Page 44 of Swordheart
Sure. When are you going to tell her what the blade says, then?
Sometimes Sarkis hated arguing with himself. He kept being right.
Halla snuffled against him, hiccupped, and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I shouldn’t have… I mean, she was at the inn… she talked about how hard it was to travel alone and asked if I’d walk her a little way, just so the men didn’t see her leaving alone and that madesense,it really did, and I thought of course she was scared, I would be, too, so I’d wait to draw you, and then…”
“It’s all right. You couldn’t have known.”
“I was sostupid.”
“No,” he said. “Just kind. It’s all right. It will be all right. I’m here. You’re safe now. No harm done.”
She looked up at him with her water-gray eyes, now rimmed with red. Her cheeks and nose were swollen from crying.
The urge flared again to go after the people who had done this and kill them. Or possibly just burn the entire world that was so unkind to people like Halla.
A fine thing for a former mercenary to be thinking. You’ll be running off righting wrongs like a swordsaint if this keeps up.
Not that he could run off anywhere. He was anchored to the sword and the wielder, whether they were as malicious as a devil or as kind as Halla.
She drew away. He found that he was reluctant to let her go. She still looked miserable, and now she looked embarrassed, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He kissed her forehead. “You don’t have to be. They’re the ones who did wrong, not you.”
Now why in the great god’s name did I just do that?
He didn’t know. He hadn’t even thought before he kissed her.
It doesn’t mean anything.He’d only brushed his lips across her forehead, like a brother might. It didn’t have to be anything more than that.
Good. Don’t let it be anything more than that. Getting involved with a wielder is asking for trouble that would take a great deal more than one lifetime to sort out.
He knew this was true, and yet the desire to kiss her again was much stronger than it should have been.
Stop. You will fail her as you fail all the others who wield you, in time.
“Oh gods,” she said, sounding exhausted. “Does that mean we can’t stop at an inn tonight?”
Despite the darkness of his thoughts, he had to laugh at that. “We’ll stop. We’ll just go in together.”
“What if they’ve heard of us and try to stop us?”
Sarkis shrugged. “They can try.”
CHAPTER 14
No one tried to stop them.
It took Halla a moment to gather up her courage to go into the next inn. She’d washed her face in a puddle so that no one could tell she’d been crying a few hours earlier. But she stared at the door and thought about other people and other people’s malice, and had a sudden urge to turn and run into the fields and never come out again.
Then she realized she’d been standing there for several minutes, with Sarkis beside her, and that he had to guess she was frightened—frightened of an inn, for gods’ sake!—and the shame of that lifted her chin.Don’t embarrass yourself.
She opened the door and went in, with Sarkis standing behind her like a particularly warlike dog at heel. She wondered if the innkeeper would think they were married, then glanced at Sarkis and had a hard time picturing him being married to anyone.
