The Giant Among Us Read Free

tangle of smashed walls and splintered beams. Even the renowned Winter Wolves could not guarantee the queen’s safety under such conditions.
    As Tavis neared the center of the village, he saw a black, blurry cloud of crows hovering over what appeared to be a low mound of soft earth. He slowed his pace and cautiously stole forward, once again taking care to step quietly. The silhouette ahead grew more distinct. The scout saw two splayed feet the size of small sheep, and soon he could make out a flabby torso as large as a supply wagon.
    This could not be the giant the stranger had just felled. A putrid odor of decay hung thickly about the corpse, and the crows had already reduced the body to a pallid mess of gore and bone. Only the heavy brow, drooping jaw, and gangling arms remained to suggest the carcass belonged to a hill giant.
    Without a closer look, Tavis skirted the foul-smelling thing. He had long ago deduced the raiders’ race from clues left behind at other sites: the tracks of dire wolf pets, cudgels made from broken trees, and bits of clothing made from untanned hide. The scout found the corpse’s putrid scent more interesting than anything he was likely to discover on it. The body had been rotting for more than a month, and it was not like hill giants to linger at a massacre.
    On the other side of the body, Tavis saw nothing but charred beams and more heaps of broken rocks, the shapes growing hazy with increasing distance. He found no sign of the stranger, or even of the giant the fellow had been battling. Save for the droning flies, High Meadow had fallen as quiet as stone.
    The scout continued his search in silence. The razing of the village had left the ground so churned up that signs were difficult to read, but if anyone could find the man’s trail, Tavis could. As Brianna’s bodyguard, he was confined to Castle Hartwick much of the time, but the scout had not allowed his abilities to atrophy. He made a practice of delighting young pages and squires by showing them how to follow the sparrows from one perch to another, and once he had even won a wager for Brianna by tracking a trout for two miles up the Clearwhirl River.
    The coppery aroma of fresh blood reached Tavis’s nose. He turned into the breeze and followed the smell to an egg-shaped depression more than a pace long. A pool of dark, steaming liquid sat in the bottom, slowly seeping into the ground. Though he had little doubt that an enormous head had hit here, the hollow seemed quite large for the skull of a hill giant. The scout inspected the area with redoubled caution, for few things were more dangerous than a wounded giant.
    It took only a moment to find the marauder’s tracks, a series of oblong depressions with a string of blood puddles alongside. The footprints were spaced roughly every ten feet, the stride of a sprinting hill giant, which puzzled Tavis. The scout had heard no clattering or crashing, and he doubted any hill giant was graceful enough to run quietly across this rubble.
    Tavis ignored the giant’s trail and continued to circle the area. About fifteen paces from the crater, he came across a muddy courtyard with a shattered fountain in the center. The area was covered with a human’s boot prints. The scout could see where the man had knelt beside the bubbling water to drink, and also where he had suddenly risen and turned.
    Tavis worked his way around the edge of the courtyard until he saw a clump of fresh mud clinging to a rock’s edge. He slipped over the rubble for a short distance. When he came across a muddy boot print streaked across a ridge-timber, he knew he had discovered the stranger’s trail. The scout moved quickly over the debris, following sporadic smears of mud, until he came to another puddle of steaming blood. Here, the stranger’s tracks turned toward the far end of the village, tracing the course taken by the bleeding giant Tavis began to suspect the stranger of being a rather reckless fellow. Few warriors