by Max Keith
“I said I had silver to pay,” she replied evenly, hoping she didn’t sound too vicious. “I didn’t say I wished to buy your entire house and contents. Charge me a fair price or get nothing from me.”
He scowled again, looking more like himself. “This is not the city, woman, with fifteen inns and eleven brothels all offering a bed and a meal,” he warned. “You’ll come in out of the rain, or you’ll be wet all night long, for my house is the only one for miles.” He smiled, gaps appearing in his ugly mouth. “You can keep your roights, but I’ll have my five mergansers or I’ll shut my door and go back to fucking my wife.”
Alorin made a face, for the bare legs and better humor were now explained; worse, she’d been thinking she could use her vagina as a bargaining chip, getting a cheaper bed and appeasing the gods at the same time. The man looked nothing like he needed to for the Old Ways, but she was tired and cranky and the gods could go fuck themselves. But now that the ill-tempered woodsman had apparently spent himself into his woman, there’d be nothing left in his balls for the gods. She shook her head at the injustice of life. “Fine. Four and a half silvers.”
“Done,” his smile was greasy, “but only if you add a roight.” That would make four silvers, three roights, an exorbitant rate unless he was also providing a feather pillow and a slave to wipe her ass. But, of course, the man was correct: there would be no other houses for miles, and by this time Alorin had promised herself a roof. “And we’ve got no bath, no stable, and no stableboy. Your horse can use the toolshed yonder.”
“Provided she doesn’t shit, I suppose.”
The woodsman smiled thinly. “Nobody likes a bitter woman, you know.”
Alorin returned the smile with venom in her eyes, then whistled for Pixie. By the time she had the beast unsaddled, taken care of, and bedded down, the night was fully dark and fully wet. She found a dry corner of the little shed for her weapons, other than the antler-knife in its sheath at her neck. And then she hooded up and slogged back around to the front of the house, her mind far away, to pound gruffly on the door.
“Let me in, dammit,” she grunted quietly, and when the knot finally fell free again she scurried inside without waiting to be invited.
“Welcome,” came the sour voice of a small, lemon-faced woman. She stood near a small hearth with her arms folded obstinately. “Food’s gone cold.”
“Your silver?” The woodsman lounged beside the fire, his feet filling the air with a cheese-like stink.
Alorin wondered what they imagined, seeing her. She was somewhat taller and far better dressed than either of the two of them, with a patrician air the two of them had undoubtedly never come across before. Yet it was their house she was in. She wondered how many demands she should make on them. “I’ll lay my money down,” she replied coolly, “after my clothes are drying at your fire. You’ve kept me outside long enough.”
“As you wish,” the lady shrugged with a veiled glance at her husband, and she went to get a blanket while Alorin stripped off her worn leathers by the door. She was a hard woman from a hard country, long accustomed to the company of rough men on rough travels, and getting her clothes off before strangers was not something she cared about. The woodsman watched in wide-eyed approval as her layers came off, slapping to the rough wood floor at her feet. He saw long, lithe arms and legs, pale skin, and brown-dyed hair that swept down to the top of her smoothly rounded ass. He saw breasts firm and high, smaller than some but larger than most, with nipples dark and rosy against her flesh. He saw the beginning shadow of her pubic hair, just starting to grow back, smudging the area between her strong, wide hips.
He saw the scars crisscrossing her body, the memories of old fights, each with its own story.
“You’re not a bit shy, are you?” he grinned. She straightened, naked and proud, and looked at him as though he were a servant.
“You may come hang my clothes to dry.” She paid no further attention to him, but moved toward a plank table to lay down three silver mergansers. “You’ll get the rest in the morning,” she added, striding with rising goosebumps toward the bucket in the corner where her nose told her the household pissed after dark. “Are there no children here?”
“Killed.” The man had a tall, thick mug full of what smelled like beer. “That’s to say, three dead as babes. The oldest was off to the War, two years gone now.” He shrugged and took a sip.
Alorin nodded as she squatted. “Did he die in battle?”
The man laughed coarsely. “It was a daughter, woman. She went off to the Army as a camp whore.” He eyed Alorin’s pale body. “Seems you could do the same, I’m thinking. You’re a beauty.”
“Thank you,” she replied dryly. He’d stirred at last, scooping up her wet things and then wringing the worst ones into a pail before he shuffled over to the fire to hang them. She heard the wife coming down a ladder somewhere behind the chimney. “Your lady said something about dinner?”
“In time, woman.” He laid her clothing methodically over stools and benches, leaving her boots very near the fire. “Turnips, carrots, and a little venison.”
“Venison!” Alorin swiped at herself with a handkerchief. “Poaching the King’s deer, are you?”
“We are.” The wife came in with a thick, rough blanket. She blinked down at Alorin’s body. “Gods, woman. Have some shame. It’s a married man you’re preening in front of.”
Alorin shrugged, letting them look again at the battle scars all over her body as she leaned in to the fire. “He’s seen you without clothes, I expect. It’s all the same parts.” The woodsman guffawed, and then he and his wife exchanged a long glance.
“I wouldn’t agree,” he sneered. “She never looked like you. Dinner, woman! This nymph here needs food.”
“Serve her yourself.” The wife slumped brooding onto a pile of fur. “She’s giving you plenty to look at; might as well wait on her, too.” Both women looked narrowly over at the woodsman, and as Alorin wrapped herself in the harsh blanket and began to feel better about her life, she pondered why she had ever, even in the faintest and dustiest corners of her mind, considered balancing her debt with this boorish man’s seed.
She had her pride, after all.
Dinner was overcooked, cold, and served in a bread trencher with sour ale to drink. The venison was stringy and more than half fat, and the wife pursed her lips as she caught Alorin gazing down at it. “You’ll not tell nobody we’re poaching,” she said nastily, “or my husband will find you and kill you.”
“Gladly.” The man’s eyes glittered above his beard, and the valkyrie wondered whether she’d be better off sleeping out with Pixie.
“You’ve nothing to fear from me.” Alorin wiped her mouth with a filthy handkerchief she’d brought, then cast it into the hearth where the gristle made it flare brightly for a moment. “I’ll be away tomorrow before the sun.” She reached underneath herself to scratch at her ass. Already she was making plans, calculating, her exhaustion gone, for there was no doubt now that she must be gone long before the sun. She’d caught the look the man had given his wife. If it was a night’s rest she wanted, she’d not get it here.
The husband and his wife glanced at each other again, another veiled flicker that said many things, and the evening unraveled ahead of Alorin’s brain as clearly as if she was reading the story in a book: they’d all go to sleep, and then at some point when the fire was nearly gone and the darkness deep and heavy, she’d be murdered for her clothes, the value of her weapons, and Pixie, who would end her days pulling sledges full of logs out of the woods. Probably they’d attempt to rape her first, though Alorin knew they’d need to kill her before she let that happen; grimly, she looked at the bearded man and wondered whether he’d try to fuck her corpse.
He would, she decided.
“Do these lands belong to the Lord Whitemar?” she asked calmly, breaking off a piece of her bread.
The pair looked again at each other, and then the woman shrugged. “To the Whitemar family,
sure,” the man replied through his beard, now foamy from his beer. “But if it’s Count Clerent you’re asking about, you’re not yet on his domain. One of his cousins, the Lord Jurren, holds these lands in fief.” He stared hard at where the blanket fell slightly away from Alorin’s chest. “What’s your name, woman?”
Alorin threw the remains of her dinner into the fire and swept her long brown hair behind her ear. “I’m called Madame Lyria. I’m a soothsayer and part-time scribe.” She shrugged. “I’m wondering whether the Count of Whitemar is in need of my services.”
The wife leaned intently forward, but said nothing. Alorin saw renewed greed in the woodsman’s eyes now and wondered whether they’d even wait til she was sleeping. “A soothsayer,” he grunted. “Would you say our fortune, Madame Lyria?” He pronounced the name with a mocking lilt in his rough voice, but Alorin merely cocked her head.
“My prophecies do not come cheap,” she replied gravely, “but if we settle on four mergansers for the night, I can give you what I know already.” She flickered a glance at both of them. “Or, for friendship’s sake, I’m willing to part with mere advice.”
“We’ll have the advice first,” the wife snapped. “And then the rest if we like what you say.”
“What you like is your own business,” Alorin replied, unruffled, her muscles held in easy readiness. A massive axe leaned against the hearth, hard by the woodsman’s hand, and Alorin began to plan ways in which she could leave without killing him; until she paid her debt, she needed to leave him alive.
The wife, though, was another matter. She had no soul to begin with.
“I know what the fires tell me, and what the rains whisper,” she intoned; many times she’d heard her friend Poildrin the mage say mystical twaddle of this sort. “I know what the meadow shouts and what the waters scream. And I know what is in your hearts.” She stared first at the man, and then at his wife; she sensed she was the more dangerous of the two, though she couldn’t have said why she felt that way. Still, Alorin Kaye had lived long enough to trust those kinds of instincts. Yes, she decided, the woman must die. “You will surely suffer for the crimes you commit,” she finished quietly. The antler-knife on its chain nestled between her breasts, and she shifted the blanket to bring her hand close to it.
Another veiled glance, full of meaning. The woodsman chuckled. “It’s the poaching she means, I think.”
“It must be, husband.” The woman’s voice was quick and low. “For what else have we to be worried about?” She looked darkly back at Alorin, and there was hostility in her gaze. “Do your fucking fires and meadows tell us that?”
Alorin glanced at her clothes, vague with steam. She’d not be able to wait for them to dry, more was the pity. Especially the cloak and boots. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d journeyed cold and damp by night. Her mouth tightened. Perfect ending to a shitty day. “Does the Lord Jurren have a holding nearby?” she asked, changing the subject.
“You ask your screaming waters,” the wife scoffed, getting to her feet. “Shall we go to bed, husband?”
“In a minute.” The beard twitched as he frowned. “I’m not sure our conversation with Madame Lyria is through.”
“I can see it isn’t,” Alorin agreed softly. Her hand was around the antler hilt now, the little dagger ready, the blanket loose between her fingers. Already the fight was happening in her mind: the standing wife presented a difficulty, especially if she had a weapon; best to bleed her right away, just to be safe. The husband would go for the axe, but despite his size it was a long, heavy weapon, double-headed, and Alorin knew she’d be inside his guard before he could even get the thing ready to strike.
But… what then? She couldn’t kill him, but it was hard to think of any damage she could do that would end the threat from him while leaving him alive. She reckoned she needed fifteen minutes: time enough to get her clothes on, make her way back out to the toolshed, saddle the horse, and then lead her away, while pocketing a chicken or two for the road. She was vaguely concerned that she couldn’t see where the wife had put her three silvers, but she figured she’d be even if one was for the meal, another for the fire and an hours’ boarding for Pixie, and for the third silver… three chickens? Four? She realized she had no idea what chickens cost these days.
Weregild for one dead wife, perhaps.
Alorin doubted she could hit the husband hard enough to knock him down without killing him; she was better with blades and crossbows. She shook her head a bit, knowing she’d need to think quickly; time was wasting, and — gods! — the husband was leaning forward to get out of his chair, his eyes crafty and wary.
Time.
Naked she sprang up from among the folds of the rough blanket, her antler-knife already out and flashing toward the wife as Alorin planted bare feet on the damp hearthstone and, with quick and practiced motions, drove the wicked little blade behind the hard-faced woman’s right collarbone. It was back out even before the wife had a chance to go from bitter scowl to shocked grimace, and then she was pivoting on her foot to charge the husband.
He was already on his feet and bellowing, the axe coming up; gods, the valkyrie realized, he was going to try to lay her belly open on the up-cut! It had been a long time since she’d gone against a man with a double-bit axe, even an untrained one like this. She twisted aside, her bare skin orange in the firelight, and her hand swept desperately down to jam the knife deep into the thick muscle of the man’s left calf, just above his boot-top. She kept going though, turning the stab into a lift, pulling his leg right up off the floorboards and then backing away to gain a bit of space; the axe, she knew, would combine with the stumbled leg to take him right to the ground.
She had a moment’s fear as she felt her knife, deep in the backside of his shinbone, resisting her hand as she tried to draw it forth; so she just let go, danced aside, and listened to the crash the bearded man made as his axe planted itself in the floor. “Fuck,” he gasped, a wrenched grunt of desperation, and then Alorin knew how she’d get out of here.
She hurdled the man on the floor, making for the hearth poker lying atop the mantel; it was long and iron and hooked at the end, and she seized it even as she glanced back down to make sure the husband was still incapacitated. The wife she was not concerned about; the valkyrie knew where she’d struck, and the woman would not be long dying. In one fluid motion, then, Alorin Kaye went from grabbing the poker to swinging it, hard, down on the wounded man’s leg, the same one with the knife still sticking out the back.
The sickening crack as the bone broke made even Alorin grimace; it did not stop her, though, from raising the poker and bringing it down again, one more, the leg bent and blackened as the bearded man’s eyes went wide in horror. With a sharp ringing noise the poker broke against the floor, the far end of it spinning off into the dark by the front door, landing somewhere over there with a clunk. She turned to see what was happening by the fire.
The wife crouched beside her own hearth, blood everywhere, gazing up with wide eyes as her face whitened and she began to tremble with cold; she was living her last moments, right there at her own fire, and she was having difficulty believing that. Her right arm trailed useless on the floorboards with blood running down it in a steady cascade to join the wide pool of it already there. She glared up at the naked Alorin with absolute and undisguised enmity, the most bitter malice Alorin had ever seen, and now she noticed the woman had a wicked little dagger clutched in her left hand; she’d been going for it, nearly ready to strike, when Alorin had taken her.
So she spat on the wife and then stood by the fire while the light dimmed in those hateful eyes.
The husband, meanwhile, lay gasping and moaning in a welter of his own shit and piss, for there was nothing on his pale face now but pure, abject terror. He was struggling desperately to pull himself backward, toward the door, with the axe completely forgotten. Alorin gazed down at him, not even breathing hard. She walked naked to where he squirmed, and then looked into hi
s eyes with no pity whatsoever as she set her bare foot on his neck and began to lean down.
He stopped at once.
“You were going to kill me, the two of you.” It was not a question, and she spoke with the softly direct tone of a High Sherriff at a trial. “Rape me, then kill me, then take my horse.” She stepped harder. “Yes?”
“Yes.” He’d glanced over, by then, at where his wife at last lost her battle against death and slumped to the ground in a blood-sodden mess. Alorin heard a whimper in his voice, and then his eyes closed as he laid his head on the floor in agony. “Kill me.”
Alorin did not answer until those despairing eyes opened once more, slitted, and then she lifted her foot. “I would like to,” she admitted, “but I cannot.” Then, sighing, she turned back toward the hearth; the man was broken, and not just his leg. She stooped casually, then took a firm hold of his horribly mangled limb and, with scant gentleness, drew her antler-knife back out.
Wherever it was that Lord Jurren had his holding, the woodsman’s screams had to be clearly audible.
“Shush,” Alorin told the sweating man. “You’ll not die.” The blood was considerable, but she still held the half of a poker; a few minutes in the hottest part of the fire, and she’d be able to seal the wound.
Quickly she stepped into her breeches and threw the silk chemise over her head, followed in short order by her tunic with its boiled leather along the front; her cloak was still soaked, but it was wool. The boots were the worst, cold and clammy in her bare feet; she’d be walking all night, she knew, and she was not looking forward to tomorrow’s blisters. Stepping delicately over the bloody mess on the floor, she crossed hastily to where the man still writhed.
