Page 3 of Swordheart
A young widow, she might have remarried if she were wealthy, but there was no market for widows of no particular wealth and no particular beauty. Her mother’s family was far too poor to be burdened with another mouth to feed. Her husband’s great-uncle, Silas, had taken her in and she had become a middle-aged widow in his house, running the household and seeing that his old age was as comfortable as she could make it.
He had been a strange, erratic, maddening man, but she had always been grateful. He put up with her, and Halla knew that could be difficult.
She knew that he had saved her from the convent, or worse.
There was a click at the door. She knew without turning that someone had bolted the door to her chamber.
It seemed thatworsehad finally caught up with her.
CHAPTER 2
She had naively assumed, that first night, that they would unlock the door in the morning. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure why she had assumed that.
I thought I was being punished like a naughty child who misbehaved at dinner, not being held prisoner in my own home like… well, like an extremely unwilling potential bride…
In the morning, the door had still been locked. She had rattled the knob and hammered on the door until Malva came through, glaring at her. “Stop making all that racket! People are trying to sleep!”
“Well, if you hadn’t locked the door—” Halla began.
“The door,” said Malva, drawing herself up, “will remain locked until you have learned how to conduct yourself in a manner becoming a woman of this family.”
Halla should have said something clever. She’d eventually had three days to think of all the clever things that she should have said. But it was such an incomprehensible thing that in the moment, Halla’s first thought was that she had misheard or misunderstood, and then she said, “Excuse me, what?” and then Malva made a disgusted noise and pulled the door shut and locked it.
They’d brought her food. Alver came up to say, politely, that he was sorry about all this. Halla stared at him and said, “So why aren’t you letting me go?”
“Mother, you know,” said Alver, wringing his clammy, ringed hands.
“Get out,” said Halla. To her moderate surprise, he obeyed.
She was extremely tempted to throw the chamber pot atMalva the next time she arrived. The only reason she didn’t was because it would get all over the floor and the doorway and then she’d be sitting in the stink of it, and she was increasingly certain that they weren’t going to let her out.
“You’ll change your mind,” said Malva airily, bringing up dinner. Her sister waited in the hallway, which meant that even if Halla had overpowered her, the door would simply get slammed in her face again, and they’d come back in greater force.
“About what?” said Halla.
“Marrying Alver, obviously. It’s the only sensible thing to do. You just need some time to think on it.”
“Or what? You’ll keep me locked up here forever?”
Malva shrugged.
“You’ll have to let me out for the funeral,” said Halla, through gritted teeth.
“No, I don’t,” said Malva. “You’ll be overcome with grief, that’s all. Although if you’d stop being so stubborn and simply agree to marry Alver—who is better than you deserve!—you’ll be able to attend as you ought.” She set the tray down on the cedar chest at the end of the bed. “Really, Halla, if you had any feeling for Silas at all, I would think you would do whatever it took to attend, but I suppose such family loyalty is simply beyond you.”
Halla hated that she had never been able to get angry without crying. It meant that her vision was too blurred for her to actually hit Malva with a flung candlestick. Fortunately, the other woman’s expression was also too blurry to make out.
“Really,Halla,” she said, and swept out of the room.
Midafternoon on the second day, there was an ungodly commotion downstairs. Halla heard shouts and a scream, and for one moment thought that someone might be coming to rescue her. She half rose from her seat by the window. Then she heard a guttural voice shouting,“Hellfire! Hellfire and burning for the worm, the worm that gnaws the roots of the world!”and realized that the bird was loose.
“Blast,” she muttered, dropping back into her chair.
The thumping and shouting went on for some time. She hoped they hadn’t killed the bird. She didn’t like the bird, but at the moment, she had a certain amount of fellow feeling for it.
“The veins of the earth run fat with rot!”shrieked the bird.
“Get a broom!” shouted someone, probably Alver.
