Eurilda stood and stepped away. "Are you here for her sake, or Khyte's?"
"That depends."
"You worry who has played you for the fool. It could have been her." The giantess watched the Alfyrian's hands, keeping her own at her sides, for she had watched enough of Frellyx's sword artistry to know his sword could be at her throat before any spell-gesture.
"While that stands to reason, you are the one that would most benefit from Otoka's death."
"Except that it was addressed to me in Inglefras's hand. While someone could have enchanted the letter after it was penned, why would I enspell myself? Also, though the sorceress is already on my list, we have a wider group to consider. For if the ensorceled letter was only intended to debilitate, not to kill, and if someone knew the apprentices' route to and from Wywynanoir, they may have hoped that I would be brought to Ielnarona for treatment."
Frellyx sighed. "Why would anyone in Wywynanoir conspire to bring you here against the interests of their ruler Inglefras?"
"When the cult of assassins learned I was with child, and saw that both sides stood to gain, they bargained with a conspirator inside Wywynanoir."
"It's logical," said the Alfyrian. "I wish it wasn't, as you must come with me."
"Do you desire my death?"
"No," said Frellyx, "though there are few deaths I've desired. Still, I can only justify not obeying Inglefras if I'm honoring her consort's wish."
"If I come with you," she said, "I may not die today, but the princess will find a way to remove me if she doesn't want to see me."
"Khyte will vouch for your safety," he said, then shouted after the fleeing giantess, "Don't give her what she wants!"
Eurilda's red robe unsashed as she jostled the crowd in her flight, and at the titters, jeers, gasps, and catcalls, she released the enchantment repressing her monstrous enormity, stepped into her own size, and then stepped over the halfway-told lewd remarks and crude jokes into the silence, then the screams stabbing through the giant-shaded concourse. Though she had half a thought to turn and grind the treacherous elf under heel, she had a whole mind to wrest Khyte from Inglefras, and sprinted through the dryad city, which from her new perspective, now looked even emptier than the city of dollhouses you would expect a princess to amass.
The city's sense of emptiness increased as Eurilda's heavy footsteps doubled on the brick streets. When her echo fell out of rhythm, she heard the pounding tread. Rather than risking a turn, she cast her lightening enchantment, and leaped towards a vast white marble estate at the end of the row of hotels, to land within the fenced-in grounds. Here she craned her neck to see Frellyx, now a giant's height again, and trusting to his hard leather boots—their hides now as thick as shed walls—as he crashed through the fence.
Other than her nonstop sprint towards the looming city wall, satisfaction, and revenge, her next thought was irritation, as the elf had suffered her to enchant him many times though he knew size-changing. Her third thought was that if the master swordsman knew her tricks, she couldn't hope to win unless her luck changed. She ran at full tilt through the sweeping grounds of this manor estate, jumping a gazebo which Frellyx crashed, then charging through a pasture with a dozen kiuvathi and another half-dozen headless cattle of the dryad world. Eurilda stooped to pick up a kiuvathi calf—which mewled through its fanged underbelly—then spun and hurled the animal at the onrushing Alfyrian. It was safe to say that hurtled livestock was a new thing to the world-weary elf, for it struck him firmly in the chest and bowled him over.
Reaching the manor's opposite wall, Eurilda hurdled to a street lined with statelier, but just as unlived-in, dryad dollhouses. She sprinted from there to another residential district with houses less opulent but just as vacant-looking, though they seemed a little cozier and more inviting. Though by entering one she might dodge the Alfyrian's pursuit, she did not know how long Khyte would be on the eastern wall. Also, if the elf abandoned his pursuit, he might head to the wall himself by a more direct route.
When Eurilda noticed her foot was damp from blood, she slowed to a walk and looked under her robes, then sashed them tight and limped on towards the wall. The source of the blood was not this time her loins, though they were still raw and purplish, but a cut on her heel. In her haste to flee, the giantess had forgotten she was barefoot, having only stolen the ambassador's robe and not his footwear.
Inspecting the wound made her conscious of its dull ache, so that though her lightened body need not limp, she walked more gingerly on the inflamed instep, until Frellyx crashed the empty manors, barreled through the homier houses, then sprinted towards her, and she forced herself to run on the wounded foot. Since Frellyx had yet to mimic her lightening enchantment, she ducked into the back yards to run on the soft grass and hurdle the fences between estates.
Though the elf splintered wooden fences, brick and stone walls hobbled his pursuit, and soon the giantess was far ahead.
When Inglefras's gold-lettered white banner flew over the eastern wall, Eurilda knew there was only one way to reach Khyte unspotted. While a giant would never pass unobserved, if she traveled at a more innocuous size, Frellyx or news of her escape would reach the wall first. While she might change shape, the plant-like but warm-blooded Tree-Women were a contradiction beyond her ability, the headless Ielnaronan animals were so unusual that she wouldn't know where to start, and animals she knew from Nymerea, Hravak, and Nahure would attract attention on the Dryad World. Only one Nymerean animal might hasten there undetected, and it was a shape she detested: the Uenarakian marching spider, whose eight legs moved so fast that they were invisible, and if its head was noticed, it was often mistaken for a flickering shadow. As she took its form, her hackles shuddered, until they were sickeningly absorbed into the nasty, neckless, creature, and her gorge rose at the nausea of knowing an overpowering hunger for blood.
The spider crept blindingly fast down the thoroughfare until it felt the tremor of oncoming feet in the cobblestones, then sidestepped up a wall, where the sorceress found traveling on walls, and springing from one house to the next, was nearly as fast, until it arrived at the house that faced the perimeter wall, where it looked down on hundreds of defenders, some in drills, others at leisure, and all waiting to be summoned to battle. Having crawled down the wall, into an alley, and behind a water cask, the spider became a stooped giantess, then a tiny one.
A few inches high, Eurilda looked both ways down the enormous perimeter street, then with a dash and both outflung arms, grabbed onto the butt of a spear marking the rhythm of a Tree-Woman's brisk pace toward the battlement steps. Though Eurilda nearly lost her grip several times, the thought of her tiny body trampled by wooden-headed dryads gave her the strength to hold on tight. With her cheek pressed flat against the wooden haft, only one eye could see anything, and in that half-vision, the details of the world were a blur until the spear-butt hammered down on the street to smudge that shaky grasp on reality and send painful tremors through Eurilda's elbows and shoulders. When her carrier leaned against the wall to allow several descending Tree-Women to pass, even the shock of the spear's faint, downward tap sent the world spinning, but Eurilda then glimpsed that they stood on the first of dozens of stairs. While she braced for the next step, she was still unprepared for the shock of the stone through the wooden spear, then followed by a score or more of the spear butt's downward blasts as the dryad ascended. Having reached the top, the dryad turned to peer over the battlements, and Inglefras leaped from her perch, wobbled forward, and hid behind a barrel of arrows.
When Eurilda's vision cleared, the three inch sorceress was on a wide battlement overlooking Wywynanoir by a dizzying drop that seemed a quarter mile. She could only see two windows from her diminutive point of view, and both were shuttered. Despite her fluttering stomach, she felt an upwelling of satisfaction and relief, as despite how punishing riding the titanic weapon was, she had expected to leap boot to boot to her objective. Being carried directly up the battlement steps was such a fortunate turn of events that the Spider-God must be spinning favorably. Though the giantess thought not to honor the arachno-deity, but only to select a form practical for moving quietly, quickly, and unobserved, perhaps the god smiled on Eurilda's poetic choice of the Uenarakian marching spider.
The tiny sorceress mushroomed into the spider shape again, then plied its many legs dexterously as it climbed then crossed the wall, crawling over the jambs of a window when dryads were underneath, or leaping the window spans when the Tree-Women's backs were turned. When she passed a vermin hole, and smelled the rodent's alien but warm aroma, the spider's stomach rang with hunger pangs, and she was almost diverted from her task, though no spider was ever distracted from its purpose, certainly not this false-faced spider whose hairy body was just a cipher inscribed by a four ton giantess from another world.
Not long after she patted herself on the back for the discipline as a spider that she never possessed as a sorcerer, she saw Khyte. As she was just slavering after one prey, she had the uncomfortable feeling of transferring this hunger, and knew what it was like to crave the flesh of her lover like a real spider, and not unlike the passionate appetite of a more barbarous giantess whose affections were spurned by a lesser beast. While it was unsettling to admit she shared her fellow giants' atavistic hunger for thinking flesh, that she might also have this in common with the spider unreeled a tormented web of dead bodies, from the still wet memory of impaling Leitara, to Otoka's students, whose gory end she did not wish despite her detestation, to the dryads, elves, and goblins she smashed into paste in her lust for Khyte, to a childhood memory, the reliving of which excited her spider-body.
After Eurilda's first year of apprenticeship, Otoka the Wise indulged her parents' request –despite her protests—for a visit from their daughter. In the two weeks allotted for this vacation, her father and mother exploited their daughter's magical gifts for the base pleasures of petty thievery and wreaking mischief, but when they discovered her gifts to be still very meager, they settled on the baser pleasure of whipping her. Seeking to please her parents with a spell powerful enough to impress and amuse them, Eurilda attempted one she had not yet mastered, only to discover that the proper motivation perfected her understanding of the unfamiliar enchantment. No sooner had she spoken it than the spellstruck qkraynori, a herd animal stolen for slaughter that evening, began not to bleat, but weep, and plead with its captors. Though her parents snickered and teased the articulate animal, removing Eurilda from their immediate abuse, they insisted she continue the spell's translation of the animal's squeals, so they would have the thrill of consuming it alive while savoring its cries, which they did not only that night, but every night of Eurilda's vacation thereafter with a different talking animal. Though making animals eloquent does not give them names, Eurilda would remember each of those anonymous beasts, both in waking and in dream. When Eurilda was returned withdrawn and starved—for she was unable to partake of pleading animals—Otoka questioned her, and hearing the horrors of her trip, assured her she never had to see them again. Years later, twisted into a spidery caricature of hunger, she understood why her parents delighted in humiliating their dinners—there was a fine line between the giants of today and their cannibalistic desires, which spoke to the truth of their experience in a way raising their daughter never did.
Though Eurilda quelled her desires to eat the Drydanan warrior, it was difficult, as her hybrid spider-giantess brain was obsessed with the thought of shrinking Khyte to a quivering mouthful of blood, no matter that spider-feet were unlikely ever to cast spells.
Her cannibal rage was stoked as Khyte conversed with yet another Tree-Woman. When their animated oinking and bleating shook the spider's copious hairs which serve as ears—telling a tale of fat, savory blood—she sank her teeth into the dryad's shoulder. As Khyte swung his palm at spider-Eurilda, his image splintered in all eight eyes, and she nimbly leaped to Khyte's shoulder and bit him. The Uenarakian marching spider venom was a quick-acting paralytic, and no sooner had the Tree-Woman fell onto the wooden battlement, setting the slats a-clatter, than Khyte's knees buckled, and he fell after.
The spider's hairy limbs then fused into arms and legs as Eurilda changed back, stopping at human height, and found that the phantasmic hunger of the spider had become real, and she was as ravenously hungry on two feet as she was on eight. She supposed running on walls and jumping over windows had worked up a natural appetite that would persist in any form she now took, though she felt a gurgle when she recalled the spider's grotesque cravings. She was so hungry that she could barely stand, but she managed to cast a diminishment spell on Khyte and place the miniaturized warrior in her enchanted pouch. Then she shrunk the shutters on the nearest window, so that the wooden slats burst and flared in their hinges. While she could have shape shifted into a Nymerean ryzeren, a bird of prey, she doubted that she could suppress this animal's natural appetites in her current state of mind, as she had very nearly succumbed to the spider's. So she simply shrunk to two feet in height, subtracted her weight to be less than that of a mouse, leaped up to the window sill, and jumped out the window. It is a known fact that a mouse is naturally light enough to fall from nearly any height without injury, and Eurilda, with her knowledge of science and magic, used the greater wind resistance of her two foot body to her advantage, as she spread her arms and legs out so that she coasted forward on the air. She stretched the six story drop to a one hundred and ten foot glide that carried her into Wywynanoir's outer city, where, as she descended, she saw that there were hundreds of Inglefras's Tree-Women in its streets, forming into phalanxes for an offensive to push against the Councilor-Generals' army. Short trenches had also been dug in the dirt streets at thirty foot intervals.
As Eurilda sank toward Wywynanoir's suburb, she seized the edge of a roof and swung herself on top of the house, where she watched the army below. Just three days ago, Frellyx and she had walked through the outer city of Wywynanoir and found it deserted. What had happened in the interim to change Inglefras's military stance to a more aggressive one, to stage this risky offensive against the superior numbers outside the hospitality city. While her consort's unforeseen twins might have been the blessing that caused it, Eurilda accepted that may have been her vanity speaking, and it was likelier something more common that precipitated this change of mood from Inglefras.
When a great commotion of Tree-Women issued in full force of arms from the East Wall, the giantess guessed this was no planned offensive or reinforcement, but Inglefras's hasty response to the kidnapping of her consort. Eurilda bounded to the next roof, ran clattering along its tiles, then hurtled to the next, and so on, until the houses were staggered too far apart for her to progress by magical leaps. After dropping intot he walled yard of a townhouse, she careened onto the porch and broke through the door with a half-giant, half-human arm. She wondered at her misshapen appendage for only a moment, having swooned, not from the shock of an extraordinary spell defect, but from hunger. When she slumped inside, her eyesight faint and nearly black, her shaking hands caught a table edge and she pulled herself to her feet until the dizziness passed.
While the furnished house couldn't be called deserted, as some conscious mind had ordered its contents according to a sense of decorum or playfulness, Eurilda knew it was never inhabited, with immaculate couch cushions never crushed by an owner's imprint, and kitchen cabinets and shelves without food.
Without food? Eurilda stifled a scream. Opening every cabinet door and all the shelves yielded only plates, cups, utensils, pots, and pans. Not only was there no food, but the brick oven was coated in dust and had a shining interior devoid of a crumb or a speck of ash. Eurilda mused that if a meal had never been cooked here, it wasn't a kitchen, but an exhibit.
Stepping into the back yard, Eurilda nearly wept to see a garden of herbs, roots, and vines, and though the dryad plants were colored weirdly—the greens tinged with mauve, the reds blotched with blue, and the browns faded nearly to white--she fell to her knees and uprooted the vegetables like a veteran farmer, only stopping to nosh like a grazing herbivore. If she had studied Ielnaronan herbivores, she could change shape and graze without looking out of place, but no animal she knew would not look suspicious on the Dryad World.
When movement through the fence caught her eye, she peeked through the slats to see Frellyx and a dozen Tree-Women. She stood stock still and waited until they entered the house opposite the alley, then bent back to her garden feast. Though they would soon search this house, there was little she could do except flee, and escape would be near impossible if weak from hunger. Not that the roots and herbs were very satisfying, and by the time she was full, her mouth was a cauldron of raw spices. As she was famished when she fell to the strange dryad salad, she had barely shaken the dirt free before devouring them, and her dinner also had an earthy aftertaste.
One minute stretched into five minutes, then twenty. The giantess began to doubt her luck—had Frellyx really passed this walled-in nook?
She ran inside, climbed the stairs, and hurtled through a window to continue her rooftop run. When troops massed in the street, she crossed to the other side of the roof, then continued her flight, and in such a manner, reached the last row of houses. She might have leaped from there to a tree branch, for strips of trees faced the houses, as if the dryads zoned forests like residential districts.
She jumped to the dirt path, and jogged cautiously, scanning for Tree-Women, kiuvathi, and giants. When the woods' arboreal scent overwhelmed her with aromatic bark, and the sweet, crisp smells of fruit and running water, she became doubly vigilant, not wanting any course in this movable feast to pass by uneaten.
When she crossed the creek, she drank from its edge for five minutes; when she found heavy tieaea clusters drooping from bent branches, she ate the barely ripe, fruit until her belly ached; and, when an intensely spiced aroma wafted from a sinuous tree that shed bark in crumbling piles, she sucked on one of the fibrous flakes, and the spicy, minty taste filled her mouth with satisfying airs that settled her stomach.
Eurilda walked the wooded path in a daze. When she heard the unmistakable hexapodal rhythm of a kiuvathi galloping full blast, coming behind her, probably for her, she panicked and ran into the thickly tangled woods.