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her pain-racked body, beseeched Hiatea’s blessing.
    As Brianna spoke, Tavis rolled to his feet holding the long, thin shaft of a normal arrow. He nocked and fired in one smooth motion. The queen did not even see the missile streak through the air. Her husband simply released Mountain Crusher’s bowstring, then a giant slapped a hand over his eye and dropped to a knee.
    The flames on Brianna’s golden amulet began to dance. The queen summoned the spell to mind, then groaned aloud as her anguish deepened. It felt as if the inexorable power of her abdominal muscles were grinding her pelvis bone to powder. She forced herself to exhale, twice, trying to breathe away her agony. The pain only grew worse.
    Brianna fixed her eyes on her husband. He was racing down the hillside, reaching for his quiver with stones and stumps flying past his head, dodging fire giant boots as they kicked the ground around him into a froth. The queen opened her mouth, forcing her tongue to curl and trill as she shaped the arcane syllables that would save her husband’s life.
    An unbearable surge of pain gripped her. She heard herself scream and felt her knees buckle, and her half-finished spell misfired. The glass rod dissolved in her hand, becoming a twinkling beam of purple luminescence that shot out of the canyon and hung high in the sky, fluttering and hissing and popping like the boreal lights gone mad.
    A fire giant’s boot slammed into her husband and sent his limp body tumbling across the mountainside. Then Brianna felt the stinging bite of ice beneath her body and realized she had collapsed. A moment later, she heard the cold thunder of boulders raining down on the frozen road, and the voices of her loyal footmen rising together in a long, mournful wail the death shriek of the Royal Snow Bear Company.
    Brianna lay doubled over in an icy rut—for minutes, it seemed—her ears ringing with the screams of the Royal Snow Bear Company. She felt the road shuddering beneath her body, the wind rasping across her cheek, even her own voice burning like bile as her screams boiled up from her womb. But she heard nothing—nothing save the cries of her loyal soldiers, perishing beneath the thundering torrent of granite.
    The seeping mists of despair filled the queen’s mind, and through this darkening haze swarmed a bevy of somber thoughts. The giants had won, and more than the battle. They had captured the gorge, and with it the silver that kept Hartsvale’s armies strong; they had felled her husband, and with him the pillar of her strength; soon, they would take Brianna herself, and with her the infant so desperately fighting to reach a bloody and uncertain future.
    Brianna did not know what to do when—if—her enemies captured her. They would present her to their mysterious guardian, the Twilight Spirit, so he could use his magic to get a giant king on her. To prevent that, the queen had vowed to die before allowing any giant to take her alive—but she had made that pledge before her pregnancy. Now, she worried that she lacked the strength, perhaps even the right, to make the same choice for her child.
    Brianna opened her eyes and exhaled long and hard, then rolled to her knees.
    A pair of hands grasped her beneath the arms. “Wait a minute,” said Avner. “I’ll help you up.”
    Avner pulled backward, rocking Brianna into a kneeling position—and filling her belly with fiery pain.
    “Avner!” she barked. “What are you doing?”
    “We’ve got to go.”
    The young scout pointed up the canyon to where the abandoned sleighs of the courtiers sat beside the road. A single fire giant was already walking by the tangle, casually kicking to death panicked draft horses as he passed. The brute was little more than a hundred yards away, close enough to see his flashing bronze eyes and foul green teeth.
    Brianna clenched the young scout’s arm. “Avner, I can’t run,” she gasped. “Not now!”
    Avner reached into his cloak and withdrew a purple