“I can get us as close as you like,” Gertie said, and the next moment, we were standing on the riverbank.

The viewport followed us, drifting out of the sky to what, in this era, was just a river. There was wet sand, a dusting of snow over smooth, dark gray rocks, and the kind of trash that washes up beside any bit of flowing water. But in the seventeenth century, it had been a very different story.

Because, suddenly, we were looking at a graveyard.

There were so many bones scattered around that they’d developed clearly defined strata: the older, blackened ones were at the bottom, rotted by the river and laced with veins of green gunk; dark yellow resided above that, with a reddish patina, as if they’d been leeching something out of the surrounding soil; lighter yellow came next, in an almost buttery shade, the only normal looking ones there; and, finally, pure white, bleached by the sun, lay on top. It was a Mount Everest of bones, more than I’d realized when viewing them from the castle. And not all of them belonged to animals.

Because, from high above in the abattoir, I’d briefly seen—yes.

“There,” I caught sight of what looked like a huge boulder, off to the left. “Can you turn the view that way?”

Gertie turned it that way.

And then sucked in her breath, because that wasn’t a rock.

I stood on the riverbank, staring at what I’d briefly seen during the chase with Mircea. When we hit the abattoir, I’d landed over the refuse dump, where the parts of butchered animals that nobody wanted had been tossed down for the river to carry away. Only the river hadn’t carried all of them.

Because some were heavier than others—way heavier.

“Is that… what I think it is?” Gertie asked.

“If you think it’s the head of a dead giant, then yeah.”

I hadn’t been sure before, but there was no mistaking it now. It had acquired mossy growths across its heavy brow ridge, which almost gave it the appearance of eyebrows, and watery stains in green and brown that lent the bare bones hollows and color, almost like it lived again. The strands of lichen floating on the water added to the impression, with what, if you squinted, almost looked like hair.

There was no doubt about how he’d died. The side of the head had a hole in it big enough for me to have squeezed through, with cracks radiating outward that had yellowed and darkened with time. I didn’t see the rest of the body, although some of the bones scattered about were suspiciously large, but then, I didn’t need it.

The skull was plenty good enough.

Somebody had killed a giant, and tossed his remains down here, and I didn’t know why.