Swordheart Read online

  He glanced over and caught the look in her eyes. It pained him more than he wanted to admit. He squeezed her fingers. “Sometimes. Though these last few weeks have been a respite. I have had to murder very few people and no one has chopped any part of my anatomy off in ages.”

  She snorted, obviously happy to lighten the mood as well. “Let us know if you start to miss that part.”

  She glanced away, smiling. He gazed at her full lower lip and imagined running his tongue across it. Increasingly, the only thing he regretted about their earlier kiss was that he had stopped at just one.

  Settle yourself, man. It is still a long way to Rutger’s Howe.

  “Well,” said Zale, in a suddenly grim voice, “it seems that you might have someone try to chop parts off you very shortly.”

  “Problem?” said Sarkis.

  Zale nodded ahead. A familiar pair of indigo cloaked men stood in the middle of the road. One was mounted, while one had dismounted and stood waiting.

  “Again?” said Halla. “They already searched the wagon. What more can they want?”

  “I suspect that it was never about searching anything,” said Zale. “The Rat has been a thorn in the Mother’s side, and they are acting it out by harassing us. They never expected to find anything. No one really thinks the Rat is smuggling…I don’t know, contraband or witchcraft or children or whatever. They simply want to prove that we cannot stop them.”

  Scar gestured for them to stop. Halla curled her lip back. There was a look in her eye that worried Sarkis.

  As it turned out, he was right to be worried.

  Halla was sick of the Motherhood, sick of being bullied, sick of men like Scar and Alver and all the rest. She slid down off the wagon before Sarkis could grab her and stomped determinedly toward Scar.

  “Halla!” She heard Sarkis’s feet hit the road behind her.

  “I have had enough!” shouted Halla in Scar’s face. “You’ve bothered us and tormented us and yelled at us and we didn’t do anything and you searched the wagon for no reason and you know it’s for no reason and this isn’t how the Mother is supposed to behave! It isn’t right!”

  And then she burst into tears.

  It was at least ninety percent intentional, as she already knew that Scar panicked in the face of crying women. Ten percent of it was that she was angry, and she always cried when she was really angry. She hooked both hands in Scar’s indigo tabard and wailed. Loudly.

  “Uh,” said Scar. “Uh. Ma’am. No. Uh.” He looked around in panic. Red backed his horse away, possibly afraid that Halla would leap into the saddle and begin crying on him instead.

  What happened next was mostly bad luck.

  Scar shoved Halla away. He shoved her rather hard, to be sure, but if there had not been a rock under her foot right there, she wouldn’t have fallen.

  But there was a rock and she did fall, with a yelp of surprise, and Sarkis, presumably, saw his wielder being knocked down and possibly injured. He charged.

  Halla herself saw only the underside of the ox, realized that she had rolled beneath the animal, and kept rolling out the other side. Her ankle twinged painfully from the rock. Then she heard the clash of steel.

  She climbed to her feet, eyes wide, to find that Sarkis and Scar were sword to sword. The priest looked shocked and Sarkis looked furious. Zale was yelling, “Stand down, stand down!” No one appeared to be listening.

  Red, who was still mounted, drew his sword. He shuffled his horse from side to side, trying to find a way to strike at Sarkis without hitting his own ally. The ox was in the way.

  “Stand down!” cried Zale helplessly.

  Sarkis was winning easily, probably because immortal swordsmen can take openings that mortal swordsmen would find dangerously close to suicide.

  The horse’s rump smacked into the ox. The ox made an irritated noise and sidestepped, making the wagon shudder, then turned its horns toward the horse, dragging the wagon sideways with it.

  Something went THWACK.

  An arrow sprouted from the mounted warrior’s throat and he toppled off the horse, just as Sarkis pulled his sword out of his opponent’s chest.

  Brindle lowered Zale’s crossbow.

  The sound of the second body hitting the road was very loud in the sudden silence.

  “Well,” said Zale, their voice sounding high and strained, “this is going to be a problem.”

  Chapter 31

  “It’s my fault,” said Halla. “If I hadn’t fallen…”

  “No, it’s my fault,” said Zale. “If I hadn’t been so stubborn about the Motherhood not having the rights to search the wagon…”

  “But if I hadn’t tried to head them off by crying at them…”

  “Far be it from me to interrupt the mutual self-flagellation, but Brindle and I actually did the killing.”

  “A gnole doesn’t mind if a human wants to take the blame for a gnole.”

  Zale wrung their hands. Sarkis looked over at Brindle. “Good shot, though.”

  The gnole shrugged. “Shouldn’t have annoyed an ox.”

  “Well, what do we do now?” asked Halla. “Do we…um…hand ourselves in? Or hide the bodies?”

  They looked at the bodies. They looked at each other. They looked at Zale.

  Zale raked their hands through their hair, twisting their braid. “What? Why do I have to decide?”

  “You’re a lawyer,” said Sarkis.

  “And a priest,” added Halla. “I think that makes you the closest we have to a legal and moral authority.”

  “Yes, but I handle property cases, not murder!”

  Halla rubbed the back of her neck. “Would praying help?”

  Sarkis snorted, but Zale seized on it. “Prayer. Yes. It’ll clear my mind, anyway.” They slid off the wagon, walked a little way away, and were suddenly, violently ill.

  “Sounds like it’s clearing something,” said Sarkis.

  Halla gave him an annoyed look and went to the priest, holding their hair back from their face.

  “All right,” said the priest a few minutes later, looking pale but resolute. “I’ve prayed.”

  Sarkis said, “That sounded more like puking to m—” and then Halla elbowed him in the ribs.

  “This was all a very regrettable misunderstanding,” said Zale, blotting the corners of their mouth on the back of their hand. “Sadly, the Motherhood is not likely to be forgiving about it. Those men did not deserve to die, but at the same time, neither do we. And nothing we do is going to make them any less dead.” They nodded firmly, as if settling the words in their mind.

  “So we’re hiding the bodies, then,” said Sarkis.

  “I think it’s for the best.”

  “The ground’s frozen,” said Halla. “I’m not sure we could bury them. And we don’t have a lot of wild beasts in the area to eat them.” She chewed on her lower lip. “If the hogs hadn’t all just been slaughtered, I’d say we take them out to an acorn wood…”

  Sarkis had been expecting Halla to sob, cry, or perhaps be as sick as Zale. Her remarkable calm in the face of two dead bodies was simultaneously heartening and a trifle alarming.

  “You’re taking this well,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “I’ve laid out the bodies of my sisters, my mother, my husband, one of the fieldhands, my great-uncle, and Old Nan the cook, when her heart gave out in the kitchen. Dead bodies don’t worry me. It’s the live ones that get you.” She went into the wagon.

  “Well, I’ve been put in my place,” muttered Sarkis.

  “Good to be humble sometimes, sword-man. Helps the digestion.”

  Halla came out with two blankets. “Let’s wrap them up and put them in the wagon.”

  Zale sighed heavily. “Corpses in my wagon…”

  “Well, we can’t very well put them on top. People would notice.”

  “Yes, it’s just the principle. What do we do with the horses?”

  “I’ll ride them out of here and strip their tack,”
volunteered Sarkis. “Once I’m out of range of the sword, I’ll get pulled back to it, and there won’t be a trail for anyone to follow, if they do come with dogs.”

  Zale nodded. “Clever.”

  “I have my moments.”

  Halla was, in fact, not quite so calm as she was pretending to be. She had seen plenty of dead bodies, she hadn’t lied about that, but seeing someone—two someones—killed in front of her had been a shock.

  She was grateful that Zale had been so upset, because it meant that she didn’t have to be. Most of what she’d said while the priest was throwing their guts up had been soothing nonsense—it’s not your fault, it’s not anybody’s fault, it will be okay—but she found it had soothed her own nerves as well.

  This comes of always being the practical one, she thought, a bit wearily. Nobody will comfort you, so you learn to do it yourself.

  Sarkis had actually rolled the bodies in the blankets. She was grateful for that. Looking at the wounds would have seriously tested her calm.

  He and Brindle hauled the two bodies into the back of the wagon and then Sarkis went off on the horses and Brindle drove the wagon onward. Halla kept looking back at the bloodstain in the road, but eventually it vanished around a bend and that was that.

  Well, except for the matter of the two bodies.

  “What are we going to do with them?” asked Zale. “It would take all day to bury them in frozen ground.”

  “Can we take them back to your temple?” asked Halla. Zale was clearly out of their depth, but she had a suspicion that Bishop Beartongue was not a stranger to disposing of the occasional corpse.

  “It would take days,” said Zale. “And they’d be in the wagon…er…smelling. And if the Motherhood stops us again and demands to search the wagon…”

  They both shuddered.

  Halla chewed her lower lip. “What about frozen water?”

  Zale glanced at her, puzzled. “I don’t follow.”

  “Look, we’re freezing at night, but the water’s still pretty slushy, particularly in the woods where you get a lot of oak leaves. We could chop a hole in the ice easier than we could dig a grave. They’ll freeze under it, and probably no one will find them until spring.”

  Zale considered this. “That…might work. Clearly you have a fine criminal mind.”

  “I’m flattered. Wait, should I be flattered?”

  “I don’t know any more,” sighed the priest.

  “It’s not like I’ve hidden a body in a pond before. It’s just that one of the goats drowned one fall and we didn’t find the body until spring.”

  “It’s a good idea, anyway,” said Zale. “They’ll know that they’re missing once the horses show up, and they’ll probably guess they’re dead before long, but there’s no reason they’ll suspect us over anybody else on the road. And by the time they find the bodies, it’ll be months from now and everyone’s memory of when they went where will be hopelessly foggy.”

  They stared at their hands. “Rat’s bones, I can’t believe we’re hiding bodies.”

  “I’d feel a lot guiltier if it wasn’t the Motherhood,” admitted Halla. “They were just awful to the hostelkeeper’s wife about a year ago. Really nasty.”

  Zale nodded. “The Hanged Mother attracts a certain kind of mind, I fear. An unkind one. I have met a few among them who were not so bad, but it is a faith for those value power and punishment. And—”

  They cut off abruptly as the wagon rounded a corner, revealing a goatherd moving his charges down the road.

  “Act natural!” hissed Zale.

  Halla plastered a smile on her face and hoped it did not look as horribly strained as it felt. Zale had a much better poker-face, probably because of their legal training, but they gave away so little that they looked more like a statue of a priest.

  “Lovely day, isn’t it?” said Halla.

  The goatherd looked at her, then at the cold drizzle surrounding them, and said, “Eh?”

  “I mean, not lovely. Very not lovely. Lousy weather.”

  The goatherd allowed as how it was indeed lousy. Zale sat stiff as a poker, gazing down the road at nothing much.

  The sword on Halla’s back moved suddenly, hilt clicking down into the sheath. Halla jumped as if she’d been kicked and let out a yelp.

  The goatherd inched over to the side of the road to give the wagon a wide berth. The goats eyed them all maliciously, but this probably didn’t mean anything, since in Halla’s experience, goats eyed everything maliciously.

  They vanished around the bend. Zale relaxed. Halla rubbed her forehead.

  “That could have gone better,” she said.

  “I doubt they suspect we’ve got bodies,” said Zale. “They probably just think we’re in a cult.”

  “Is that better or worse than bodies?”

  “It’s fine as long as they don’t want to join our cult.”

  Brindle stared straight ahead, shaking his head slowly. He muttered something under his breath, fortunately not in a language that either human understood.

  Halla looked both ways for observers, then carefully drew the sword, and Sarkis appeared beside her.

  “The horses were running when I dematerialized,” said Sarkis. “They’ll…ah, you two look a trifle tense. Is something wrong?”

  “There are rather more dead bodies than I find acceptable stowed under my seat!” said Zale.

  “How many dead bodies would you find acceptable?”

  “Ideally, zero.” The priest chewed on their lower lip. “One would be bad, but I feel like I would handle it better. Two is really an excessive number.”

  Halla made a strangled noise that might have been a laugh or a sob or a sigh. Even she wasn’t entirely sure. Sarkis pounded her on the back for a moment, apparently fearing that she was choking.

  “Well, at least the horses will keep going for a little bit, I expect.” He scowled. “I don’t like to spook a horse, but the farther away they get before they stop, the safer it’ll be for everyone.”

  “Better not try it with an ox, sword-man.”

  “I would not dream of it, Brindle.”

  “That’s the horses sorted then,” said Zale. They sighed. “And now to sort out the bodies…”

  Finding a pond was easier said than done.

  It had to be far enough off the road that nobody would notice them lugging bodies and close enough to the road that they could lug bodies. It had to be a pond that nobody was using to water their stock, because neither Halla nor Zale wanted to risk fouling someone’s primary water source. And they definitely had to have some kind of tree cover so that no one would be strolling by and notice a pair of corpses frozen under the ice.

  And of course, nobody would have put such ponds on the map, preferably with convenient notes like, “Perfect for body disposal!” or, “Dump unwanted enemies here!”

  The bodies stayed in the wagon that night, which meant that everybody else stayed outside. Brindle generously offered the ox’s body heat, so there were three humans and one gnole huddled against the side of the large, bemused, but basically good-natured ox.

  Sarkis resigned himself to not getting much sleep. Zale curled themself into a neat ball, not unlike Brindle. Halla dropped off immediately and then began trying to wedge herself into the space between his back and the ox.

  Well, it’s the warmest spot around, I suppose…

  He wondered how on earth she’d shared a bed with her husband. Had the man simply brought his own blanket to wrap himself in?

  The thought of Halla sharing that other man’s bed woke an unexpected jealousy. He surrendered to it, and gathered her up so that she was across his lap with her back to the ox’s warmth.

  This was not the best idea, he realized a moment later. It was all too easy to imagine her waking up, turning to straddle his hips, looking in his eyes and saying…saying…

  Probably, “Oh no, are your legs asleep again? I’m sorry!”

  He stifled a sigh. Brindle reached out and po
ked his shoulder with one clawed finger.

  “Hmm?” He looked up into the gnole’s striped face.

  “Twisting your whiskers, sword-man. A human should go to sleep.”

  “A human’s trying.”

  “A human should try harder.”

  Chapter 32

  “I can’t believe there’s corpses in my wagon,” said Zale the next morning, hunching their narrow shoulders up around their ears. “I keep thinking about them being right there. Under the seat.”

  “I’m wondering how we’re going to get them out of the wagon,” said Halla. “Without being caught.”

  “You know,” said Sarkis, “I’ve killed hundreds of people—possibly by this point thousands—and I’ve never had this much trouble with two dead bodies before.”

  “Perhaps you should take this as an incentive to give up killing,” said Zale.

  “It certainly takes a lot of the fun out of it.”

  “Who knew that it would be so difficult to find a small pond?” moaned Halla. “There’s hundreds of them. I know there’s hundreds of them. But where are they?”

  “One north of here,” said Brindle, not turning his head.

  “Eh? How do you know?”

  “Smell it.” Brindle tapped his nose. “Smells like ice.”

  “Ice has a smell?” said Zale.

  “Gnoles say humans can’t smell,” muttered Brindle, rolling his eyes. “Not just saying. Yes, rat-priest. Smells like cold tin.” He tilted his head back and sniffed. Halla could see his black nostrils working.

  “I’ll go look,” said Sarkis, sliding off the wagon.

  He came back a few minutes later. “It must be farther back than I thought, because I didn’t see it. But there’s a track into the woods a little way up from here that we can probably get the wagon down.”

  When they reached the gap, Brindle looked at it thoughtfully, then nodded and steered the ox toward the overgrown track. “Good road,” he said after a moment. “But not used much.”

  “Could be one of the pig roads,” said Halla. “I mean, not made by the pigs, but this is the acorn wood everybody fattens their hogs up in, and then you have to go get them out again. And if they don’t want to come out, you need to get a wagon up there so you’re not carrying a slaughtered hog for miles. But you only need it a couple times a year.”