Eolair sighed and called his servant to pour him another cup of wine. It was past time for him to sleep, but he sensed it would not come easily this night. As he waited for the young man to finish pouring, a grim bit of poetry he had often heard in childhood seeped up from his memory, unbidden and unwanted—a song about the Morriga, the Mother of Crows.

I see the world of the dead

The world that is coming

Her world, all laid beneath her feet

Summer will have no flowers

Cows will give no milk

Women will lose all their modesty

And men all their valor

Fruitless forests

And empty seas

Great storms will rage

Around empty fortresses

Battles will be waged everywhere

And treacherous princelings

Will drape a shroud of sorrows

Over the world

Every man will be a betrayer

Every son a thief

The count sat up another hour waiting for Aelin to return, but decided at last that the young man was likely having too good a time with his fellows to rush back and sit with an aging great-uncle. At last Eolair went to his bed, oddly grateful for the distraction of his aching bones.

After their night on the moonlit hilltop and Snenneq’s confusing ritual with the knuckle bones, not to mention the vaguely disheartening idea it had given Morgan about losing what he most expected, he had soured a little on the company of the trolls and had resumed spending time with his older friends.

“Have you heard the news?” he said as he pushed into their tent. “Count Eolair’s nephew was attacked on the road by a giant! A real Hüne!”

The others looked up at him, Astrian already smiling as if at some jest, Olveris sharpening his sword, Porto bleary, as if just now roused from sleep, although it was long past the change of the evening watch. “Of course we have heard, Your Highness,” Astrian said. “I thought by your excitement you brought something new—perhaps something from your grandfather’s cupboard to soothe our throats, which are dry as Nascadu.”

“And you think that is nothing?” Morgan shook his head in disgust. “A living giant! We are almost in Erkynland!”

“Erkynlanders are just as dull as the Rimmersgard folk. Why should I begrudge them a few giants of their own, to enliven their dreary days? And in truth, it is as well for the giant’s sake it was not me he waylaid.” Astrian patted his sheathed sword. “I would have poked a few holes in the beast and then we would have found out if it was truly as large as Sir Aelin claims.”

Olveris smiled a sour smile at Astrian’s boast and continued scraping stone against steel, but Porto sat up straight. “You are foolish to say such things,” the old knight declared. “You do not know. Until you face one, you cannot know.”

Olveris groaned and set his sword down. “Now it will be the giants of Nakkiga again. Porto killed dozens, he says.”

“I have pretended to no such thing, sir, but I have faced a giant.” The old knight was trying to retain his good temper, but only just managing. “Why must you always follow Astrian’s lead in this dance, Olveris? Must all you Nabban-men scoff at what you do not know?”

“We know about you, old broomstick,” Astrian said. “You would throw your sword in the air and take to your heels if you ever saw a living orxis.”

Porto turned imploring eyes toward Morgan. “He speaks nonsense, Highness, I swear it. He knows nothing of the north or the days when I followed Duke Isgrimnur. On the mountain of Nakkiga, as the White Foxes call it, my fellow soldiers and I slew a great, fierce giant. By the Wounds of Saint Honora, the beast killed three of my companions. How could I forget?”

“No one says you forgot.” Sir Astrian seated himself on a wooden chest and spread his bootheels wide on the tent’s earth floor, then leaned toward the old knight. “We say that you have made it up. Please take note of the distinction.”

“Enough, Astrian.” Having spent much time of late with the kindhearted trolls, Morgan found it a little harder to countenance the younger knights’ casual cruelties. “He is right—you do not know.” He turned to Porto. “Did you really fight one? Was it as big as Aelin says this one was?”

“I do not know, my prince.” Porto looked at his comrades with poorly hidden triumph on his face. “Because no man can think much about such things when one of those monsters stands before him, and if he says differently I call him a liar. I can only tell you the giant we fought was far, far bigger than me. I do not think I could have put my arms even halfway around its chest.”

“And it grows with every year that passes,” Astrian muttered, but he said it quietly and avoided Morgan’s eye.

“It could grow no larger than it looked to me that first moment,” Porto declared. “You would not believe how long its arms were, Prince Morgan. Like the trunks of grown birch trees, white and wide. But what I will never be able to forget—and I have tried, no matter what these two scapegraces might have you believe—is how it looked at me. Its eyes were like a man’s. Yes, it had thought, I swear, and I think that was the worst of it.” He made the sign of the Tree and looked at Morgan almost plaintively. “Why should our loving God spend the gift of reason on such a monster?”

“Back home, they say the kilpa that lurk in southern oceans are sailors who drowned,” Olveris volunteered. It was so unusual of him to offer anything other than terse mockery that even Porto listened. “Mayhap the same is true for giants,” he added. “Perhaps they are sinners cursed to roam the wilderness.”

Morgan shuddered a little at the thought—to be so alone, so hated, but knowing you had once been a man! It was a horror he might even have enjoyed, like a particularly dreadful ghost tale, had Eolair’s nephew Aelin encountered his giant fifty leagues away or years in the past, instead of this very day and just a short ride from where they sat.

The wind rattled the sides of the tent. None of them jumped, but even Astrian’s grin looked a little forced as he said, “Ah! The monster is outside even now!”

“Stop,” Porto spoke with a firmness Morgan had seldom heard. “Do not speak of devils, man, because devils listen. And do not mock God’s monsters or He may show you your folly.”

“Perhaps we should talk of other things,” Morgan began, but Porto was telling his story again.

“It came upon us without noise—you cannot imagine that something so large can be so quiet.” Porto’s eyes were wide, as though he found himself back on the mountainside. “We did not guess it was there until it killed one of the other men and threw his headless body into the clearing where we stood. Then it came at us through the trees, pushing even the biggest trunks over and breaking the smaller ones like river reeds under its feet.” He paused, shaking his head slowly as if, even after so many years, mere words could not explain it. “The fear came over me—it was like I had been thrown into an icy river. I could scarcely stand upright, my knees shook so. And then it roared, that mouth full of yellow teeth, that great, gaping mouth . . .”

“Well?” Morgan said after a few moments. “What happened? You have never told me so much of this tale before.”

“Because nobody wanted to hear it,” said Porto, full of wounded dignity. “Some were too busy mocking me for a liar.” He glared at Astrian. “I would like to see you, Sir Dauntless, in such a moment. You may fear no human foe, but something so uncanny—it unmans you.”

Astrian appeared ready to say something, but Morgan caught his eye. The knight bowed his head to the prince instead, as if to say, “Very well, I will not interrupt this nonsense if it pleases Your Highness to hear it.”