Mal could see where Elliot had been snacking on the beans.
“The rest of the owner is over here.”
Merrow led the way up the row. The greenery was thick, and Mal almost tripped over the giant’s body. Mostly because it wasn’t particularly giantlike. In fact, he was only about three and a half or maybe four feet tall. He was no child. He had a full, long beard and his long brown hair was caught up on his head in a topknot.
He’d also been mutilated. Lacerations cross-hatched his body from head to toe. Flies buzzed thickly in the wounds. Mal cast a quick spell to chase them off and preserve the corpse.
She squatted down to get a closer look. Law hadn’t been surprised by the size of the hand, which meant he hadn’t been shrunk as part of the attack. Which meant he was a mini giant. Who knew they were even a thing?
“What do you think?” she asked Merrow.
“He was chased here. And he wasn’t alone.”
“Who’d want to kill him?”
“Impossible to say. They covered their tracks, literally. Or flew.”
“We’ll see about that,” Mal murmured, examining the wounds. They were only about two inches long each. “These don’t look like regular knife wounds, do they? They’re kind of ragged and scalloped on one end. Ever seen anything like it?”
“No.”
“Me either, but it’s a distinctive weapon, so if we find it, we find the killer.”
“Or killers,” Merrow said. “Very small weapons, as well. Possibly pixie-sized.”
“That would definitely put a damper on the wedding,” Mal said, straightening up. “You said he wasn’t alone?”
“The rest of his group are back by the trees. That’s where things get weird.”
Because a ridiculously small giant getting his hand chopped off wasn’t already weird?
“Lead the way.”
Mal expected there to be more of trail, at least of broken foliage, but there was little, giving more credence to the idea that the giant had been chased by pixies, who would have been flying.
The rest of the giants were stacked on top of each other and skewered through with a long spear, which had to have taken real force.
These varied in size, with two being typical giant height—one closer to sixteen feet tall, the other closer to eighteen—while the rest were small. All were male. Mal assumed the weird part was that they’d been hacked up. Not dismembered, exactly, but cut up and cut apart like somebody had been looking for something inside them. Several had holes in their rib cages big enough to allow arms to poke inside. Big arms. Or maybe just made to look that way.
Some of the intestines and organs had been pulled out and dropped onto the ground as if they had been in the way of the search.
“Funny how the attackers looked inside but didn’t seem to search the clothing,” Mal noted.
“Think they found what they were looking for?” asked Merrow.
“Hard to say.”
They had to have been searching for the talisman Law was talking about. Couldn’t be very big, not if it was something for a pixie to carry or wear. Maybe the attackers thought the giants would swallow it? Or insert it under their skin? Mal couldn’t imagine a whole lot of other explanations for hacking up their bodies.
“Not much we can do here. Better if you go help look for the missing kids,” she told Merrow. “I’ll look around a little more and see what else I can find out.
Merrow gave a short nod and vanished.
Mal walked around the stack of bodies. Either there had been quite a few attackers, or they’d had magical help. Actually, she had no doubt they’d had magical help; without it, they couldn’t have hidden their actions from LeeAnne and Law, who were so intimately tied to Effrayant.
Mal frowned. Same with the missing kids, if they’d been kidnapped. And two events like that happening nearly at the same time couldn’t be coincidence. Had one been a distraction from the other? She tried to make sense of the timelines, but the only conclusion she could draw was that she had far too little information to make sense of it.
She attempted a magical reconstruction of events and quickly discovered that a short-circuiting spell had been left behind. They couldn’t be sensed until triggered, and they made any spells cast in a specific vicinity go haywire. They could be cleaned up, but there wasn’t much point. Cleaning meant scouring up every bit of magic, which defeated the purpose. Its influence would wear off eventually, and Mal wasn’t going to waste energy neutralizing it if there was no benefit.
