With an impatient grunt, the shaman dropped the boulder he had been examining and reached for another. Brianna found herself silently cursing Goboka's delay. When they stopped moving, the smell of the ogres grew immeasurably worse, to the point where her jaws ached and her stomach churned. Not even the bitter wind could carry the awful stench away fast enough, and she could not recall ever wanting anything quite so much as she now wanted to retch.
But that was impossible. Even if the ogres had not gagged her with one of their filthy rags, the princess could not have stopped her teeth from chattering long enough to do the job. They were high in the mountains, where the sun's rays were as frigid as ice, and a slabbing, bitter cold crept into the lungs with every breath. To make matters worse, as a way of discouraging another escape attempt, Goboka had burned Brianna's cloak with the bodies of his dead warriors. She wore nothing more than the faltered remains of the cashmere dress in which she had attended Tavis's party. Even the slightest breeze numbed her flesh, and up here the wind howled loud enough to shame an entire pack of dire wolves.
Brianna twisted around to look op the mountain, praying she would see her father's men climbing over the rocky notch above. She could not understand what was taking them so long. Even if she had not been missed until the ball started, the ogres would have had less than a three-hour start on her saviors. With the advantage of the swift royal horses, the rescue party should be closing in by now.
At least Brianna hoped they were. Already her bones ached with cold, and her joints felt too stiff to move. If her rescuers did not arrive soon, there would be nothing left to recover but a frozen body.
When no guards appeared. Brianna reluctantly forced herself to look down the steep couloir again. Watching for rescuers only made her wait more agonizing.
At the front of the ogre line, Goboka picked up a long, narrow stone with a sharp point on each end. With a mighty thrust, he drove one end deep into the ground, planting the stake in the center of the couloir, where the walls stood within twenty paces of each other and the pitch was so steep stones sometimes rolled down the hill with no visible impetus. The shaman tested the pillar to make sure it was steady, then look Runolf's head and placed it on top of the post.
The shaman said something in the deep, guttural voice he used for casting spells, Runolf's eyes popped open. They were not dazed or glassy, as those of a dead man, but seemed fully alert and alive. The traitor's gaze roved over the couloir and came to rest on Brianna's face. There was an expression of terrible anguish in the depths of his eyes, but also something more, as though he was more sad for the princess than he was for himself.
Brianna could not look at Runolf's face without remembering how he had asked forgiveness and claimed the decision to betray her had not been his. Then whose decision had it been. Runolf? Was Tavis involved? Did his betrayal of her include more than abusing her good name? The princess would have liked to call down and ask all these questions of the traitor, but of course she could not. She had a gag in her mouth, and even if she had not, who was to say Runolf could answer. He was Goboka's creature now, and the sadness in his eyes might have meant anything-or nothing at all.
Goboka looked across the valley and raised his hands to his mouth. A loud, wavering cry erupted from his throat, cutting through the wind to crash against the cliffs of the distant mountains. For a moment, there was no answer, until an excited murmur slowly bubbled up from the remote fields beneath Needle Peak. The gray stones stirred, and at first Brianna could not understand what she was seeing. Then the distant shapes began to arrange themselves into ragged formations, line after line, rank upon rank. A strange thunder rumbled across the valley, growing more rhythmic with each repetition, until she could make out a single, guttural word rising from the throats of a thousand ogres: "Bree-an-a! Bree-an-a!"
The disembodied head of Runolf Saemon sat thirty paces down the slope, fixed atop a small rock spire lodged between the craggy walls of the sleep couloir. The sergeant's face was pale with death, his cheeks hollow and his lips the color of ash, but his eyes still seemed very much alive. They were as blue as mountain columbines, with twitching crow's feel at the corners and watchful pupils fixed on Tavis's face.
For a long time, the scout sat on his haunches in the windy notch above the couloir, waiting for Basil and Avner to join him.
More than anything. Tavis wanted to avoid thinking about the gruesome scene below, but his mind would not allow it. His thoughts kept returning to what he saw, searching for an acceptable theory to explain why it was Runolf Saemon's head waiting down there.
