Page 1 of Swordheart
CHAPTER 1
Halla of Rutger’s Howe had just inherited a great deal of money and was therefore spending her evening trying to figure out how to kill herself.
This was not a normal response to inheriting wealth. She was aware of that. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to have many other options. She had been locked in her room for three days and the odds of escape, never good, were growing increasingly slim.
Her relatives were going to be the death of her.
She had always believed that this was true in a metaphorical sense. Her two aunts and her assorted cousins would have tried the patience of a paladin or a saint. It was only in the last two days that she’d realized it was probably true in a literal sense as well.
Halla rested her forehead against the diamond-shaped glass in the window. Uncle Silas had been reasonably wealthy, partly because he never spent a single penny he didn’t have to. All the windows were made of many tiny panes, inexpensive to replace if one was broken. He would have used oiled paper if he could have gotten away with it, like the poorest houses in the village, but as he aged, the damp got into his joints. When not even a roaring fire could drive it away, he finally gave up and put glass in the windows.
It was cheap glass, full of bubbles. The reflection it threw back to her was distorted, so she could see only an oval of pale skin, pale hair, and respectably dark mourning clothes.
She wished Silas had spent more on glass and saved less. Or at least had the decency to leave the money to his other family members, and not to her.
The look of shock on Aunt Malva’s face when the village clerk had read out the will had been gratifying for an instant. Then the rest of Silas’s family had turned to stare at her and it had sunk into Halla’s brain that her great-uncle had really and truly left everything to her.
He’d probably thought he was doing her a favor.
Now I have something they want, and they can only get it by going through me.
Married or buried, I suspect it’s all the same to them. So long as the marriage comes first.
Cousin Alver had proposed that first evening. She rebuffed him, claiming that she was still much too distraught to think of any such things. The conversation hadn’t gone well after that.
“Your husband is long gone,” said Aunt Malva, setting her knife down on the table with a click. “You cannot possibly still be in mourning for him!”
Halla narrowed her eyes and set her own fork down. “My great-uncle passed awayyesterday,madam!”
Aunt Malva flushed. Her skin was whited with powder to an unnatural shade, which matched the whitewash on the walls. It made her flush of anger all the more vivid, coming out in red blotches around her eyes and her ears where the powder hadn’t quite gone on correctly.
Great-Uncle Silas had not believed in wasting money on tablecloths, even if it made the kitchen look like a poor crofter’s hall, so Malva’s hands were very white against the dark wood of the table. She reminded Halla of a ghost or a ghoul.
Mostly a ghoul. Coming along to gnaw the corpse before Silas is even cold.
Hmm, perhaps a ghoul would prefer a warm corpse, now that I think about it. Maybe it’s like fresh bread out of the oven, if you’re a ghoul.
“Well,” said Aunt Malva. “I suppose I am simply surprised that anyone would mourn Silas, that’s all.”
“Mother,” said Cousin Alver quietly.
“I’ll speak the truth, Alver! I always do, no matter how it costs me. Silas was a strange, wretched, tightfisted old man, with no proper affection for his kin or clan.”
“He is not even in theground,” said Halla, abandoning her thoughts about ghoul diet. “And he was very kind to me when I was young.”
“And even kinder now that you aren’t!”
“Mother.”
“In fact—” Malva began, and then a guttural voice interrupted her.
“Into the pit, the pit, the black pit, when the souls scream and the worms coil…”
Halla seized on the excuse gratefully and rose to her feet. “You’ve upset the bird,” she said.
The bird in question was a small, finch-like creature that could have perched easily on Halla’s smallest finger, had she been foolish enough to stick her finger in its cage, which she wasn’t. It had a red beak and red eyes and most of the time it sang a repetitive three-note song that went, “tweedle-tweedle-twee!” Occasionally, its eyes would flash green and it would begin roaring in an impossibly deep voice about the end of the world and the screams of the damned.
Great-Uncle Silas had been extraordinarily fond of it. Two priests and a paladin had certified that it wasn’t possessed by a demon, although they also all said that there was clearly something very wrong with it and had recommended a great deal of fire followed by a great deal of holy water. Silas had instead put it in a cage in the dining room, because he was that sort of person.
