The Seven Kennings Trilogy

For as long as anyone can remember, the six nations of Teldwen have known relative peace. Each is blessed with a single elemental kenning — water in Brynlon, earth in Rael, plants in Forn, wind in Kauria, and fire among the giant Hathrim of Hathrir. Only Ghurana Nent, a land overrun by freakishly dangerous wildlife, has no kenning of its own, though it is rumored to be the site of an undiscovered sixth. To be blessed is rare: seeking a kenning means braving its source, and most who try drown, burn, or suffocate rather than survive it. Even the blessed pay a price, since drawing too deeply on the power drains their life and ages them before their time.

The peace breaks when two giant forces strike at once. On the eastern shores, pale nine-foot giants in bone armor land in the dead of night, falling on the coastal cities of Brynlon and Rael and slaughtering everyone in their path. They speak an unknown tongue and come to be called the Bone Giants. On the western coast, a tribe of twelve-foot Hathrim fire giants led by the firelord Gorin Mogen arrives in Ghurana Nent claiming to be refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption — but they quickly make clear they have come to stay, raising an entire city with the help of hired Raelech stonecutters who were deceived into believing they had been carried home to Hathrir.

In the present, the tale is told by Fintan, a Raelech bard whose kenning lets him take on the exact face and voice of anyone and project it across an entire city. He arrives at Pelemyn, the Brynt capital, as a herald that armies from Forn and Rael are marching to strike back at the Bone Giants — then carries his audience back to the days before the invasion, told through many eyes. In Kauria, the language scholar Gondel Vedd is set to questioning a captured Bone Giant scout and slowly learns that the invaders come from a distant land called Ecula, driven by a fanatical faith built around a seventh kenning no one in Teldwen has ever heard of. At Pelemyn, the Tidal Mariner Tallynd du Böll single-handedly capsizes an entire Bone Giant fleet before it can land — saving her city, but aging from twenty-eight to forty-eight in the doing.

On the Nentian plains, a young man named Abhinava Khose loses his entire family to a freak animal stampede on a hunt — a tragedy he blames on himself, having chosen that moment to try to tell them he is gay and that he hates the killing their trade depends on. Alone in a land where no one survives the wild, he is marked but spared by a pack of blood cats, and wakes to find he can speak to animals: the first Beastcaller, blessed of the sixth kenning. Hoping to break Ghurana Nent's fear-driven order, he leads more than thirty would-be seekers — among them Tamhan, the boy he loves — to seek the kenning for themselves. The city watch pursues them and kills one of the seekers; Abhi answers with a swarm of wasps that leaves the soldiers dead and ages him years. Only three of the thirty are blessed. Rather than return home, Abhi travels to Hashan Khek, the city nearest the Hathrim, and forces its cruel viceroy, Melishev Lohmet, to sanction a beastcallers clave in exchange for his help against the giants.

When Melishev sends an army against the Hathrim, the Fornish greensleeve Nel — among the most powerful wielders of the plant kenning — leads her own people to confront them. The fire-blessed Hathrim march out to meet the Fornish, and Abhi calls down a stampede that kills every one of them save Gorin Mogen himself, who carves through the fire-vulnerable Fornish until Nel sacrifices herself, turning to living bark and vine to drag the firelord down into the earth. The surviving Hathrim surrender. The western invasion is broken — but most of the Bone Giant host, all but the fleet Tallynd drowned, is still loose on the continent, and the riddle of the seventh kenning remains.

At Pelemyn, Fintan's nightly tellings continue, but the tales themselves now range far beyond the Brynt capital — Fintan even travels north himself, since a bard is bound to witness history in the making. And there is much to witness. Olet Kanek, a firelord of a rival Hathrim clan who had been betrothed to one of Gorin Mogen's sons, took no part in the failed invasion and so survived it. With the Mogens dead, she journeys to Talala Fouz, the Nentian capital, and wins the king's leave to found a colony of her own in the Gravewood — the brutal forest that blankets the north — hoping to build a place free of her people's endless violence. Abhi joins her to help her company survive the Gravewood and to slip the grip of Ghurana Nent's cruel and powerful men.

Barely has Olet's party set out when her father — the head of yet another violent Hathrim clan — arrives at Talala Fouz demanding leave to sail upriver and drag his daughter home. The king refuses, and in answer Olet's father orders his Fury, the deadliest of the fire-blessed, to set the city ablaze. Abhi, not yet caught up to Olet, is still in Talala Fouz; he kills her father with a single spider's bite and then destroys the rampaging Fury with a host of creatures drawn from the sea.

Back in Khul Bashab, the three who were blessed alongside Abhi become a movement. Working with Tamhan, they paper the city with notices of their existence and their demand for change, hunted all the while by the viceroy and his watch. One is captured and killed; the other two press on, among them Hanima, a Hivemistress with command over bees and stinging insects. They win the people over, rise up, and cast out the viceroy and his cronies, and as more citizens gain the sixth kenning, Khul Bashab throws off the crown to stand as an independent city-state. When Melishev Lohmet — now king of Ghurana Nent after the old king burns to death — sends an army to crush the beastcallers, they scatter it with ease. It also becomes clear that Abhi is no ordinary Beastcaller: where every other blessed commands a single kind of animal, his dominion extends over them all.

In the east, the counterattack against the Bone Giants gathers. Gondel Vedd's work has laid bare the shape of the enemy: the Eculans of far-off Ecula, whose faith is built around a Seven-Year Ship that comes for those who would seek the seventh kenning. Suspicion falls on the Mistmaiden Isles off the Brynt coast — haunted by wraiths that becalm sailors and devour their souls — and when Tallynd du Böll ventures there, she finds the Seven-Year Ship itself, marking the Isles as the wellspring of the seventh kenning. Meanwhile the freed nations strike back army by army: in Rael, a swift courier named Tuala and her childhood friend, a juggernaut of the earth kenning, march to liberate a captured Brynt city, and the juggernaut spends his entire remaining lifespan to shatter a Bone Giant host — a sacrifice shadowed by Tuala's unspoken love for him. One by one, the invaders' armies across Rael and Brynlon are destroyed.

But the answer to why any of it happened waits in the north. Koesha, the wind-blessed captain of an all-women crew from a land across the ocean, is wrecked on the northern shore when a kraken takes her ship — most of her sailors survive only because Abhi calls the beast off. Stranded, they shelter with Olet's colony, where word spreads of a strange man living alone on a nearby island. A party brings him back at his own request, and he at once attacks, draining the life from one of the Hathrim and growing younger and briefly unkillable before Olet burns him to ash. He was, it seems, a wielder of the seventh kenning — the power to steal the years and lives of others. His island proves to be the heart of a vast, ancient spy network of wraiths who have worn the bodies of drowned sailors for centuries, and he himself the architect of the entire invasion. Why he set it all in motion is still unknown, and on that revelation the book ends.

The final volume answers every question the war has raised. In the present, Fintan brings his long telling to its close. The wraith spy network seeded across the continent is hunted down and rooted out, and Koesha and her crew, having built themselves a new ship, at last make harbor in Brynlon.

Koesha, Gondel, and Tallynd sail together to the Mistmaiden Isles and there come face to face with the god of the seventh kenning. He unfolds the secret history of the world: how the ancient feuds of the gods carved its lands and seas and gave rise to its peoples, and why so few who seek a kenning survive — a god must first hoard the life-energy of all those who died seeking before it, so that every blessed soul is, in truth, spending the lives of the dead who came before. Then the greater confession: it was this god who created the Eculans and their cult, engineering the whole invasion to annihilate Brynlon out of an ancient grudge against the water god — and a second invasion is already on its way.

Bearing no grudge against the wind god or Koesha's people, he grants her a second blessing: a form of the seventh kenning that lets her pour her own lifeforce into others, healing them and rolling back their years. Twice-blessed now, Koesha returns with Gondel and Tallynd to carry the truth home, and for the first time all six nations of Teldwen bind themselves into a single coalition — to sail to Ecula and end the second invasion before it can ever leave port.

The great barrier is the ocean itself, where krakens drag down any ship that dares the crossing — the Eculans slipped past only by coating their hulls in kraken blood, a trick the coalition has no time to repeat — so it falls to Abhi and his power over the deep to see the fleet across. It is here that the scattered heroes of the trilogy finally converge. Ecula proves to be three islands; the first falls easily, and there the coalition finds native rebels who have long resisted the cult and who help them plan the assault on the capital. The Eculans fight with suicidal ferocity and exact a heavy toll, and at the height of it Tallynd spends still more of her life to break their army — after which Koesha gives ten of her own years back to her, leaving Tallynd near sixty. The cult is thrown down, the freed Eculans turn gladly toward trade and peace, and the coalition sails for home.

One promise remains. Koesha had sworn to return and tell the god of the seventh kenning how it all ended, and she keeps her word. Displeased but outwardly gracious, he stages an elaborate death — drawing every last wraith of the Mistmaiden Isles into himself to cleanse them, then hardening into stone — and restores the decade Koesha gave to Tallynd, a parting show of goodwill. Koesha is not fooled. She takes a sledgehammer to the marble, and at its center finds a still-beating heart, proof he meant to return one day. She stabs it through, gathers every shard of the statue, and drops them into the ocean one by one on the long voyage home.

The rest is homecoming. Koesha and her crew return as living legends — and it is revealed that their all-women crew was no accident: on their overcrowded islands, a woman must earn the right to bear children, and there are few surer ways than becoming a hero of the sea. And Abhi, at the very last, comes back to Khul Bashab and finally tells Tamhan what he has felt since the beginning. It is met in full, and the world's first Beastcaller gets his happy ending, as do the many other threads the war leaves in its wake.