One
Only fools make promises. So I guess you can call me a fool.
At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. The hounds that dogged Del and me to Staal-Ysta, high in Northern mountains, were vicious, magic-made beasts, set upon our trail by an unknown agency. For weeks they merely stayed with us, doing nothing other than playing dogs to sheep, herding us farther north. Once there, they’d done much more; they attacked a settlement on the lakeshore, killing more than thirty people. Some of them were children.
Now, I’m no hero. I’m a sword-dancer, a man who sells his sword and services to the highest bidder. Not really a glorious occupation when you think about it; it’s a tough, demanding job not every man is suited for. (Some may think they are. The circle makes the decision.) But it’s a job that often needs doing, and I’m very good at it.
But it doesn’t make me a hero.
Men, I figure, are pretty good at taking care of themselves. Women, too, unless they stick their pretty noses into the middle of something that doesn’t concern them; more often than not it doesn’t, and they do. But children, on the other hand, don’t deserve cruelty. What they deserve is time, so they can grow up enough to make their own decisions about whether to live or die. The hounds had stolen that time from too many settlement children.
I owed nothing to Staal-Ysta, Place of Swords, which had, thanks to Del, tried to steal a year of my life in the guise of honorable service. I owed nothing to the settlement on the lakeshore, except thanks for tending the stud. But no one owed me anything, either, and some had died for me.
Besides, my time on the island was done. I was more than ready to leave, even with a wound only halfway healed.
No one protested. They were as willing to see me go as I was to depart. They even gave me gifts: clothing, a little jewelry, money. The only problem was I still needed a sword.
To a Northerner, trained in Staal-Ysta, a jivatma—a blooding-blade—is a sacred thing. A sword, but one forged of old magic and monstrous strength of will. There are rituals in the Making, and countless appeals to gods; being Southron, and apostate, I revered none of them. And yet it didn’t seem to matter that I held none of the rituals sacred, or disbelieved (mostly) in Northern magic. The swordsmith had fashioned a blade for me, invoking the rituals, and Samiel was mine.
But he didn’t—quite—live. Not as the others lived. Not as Del’s Boreal.
To a Northerner, he was only half-born, because I hadn’t properly keyed him, hadn’t sung to forge the control I needed in order to wield the power promised by the blessing, by the rituals so closely followed. But then, clean, well-made steel is deadly enough on its own. I thought Northern magic redundant.
And yet some of it existed. I felt it living in the steel each time I unsheathed the weapon. Tasting Del’s blood had roused the beast in the blade, just as her blade, free of the sheath, had roused the trailing hounds.
I did not leave the sword lying in dirt and turf throughout the night. Old habits are hard to break; much as I hated the thing, I knew better than to ignore it. So I fetched it, felt the ice replaced with warmth, shoved it home in its sheath. I slept poorly, when at all, wondering what the hounds would do once I caught up to them, and if I’d be called on to use the sword. It was the last thing I wanted to do, after what Del and others had told me.
She had said it so plainly, trying to make me see: “If you go out there tomorrow and kill a squirrel, that is a true blooding, and your sword will take on whatever habits that squirrel possesses.”
It had, at that moment, amused me; a blade with the heart of a squirrel? But my laughter had not amused her, because she knew what it could mean. Then, I hadn’t believed her. Now, I knew much better.
In the darkness, in my bedding, I stared bitterly at the sword. “You’re gone,” I told it plainly, “the moment I find another.”
Unspoken were the words: “Before I have to use you.”
A man may hate his magic, but takes no chances with it.
The stud had his greeting ready as I prepared to saddle him. First he sidled aside, stepping neatly out from under the saddle, then shook his head violently and slapped me with his tail. Horsehair, lashed hard, stings; it caught me in an eye, which teared immediately, and gave me cause to apply every epithet I could think of to the stud, who was patently unimpressed. He flicked ears, rolled eyes, pawed holes in turf. Threatened with tail again.
“I’ll cut it off,” I promised. “As far as that goes, maybe I’ll cut more than your tail off … it might be the making of you.”
He eyed me askance, blowing, then lifted his head sharply. Ears cut the air like blades. He quivered from head to toe.