Tilda Marsh counted teeth on her belt while the giant crossed the far field. Three teeth, each pulled from a giant she had dropped with the sling braided from her own white hair. She was too old now to run. That was why she wanted a boy at her side who could learn the throw before her arms failed for good. The boy stood beside her instead of behind her, which was worse. Ned Larrow gripped a rolled map like it might shield him. His ink-stained fingers shook. She had asked him to watch and mark distances. He was a mapmaker, not a fighter, but he was the only young one who had stayed when the others fled. "It's coming faster," Ned said. His voice barely carried. The giant's steps flattened a fence. It smelled the smoke from the village hearths and turned toward the nearest roofs. Tilda had homes to save. She loosed a stone. It struck the giant's ear. The giant roared and charged, no longer wandering but hunting. "That was wrong," she muttered. Her fingers had lost the old speed. The second stone flew short and buried itself in mud. She reached for a third and found her pouch empty. The giant was thirty paces off now. Tilda's arm ached. She would not clear the sling in time. She pressed something into Ned's palm. It was a small clay whistle, painted with faded flowers, the toy she had carried since she was a girl no bigger than him. "Blow it hard," she said. "When I say." Ned stared at her. "You want to draw maps of safe roads. There are no safe roads while that thing lives. Blow it." She fed a stone into the sling and began to swing. The giant filled the sky above them. Tilda's boots slid in the wet grass. "Now," she said. Ned blew. The whistle shrieked, thin and sharp. The giant flinched and cocked its head toward the sound, and its huge foot came down wrong. It stumbled. Its chin dropped level with the hilltop. Tilda released. The stone cracked into its temple. The giant swayed, then fell backward across the ruined fence. The ground shook. It did not rise. Smoke still drifted from the untouched roofs below. The homes stood. Ned lowered the whistle. His hands had stopped shaking. "I made it stumble," he said, half to himself. "You did." Tilda took the whistle back and closed his fingers around empty air. "Keep the next one. You'll need your own." She walked to the fallen giant and drew her knife to claim a fourth tooth. Behind her, Ned unrolled his map and looked at it differently now. He had come to chart a path out of these hills. He was starting to think about the path back in.

Three days after the giant fell, its body began to reek. Tilda meant to spend those days teaching Ned the throw. She could not. From the high ground behind the bakery she watched two more shapes cross the far hills. They walked with their heads low, sniffing. The dead one's kin had caught the scent, and they were coming to find it. "They'll reach the village by morning," Tilda said. Ned stood beside her, the whistle at his belt. His fingers had stopped shaking days ago, but they twitched now. "I can't teach you the sling with them wandering the fields. We'd be caught in the open." "Then we make them go somewhere else," Ned said. He unrolled his map and pointed. Past the last hill lay a dry ravine. "Lead them there. Away from the roofs." Tilda studied the boy. He was thinking like a fighter now. But leading two giants took more than a whistle and an old woman's arm. She needed muscle to move the bait. That was when the big woman came up the slope, a bear cub tucked under one arm. Petra Bole fixed things nobody asked her to fix. She had patched the bakery's cracked door that very week without a word. Now she looked at the giant's swollen corpse and wrinkled her nose. "You want it gone," Petra said. Not a question. She set the cub down. "I can drag it. Where to?" Tilda pointed at the ravine on Ned's map. "Their noses follow the body. If it moves, they move." Petra fetched her cart and two ropes. She looped them under the giant's arms and pulled. The wheels sank, then rolled. Tilda had never seen one person haul such weight. Ned marked the path ahead, calling out the firm ground. They worked through the night, the cub trotting behind. By dawn the body lay in the ravine, far from any home. The two giants crested the last hill and smelled it there. They lumbered down into the dry cut, away from the village. Ned blew the whistle once, sharp, to pull their heads deeper in. They did not turn back. Tilda lowered her sling. The roofs behind her were safe. The fields lay quiet. "Now I have time to teach you," she told Ned. Petra wiped her hands on her overalls and picked up the cub. "You'll want more than one whistle-blower," she said. "When you train them, I'll mend whatever they break." Tilda looked at the big woman, then at the boy with the map. She had come to these hills alone. She was not alone now. The giants had bought her nothing but a stretch of quiet days. It was enough to begin.

The quiet days did not last. Two mornings after the giants went into the ravine, Ned came running up the slope with his map crushed in one fist. He unrolled it on a flour barrel behind the bakery. His finger stabbed the far edge, past the ravine. "There are two more," he said. "Dead ones. I found them yesterday while mapping the cut." Tilda knew what that meant. Two corpses meant two fresh trails of stink, and stink pulled giants the way honey pulls flies. A new one could smell them and come looking. It would cross the fields before her recruits were ready to swing a sling. "We can't move two more bodies," Tilda said. "Petra hauled one all night. She can't drag corpses forever." She looked at her recruits sweeping the steps and mending fences. None could throw yet. None could stand against a giant in the open. A boy set down his broom. Finn Varrow swept those steps every morning, quiet as dust, but he never bent his neck for anyone. He wore a ring he never spoke about. He stepped up to the barrel and studied Ned's map like it belonged to him. "You don't move the bodies," Finn said. "You burn them." He tapped the ravine. "Ash has no scent a giant can follow. Fire kills the smell for good." Tilda stared at the boy. He spoke plainly, but he spoke like a plan was already finished in his head. "Fire in a dry cut," she said. "With two live giants still down there." "Then we draw them out first," Finn said. He did not blink. So they went. Petra came with her ropes and her cub. Ned carried the whistle. Finn carried a torch and a jar of oil from the bakery. At the ravine's lip, Ned blew the whistle three times. The two live giants lifted their heads and lumbered toward the sound, away from the far end where the fresh corpses lay. Finn slid down the loose rock alone. He poured oil over both bodies and struck the torch. The fire caught fast. Black smoke rolled up the cut. The two live giants roared and crashed off toward the empty hills, driven by heat and noise. Finn climbed back up, boots gray with ash, and watched the corpses burn to nothing. When the smoke thinned, no scent remained to call a fresh giant down. The trail was dead. Tilda's recruits could train now without a monster in the fields. Tilda looked at the boy wiping soot from his ring. "You've done this kind of thing before," she said. Finn only picked up a fallen broom and handed it back to a recruit. "Sweep the ash into the water," he said. "Leave nothing behind." Tilda counted her guardians again. This morning she had one more.

The trouble came before the sun cleared the hills. Word of Tilda's whistle-blowers had spread from house to house, and now a knot of villagers crowded her bakery steps. They pushed their children behind their legs. A mother gripped Tilda's sleeve. "Hide us," she begged. "Don't teach our young ones to fight giants. Bury us in the cellars until it passes." Others nodded, pale and shaking. Tilda saw the fear catch and spread like fire in dry grass. Tilda did not argue. She unhooked three giant teeth from her belt and set them on the flour barrel. "These were dropped by things that hunted us," she said. "I dropped them with a sling I braided from my own hair. Cellars hold you until a giant smells you through the floor. Then there is no door strong enough." The villagers muttered. A cellar felt safe. A sling in a child's hand did not. Tilda saw she was losing them. She needed proof, not words. Ned pushed through the crowd, his map crushed under one arm and his ink-stained fingers tight on the whistle at his belt. He was the mapmaker she was training to take her place. "Show them, Tilda," he said quietly. "Show them what the young ones can do." Then a shape moved behind the crowd. An ash-gray dire wolf padded from the tree line, broad as a plow horse, yellow eyes fixed on the children. Mothers screamed and clutched their young. Some turned to run for the cellars. Tilda did not run. Finn Varrow stepped out beside her, the boy who swept these steps every morning and held himself like he owned the hills. He had burned two giant corpses without flinching. Now he put two fingers to his mouth and looked at Tilda. She gave one nod. "Whistle," Tilda said. Ned blew three sharp notes. The wolf's ears flattened. Its head swung toward the sound, confused, its charge broken. In that gap Tilda loosed her braided sling. The stone cracked against the wolf's skull. It stumbled, yelped, and bolted back into the trees, tail low. The steps went silent. A small girl slipped from behind her mother's legs and picked up a stone from the yard. She turned it over in her palm, then looked up at Tilda. Tilda knelt to the girl's height. "That is how," she said. "Not hiding. Standing. One blows, one throws. A giant is slower than that wolf, and just as blind to two of you working together." The mother who had begged for a cellar wiped her face. She pulled her son forward instead of back. "Teach him," she said. "Teach him proper." By midday, six more children stood in Tilda's yard with stones in their fists. The fear had turned. But six new mouths meant six new families watching, and Tilda had only one whistle and one sling to train them all.