At first, he felt it through the soles of his feet: a small, unsourced vibration, like a cart a long way off. Then the river shivered, its surface breaking into ripples that ran against the current. The birds fell silent all at once. A woman in the nearest field straightened and turned toward the trees, shading her eyes.
Halfdan knew that kind of silence. Cities have it too, right before something you'll remember for the rest of your life happens.
"Lili," he said softly. "Behind me."
She obeyed at once, pressing against his back, her fingers finding the seam of his belt and hooking in, the way his little sisters used to hold on to him when crowded streets got too big. He planted his feet on two stones and felt the shallow water slip and chatter around his ankles.
The trees on the far edge of the field leaned fractionally the wrong way. Something big moved where there was no path big enough to hold it. Stalks bent and didn't spring back. A line of olive trees at the boundary shivered like a row of old men. Then the line broke.
"…You've got to be kidding me," he muttered.
A giant stepped into the light, and the day itself seemed to change shape.
He was as tall as a house raised on another house's shoulders, ten meters, maybe more; it barely mattered; he made human measurements feel like children stacking blocks. His skin had the color and texture of dried clay left in sun, cracked in tributaries, weathered to plates over the big muscles of thigh and shoulder. He wore a ragged skirt of leather and woven grass. His hair hung in cords, matted with burrs and dust, and his beard was a wild, knotted thing like seaweed caught on a rock. His eyes were wrong. They were the wrong red, a glassy, feverish color that did not belong in living faces. When he breathed, the sound scraped.
People ran. They ran the way people always run: the nearest first, then the next, then all of them, as if terror were a liquid that had to spill to the edge before it could drop. Someone yelled, "Get the children!" in a voice already too high.
Halfdan's mind did a quick, bright, ugly arithmetic.
A giant that size could close the distance between the treeline and the town in moments. Outrunning it would be impossible for ordinary people, fighting it, even less so.
The giant had stepped on two workers without noticing. One still moved. The other didn't. The giant's foot came up, a slab of packed mud; it left a print that filled with water. He swung his hand at a cart. It exploded into wood and onions.
Halfdan shoved Lili further behind him with one hand and raised the other. "Include: Arash," he said. The gauntlet answered like a muscle that had been waiting for an instruction. Arash's clarity slid into him, clean and cool. Distance, wind, the lazy tilt of the giant's head, he saw it all, understood it instinctively, the way a hawk understands a field's map of mice.
"Stay on the stones," he said. "If he comes toward the river, run for the bridge. Do not stop. If I yell, you run faster."
"You cannot-" she began, in the tone children have right before they say "do this instead of that," and he cut her off gently but firmly.
"Captain's orders," he said.
She swallowed and nodded, eyes wide, mouth small.
He pulled energy into his hand. The bow of light drew itself as if it were a secret he had always kept, and the arrow was an extension of the way he wanted the world to be.
"Great," he sighed. "First day in my third life, and there's already a boss fight. I almost miss being a crippled noble. Almost."
He breathed in, breathed out, and loosed.
The arrow went through the giant's left eye with a soft, obscene pop. Red liquid burst and leaked. The giant's head jerked back. His mouth opened. The sound that came out was not a roar so much as a desperate, furious tearing, an avalanche trying to be a word.
"Good," Halfdan said under his breath, and shot again. The second arrow took the right eye. It was good work. It would have been better if anything in this world obeyed simple rules.
The giant did not fall down crying. He did not turn his head slowly and topple like a tree. He went suddenly, horrifyingly fast. Blind, he swung toward the place where the pain had come from, hands raking the air, fingers like scythes. He plowed forward. People who hadn't run yet ran then; a man standing frozen as if inside a spell broke free of it and dove into a ditch. The giant's foot hit the stepping stones short of Halfdan's position and slipped; he crashed a knee into the water with a splash that slapped his face with cold.
Halfdan had three choices: retreat onto the bank and hope the giant followed a different noise; stand and shoot and hope he got lucky more than once; or be an idiot.
He shot.
Arash's guidance lived in his hands. He loosed an arrow into the soft spot beneath the chin, another into the crook of the elbow as those massive fingers reached for him. The arrows sang through the air, struck true, and buried themselves deep. But the giant's flesh wasn't just flesh, it was something denser, older, packed with the weight of years. The wounds bled lightly… and nothing more.
A hand swept where he had been. He jumped back two stones, then another, the bow dissolving and reforming with each breath. "How long?" he asked the gauntlet, not expecting an answer and getting one anyway, a pressure against his wrist bone that resolved into a number in his head. MP ticking down like drops off a blade. Not disastrous levels yet. Not good either.
"Hal!" Lili's voice, thin with fear and fury both. He didn't take his eyes off the giant to answer.
"Bridge," he said. "Now."
She hesitated for half a heartbeat, stubbornness warring with reason, and then he heard her run, small shoe-leather on dust.
The giant lunged, hands scooping. Halfdan sprang sideways. He felt the wind of those fingers; it lifted the hair at his temple. He hit a wet rock, slid, corrected, and fired three arrows in a rhythm his body made without asking permission. Inside the wrist. Hollow above the clavicle. Soft patch at the temple that was no longer an eye.
The giant flailed, found a tree instead of him, and tore it up by the roots. He swung it blindly. It hit the water and threw a fan of glitter and mud. Halfdan ducked and came up coughing, tasting sand.
The giant found something else to throw, half of the cart he had smashed, and hurled it in a blind arc. Halfdan dove. The cart slammed into the shallow water where he had been standing and blew apart. A wheel caromed off a stone and boomed away like a bell.
He came up dripping and tasted metal. The villagers had reached the far slope now, a ragged line pulled into human bundles, two or three around each of the smallest, pulling, pushing, carrying. Someone had fallen; two more bent to haul him up, curses and prayers braided on their tongues.
"David made it look easy," he muttered. "Maybe I just need a sling."
He ran. He didn't remember deciding to run; his body threaded itself through the space between the giant's legs, found purchase on the inside curve of an ankle, sprang, up a calf, across the corded arch of a knee, along the rough slope of a thigh. He was a thought in motion, a line drawn across an impossible page.
"Hal!" Lili's voice again, far and small, like the bell that had rung earlier. He didn't look. He couldn't. He was balanced on a shelf of muscle the size of a door, and the giant was reaching down now in this horrible, clumsy sweep, trying to crush the itch crawling on him.
Halfdan shot. Tendons at the groin, the notch under ribs, the seam of muscle at the side of the neck. He felt each shot land; he felt the giant's whole body react to each as if he were a small, cruel insect with pins. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough. He needed a joint to ruin or a brain to shut off. He had already done the eyes.
The giant convulsed. Halfdan lost his footing and slid, catching himself on the belt that bound the ragged skirt.
"Down!" someone screamed.
It wasn't Lili. It was a deep, manly voice. The warning sliced through everything.
Halfdan dropped, letting gravity claim him. A heartbeat later, the giant's hand slammed into the spot where he'd been, like a man trying to crush a mosquito.
Halfdan hit water. The shock slapped the thought out of him for a heartbeat. He came up to the smell of mud and the taste of iron. The "down" voice shouted something else he couldn't catch; people were still moving, but there was a new contour to the way they moved, a sense in the chaos, as if someone had pulled them into a shape.
He spat and wiped his eyes and looked up because some part of him refused not to. The giant had found him again by the luck of rage. He felt the moment settle, the way a coin half off a table decides whether to fall or not.
"Arash," he said, though there was no need to say it. "Guide me."
He drew the bow of light farther than before, the string humming against his fingers like a tuning fork. He braced his stance against water that wanted to trip him, breathed once, steady.
He aimed for the seam where the giant's clay plates overlapped at the throat, a narrow line that rose and fell with every breath. He could put an arrow through that.
He could.
He fired.
The arrow flew, a simple solution to an impossible equation. It struck the seam and went through. Blood flowed, and the giant reeled. He wasn't falling. He was recalculating how to break the thing that hurt him.
"Move!" the gravel-voice roared from the river bank, closer now. "Boy, move!"
Halfdan's body had already decided to. He threw himself sideways, across slippery stone, knees barking against edges, breath in halves. The giant's hand slammed down where he'd been, so close he felt the wind of it on his scalp. Stone shattered; water jumped sky-high in a curtain.
He knew two things clearly.
First: he could not keep this up. Include ate MP like fire eats dry grass. Another few minutes, ten, maybe twelve, and he'd be standing there with his pretty face a few steps away from a giant. About as useful as a man shouting advice from the sidelines.
Second: unless something changed, people would die. Not just faceless people, either. Lili. The woman with honey cakes. The man who had fallen in the field and the two who went back for him because that's what decent people do when the world sharpens its teeth.
Halfdan stood in water to his ankles, mud around his boots; the world balanced on those two small facts. He looked up at the blind, furious head that had turned toward his last arrow the way a sunflower turns to light it can no longer see. He felt the gauntlet's weight like fate on his bones.
"Install?" he said aloud, the way someone says "maybe I should take the parachute" while already falling. Arash thrummed. The idea snapped into his mind fully formed: full access, all speed, all aim, all of Arash's terrible single-minded grace. Twenty MP a minute. His reserves would go like oil on hot stone. He could not keep that up long. He might not need to.
He thought of Rhea's decree and the neat way cruelty wears a crown. He thought of Lucia's fingers twisted in her skirt. He thought of Giuliano's bright hair and that stupid, perfect, easy smile.
Somewhere, faint, like a ribbon through a crowd, he heard Lili's voice. "Hal!"
He set his shoulders. "Alright," he said to nobody, to the world, to the god who had dumped him here with a toy and a target. "Let's do the stupid thing."
He drew as deep as his lungs would let him. He felt the change in the air and knew he was about to carve a hole in his own luck and climb through it.
"Install-" he began, and the giant charged, and the river exploded around him, and the sky tilted, and the world took a breath-