Page 11 of Swordheart #1

Sarkis spent the hours while Halla slept wondering what the hell to do next.

It was one thing to remove a woman from a house she very much did not wish to be in. It was another to become a fugitive in a strange land within an hour of meeting.

Possibly I could have planned that better.

If only she’d had some kin to come ride to her rescue. Still, he couldn’t very well leave her to get married off to a man who would drop her down the stairs to save his own skin.

He’d been reasonably optimistic until he’d actually climbed the hillside to the top and looked out over the landscape.

Rutger’s Howe was tucked into a half circle of hills.

North, the land was flat farmland. South were rolling, stony hills, suitable for sheep and not much else.

The lich road meandered between the two, where the main road ran east to west. Obviously if one wanted to move quickly, one would head north.

Unfortunately, the land to the north was well-farmed, well-tended, obviously not at all wild, and that made it difficult for two people to vanish into. There were a few patches of woodland that might be promising, but that was all.

He would have been fine in a wilderness. Sarkis was excellent with wilderness. The south had nothing to compare to a winter in the Weeping Lands anyway.

But where you had farms and roads, you got people, and people asked questions. Questions like, “Hey, are you the pair that vanished from that town after killing that guard?”

Halla had, he would admit, handled the young man at the lich-gate well.

He had been afraid he’d have to kill him, too, and Sarkis disliked killing priests, even priests of soft southern gods.

There were stories that a priest’s blood would etch a blade that drew it and curse it to never take an edge, and Sarkis wasn’t sure how far that curse would extend.

It would be damnably inconvenient to be trapped for eternity in a dull sword.

Without a handy wilderness to vanish into, they would probably need a city. Cities were basically wildernesses with too many witnesses anyway.

He contemplated how long it would take to walk down the average city street with Halla asking questions about every single thing that caught her interest.

Great god give me strength.

He scanned the landscape again, hoping that something would jump out at him. Nothing did.

For a moment, he could almost feel the presence of two people behind him.

Something more than memory, less than ghosts.

Angharad, to his left, a step behind. On his right, the Dervish, moving restlessly, never still.

He had looked over more lands and more maps than he could count with those two beside him, and he had trusted their eyes to find the patterns he had missed.

But they were gone now, and Sarkis’s only ally in this land was a middle-aged woman fleeing from her family.

He climbed back down the hill and settled into the corner beside the fire, opposite Halla.

It was cold. Not the wracking, bone-chilling cold of the Weeping Lands in winter, but cold enough to make him fold his arms and tuck his hands underneath, cold enough to pull his knees up to conserve what heat he could.

His charge had huddled into her cloak, hood drawn down. He had not had a chance to study her closely in their flight, beyond his initial impressions.

She was a handsome woman, if not beautiful.

Her upper lip was thin, the lower one full, which might have looked like a pout on someone else.

On Halla, combined with her wide, curious eyes, she mostly looked as if she had just thought of a particularly interesting question and was trying to figure out how to phrase it.

Her hair was pulled back in a thick braid. Women in this country did not cover their hair, as he recalled, unless they were in religious orders. In the heavy black habit, she looked as if she might be about to join such an order.

I suppose if I must escort her to a nunnery, then so be it. Great god help me, then I’ll be servant to a nun. Unless she surrenders the blade to her order, and then I’d be in service to … what? Whichever one of her superiors drew the blade?

He put his hand over his eyes. Bound to a nunnery. Great god. The Dervish would have laughed until he fell over.

No sense in borrowing trouble. We haven’t even gotten free of her relatives yet.

Her hands, when she bandaged the slash on his arm, had been work-roughened but kind. It had been a long time since someone had touched him kindly. He was more used to people trying to stab him or bash his head in.

Well, it might yet come to that.

Sarkis sank his chin to his chest, and waited for morning to come.

It was a cold, cheerless waking. Halla was thirsty, and starting to wish she’d eaten more of the dinner they’d brought her the night before.

“From the top of the hill, I see woods to the north,” Sarkis said. “Better cover, but are they safe?”

Halla considered for a moment. “Not the nearer ones. That’s an acorn wood, and they’ll be rounding the pigs up for slaughter. They’re busier than a market at this time of autumn.”

Sarkis sighed. “All right. I cannot swear we’ve eluded pursuit, but since no one’s breathing down our necks at the moment, we should plan as best we can. Where should we go next, lady?”

“You’re asking me ?” said Halla.

“I am hundreds of miles and a number of years from the lands that I know. You know far better than I do where we might go safely next.”

This was true. It was just that the notion of any warrior, let alone an enchanted one, taking orders from Halla seemed faintly absurd. She couldn’t even give orders to servants without phrasing them as requests, and half the time the servants talked back anyway.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m just… not used to anyone asking my opinion, that’s all.”

Sarkis raised an eyebrow and said, “I don’t know why not. You ask too many questions, but you have not struck me as overly stupid. Merely… easily distracted.”

“I try not to be stupid,” said Halla. “But I have made so many poor choices in my life, so perhaps I must be, after all.”

She looked up to find that he had cocked an eyebrow at her. “Then that makes two of us,” he said, and smiled.

Halla laughed. It was an odd thing to feel solidarity with an enchanted sword, but the last few days had been nothing but odd things piled together. “I was thinking we might go to the Temple of the White Rat,” she said.

“I do not know of them.”

“They… fix things. I told you, our priest before the current one was of the White Rat? They find solutions.”

“An odd thing for a religion to be good at.”

Halla shrugged. “There’s a saying about it, or maybe a joke—I can’t remember all of it.

About how two people disagreed over a cow and brought it to a priest. Priests of the Forge God would take the cow as a tithe for wasting their time, the Dreaming God would kill the cow on suspicion of being possessed by demons, and the Four-Faced God would wait until the cow died and deliver a sermon about how all of us, men and cows, must pass away.

But the White Rat’s priests would take the cow, breed her, give a calf to each of the people arguing, and then sell the milk for a profit. ”

“That sounds like plain good sense.”

“Perhaps there’s so little of that to go around that they had to make it divine.”

He snorted. “How many gods do you have in this accursed land?”

Halla had to think. “Um. Well, there’s the Rat, and the Four-Faced God and the Dreaming God and the Forge God and the Lady of Grass and St. Ursa—although she’s a saint, not a god—and the Saint of Steel, but he’s actually a god, not a saint, which is very confusing—”

Sarkis put his face in his hands. Halla couldn’t quite make out what he said, but it seemed to involve something about putting the entire country to the torch. She hurried on. “There’s a big temple to the Rat in Archon’s Glory… uh, that’s the capital of Archenhold.”

Sarkis rubbed the back of his neck. “And how far away is that?”

“Not quite a week, maybe five days on foot. North and east. But wait, that’s the thing!” She reached out and caught his sleeve. “Amalcross is on the way!”

He waited politely for her to explain.

“It’s a town. Great-uncle Silas had a friend there. Another collector. They used to visit sometimes, and trade objects. I’m sure that if he knew I was in trouble, he’d help me.”

“Would he?” asked Sarkis.

Halla spread her hands. “Well, if he wouldn’t normally, I can always bribe him with the stuff in Uncle Silas’s house.”

Sarkis nodded. “That’s a fair thought. I do not always trust goodwill, but greed… greed is usually predictable.”

“That’s a dark way to look at the world.”

“The world is a dark place. What is the land like, between here and there?”

“Err… farmland, mostly. Woods along the road in a few places.”

“Is your land at war? Do clans raid the road?”

“Uh…” Halla wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “No, the war’s been over for years now. I guess there might be highwaymen, sometimes? But they get rooted out if they get too bad. And… err…” She wracked her brain. “There’s sheep?”

He gave her a fixed look. “Do the sheep in your land attack travelers?”

Is he joking? It seems like he must be joking … Sarkis’s face was so grim and the scar through his eyebrow made him look so stern that she couldn’t be sure.

“Yes,” she said. “Constantly. I’m surprised we haven’t been set upon by attack sheep already.”

He did not crack a smile.

“Of course they don’t! They’re sheep!”

His lips twitched.

She gave up. “Does this seem… doable?”

“Are you asking me if I think I can protect you for a week’s walk through pacified farmland?”

Halla threw her hands in the air.

“I believe we can manage, once we’ve thrown off pursuit. I do not know about the road. If we circled far south, into the hills, we might be safer.”

“Ah… hmm. If we go too far south, we’ll risk running into the Vagrant Hills.”

“I take it that is not a place we wish to be?”

“No. They’re weird. Uncanny. Not natural.” It occurred to her suddenly that she was saying these things to a clearly unnatural and uncanny being who lived in a sword. “No offense intended!”

“Not being a hill, I take no offense.”

Halla sighed. “I mean… well, we don’t want to go there.

Strange things happen. And if you get too close, sometimes you wake up and you’re in the hills even when you weren’t.

At least, so I’m told.” She picked at her skirt, reluctant to admit that she had never been anywhere near the Vagrant Hills herself. Or almost anywhere, for that matter.

Sarkis nodded. “We will avoid the far south, then. Now which way must we go, to find this friend of your uncle’s?”