The sun melted into the eastern mountains, illuminating the snowcapped summit with golden hues, and sending a cool breeze over the valley. Clouds in the north gathered and darkened the horizon. If the company didn’t start soon, they’d be navigating the steepest part of the trail in the dark and cresting the mountain in a storm. Erika slipped her bow over her shoulder and strolled to where her brother and Neal were deep in conversation. They stooped, hovering over a map spread on the ground in front of them.

“You said we were taking the mountain trail.” Neal seemed exasperated.

“I’ve changed my mind. There’s snow on the mountain already and a blizzard on its way.” Barin glanced at the sky and Erika followed his gaze.

“It’s the shortest distance,” Neal argued, folding open a corner of the map that had curled.

“How accurate is this map?” Barin asked.

“It’s one of your father’s.”

“Ancient, most like,” Barin replied.

Erika stretched her neck to see the chart as Barin brushed the creases out of the torn and mildewed parchment. He set rocks on each corner of the map. Inverted V-shapes showed Mount Ream, the northernmost point of the Potamian empire, and the mountain range that made up the western side of the valley. Barin drew an invisible line through the valley with his finger south to the flood plains of Bowmont and then back north again where a thin squiggle showed a junction.

“Here is Canyon Gia?”

Neal scratched his stubble and let a low grunt escape his lips. Erika leaned in closer.

“What’s all that?” she asked, pointing to an unmarked section of the map east of the mountain range.

“That, my dear sister, is the Casdamian Empire.”

“Isn’t the phantom Vouchsaver supposed to live on that other mountain?” she asked. “The mountain named Casda de Moor?”

“Allegedly,” Barin answered. “And according to legend, Mount Ream is the sacred grounds of the mountain giants.”

“They’re seldom seen,” Neil argued. “Except by the simpletons in Fairmistle.”

“…Who claim they guard Mount Ream.” Barin rolled the map and tucked it in a leather case hanging from his belt. “I would rather tackle the skura in the canyon than the giants and the snow on the mountain.” He looked at Neal and rose. With a whistle and a wave, he called the men.

Erika followed well behind her brother, the pack on her back and her bow and quiver strapped on her baldric. Once they were well into the forest, Barin led them to a grassy clearing by a creek and dropped his pack.

“Let’s rest,” he breathed. Thirty-nine men had left King Tobias’ court and ventured on this mission a week ago. Only nineteen were returning.

Erika wandered away from the men a short distance. Though old-growth forest surrounded them, she could still see the stars. A creek gurgled nearby. Frogs and crickets sang. She sat on the mossy ground and leaned against an old cedar tree, hoping to clear her mind.

All her life she had rejected the ways of royalty—nobility seemed so self-centered, and yet here she worried about how the murder she had committed would influence people’s sentiments toward her. She hadn’t once thought about the poor man who died by her hand. How callous that her reputation bothered her more than the effect it had on the people he knew.

What about the man’s family? His kingdom? What would become of the island? She closed her eyes and could still hear the mournful lamentation of the native people who had carried him away. A king. A beloved king. An entire nation grieved because of her.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “If I could take back those moments, I would.” The deaths of the soldiers were also her fault, for her arrow startled the flock of skura before Barin and his men had been ready. To think she had so much blood on her hands!

Erika knelt by the creek and splashed water on her face, hoping the cold would wake her from despondency. With the moonlight behind her, she gazed at her reflection for a long moment. Why? Why had she come to fight when she could have stayed home safe, like her sisters? What made her so eccentric? So abnormal? Even her grandfather had seen an oddity in her. What had he told her?

The night he died, she sat in candlelight by his bedside. He spoke in a whisper, his lips hidden under his gray beard. He squeezed her hand as if to drive the very meaning of each utterance into her heart. Tonight, as she gazed in the quiet pool, she saw his face in the reflection and heard his words in the creek’s babble.

“You must win, Erika. Princely matters distract your brother, but you have the fortitude. Your father sees the little girl in you. I see an empress. The land is for ploughing. For growing crops to feed our families. Not for breeding humongous cockroaches with faces of horror and tongues of fire that creep over the countryside, devouring everything in their path. No. We wiped them clean from our lands, but they must never gain a foothold again, and neither should their cousins, the skura, or the goblins. Keep the valley safe from anything evil and self-serving.”

She had promised him she would. All her life she had trained for that day and now she had foiled everything.

Would he have given up on her after she killed an allied king?

She held her breath, hoping to hear something from him, a word of either admonishment or encouragement, but of course, she heard nothing except the sound of the creek.

“No one in our family ever gave up. I have Potamian blood running through my veins,” she told the worried image staring back at her. “This mistake cannot destroy me. Though I committed a horrible transgression, it’s over. Somehow good must come from this!” The pool had ceased rippling, tinted blue from the moonlight, her youthful reflection staring back at her.

She dried her face with the hem of her tunic and returned to her place by the cedar tree. With eyes closed, she tried to think of a way to overcome her misdeed. Her thoughts wandered until she fell asleep.

Erika woke to the sound of men snoring. A few men-at-arms were awake and had made a campfire. She could hear Barin discussing tactics with Neal somewhere in the shadows.

Mist rose from the valley and into the hills and with it, a chill. She shivered and wrapped her cloak tighter around her. When she heard a branch break behind her, she started. It could have been someone collecting firewood. She listened. Something moved, but not a person. It could have been a badger or a raccoon. She peered into the shadows, letting her eyes adjust to the dense darkness of the forest. Fog settled among the trees. The mist parted into fingers which crept over the land like the hand of a giant man tapping on a table. Closer and closer it came until she saw the shape of a man, but a man without substance, only mist, and huge. A mountain giant? Her eyes followed the arm until she saw its shoulders bent over and then his face above the treetops, back-lit by the half moon. She jumped up and gasped. “What’s that?” she asked.

“What?” someone asked. She had garnered several soldiers’ attention, and they had drawn their swords and hurried to her.

Barin also came to her side and squinted into the dark forest where she stood, but the mist had disappeared, the arm, the shoulders, the face—gone.

“Did you see it?” she asked.

“What, Erika?” he asked, his inquiry cold and accusing. Barin must think she’s gone daft seeing shapes in the woods. The stress of this journey had affected her mind.

“The mist. It had fingers and looked just like an enormous man.”

Their eyes met. He nodded, but only slightly, as though he wanted to keep a rein on any panic her sighting might cause.

“I saw nothing.” Barin turned to his men. “Pack up. Let’s go. We have a long hike ahead of us. I want to be in Prasa Potama by the sun’s zenith tomorrow.”

Someone kicked dirt on the fire while the rest of the men gathered their knapsacks, satchels, and quivers, and others rolled up their blankets.

Erika knew she saw something, but of course, it disappeared when Barin looked, making her out to be a fool.

“I saw it. A mountain giant t’was,” Rory, a fair-haired young soldier from Fairmistle, a river town to the south, whispered in her ear.

“Don’t let them fool you. They saw it too—they’re just not confessin’.” He nodded and gave her a smile which she returned, soothed by his soft country dialect.

Not long after they began their ascent did the trail steepen to a vertical incline. The forest thinned as she hiked and instead of dense firs now needle-less saplings scattered the landscape, their twisted branches grasped for the stars. Leafless underbrush exposed bare ground, and massive boulders glowed like lantern globes, casting shadows that could have been goblins waiting to ambush them. Erika’s lungs grew hot from the thin air and heavy breathing. She walked with eyes wide, flinching at every unfamiliar sound, regarding the others to see if they too showed alarm. If so, she couldn’t tell, but Rory kept looking at her as if he sensed something strange in the air. The discomfiting foliage, the whistle of the wind, the perilous climb all added to the discordance of this mountainside. But something worse hovered over them.

“Do you sense anything?” Erika asked Rory.

“Aye, I do, Fairest. But we be on Mount Ream and there’re legends rooted here. We’d be fools not to suspect the spirits. Take guard of yerself, if you know what I mean. Be leery.”

“Is there a difference between being mistrustful and being afraid?” she asked, half laughing, though she felt no gaiety. Fear had tightened every muscle in her body.

“Two in the same,” Rory answered, scanning their surroundings. “I would not trust a single creature livin’ here. Man, nor beast alike.”

She wondered if men lived on this mountain, and what sort of humans they’d be?

Well into the night at an hour when she should be asleep under the stars wrapped in a woolen blanket, the company reached the canyon of which Lord Garion had warned them. The gorge wasn’t just a dip in the ground where one skips down to the bottom and then climbs up again. A huge fracture in the earth defined Canyon Gia, dark and foreboding—a bottomless pit—and to descend into its domain would summon one’s doom.

“Why did we come this way?” she asked under her breath.

Only Rory and Samuel heard her. Rory shook his head. “A fool’s challenge?” He eyed Barin. Erika’s brother had been surveying the canyon, pacing along the rim, no doubt looking for a fitting way down. Neal trailed behind and at one point he and several other soldiers gathered sagebrush and wrapped the dried leaves around branches. Neal stooped on the ground and struck his dagger with flint, nursing an ember. When the kindling ignited, he shared his flame with soldiers holding the other two torches, and then walked with Barin, lighting the way. They stopped at an incline.

“If we had taken the northern trail, we would have had to pass the caves,” Samuel interjected. “Strange beings occupy the caves.”

“Dragons, they say,” Rory agreed.

“Who’s saying dragons are wicked?” Erika asked. “No one knows their allegiance. Maybe they’re allies.”

The young men looked at her with surprise. “Nary a man in his right mind confronts a dragon askin’ who his king is, save those wishin’ for death.”

“I’m just saying our chances may have been better traveling that route than this one.”

“Maybe you’ll get to lead the next expedition,” Samuel laughed. Erika frowned and hushed him, anxious that her brother might hear and suspect insubordination. Erika seldom questioned Barin’s decisions, but stepping into this ominous chasm gave her pause, reminded of Lord Garion’s warnings.

“Pick up your things. We’re going in,” Barin told the group, and without hesitation, he started down the cliff. With tired legs and sore shoulders, Erika lifted her heavy satchel onto her back again and followed the others.

Barin had not found an actual trail into the gorge, but a steep creek bed filled with snow and ice. Erika slipped as soon as she stepped down, and Rory grabbed her hand from above.

“Slowly, Fairest. We don’t want to be losin’ a princess.”

His words surprised her. She hadn’t felt like a princess—not now, not after all that had happened. If he had called her a murderer, she would have deemed it more fitting.

She appreciated Samuel and Rory staying with her. They could have walked with the prince and foot soldiers who were halfway down the bank already.

“You don’t need to stay behind with me. I can make it,” she said.

The men looked at each other. Rory shrugged. “No, bother.”

Rory led, treading cautiously from one stone to the next, avoiding the frozen snow in between the rocks. “Mind you for this one, Fairest, it’s icy,” he advised her.

Barin and Neal were far below them, their torches gleaming like lightning bugs against the darkness. The other men-at-arms, their dark profiles barely distinguishable from the shadows, made their way after them, helping each other just as Samuel and Rory were helping her, each at their own pace.

Soon Erika could not feel her nose or her earlobes because of the cold, and she kept her hands tucked in her cloak unless she had to grab onto frozen limbs to keep from falling. Without Rory and Samuel, she’d be struggling to find her way alone. The other men had already reached the basin.

Halfway down the embankment, she heard rushing water.

“Almost to the bottom,” Rory announced.

“Where are the others?”

“Upstream.”

Unusual vegetation fringed the flowing river at the nethermost part of the canyon. Thorny trunks of neither trees nor bushes entangled one another, making it impossible to determine where one began, and another ended. The closer to the riverbank, the denser the muddle, so that if she were to leave the trail she’d have crawled through a labyrinth of branches.

A long way from Barin and his soldiers she could see their torches flickering in the distance until they disappeared.

“Call my brother,” Erika asked of Samuel. He gave her a puzzled look. “Call him,” she repeated. “You have a more thunderous voice. He’ll hear you.”

The soldier took a deep breath and sent his bid echoing against the canyon walls. “Sir Barin!”

“Just a little way forward from you. We’ll wait at the river!” came the reply.

“No fear. We’ll catch up to them soon,” Rory assured her.

Unlike her skittish sisters, Erika spent her youth climbing trees, swimming rivers, and sparring with the men. She learned a bit of nursing and the sight of blood didn’t make her sick. But the cliffs closed in on her as the chiseled rock walls of a dungeon. Tree limbs hugged each other with crippled arms. The ground, lumpy with roots and stones, made it difficult to walk, and the smell reeked like a musty old cave, choking out any fresh air the river might have brought. Walking stealthily with nothing but twisted tunnels commanding her movements.

“Are we on the same trail as my brother?” she asked. Neither Samuel nor Rory answered.

After trudging through the darkness with no end in sight, no flames of her brother’s torch nor a hint that an outside world still existed, she stopped and touched Samuel’s arm.

“Call them again, please.” Again, Samuel’s voice echoed. They waited longer than they should have. No response.

He called again louder. This time his voice seemed muffled by the surrounding growth. She heard no echo, neither did Barin answer.

“Perhaps they’re too close to the river to hear us. Come, let’s keep movin’,” Rory said.

“I suppose we’ll meet up with them eventually,” Erika agreed.

Regardless of how long they walked, the landscape didn’t change but for the wet air that now formed around them. A fog seeped through the trees, filling the tunnel with fingers of mist.

Fingers, yes. Just as she had seen on the mountain. Long knobby fingers with sharp fingernails. When a vivid and vaporous finger pointed at her from up ahead, she grabbed both Samuel and Rory’s arms.

“Holy Idols!” Samuel whispered through clenched teeth as he drew his sword.

“That weapon will do no good against the mountain giants, Samuel,” Rory whispered nodding toward Samuel’s sword, though he drew his own.

“What will, then?” Erika asked, pulling an arrow from her quiver.

Samuel shook his head. “If we cannot see him, perhaps he cannot see us, either” Samuel whispered. “Or hear. Avoid his touch.”

As the misty finger moved toward them, they crouched low and moved aside to let it pass. But more fingers were making their way along the trail toward them.

“What do they do when they touch you?” Erika asked, wondering if these mountain giants had ever caught anyone.

For an answer, they heard a scream coming from further up the trail. Barin! The mist changed course, melting into the darkness up ahead. Erika broke into a run after it, Samuel, and Rory at her side.

The vapor now appeared as the feet of a giant. Like lightning, the mountain ogre sped through the canyon toward the cries they had heard. Erika and the soldiers followed jogging, and out of breath. The tunnel widened, and before them, a thick blanket of haze covered the forest. Muffled groans of human beings came from the center of the fog. Erika would have hurried in, but Samuel held her back.

“Careful,” he whispered. “Something’s happening. Something’s in there.”

Rory stepped ahead of her, and a misty hand grabbed his foot. He hit the ground, and the vapor rolled over him, thickening until Erika could barely see him.

“Help,” Rory cried as he tossed in the dirt. “I’m being crushed.” Even as he spoke the mist took form and like a sponge, grew. From the white vapor, it darkened until it became a broad-chested being. His arms were as large as a horse’s body, his head the size of a castle gate. Limb by horrid limb, he materialized as he planted his knees on Rory’s back and pushed the young man against the earth with his huge cloudy hands, laughing as he pressed Rory into the ground.

The harder the mountain giant pushed, the stronger he became until his hands turned to stone and the rest of him unfolded. Behind him, hovering over the giant, encouraging him, stood a figure in a dark cloak. The form knelt, sucking in the air around Rory, breathing deeper and deeper as the soldier’s screams became muffled. Erika dove forward, reaching for Rory’s hand. The giant slapped her away, and she fell backward. Samuel scrambled and grabbed Rory’s arm. The giant growled, swiping out at Samuel. The cloaked figure had inched near enough to Rory’s face, as if stealing his breath.

Erika jumped back up, catching her wind. Samuel still had hold of their friend, and so she lunged for Rory’s other arm. The giant let up, his weight no longer holding Rory, and took a swing at Erika. Much quicker than the slow-moving ogre, Erika dodged his iron fist. Samuel pulled, moving Rory away from the giant. Erika waved her arms to distract the giant long enough for Samuel to pull Rory into the tangled web of trees nearby. Erika sped into the brush and joined them as the giant dissipated into mist again, his fingers chased them, but with a body too large to slink in-between the folds of the forest.

Rory panted—his face covered with bruises. He bent over, gasping for air. Had he not been wearing armor, he would have been dead. “They come alive as they kill,” he said. “I felt my life being sucked away.”

“By the figure in the robe?”

Rory nodded, still gasping. “Yes. It felt odd as if the devil stole the life out of me before I died.”

“Did you see him, Samuel?” Erika asked.

“I did.”

“The dark spirit,” Rory remarked in-between breaths.

“Lord Skotádi?” Erika asked.

Rory shrugged. “I’m not sure if it be the same. There’s a dark lord who steals the life out of people dyin’. It’s an old legend in Fairmistle, but my people have seen it and know it’s more than a folktale, sure as the stars come out at night. Now I’ve seen it too.”

Erika brushed the dirt and grime off the young man’s face. “Will you be all right?” she asked.

“Better than if you hadn’t dragged me away.”

“The giants are running to where we heard those cries. We’ve got to find Barin,” Samuel urged.

Erika and Rory followed Samuel, weaving in and out of roots and low growing branches while the mass of mountain giants rolled like a wave of fog on the road. The monsters had the appearance of translucent warriors shifting in and out of one another, half vapor, half form heading toward a thicker more ominous mass. The cries of men grew louder. When the mountain giants reached their destination, they piled themselves atop one another until their bodies fused in one thick and eerie cloud.

“There’s a heavier mass under them,” Rory whispered, his voice trembling.

“Enjoying their kill as if at a feast.”

Erika saw arms and legs of stone and iron moving over what she presumed were their victims. Hurrying toward the mass, she stumbled over a sword. Weapons lay strewn in the surrounding dirt, satchels, boots, remnants of her brother’s army. Her heart stood still. The screams coming from the center of the haze were unbearable.

“No!” She rushed toward the fog, her arm snatched by Rory.

“They’ll slaughter you,” he pleaded. “We don’t want that.”

“We need to do something!”

Samuel had dashed ahead and finding a torch Barin’s troops had carried, he returned, blowing on the embers until a flame ignited. As he walked back to her, led by the flame, the mist recoiled from it.

“The fire! The giants are dodging the fire. Light another!” She and Rory broke branches from the vines and lit the tips from Samuel’s torch. Erika stepped into the mist, swinging her torch in a broad circle, stomping at the giants, angry and determined.

“Go away, you beasts! Leave this place!” she commanded. The mist flinched wherever the torch touched it. Though it tried to return, with the three of them wielding fire, the giants had no recourse but to leave.

In the thinning mist, a fleeting cloaked figure disappeared among the trees.

The giants that had materialized diminished back into vapor. One by one they peeled off each other like an onion shedding its skin, leaving a wretched pile of human beings uncovered.

Erika moaned when she saw her brother’s army. Mangled armor, crushed helmets, and clothing strewn across the ground. She stepped over the remains searching for life. Samuel knelt next to a soldier and lifted him into his arms. Rory helped a wounded man remove a bent cuirass. Because of their armor, most of the men were still alive, rising, catching their breath, and removing damaged armor.

“He’s here, Fairest. He’s alive. A might muddled but breathin’,” Rory answered.

Erika rushed to her brother as Barin sat upright, in better shape than Rory had given him credit. She helped him remove his helm and then threw her arms around him. “Thank Pólemos you’re alive,” she whispered as she hugged him.

“We were dead men. What did you do? Why did they flee?” Barin asked Rory.

“The torches, Vasil,” Rory answered.

Barin rose and took command again, gathering his army, helping to revive the rest of his troops. Of all nineteen men, one had died and one crushed so brutally that his leg needed a splint.

“Now that we know how to keep mountain giants away, we can move on. We have a river to cross, and a canyon wall to climb. Let’s pick up our weary bones. Gather what is usable and begin our journey home. We’ll bury Richard, and then two of you will take this man as your charge,” he nodded toward the soldier with the broken bones. “From now on we stay close together.”

Barin’s eyes rested on her, and he smiled. What a sight she must have been with her hair no longer tied but hanging in knotted streams over her shoulder guards. Sweat had mixed with tears and when she wiped her face, she removed a handful of mud.

Neal returned from scouting upstream. “There’s a way across the river I think we can manage well enough if some men will help the wounded and others carry twice the load. It’s no more than waist high for any of us.”

“Good news, at last!” Barin said. “Then let’s leave this place!”

No one would question that command. Barin limped toward the river and Erika and the men followed.