Page 29 of Swordheart
He seemed genuinely surprised, but offered her his arm. The skin was heavily tattooed, the black faded to dark blue, in patterns of stylized rams, stags, horses. There were scars there, too, cutting starkly across the lines of ink. A stag with curling horns ran across his left bicep, its throat sliced open with silver.
It must be the light,she thought,or perhaps the sword heals him with metal instead of flesh.
She’d brought a kerchief with her, but sacrificed it now. The blood had dried black across his tattoos, and she wished that she could clean it. Did enchanted swords worry about infection?
Regardless, she folded the cloth neatly and tied it around hisupper arm. His skin was human temperature, but the muscle underneath was hard as iron. If she’d banged her knuckles on it, it would probably have rung like metal.
And I am growing fanciful in my old age, or I am very tired, or both.
The fire was putting out a tiny bit of heat now. Halla huddled close to it, barely able to tell if it was warmer or not. Sarkis knelt beside her, feeding twigs to the flame.
She wasn’t sure if she slept. It seemed more like she stopped thinking and her eyelids closed.
He never did explain about the owls…
And then it was nearly dawn and the fire was out and Sarkis was shaking her awake.
CHAPTER 9
Sarkis spent the hours while Halla slept wondering what the hell to do next.
It was one thing to remove a woman from a house she very much did not wish to be in. It was another to become a fugitive in a strange land within an hour of meeting.
Possibly I could have planned that better.
If only she’d had some kin to come ride to her rescue. Still, he couldn’t very well leave her to get married off to a man who would drop her down the stairs to save his own skin.
He’d been reasonably optimistic until he’d actually climbed the hillside to the top and looked out over the landscape.
Rutger’s Howe was tucked into a half circle of hills. North, the land was flat farmland. South were rolling, stony hills, suitable for sheep and not much else. The lich road meandered between the two, where the main road ran east to west. Obviously if one wanted to move quickly, one would head north.
Unfortunately, the land to the north was well-farmed, well-tended, obviously not at all wild, and that made it difficult for two people to vanish into. There were a few patches of woodland that might be promising, but that was all.
He would have been fine in a wilderness. Sarkis was excellent with wilderness. The south had nothing to compare to a winter in the Weeping Lands anyway.
But where you had farms and roads, you got people, and people asked questions. Questions like, “Hey, are you the pair that vanished from that town after killing that guard?”
Halla had, he would admit, handled the young man at thelich-gate well. He had been afraid he’d have to kill him, too, and Sarkis disliked killing priests, even priests of soft southern gods. There were stories that a priest’s blood would etch a blade that drew it and curse it to never take an edge, and Sarkis wasn’t sure how far that curse would extend. It would be damnably inconvenient to be trapped for eternity in a dull sword.
Without a handy wilderness to vanish into, they would probably need a city. Cities were basically wildernesses with too many witnesses anyway.
He contemplated how long it would take to walk down the average city street with Halla asking questions about every single thing that caught her interest.
Great god give me strength.
He scanned the landscape again, hoping that something would jump out at him. Nothing did.
For a moment, he could almost feel the presence of two people behind him. Something more than memory, less than ghosts. Angharad, to his left, a step behind. On his right, the Dervish, moving restlessly, never still. He had looked over more lands and more maps than he could count with those two beside him, and he had trusted their eyes to find the patterns he had missed.
But they were gone now, and Sarkis’s only ally in this land was a middle-aged woman fleeing from her family.
He climbed back down the hill and settled into the corner beside the fire, opposite Halla.
It was cold. Not the wracking, bone-chilling cold of the Weeping Lands in winter, but cold enough to make him fold his arms and tuck his hands underneath, cold enough to pull his knees up to conserve what heat he could.
His charge had huddled into her cloak, hood drawn down. He had not had a chance to study her closely in their flight, beyond his initial impressions.
She was a handsome woman, if not beautiful. Her upper lipwas thin, the lower one full, which might have looked like a pout on someone else. On Halla, combined with her wide, curious eyes, she mostly looked as if she had just thought of a particularly interesting question and was trying to figure out how to phrase it.
