Page 30 of Swordheart
Her hair was pulled back in a thick braid. Women in this country did not cover their hair, as he recalled, unless they were in religious orders. In the heavy black habit, she looked as if she might be about to join such an order.
I suppose if I must escort her to a nunnery, then so be it. Great god help me, then I’ll be servant to a nun. Unless she surrenders the blade to her order, and then I’d be in service to…what? Whichever one of her superiors drew the blade?
He put his hand over his eyes. Bound to a nunnery. Great god. The Dervish would have laughed until he fell over.
No sense in borrowing trouble. We haven’t even gotten free of her relatives yet.
Her hands, when she bandaged the slash on his arm, had been work-roughened but kind. It had been a long time since someone had touched him kindly. He was more used to people trying to stab him or bash his head in.
Well, it might yet come to that.
Sarkis sank his chin to his chest, and waited for morning to come.
It was a cold, cheerless waking. Halla was thirsty, and starting to wish she’d eaten more of the dinner they’d brought her the night before.
“From the top of the hill, I see woods to the north,” Sarkis said. “Better cover, but are they safe?”
Halla considered for a moment. “Not the nearer ones. That’s an acorn wood, and they’ll be rounding the pigs up for slaughter. They’re busier than a market at this time of autumn.”
Sarkis sighed. “All right. I cannot swear we’ve eluded pursuit, but since no one’s breathing down our necks at the moment, we should plan as best we can. Where should we go next, lady?”
“You’re askingme?” said Halla.
“I am hundreds of miles and a number of years from the lands that I know. You know far better than I do where we might go safely next.”
This was true. It was just that the notion ofanywarrior, let alone an enchanted one, taking orders from Halla seemed faintly absurd. She couldn’t even give orders to servants without phrasing them as requests, and half the time the servants talked back anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m just… not used to anyone asking my opinion, that’s all.”
Sarkis raised an eyebrow and said, “I don’t know why not. You ask too many questions, but you have not struck me as overly stupid. Merely… easily distracted.”
“I try not to be stupid,” said Halla. “But I have made so many poor choices in my life, so perhaps I must be, after all.”
She looked up to find that he had cocked an eyebrow at her. “Then that makes two of us,” he said, and smiled.
Halla laughed. It was an odd thing to feel solidarity with an enchanted sword, but the last few days had been nothing but odd things piled together. “I was thinking we might go to the Temple of the White Rat,” she said.
“I do not know of them.”
“They… fix things. I told you, our priest before the current one was of the White Rat? They find solutions.”
“An odd thing for a religion to be good at.”
Halla shrugged. “There’s a saying about it, or maybe a joke—I can’t remember all of it. About how two people disagreed over a cow and brought it to a priest. Priests of the Forge God would take the cow as a tithe for wasting their time, the Dreaming Godwould kill the cow on suspicion of being possessed by demons, and the Four-Faced God would wait until the cow died and deliver a sermon about how all of us, men and cows, must pass away. But the White Rat’s priests would take the cow, breed her, give a calf to each of the people arguing, and then sell the milk for a profit.”
“That sounds like plain good sense.”
“Perhaps there’s so little of that to go around that they had to make it divine.”
He snorted. “How many gods do youhavein this accursed land?”
Halla had to think. “Um. Well, there’s the Rat, and the Four-Faced God and the Dreaming God and the Forge God and the Lady of Grass and St. Ursa—although she’s a saint, not a god—and the Saint of Steel, but he’s actually a god, not a saint, which is very confusing—”
Sarkis put his face in his hands. Halla couldn’t quite make out what he said, but it seemed to involve something about putting the entire country to the torch. She hurried on. “There’s a big temple to the Rat in Archon’s Glory… uh, that’s the capital of Archenhold.”
Sarkis rubbed the back of his neck. “And how far away is that?”
“Not quite a week, maybe five days on foot. North and east. But wait, that’s the thing!” She reached out and caught his sleeve. “Amalcross is on the way!”
