Paladin

by Sally Slater

  Her mother closed her eyes and traced a circle over her left breast. “Great Goddess, let us survive this day.” Her lids flew open and she looked at Sam, speaking with low urgency. “You need to run, Sam. Run as fast and as far as you can.”

  “What about you?”

  “I will run in the opposite direction. It can’t catch us both.” She shoved at Sam’s chest. “Run!”

  Sam hesitated, staring at her mother’s frightened face, and then broke into a limping run. Pain shot up her injured leg with each footfall and several times she nearly fell, but she did not look back. She heard nothing but the sound of the rain hitting the trees and her uneven breath. Was the demon close behind? Had it even followed her? She half-hoped that it had—the alternative was that it had chased after her mother.

  A shrill scream pierced the air. Sam skidded to a stop. Mother. Heart pumping in her chest, she twisted and looked behind her. No sight of the demon.

  The scream came again, long and loud, a mix of pain and terror. Her heart leapt into her throat. Please, Gods, let her be okay. With a final prayer, she turned and ran in the direction of the scream.

  She found her mother stumbling in the rain, wet hands clutching her side. “Sam,” her mother said in a voice that was paper thin. “I told you to run, you foolish child.”

  “You said you would run, too,” Sam accused as she rushed to her mother. Hot tears pricked the back of her eyes, but she refused to cry.

  Her mother’s pale lips formed a wan smile. “I did run. And now I’m caught.” Her hands were slick not with rain but with blood. She reached out and touched Sam’s cheek with scarlet fingers. “But you are not caught yet. Run. Run!”

  “I’m not going to leave you,” Sam said through clenched teeth.

  “Better to both die then?” Tsalene asked harshly, a spark returning to her eyes. She removed her other hand from her side, revealing the extent of her wound. “Don’t throw away your life for a dying woman, Sam.”

  “Don’t say that!” Sam covered her mother’s wound with her own hands, felt the hot liquid against her palms. “You’re not going to die. Just . . . hold on.”

  Her mother gripped her by the shoulders and shook. “Run, Sam! For the love of Emese, run!”

  But it was too late; the demon lurched out from behind the cover of the trees. Blood dripped from a wound in its side. Had her mother done that? How?

  Her mother sagged to her knees and wrapped her arms around Sam’s legs for balance. “Run, child!”

  Sam felt her own knees sag. “I can’t,” she said brokenly. The tears brimming in her eyes spilled over. “I’m afraid.”

  “For me?” Her mother smiled and like always it transformed her. “I do not fear the Afterlight. But it’s not yet your time.” The smile left her face and she became gray and drawn again. She lay her head on Sam’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Sam asked. Her mother didn’t respond. “For what?” she asked again, panic creeping into her voice. “For what?”

  The demon’s growl filled her mother’s silence.

  “Stay away!” Sam shouted over her mother’s slack form. She’s not dead, Sam chanted in her head, as if wishing would make it so. She’s not dead. She’s not dead.

  Gently, she tilted her mother’s head back, cradling her neck. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her mouth parted. Her pale faced glistened with tears. Sam ran her thumb over her mother’s damp cheeks. The skin was cool—all the heat had drained out of it. Her fingers ran south to her mother’s neck, where her pulse should be. Nothing.

  “No,” Sam whispered. And then she threw back her head and screamed. Fury like she’d never before felt consumed her, drowning out everything else. My mother is dead, echoed endlessly in the back of her head. But grief blended with anger and set her blood aflame.

  Sam eased her mother’s limp body to the ground and stood up, meeting the demon’s crimson stare with her own defiant stare. Less than three yards away, it cocked its head to the side like an overgrown wolf pup, as if it couldn’t quite figure her out.

  “You killed my mother,” she told the demon with a calm she didn’t feel, “and now I’m going to kill you.”

  The demon’s lips peeled back into a hungry, canine grin, and Sam bared her teeth in a semblance of a smile. “I will kill you,” she promised, curling her fingers into claws. The demon snarled in response and pawed the ground with its foreleg.

  A shred of rational thought managed to slip through the wall of her anger. She had no weapon or armor. She scanned the woods for something, anything she could use against the demon. A fallen branch rested on the ground near her feet. It would have to do. She snatched it up, tucking it under her arm like she would a thrusting spear.

  The demon charged, and so did she.

  It launched itself at her in a blur of black fur. She ran towards it, angling her makeshift spear towards the left side of its barrel chest, where she imagined its heart would be, if demons had hearts.

  Before they connected, something heavy slammed into her side. The branch snapped in two as she landed in a sprawl on the ground. Dazed, she struggled up onto her elbows.

  “Get behind me!” a man’s voice shouted.

  Sam’s eyes swung towards the voice. A tall, starkly beautiful man stood in the middle of the forest path with his sword held aloft, his gaze trained on the demon. He was panting heavily, and some combination of rain and sweat had plastered his blond hair to his skull. “Get behind me, Gods damn it! Move!” He let out an exasperated huff. “Do you want to die?”

  Her gaze shifted to her mother, laid out among the dirt and fallen leaves, back to the strange man, and then finally the demon. Swallowing a sob, Sam scrambled to her feet and wove her way through the brush till she was a few paces behind him.

  He turned to glare at her. “Fighting a demon with a stick? Are you mad?”

  Sam looked at him with a blank expression. “My mother is dead.”

  The sharp planes of his face softened for an instant and then hardened again. “You can grieve later. For now, focus on staying alive.” He dug something out of his boot—a long knife—and tossed it at her feet. “Don’t use it unless you have to. Leave the demon to me.”

  Sam nodded mutely and picked up the knife. She’d lost the white rage she’d been feeling. Now she just felt brittle and empty.

  The man did not attack immediately—he observed, tilting his head back to take in the beast’s full height. “It’s big,” he said quietly. “One of the biggest I’ve seen.” He adjusted his grip on his sword and edged closer.

  The demon gave him a considering look and then sniffed at the air, licking its chops. Ignoring the man, it ambled over to her mother’s body and snuffled at her stomach, mottled red and brown where she’d bled through her gown. It lolled out the full length of its tongue and began lapping up the blood. Teeth flashed and sank into purpling skin.

  Rage flared anew. “Get away from her!” Sam screamed. She sprinted toward the demon and rammed her knife into its side.

  The demon reared onto its hind legs and roared, knocking Sam onto the ground. Claws scraped the ground, inches away from her face.

  Hands slid under her arms and pulled her backwards and up. “You bloody idiot,” the man fumed, shoving her behind him. “Stay. Back.” He gave her another shove for good measure.

  He drew his sword and faced the demon. Its eyes had gone wild, rolling in their sockets. The knife, Sam noted with grim satisfaction, was still buried in its ribcage. There was no way she’d let that thing eat her mother, dead or not.

  The demon swiped at the man with its front paw. He held his ground and swung his sword. The blade struck talon, which must have been as hard as steel, or harder, since it didn’t break. He swung again, before the demon could retract its claw. This time, the edge of his blade sliced clean through the demon’s carpals, hacking paw from limb. Dark brown sludge spurted from the stump of its leg, reeking of rotten meat.

  The beast let out an unearthly how
l, but the loss of its limb did not slow it down. It stretched its neck forward, snapping at the man’s throat. He ducked and rolled out of reach. He regained his footing and then lunged, jamming his sword into the demon’s breast. The sword slid out covered in the same putrid brown sludge. Still, the demon did not die. It attacked with jaws open wide, closing on air as he skirted out of the way.

  The demon sprung at him. He shifted to the side and leapt, raising his sword high over his head with both hands. He slashed down, hard and fast, blade whistling through the air. Skull split from spine, and the demon’s severed head dropped to the ground.

  It was dead.

  So was her mother.

  The man wiped his sword on the grass and returned it to its sheath. He rubbed his face with one hand. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “My foot . . . It’s sprained, I think. I fell, before.” Before the demon. Before her mother had died. She hid her face with her hands and turned her back to him, so he couldn’t see her tears.

  A hand touched her shoulder. “It gets better.”

  She whipped around, let him see the angry tears. “Does it really?”

  He hesitated. “No. No, it doesn’t. It gets . . . easier.” His hand fell from her shoulder. “I’m sorry, my lady. I don’t have the right words. I’m just a man with a sword.”

  Sam made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “I suppose I should thank you.” She didn’t say, I wish you’d come earlier. Instead, she asked, “Who are you?”

  He drew himself up and swept an elegant bow. “Paladin Tristan Lyons, First of the Sword.”

  Sam gasped in spite of herself. “Demon slayer.”

  “Aye.” An unreadable expression crossed his face. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save her, too.”

  What was there to say to that? She couldn’t say, it’s okay—it wasn’t. She couldn’t blame him either. So Sam said nothing.

  They stood in silence for a while, the rain falling in torrents around them. “You’re shivering,” he said finally. “We should get you home. Can you walk?”

  She nodded. “My ankle’s not so bad as that. What about my mother’s—” She stopped short, unable to finish the sentence. “Will you bring her home, too?”

  “Aye, my lady.” With a backward glance at her, he walked over to her mother’s body, unmoved from the forest floor where Sam had left her. He knelt down and scooped her mother into his arms. Her body hung like a wet rag doll, her head flung back at an unnatural angle, hair trailing in a snarled black curtain.

  Bile rose in Sam’s throat, and she looked away. That corpse wasn’t her mother. It was a shell, nothing more.

  My mother is dead.

  And there was nothing she, Paladin Lyons, or even the Gods could do about it.

  Her hands clenched into fists.

  She couldn’t change the past, but she could change the future.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sam held the scissors at her neck and closed her eyes.

  Snip, snip.

  Twisted coils of sable hair fell to the floor of the inn. It’s only hair, she told herself, hacking off another lock. Hair grew back. Although if all went as planned, it would be ages before she’d wear long hair again.

  Sam turned towards the mirror and winced. The ducal court at Haywood had called Tsalene of Rhea an exotic butterfly, but Sam wasn’t pretty and never had been. The only beauty she’d inherited from her mother was a poor imitation of her smile and her glorious mane of hair. The latter now lay on the floor in tangled snarls. Her new ear-length cut, no matter how nicely it curled, did her prominent nose no favors.

  Sam removed her chemise, shoving it into her small travel sack of belongings. She snatched up the band of cloth from where she’d laid it down on the straw mattress and wrapped it around her small breasts. The binding was far from comfortable, but it was bearable. She pulled on a pair of tan breeches and a loose-fitting tunic, and then faced the mirror again, doing her best to emulate a man’s relaxed posture.

  A younger, softer version of the Duke of Haywood stared back at her. The Duke of Ice, they called him now, his heart hardened to stone by his wife’s untimely death. Father and daughter shared the same intense yellow-green stare, but hers lacked his frost.

  Do you even miss me, Father? She wondered how many days had passed before the duke had even noticed she was gone.

  Sam had few regrets about leaving Haywood behind. Since the day of her mother’s funeral, her father had been shut off and cold to her. Rather than suffer the sting of her father’s indifference or fall into a depression, Sam had used the tragedy of her mother’s death to fuel her. What was once a hobby became compulsion. Sam spent every spare hour training. She practiced with a sword on foot, on horseback, against pells and training dummies, and when she could, against people. She learned how to fight with a shield and how to defend herself without one. If she didn’t have a blade in hand, she used bell clappers and lifted stones to strengthen her upper body. In the early mornings, she ran, weighted down by a heavy breastplate she’d stolen from the castle armory.

  She touched her shorn hair, running her fingers through phantom locks. All of her training had been for this. For a chance to become her own hero.

  It was now or never. The Paladins waited for no man.

  And certainly for no woman.

  After collecting her things, Sam paid the innkeeper and set out towards the northernmost part of Heartwine, the kingdom’s capitol. She hadn’t the luxury of a horse to call her own, so she traveled by foot, passing through the commercial quarter, where shops were stacked one on top of the other on either side of the street, and then over the footbridge into the Old City.

  An ancient church stood at its epicenter, an architectural remnant of the Age of the First Men. Rows of houses spun out from the church like the radials of a spider web. Four-storied homes with timber frames leaned against each other, some leaning out over the streets. Above the tiled roofs of the houses rose the crenellated turrets of the royal palace, and beyond that lurked an enormous fortress. A sprawling structure of stone and brick, the fortress served as headquarters to the Paladins and gave residence to the High Commander himself. The Duke of Haywood had made clear his dislike for the living legend—a point in the High Commander’s favor as far as Sam was concerned.

  Drawing nearer, Sam could see a long line of boys extending past the latticed iron gates blocking the entrance to the fortress courtyard and well into the street. There must have been hundreds of boys, and it was early yet; there would surely be many more to come.

  Quietly, Sam took her place at the end of the line, so anxious she was sick with it. Would anyone believe her charade, or would they see right through her? Every time someone glanced her way, her heart leapt into a gallop. She kept her mouth shut and her eyes on the ground to discourage anyone from talking to her.

  The line moved steadily along, and Sam eventually passed through the massive iron gates into the courtyard. Around its perimeter was a two-tiered arcade with marble columns and rounded arches. Apart from a cobblestone circle in the center, the ground was covered with thick well-manicured grass.

  A few yards in front of her, a thin, balding man with spectacles perched on the tip of his nose was recording names. A delicate white hand curled around a feather quill. He peered at her over his spectacles. “Name?”

  “It’s Sam.” Her eyes flew wide. Too high, too high! She coughed noisily into her hand and said in lower tones, “Sam of Haywood.”

  Behind his glasses, his gaze narrowed in an assessing stare. She fidgeted under his scrutiny. “Is there an honorific I should note?” he asked.

  She cleared her throat and gave the falsehood she had devised. “Lord Sam of Haywood, second son of Lord Hawkins.” There was, of course, no such lord in Haywood. Or if there was, she’d never made his acquaintance.

  The man wrote down her name in a looping scrawl. “And your weapon?”

  “Weapon?” she repeated, not grasping his meaning.

  He waved h
is quill with an impatient flick. “Your preferred weapon. Knives, bow-and-arrow, sword—”

  “Sword. Definitely sword.”

  “Wonderful,” the man said without inflection, scribbling “sword” beside her name. Once finished, he pointed toward the paved circle in the center of the courtyard, where most of the boys had gathered. “Wait over there.”

  She thanked him and started in that direction. Her steps grew heavier as she approached—by the Gods, she was nervous! Though she’d done nothing but stand in line for hours, and it was a rather brisk morning, sweat encircled her underarms and pooled in the space between her flattened breasts. The dampness of her binding cloth made her skin itch, but she couldn’t very well scratch there.

  She stopped a few feet back from the circle, gathering her courage and sizing up her competition. There were tall boys and short boys—though none as short as she—fat boys and skinny boys, boys in second-hand clothes and boys dressed in expensive fashion. Some, like her, stood alone while others stood in groups, talking and laughing.

  “Watch where you stand,” a voice said in her ear. Sam whirled around to face a boy around her own age, handsome in a haughty sort of way, with a patrician face, cool, gray eyes, and thin lips arranged in a frown. He wore his black hair in curls to his shoulders, and if those perfect ringlets were Gods-given, then snowflakes were green. “Fenric,” he said by way of introduction. “You’ll thank me later.”

  Her forehead creased. “Excuse me?”

  “Look at the boy over there,” he said, jerking his chin to the left. “You’re staring. Don’t be so obvious about it.”

  Annoyed by his audacity, she glared at him and then subtly returned her gaze to the same general vicinity.

  “With the strange clothes and silver hair,” Fenric breathed, his voice just above a whisper.

  Once she knew what she was looking for, it was impossible to miss him. The others had given him a wide berth. His hair was long as a woman’s, braided in a thick plait to his waist, and the color of spun silver. His clothes, however, long black robes that billowed out in a bell-shape around his ankles, were of a familiar Rhean make. This piqued her interest. Few traveled to Thule from her mother’s homeland.