Page 112 of Swordheart
“A gnole will believe it when a gnole sees it,” muttered Brindle.
Twenty minutes later, he believed it. The ox ducked its head under an overgrown set of branches, and they emerged onto the road to Amalcross.
CHAPTER 36
“Halla, you’re dreaming. It’s a nightmare. Wake up. Halla…” The wagon creaked. Halla tried to fight her way free of the shreds of sleep, but the dream had been so monstrous and the wagon was so dark that she was not sure if she was out or if this was just another moment of it.
“Halla, wake up!” Zale sounded worried and exasperated all at once. Halla wanted to tell them not to worry but she seemed to be paralyzed.
Cold air rushed in as the wagon door opened and it dipped under Sarkis’s weight. “What are you doing, priest?” he roared.
“I’m not doing anything, you daft barbarian! Halla’s having a nightmare!”
The realization that she had to save Zale from Sarkis’s conclusions broke the paralysis. “Nothing!” she gasped. “Dream!”
“… oh.” She saw the faint outline of Sarkis’s face as he pulled the door shut, and then he was fumbling for her in the dark.
He found her shoulders and pulled her upright, and between that and the blast of cold, she felt the dream falling away at last. She drew a deep, grating breath, then another.
“They were following us,” she said.
Neither Zale nor Sarkis had to ask what they were.
“I looked back and they were on everything. Like there had been a hard freeze and a glaze of ice.”
Sarkis sat down on the bunk, banged his head on the wall, grumbled, and then pulled her into his arms.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t be having nightmares. You’re the one it landed on.Idon’t get to have nightmares.”
“Oh for the great god’s sake,” growled Sarkis. She could hear his voice rumbling in his chest under her ear. “The person who has nightmares is the one who gets to have them. And if I dreamed like normal folk, I’d have them, too.”
“You don’t dream?” asked Zale, interested.
“I dream in silver. It’s like being in the sword again. If I dream at all, which is rare.” He began running his hand over her hair.
It was very comforting to lie in the dark and be stroked like a cat. It was probably not respectable, but respectability seemed increasingly useless. What did it matter, when there were monsters in the hills, not just stories to frighten children, but real, honest monsters that hung in the trees, waiting to land on the unwary?
She pressed her face against his shoulder.
“It will be all right,” he said. “We’re out. We don’t have to go back.”
“How else will we ever know if the rune can get you out of the sword?”
“We’ll find another way. Or we won’t. It’s been nearly five hundred years. A few more years won’t kill me.”
“That’s theproblem!”
He laughed, a deep, subterranean chuckle that she felt through the side of her face. “Go back to sleep. We don’t need to sort it all tonight.”
“Nor are we likely to,” said Zale. “And we have survived, and that is as much as the Rat asks of us on any given day.”
“Practical,” said Sarkis.
“We’re known for it,” said the priest.
Amalcross looked just the same as it had when they left it. A gnole squeaked good-naturedly at them as the wagon rolled past. The ox was unimpressed, but the ox had not been impressed by anything so far, and was not about to start now.
Bartholomew looked more than a little startled to see them when he opened the door, then suddenly pleased. He ushered them inside to meet his guest, a short, owl-eyed man with shaggy brown hair.
