A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,17

for the better. But I won’t need to work quite as much. Occasional morning meetings, but mostly I’ll start at noon from now on and be finished by the early evening.”

“That actually sounds like a better job. Is it?”

“We’ll see. I start tomorrow.”

Tamöd and Pyrella regaled me with tales of the tidal mariner and the oyster while Elynea and I tiptoed around each other, anxious not to invade the other’s privacy. She pretended she hadn’t been crying, and I pretended I didn’t notice.

“Perhaps, if you will be here in the morning, I could look for a job,” she ventured over dinner.

“While I look after the kids? Sure, I can do that.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then said practically nothing else the entire evening as if she felt she had trespassed enough.

Elynea made an effort to look confident and capable in the morning, and I think she pulled it off. Her curled cloud of hair was pulled back from her forehead with a white headband, and she wore a deep orange tunic with a white belt and brown pants tucked into boots.

“That’s new,” I noticed.

“Donated to me by the kind woman across the street.”

I wished her luck and assured her that the kids would be fine, and she left in what I supposed passed for good spirits.

She returned at noon, defeated, her voice grating like a millstone. “There’s no work to be had. At least no work for me. So many desperate people looking. Some of them can still smile, though.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how they do it.”

I was silent for a few moments, thinking about how I managed it. When I thought of Sarena, watching her die slowly and helpless to prevent it, I found it impossible to smile, too.

“I think…maybe…?” Elynea turned to me, waiting for me to finish. “They have figured out a way to forget temporarily.” Her eyebrows climbed, and she shook her head at the impossibility of this. “No, I know you can’t ever forget such a huge part of yourself,” I assured her. “It’s always there, an enormous thing—like the palace. But sometimes, you can go into a tiny room, lock the door behind you, and that vast, overwhelming sadness is on the other side. It’ll always be there, and you can’t stay in that locked room forever. But maybe, while you can’t see it, you can forget about it a tiny while and discover something to smile about before you have to emerge and face the enormity again. And then, who knows? Maybe you’ll find more and more rooms to smile in, and over time the character of the palace changes until it’s the sadness that’s locked in those tiny rooms and not the happiness. Maybe that’s what healing is like.”

Elynea stared at me, a plateau of sorts that I hoped might end well, but she dissolved into a loud sob and ran into my bedroom, slamming the door.

“Or maybe my skill with extended metaphors leaves much to be desired,” I said.

“Why did you make my mom cry?” Tamöd shouted.

“You’re so mean! I hate you!” Pyrella added, and the two of them ran to the other bedroom and followed the example of their mother by slamming the door as forcefully as they could. Sadness and anger behind the doors.

“Shit,” I said. This was why I preferred history. All the shouting was in the past, and none of them had been shouting at me.

This is not to say that Elynea and her children were not welcome to my home; with my wife lost the winter before the invasion, I had more space than I needed, and sharing it was the least I could do in a time of crisis. Sharing any more than that, though, was impossible. Perhaps she saw the yawning empty place in my chest that Sarena used to fill and speculated about moving in there, and maybe she wondered if I could occupy the space in her heart where her husband used to live. It was a terrible idea: neither one of us would be anything more than a squatter. I counted on my new work to distract me from such matters and give me an excuse to stay out of her way. We would all be better off if we respected one another’s emptiness.

But as I began to make myself a solitary lunch before heading to the wall for the bard’s first performance, I resolved to write this story as you see it set down now. The