The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [124]
Then the woman in the rock niche raised her hands and whispered the words to a spell, too softly for any of the giant-kin to hear over the din of the crumbling glacier. And as she spoke, the power of her own magic took hold of the valley before her.
And time stood still.
* * * * *
Tavish had traveled a great deal in her life, had endured many months of exposure to weather, many meals of substandard food, long days of wearying travel and exhausting nights of frequently interrupted sleep. Yet never in her six decades of life, she knew, had she been so tired, so hungry, and so cold.
She had followed the firbolg party onto the slopes of the Icepeak, in fact almost blundering into the giant-kin as they backtracked down their trail. Scrambling into a dense stand of pines, Tavish had held her breath as the column marched past within an easy stone's throw of her hiding place.
Then, of course, she, too, had reversed her course, following the plain trail of the giants as they returned to the lowlands and made the long, circuitous passage around the base of the mountain. Her steady pursuit had left the bard little time for food gathering, and she hadn't dared light a fire that might reveal her position, so she had grown progressively weaker, colder, and more miserable during the course of the trek.
Then had come the final, terrifying climb up the steep approaches of this cliff-walled vale, until she once again reached a vantage over the giant-kin. Now she crouched among the rocks on the mountainside, half a mile from the glacier but high enough for a clear view of the ice sheet and the firbolg party gathered at its base. And yet, as fatigued and uncomfortable as she was here, she wouldn't have been anywhere else in the world, given the fascinating nature of the events going on before her.
First came the astounding effect of the axe's blow against the glacier as the gaping crack shivered its way upward across the face of the ice. In the immediate following moment, some kind of magic seemed to halt the firbolgs in their tracks.
Tavish stared in astonishment as the giant-kin froze like statues, immobile and apparently unaware. They remained fixed in the actions they had been engaged in, some who had been walking growing rigid to the point of having one leg raised, ready to take the next step, though not yet coming into contact with the ground. Even more strange, several blocks of tumbling ice hung suspended in the air, their plummeting descent halted by the unseen force.
But Tavish's surprise grew to astonishment as she saw the black-haired young woman emerge from concealment and walk boldly among the unaware humanoids. Squinting-her eyes were not the keen tools of observation they had been twenty years earlier-she studied the flowing hair with its suggestion of familiarity, and she thought that she recognized the woman's confident gait.
Tavish saw the great chieftain, the one who had bested the troll on the dock and who had guided his ship across the Strait of Oman, now bearing the great, diamond-bladed axe in his hands. He stood as though in thoughtful repose, observing the jagged, narrow crack that shot up the face of ice following the impact of his blow, the axe held loosely at his waist.
As the tiny female figure clambered up the boulders, Tavish saw that her target was the giant wielding the great axe. With some difficulty, the woman scrambled up the last high boulder and tugged the Silverhaft Axe from the frozen hands of the rigid firbolg. The weapon was huge, and appeared to be quite heavy, yet the princess drew it free without apparent effort.
She turned, her black hair swirling around her head as her face exploded into an expression of fierce triumph, and the bard recognized her for certain: This was Princess Deirdre Kendrick! Why the woman, youngest daughter of her friends, should be here remained a mystery to the harpist, yet Tavish sensed something very wrong, dangerously evil, in the scene