Reading Online Novel

Sword-Maker(22)



I glared at the hilt riding so high on her left shoulder. Had Del somehow willingly subjugated her own personality to the demands of a magicked sword? Did she need revenge so badly?

She had sworn oaths. I swear a lot myself, but generally not oaths. At least, not the binding kind; the kind that make you do something you’d really rather not do. But Del was different. Del took vows and oaths and swearing much more seriously. It was what had driven her to become a sword-dancer. To give up a child. It was what had driven her south, alone, to search for a kidnapped brother.

It was what had driven her to seek out a sword-dancer called the Sandtiger, who knew people she didn’t, and how to find them.

A man makes of himself many things, depending on his needs and the shaping of his life. Me, I’d been a slave. And then a free man seeking power to make a real life for himself. A life of his own choosing without demands from other people.

Well, yes, there were demands. If I hired on to a tanzeer, I was his to command. But only if what he wanted agreed well enough with my willingness to do it. And there were things I was unwilling to do. Killing people who deserved it, or who gave me no other choice, was something I’d come to terms with many years before. For a long time, killing was almost enjoyable, because it released some of my anger. After a while, having grown up a little, hostility was no longer so evident. I was free. No one could ever make me a slave again. I no longer had to kill.

Except it was the only thing I was good at.

Sword-dancing was my life. I’d freely chosen it. I had apprenticed formally and become a seventh-level sword-dancer, which made me very good. It made me what I was. A dangerous, deadly man.

Who hired out his sword to anyone with coin.

By nature, we are solitary souls. After all, it’s hard for a hired killer to have a normal life. Whores don’t mind sleeping with us so long as we pay them and they can brag about it—and sometimes our fame is payment enough—but decent women don’t generally marry us. Because a man who sells his sword for a living always walks the edge of the blade, and a woman who wants to grow old with her man doesn’t like to lose him young.

There are exceptions, of course. Sword-dancers do marry, or take a woman as their own without benefit of rites. But most of us don’t. Most of us ride alone. Most of us die alone, leaving no woman or children to grieve.

There was a reason for it. Domestic responsibility can ruin a sword-dancer’s soul.

And now here was Del. No longer the same Del. Forever a different Del. Not because of the girl she’d borne, though it did make me think of her differently. Not because we’d shared a bed so many times in the past. But because of what she had done and what I had done; because of what we’d become.

Loyalty is a sacred thing. A thing to be admired. A thing to be treasured. It isn’t something two people in our profession, where loyalty is so often purchased, experience very often. Loyalty within a circle is very rare indeed, because too often someone dies, or sacrifices pride, which can destroy a relationship. But for a while we’d known it. For a while we had lived it.

But we’d both of us forsworn the virtue in the circle on Staal-Ysta.

Oh, hoolies, bascha, what I’d give for the old days.

But which old days? The ones with her, or without her?

Without was easier. Because with I’d nearly killed her.

Del turned in the saddle a moment, hooking hair behind an ear. It bared her face. A fine-drawn face of magnificent planes, and too many of them visible. Pain, oaths, and obsession had reshaped youthful flesh into a mask of brittle beauty. A cold, hard-edged beauty that made me think of glass.

Glass too often breaks. I wondered when she would.

Just after dawn I awoke, looking for Del. It was something I’d found myself doing each morning since we’d joined up together, and it irritated me. But each morning I did it anyway. For reassurance.

And each morning I said to myself: Yes, Del is alive. Yes, Del is here.

It isn’t a dream after all.

Grunting, I sat up. Tried to stretch muscles and pop joints without waking her, because no man likes a woman to see how he’s growing older, how the years are taking their toll. And then I stood up, slowly, and walked, equally slowly, over to the stud. I checked him every morning, just to be sure. The claw slashes were healing well, but the hair would come in white. Like me, he’d carry the scars to his death.

Still, he seemed in much better spirits—or maybe it was just that the gelding’s presence made him take more of an interest in life. Whatever it was, he was more like his old self. His old, unpleasant self.

I ran my hand down the stud’s shoulder, peeling winter hair. It was nearly spring; he was beginning to shed his fur.