Lyne was beyond exasperated—ready to turn on his heel and walk home, it seemed. “Then why denote her as a giantess?” He threw a look at Weaver, as if it were her fault. “F’relsake, can’t we come up with a different term?”

“The First Children of Eve are known by many names, if you only listen with care to the old songs,” said Weaver. “Angel Eaters, Adam’s Woe, Cairn’s Care  . . .”

“Fine!” Lyne snapped. “All better names than ‘giantess.’”

Burr had stopped a few hundred paces short of a cottage that they had all, without discussing it, been heading for since it had hove into view. Until recently they had been traversing wolfish country, where even the creatures that weren’t wolves tended to come equipped with a remarkable array of horns, tusks, and claws. In such places Burr liked to advance to the head of the group. Brindle liked to bring up the rear. Remarks he’d made along the way suggested he was afraid of being attacked from behind by unspecified creatures who—or so it could be guessed—were extraordinarily quiet in their movements and patient in their approach to hunting. But there hadn’t been much excitement so far. Everything that had come at them had done so from the front and found itself on the wrong end of Burr’s spear. A few times Prim had taken up her bow and nocked an arrow, just in case, but not let any fly.

At no point during even the most thrilling encounters had Burr actually shown signs of excitement, or exhibited the least reluctance to keep forging ahead, and so it was strange that he now stopped, in an open space with no wild beasts of any kind in evidence, and no obstructions. A stone’s throw away, off to their left, a couple of mounts were eating grass, bending their necks to crop it from the ground and then bobbing back up to eye them curiously as they chewed.

“No walls, really,” Burr pointed out. “No weapons. Livestock out in plain sight, unafraid.”

“Yes indeed,” Mard said, “it seems very safe.”

“Why?” Brindle asked. Rhetorically. “That’s what Burr is asking himself.”

Mardellian hadn’t considered that angle. Neither had Prim.

“Well,” Mard guessed, “you know, we haven’t seen what’s inside the cottage yet.”

“Bread baking, to judge from the fragrance,” Prim said.

“It could be full of armed Autochthons.”

“It’s not,” said Brindle, and nodded at Burr. The man-at-arms, after giving the cottage only a quick look, had turned his back on it and was now surveying the sweep of dark hills that enclosed the valley and the pair of snowcapped peaks at its head, between which they had passed yesterday.

“You see—” Brindle began.

But Lyne, impatient with the lesson, cut him off. “We’ve been making our way through her defenses ever since we came down the pass and spotted that wolf up on the ridgeline, staring at us.”

“We’re . . . surrounded?” Mardellian asked.