Turns out part of the reason some stuff hasn't been shipping when it was supposed to is possibly due to paper shortages. Huh, that's not ominous or anything. But I do have the four comics from April I was still looking for. They even split into neat pairs. Two written by Si Spurrier, which is where we'll start.
The relationship between the girl and the giant continues to deteriorate. The girl is entranced by the people she sees, and the giant seems to be growing either despondent or frustrated as she shoves it away. Which is when that princey guy on the cover sends the father of the family that tried to befriend the girl to lure her into a fancy party. The giant's given its own room, but isn't around as the girl tries all sorts of food and drink, then gets wooed by the prince and, eesh, I don't know how old he is (or her for that matte) but it sure looks like there's a troubling age disparity there.
Meanwhile, there's an army of the goblin/zombie looking types preparing a siege. The prince has the daughter of that guy that lured the girl in dressed up like the girl, and sends her out alone at the army. She dies, the giant draws a false conclusion and it kills a lot of people. When i say "a lot", I mean like hills of bodies. Then when it figures out it was duped and turns back on the prince's forces, it gets obliterated. Well, crap.
Bergara likes to use these layouts with one large panel to establish setting or some thing important, and then smaller reaction panels around it. When the prince guy shows up in some flying golden boat, that's get most of the page space as everyone watches it descend. There's one small panel in the corner showing the father with a big forced smile and some retainer's bland face behind him, and below that, another panel showing the retainer is jamming a knife against the father's back. The pages showing all the fancy clothes and food of the big party, interspersed with close-ups of the child eating or drinking, enchanted by the whole thing.
There's one especially nice sequence, right after the child takes a sip of something where we the giant wide-eyed, then something cracks at the base of the tree where the story began. The final panel is a hand between us and the child. So often that's been the giant keeping her away from people, but this time, it's the prince reaching towards her, asking to dance. All the things the giant's been trying to keep her from (for some reason) are finally available to her, and it seems like it's a bad thing. Unless Spurrier and Bergara are just messing with my preconceived notions. We don't know what the end goal for the child is. Maybe this is better for her. Hard for me to buy that this prince guy isn't an imperialist piece of shit, though.
Nettie shoots the "elk" (that's what they call it, and I guess the antlers are right, but the face looks like a moose to me) and kills it, which seems to surprise the hell out of both the Pale and the Carrion Kid. There's even a panel of the two of them pausing from their fight to just stare. The elk turns out to be a man, and what's more, the peculiar nature of Brokehoof seems broken. People are scratching gold out from beneath their skin, the Pale isn't killing the new prospectors, people are no more ga-ga over gold than they normally are.
Nettie, meanwhile, meets with Inspector LaPointe, who explains the identity of both the man who was an elk, and the man who became the Pale. Or, he explains a version of it, right before he reveals he's been the one profiting from selling Caleb's stake, over and over again. The good inspector wasn't affected by the gold fever, because he found a better way to profit from it. He's ready to get rid of Nettie as well, though he tries to dress it up as justice because of something she confesses from before she came here, but none of us are buying that. He may have underestimated how well he's got the system with the supernatural out there figured, though.
Nettie's sharp turn towards LaPointe makes me wonder if the ritual he describes seeing in the flashback wasn't about to recur, before the conversation took a turn. It certainly seemed like there was some godless rutting about to happen, and Otsmane-Elhaou was using wavy lines to connect the speech bubbles to the speaker, the way he typically has when someone sees to be falling under the particular spell of this place. Although maybe not, he uses them when Nettie is terribly confused and horrified by what's going on as well.
I don't understand exactly why the first ritual took place; maybe something in the land itself sensing an opportunity. A niche that was available for a predator. That might explain the Pale hanging up victims in a cabin to let their blood feed those pitcher plants. I guess we'll see what the final issue brings on this one, too.
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