A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,208

a while some distance away from the walls, allowing me this time to write without danger of a spilled ink pot or a scribbled word as a result of wagon wheels over rocks. The company of mariners sent with us by the quartermaster is scouting ahead, entering the city to make sure there are no traps or Bone Giants around.

I am sure they will be doing some discreet looting in advance of the rest of us to pay themselves for the danger. I am of Mother’s mind in this regard: robbing the dead holds no attraction for me no matter how shiny the gold. Robbing the absent Bone Giants of a ship or five, however, sounds perfectly justified. I am not sure if that is morally defensible, but I feel it anyway. Perhaps it is just as well that no one listens to me.

We can see the silhouetted fleet anchored in the harbor from here. Father is trying to determine which ships might be in the best shape from this impossible distance and speculating aloud. Mother is ignoring him. Jorry has found a pretty girl to flirt with a couple of wagons behind us, and her parents have put him to work under their watchful eyes. The girl is extremely conscious of being the subject of a public mating ritual and uncomfortable with it as well. She’s tolerating him only to be polite, but Jorry isn’t picking up on any of those signals. He is little more than an ambulatory boner.

—

A mariner scout has just come from the west on horseback to warn us that there are small raiding parties of Bone Giants roaming around the outlying farms. “You should all head back,” he said. “It’s not safe.” He has blood on him—not his own, though.

The men challenge him: Is this an order? Does he even have authority to order us around? How many parties of Bone Giants did he see? How many in each party? Were they actually headed this way or farther into the country? What if we head back now without the mariners in the city and these parties find us along the way?

“I’m going to report to the gerstad now,” the scout said, making a visible effort to be patient. “Do as you like. I’m merely informing you that there are giants in the area and it’s not safe. We may have to head back.”

The father of the pretty girl Jorry was flirting with said, “Won’t the mariners in the city protect us?”

That caused the scout to shed his thin veil of professionalism. His eyes grew to the size of chicken eggs, and he bared his teeth. “No! No, they won’t. Bryn drown us all, I was in a party of five, you understand? Five men on horseback! We came upon three of the Bone Giants, and I am the only one who escaped. Do you see? We can’t fight them. They’re too big. Their reach is inhuman. If you get one, the others take you down—that’s exactly what happened. We got one of them, and they got four. Blows coming from angles you can’t predict, from distances you think impossible. One of them shattered my shield—” He broke off, realizing he had lost control. “But you can stay here if you like.” He trotted off to the city, men shouting after him to come back and answer their questions. And once it was clear that he wouldn’t stand there and be a target for them, they began to argue amongst themselves about what to do. Except for Father. He asked Mother what she thought.

“To the deep with what these others think,” he said. “What do you figure we should do?”

“I think we should get on one of those ships right now and sail back to Setyrön,” she said. “We’re dead if they find us here. And if there are more than a few of them, then those walls and the mariners inside them won’t make much difference. They didn’t make any difference to all the rest of those people.” She shook her head. “We never should have come down here, Lönsyr. We need to get away as fast as we can. And taking a ship was the whole idea anyway. Let’s go.”

He didn’t argue. He nodded once and whipped the horses. I had to call to Jorry to tell him we were leaving, and he was forced to run to catch up with us. Or jog, anyway; we weren’t moving all that fast.

We weren’t the