SULLENDAY

Storey got the bed. And she acted like it was WAY better than the ice carpet. But both were cut from ice, so it was hard to imagine that one was more comfortable than the other. I’d figured that one out as soon as I looked at the room, so I’d made a strategic decision and offered the bed to Storey. I reckoned I’d look pretty gallant if I offered to sleep on the floor.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep a wink, and I don’t think Storey did either. Come morning we were both in an icy mood, which, considering the fact that we were in a room made of ice, wasn’t entirely surprising. It was almost a relief to see the cell door open and hear the giants order us to return to the throne room.

We passed through that long hallway again, and once more we had to sprint just to keep up with the giants, but this time the jog gave me an idea. With forty-foot-long legs, a frost giant could be out for a casual stroll and he’d still be moving faster than a fiery hellhound. The giants hadn’t run from the throne room on Dark Lord Day. They’d just walked out. And I didn’t think they left because they’d stolen the scepter. When we reached the throne room, I saw that One Eye still had that half-thawed crown of snow and two of his generals wore melted ice armor. Gorey had really turned up the flame at this year’s Dark Lord Day. He’d obviously made the room too hot for their ice attire. If they’d stayed around for another minute, there would have been a dozen naked giants in the throne room, and no one wanted to see that.

I finally understood what had happened, so I tried to make amends. “When I saw you leave the throne room, I thought you guys had hit the road with the scepter. I didn’t realize that you’d just gone out to catch some cool air,” I said. Then I went on to explain my various revelations. I even apologized for One Eye’s half-melted crown of snow and suggested we try out a fountain of ice or something more frost-giant-friendly next year.

“So we’re square?” I asked. “Forgive and forget. That sort of thing?”

The great and powerful and just plain tall king of the frost giants shook his head, which made his half-melted crown of snow twist and fall again. I bit my lip and tried not to laugh while we waited for the king to speak. But One Eye must have been lost in thought, because he just nodded to one of his captains, who told us the king still hadn’t reached a verdict. And apparently he wasn’t going to get there anytime soon, so One Eye was moving us out of the ice cell. Maybe he thought he was being kind. He wasn’t. From my point of view, the king put me in the one place that was worse than prison: school.

The guards led us from the throne room to the doors of Nightshadows North. As I’ve mentioned, our school runs an academy in the mountains for the frost giants and another one in the lava plains for the dragons. I’d always wondered what our sister schools looked like, and this one did not disappoint. We entered through three-hundred-foot-tall doors and walked down what seemed like an endless corridor just to reach our classroom. And inside, the schoolroom was huge, big enough to fit an eighty-foot-tall professor who wrote on a wall of polished ice with a charcoal rod made from the burnt length of a gigantic fir tree.

From the hallway to the classroom, everything about the academy was different. Giants live to be sometimes two or three hundred years old. That’s three times the lifespan of a warlock. As we walked to our seats, the guards explained that the students don’t graduate until they’re thirty-six. That’s thirty years of school! So they did things a little more slowly. That first class lasted the entire day. Eight whole hours! And we studied only one thing. It was some poem called The Prose Giganta. They called it epic poetry, which sounded kind of exciting, and the stories in it actually were IMPRESSIVE: giants stepping on kings, stealing heaps of gold, and smashing whole cities. It was Dark-Lord-level stuff. But unlike orc history, which was mostly written in short sentences and had a lot of pictures in between the paragraphs, The Prose Giganta was penned in something called kennings, which were two- or three-word phrases that replaced just one word.

So, instead of saying “blood,” they called it “battle-sweat.” As in, I smashed his brains in and let forth the BATTLE-SWEAT. “Sky-candle” meant “sun.” “Sail-road” stood in for “sea.” And “bane-of-wood” replaced “fire.” Simple—right? Well, not really. They were like little puzzles. In most cases, I had to really think about the kenning to understand it. I mean, who would have thought “wave-swine” meant “ship”? That was definitely not what I pictured.

I needed a moment to wrap my head around the idea. When I finally understood what the giants were doing, I realized I could get away with a lot by using kennings. If Professor Irae heard me describe the dirty details of my indigestion normally, she’d probably turn me into a cloud of foul-smelling gas. Big trouble. However, if I used a kenning—something like “cheek-horn” or “seat-bomb,” instead of just saying “fart”—most of the grimmies would get what I was talking about, but Professor Irae couldn’t really punish me (or at least she couldn’t turn me into a “cheek-horn”).

I was happily contemplating the various possibilities when I felt a tug on my robe. It was Storey.

“Do you get this stuff, Wick? Makes no sense to me. Why say ‘battle-sweat’ when you can say ‘blood’? It’s two words versus one,” she said.

I could tell she didn’t share my enthusiasm for kennings.

“If you ask me, the giants live too long,” she said. “They invent this stuff just to pass the time.”

“Clearly, you don’t get it,” I said, but Storey told me she didn’t WANT to get it. She was a warrior. She liked to say exactly what was on her mind. She didn’t appreciate creative language. Metaphors. Stuff like that. She also pointed out that it was Sullenday. Apparently, these guys didn’t believe in taking a day off. She spent the whole class rambling on about what sort of standing she’d end up with in the Cats-are-fluffy, or whatever her order was called. Then she went back to scribbling in her journal.

I tried to sneak a look at it, but she slammed it shut again. I shook my head and went back to my study of kennings. I was actually starting to enjoy the lesson. But Storey must have been angry that I’d tried to take a peek at her journal, because as soon as she saw a smile on my face, she reminded me about the whole impending-death thing, and that pretty much put a damper on the rest of my day.