—Oldest recorded Pyrrhan lullaby
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Idon’t know what I expected. Ghosts? Giants?
But no. We get both—ghostly giants at least twenty feet tall.
“I am not having a good time,” I shout, because anger is safer than fear. I can still function with anger, but terror makes me want to freeze in my tracks. The twenty-paces-high, restlessgiantspirits are stomping across the cave floor toward us, bellowing roars like mountains crashing into each other.
“Don’t see that every day,” Kaelen says, and I look at him in disbelief.
He’ssmiling.
Suddenly, the old scrolls with their tales of Valourian berserkers don’t seem as far-fetched.
“Stay with me, Soli. I don’t know if my sword can even touch them, but if we have to face danger, let’s do it together.”
“Kaelen,” I begin, with no idea of what I want to say next.
He flashes a wicked grin and grabs my arm to pull me toward him. Then he presses a quick, hard kiss on my lips and releases me. “If we’re going to die, I wanted to do that one last time.”
Amid all that chaos, I stare at him, touching my fingers to my lips, then return his grin. “Well, forget that. We’re not dying now!”
With that, he races toward the draugrs, shouting a war cry.“A Valourian, A Valour!”
I throw all sense to the wind and follow him, dagger in hand, but Andras cuts between me and Kaelen, shoves me back, and runs towardthe draugrs. There are three of them; no, four—one is smaller, maybe only twelve feet tall.
I’m now somehow holding the reins for Cloud, River, and Andras’s horse, none of whom show the slightest inclination to follow the men toward the draugrs. Maybe horses really are smarter than humans.
When the prince suddenly swerves to the left, the Sylvan swerves to the right, as if they’ve fought together in a dozen wars, a hundred, both of them yelling and making so much noise that it confuses the draugrs, who swing their huge heads back and forth and stumble to a stop.
I watch, waiting for my chance to do … something. Until an opportunity presents itself, I study these mythical creatures, which I didn’t completely believe in until this moment. They’re enormous, the size of a two-story house, except for the smaller one, who is only as big as a large outbuilding. They don’t wear clothes, but a mossy green covering rises from their giant stone feet to their shoulders. If these are truly the draugrs and not simply remnants of the giants, they don’t seem all that restless, necessarily.
More … angry.
Really, really angry.
They look like stone statues come to life, if the statues were carved by a sculptor who’d never seen the human form. Their heads are shaped like enormous square blocks, completely oversize and disproportionate to their bodies, which are easily half as wide as they are tall. There’s no way we can get past them, even if thatisa tunnel on the other side of the cave. Their eyes are slashes like fissures in the stone of their faces, and an eerie red light burns deep inside where a pupil would be on a person. Their mouths are open in vicious stone snarls, and their roars thunder through the cave, bouncing off walls and smashing into my ears.
“Try singing, Andras!”
The Sylvan shoots a disbelieving look at me. “Really?”
“I don’t know! Don’t listen to me! What do I know?” I shout, horrified that my sketchy memory of something I read a long time ago could get us all killed.
“Who else would we listen to?” Andras calls out, then lowers his sword and begins to sing in Sylvan.
I don’t know what the song means, but his voice and the tune are so beautiful I can’t help but get caught up in the song until Chitai shouts, “Watch out, watch out, watch out!” and snaps me out of my trance.
The first three draugrs all sway back and forth, as captivated by Andras’s song as I was, but the smaller one—the one in the back—runs right at the Sylvan lord and crashes into him.
The singing stops.
When the draugr roars out his triumph, waving one shadowy fist in the air, I see Andras, unmoving, on the floor of the cave.
He might be dead because I said we should sing.
Sing.
