The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence

Author:Iain Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Childrens, Historical, Adventure
ISBN: 9780385903936
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2009-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

“That witch is a phony,” said Chip. “Isn’t she?”

“What do you mean?” asked Laurie.

“She’s giving him the business.” Chip sounded a bit angry about it. “She’s making the giant’s dream come true.”

“I guess she is,” said Laurie.

“Poor Jimmy.”

The witch led the boy into her house.

A small fire was burning with a sweet smell in the middle of the floor, in a circle of red stones. A chair and a table, both built of sticks, made up the only furniture. But there were a great number of baskets woven from grasses, and beside the chair stood a spinning wheel, where the witch had been turning rushes into thread. On the wall hung a picture she’d drawn with red and black mud, showing Gypsy caravans drawn up in a circle.

“That picture. Is it the red lake?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” she told him.

“I stayed there with the Gypsies,” he said. “The King told me that a witch stole his heart. What do you think he meant?”

She smiled at this, but only briefly. Then she waved her froglike hand, as though to dismiss the King. “Bah!” she said. “Who knows what Gypsies think?”

With that, the witch turned away and led Jimmy across the room, to a door even smaller than the first one. A smell of dirt and worms came out when she opened it. “Stay close behind me,” she said, and went through.

Beyond the door was a tunnel that dropped steeply through the ground. When it leveled off Jimmy was far beneath the swamp, in utter darkness, following the witch only by the slithery sounds of her walking or the wheezing of her breath.

For an hour they walked and crawled through the tunnel. Then it started sloping up again, and at the top Jimmy bumped heavily into the witch’s back, not knowing that she’d come to the end of the tunnel. She grunted, and a crack of light appeared as she pushed against a door.

“Come this way,” she said.

She led Jimmy out of the tunnel, into the hollow trunk of a burned-out tree. At one time it might have stood hundreds of feet high, for the trunk was wide enough that the witch had set up a little summer cottage inside it. Even now, with the top shattered off, it was the highest thing around. Like a black rock on a green sea, it rose all alone from a rolling field of heather.

Jimmy looked back toward the swamp. He could hear the dragonflies clattering over the reeds. “Years ago,” he said, “my mother set out for the swamp. Did she find you?”

“No,” said the witch.

“Are you sure?”

“Since Collosso, you are the first to come. Now your destiny is over there.” The witch pointed again to the far-off mountain. “The giant swore that he will crush you like a nit. But I do not believe it is so. He lives in fear of the day that you will find him.”

She put a webbed hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “Good luck, giant-slayer. When I see you next, I will have to look way up to recognize you.

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