A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,169

by the prospect of learning new skills, the idea held little relish for Jorry. His face was long and mournful as he listened to our parents making plans.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“Little chance of ever seeing Mella du Bandre again if we’re switching claves.”

“So? There’s a greater chance of seeing plenty of other girls whenever we’re in port. Huge cities every time, Jorry, instead of villages and homesteads in the country. Math. Odds.” I snapped my fingers in his face. “Think about them.”

He squinted at me and sneered, ready to scoff by reflex, and then froze as math happened in his head. “Oh.”

I rolled my eyes. His attachment to Mella du Bandre had all the depth of a lily pad. “Your happiness is chained to your groin, little brother. Set it free.”

“My happiness or my groin?”

“Never mind. Shut up and stay miserable.”

I viewed the return to Möllerud as a proper thing. It would not be a helpless, hopeless grind across the tracks, tears coursing down our cheeks as blackwings fatted themselves on a silent city. There would be mourning, true, but there would also be a cleansing and a slow, patient redirection to order in the wake of chaos. A steady building after quick destruction.

Mother told me that this is the pattern of life, and I have seen nothing to contradict it yet: it slowly gets better but suddenly gets worse. And so we must always work, always build, shoring up our walls against the storms that will inevitably descend.

I have been thinking about that night when Motah stole a map of the continent from us. Was that the first gust of this later storm? We haven’t seen these “Bone Giants” in person, but that’s what hearsay is calling them. People we spoke with in Setyrön said they got to the tops of the walls and even got into the city before they were all killed. The tidal mariner dumped most of them into the ocean before they could land, and the same thing happened in Pelemyn. But they were tall and pale and thin like that woman, and their violence was abrupt like hers. And like the man who killed most of the du Hallards. At least Tarrön was safe with an aunt and uncle in the city.

When I tried to talk about it with Father, he shushed me. “Speak no more of that with anyone.”

I know his fear was that we’d be blamed somehow. The air was thick with it: Why hadn’t the mariners seen this coming, or the quartermasters, or the pelenaut? But there had been nothing for us to see except for a single, starving, nearly naked lost woman. And then, of course, there had been the stories of Tarrön and Mella, which the constable had improbably dismissed as some kind of mutant Fornish pirates. She may have never even told anyone about it.

On the way down to Setyrön in an impressive if motley caravan of soldiers, merchants, and other citizens, we came across an older Kaurian man and one of Reinei’s most blessed, a real tempest. I confess to staring impolitely: I do believe I was, for the first time, smitten.

The tempest—introduced as Ponder Tann—had shorn his hair practically down to his skull, and his face was likewise clean-shaven and so very pleasant to look at. He looked like a man who truly believed in the peace of Reinei. Over light brown pants and boots he wore a multitude of thin, gauzy swaths of bright orange and yellow fabric looped and tied around him. They were squares or rectangles knotted at the corners, nothing like a tunic or a shirt about him, just layers of sheer fabric. He must get cold, I thought, and then remembered that he would never be too cold or too hot unless he wished it. He had nothing to fear from the air.

His companion looked slovenly by comparison; if you didn’t see the Kaurian mistral’s osprey on his shoulder, you would assume that he was some kind of servant to the noble-looking tempest. The truth was the opposite: the tempest was there to protect and serve this old man.

He was largely bald but had let the gray curly hair around the temples and the back of his head grow out. He’d pulled it back into a queue behind him. His eyebrows had gone gray, too, and he had the beginnings of a curly, woolly beard sprouting on the dark crag of his jaw. His clothing was much more common and