Page 105 of Swordheart
She gave him a sympathetic look. He noticed that even when she smiled, she was careful to keep her lips together. Perhaps bared teeth upset the rune.
“He says… do you want… sword house gone?”
Sarkis felt his stomach lurch. Could the rune do that? Set him loose from his prison? Let him die for good? Get him off this wretched chain of battle after battle, life after life…
“Can they do that?” he asked.
The woman shrugged.
“Sarkis?” said Halla.
Reality rushed in. He couldn’t very well leave Halla. She still needed him.
No, she doesn’t. She’s got Zale and Brindle and once you’re out of the hills, she’s nearly home. She’ll be fine. She doesn’t need you that badly.
Maybe he just wanted her to need him.
“If the rune can help you,” said Halla, “then we should find out more. If they can get you out of the sword…”
She trailed off. Sarkis studied her face, the way her pale eyebrows had drawn down and her water-gray eyes.Couldthe rune help him? Could a group of strange deer people possibly unmake thezethwoman’s sword?
“It’s not that I want you to die!” Halla said, clearly misinterpreting his look. “I don’t! I think it’s awful! But if that’s what you want and it’s been hundreds of years and maybe the rune can fix it, then—”
“No,” said Sarkis. He felt strangely light, as if he had just shed a heavy load of armor. “No, it’s all right. I will see you safely home. And then perhaps, afterward, we can find our way back here. A few weeks is not so long, compared to five hundred years.”
He did not say what he was thinking, which was that Halla herself might live thirty or forty more years.Thirty or forty years is not so long either, compared to five hundred.
“We might not be able to find our way back,” said Zale quietly. “The Vagrant Hills are… unpredictable.”
“You don’t have to give this up for me,” said Halla. She seemed near tears. Sarkis wondered how long it had been since anyone had given anything up for her. Perhaps no one ever had.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Perhaps they could not help me, and perhaps they can only kill me. I find that I would rather wait until our task is done to take the chance.”
“But—”
“And perhaps I am not quite ready to die just yet after all.”
The woman watching them nodded. She had apparently followed enough to keen her translation to the tall stag-man, who flicked his ears. He lifted his spear in front of him, crossed his forearm over the shaft in a gesture that clearly carried the weight of ritual, and then turned and walked away. One by one, the otherrune melted away into the woods, until the human translator was the only one left.
“Will the Hills let us go?” asked Zale.
She shrugged again. “Here… does what here wants.” She seemed to think for a moment, then added, “Now is… easy. Once was… not easy.” She waved her hands, taking in the sky and the ground. “Some day, maybe not easy again.”
Zale nodded. “Do you wish to come with us?” they asked. “I do not know who your people are, but we can take you with us.”
“What? No.” She seemed astonished by the suggestion. “These—” she keened a note “—they are my people.” She lapsed briefly into the language of Charlock, without any of the halting effort of translation, then tried again. “I am here. My house. My here. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Zale, and bowed deeply to her. “Thank you, madam.”
She nodded and vanished as silently as the rune, and then it was only three humans, a gnole, and an ox sitting alone on the hillside.
“Well,” said Zale slowly. “Well, well, well. I suppose I can vouch for some of the reports of the Vagrant Hills after all.”
“What did she mean, at the end?” asked Halla softly, as they climbed back onto the wagon.
“Rat only knows,” said Zale. “But she clearly didn’t want to leave, so it’s none of our business. Now let’s see if the Hills decide to let us go after all.”
CHAPTER 34
