Page 168 of Swordheart
Halla and Zale nodded glumly.
“So,” said Mare. “Would you like to get there much faster?”
Halla’s heart leapt at the prospect, though she wasn’t exactly sure what the paladin meant. “We’d love to,” she said. “But what did you have in mind?”
Mare grinned. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”
Sarkis would have sworn that he remembered his few hours spent with the Sainted Smith—he grimaced even thinking the name, but knew no better one—far better than he liked.
After a few hours of answering Nolan’s questions, he realized just how much he had deliberately forgotten.
“Give me a little time,” he said finally, his voice clipped. “I have answered many questions. This is not a memory I cherish.”
“Oh,” said Nolan. The scholar tried to hide his disappointment. “Yes, of course. I’m sure it was physically quite painful.”
Sarkis wanted to laugh or scream or grab the little man by the throat and shake, but he did none of these things. He had to get word to Halla, and cooperation was his only chance for now.
He closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead with his knuckles. The wagon rattled along under him.
Behind his eyes, he saw firelight and the shadow of the Smith. She was perched on the edge of the table, a lanky woman with heavily muscled arms. Her eyes were lit with flame from without and with a frantic glitter from within.
“It will be glorious,” she promised him. “I know this is a punishment, but if it works, you will live for all time! You will see kingdoms rise and fall, you will see history!”
“I’ve seen enough kingdoms fall,” he’d replied, hearing his chains rattle as he moved. “I’ve helped a few of them along. It’s all a lot of blood and screaming.”
She didn’t listen to him. Sarkis got the impression that the Smith did not listen to many people. The forge light blazed off to his right, where her apprentices were hammering the steel. Three swords, three smiths, the rhythm just slightly off between them, like a faltering heartbeat. “It will be glorious,” she said. “If it works.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” asked the Dervish, in his light, amused voice. There was a mask of dried blood over his handsome face, but his voice was still the same.
“Oh, you’ll die,” said the Smith. “At least, I hope you’ll die. The alternatives are worse. I’ll try to get you out of the sword, of course, if you’re trapped in there and can’t come out.” She chewed on her lower lip.
“That happens?” asked the Dervish.
“Oh yes.” She nodded vigorously. “It’s happened to two people so far, I’m afraid. But I’m sure I’ll be able to get them out. Eventually.”
“Eventually?” The Dervish’s voice was no longer quite so amused.
“I’ve beenbusy,” said the Smith petulantly. “There’s so much to do. And once they’ve gone mad in the blade, it’s not as if they’re going to go any madder, are they?”
One of the apprentices called to the Smith. “Time.”
“Right!” The Smith slid off the table. “You first,” she said to Angharad Shieldborn. “You first…”
Sarkis straightened. The scene was too vivid. He could even smell the stink of burning flesh as the dull red sword sank into his captain’s breast. Angharad had grunted, but she had not screamed. The metal had hissed like a serpent and he knew it should not work, it was too uneven a tempering, there were too many bones, the blade should warp or break, but the Smith pulled it free and it was straight and fine and charred black with Angharad’s blood.
He’d shouted until his throat was raw, thrown himself against the chains, but Angharad was dead, body falling to one side, as dead as the rest of his men, all those brave, cranky, valiant souls who had looked to him to save them. He had failed them all and they hung from the walls of this cursed keep and now Angharad’s lifeblood was burnt onto a piece of metal and the Smith was looking at him with herzetheyes…
Stop. Think of something else. Stop.
He tried to drown the memory in something else. Anything else. The way the Weeping Lands looked in high summer, when the grass had turned golden and wind rushed over it in glinting waves, and the smell of grass came to him on the wind… The ocean, moving like the grass had, while he stood on the deck and smelled salt and heard the roar of the waves and also the Dervish being violently seasick over the side of the rail. That was before Angharad had joined them, a few months before, and he still hadn’t been sure about the Dervish, but he went over and pulled his hair back anyway and said, “It gets better,” and the Dervish said, “Yes, it’ll be better when I’mdead.”
The Dervish, who had died at the hands of the Smith, screaming as the sword slid into him…
Stop.
He thought of Halla. Not of bedding her—that felt too much like betrayal still—but the way she had slept in his arms afterward. They had fit together so well. It had been so comfortable, the way his arm slid into the hollow of her waist so that he could tuck his hand up between her breasts, the tops of his thighs against the backs of hers. He hadn’t even minded that she tried to burrow under him in her sleep.
Bedding was easy, compared to being able to sleep comfortably against someone. Hell, among his men, nobody’d bed down next to Fisher except Boll. Boll could sleep through the end of the world, and Fisher flailed and fidgeted like he could see the end coming. Fisher was always on the end, if they were jammed into tents together, and Boll was always between him and the rest of the troops. He’d even taken to sending them on scouting missions together as if they were a couple, even though there was nothing between them. It was just easier that way.
