Page 2 of Swordheart
“Hush,” said Halla, pulling the tray with the bird’s food out. It was built so that you never had to put your hand inside the cage. She took a bit of chicken off her plate and put it in the tray, then slid it back in. The bird leapt on it, cackling in a voice like a very old man heard through a drainpipe.
“Nasty creature,” said Aunt Malva.
Normally Halla would have agreed with her, but she didn’t want to give the woman any satisfaction. “Silas was fond of it,” she said.
“Silas was fond of a great many useless things,” said Malva, giving her a look that left no doubt who she was referring to.
“If you’ll excuse me,” said Halla, “I find I have no appetite.” She stalked from the room, angry and shaken and secretly relieved that she had a perfectly good excuse to flee from Alver and his mother.
Cousin Alver had caught her on the stairs. She might have felt the smallest twinge of respect for that, except that she had clearly heard, as the door swung shut, Aunt Malva saying, “Well? Go after her!”
You know that she is wrong, but you feel no need to smooth things over unless she orders you to do it.
“Halla,” he said from the bottom of the staircase. He curled his hands around the banister. He wore large gold rings set with stones. The servants said he never took them off, not even to bathe or sleep, and Halla knew that the skin around them was always clammy with sweat.
She could imagine, far too easily, those clammy, ringed hands on her skin. Her stomach turned over and she was glad that she hadn’t eaten much.
“Halla, my mother doesn’t mean the things she says. She just wants what’s best for you.”
“She means every word,” said Halla. “It’s just a shock to her that I’m not her nephew’s penniless widow any longer.”
Cousin Alver gripped the knob at the base of the banister, not looking at her. “You know she’s always been fond of you.”
“She’s got a damned strange way of showing it!”
“Yes, she does.” His voice was so dry that for a minute Halla was forced into unwilling sympathy with him. However hard itwas to deal with Aunt Malva in small doses, being her son was probably an entirely different circle of hell. Then he destroyed that instant of sympathy by saying, “She’ll be better if there are children. She’s always been very good with children.”
“I havenotagreed to your proposal!”
“Well.” Cousin Alver still didn’t meet her eyes. “We’ll discuss this tomorrow, when you’re less tired.”
Halla wanted to be the sort of person who yelled at her cousin and forced him to acknowledge that she had a choice in the matter. Unfortunately, it seemed that she was the sort of person who ran up the stairs to her bedchamber, grateful for the reprieve.
This was a depressing discovery.
But not, I suppose, an unexpected one.
At least I am the sort of person who slams the door. That’s worth something.
She collapsed on her bed, the echoes of the slam still ringing through the house.
The money was useless to her. She knew that she would never be allowed to touch it. They would marry her to Alver and take it away so that it stayed in the family and everything would be just as it had been, except worse because Alver was alive and Silas was dead.
Why couldn’t it be Alver who was old and had bad lungs? Why couldn’t he have died instead?
Well, but if Alver was old then he wouldn’t be looking to marry me, and presumably there’d be someone else to fill the Alver-shaped hole in the world, and I’d be right back here except with a different obnoxious person trying to wed me.
Although at least that person might not have clammy hands.
She got up and stared out the window into the dark, thinking about all the ways a woman could die.
Even if her cousins did not actually poison her or push her down the steps, there were many ways to make an unwantedrelative’s life shorter. Medicines administered for her “health” that left her docile as a milch cow. Wonderworkers whose talents ran to harm.
Childbirth.
Halla shuddered.
Her late husband hadn’t awoken any great passions in her, but at least he hadn’t made her skin crawl. They had gotten along tolerably well for a few years, until a late spring fever had swept the land and carried him off. His estate had gone to his brother and Halla had found herself nearly penniless after the death duties.
