Karl did not sleep well that night. He was troubled by night terrors.

He dreamed that he was in darkness and that Steel loomed nearby, his crazy eyes on Karl.

“Death is the solution. No man no problem. Same goes for a prince.” As before, Steel’s voice sounded like he was spitting out the words.

In his dream, Karl turned to run, but his limbs felt as heavy as lead. The spectre from the palace, the one with clay fingers hovered nearby. “Steel’s right,” he urged in his strained voice, bloodshot eyes popping. “Yer should have let me make it easy. I would’ve just given you a little stroke…”

Steel’s gloating voice followed them. “You can run. But you’re like Trot. Already a walking corpse.”

He felt himself gripped with terror and blackness engulfed him. Then out of the darkness there loomed a face, strange as any from his dreams… but he laughed out loud with relief at the sight of it. A lurid green face, with a too-large forehead and wide, staring eyes. It was his mother, peering at him anxiously.

“Oh darling, you’re having a nightmare. There now.” She gathered him into her arms. The bed creaked and sagged under her weight.

He looked up at her as she rocked him. “You could tell?”

Her grey lips formed a smile. “I am a night-hag. We can sense these things. I just checked in on your dream.”

“Oh yeah.” She had told him about this before. A night-hag could sense nightmares, and then enter them … somehow. He didn’t understand it, but there it was. She had described a dreamer suffering from nightmares as being like a beacon in the dark. Some strange other sense she had.

“I – I dreamt I saw Steel.”

She tutted. “My poor boy. Nightmares don’t get worse than that.”

“But could it mean anything?”

“Dreams all have meaning. But they’re of a different world.”

Karl usually had trouble getting his head round otherworldly concepts. His mother though, she was a creature of both worlds. Or did that mean she didn’t quite belong to either world? One myth about night-hags he had heard in the palace that had actually turned out to be true, was that they had some kind of double existence. In one way, they were physical creatures, like ogres. In another, they were otherworldly. Although his mother, and Ulva too, had always taken an affectionate interest in mortal affairs, they were not a part of the mortal world and their lair could not be reached by Earthly means. His mother could both hug him and grapple with a ghost. She was both physical and ethereal. She did not have to be either/ or.

“I’m always happy to have you in my dreams,” he assured her. “You’re my very favourite nightmare.” He pulled a face at her. “A nightmare that brings joy.”

She grinned at that, and they rubbed their noses together, then she rocked him and told him that they could be together forever this way. He relaxed in her arms. The night seemed to go on forever, even though she had her arms around him.

He was glad that Cintia couldn’t see him now. He wanted to impress her. Really impress her, not just be a prince with no kingdom. If he had nightmares and then only felt safe in his mother’s arms, wouldn’t that make him look weak? His weakness had made him something of a curiosity to Ulva and Aila, strong supernatural beings as they were. And it was something that made his mother love him all the more, but now he realised that was just the way she was. He realised that now. He did not know Cintia well enough to guess what would really impress her.

00O00

The next day, the three of them boarded a steam train headed west. With the coin rescued from the safe in the palace, Lee could fortunately afford a private carriage, with comfortable padded seats and a tray of refreshments too – bread, fruit, cheese and coffee. She and Karl sat down together and Cintia sat opposite them. To Karl’s relief, his mother pulled off her mask, leaving her green face bare. She gave a little groan and kneaded at her cheeks with her fists, then she smiled. “This is comfy, hey?” She picked up the pot of steaming coffee and swallowed the lot in one swig. She looked too large for this carriage, just like she had looked too large for their room in the inn.

“This looks pretty good,” she said, thrusting the tray of food at each of them in turn. She was not satisfied until the two of them had eaten well.

“First class treatment. Fit for royalty,” said Cintia, gazing out of the window as the snow covered planes and pine trees went flashing by. The golden sunshine lit up her beautiful face, really showing off her gorgeous complexion, Karl thought. Her jacket was tight over her firm breasts. She smirked. “Doesn’t Twiggy want anything to eat.”

Lee had propped Twiggy, the living broom, by the window. Its carved face was immobile as if it were asleep, but it really was an ugly thing.

Lee smiled. “Twiggy’s asleep. Perhaps he’ll take a sugar lump when he wakes up. He finds a little energy doesn’t go amiss.”

“Hm. Cute,” said Cintia.

Karl wondered how she could bear the sight of the thing, let alone call it cute. “You actually want to see the broom eat a sugar lump?”

“Now, Karl. I’m his mother, so that makes him your little brother!” admonished Lee.

“There’s such a thing as sibling rivalry,” said Cintia gravely. “Boys will get jealous.”

“There’s no need to be jealous, Karl,” said Lee, her green face splitting in a wide grin. “You’ll always be my favourite.”

Great. She reckoned the broom counted as his brother. Oh well. Karl leaned against his mother and she slipped a strong arm around him. The journey to the station had tired him more than he thought.

Lee flicked a strand of red hair away from her face with her free hand. “So … we’re leaving Ostinia far behind, kids. How will that feel?”

“I’m fine with that,” said Karl, snuggling against her. “What sort of place will it be under Steel and his ghouls?”

Lee swallowed. “It – it’s too awful to think about. I – I don’t…” She didn’t finish that sentence. Evidently Steel derailed her train of thought.

There was a pause. Cintia sighed. “Is anything troubling you, Cintia?” asked Lee.

Cintia scratched her freckled nose and glanced over. “Nothing you need to know.”

Lee frowned. Clearly, she supposed Cintia needed emotional support about the destruction of her village, but Cintia didn’t want to talk with her about it. Karl thought his mother should not take it personally. If Cintia didn’t want to talk about things with her, surely that was that?

“Cintia will talk about it when she’s ready,” said Karl. “No hurry, Cintia.”

“Thank you, your highness,” said Cintia, her cherry lips twitching to form a small smile.

“Save the ‘your highness’ ‘til we’re with my grandmamma. It’s not like I’ve got a kingdom anymore. What am I king of right now? This carriage?”

“Well, you’re stoic about it,” said Cintia grinning. “You’re what I call a trooper.”

“That’s my boy,” said Lee proudly.

00O00

Lee did not give up trying to get Cintia to open up to her. Karl could see her tactic. She insisted on telling the two of them a story, and it turned out to be one about her past life. It was to show Cintia that she, for her part, trusted her. It was one of her stories about her earlier life in the land of giants, before she knew Ulva and Aila. Back then, she had also lived high up in the mountains, and her neighbour in a cave further down the crag had been an ogre. Karl understood that the land of giants was another of those places that had to be reached by magic. His mother had told him that it was marked out by the River of Sleep and the River Dream.

“It’s important that outsiders are ready to support one another, as we have no one else,” Lee explained, for Cintia’s benefit.

“You’re attracted to fellow outcasts?” said Cintia, looking up from the window.

“We all need emotional support,” said Lee pointedly.

Karl gave a wry smile. That was a less than subtle hint.

Cintia gazed at her. “What do you call a hag who seeks the company of ogres? An ogre-hag?”

Lee folded her arms. “Really, Cintia? Making a new word by bolting ‘hag’ onto the end of an existing one? Who does that?” She considered this for a moment. “Still, who knows what might catch on, hey? You probably could say ‘ogre-hag.’ You have a way with words.”

Cintia smirked.

Lee tried again to begin her story. Karl had heard it before. It was about her ogre friend from long ago. He wondered how she would retell it for Cintia’s benefit.

“Let me tell you about my friend, Kaezig or Kae, the ogre. He had a father and a mother. His father was an ogre with one great eye in the middle of his forehead. The one-eyed ogres, poor things, have dull intellects. Kae’s mother on the other hand, was a three-eyed ogress. They are much more intelligent than the one-eyed…”

Cintia interrupted at this point and Lee stuttered to a halt. “But they are all still ogres, yes? How can they be the same species if they’re so different?”

“Ogres all look different, but they’re all ogres,” said Lee. “I knew an ogre with six heads. We rock dwellers and mountain dwellers aren’t always humanoid. There are those of us that are very… well… different.”

“Ohhh I see. Like you can fly – except when you can’t. Hags are basically giantish things, like ogres?”

“Steady on,” admonished Karl.

“It’s OK,” said Lee shrugging her broad shoulders. “Yes, I’m a ‘giantish thing.’ Giants have been around a lot longer than humans, and there have always been… shall we say variants? The ogres, the half-ethereal hags, the trolls too… I try to love them all, although trolls can be rude and they disrupt forums.”

“What? They disrupt which…!” exclaimed Cintia.

“Meeting places, gatherings,” Lee explained. She stroked her green cheek pensively. “In the beginning of days, the great ones really were huge. They helped shape the mountains and the islands. That’s why the name ‘giant’ stuck. But I’m not that big. Neither were my ogre friends.”

“You just look like an oversized woman,” said Cintia. “Nothing wrong with that though…” she added hastily. “You’re actually quite good looking without the rubber mask.”

Cintia thought his mum pretty! Well that was super weird. Karl had certainly never given that kind of thing any thought before.

“It’s very kind of you to say so, Cintia,” said Lee, inclining her head. “Um… Anyway, Kae’s story. Ogre hereditary is very difficult to predict. This was wonderfully demonstrated when Kae’s dad took a mistress and had a child… The poor thing was born without any limbs. Shaped like a snake.”

Cintia grimaced. “That is sad … and shocking.”

Lee nodded solemnly. “I understand the father didn’t want the snake baby. Rejected through no fault of its own.” Karl noticed she spoke in a husky voice when she told this part of the story. Did it make her sad?

She shook her head, her long red hair rippling and bouncing. “But it can happen that a one-eyed-ogre and three-eyed-ogre can be blessed with a child of unparalleled beauty and intelligence. A humanoid frame, two eyes and fine features, just like a human. So it was with Kae. He was very like a man.”

Cintia interrupted again. She certainly interrupted a lot. “Hang on… now you’re saying you rock and mountain dwellers have the same standard of beauty that we do, even when some of you have six heads?”

“Of course. What did you think?” Said Karl.

Cintia shrugged. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it much.”

Lee made a valiant attempt to press on with her story. “At this time there was a feud between the dragons and ogres on the borders of Giant-Land, but Kae was friends with a dragon name Flammarion, or Flam. The brave boys communicated first by a code they had devised by thumping rocks together. In this way they could send messages over long distances. Unfortunately a troll intercepted their messages and gave them away to Kae’s father, who flew into a rage at Kae. Something along these lines.” Lee tried to make her voice deep, slow and dull. “Dragons are for killing. Not for talking to.”

Cintia smirked at this attempt at mimicry.

Lee sighed. “I suppose he couldn’t help being so insular. Kae and Flam set out together to make a new life. Flam was a deep thinker; a dragon with an interest in the rise and fall of different civilisations. He had discovered the ruins of a small, human community, destroyed by a fiend from deep beneath the Earth. It had left a clear trail of grey slime on the way back to its lair.”

“The monster is a clear threat to humanity,” Flam told Kae.”

“Then some brave ogre ought to kill the monster,” said Kae. “But who would challenge such a foe?””

“I can think of someone, bold and reckless enough,” said Flam. “But you will have help…””

Flam had hoarded a scrap of metal from a falling star, and now he consumed it, remaking it in the fires of his belly, to fashion a might sword for his friend to wield.”

Flam flew Kae to the fetid, slimy pit in the ground that was the entrance to the monster’s lair.”

“Be brave, Kae, and sink.””

“Kae slid into the slime and waded through it, down a dank tunnel that wormed into the Earth until he came upon the horror in its lair, lit up by bioluminescence. What he saw, was a pool of slime and on the surface, myriad lidless staring eyes and snaking tentacles forever groping and clutching. The monster was always on the alert and always reaching… its hungry tentacles reached for Kae…””

At that moment, Lee had to stop, because the train had screeched to a halt. It was evening and the lamps in the carriage were on, but now they flickered and went out.

Cintia’s face looked eerily pale in the dark. “What’s going on?”

“I – I sense something really, really bad,” said Lee, her blue eyes wide.

A hissing voice resounded throughout the carriage. “No fugitive can escape Steel’s clutches. He has eyes everywhere. His underworld recruits will see that his will is done!”