Chapter 350: Ashore [2]

Kane’s gaze sharpened for half a second.

’Stone here too?’

He didn’t push it.

The empty-handed Giant’s face had already closed around the admission, like a wound closing around a blade left in place.

There would be a better hour for that question, when they were not standing on a quay with a Hydra’s eye still fresh in memory and wrong smoke still climbing the ridge.

Kane shifted Mjoldr on his shoulder instead.

"You all must be tired."

The empty-handed Giant’s mouth curved, slow and genuine for the first time since the boat had bumped the quay.

"It has been years since we had someone from the land visit us."

He turned toward the ascending path, spear-Giant falling in behind as before.

"Come. Guest right holds up to the lower halls. Beyond that, the Elder decides."

Kane nodded once.

The household followed.

The elves stayed alert without making a performance of it, not for the Giants’ bulk or the spears, but for the environment itself.

Loose stone.

Overhangs that could shed without warning.

The way the path climbed through cuts that funneled sound and weather in equal measure.

Firlia’s eyes moved constantly.

The elven commanders kept a quiet count of exits and choke points.

Misha walked with the pale-wood token still in hand, already measuring what a Giant hall would do to ordinary negotiation distances.

The spear-Giant’s voice drifted forward, amused under the fatigue.

"A barbarian, huh?"

A laugh rolled off the stone.

"We had your ancestors coming here on boats once. Trying to take us and our women—though their cocks would not even have gone in. Ambition without arithmetic. The sea took most of them before we had to."

Kessa’s ears flicked up.

Her mouth opened with the particular bright mischief that meant the salt and the near-death hadn’t improved her judgment.

"Oh, don’t you worry about that. Kane’s cock is big enough to pierce—"

Thora’s hand found the back of Kessa’s neck without looking.

Misha stepped in from the other side and simply put her palm over Kessa’s mouth.

"Mmph!"

The tiger-striped woman made an offended noise into the silence and subsided, eyes glittering.

Kane smiled once and glanced back at the empty-handed Giant.

"Why would they want to come here?"

"Because our land is peaceful."

The Giant didn’t slow.

"We stay away from the wars and from everything that might harm us in any way. Or we did. The pits did not respect the old arrangement. Neither did the deep one, once the wrong stone woke it."

The path steepened.

Stone steps cut for Giant stride forced the household into an uneven rhythm.

Thora’s breathing shortened.

The wrapped ribs made every rise a negotiation she was losing by degrees.

"Ah—I’m so tired."

Kane stopped, turned, and put his back to her without ceremony.

"Up."

Thora hesitated half a breath: pride, pain, the old refusal to be carried, and then climbed onto him, arms around his shoulders, legs careful of the axe.

He settled her weight and kept walking.

Misha, a few paces behind, had fallen back without meaning to.

The climb and the lists in her head had stolen the same wind.

She didn’t ask.

She only looked at him with the particular golden-eyed pout that meant the strategist had run out of elegant options.

Kane shifted Thora higher, freed one arm, and hooked Misha up against his other side as if the arithmetic of two women and a cleared body were simple.

Misha made a small sound of protest that was mostly relief and locked an arm around his neck.

"You are going to regret this later," she muttered against his ear.

"I already regret the Hydra. This is cheaper."

Kessa watched the arrangement for three steps, then decided the joke was on the mountain.

"If you are collecting, Chief, the stripes are heavier than they look."

"Then stop looking and climb."

She didn’t.

She waited until the next wide landing, put a hand on his shoulder, and simply flowed up onto his back behind Thora with the casual arrogance of a cat claiming a warm roof. Kane adjusted once, found the balance, and kept climbing.

The weight was real.

He passed Mjoldr back without looking.

"Griselda."

Griselda took the axe as if she had expected the handoff all along, containment case still tight against her other side, wings half-folded for the narrow path.

Firlia watched the whole moving pile of household and barbarian for a long moment, quiet, unreadable, and then turned her face toward the stone wall and kept walking as if the path required her full attention.

Mist thickened as they climbed.

Voices carried through it: Giant voices, calling, arguing, the ordinary noise of a people who had not stopped living even while half their stone burned.

The path opened.

A waterfall shouldered down a black face of rock into a pool that fed the lower cuts.

In the middle of the spray and the thunder, a village clung to the ledges, houses built to a scale that made Sylvander’s guest halls look like toys, cave mouths deep enough to swallow a coastal runner whole, Giants moving between them with the unhurried force of things that had always known the ground would hold.

Children the size of adult humans stared from a doorway.

An old Giant with a basket of wet stone paused and watched the small procession pass.

Someone shouted a warning about a loose overhang further up the ridge; someone else shouted back that the overhang had already fallen yesterday and to stop scaring the guests.

Kane set his passengers down on a flat stretch of worked stone near the waterfall’s edge.

Thora exhaled through her teeth and stayed upright by pure decision.

Misha smoothed her hair with the precision of someone restoring order to a ledger.

Kessa stretched until her spine popped and grinned at a pair of Giant youths who were openly counting her stripes.

"Where will the emperor be?" Kane asked.

The empty-handed Giant shook his head once.

"We do not use that word the way the land does. The Elder holds the central hall when the central hall is not under ash. He is out on the high sight lines today, watching the ridge and the pits. We will send word. He will call you when he is ready to hear southern arguments over the sound of his own stone cracking."

The spear-Giant gestured toward a low structure cut into the cliff face, its door sized for Giant shoulders and its windows shuttered against the spray.

"Cottage for guests. Water inside. Fire if you want it. You don’t leave the lower village without an escort. You don’t open the wrong-smelling box in the open air. You don’t climb toward the smoke alone. Break those, and guest right becomes a conversation we would rather not have while we are already short of patience."