A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,209

only ones to move. Some families decided to head for the city gates as we headed to the harbor. Some of them turned around. Some remained where they were.

—

Writing as we roll now, and this road we’re taking is ill maintained and rough going. But Mother was right: we both need to get away and never should have come. The Bone Giants are here. Now. Coming out of distant tree lines like the pale wraiths of the Mistmaiden Isles, running across the dead fields of once-green farms. I knew that these wouldn’t be like Motah, mostly naked and trying to appear harmless, but they were even more horrifying than I expected. Clacking bones and painted faces, white butchers who feed the blackwings, strange swords in their hands to slaughter us like animals. Which makes me wonder: Are we even human in their eyes? Are they in mine?

The scout is streaking for the castle, whipping his horse in panic. He has a chance to make it, I think. But the families that were headed that way behind him have largely rethought and are trying to turn their wagons around to either head for the harbor or simply go back. The ones who remained where the scout found us are definitely turning back for Setyrön. I can see some mariners up on the walls with bows. But there are more giants than archers already. They just keep coming. That mariner scout might have found an isolated party of three, but this is no isolated raiding party foaming out of the country like wave breakers. I think it must be the army come back to claim their fleet or at least occupy the city now that they’ve sacked Hillegöm and the interior villages. It’s the tide rolling in, except it’s no gentle progression of curling waters but one huge menacing whitecap, and I hope we’re not on the beach when it hits.

—

The outcry when the bard dismissed Kallindra’s seeming was swift and loud.

“Don’t worry; the story continues,” he assured everyone. “But I’m going to let the Kaurian scholar Gondel Vedd take it from here.”

I really shouldn’t eat while angry. Reinei found a way to remind me that peace is a better garden to cultivate in the mind. Ponder and I were eating breakfast at an outdoor café in Setyrön, and the people at the next table made clear through their expressions of disgust and muttered comments that I had committed a culinary crime by slathering my smoked moonscale with mustard. While I paused to glare at them, full fork raised and suspended before my mouth, a gust of wind from the sea blew that glorious mustard-covered bite right off my fork and onto my lap, beginning my day with a fresh mustard stain. The Brynts laughed at me and I laughed with them, but not for the same reason.

“Oh, no, Gondel!” Ponder said, dipping his napkin in water and offering it to me.

“No, thank you, I’ll be fine. It’s a gentle lesson from Reinei about what can happen when you don’t maintain your peace of mind.”

I had already sent a letter to the mistral on yesterday’s ship to Kauria and a longer one to my husband in hopes that he’d forgive me for my sudden disappearance and an absence that may stretch out for months. I could not in good conscience return yet; there had to be a way to get ahead of this and save Kauria from an assault like the ones Brynlön and Rael suffered, and right then Brynlön was my best hope of teasing out more information from the Eculans. Saviič could help me translate the blank spaces in Zanata Sedam, but could not tell me any more about their plans.

Ponder agreed that we would be better off doing most anything else than trying to approach the entire army occupying Göfyrd in hopes they would opt to talk instead of kill us on sight. So it was back to Möllerud for us, where there was a fleet that we could examine for clues on how they crossed the ocean and perhaps there would be some written orders left behind in the city. That large party of people we’d passed on the way to Setyrön was more than enough to handle that small group of Bone Giants we had run into, so it should be a safe place to conduct our investigations.

For a couple of days as we traveled down the coast on foot, we could forget that there was a