Giants Above Nashkel

By the second day, Kora had stopped asking Maeril whether the weather would turn and started asking when. The rest of the caravan learned more slowly.

Maeril sent the spectral hawk high when the land opened and matched what it saw against mud, grass, birds, and wind below. She called turns before rain reached them and shifted wagons away from ruts that opened black under passing wheels.

At one narrow cut, she had them cross one wagon at a time, with animals led 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.

By the time Nashkel came into view, the Cloud Peaks had grown from distant darkness into shoulders of rock and cloud, heavy against the southern sky.

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 it did when a wheel began to wobble under load.

Caravans waited near the square, in the inn yard, and 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 naming the thing they all feared.

Even the children in the family wagon fell silent.

Maeril came to stand beside Rishi.

“This is not delay,” she said.

“Something’s wrong.”

“This is fear with nowhere else to go.”

A local guard met Darran near the inn yard. He had the exhausted expression of a man who had repeated the same bad news too many times and still had to deal with the consequences.

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

Darran looked toward the road above town. “Start with what you saw.”

“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.”

Rishi looked toward the road rising beyond town, where cloud pressed low over the pass.

“Giants,” he said. The nearest waiting merchants shifted.

“Two. Maybe more,” the guard said.

“Kobolds hold the lower gullies. They screech at night and scatter whenever a patrol comes close—enough noise and movement to keep our eyes off the heights.”

He looked up toward the pass. “The wagons are hit from above. One team was 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.

Iron Throne trouble. Mountain curses. Bandits paying monsters. Black Network insurance. Mine spirits. Angry gods. One man swore there was a ghost with a hammer.

Darran listened to all of it for less than a minute. Then he held up one hand.

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

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

Darran turned toward Kora. “We stay.”

Kora nodded. “I’ll set the watches and get the guards moving.”

Darran did not look to Rishi or the locals. He looked at Maeril first.

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

Maeril looked at the inn.

“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, expect judgment.”

Darran looked at the guard. “Find the room.”

The guard gave Darran a helpless shrug. “There’s a room behind the inn. Follow me.”

He led them through the crowded common room and around the back.

It was a storage space behind the inn, narrow, windowless, and smelling of sacks, old apples, and damp wood.

“Good enough,” Maeril said, dismissing the guard.

Maeril set her spellbook on an upturned crate.

Rishi came in and closed the door behind them.

Outside, the noise muffled: wheels, voices, animals, fear changing hands.

Inside, Maeril set the room for spellwork with quick precision. Book. Chalk. Basin. A line on the floor, not quite a circle. Two small marks by the door. One by the crate. Her fingers moved fast, but not carelessly.

Rishi stood where he could see her.

She noticed.

“I might seem distant for a moment.”

Rishi nodded, guarding the small place.

The spell began quietly.

Maeril drew a small tuft of bat fur from her component pouch and held it between two fingers above the basin. She spoke a short phrase under her breath, then traced a precise shape in the air with her free hand.

No light answered her. The eye that opened above the basin was invisible; it slipped beneath the door, carrying Maeril’s attention toward the pass.

Her eyes remained open but did not see him.

She held her body still with effort. A finger twitched once against the crate. Her mouth tightened, then eased. Her breath slowed, caught, then returned thinner than before.

Rishi knew her magic in its smaller workings: unseen hands, quiet lights, locks yielding, stains lifting, stubborn pages made legible. This was different. She had sent her sight where her body could not go, leaving her body under his protection.

Maeril’s fingers curled.

Not fear.

Attention.

Through the arcane eye, she followed the pass beyond kobolds in the lower rocks to prepared stones above the bend, giant tracks, and a camp hidden behind the ridge.

She returned all at once. For one breath, her gaze found the room piece by piece: basin, crate, chalk, door, him.

Rishi waited until she saw him.

Then he asked, “What did you see?”

She licked dry lips.

“Someone made giants into a road problem,” she said. “Not elegantly. But enough to kill wagons.”

“Did anything see you?”

Her expression flickered.

“No. But invisible is not the same as undetectable. I did not intend to test the distinction.”

Rishi did not like that.

She caught the look on his face. “Which is why I did not stay longer. See? Wisdom. Growth. Very irritating.”

Maeril gathered her things. Rishi opened the door, and they stepped into the inn’s larger back room.

Darran shifted a mug to pin down one of two bad maps while Kora and the local guard traced the pass across a third, worse sketch.

Kora looked up first.

Maeril met her with the expression of a woman bringing unwelcome facts and no intention of softening them.

“The locals are right,” she said. “The pass is held. Two giants, kobolds in the lower rocks, prepared stones above the bend. They are working together—holding the road, not merely hunting along it. Someone has organized them.”

Darran absorbed that without flinching, then tapped the map. “Can the wagons move?”

“No,” Maeril and Rishi said together.

Darran looked between them.

Rishi 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,” Rishi 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 climb, shut up, and stay useful while afraid.”

The local guard drew himself up, mouth already opening.

Darran cut him off. “Kora chooses.”

Kora nodded once.

Maeril glanced toward Rishi. “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.”

Rishi inclined his head.

Maeril choked back a laugh.

Kora narrowed her eyes. “Problem?”

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

Kora gave her one last narrow look, then bent over the maps again.

The plan came together quickly because few choices remained. Darran would remain in Nashkel with the wagons, the family, and the cargo.

Kora would choose a small group of guards and lead them into the pass, but hold them below the camp until the stones had fallen. Maeril would make Rishi invisible, then watch the camp from below. Rishi would enter alone and trigger the rockfall while the road was empty, bringing the stones down before any wagon or guard passed beneath them.

No one called it safe.

With the broad shape agreed, Kora set their departure for the following morning.

“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 Rishi. “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.