The Sword & Sorcery Anthology

by David G. Hartwell

  So she came at last to a huge forest with oaks thick as a goddess’ waist. Over all was a green canopy of leaves that scarcely let in the sun. Here were many streams, rivulets that ran cold and clear, torrents that crashed against rocks, and pools that were full of silver trout whose meat was sweet. She taught herself to fish and to swim, and it would be hard to say which gave her the greater pleasure. Here, too, were nests of birds, and that meant eggs. Ferns curled and then opened, and she knew how to steam them, using a basket made of willow strips and a fire from rubbing sticks against one another. She followed bees to their hives, squirrels to their hidden nuts, ducks to their watered beds.

  She grew strong, and brown, and—though she did not know it—very beautiful.

  Beauty is a danger, to women as well as to men. To warriors most of all. It steers them away from the path of killing. It softens the soul.

  When you are in a tree, be a tree.

  She was three years alone in the forest and grew to trust the sky, the earth, the river, the trees, the way she trusted her knife. They did not lie to her. They did not kill wantonly. They gave her shelter, food, courage. She did not remember her father except as some sort of warrior god, with staring eyes, looking as she had seen him last. She did not remember her mother or sisters or aunts at all.

  It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone, it was as if she could not speak at all. She knew words, they were in her head, but not in her mouth, on her tongue, in her throat. Instead she made the sounds she heard every day—the grunt of boar, the whistle of duck, the trilling of thrush, the settled cooing of the wood pigeon on its nest.

  If anyone had asked her if she was content, she would have nodded.

  Content.

  Not happy. Not satisfied. Not done with her life’s work.

  Content.

  And then one early evening a new sound entered her domain. A drumming on the ground, from many miles away. A strange halloing, thin, insistent, whining. The voices of some new animal, packed like wolves, singing out together.

  She trembled. She did not know why. She did not remember why. But to be safe from the thing that made her tremble, she climbed a tree, the great oak that was in the very center of her world.

  She used the rope ladder she had made, and pulled the ladder up after. Then she shrank back against the trunk of the tree to wait. She tried to be the brown of the bark, the green of the leaves, and in this she almost succeeded.

  It was in the first soft moments of dark, with the woods outlined in muzzy black, that the pack ran yapping, howling, belling into the clearing around the oak.

  In that instant she remembered dogs.

  There were twenty of them, some large, lanky grays; some stumpy browns with long muzzles; some stiff-legged spotted with pushed-in noses; some thick-coated; some smooth. Her father, the god of war, had had such a motley pack. He had hunted boar and stag and hare with such. They had found him bear and fox and wolf with ease.

  Still, she did not know why the dog pack was here, circling her tree. Their jaws were raised so that she could see their iron teeth, could hear the tolling of her death with their long tongues.

  She used the single word she could remember. She said it with great authority, with trembling.

  “Avaunt!”

  At the sound of her voice, the animals all sat down on their haunches to stare up at her, their own tongues silenced. Except for one, a rat terrier, small and springy and unable to be still. He raced back up the path toward the west like some small spy going to report to his master.

  Love comes like a thief, stealing the heart’s gold away.

  It was in the deeper dark that the dogs’ master came, with his men behind him, their horses’ hooves thrumming the forest paths. They trampled the grass, the foxglove’s pink bells and the purple florets of self-heal, the wine-colored burdock flowers and the sprays of yellow goldenrod equally under the horses’ heavy feet. The woods were wounded by their passage. The grass did not spring back nor the flowers raise up again.

  She heard them and began trembling anew as they thrashed their way across her green haven and into the very heart of the wood.

  Ahead of them raced the little terrier, his tail flagging them on, till he led them right to the circle of dogs waiting patiently beneath her tree.

  “Look, my lord, they have found something,” said one man.

  “Odd they should be so quiet,” said another.

  But the one they called lord dismounted, waded through the sea of dogs, and stood at the very foot of the oak, his feet crunching on the fallen acorns. He stared up, and up, and up through the green leaves and at first saw nothing but brown and green.

  One of the large gray dogs stood, walked over to his side, raised its great muzzle to the tree, and howled.

  The sound made her shiver anew.

  “See, my lord, see—high up. There is a trembling in the foliage,” one of the men cried.

  “You fool,” the lord cried, “that is no trembling of leaves. It is a girl. She is dressed all in brown and green. See how she makes the very tree shimmer.” Though how he could see her so well in the dark, she was never to understand. “Come down, child, we will not harm you.”

  She did not come down. Not then. Not until the morning fully revealed her. And then, if she was to eat, if she was to relieve herself, she had to come down. So she did, dropping the rope ladder, and skinning down it quickly. She kept her knife tucked up in her waist, out where they could see it and be afraid.

  They did not touch her but watched her every movement, like a pack of dogs. When she went to the river to drink, they watched. When she ate the bit of journeycake the lord offered her, they watched. And even when she relieved herself, the lord watched. He would let no one else look then, which she knew honored her, though she did not care.

  And when after several days he thought he had tamed her, the lord took her on his horse before him and rode with her back to the far west where he lived. By then he loved her, and knew that she loved him in return, though she had yet to speak a word to him.

  “But then, what have words to do with love,” he whispered to her as they rode.

  He guessed by her carriage, by the way her eyes met his, that she was a princess of some sort, only badly used. He loved her for the past which she could not speak of, for her courage which showed in her face, and for her beauty. He would have loved her for much less, having found her in the tree, for she was something out of a story, out of a prophecy, out of a dream.

  “I loved you at once,” he whispered. “When I knew you from the tree.”

  She did not answer. Love was not yet in her vocabulary. But she did not say the one word she could speak: avaunt. She did not want him to go.

  When the cat wants to eat her kittens, she says they look like mice.

  His father was not so quick to love her.

  His mother, thankfully, was long dead.

  She knew his father at once, by the way his eyes were slotted against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She knew him to be a king if only by that.

  And when she recognized her mother and her sisters in his retinue, she knew who it was she faced. They did not know her, of course. She was no longer seven but nearly seventeen. Her life had browned her, bronzed her, made her into such steel as they had never known. She could have told them but she had only contempt for their lives. As they had contempt now for her, thinking her some drudge run off to the forest, some sinister throwling from a forgotten clan.

  When the king gave his grudging permission for their marriage, when the prince’s advisers set down in long scrolls what she should and should not have, she only smiled at them. It was a tree’s smile, giving away not a bit of the bark.

  She waited until the night of her wedding to the prince, when they were couched together, the servants a giggle outside their door. She waited until he had covered her face with kisses, when he had touched her in secret places that made her tremble, when he had brought blood bet
ween her legs. She waited until he had done all the things she had once watched her brother do to the maids, and she cried out with pleasure as she had heard them do. She waited until he was asleep, smiling happily in his dreams, because she did love him in her warrior way.

  Then she took her knife and slit his throat, efficiently and without cruelty, as she would a deer for her dinner.

  “Your father killed my father,” she whispered, soft as a love token in his ear as the knife carved a smile on his neck.

  She stripped the bed of its bloody offering and handed it to the servants who thought it the effusions of the night. Then she walked down the hall to her father-in-law’s room.

  He was bedded with her mother, riding her like one old wave atop another.

  “Here!” he cried as he realized someone was in the room. “You!” he said when he realized who it was.

  Her mother looked at her with half-opened eyes and, for the first time, saw who she really was, for she had her father’s face, fierce and determined.

  “No!” her mother cried. “Avaunt!” But it was a cry that was ten years late.

  She killed the king with as much ease as she had killed his son, but she let the knife linger longer to give him a great deal of pain. Then she sliced off one of his ears and put it gently in her mother’s hand.

  In all this she had said not one word. But wearing the blood of the king on her gown, she walked out of the palace and back to the woods, though she was many days getting there.

  No one tried to stop her, for no one saw her. She was a flower in the meadow, a rock by the roadside, a reed by the river, a tree in the forest.

  And a warrior’s mother by the spring of the year.

  The Red Guild

  RACHEL POLLACK

  1

  “I would like to see your master, please.” The merchant stood in the doorway, nervously shifting his weight. Except for a first glance at Cori, his eyes slid right past her.

  “There is no master here,” she said. “I serve only myself.”

  “What? Oh. I mean, I’m sorry.” She could see him shrink back as he looked over his shoulder at the single dirt road from town, empty of any other houses (must they all do that?). Then he looked her up and down, seeing the long deep red dress, the green scarf that covered her hair and then crossed around the back of her neck to tie at the throat, the long delicate hands slightly reddened from the scrubbing she’d given the house that morning, the small breasts and long slender waist, the delicate face with its thin lips, high cheeks, and wide eyes. “I’m sorry,” the merchant repeated. “I must have made a mistake.”

  “If you must, you must,” Cori said, and almost slammed the heavy wood door. Instead she reminded herself how much she needed a client. “Why don’t you tell me what you want?” she said.

  “Well—” The man swallowed. “The people, I mean in the town, they said, that is, the innkeeper, a bald man—”

  “Jonni.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Jonni. He told me—” He stopped. “That an—”

  “That an Assassin lived here.”

  He caught his breath at the word. “Yes. A member...a member of the Red Guild. Yes.”

  “I am an Assassin,” Cori said.

  He stared at her. He was a tall thick man, this merchant in his yellow satin robes streaked with pink and purple velvet. He stood more than a head above the skinny girl, and probably weighed a good third more than she did. He could have knocked her down with a single shove; or so it looked. “I didn’t know the Guild took, uh...” Again his voice trailed off.

  “Took women?”

  A smile played upon his fleshy lips. “Took girls.”

  Cori smiled back at him. “The Guild takes what belongs to it. Please come inside.” She led him down the narrow center hall of her house, her black slippers silent on the tile floor, his embroidered leather boots clunking awkwardly behind her, to a wide, high-ceilinged room filled with sunlight and a cool breeze from the large curtainless double windows facing the open fields. Against one wall stood several paintings, dark and abstract. Cori had been trying to decide whether she liked any of them well enough to hang when the knock came at the door. Besides the paintings the room contained only two flat red cushions set on either side of a brass disc engraved with Earth Markings in the center of the stone floor. Cori sank down cross-legged, her back absurdly straight even for her; she restrained a grin as the heavy man grunted his way to the floor.

  “My name is Morin,” he said. “Morin Jay. Do you know the city Sorai? By the sea?” Cori nodded. “I’ve lived there for ten years now. It’s a good place for a merchant. Opportunities from the sea trade, you know. But it’s not overcrowded. That’s important for a merchant.”

  “Mr. Morin, why do you want an Assassin?”

  “Yes, yes, but you should know the background.” The sunlight on his face brought out his paleness. Cori imagined, him sitting before his ledgers all day, harassing even paler clerks. “I came to Sorai with enough money—from my family, I was the third son.”

  “Mr. Morin, please.”

  “Oh. Yes. Well, I sent out a caravan—I couldn’t afford any ships at first, so I bought a cargo and anyway, the Yellow God stroked my camels as they say, and then my ships, when I could afford them, and now I find myself, well, not in a safe, but a comfortable position, one I can build on. But not safe. Not safe. That’s the point. I need to expand, I need to keep my investments constantly turning over.” Cori imagined a row of little money bags somersaulting. “The Yellow God doesn’t like money sitting in cellars, you know.”

  Cori sighed. It was beginning to sound like the kind of offer every Assassin hated, when you knew you should say no, but found yourself hoping something would justify it. “Let me see if I can help you. A rival merchant has attacked your operations and you find no choice except to remove him.”

  “Rival?” he said. “My father’s god, do you think I would hire—” He swallowed. “No, it’s very different. Not a rival. A dragon.”

  Cori’s eyes widened despite herself. Dragons may once have blotted out the sky, but that was long ago, before the Blank God had taken most of his servants with him into the World of Smoke. The last dragon kill, the only one Cori knew of really, had taken place a good twenty years before she had joined the Guild. She imagined a scaly monster laid out before her, imagined her Mark burned into its belly, imagined the line of Guild members shouting her name as she walked coolly into the great Hall in the Crystal City to formally announce her kill.

  Morin Jay’s sigh brought her back to reality. “I’m sorry. I should have realized it was too—too ambitious for a girl.” He pushed himself up.

  Cori’s grip held him like a paper doll. “Please continue, Mr. Morin,” she said, and lowered him to his seat.

  “Is there any point? Look, Miss—”

  “Coriia. No Miss. Assassins are forbidden all titles.”

  “Coriia, then. I don’t mean to insult you, really. God knows I wouldn’t anger a Guild member, even—”

  “Even a girl, yes. Don’t worry, Mr. Morin, assassins never get angry.”

  “But really, a thing like this—” He gestured. “A dragon.”

  “Do you think the Guild would credit me if I couldn’t handle whatever jobs I took?”

  Sweat dripped over his cheeks. “I don’t really know the Guild has credited you. Maybe that innkeeper was playing a joke on me.”

  A flick of a thumb and forefinger yanked away the scarf that covered Coriia’s head and neck. Morin Jay’s eyes saw first the red hair, cropped closer than any normal girl would even contemplate; and then they moved down to the hollow of the throat, where the mark gleamed, as red and liquid as a fresh wound. A spiral cross, the arms curled clockwise. As the merchant stared at it, the mark appeared to spin, like the sun wheel of a meditator.

  “Mr. Morin,” Cori said, with just a hint of the Voice, enough to command obedience, “the knife hidden in your pouch. Throw it at me.”

  Morin didn�
�t ask how she had known the jeweled blade was there. His eyes stayed on her mark as he fumbled in his pouch, found the blade, and with greater speed and accuracy than Cori expected, launched it at her throat. Her right wrist snapped; the scarf, with its pencil line of “diamond metal” sewn into the outer fabric, flashed out; the two halves of the knife clattered against the wall. “Am I an Assassin?” she asked.

  Again he surprised her. Sweating, he whispered, “It takes more than a quick hand and a blade scarf to kill a dragon.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does.” Again the mark spun, slowly this time, and as the merchant stared, his face slackened and he began to moan. Cori knew what he was seeing. The image would grow, filling the room. He himself would shrink to a dot, the tiniest pin prick against a cloud. Darkness would surge through him, an invasion of utter cold, slowing the blood rushing through his body. Cori knew this feeling. Her teacher had used it to bring her back the time she’d run from the Guild. For Morin Jay it would seem as if the slightest noise, just a breath, a scratch of a fingernail against a thigh, and he’d shatter like a frozen bubble.

  Abruptly it ended. He sat again on a thin cushion across from a young girl, her face as innocent as spring, her head and throat covered with a thin green scarf. She nodded, fighting a smile that attacked the edges of her mouth. “Tell me about your dragon,” she said.

  They traveled to Sorai separately, Morin Jay by coach along the sea road, Cori on foot, running with the “unwilled stride.” Someone, not a Guild member, had once described the stride as drawing power from the Earth. It was nothing of the kind. Instead, she let the Earth enter and propel her, a hand moving a puppet. It felt good, the pull of the muscles, the slap of her slippers against the dirt and rock of the low hills leading to the sea, the changes in light and temperature as gray sea clouds rolled across the sun, the thick smell of late spring.