Page 50 of Swordheart #1

The priest of the Four-Faced God was almost pathetically delighted to see Zale. “A colleague!” he said. “Of course—of course—as long as you like, certainly—please, put your ox in the stable—oh dear, I only have one guest room, I’m so sorry, but we can put the novices out and change the sheets and—”

Zale took his hand and patted the back kindly. “That will not be necessary at all, Father. We have a wagon that travels with us, and I would not see your novices suffer in the cold. A stall for the ox and a meal or two is all that we will impose upon you.”

“Oh dear! Are you certain? How long are you staying?”

“Until the matter of the will is sorted out.” Zale smiled warmly, the icy legal demeanor gone as if it had never existed.

“But if we may eat with you tonight? I fear I will bore you senseless, since all my chatter is of the capital and the temple politics there, but if you will grant me your patience…”

“Not at all,” gasped the priest. Halla realized with a pang how desperate the poor man was for news of the wider world. Was Rutger’s Howe really such a backwater? Well, perhaps it was.

She would think so again, several times in the next few days. It was familiar and comfortable and she was glad to be home, but she kept thinking how much smaller it seemed, compared even to Amalcross. People walked by the stableyard and stared at the painted wagon as if they had never seen one.

They stared at Brindle, too, and that really annoyed her.

There were gnoles in Rutger’s Howe, for the love of the gods, it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen one before.

But somehow the local gnoles were unremarkable, while Brindle, calmly going over the wagon, fixing harness leather and replacing nails, merited staring.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why people are being so… I’m sorry.”

The gnole gave her a look, ears down and back, in what she had learned was wry amusement. “A gnole is a job-gnole, not a rag-and-bone gnole,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means, Brindle.”

He turned back to his work. “Rag-and-bone gnole works in gutters, takes trash. Works hard. Not insulting a rag-and-bone gnole. But a job-gnole works on wagons.” He put his claws across his chest. “Fixes. Drives an ox. Human sees a job-gnole, maybe a human doesn’t expect it.”

Halla knew perfectly well what he wasn’t saying, about human behavior and human assumptions of superiority. He’s being diplomatic. Because I am, after all, a human, and this is my home.

And if I try to say much more, I’ll make a mess of it, and it won’t fix Brindle’s problem at all.

“Tell me if I can do anything,” she said wearily. “Or if anyone gives you trouble. Sarkis’ll set them straight.”

Brindle gave her a gap-fanged grin. “A gnole would like to see that,” he admitted.

The other significant problem was the Four-Faced priest’s housekeeper.

Widow Davey lived across the road from the small church and came over every evening to do the cooking and the tidying up. She was kind, generous, efficient, and when she learned that Widow Halla was going to be setting up her own household, she bustled over, full of helpful advice.

“I’ve been keeping house for over twenty years,” said Halla grimly. “I’ve told her that. But she still wants to show me the best way to blacken a grate and how to make chicken stock. I have been making chicken stock since I was twelve. ”

“Do you want me to stab her?” asked Sarkis, who was feeling rather useless now that no one was shooting arrows at them.

“No. I mean, yes, very much, but don’t actually do it. She means well.” Halla gritted her teeth. “She just won’t listen. She’s seen me at market since I moved here, but now that Silas is gone, suddenly I need all her advice. Gods’ teeth! Did she think he was making the chicken stock?”

Sarkis had only the vaguest notion of what chicken stock even was. Something you fed to chickens, presumably. “Well, perhaps Zale will be done with whatever they’re doing soon.”

“Bartholomew should arrive tomorrow,” Halla agreed.

“How will they make a judgment?”

“Oh, they’ll call a triumvirate. Clerk, priest—that’s our host, Zale can’t do it—and the Squire’s bailiff will make the third.”

“Will they find in our favor, do you think?”

“The priest certainly will. He’s already told Zale as much. The clerk will probably depend on whether he’s more scared of Malva or Zale. The Squire’s bailiff, I don’t know.”

The Squire’s bailiff, when he arrived, was a large man with the placid air of a contented cow and a mind like a razor. He arrived at the same time as Bartholomew and went to the same hostel, where, ironically, Malva and Alver were also staying.

“Should I be worried about this?” asked Zale, upon learning of the accomodations.

Halla shook her head. “I honestly don’t think so. Aunt Malva doesn’t really improve upon close acquaintance.”

“And your cousin?”

“Alver will agree to anything, mean none of it, and then do whatever his mother tells him.”

“A familiar, if regrettable dynamic.” Zale nodded. “Well, it is only another two days and then we shall have our decision.” They smiled. “And I have a trick or two up my sleeve, in case things go very badly indeed.”

But things did not go badly. In fact, given the sheer chaos of their trip to and from Archon’s Glory, the judgment was almost an anticlimax.

The judgment was held in the church, that being both a large room and, given the proximity of the gods, presumably a better space for deliberation. Sarkis didn’t know if it would help, but at least the room was large enough that he didn’t need to sit too close to Halla’s wretched relatives.

He tried to remember what Halla had said.

The priest who served in this church could belong to any god, as he recalled.

That probably explained why the stained glass windows were generic scenes of the seasons rather than any particular deity.

The wooden pews were sturdy rather than elegant, with marks on the legs where either small children or dogs had gnawed on the edges.

The stone floor radiated cold. Everyone was wearing at least two layers of clothes.

Only Zale seemed unaffected by it, moving rapidly back and forth, presenting the case methodically to the three judges.

The priest was finally in their element, and Sarkis wondered that he had ever thought them weak.

Their long-fingered hands moved back and forth, sweeping gestures to underscore their words, their angular face by turns solemn and stern and amused.

Halla sat in a pew in the back of the room, clutching Sarkis’s hand.

He wanted to put his arm around her, shield her from the glare that Malva was shooting in her direction, but he wasn’t sure how she would feel about it, or if it would bias the judgment.

A respectable widow. He hated how much that mattered.

Alver’s defense was… well, even to Sarkis’s biased ears, it didn’t sound good. The old man should have left the property to his family. No, Halla wasn’t family. Well, she was sort of family, by marriage, so yes, maybe he had left it to family, but not the right family.

He tried to argue that Silas had not been in his right mind, whereupon Zale called Bartholomew up from his spot on the pew, and Bartholomew demolished that argument in a few well-placed sentences.

Senile? No, he had not been senile, he’d driven a brutal bargain with Bartholomew for a set of old books and a giant snail shell a month before he died.

And anyway, the will that Bartholomew had witnessed was six years old, so even if he had been getting on at the end, it didn’t signify.

No, Halla had not had any undue influence over him.

She was a housekeeper and a good one. Efficient, kind, respectable, but not what you’d call a seductress, and he meant no offense to her by saying so.

Halla laughed at that. Sarkis wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to go glare at the man until he agreed that she was beautiful.

He was braced for a discussion of the way that he and Halla had left the house, but Alver did not bring it up. Possibly the man had realized that it made him look at least as bad as Sarkis and had decided to simply pretend that it hadn’t happened at all.

That hired man can’t have died, or they would probably try to have me up on murder charges. Perhaps the dreadful woman turned him out after he could no longer guard her.

Alver fumbled his way through the statement until Malva apparently could bear it no longer, and then she stood up and pushed him out of the way.

Sarkis watched the triumvirate’s reactions with amusement.

The clerk visibly flinched, the priest’s lips thinned, and the bailiff’s small, bright eyes grew smaller and brighter as he narrowed them.

“Family comes first,” said Malva. “Silas knew that once. I don’t know what changed that, but clearly that woman had something to do with it!”

“But she is family,” said the bailiff mildly.

“Her?” Malva dismissed this with a hand. “No one could believe that my dear nephew would have wanted his wife favored above his blood!”

“How long has your dear nephew been dead?” asked the bailiff.

Malva opened her mouth and shut it again.

“Twelve years,” called Halla. “Thirteen next summer.”

“Perhaps the deceased thought that he was doing a kindness, seeing that his nephew’s widow was cared for,” said the priest of the Four-Faced God.

“A pension would have been sufficient,” said Malva. “No one is claiming that she should be turned out into the cold.”

“This from a woman who shouted, ‘You’re dead to the family,’ as I was leaving,” muttered Halla to Sarkis.

Sarkis snorted. He might have said something, but then Zale astonished him by saying, “Ser Sarkis, please come forward.”

“Ah…” He rose to his feet. “Yes, of course, priest Zale, but I am not sure what good that I will do. I know nothing of the will nor the law.”

“You have been a guardsman for Mistress Halla for some weeks now, have you not?”

“I have.”

“You escorted her to Archon’s Glory and my Temple, did you not?”

“Yes.”

Zale smiled with the air of one going in for the kill. “And did she travel in wealth and comfort?”

“We slept in hedgerows. She had to sell her jewelry so we could eat,” said Sarkis. “I have nothing of my own but the armor on my back, or I would have forbidden it, but she insisted.”

“Not exactly the act of a woman who masterminded an alteration of the will in her favor, was it?”

Sarkis snorted loudly.

“Traveling alone with a strange man is not the act of a respectable woman,” said Malva.

Sarkis turned toward her furiously. “I have guarded her as I would my sisters. No one will offer her disrespect in my hearing, man or woman, or they will answer to me. ”

He put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Malva slapped Alver’s arm. “Alver! Are you going to let him talk to me like this?”

Alver eyed the sword and Sarkis and said, “Yes, mother, I believe I am.” The bailiff’s lips twitched.

“Ser Sarkis,” said the priest of the Four-Faced God mildly, “we do not threaten violence within the walls of the church.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Sarkis inclined his head. “I fear I am not native to these lands.” He contemplated how barbaric he wanted to appear.

In for a lamb … “In my homeland, duels are fought before the altar so that the god may decide the victor.” Which was nonsense, of course, but hopefully impressive sounding nonsense.

“That will not be necessary,” said Zale firmly. “Now, if I may draw your attention, gentlemen, to the wording of the will…”

The process stretched out interminably. Halla shivered in the cold room. But at last, the three judges nodded to Zale and Alver, and everyone filed out of the temple to give them time to deliberate.

It took less than ten minutes. The clerk was sweating and refusing to meet Malva’s eyes as he delivered their judgment. “The will is upheld. Mistress Halla is Silas’s heir.”

“What?” said Halla.

“What?” said Malva.

“Really?” said Halla.

“ What? ” said Malva.

“Thank you, wise sirs,” said Zale, and bowed deeply, while Halla dissolved into tears of sheer relief.