Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

  She knew she shouldn’t be scared—she hadn’t done anything, and if anybody asked, she’d explain about Malva and the locked door—but her nerves still jangled. What if they were looking for her, and dragged her back to Rutger’s Howe? What if they’d been told she was mad or an accomplice or a criminal herself?

  What if Roderick had died and the constables were looking for a murderer?

  Stop, she told herself firmly. You’re being ridiculous. You care very much because it’s your life, but most people won’t care in the slightest about Aunt Malva and Cousin Alver and your stupid inheritance. Everyone’s got their own troubles and nobody wants to get involved in yours.

  This was all undoubtedly true, and yet the door of the public house loomed in front of her like a castle gate. The sign over the door was a pig with a mug of ale, and the words ‘The Drunken Boar’ crudely carved underneath.

  She shook herself. This is ridiculous. How did I get so far outside of my normal life that I’m frightened to go in and buy a meal?

  That was exactly what it felt like, though. As if she had stepped to one side of the world and now her life was running in strange, shadowy parallel. She had been in the normal world where Silas was alive and she slept in her normal bed and got up in the morning and ran the million little tasks of a household, and now she had fallen into a world where she slept in hedgerows in the arms of an enchanted sword, and tried not to be so helpless that he’d hold her in contempt. A world where she listened for constables coming for her, where she was worth more money than she’d even imagined and still only had a few coins to her name.

  It’s all the same world. And you just have to get through this bit and everything will go back to normal.

  She didn’t quite believe that was possible. Could the world simply snap back into place that easily?

  Why shouldn’t it?

  She opened the door and stepped inside.

  It was early enough in the morning that a few guests were eating breakfast. They glanced up at her as she entered…and then looked away, uninterested.

  Halla felt invisible and nearly fainted with relief.

  Then the warmth of the fireplace hit her, and she thought she really would faint. It was glorious.

  She pulled the door shut behind her and marched up to the counter to order breakfast.

  The publican took her order, took her coin, and gestured her to a seat by the fire. “Ye look cold,” he said.

  “I am freezing,” she said.

  “Brisk out, aye.”

  “Well, it’s that time of year.”

  “Oh aye, aye. Ye come far?”

  “Just out from Amalcross,” she lied.

  “Long way to walk.”

  “Ah well. Got no horse to carry me.”

  “Ah, but it means ye’ve no horse to feed.”

  “There’s that.”

  Pleasantries thus concluded, she sank into one of the chairs by the fire.

  I may never move from this spot.

  She stared into the flames. Red-orange tongues licked the underside of the logs, scaled like a lizard in white and black ash. Her cold feet began to tingle painfully as they warmed. Halla grimaced, but at least it kept her from falling asleep on the spot.

  It was only a moment before a serving woman came out with bread stuffed with spiced meat and potatoes and a tankard of cider. Halla forgot her feet, forgot her woes, and fell on the food like a starving dog.

  It wasn’t even good meat. It was stringy and tough and probably from a milch-cow that had gone too far past her prime. Halla didn’t care. It was amazing.

  Afterward, she slumped in the chair, trying not to fall asleep, aware that she should get up and keep moving, but it was warm and the chair was so soft…

  “Hello…?”

  Halla realized her eyelids had been closed and sat up quickly.

  The woman who spoke was smaller than she was, not young, with a lined face and gray-streaked black hair. She had dark eyes with wrinkles fanned out from the corners.

  “Hello,” said Halla. “I wasn’t asleep. Um, okay, I was sort of asleep, but let’s pretend I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I just saw another woman and I…well, you know.” The woman glanced over her shoulder at the rest of the room, full of men eating quietly, paying no attention.

  Halla nodded. She did indeed know.

  “It can be difficult for a woman on the road alone,” said the woman.

  “That’s the truth,” said Halla. “My name’s Halla.”

  “I’m Mina.”

  They sat while the serving woman brought Mina cider. She wrapped her hands around the mug to warm them.

  “Have you been traveling long?” asked Mina finally. She looked over her shoulder again, as if expecting pursuit.

  “A few days.” Halla felt suddenly better about the whole thing. Traveling. She’d been traveling. Not staggering through hedgerows with aching feet, after a man who probably thought she couldn’t find her way out of a paper sack without help.

  Traveling. I am a traveler. I will look back on this someday and be worldly and jaded—”Oh, yes, my dears, I was a great traveler when I was middle-aged. I saw many exotic hedgerows and was manhandled into ditches all across this great land.”

  Mina smiled uncertainly, and Halla realized that she’d been smirking at her own thoughts. “And you?”

  “Oh,” said Mina, her smile fading. “It feels like a long time. Probably longer than it really was.” She stared into her mug.

  Halla nodded. Sadly, this reminded her that she, too, had a destination, and she should probably get moving. She started to rise from her chair.

  Mina held out a hand. “Ah…Miss Halla? I…ah. Would you mind if we left together?” She glanced over her shoulder again. “I’d rather no one know I was traveling alone. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  Halla’s heart went out to her. “Of course not. Whenever you’re ready.”

  She put the mug down. “Now is fine. I just wanted to stop and get warm. I don’t mean to keep you waiting.”

  Halla got to her feet, rearranged her cloak, and picked up the enchanted sword.

  “Is that your sword?” asked Mina, her eyes going round.

  “Oh, no!” said Halla, and then, “Well, sort of. I guess it’s mine, but it’s really a friend’s.” She shrugged herself into it, tugging her cloak free of the straps. It did get easier with practice.

  “I suppose if you’re waving a big sword around, you’re not so worried about someone attacking you.”

  “If I waved this sword around, I’d probably cut my head off,” said Halla cheerfully. “No, I’m just carrying it. It’s a long story.”

  They left the inn together, chatting amiably. No one followed them, so far as Halla could tell.

  They walked along the side of the road together. Sarkis would have been wary, probably scoping out nearby ditches, but Halla pushed the thought out of her mind. If anyone is looking, it’s for a man and a woman, not two women. Or one woman. Technically, I’ve been kidnapped, I think.

  Undoubtedly, Cousin Alver would have spun it that way to the constables, since, “My cousin ran off with a strange man rather than marry me,” would have been an unforgivable blow to his pride.

  She didn’t mention any of this to Mina.

  After a time, the other woman fell silent. She looked over her shoulder repeatedly, as if she was running away from someone.

  “Are you all right?” asked Halla.

  “Aye, fine.” She sounded curt.

  Frightened, Halla thought, a bit sadly. She wondered if it was a man, then snorted at her own foolishness. Of course it’s a man. It always is.

  “Do you need to go your own way?” she asked. “Get off the road a bit, perhaps?”

  “Not just yet,” said Mina, glancing over her shoulder again. “But…aye, off the road is not a bad thought.”

  They found a break in the hedgerow, on the far side of the ditch. Halla paused, not entirely w
illing, but the other woman gestured to her to go first.

  I don’t know what you’re worried about. You’ve been sleeping in hedgerows. You crapped in one this morning, while Sarkis tried to pretend that he was birdwatching. It’s not like you don’t know them intimately by now.

  Halla shook herself mentally and crossed the ditch.

  She’d barely stepped around the hedge when a shadow loomed up before her.

  “Mina!” cried Halla, backing away. “There’s someone here!”

  “Good,” said Mina. Her voice sounded different suddenly: sharp and irritated, without a trace of fear. “Took you long enough to show up. I thought I’d have to walk halfway to Archenhold.”

  The figure grunted and stepped forward.

  It was a man. He was taller than Sarkis, though not as broad. He had a very large knife in his hands, the sort used to gut deer.

  “Um,” said Halla, eyes fixed on the knife. “Mina? Is this a friend of yours?”

  Mina gave a loud, derisive snort.

  “I’ll be having your money now,” said the man.

  “You what?” said Halla.

  “Your money,” said the man. “Give it to me.”

  “My…oh gods! Are you robbing me?” She wheeled around and stared at Mina. “Wait, you came out here with me so you could rob me?”

  “Not real quick on the uptake, are you?”

  Halla flushed with embarrassment. Here she’d been thinking about being a great traveler, and she couldn’t even get robbed correctly. Traveler. She was a country bumpkin who’d been to a real city three times in her life. What was she thinking?

  The man gestured with the knife, and fear rushed in and joined the embarrassment. “Give me your money, there’s a good girl,” he said, advancing on her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want you to hurt me either!” said Halla, backing away. “But I don’t have much money, and I need it. I’ll starve!”

  “Not my problem,” said the man. He gestured with the knife.

  “Get the sword, too,” said Mina from behind him. “It’s probably worth something.”

  “No!”

  Halla had almost forgotten the sword.

  For one instant she thought Maybe it would be better to be robbed than to let Sarkis see how stupid I just was, and then good sense prevailed. She grabbed the hilt over her shoulder and tried to claw it free. “Sarkis! Sarkis, help!”

  At the same moment, she tripped on a tree root and fell over backward.

  The sword struck her across the back, knocking the wind out of her. Please, gods, she thought, as the man loomed over her, please, please don’t get knocked back in the sheath—

  “Stop there,” said Sarkis softly. The edge of his sword lay across the back of her attacker’s neck.

  The man froze.

  “Step back,” said Sarkis. “And you, madam, you may think you’re being very sneaky with that knife, but I’ll have his head off if you take another step. Halla, are you hurt?”

  “Fine,” squeaked Halla. She had no idea if she was hurt or not. She very much wanted all of this to not be happening.

  “Please don’t kill me,” said the man with the sword against his neck. “I wasn’t gonna do anything. I swear. I’ll go.”

  “Where the hell did you come from?” hissed Mina.

  “Don’t care,” said the man with the knife, staring straight ahead. “Don’t care. I’ll leave. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Drop the knife,” said Sarkis. “At your feet, not on her.”

  The man’s fingers opened and the knife landed in the leaves with a crunch.

  “I’m doing it,” he said. “Not going to fight you. Mina, don’t do anything stupid.”

  “That is excellent advice,” said Sarkis. “I suggest you listen to him. Drop your knife as well.”

  “But—”

  “Mina,” said her partner, in pained tones.

  She tossed down the knife, grumbling.

  Sarkis lifted the sword a half-inch away from the man’s neck. “Now would be an excellent time to back away,” he said.

  “Yes. I’m going. Sorry.” The man kept his hands in front, where Sarkis could see them, without even being told. He began backing into the woods.

  “Madam, I suggest you go with him. If I have to deal with either of you again, my patience will be exhausted.”

  Mina, lips thin and arms folded, joined the man at the edge of the woods.

  “You may run now,” said Sarkis pleasantly.

  They ran.

  The pair did not exactly melt into the trees—there was too much loud crashing and stomping and cursing for that—but they vanished in very short order. Sarkis stood over Halla, sword held at the ready, then leaned down and helped her to her feet.

  “Are you sure you’re unhurt?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” said Halla. “I’m fine. Completely fine.”

  Don’t embarrass yourself in front of the magic sword.

  She nodded firmly to show him how fine she was, and then promptly, humiliatingly, burst into tears.

  Sarkis was not in the least surprised. Halla had held up surprisingly well, but two attacks in three days was simply a bridge too far.

  He swapped the sword to his off hand and sheathed it awkwardly. With his free hand, he pulled her close.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Shhh. It’s okay. They’re gone.”

  She sobbed into his shoulder, fingers locked around the edge of his surcoat. He wrapped his arms around her and waited.

  It was not the first time that he’d held someone who was crying their heart out. His mother had done it when his father died. And his troops…well. Fisher was notoriously tender-hearted for a man who put crossbow bolts into people for a living. He bawled after every single battle. Nobody said anything about it because Fisher had saved all their lives twice over. You just patted his back and said, “There, there,” until he was okay again.

  Angharad had done it once—and only once—when the man she loved had turned out to be worthless. That had been awkward, since she was a head taller than Sarkis and also he had been battling his desire to take a fast horse after the man and gut him like a hog.

  He wouldn’t have minded gutting Halla’s attackers like hogs as well, but he suspected that would have upset her even more. So he contented himself with chasing them off and now with holding Halla while she soaked the front of his surcoat with tears.

  She kept saying something over and over again. It took him a few minutes to make out the words through the sobs.

  “But I didn’t do anything to them!”

  Sarkis sighed. “I know. I know.”

  And that was the problem right there. There was something terribly kind and trusting about Halla. Wherever these people had come from, their impersonal malice had clearly astonished her. She just wasn’t used to evil or desperate people turning up out of nowhere.

  Well, when you think about it, the greatest threat was people she knew. And she went off with you, trusting as a lamb, without any more proof of goodwill than that you were clearly enchanted. Why are you surprised that she has no proper fear of strangers?

  Yes, but that’s different. I was getting her away from a bad situation, he argued. I was clearly the lesser of two evils.

  Sure. When are you going to tell her what the blade says, then?

  Sometimes Sarkis hated arguing with himself. He kept being right.

  Halla snuffled against him, hiccupped, and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I shouldn’t have…I mean, she was at the inn…she talked about how hard it was to travel alone and asked if I’d walk her a little way, just so the men didn’t see her leaving alone and that made sense, it really did, and I thought of course she was scared, I would be too, so I’d wait to draw you, and then…”

  “It’s all right. You couldn’t have known.”

  “I was so stupid.”

  “No,” he said. “Just
kind. It’s all right. It will be all right. I’m here. You’re safe now. No harm done.”

  She looked up at him with her water-gray eyes, now rimmed with red. Her cheeks and nose were swollen from crying.

  The urge flared again to go after the people who had done this and kill them. Or possibly just burn the entire world that was so unkind to people like Halla.

  A fine thing for a former mercenary to be thinking. You’ll be running off righting wrongs like a swordsaint if this keeps up.

  Not that he could run off anywhere. He was anchored to the sword and the wielder, whether they were as malicious as a devil or as kind as Halla.

  She drew away. He found that he was reluctant to let her go. She still looked miserable, and now she looked embarrassed, too.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  He kissed her forehead. “You don’t have to be. They’re the ones who did wrong, not you.”

  Now why in the great god’s name did I just do that?

  He didn’t know. He hadn’t even thought before he kissed her.

  It doesn’t mean anything. He’d only brushed his lips across her forehead, like a brother might. It didn’t have to be anything more than that.

  Good. Don’t let it be anything more than that. Getting involved with a wielder is asking for trouble that would take a great deal more than one lifetime to sort out.

  He knew this was true, and yet the desire to kiss her again was much stronger than it should have been.

  Stop. You will fail her as you fail all the others who wield you, in time.

  “Oh gods,” she said, sounding exhausted. “Does that mean we can’t stop at an inn tonight?”

  Despite the darkness of his thoughts, he had to laugh at that. “We’ll stop. We’ll just go in together.”

  “What if they’ve heard of us and try to stop us?”

  Sarkis shrugged. “They can try.”

  Chapter 14

  No one tried to stop them.

  It took Halla a moment to gather up her courage to go into the next inn. She’d washed her face in a puddle so that no one could tell she’d been crying a few hours earlier. But she stared at the door and thought about other people and other people’s malice, and had a sudden urge to turn and run into the fields and never come out again.