Giants Above Nashkel

By the second day, Kora had stopped asking Maeril whether the weather would turn and started asking when.

The caravan learned after that.

Not eagerly. Not gracefully. But the road kept proving Maeril right in small, useful ways. She sent the spectral hawk high when the land opened, read the clouds when the hawk vanished into them, and matched what it saw from above with what mud, grass, birds, and wind told her below. She called turns before the rain reached them. She shifted wagons away from ruts that looked solid until they opened black under passing wheels. She had them cross one narrow cut one wagon at a time, animals walked instead of driven, while Kora stared down the first guard foolish enough to complain.

By the third evening, Darran rode back to Maeril before choosing a halt, the old woman in the family wagon asked her about weather before distance, and Kora was giving orders while Maeril was still pointing.

The caravan learned.

Slowly.

Grudgingly.

Enough.

Under that learning, the land climbed. Fields loosened into rougher ground. Stone rose through the road. The rain thinned, then returned colder. The Cloud Peaks grew from distant darkness into shoulders of rock and cloud that held the southern sky down with both hands.

Nashkel received them with too many wagons standing still.

Darran saw it before the lead team crossed fully into town. His face changed the way a ledger changed when a number stopped balancing.

Caravans waited near the square, in the inn yard, along the warehouse road, tucked against walls where no moving caravan should be. Oxen stood unharnessed under damp canvas. Guards lingered in knots, not resting, not working. Drovers argued over nothing because nothing was safer than the thing they all wanted to argue about.

The family wagon went quiet.

Even the children stopped looking for the hawk.

Maeril came to stand beside Ṛṣi near the second wagon.

“This is not delay,” she said.

“No.”

“This is fear that learned to park.”

A local guard met Darran near the inn yard. He had rain in his beard, a dented helm under one arm, and the exhausted expression of a man who had repeated the same bad news until words had lost their shape.

“No one through the upper road,” he said before Darran could ask. “Not today. Not tomorrow unless someone changes the mountain’s mind.”

Darran did not dismount. “Rocks?”

“Rocks. Screeching in the high gullies. Two giants seen clear enough to stop arguing about shadows.”

The nearest drover spat into the mud.

“One had a tree,” the guard added.

Maeril’s brows lifted. “A tree.”

“Trunk. Branches stripped. Carried it like a club.”

“Subtle.”

“Wasn’t trying to be.”

Ṛṣi looked toward the road rising beyond town, where cloud pressed low over the pass-country.

“Giants,” he said, weighing the word.

The word still made the nearest waiting merchants shift.

The guard nodded. “Two. Maybe more if fear is counting. Kobolds heard near the rocks. Little devils screech at night and scatter when patrols get too close. Wagons hit from above. One team crushed. One driver lived long enough to wish he hadn’t seen it.”

Rumors arrived behind him as if they had been waiting for permission.

Old Iron Throne trouble. Mountain curses. Bandits paying monsters. Black Network insurance. Mine spirits. Angry gods. A ghost with a hammer, according to one man whose confidence deserved no support.

Darran listened to all of it for less than a minute.

Then he held up one hand.

“Rumors don’t crush axles,” he said. “Giants do.”

The guard looked relieved to hear someone choose the solid danger.

Darran turned toward Kora. “Wagons stay.”

“They were staying whether you said it or not.”

“Good.”

He turned next to Maeril.

Not after Ṛṣi. Not after asking the local men again.

Maeril first.

“What can you tell me that they can’t?”

Maeril looked briefly at Kora.

Kora’s face did not change, but she lifted her chin a fraction.

There.

Work.

Maeril drew in one slow breath.

“I can tell you after I look.”

The local guard frowned. “You want to go up there?”

“No. I have an uncommon fondness for my skull.” She tapped her temple once. “I want a room. Quiet. One door. A table if the gods are feeling literate. Basin if not. Nobody interrupts me unless the inn catches fire, and even then I expect judgment.”

Darran looked at the guard.

The guard looked at Kora.

Kora said, “Find the room.”

He found the room.

It was a storage space behind the inn, narrow, windowless, and smelling of sacks, old apples, and damp wood. Good enough. A bad place for dinner. A fine place for leaving one’s sight somewhere else.

Maeril set her spellbook on an upturned crate.

Ṛṣi closed the door behind them.

The latch sounded louder than it should have.

Outside, Nashkel’s noise became muffled: wheels, voices, animals, fear changing hands. Inside, Maeril arranged herself with quick precision. Book. Chalk. Basin. A line on the floor that was not quite a circle. Two small marks near the door. One near the crate. Her fingers moved fast, but not carelessly.

Ṛṣi stood where he could see the door.

And her.

She noticed.

“Do not hover.”

“I am guarding.”

“You guard like a moral weather system.”

“I can stand elsewhere.”

“No.” She did not look up from the chalk. “Stand there.”

So he did.

The spell began without drama.

That made it stranger.

No burst of light. No theatrical sound. Maeril set both hands near the basin, breathed once, and let the room lose part of her.

Her eyes remained open.

They did not see him.

Her body held still with the effort of someone walking a narrow ledge far away. A finger twitched once against the crate. Her mouth tightened. Then eased. Her breath slowed, then caught, then returned thinner than before.

Ṛṣi had seen her magic often enough by now: unseen hands, quiet lights, murmured words over ink, locks, stains, pages, and the stubborn little inconveniences of living. He had seen her read magic from stone and thread. He had seen her hold a man still in the middle of violence with one hard word.

This was different.

This was absence made disciplined.

She had sent her sight where her body could not go, and now her body sat in a storage room under his protection, breathing because she trusted the door to remain closed and trusted him to keep the world from reaching her before she returned.

The thought tightened something in his chest.

A step sounded outside.

Ṛṣi’s hand shifted on the staff.

The step passed.

Maeril’s fingers curled.

Not fear.

Attention.

Somewhere far from the room, she had found something.

He wanted to ask.

He did not.

The room held.

A cart rattled outside. A man cursed. Somewhere in the inn, someone laughed too loudly and stopped too quickly. The basin water trembled though nothing touched it.

Maeril inhaled sharply.

Her eyes focused.

She was back all at once and not entirely back for a breath after that. Her gaze found the room piece by piece: basin, crate, chalk, door, him.

Ṛṣi waited until she saw him.

Then he asked, “What did you see?”

She licked dry lips.

“Enough.”

That was not reassuring.

“Two giants,” she said. “One with a stripped tree trunk. The locals were not exaggerating that part, which is disappointing because I had hopes for metaphor.”

He stayed silent.

“Kobolds in the rock. Prepared stones above the bend. A camp tucked behind the ridge.” She reached for the map they had brought and touched the blank space where the pass narrowed. “And enough wrongness in the goods and tools to say someone made giants into a road problem.”

“Organized.”

“Yes. Not elegantly. But enough to kill wagons.”

“Did anything see you?”

Her expression flickered.

“No. But something might have noticed the shape of looking if I had stayed longer.”

Ṛṣi did not like that.

Maeril saw it.

“Which is why I did not stay longer. See? Wisdom. Growth. Very irritating.”

He opened the door.

Darran, Kora, and the local guard were already waiting in the larger room beyond, bent over a table where two bad maps and one worse sketch had been weighted under mugs.

Kora looked up first.

Maeril entered with the expression of a woman bringing unwelcome clarity and no apologies.

“The locals are right,” she said. “The pass is held. Two giants, kobolds near the stone, prepared rocks above the bend, and enough organization that this is not wandering hunger.”

Darran absorbed that without flinching.

“What do you need?”

Maeril looked at Kora.

“People who can obey quickly.”

Kora smiled then.

Not nicely.

“I have people who can learn.”

Darran tapped the map. “Can the wagons move?”

“No,” Maeril and Ṛṣi said together.

Darran looked between them.

Ṛṣi touched the narrow pass on the sketch. “Not while the stones remain above the road.”

Kora leaned over the table. “So stones first.”

“Stones first,” Ṛṣi said. “Then giants.”

Maeril added, “Preferably before the giants notice how attached everyone is to breathing.”

The local guard rubbed his face. “You’re talking about going up there.”

“We are talking,” Maeril said, “about not sending wagons underneath murder-rocks and hoping optimism has structural value.”

Kora pointed with two fingers. “Wagons stay. Guards go light. Spears, swords, shortbows. No one comes who can’t shut up, climb, and be afraid without becoming useless.”

The guard looked offended on behalf of several people not in the room.

Darran did not.

“Kora chooses,” he said.

“I was going to.”

Maeril glanced toward Ṛṣi. “Where does he go?”

Kora looked him over: robe, sandals, staff, calm hands, no armor worth naming.

“Somewhere he doesn’t get squashed before he can poke something useful with that stick.”

Ṛṣi inclined his head.

Maeril made a small sound.

Kora narrowed her eyes. “Problem?”

“No,” Maeril said, with heroic restraint. “Please continue.”

Ṛṣi looked at the table.

Darran looked briefly confused and then decided, wisely, that the matter was not his road.

The shape of the plan came fast because there was not enough room for cleverness.

Wagons stayed in Nashkel. Darran stayed with them and the family and the cargo. Kora took a small band of guards who could move without sounding like dropped kettles. Maeril handled the timing of stone, weather, and field magic. Ṛṣi went where the first harm had to be stopped by a body.

No one called it safe.

That helped.

Kora straightened. “Before dawn.”

Maeril closed her eyes.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Dawn and I have never reached a lasting agreement.”

“Dawn doesn’t negotiate.”

Maeril opened one eye. “That explains much.”

Kora picked up her spear. “Sleep if you can. Complain if you must. Move when I say.”

“See?” Maeril said to Ṛṣi. “This is why I like her.”

Outside, the wind pressed cold against the inn walls.

Beyond Nashkel, the pass waited under cloud, stone, and two giants who had not yet learned that the road had begun answering back.