“You . . . want . . . talk?” The giant’s voice was nothing manlike, more like the rasping of a popinjay from the southern islands, but so deep that Jarnulf could feel it in his ribs and belly. Clearly, though, the stories had been true: some of the older Hun?n could indeed use and understand words, which meant that the terrible risk he was taking had not been completely in vain.
“Yes. Turn around, monster. Face me.” Jarnulf couched the butt of his spear between two of the bound logs that formed the platform, then balanced it so the leaf-shaped spearhead pointed toward the giant’s heart like a lodestone. “I know you are thinking you might swing down and escape before I can hurt you badly. But if you do, you will never hear my bargain, and you will also likely not eat tonight. Are you by any chance hungry?”
The thing crouched in a jutting tangle of its own arms and legs like some horribly malformed beggar and stared at Jarnulf with eyes bright and baleful. The giant’s face was cracked and seamed like old leather, its skin much darker than its fur. The monster was indeed old—that was obvious in its every stiff movement, and in the pendulous swing of its belly—but the narrowed eyes and mostly unbroken fangs warned that it was still dangerous. “Hungry . . . ?” it growled.
Jarnulf gestured at the corpse. “Answer my questions, then you can have your meal.”
The thing looked at him with squinting mistrust. “Not . . . your . . . ?”
“This? No, this old woman is not my grandmother or my great-grandmother. I do not even know her name, but I saw her people carry her up here, and I heard them talking. I know that you and your kind have been raiding tree burials all over this part of Rimmersgard, although your own lands are leagues away in the north. The question is . . . why?”
The giant stared fixedly at the spear point where it stood a few yards from its hairy chest. “I tell what you want, then you kill. Not talk that way. No spear.”
Jarnulf slowly lowered the spear to the platform, setting it down well out of even the giant’s long reach, but kept his hand close to it. “There. Speak, devilspawn. I’m waiting for you to tell me why.”
“Why what, man?” it growled.
“Why your kind are suddenly roaming in Rimmersgard again, and so far south—lands you were scourged from generations ago? What calamity has driven your evil breed down out of the Nornfells?”
The corpse-giant watched Jarnulf as carefully as it had watched the spearpoint, its breath rasping in and out. “What . . . is . . . ‘calamity’?” the giant asked at last.
“Bad times. Tell me, why are you here? Why have your kind begun to hunt again in the lands of men? And why are the oldest and sickliest Hun?n—like you—stealing the mortal dead for your meals? I want to know the answer. Do you understand me?”
“Understand, yes.” The thing nodded, a grotesquely alien gesture from such a beast, and screwed up its face into a puzzle of lines. “Speak your words, me—yes.” But the creature was hard to understand, its speech made beastlike by those crooked teeth, that inhuman mouth. “Why here? Hungry.” The giant let its gray tongue out and dragged it along the cracked lips, reminding Jarnulf that it would just as happily eat him as the nameless old woman whose open-air tomb this was. Even if it answered his questions, could he really allow this inhuman creature to defile an Aedonite woman’s body afterwards? Would that not be a crime against Heaven almost as grave as the giant’s?
My Lord God, he prayed, grant me wisdom when the time comes. “‘Hungry’ is not answer enough, giant. Why are your kind coming all the way to Rimmersgard to feed? What is happening back in the north?”
At last, as if it had come to a decision, the beast’s mouth stretched in what almost seemed a smile, a baring of teeth that looked more warning than welcome. “Yes, we talk. I talk. But first say names. Me—” it thumped its chest with a massive hand—“Bur Yok Kar. Now you. Say.”
“I do not need to tell you my name, creature. If you wish to take my bargain, then give me what I ask. If not, well, our trading will end a different way.” He let his hand fall to the shaft of the spear where it lay beside him. The giant’s gleaming eyes flicked to the weapon, then back to his face again.
“You ask why Hojun—why giants—come here,” the creature said. “For food. Many mouths hungry now in north, in mountains. Too many mouths.”
“What do you mean, too many mouths?”
“Higdaja—you call Norns. Too many. North is awake. Hunters are . . . everywhere.”
“The Norns are hunting your kind? Why?”
“For fight.”
Jarnulf sat back on his heels, trying to understand. “That makes little sense. Why would the Hikeda’ya want to fight with your kind? You giants have always done their bidding.”
The thing swung its head from side to side. The face was inhuman but something burned in the eyes, a greater intelligence than he had first guessed. It reminded Jarnulf of an ape he had once seen, the prize of a Naarved merchant who kept it in a cage in the cold courtyard of his house. The beast’s eyes had been as human as any man’s, and to see it slumped in the corner of its too-small prison had been to feel a kind of despair. Not everything that thinks is a man, Jarnulf had realized then, and he thought it again now.
“Not fight with,” the giant rasped. “They want us fight for. Again.”
It took a moment to find the creature’s meaning. “Fight for the Norns? Fight against who?”
“Men. We will fight men.” It showed its teeth. “Your kind.”
It was not possible. It could not be true. “What are you talking about? The Hikeda’ya do not have the strength to fight mortals again. They lost almost everything in the Storm King’s War, and there are scarcely any of them left. All that is over.”
“Nothing over. Never over.” The giant wasn’t looking at him, though, but was staring raptly at the body of the old woman. Thinking again about supper.
“I don’t believe you,” said Jarnulf.
Bur Yok Kar turned toward him, and he thought he could see something almost like amusement in the ugly, leathery face. The idea of where he was, what he was doing, and how mad it was, suddenly struck Jarnulf and set his heart racing. “Believe, not believe, not matter,” the corpse-giant told him. “All of north world wakes up. They are everywhere, the Higdaja, the white ones. They are all awake again, and hungry for war. Because she is awake.”
“She?”
“Queen with the silver face. Awake again.”
“No. The queen of the Norns? No, that cannot be.” For a moment Jarnulf felt as though God Himself had leaned down from the heavens and slapped him. In an instant, everything that Father had taught him—all his long-held certainties—were flung into confusion. “You are lying to me, animal.” He was desperate to believe it was so. “Everyone knows the queen of the Norns has been in a deathly sleep since the Storm King fell. Thirty years and more! She will never awaken again.”
The giant slowly rose from its crouch, a new light in its eyes. “Bur Yok Kar not lie.” The beast had recognized Jarnulf’s momentary loss of attention, and even as he realized it himself, the giant took a step toward him. Although half the length of the treetop platform still separated them, the creature set one of its huge, knobbed feet on the head of his spear, pinning it flat against the tethered logs. “Ask again. What name you, little man?”
Angry and more than a little alarmed at his own miscalculation, Jarnulf rose and took a slow step backward, closer to the edge of the platform. He shifted his balance to his back foot. “Name? I have many. Some call me the White Hand.”
“White Hand?” The giant took another shuffling step toward him, still keeping the spear pinned. “No! In North we hear of White Hand. Big warrior, great killer—not skinny like you.” The creature made a huffing noise, a kind of grunt; Jarnulf thought it might be a laugh. “See! You put spear down. Hunter, warrior, never put spear down.” The giant was near enough now that he could smell the stench of the rotting human flesh in its nails and teeth, as well as the odor of the beast itself, a sour tang so fierce it cut through even the stiff, cold wind. “Ate young ones like you before.” The corpse-giant was grinning now, its eyes mere slits as it contemplated the pleasure of a live meal. “Soft. Meat come off bones easy.”
“I am finished with you, Godless one. I have learned what I needed to know.” But in truth Jarnulf now wanted only to escape, to go somewhere and try to make sense of what the creature had told him. The Norn Queen awake? The Norns preparing for war? Such things simply could not be.