Page 73 of Swordheart
No, it didn’t bear thinking about.
“Do… do you want a different wielder?” Halla asked after a moment. There was an unexpectedly fragile look in her eyes.
“No!” He didn’t know if he was reacting to the question or the look, only that he didn’t want her to look like that. “I just don’t want you to suffer because you think you have to keep me around.”
He went back to his meal, shoulders hunching. The thought of no longer seeing Halla was an unexpectedly sharp knife in his gut.
Don’t be foolish. You’ve known the woman for less than a week.
She smiled at him abruptly. The knife twisted.
You will only fail her in time, as you have failed all your people. If she sells the sword, perhaps you can avoid that somehow.
“Well, hopefully the Temple will take care of all that,” she said.
He grunted.
“Well,” said Halla, sitting back. “It is somehow only the middle of the day. I have a thought about what we could do next, but… err… I don’t want to offend you…”
Sarkis had a brief, mad hope that she was propositioning him and stared at her.Surely not.“What?”
“There’s a library in Archon’s Glory,” she said. “A pretty good one. I thought we could go dig around in there, maybe find a scholar who’s willing to talk, and maybe we can work out how long you’ve been in the sword.”
Sarkis blinked at her. It had been so long since a wielder had cared where he was from—had even seen him as a person witha history, rather than a weapon—that he had almost lost sight of the question himself.
“Oh,” he said, a bit faintly. “I… Yes. I would like that.”
“Great!” Halla pushed back from the table. “Let’s go.”
The library was a testimony to civic architecture—large, clean, set back off a courtyard with a fountain. Friezes of scholars engaged in debate gazed down on them benevolently. Halla had visited once before with Silas, and was pleased to see that nothing much had changed. She walked up to the attendant just inside the doors and said, just as Silas had years ago, “Is there someone who could assist us with a historical research question?”
She was just congratulating herself on handling this like a competent person and not a yokel from a tiny backwater town when the attendant gave her a weary smile. “There are many kinds of history, ma’am,” he said. “Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Uh… hmm…”
“Military,” put in Sarkis.
The attendant nodded. “Go straight back and turn right, then take the second left. There’s a woman back there named Morag who can probably put you on the right track.”
The path was not quite so clear cut as the attendant had suggested. There were about five possible places to turn right, and Halla was briefly distracted by an enormous statue of a minotaur with improbable endowments—my goodness, that can’t possibly be to scale, can it?—and then Sarkis very clearly noticed her noticing the minotaur and she blushed scarlet while he grinned.
Whydid the man make her blush so easily? She was a respectable widow, for the gods’ sake.
This made her think of the fact that he’d been kissing her not two hours earlier. And then that led to other thoughts about Sarkis, possibly in comparison to the minotaur, and that onlymade her blush harder. She put both hands to her burning cheeks and muttered something about it being hot.
“Well, if our bull-headed associate is any indication, it certainly isn’t cold in here.”
“You are awretch.”
By the time they had located their historical scholar, Halla had finally stopped blushing. Morag was a dark-skinned, heavyset woman with her hair in narrow braids, the whole mass pulled back from her face with golden cords. She looked from Sarkis to Halla and back again. “My specialty is military history,” she said. “What can I help you fine people with?”
Halla had been trying to work out the best way to ask questions without revealing Sarkis’s secret. She had had an idea at last, and was rather proud of it.
“This is my friend Sarkis. He’s from… ah… well, a long way away. We’re not sure how far away. His people tell a great many stories about battles, and we’re wondering if you can help us figure out where and when some of those battles took place, so we can work out his people’s history.”
Morag put her chin in her hand. “Now that’s an interesting request. How specific are the stories?”
Halla glanced at Sarkis, who was looking at her with surprise and approval. “Very specific,” he said. “I can tell you at least the local geography and what the people involved called themselves.”
