Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

  “I have had in-laws that did both those things.”

  “What, really?”

  “Primarily when drunk.”

  She laughed. Her stomach growled loudly in counterpoint and she thumped herself. “Quiet, you.”

  After a moment, she said, “My in-laws just seem to want to marry me off. Are you married?”

  “I was, once.”

  Halla stilled. He glanced back and saw her eyes were filled with sudden sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shook his head. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I did not leave her behind when I went into the sword. She decided years before that she did not want to be wed to a man who might be gone for years at a time, and she cut the ties. It was for the best.”

  “Oh,” said Halla. And then, “I’m still sorry. That must have been hard.”

  He shrugged. “She was strong. Strong enough to know what she did and did not want. And there were no children to bind us.”

  Strong enough to cut the tie and say to my face that love was not enough.

  And a good thing, too, in the end. Enough people paid the price for my mistakes without a wife to suffer as well, or great god forbid, children.

  No, when he died at last, if he was ever allowed to truly die, the world would forget the name of Sarkis of the Weeping Lands. He had neither son or daughter to carry on his line.

  And thank the great god for that.

  Chapter 11

  They slept that night in a tangle where a hedgerow had run into a band of trees and turned into a dense thicket of brush. It was cold, but it was out of the wind.

  “Tomorrow, an inn.” Sarkis frowned. “You will need to sheathe the sword, though. I expect our description has been spread about. Do women travel alone in your country?”

  “Often enough,” Halla said, wrapping the cloak tight around her shoulders. “It won’t draw a great deal of comment. If I were younger or better looking, someone might care. As it is, they might think I’m being foolhardy, if anybody notices me at all.”

  He scowled at her. “You are a fine looking woman. If your countrymen cannot see that, it is the fault of the decadent south, not you.”

  Halla blinked at him, then felt a smile spread helplessly across her face. “That’s…that’s very sweet. Thank you.”

  “I am not sweet. Did I mention that I’ve fought dragons?”

  “Yes, but you also mentioned that it was mostly unsuccessfully.”

  Sarkis grunted. “At any rate,” he said, “if anyone asks, I trust you’ll simply do that thing you do.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know.” He waved his hand irritably. “Begin asking unexpected questions until everyone in the conversation starts doubting their senses. It’s a talent. Like some strange form of diplomacy that goes so far in the wrong direction that it comes out the other side.”

  Halla had to stop and parse that for a minute.

  “Was that an insult?” Well, two compliments in one day was probably far too much to hope for…

  “It was merely an observation. My lady.”

  He added the last two words perfunctorily. It reminded Halla of the way that her late sister had said, “The gods bless you.” There was an implication that saying it took the insult out of whatever she’d said right beforehand, and if you didn’t agree to that, then it wasn’t her problem.

  She tried to get comfortable against the tree trunk behind her. It was a losing proposition. Sarkis handed her the small pack to use as a pillow, but there wasn’t much to be done about the cold or the things poking her on the ground.

  I swear the ground has gotten harder since I was a small child. Didn’t I used to fall asleep out on the hill behind the house?

  Sarkis stretched out his booted feet and leaned against the tree beside her, looking as if he slept on the ground all the time.

  He probably does.

  Probably the ground is harder in the Weeping Lands, too. These are like decadent southern trees or something.

  She knew that Sarkis probably held her in mild contempt. Mild if I’m lucky. She was slow and weak and she talked too much. And was from a decadent civilization with too many gods, et cetera, et cetera.

  It’s probably easy to feel superior when you’re hundreds of years old and built like a wall. And nobly sacrificed yourself to become a weapon for your people, even if you lost.

  She studied her right shoe. She wasn’t sure if she should take it off or not. There was undoubtedly a blister underneath it. She was mostly afraid her foot would swell up and she wouldn’t get her shoe back on afterward.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll sleep at an inn. In a bed. A real bed. With a mattress. It doesn’t even have to be a good mattress. I don’t even care if it’s got bugs.

  No, the shoe was going to have to come off. She gritted her teeth, unlaced the shoe, and pulled it loose.

  The blister was gigantic. It had broken open and now there were loose flaps of dead white skin across her heel, framed in angry red, with bits of lint sticking to both.

  Well, that’s unpleasant.

  “What have you done to yourself?” asked Sarkis. And then, “Ah. Most impressive.”

  “It’s just a blister,” Halla muttered. “Not a big deal.”

  “On the contrary. Men have died of blisters.”

  “They have not.”

  “If someone cannot keep up during a forced march and falls behind, they must be left. Often the enemy gets to them before they can catch up or be retrieved.”

  “Gods have mercy. We’re not on a forced march.”

  “We are, of a sort, but I will not leave you behind, as that would negate the purpose of the march. Perhaps tomorrow we can steal a horse.”

  “How about socks?” asked Halla hopefully. “A better sock would fix things.”

  “Great sagas are not written about successful sock raids upon a rival holding.”

  “How do you know?” said Halla, attempting to tear a strip of cloth from the bottom hem of her habit. “You’re in the decadent south now. We might have sock raids constantly for all you know.”

  Sarkis gave a loud snort to indicate what he thought of this, but then robbed it of much of its impact by taking her foot in his hand and wrapping the cloth around it. His hands were much warmer than they had any right to be, given how cold the air was. Halla waited for him to recoil from the admittedly unpleasant blister, but he seemed unconcerned.

  “Warn if it’s too tight,” he said, patting her knee absently. As if I were a horse he’d just reshod. Except a horse would probably be more useful right now.

  “What, will my foot fall off?”

  “Your toenails may.”

  Halla blinked at him, realized that he wasn’t joking, and stared gloomily at her shoes. “Do people die of lost toenails?”

  “Less often than blisters.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort.”

  “When I led warriors, good shoes were considered as essential as a good sword. Moreso, in fact. If one has a bad sword, one can still run away.”

  “These were good shoes,” said Halla. Oh gods, he thinks I’m one of those women who wear uncomfortable shoes to look fashionable. If she owned any fashionable shoes, it was purely by accident, because she’d owned the pair long enough for the fashion to come around again. This wasn’t something she felt like admitting. “It’s just that I’m not used to wearing them for days without taking them off.”

  Sarkis grunted.

  Her stomach growled like a bear. Halla sighed. She’d eaten a few handfuls of chickweed and late sorrel earlier, but her body was not happy with such meager fare, particularly not if it was doing the hard work of keeping her warm.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sarkis abruptly.

  She looked up, startled.

  It was growing too dark to see much of his expression. He was frowning, or perhaps the scar through his eyebrow only made it look like a frown.

  “Sorry? For what?”

 
; “I am doing a poor job guarding you. You are hungry and footsore and I do not know this land well enough to feed you.”

  “But we’re in a hurry,” said Halla. “To get to Archenhold, or at least to get away from Rutger’s Howe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if we weren’t in a hurry, then I could feed us just fine,” said Halla with some asperity. “It’s autumn. You’ve got to work to starve in the middle of autumn.”

  “Do you?” He sounded nonplussed.

  She started counting things off on her fingers. “There’s acorns, if I had a week or so to leach them…we’re getting to end of the season for filberts, but we could probably turn up a few good ones left…persimmons are ripening, though those could be tricky, since the beasts want them too, and if they’re close enough to a house that the beasts aren’t a problem, the farmers probably are. If we wanted to raid a garden, there’s plenty of things still in the ground, everybody stores the roots like that until they need them. Although I’d feel bad, since if we took too much, people might go hungry. But that’s true about any food, except acorns.” She considered. “And I guess cattail roots, although they’ll be woody right now, so we’d have to be really hungry…”

  “Enough, enough!” She could hear that he was smiling. “I yield!”

  “It’s just that pretty much anything we might harvest takes time and work and probably cooking supplies.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m not completely useless, you know,” she said, picking at her skirts.

  There was a long silence, and then out of the dark, his voice said, “I never thought you were.”

  She was glad that he couldn’t see her blush.

  Since, despite all the talk, there was nothing to eat and not much to be said, Halla arranged her cloak as best she could, huddling to try and get warm. The air was very cold. She could pull her collar up over her face, which was warmer, but then the fabric got damp and hard to breathe through and she felt like she was suffocating.

  She would certainly never get comfortable enough to sleep, Halla told herself sadly, and then fell asleep.

  She had a vague memory, somewhere in the night, of Sarkis speaking to her, but she couldn’t remember a word he said, or if she even answered.

  Chapter 12

  Halla woke, surprisingly warm, with someone’s arms around her.

  She couldn’t remember the last time that happened.

  Probably because it’s never happened, has it?

  Her late husband had not slept in the same bed with her, preferring his own. Her older sister had married first, so she had been sleeping alone for many years.

  Maybe when I was very small, and Mother was still alive…

  She seemed to be in Sarkis’s lap, with her head resting against his shoulder. He had wrapped his arms around her waist to hold her in place.

  It wasn’t unpleasant. He made a much warmer surface to rest on than the ground. She just wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, if anything.

  Respectable widows certainly did not sleep in the arms of their guardsmen, but Sarkis was an enchanted sword, so that didn’t count, did it?

  She suspected that someone like Aunt Malva would think it very much counted.

  “How did I get here?” she asked finally.

  Sarkis snorted. She realized that he had his cheek against her head, which she hadn’t noticed because her hood was drawn. “You wiggled around in the night. I assume you were trying to get warm, because once you found me, you latched on to my legs.”

  Halla sighed. “My sister always said I tried to push her out of bed and steal the blankets.”

  “I eventually picked you up to make things easier. Do you remember me asking if that was permissible?”

  “I remember something or other. Did I say yes?”

  “You snored at me. I decided that was close enough.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  She wasn’t sure what to do next. Get up, probably, but Sarkis was really very warm and the air was cold. He hadn’t let go of her, either.

  The arms wrapped around her were hard with muscle. So was his chest. It was like lying against a surprisingly comfortable brick wall. Halla might be a respectable widow but she’d have to be dead not to appreciate that.

  “Aren’t I heavy?” she asked.

  “Both of my legs are asleep. Lady.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “No, it isn’t! You can’t feel your legs!”

  “There is a certain point after which they cannot get any more asleep. Now that they have passed that, it’s fine.”

  “I’m so sorry!” Halla groaned and rolled off him. He released her immediately. The world seemed much colder outside his embrace, and she had a strong urge to return to it at once before she froze.

  Don’t be stupid. He’s your guard, not your pillow. And he’s stuck with you. Don’t assume…well, anything.

  She rubbed her hands over her upper arms, then dug through her pack for her hairbrush. Her wretched hair was so thin that it tangled if someone so much as looked at it, and then broke when she tried to tease the tangles out.

  Sarkis watched her combing out her hair and scowling furiously at the knots, and hid a smile.

  He had not quite told the whole truth about how Halla had ended up in his lap. She had indeed latched onto his legs in her sleep, but it hadn’t stopped there. She had thrown her arm over his thighs and burrowed against his hip.

  Sarkis found this amusing at first. Her expression was one of dogged concentration, as if sleep required a great deal of thought. It was…well…cute wasn’t a word that was used often in the Weeping Lands, but there you were. He tucked her cloak up under her chin, shaking his head.

  Then she had shifted in her sleep and rolled partly onto his legs, with her head in a rather indelicate position.

  This was a problem.

  It was certainly not the first time that a woman had had their face in that vicinity, but Sarkis really preferred them to be awake and enthusiastic about it, not snoring.

  “Lady?”

  More snoring.

  “Lady Halla, I’m going to have to move you.”

  Definitive snores.

  He picked her up and settled her on the ground beside him, whereupon she rolled over and attached herself to his side again.

  Sarkis sighed. He’d had plenty of wielders, but this was the first one who had been determined to use him as a mattress.

  “All right.”

  He lifted her into his lap. She mumbled something, eyebrows drawing down.

  “Is this all right?”

  Snore.

  Sarkis gazed briefly at the sky, or what he could see of it through the tree branches.

  He drew her head down against his shoulder and wrapped his arms around her. “I suppose I don’t have much choice.”

  She snored agreeably against his neck.

  He sighed again, feeling an inexplicable rush of protectiveness. Which is redundant for any wielder. I must protect them no matter how I feel about it. He stroked a finger across her cheek. Her eyelids didn’t so much as twitch, even when he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

  The skin along her jaw was very soft. He wondered how far down that softness went.

  Well, he certainly wasn’t the sort of man to take advantage of a sleeping woman. He even felt a bit awkward about this much contact, but he was simply going to have to deal with it. Halla was warm and heavy, her body pliant…as long as he didn’t try to move away.

  Glancing over at her now, Sarkis thought she looked much less soft. The severe lines of the habit did not flatter her figure at all. If he had not held her in his arms—and if he hadn’t had an involuntary look when first summoned—he would have had no idea at the extent of the curves that lay under the dark fabric.

  Woman’s built like an hourglass. The sort that measures twelve hours at a stretch.

  Had he been younger and not trapped in a peculiar
living death inside a hunk of enchanted metal, Sarkis would not have minded checking the time more closely.

  …As it were.

  Ah, yes, that’s a very useful thought when she’s starving and half-frozen and you’re still waiting for the guards to catch up with you.

  Mourning black did not suit her. It showed up the contrast between her skin and her white-blond hair, leaving her pink and blotchy, her nose red with cold.

  Jewel tones, he thought absently. Deep red, dark green. Perhaps warm browns.

  Yes, thinking about what colors would suit her is an even more useful thought. Has being in the blade addled your wits at last?

  Well, something better than black, anyway, he argued with himself. Black is not a good color on her.

  Still, that was probably for the best. A woman traveling alone did not want to attract unwanted attention. And while Sarkis would defend her to his last breath, he’d rather not have to do so.

  “Are we ready?” he asked, and she nodded.

  They walked for an hour or so, keeping to the side of the road. The only traffic was a swineherd leading his charges out of the acorn wood, and he did not seem inclined to make conversation.

  “There’s a public house a little way up ahead,” said Halla after a time. She shoved pale strands of hair out of her eyes. “I know we probably shouldn’t stop, but I guess we’ll want to get off the road so nobody spots us.”

  Her stomach growled again.

  “If they are looking for anyone,” Sarkis said, “it is for two people traveling together. If your aunt has convinced the constables that I have kidnapped you, then they will not be expecting a woman traveling alone. If you sheathe the sword and go in, you should be able to buy some food.”

  “Really?”

  He’d seen men rescued from certain death with less hope blazing in their eyes. He nodded.

  “Real—” he started to say, and then Halla slammed the sword back into the scabbard and the blue fire took him away.

  Chapter 13

  Halla approached the door of the public house with her heart in her throat.