Page 2 of Swordheart #1

She had naively assumed, that first night, that they would unlock the door in the morning. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure why she had assumed that.

I thought I was being punished like a naughty child who misbehaved at dinner, not being held prisoner in my own home like… well, like an extremely unwilling potential bride…

In the morning, the door had still been locked. She had rattled the knob and hammered on the door until Malva came through, glaring at her. “Stop making all that racket! People are trying to sleep!”

“Well, if you hadn’t locked the door—” Halla began.

“The door,” said Malva, drawing herself up, “will remain locked until you have learned how to conduct yourself in a manner becoming a woman of this family.”

Halla should have said something clever.

She’d eventually had three days to think of all the clever things that she should have said.

But it was such an incomprehensible thing that in the moment, Halla’s first thought was that she had misheard or misunderstood, and then she said, “Excuse me, what?” and then Malva made a disgusted noise and pulled the door shut and locked it.

They’d brought her food. Alver came up to say, politely, that he was sorry about all this. Halla stared at him and said, “So why aren’t you letting me go?”

“Mother, you know,” said Alver, wringing his clammy, ringed hands.

“Get out,” said Halla. To her moderate surprise, he obeyed.

She was extremely tempted to throw the chamber pot at Malva the next time she arrived. The only reason she didn’t was because it would get all over the floor and the doorway and then she’d be sitting in the stink of it, and she was increasingly certain that they weren’t going to let her out.

“You’ll change your mind,” said Malva airily, bringing up dinner. Her sister waited in the hallway, which meant that even if Halla had overpowered her, the door would simply get slammed in her face again, and they’d come back in greater force.

“About what?” said Halla.

“Marrying Alver, obviously. It’s the only sensible thing to do. You just need some time to think on it.”

“Or what? You’ll keep me locked up here forever?”

Malva shrugged.

“You’ll have to let me out for the funeral,” said Halla, through gritted teeth.

“No, I don’t,” said Malva. “You’ll be overcome with grief, that’s all.

Although if you’d stop being so stubborn and simply agree to marry Alver—who is better than you deserve!

—you’ll be able to attend as you ought.” She set the tray down on the cedar chest at the end of the bed.

“Really, Halla, if you had any feeling for Silas at all, I would think you would do whatever it took to attend, but I suppose such family loyalty is simply beyond you.”

Halla hated that she had never been able to get angry without crying. It meant that her vision was too blurred for her to actually hit Malva with a flung candlestick. Fortunately, the other woman’s expression was also too blurry to make out.

“Really, Halla,” she said, and swept out of the room.

Midafternoon on the second day, there was an ungodly commotion downstairs.

Halla heard shouts and a scream, and for one moment thought that someone might be coming to rescue her.

She half rose from her seat by the window.

Then she heard a guttural voice shouting, “Hellfire! Hellfire and burning for the worm, the worm that gnaws the roots of the world!” and realized that the bird was loose.

“Blast,” she muttered, dropping back into her chair.

The thumping and shouting went on for some time. She hoped they hadn’t killed the bird. She didn’t like the bird, but at the moment, she had a certain amount of fellow feeling for it.

“The veins of the earth run fat with rot!” shrieked the bird.

“Get a broom!” shouted someone, probably Alver.

More thumping, followed by cackling, followed by silence.

One of the cousins brought her food that night. Halla couldn’t remember her name, but it didn’t much matter, since they were all fairly interchangeable anyway. Sayvil, Aunt Malva’s sister, lurked on the other side of the door, watching them through a crack.

“What was all that noise earlier?” she asked.

“Malva told Roderick to wring the bird’s neck,” said the cousin.

“He opened the cage, didn’t he?”

The cousin nodded. “Fastened on to his face like a leech,” she said, with a certain amount of relish. “He was screaming and hopping around like anything. Then he got it loose but it flew up into the rafters.”

“Oh dear.” Halla composed her face to look as innocent as possible. “I’m good with the bird, I could probably get it back.”

The cousin looked blank. “Do you think we were born yesterday, girl?” snapped Sayvil from the door. “Anyway, the bird’s gone out the door, and good riddance.”

Halla sagged. Well, it had been a thin hope.

It was that night, as she sat brooding, that she realized that she was probably going to have to kill herself.

H alla had no great desire to die, but she had even less desire to remain living among her relatives. This did not leave her with many options. She had run through every possibility in her head and no matter which way she turned it, her continued life was about to get very, very bad.

If I could just break out of the house and… and what? Be penniless on the street on the edge of winter?

This was a daunting prospect, but she’d been willing to try.

It wasn’t the worst situation she’d ever found herself in.

If she could get to a convent, she could throw herself on the mercy of the nuns, like so many other unfortunate women did.

It would probably mean a lot of scrubbing floors, but Halla wasn’t afraid of hard work.

If she could get to a priest, things would get easier. She could throw herself on the mercy of the Four-Faced God, whose priest currently inhabited the village church. He wouldn’t let her be dragged to the altar unwillingly.

But that assumes I can get out. And that’s the tricky part.

Well, the windows are right out. Even if they weren’t these stupid diamonds, I’m two floors up. I’d fall in the street and probably break my legs, and then I’d be in pain as well as betrothed. And then I couldn’t run.

The notion of being at Alver and Malva’s mercy and unable to escape… she couldn’t imagine.

No, wait, she could imagine it very well, since it was apparently happening right now.

Once they start locking you in your room, it only gets worse though. I’m going to be kept in an attic like a mad aunt. And Alver seems to think we’ll have children, which … Halla shuddered. Locked in a room, pregnant… gods above and below…

She didn’t even dare to think about what else could happen. There were rumored to be drugs that could render someone docile or wipe their mind as clean as new snow. Death was undoubtedly preferable to that.

No, the future is not looking very good at all. Unless I do something… drastic.

There was a sword over the bed, in a tarnished silver scabbard.

One of Silas’s prizes, no doubt. He had collected strange objects and left them scattered haphazardly around the house.

She’d found a manticore skull in the pantry once.

It had just stared eyelessly at her, and eventually she rearranged the sacks of flour and jars of spices to make room.

It was still there. The cook had screaming hysterics when she found it the next day, but you got used to things.

She’d never been quite sure if Silas had gone senile or just enjoyed leaving things where they would shock people.

And then, of course, there was the bird.

It had been sold to Silas as a dwarf parrot, which it certainly was not, and while you could argue that it did talk, it did so in a way so unnatural that it raised the hair on the back of your neck.

Two servants and the cook had quit on the spot.

The cook had to be rehired at twice her previous wage and one of the servants had refused to come back for any price.

Halla took the sword down and stared at it. The hilt was wrapped in leather and the cross guard was plain. The scabbard was the only ornamented part, the metal etched with interlocking circles. The grooves in the etching were black, with paint or tarnish, she didn’t know.

It looked old. She wasn’t even sure if she could pull it out of the sheath or if it had rusted in place.

She tried to hold it by the hilt and her wrists immediately began wobbling with the weight.

How did you kill yourself with a sword? People in ballads and sagas fell on their swords, but what did that mean?

If she fell over on the sword, presumably she’d be lying on top of a sword and then what?

If it was lying flat on the ground, nothing would happen, and if it was lying on its side, she might get cut up a bit.

Were you supposed to wait for infection to take you?

No, no, don’t be stupid. Obviously you have to prop the thing up on the floor somehow so it goes through you when you fall on it.

… however the devil you do that.

Obviously, guardsmen and soldiers killed each other with swords all the time.

It was just that it seemed like it would be much easier to kill someone else, when the sharp bits were all aimed away and you didn’t have to worry about whether it hurt.

In actual practice, Halla found herself looking at the sheathed sword and thinking that she could probably hurt herself quite badly, but what if she lived ?

Aunt Malva might try to nurse me back to health. Dear sweet merciful gods, please, anything but that.

And they’ll post the banns while I’m in bed and when I wake up, I’ll be wed to Alver.

She put the sword on the bed and made another circuit of the chamber, looking for usefully fatal objects. There weren’t many.

Why couldn’t Silas have left bottles labeled Deadly But Conveniently Painless Poison lying around?