“Not quite.” He leaned closer to the flames. It was summer, and even with evening coming on quickly the air was warm, but Morgan could not remember feeling so cold in a long time, even in snowy Rimmersgard. “I almost became a meal for River Man.”

“Who is that?”

“The trolls call it a ‘Kallypook’ or something. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He described the monster to Porto, who reacted with appropriate awe at the prince’s close escape.

“That is why I never go far without my sword,” Porto said, patting the hilt fondly. “The forest, all these wild lands—they are full of terrible things. Did I tell you of some of the things I saw at the Nakkiga Gate?”

Morgan was about to answer wearily—when his teeth had temporarily stopped chattering—that he had heard about Nakkiga Gate from the old knight a hundred times, but he realized that he had never heard Sir Porto talk of anything quite like this. “Were there such things at Nakkiga?” he asked. “Kallypooks?”

“I did not see your water-monster, so I cannot say. But I can promise you that we fought many kinds of demon-spawn. The Norns themselves were bad enough, with their corpse-skin and dead eyes. And silent! Like fighting ghosts. There was one I had to fight by myself in a cave on the mountainside. He was already wounded, thank merciful God. And when I cut the arm off him, he never said a word, made no cry of pain—just kept crawling toward me, blood pouring out of him like a river. I had to slice his head away, nearly, before he gave up. But it was not the Norns I feared most. No, that would have been the giants.”

In his present mood, Morgan was not certain he wanted to hear any more, but he was also too cold to move away from the fire. “I have heard many stories about the northern giants,” he said to the old knight. “And not just yours. My grandfather had to fight one, he told me.”

“We fought more than one of them on our way to Nakkiga. Praise the Aedon there weren’t more. That was the Norns’ great weapon, those cursed, murdering beasts. Big as houses, strong as bulls.”

Morgan remembered the tales he had heard more recently from the men who had survived the fighting on the Frostmarch Road, about the biggest giant anyone had ever seen. His guts felt like water to think of it. “How can anyone kill such a thing?”

“One man can’t. Perhaps Camaris the Great could, but no other man I’ve met could survive long enough to make a killing blow. Great clubs those creatures had, studded with spikes, and every time they swung, men flew apart into bloody bits. I saw one giant pick a man up and squeeze him until he burst like a ripe plum crushed in your fist.”

Morgan was becoming even more certain he didn’t want to hear any more of Porto’s tales, but he did not know how to stop him without seeming cowardly. The old man had a look on his face that Morgan had never seen, as if he was not just telling a story but seeing it happen again before him.

“One moment the poor devil was alive and screaming,” the knight said, still staring at something that Morgan couldn’t see and didn’t want to see. “The next he was nothing but drippings and ragged skin.”

It was impossible not to flinch. “God preserve us! How did you not go mad?”

Porto gave him a flat look. “Oh, Highness, I saw worse, much worse. At Nakkiga, I saw our own dead climb up out of their graves and come against us.”

“Good God.”

“God could not have been there that day—at least that is what I thought, many times, may the Redeemer forgive me.” He made the sign of the Tree. “And even that was not the worst that came to me.” Porto shook his head. As he tried to find new words, he made a sound that Morgan recognized as someone fighting tears. “But I cannot talk about that, about what they did to me—no, what they did to my friend who died at Nakkiga. They . . . he . . .” The old man shook his head again, harder, as if trying to dislodge some stinging, biting vexation. “No, I still cannot speak of it. I am sorry, Highness. But those damned, white-skinned things are not God’s creatures, they are something else. Demons. Remember that if you ever face them.”

“And the Sithi?” It had suddenly occurred to Morgan that the very same people they were seeking all along the edges of this dark forest were the cousins of Porto’s Norns. If the Norns were demons, what did that make their relatives?

It took the old knight a moment to reply. When he did, his voice was still shaky, but more controlled than it had been. “The Sithi? What do you ask, my prince?” Porto slapped at his cloak, then looked around. “By all that is holy, why is there nothing to drink anywhere?”

Morgan was surprised to realize he hadn’t had a drink himself all day. “I’ll find something.” He fetched his saddlebags, which he had left hanging over a branch near his grazing horse, and carried them back to the fire, nodding to the men who gave him “Good day, Highness,” or “God speed you, Prince Morgan,” on the way. By the time he returned to the fire he felt a little better. He enjoyed traveling with battle-hardened men who treated him as one of their own—albeit a bit more exalted—instead of as an excuse to run to his grandfather and grandmother and complain about him.

He handed Porto a silver flask that carried his princely arms in gemstones and fine enamels. “The Cuthmanite Brothers’ best apple brandy. I brought it in case we became lost in the forest, or were attacked by Norns.”

Porto reached out for the flask, staring at it like a child given a colorful whirligig. “What good would this do if we were attacked by Norns, Highness?”

“It would make sure we didn’t care.” He dropped down on the log beside the old knight.

Porto took out the stopper and sniffed the neck of the flask, eyes shut. His smile unrolled across his bearded face like a hedgehog waking from a happy dream. “Ah,” he said, then offered it to the prince.

“Your health, Porto.” Morgan took a warming draught. It rolled down his throat with the clean bite of the finest stuff, honeyed fire.

Porto accepted the brandy back from him reverently. He took a mouthful and savored it, puffing his cheeks as he sluiced it from side to side, so comical that Morgan laughed out loud. “It is worth some care,” the old knight told him with more than a hint of pained sensibilities. “You may drink such stuff every day, my prince. It comes to a man like myself perhaps once in a lifetime. Your very good health, Highness.” He took a proper swallow.

Morgan was still grinning, but he waited a respectful time for Porto to savor his brandy before asking him what he had been about to say of the Sithi.

“Ah, yes. So.” He hesitated, then held up the flask. “Another sip, Highness?”

“For me or you? No, go on, have as much as you like.” He looked up at the sky, which was beginning to darken in the east. “Well, as much as you can drink before I have to blow the Horn of Failure so the Sithi can ignore it again. I’m not such a fool as to leave the brandy with you while I’m gone.”

Porto again made the sign of the Tree. “Careful how you talk, Morgan. Prince Morgan, I mean.” He leaned, his breath fuming with the Cuthmanite monk’s finest. “They might hear you.”

“If you mean the fairies, if they can’t hear that great bellowing horn we’ve blown every night for a fortnight or more, they’re hardly going to hear me talking to you. But what were you going to say about them?”

Porto fortified himself again before beginning. “I saw the fighting at the Hayholt, Prince Morgan, as you know. Back in the Storm King’s War. I saw the fairy folk, the white and the golden, the Norns and the Sithi—even saw them fighting each other, although that was . . .” He frowned. “Hard to explain it properly. Like hearing a song in someone else’s tongue, Highness. Trying to make it out, do you see, without understanding the words.”

“I don’t think I do see, Porto. What do you mean?”