Page 68 of Swordheart #1

“You’re alive,” Sarkis said, against the side of her neck. “I thought I’d never see you again. I was so afraid I’d lost you.”

It occurred to him, belatedly, that he had lost her. He’d been a fool and she’d cast the sword aside. She’d been right to do so. He should let go, step back, accept the judgment that he had due.

He did not seem to be doing any of these things. He seemed to be holding her so tightly that he had lifted her a little off the floor. And she was pressing herself against him, her body molding to his, and if he had lost her, she did not seem to know it.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m fine. Are you—have you—”

“Healed,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s fine. Are you safe? Alver, Nolan, are they…?”

“All dealt with. We’re back home.”

He leaned back then, arms still around her waist, so he could search her face, terrified of what he’d find. Fear? Anger? Impatience? Is she waiting for me to stop mauling her so that she can tell me she’s giving the sword to her niece and I can go to hell?

She smiled at him, and his heart turned over.

“Halla…” he said, and pulled her mouth to his.

He kissed her hungrily, still not quite believing it was real.

All the fear that had been coiled in his gut shuddered into passion.

He wanted her here and now, on the floor in front of the fire if need be.

He wanted to sink inside her and feel her heat around him and know that she was his, as surely as he was hers.

Can’t. Can’t do that. It’s the one thing she really is afraid of.

“Halla,” he said, his voice thick. “I need you. I know we can’t—but—”

“No, it’s all right,” she said, surprising him, and then she was off on a complicated tangent about being tied up in a room with Zale and telling Alver she was pregnant and how Zale had worked out that if he just went back in the sword afterward…

He tried to follow this, but his mind got stuck on the bit where Alver had tied her up. He would kill the clammy-handed louse. He’d use his bare hands so as not to waste good steel on him.

“Oh dear,” said Halla. Apparently he’d said that out loud.

“I stabbed him, you see, and… oh, not very well!” She held up her hands, as if apologizing.

“In the arm. He screeched like a chicken laying a particularly large egg, and then I know I was probably supposed to stab him again, but there didn’t seem to be much point. ”

Rage at Alver had dampened his libido somewhat, but Halla’s cheerful expression, and the mimed stabbing, woke it again. Great god, but he loved her. She was so absurd and so dear, and also it seemed she was capable of stabbing kidnappers and then being matter-of-fact about it.

Also, he could apparently make love to her without fear.

Sarkis picked her up in his arms—she squeaked—and carried her to the bed. “Yes?” he said, searching her face again.

She reached up and pulled him down beside her. “Yes,” she whispered in his ear.

He knew that he should go slowly, that it had been a very long time for her, but he couldn’t.

He tugged at her clothes, slid his hands across her breasts, and then he was lost to a kind of frenzy.

Her warmth and her softness filled his senses.

He needed her desperately, needed to take her and be taken until all the fear and horror of the last few weeks was a faded, distant memory.

It was not until he had entered her on one hard thrust that he fought clear of the haze. “Halla.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “Am I hurting you? Is this…?”

“No, it’s fine,” she said, sounding a bit faint. “Truly. Err… are you done?”

He resisted the urge to beat his skull against the headboard. “No. I’m not done. It goes on for a while yet, unless you don’t want it to.”

“That’s fine.” She wiggled under him, adjusting her position, in a way that tested his self-control enormously. Just the feel of her breasts against his chest was probably going to kill him.

At this rate, it may not go on for much longer at all. Although if it goes on for more than two minutes, I’m already ahead of the game.

Besides, I’d like to see how any other man would manage, after a few hundred years of celibacy …

In the end, he did not last nearly as long as he’d like. When she gasped in his ear, he came completely undone.

When he could manage coherent thought again, he propped himself up on his elbows. “I could have managed that better,” he said.

“I’m just glad you’re here,” she said.

“So am I, but it was not my intent to… ah… manhandle you.”

“As long as you don’t intend to throw me into a ditch.” She chuckled, which did interesting things to various muscles and focused Sarkis’s attention immediately.

“No ditches,” he said. He slid his hand down between their bodies and began to touch her in ways that did even more interesting things. “But it would be unforgivably rude to take without giving back.”

“If you say—so!” The last word came out as a squeak, and Sarkis set out to make sure that both of them were well pleased.

It was the middle of the night. The fire had burned down and the bird had woken in its sleep to shout loudly about death and the worm, then gone back to sleep. Halla was half-asleep against his chest, and Sarkis stared down at the fine lines etched across her eyelids and the corners of her eyes.

Great god, he’d almost lost her. No, he had lost her. It was by Halla and Zale’s doing, not his, that she was here in his arms. He had failed her. How could he keep from doing so again?

She opened her eyes and frowned. “You’re upset.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re scowling. The sad scowl, not one of the others.”

He filed the notion that he had different types of scowl away for later.

“Forgive me,” he said. He freed one hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I’ve failed you. I didn’t protect you, and I didn’t tell you all the truth. I don’t deserve… this. I don’t deserve you. ”

“You didn’t deserve to be stuck in a sword for five hundred years, either,” she said tartly.

“Well, perhaps not.” He flopped back down on his back, staring at the ceiling. “So… err… now what?”

Halla considered this. “Well. I suppose you are stuck with me, now that I’m the wielder again.”

He smiled up at the ceiling. “So I am.”

“And as I am now a wealthy enough widow to be automatically respectable, I do not need to worry about having a very handsome lover lurking around the house.”

“I’ll kill him,” said Sarkis.

“I meant you, wretch.”

“I am not very handsome. I am scarred and irritable and, unfortunately, immortal.”

“Yes, but you carry it well.” She propped herself up on one elbow. “I mean it, though. The neighbors will gossip, but… well, it’s not fair, but there you are. I will be eccentric instead of a pariah.”

He scowled at her, clearly deep in thought, then said, “Marry me.”

Halla blinked at him, not sure if she’d heard correctly.

“If you marry me, you won’t be eccentric. No, dammit, this is coming out wrong. Marry me to marry me, not because of your neighbors. I’ll kill your neighbors.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Halla, focusing on the one bit that she could make sense of. “I like most of them.”

“Fine, then I will glare at them. But you should still marry me anyway. I mean, you shouldn’t, really, you can do much better, although given what I’ve seen of the men in your land…” He trailed off, muttering something under his breath, in which Halla caught only the words decadent and torch.

“Are you asking me to marry you?”

He gave her an exasperated look. “Yes. Of course. Because—oh, great god’s balls, I don’t even know how to marry you in this country.”

Halla felt her lips twitching. He sounded so distraught, she didn’t want to laugh at him. “Well, we go before a priest… Zale would probably be happy to perform it… and say vows and then…”

Sarkis shook his head. “But you have no family to set your price. And even if you did, I could not pay it.”

“Price?”

“The marriage price. What your husband pays your household, to make up for your loss.”

Halla raised her eyebrows. “We do it the other way around. The woman provides a dowry so that the husband will take her.”

The resulting mutter was louder and sounded a bit like Silas’s bird. “How barbaric.”

“Well, I haven’t got a family and you haven’t got any money, so can’t we just ignore that?”

He bristled. “I will not steal you!”

“Err… but I’m agreeing to it?” Halla did not know whether to laugh or cry. “Sarkis, I’ve chased you from pillar to post and then you had to fall on your sword and—and—can’t this all just cancel out?”

She could tell by his scowl that it did not, in fact, cancel out. He got to his feet and stomped around the bedroom, dragging his hands through his hair.

This is just my luck. I worry that he’ll hate me, but instead he wants to marry me except that he can’t because … because …

“All right,” she said, tucking her feet up under her on the bed. “Explain this to me so I understand.”

It was, she had to admit, rather fascinating.

It made sense, in a land where you lived and died by social standing.

Not like this one, Halla thought wryly, where if you have no standing, you go work as someone’s housekeeper, and if there’s a hint of scandal, he turns you out and you end up scrubbing floors in a nunnery. Hmm, yes. Wildly different, those.

Hell, maybe Sarkis’s people have the right idea. Put a material price on people so everybody knows what they’re worth.

“Why does somebody need a high price? Aren’t you just bankrupting your husband before you marry him?”

“No, no. A high marriage price means higher standing for both husband and wife. The wife because her family values her highly, the husband because he can afford to meet it. Most of the goods will go with the couple. If land is offered, they may live on it, or it will be held in trust for their children.” He shook his head.

“If it isn’t… well, we have fought clan wars over less. ”

Halla rubbed her forehead. “What if her husband can’t meet her price?”

“Then they do not wed.”

“What? Seriously? ”

He looked uncomfortable. “Well… she can agree to be raided away. It causes a great deal of upheaval, but if two people are obviously in love, sometimes their families will turn a blind eye, or… ah… pursuit will be symbolic. But she still has her price, you understand. Everyone knows her status. That is not lost. And her children cannot then inherit her husband’s wealth, because she is still a member of her parent’s household, in absentia.

Her children are fatherless, to all intents and purposes, though they may know their fathers well. ”

Halla rubbed her temples. “What if two men or two women wed?”

“Whichever one is being taken from their household must be paid for. If they are both leaving a house, then they will each set a price and their families will negotiate. Between two women of high standing, for example, particularly if one or more has proven that they can bear children, negotiations can stretch on for months. Frequently both families will cede land, or one will cede land and the other build a house on it, and feel that both have gotten off lightly.”

“So how do we figure out my price?” she said, “I run my own household now, so do I get to name my own?”

“Absolutely not,” said Sarkis. “No one names their own price. You can’t determine what you’re worth to other people.” For the first time since bringing up the price, his scarred face cracked into a smile. “Besides, I know you. You’ll undervalue yourself terribly.”

Halla didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed by the accuracy of this observation. “Well, my family’s dead.”

“Only the first family is blood. The rest are made by time or love or battle.” He frowned, tapping a nail against his teeth. “Zale. Do you value Zale?”

“I’d jump in front of a charging horse for them,” admitted Halla.

“Then they will set your price.” He nodded firmly. “They are a crafty negotiator. They will drive a hard bargain.”

“But you said you can’t pay it!”

He leaned his forehead against the bedpost. “There’s that. Perhaps I could work as a mercenary for a time, or…”

“Oh no!” Halla glared at him. “I just got you back! I’m not losing you again! And anyway, maybe you don’t age, but I don’t want to waste any more of the years I’ve got left.”

Sarkis sat down on the bed and wrapped his arms around her. “Are you certain you wish to marry me at all? You’ll grow old, and I will not. Will you hate me in time?”

She gave a very loud and unladylike snort. “I spent the last decade tending an old man,” she said. “The fact I won’t have to do that again is not a hardship.” She tilted her chin up to look at him. “Will it be too hard for you, watching me age?”

“It will gut me,” he said calmly. “But everyone watches the one they love age. At least I can know that you will not be alone. And I would rather be here, for as long as you live, than out in the world, worrying about you.” He smiled abruptly.

“Besides, I know you. You’ll still need someone to pull you out of trouble when you’re ninety. ”

Halla let this bit pass because he had just said something unexpected.

Everyone watches the one they love age.

The one they love.

“Love?” she said.

“Yes?”

His tone of polite inquiry was so at odds with what Halla expected that it took her a minute to sort out the reason. He thinks that was an endearment. Is the magic in his head translating things strangely?

“Sarkis, this is important. I don’t know if the words are coming out right. You said… well, implied, I guess… that you love me.”

“Oh. Did I?” He pulled back so that he could look her in the face. “Is that a problem?”

“No, but… I…” She rubbed her forehead and decided that all this hedging around was making her head hurt. And what’s the point anyway? To not be the first person to admit you’re in love so that you don’t feel like you’re pathetic if the other person doesn’t love you back?

“Sarkis, I love you. Or I’m in love with you. Or both. Both seems likely?”

“That does explain why you want to marry me, given my obvious flaws.”

“Flaws? What flaws?”

“Immortality. Manhandling.”

“You’ve got better about the manhandling.”

“I try.” He frowned. “Ah—I’m in love with you, too. Did I say that already?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh. Well, I am. For quite a while now. I don’t just gut myself for any wielder, you know.”

Halla winced. “Hopefully you won’t need to do so again.”

“I am looking forward to a long stretch of being human, married to you, and not acquiring too many more scars. And perhaps—oh great god, you’re crying.”

“It’s all right,” said Halla, wiping the tears away with the heel of her hand. “It’s fine. It’s really fine. Yes, I’ll marry you. We’ll work out the rest somehow.”

He kissed her then, and for a little while, neither of them worried about prices or the future at all.