Page 165 of Swordheart
It was the sort of situation where screaming would have been entirely appropriate, but at first she wasn’t sure if she was really awake, and then there were a lot of blankets in her mouth, and then she was standing out in the cold outside the wagon’s door and it seemed a bit late for screaming.
There was a strange man wearing the robes of the Hanged Mother and carrying a very large sword. Bigger than Sarkis’s sword. Halla wondered if he was compensating for something.
Zale was dragged out right after she was, by a pair of men with much less impressive swords. The priest looked as bedraggled as she felt, but they didn’t scream, either.
“Where is your spirit?” roared the indigo-cloaked man.
Halla said, “Whuh?”
He pointed the sword at her. It was quite a lot of steel to be looking at at this hour of the morning. “I’ll ask again, woman, and you’d best answer! Where is your spirit?”
“Uh…” Halla wracked her sleep-addled brain. “I guess… probably somewhere in my chest, isn’t it? Although when I think ofme,I usually think of something inside my head…”
The man stared at her. So did the other two. Zale put their face in their hands.
“What?” the Motherhood priest said finally. He had an insignia on his collar that probably meant he was a captain, or whatever the theological equivalent was.
“You know,” said Halla. “Right behind your eyes? That’s always sort of where I thought the soul was.”
“Not yoursoul,” said the man, lowering his sword a few inches. “Yourspirit.”
“Is there a difference?” asked Halla. Then, realizing this was probably not the time to be arguing, “I’m sorry! I’m not really very theologically minded. If you say there’s a difference I’ll believe you, of course. You’d know better than I would.”
“Yourdemon,” said the man. “Your tame spirit. Your… I don’t know what it is! Familiar! The thing that does your bidding!”
“Nobody does my bidding,” said Halla, a bit sadly. “I mean, sometimes I ask the cook to make something in particular, but half the time she says it can’t be done and I’ll take meat pies and be glad for it. So we eat a lot of meat pies. She’s very proud of them. Oh dear…” Halla pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m going to have to see if she’s still available, aren’t I? Youknowthat awful Malva didn’t pay her…”
The man in indigo was starting to get flushed, although with frustration or rage or embarrassment, Halla wasn’t sure. “Stop babbling!”
“If I may,” said Zale gently. “Brother, wherever did you gain the impression that Mistress Halla had a tame spirit that served her?”
“I’m not your brother, Rat priest,” spat the man. He turned a broad glare on Zale. “I have been tasked with finding our brothers who went missing on this road. We encountered bandits two days ago who spoke of you and your witchcraft.”
Butter would not have melted in Zale’s mouth. “I’m sorry to hear about your men.”
“The bandits saidyouundoubtedly killed them.”
Zale’s eyebrows went up. “And you believed them?”
The flush climbing up the man’s face grew redder and more mottled. “They described your wagon! They said you were a priest and a woman and a gnole—and a tame devil!”
“We did run into some bandits,” said Halla. “But I’m not sure about the tame devil bit. We had a guard. He fought like a devil, I’ll grant you that much, but he’s pretty human.”
The mention of the gnole made her glance around. She couldn’t see Brindle anywhere, which was unusual. She would have expected him to stay close by his ox.
“Where is he now?” The man turned his attention back to her, holding the sword up again.
“Uh…” Halla’s eyes nearly crossed as she stared down the blade. “I don’t know? I only hired him to get me back to Rutger’s Howe, and then he did, and then he left. I mean, I wasn’t going to hire him to guard me in my own house. That seemed a little excessive. I wish he’d stayed around, actually, then I could have hired him again for this trip…”
“We are visiting a close family friend,” said Zale, stepping into the gap. “He lives in Amalcross. He was kind enough to help Mistress Halla with a legal matter, so we were stopping there.”
“His health isn’t good,” improvised Halla. “And he was so helpful. He was one of the witnesses to the will, you know.” She beamed at the man in indigo, on the principle that it couldn’t hurt.
His rage was definitely giving way to bafflement. She just hoped that he wasn’t one of those men that became angrier when they got confused. “And you know nothing of these missing men?” he demanded.
“If they’re the same ones that we saw on the road, we saw them… what, eight days ago? Nine?” Zale looked at Halla. Halla shrugged helplessly. She’d lost any sense at all of how much timehad passed. “But I don’t know if those are even the same men. They didn’t leave their names.”
“The bandits described you,” said the man stubbornly.
