed use and understand words, which meant that the terrible risk he was taking had not been completely in vain.

“Yes. Turn around, monster. Face me.” Jarnulf couched the butt of his spear between two of the bound logs that formed the platform, then balanced it so the leaf-shaped spearhead pointed toward the giant’s heart like a lodestone. “I know you are thinking you might swing down and escape before I can hurt you badly. But if you do, you will never hear my bargain, and you will also likely not eat tonight. Are you by any chance hungry?”

The thing crouched in a jutting tangle of its own arms and legs like some horribly malformed beggar and stared at Jarnulf with eyes bright and baleful. The giant’s face was cracked and seamed like old leather, its skin much darker than its fur. The monster was indeed old—that was obvious in its every stiff movement, and in the pendulous swing of its belly—but the narrowed eyes and mostly unbroken fangs warned that it was still dangerous. “Hungry . . . ?” it growled.

Jarnulf gestured at the corpse. “Answer my questions, then you can have your meal.”

The thing looked at him with squinting mistrust. “Not . . . your . . . ?”

“This? No, this old woman is not my grandmother or my great-grandmother. I do not even know her name, but I saw her people carry her up here, and I heard them talking. I know that you and your kind have been raiding tree burials all over this part of Rimmersgard, although your own lands are leagues away in the north. The question is . . . why?”

The giant stared fixedly at the spear point where it stood a few yards from its hairy chest. “I tell what you want, then you kill. Not talk that way. No spear.”

Jarnulf slowly lowered the spear to the platform, setting it down well out of even the giant’s long reach, but kept his hand close to it. “There. Speak, devilspawn. I’m waiting for you to tell me why.”

“Why what, man?” it growled.

“Why your kind are suddenly roaming in Rimmersgard again, and so far south—lands you were scourged from generations ago? What calamity has driven your evil breed down out of the Nornfells?”

The corpse-giant watched Jarnulf as carefully as it had watched the spearpoint, its breath rasping in and out. “What . . . is . . . ‘calamity’?” the giant asked at last.

“Bad times. Tell me, why are you here? Why have your kind begun to hunt again in the lands of men? And why are the oldest and sickliest Hunën—like you—stealing the mortal dead for your meals? I want to know the answer. Do you understand me?”

“Understand, yes.” The thing nodded, a grotesquely alien gesture from such a beast, and screwed up its face into a puzzle of lines. “Speak your words, me—yes.” But the creature was hard to understand, its speech made beastlike by those crooked teeth, that inhuman mouth. “Why here? Hungry.” The giant let its gray tongue out and dragged it along the cracked lips, reminding Jarnulf that it would just as happily eat him as the nameless old woman whose open-air tomb this was. Even if it answered his questions, could he really allow this inhuman creature to defile an Aedonite woman’s body afterwards? Would that not be a crime against Heaven almost as grave as the giant’s?

My Lord God, he prayed, grant me wisdom when the time comes. “‘Hungry’ is not answer enough, giant. Why are your kind coming all the way to Rimmersgard to feed? What is happening back in the north?”

At last, as if it had come to a decision, the beast’s mouth stretched in what almost seemed a smile, a baring of teeth that looked more warning than welcome. “Yes, we talk. I talk. But first say names. Me—” it thumped its chest with a massive hand—“Bur Yok Kar. Now you. Say.”

“I do not need to tell you my name, creature. If you wish to take my bargain, then give me what I ask. If not, well, our trading will end a different way.” He let his hand fall to the shaft of the spear where it lay beside him. The giant’s gleaming eyes flicked to the weapon, then back to his face again.

“You ask why Hojun—why giants—come here,” the creature said. “For food. Many mouths hungry now in north, in mountains. Too many mouths.”

“What do you mean, too many mouths?”

“Higdaja—you call Norns. Too many. North is awake. Hunters are . . . everywhere.”

“The Norns are hunting your kind? Why?”

“For fight.”

Jarnulf sat back on his heels, trying to understand. “That makes little sense. Why would the Hikeda’ya want to fight with your kind? You giants have always done their bidding.”

The thing swung its head from side to side. The face was inhuman but something burned in the eyes, a greater intelligence than he had first guessed. It reminded Jarnulf of an ape he had once seen, the prize of a Naarved merchant who kept it in a cage in the cold courtyard of his house. The beast’s eyes had been as human as any man’s, and to see it slumped in the corner of its too-small prison had been to feel a kind of despair. Not everything that thinks is a man, Jarnulf had realized then, and he thought it again now.

“Not fight with,” the giant rasped. “They want us fight for. Again.”

It took a moment to find the creature’s meaning. “Fight for the Norns? Fight against who?”

“Men. We will fight men.” It showed its teeth. “Your kind.”

It was not possible. It could not be true. “What are you talking about? The Hikeda’ya do not have the strength to fight mortals again. They lost almost everything in the Storm King’s War, and there are scarcely any of them left. All that is over.”

“Nothing over. Never over.” The giant wasn’t looking at him, though, but was staring raptly at the body of the old woman. Thinking again about supper.

“I don’t believe you,” said Jarnulf.

Bur Yok Kar turned toward him, and he thought he could see something almost like amusement in the ugly, leathery face. The idea of where he was, what he was doing, and how mad it was, suddenly struck Jarnulf and set his heart racing. “Believe, not believe, not matter,” the corpse-giant told him. “All of north world wakes up. They are everywhere, the Higdaja, the white ones. They are all awake again, and hungry for war. Because she is awake.”