Page 37 of Swordheart
“But we’re in a hurry,” said Halla. “To get to Archon’s Glory, or at least to get away from Rutger’s Howe.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if we weren’t in a hurry, thenIcould feed us just fine,” said Halla with some asperity. “It’s autumn. You’ve got toworkto starve in the middle of autumn.”
“Do you?” He sounded nonplussed.
She started counting things off on her fingers. “There’s acorns, if I had a week or so to leach them… We’re getting to the end of the season for filberts, but we could probably turn up a few good ones left… Persimmons are ripening, though those could be tricky, since the beasts want them, too, and if they’re close enough to a house that the beasts aren’t a problem, the farmers probably are. If we wanted to raid a garden, there’s plenty of things still in the ground, everybody stores the roots like that until they need them. Although I’d feel bad, since if we took too much, people might go hungry. But that’s true about any food, except acorns.” She considered. “And I guess cattail roots, although they’ll be woody right now, so we’d have to bereallyhungry…”
“Enough, enough!” She could hear that he was smiling. “I yield!”
“It’s just that pretty much anything we might harvest takes time and work and probably cooking supplies.”
“I see.”
“I’m not completely useless, you know,” she said, picking at her skirts.
There was a long silence, and then out of the dark, his voice said, “I never thought you were.”
She was glad that he couldn’t see her blush.
Since, despite all the talk, there was nothing to eat and not much to be said, Halla arranged her cloak as best she could, huddling to try and get warm. The air was very cold. She could pull her collar up over her face, which was warmer, but then the fabric got damp and hard to breathe through and she felt like she was suffocating.
She would certainly never get comfortable enough to sleep, Halla told herself sadly, and then fell asleep.
She had a vague memory, somewhere in the night, of Sarkis speaking to her, but she couldn’t remember a word he said, or if she even answered.
CHAPTER 12
Halla woke, surprisingly warm, with someone’s arms around her.
She couldn’t remember the last time that happened.Probably because it’sneverhappened, has it?
Her late husband had not slept in the same bed with her, preferring his own. Her older sister had married first, so she had been sleeping alone for many years.
Maybe when I was very small, and Mother was still alive…
She seemed to be in Sarkis’s lap, with her head resting against his shoulder. He had wrapped his arms around her waist to hold her in place.
It wasn’t unpleasant. He made a much warmer surface to rest on than the ground. She just wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, if anything.
Respectable widows certainly did not sleep in the arms of their guardsmen, but Sarkis was an enchanted sword, so that didn’t count, did it?
She suspected that someone like Aunt Malva would think it very much counted.
“How did I get here?” she asked finally.
Sarkis snorted. She realized that he had his cheek against her head, which she hadn’t noticed because her hood was drawn. “You wiggled around in the night. I assume you were trying to get warm, because once you found me, you latched on to my legs.”
Halla sighed. “My sister always said I tried to push her out of bed and steal the blankets.”
“I eventually picked you up to make things easier. Do you remember me asking if that was permissible?”
“I remember something or other. Did I say yes?”
“You snored at me. I decided that was close enough.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
