Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [221]
Aylaen had not seen him coming, and she was shaken by the fall. She sat up, choking and coughing and spitting seawater.
Skylan leaped to his feet and looked, his heart in his mouth, at Garn. His friend lay on the beach.
Heedless of the giants, Skylan ran to his friend and flung himself down into the sand beside him. He searched anxiously for a wound, and he did not see any. Then Garn looked up at him.
Skylan saw the shadow of death in his eyes.
“Where does it hurt?” he demanded.
“It doesn’t,” Garn said, frowning, puzzled. “I can’t feel my legs. I can’t feel anything.”
Skylan saw the blood seeping out from underneath his friend’s body, and he knew that Garn’s body was broken. The dream came back to him. Only then it was Draya who had been slain by the giants.
She could not move. I held her in my arms as she died.
“You can’t leave me!” Skylan said fiercely, making it an order. He took hold of Garn’s limp and unresponsive hand. “I need you!”
Garn smiled. “Not . . . much choice . . .”
He coughed, his breathing labored. He could no longer talk, and he asked the question with his eyes. Aylaen?
“She is safe,” said Skylan. “You saved her life.”
He wrapped the palm and fingers of Garn’s hand around the hilt of his axe and held them there, so that Garn would come before Torval holding his weapon.
Garn’s breathing slowed to nothing. His eyes stared into the sun and did not blink.
Skylan fought back the tears. Garn had died a warrior’s death. He did not want to dishonor his friend with blubberings and wailings, but the tears came, hot and burning, down his cheeks.
He heard, behind him, a heart-piercing moan.
“Aylaen—” Sklyan turned to comfort her.
“You killed him!” Aylaen screamed and she struck him across the face.
She hit him again, bruising his cheek and splitting his lip. He tasted blood.
“You were jealous of him and you killed him!” she cried in a frenzy of grief and rage, hitting Skylan, pounding on him, beating him with her fists and kicking him. “You killed him!”
He bowed his head before the onslaught, did nothing to defend himself. Bjorn and Erdmun had to leave the battle to drag her off him.
Wulfe saw the giants from a distance. He heard the cries and shouts, he smelled the blood and iron. He would have run away from the battle, but he recognized the foe from his mother’s lullaby-tales. They were known as Flesh-Spinners and though he had never seen them, he hated them.
The giants were fae, wicked fae, shunned and despised by the faery folk because, during the First War, the Flesh-Spinners had turned against their own kind and fought alongside the Ugly Ones. The faery folk had never forgiven the Flesh-Spinners for their treachery or for the fact that they believed the giants continued to slavishly serve the gods of the Ugly Ones.
According to the fae, the Flesh-Spinners had been giants who bestrode creation, scattering stars like seeds throughout the universe and spinning their own flesh on enormous wheels, using the threads formed of their bodies to form the fabric of worlds. The faery folk populated these worlds and loved and cared for them.
But then came the gods of the Ugly Ones. They saw the beautiful worlds and wanted them. They praised the work, and the Flesh-Spinners grew proud and haughty, refusing to believe the fae when they warned the Flesh-Spinners that the gods were trying to trick them. The Flesh-Spinners believed the lies of the gods and ended up giving them the worlds. The fae were furious, and they cursed the Flesh-Spinners, so that their flesh would never again grow back. They could make no more worlds.
Angry at the fae, the Flesh-Spinners sided with the gods and fought against the fae during the First War,