Page 61 of Swordheart #1

“The constables were very nice about the whole thing,” said Halla. “At least, I thought so.”

“I still wish that they’d arrested Malva, too.”

“Well, yes, but she had a broken nose and it doesn’t look right if you’re arresting old ladies who’ve already taken a beating. Even a richly deserved one.”

Alver was now in a holding cell, due to be taken by the bailiff to face the Squire’s justice.

His attempt to claim that Halla had set upon him and stabbed him without provocation had floundered to a halt when Zale had silently presented their wrists to the bailiff, rope burns and all, and told him, in grim, precise terms, about the mortgaged properties.

“I regret we cannot stay and testify,” the priest said, “but we are very concerned for our friend Bartholomew. Alver mentioned him several times and we fear that his associate may have led him into a difficult situation. He is… well, very sharp in the field that he is interested in, but not at all worldly, if you understand me.”

The bailiff laughed. “I know the sort very well, my legal-minded friend.” His gaze flicked from Zale to Halla. “And the large, dour fellow who was with you before?”

Halla silently cursed the intelligence of the bailiff, but Zale never faltered. “Accompanying Bartholomew and the associate in question. He is why we are hopeful that no attempt will be made on Bartholomew’s life, but we still do not wish to dally.”

“Then good luck,” said the bailiff, and the next morning they were on the road at cock’s crow, sitting behind Brindle, who was tapping the ox’s flanks with the goad and murmuring gnolish encouragements.

Zale waited until they were out of the town gates to say, “They weren’t being nice about the whole thing.”

“What?”

“Halla, my dear client, they were waiting for you to become extremely angry about the fact that they hadn’t protected you from your relatives.

The clerk should have spotted the issue with the mortgages, the priest and the bailiff should have realized that they might not let things go so easily, and they should have at least had a constable make sure they left the town.

Failing that, they should have closed up the house and not let those two make free with your inheritance and familiarize themselves with the layout of the house.

They have, in fact, failed you rather dismally.

You’d be well within your rights to complain to the Squire. ”

“Oh,” said Halla, rather astonished by this. “I… oh. Hmm.” It hadn’t occurred to her to be angry. “Well. I’m sure they meant well.”

“You are sure that everyone means well,” said Zale, clearly amused. “Which is why I think you are perhaps well matched with Sarkis after all. He’s sure that everyone is determined to kill everyone else in their sleep. Between the two of you, you average out to a nicely functional outlook.”

“Assuming we get him back,” said Halla.

“I have faith. It is, by definition, part of what I do.”

The trip to Amalcross… again… was slow. Again.

“Can’t we go any faster?” fretted Halla.

“Faster!” said Brindle scathingly. “A human always wants an ox to go faster. Ox goes as fast as an ox goes. Like to see a human pull a wagon any faster.”

“They do not know that they are being pursued,” said Zale soothingly. “Indeed, they have no reason to believe that you will be capable of pursuit, or even that you might wish to do so.”

“But they’ve got horses!”

“Horses are not magical and they cannot run for hours at a stretch. Particularly not when ridden by an elderly, sedentary scholar.”

Halla was forced to acknowledge the truth of this. They had stopped at an inn, asking for information, and found that, while three days ahead of them, Bartholomew and Nolan had stopped very early in the day.

“Three of ’em,” said the innkeeper, when Zale had pressed her. “Old fellow and a young guy, and their bodyguard. Face like thunder on that one.”

“But unhurt?” asked Halla. Oh, it’s a stupid question, he can’t be hurt, at least not for long.

The innkeeper cocked an eyebrow at her. Halla could read her thoughts easily enough— is this woman a jilted lover, come looking for the man who did her wrong?

“He’s an… uh… family friend,” said Halla. “The older man. We heard he got into some trouble with bandits, you see, and I worried…”

The woman’s face cleared. “He looked fine. Young fellow had taken a beating recently.”

“Oh dear.” Halla tried to keep her face composed. She could venture a guess who had administered that beating.

So Bartholomew is the wielder, then.

Somehow that made her angrier. Bartholomew knew her. He had been Silas’s great friend. He’d even helped her. He knew how much she hated Alver, he knew what Malva was like, and he’d still abandoned her to their mercies without a second thought to get his hands on the sword.

She sat on the wagon seat as they drove on, mile by mile, and fumed.

“Twisting your whiskers, fish-lady.”

“What?”

Brindle gave her the annoyed-but-patient look that he usually did when a human was failing to understand something obvious. “Twisting your whiskers. Hurts and doesn’t help, but a gnole keeps doing it.”

“Oh.” Halla sighed. It did feel a bit like that, now that he said something. “You’re right. I just can’t seem to stop.”

To her surprise, Brindle leaned over and licked her cheek. “A human will get her mate back. Be easy.”

Halla flushed, as much in surprise as embarrassment. “He isn’t… I mean, I don’t know if he’s… not that I wouldn’t like him to be, but…”

Brindle rolled his eyes. “Humans can’t smell.”

Halla waited politely, but apparently this was a complete thought, and Brindle lapsed back into silence.

They stopped that night near the Drunken Boar inn, far too late to worry about cooking dinner for themselves.

Halla looked up at the sign and thought grimly that she had once been so excited to see that sign, several weeks and an eternity ago.

Now it seemed like she was cursed to follow this road back and forth until she died.

“I’m not dead, am I?” she asked Zale. “This isn’t the afterlife and we’re following this road forever, are we?”

“I don’t think so,” said Zale. “I must believe that the Rat would intervene. At least on my behalf, and I’d put in a good word for you, too.” Halla grunted, then thought, I sound like Sarkis, and then tried very hard to think of something else.

She and Zale went inside to pay the innkeeper for use of his pump and fodder for the ox, and to purchase what was left of the evening meal. Potatoes and pork drippings, which were delicious even when lukewarm.

“Na’ worries,” said the innkeeper. “No rooms tonight anyway, thanks to these gents.” He nodded across the common room, to where three “gents”—one of them a woman—were sitting at a table.

They were all tall and well-muscled and they radiated a sense of purpose, and something else…

Halla couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she felt like she was standing near a stove.

“Oh, paladins, ” said Zale, sounding affectionate and resigned all at once. One of the gents lifted her tankard.

Halla looked more closely and saw the closed eye symbol on the tabards. Paladins of the Dreaming God. Of course. That would explain why all three were rather relentlessly pretty in a chiseled heroic-statue sort of way. The Dreaming God was well known for His taste.

Zale approached them as if they were colleagues, which, Halla supposed, they were. The three paladins pushed out a chair for the priest and another for Halla. She took it, feeling a bit embarrassed. Widowed housekeepers from Rutger’s Howe did not usually sit down with demonslayers.

Zale clearly felt no such compunctions. The priest introduced Halla—“My client”—and then the four launched into a discussion that sounded less theological and more like temple gossip.

Halla drank her small-beer and ate her food and did not try to contribute until the talk turned to things she understood.

“It’s been a mess,” said one of the paladins, leaning back in his chair.

“Since the Clockwork Boys got turned off, all the demons that were running the damn things jumped… well, you know. Five years and we’re still cleaning up the mess.

The last one got into a swineherd, near as we can tell, and then his own pigs killed him.

Then it jumped to the biggest sow and went off and had babies.

Of course, nobody called us in until there was a whole army of demon-led pork on the hoof. ”

Zale and Halla both winced.

“The demon was just smart enough to open doors. Or the sow was, anyway.” The paladin flipped his cloak back to reveal his arm in a sling. “We got her, finally, but she gave as good as she got. Don’t suppose you’re a healer, priest?”

“Lawyer,” said Zale apologetically. “Advocate divine, technically, but I mostly deal with property cases. Halla?”

Halla grimaced. “I can take a look,” she said, “but most of the medicine I’ve done was on goats, and that was a decade ago.”

The paladins laughed. The injured one worked his arm out of the sling and laid it across the table.

Halla looked at it, eyes going wide, and then up at him. “How are you not screaming right now?”

“It’s only pain, Mistress Halla,” said the paladin. “The Dreaming God kept me from worse.”

“He could have done a better job,” she said tartly, bending over the wound.

The pig had stepped on his arm, it looked like, gouging the flesh and grinding mud and grime into the injury.

The bone wasn’t broken, but it had already swollen and the red taint of infection was starting up around the edges.

Still, from having treated goats a decade ago, she knew this kind of wound. It did not require any great skill so much as patience. She called for hot water and clean cloths and sat down to clean it out. The paladins called for another round of ale.

“You’re good at that,” said her patient, watching her.

“You move less than a goat,” she said absently, picking a bit of gravel out with tweezers.

All three paladins roared with laughter at that one. Halla grabbed the man’s arm to keep him from moving— here I am, acting like Sarkis again. The paladin’s upper arm was as thick around as her neck and she had absolutely no chance of holding him down by force, but he submitted meekly.

It took nearly an hour, and her patient was more than a little drunk by the time she finished. He caught her hand as she stood. “Thank you, Mistress Halla,” he said.

“It was nothing,” she said.

Her patient tapped her wrist with his finger. She looked down and saw him studying the red scabs where Alver’s ropes had abraded the skin.

“I think perhaps you have some troubles of your own,” he said, glancing from her to Zale. Halla said nothing. Zale inclined their head, a gesture that agreed without giving away a single word of information.

He kissed the back of her hand. The number of men who could get away with kissing a woman’s hand, in Halla’s experience, were exactly zero, but now she had to change the number. Apparently if you were six feet tall and chiseled and capable of killing demons, you had the presence to pull it off.

Unaccountably, she blushed. Dammit, the paladins were pretty, and yet… and yet…

You’re reading far too much into it. And even if you weren’t … All she wanted was a grim, scarred man with silver lines cut through his skin.

“Leave off, Jorge,” said the female paladin, elbowing her cohort. “You’re in no shape for it and she’s in no mood.”

“Can’t blame a knight for trying,” said Jorge. “Well then, I’ll show my appreciation some other way. Innkeeper! Put these gentlefolk’s bill on the Dreaming God’s tab, will you?”

The innkeeper grunted.

“That was well done,” said Zale, as they walked away from the inn.

“He probably wouldn’t have lost the arm, but you never want to risk it with infection,” said Halla.

“Not quite what I meant. It never hurts to have the Dreaming God’s folk on your side.

They’re dumb as posts and single-minded to the point of suicide about demons, but if you want someone with a very large sword to stand between you and the enemy, they truly have no equal.

” They paused, then added, a bit dryly, “Relentlessly good-looking, too. It’s almost annoying. ”

“I didn’t do it for that, ” said Halla.

Zale smiled. “I know.”