Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

Halla of Rutger’s Howe had just inherited a great deal of money and was therefore spending her evening trying to figure out how to kill herself.

Her late mother-in-law had been cut from the same cloth as her sister Malva. Halla had tried to love her and then had tried to like her, and then had tried to be dutiful and compliant, and finally had settled for not being too obviously relieved when the woman had dropped dead.

“What are you saying?” she asked. “I’m counting,” he said, with marvelous patience. “Why?” “So I don’t scream at you. My lady.” “Oh. Silas used to do that, too.” “I am not in the least surprised.”

“The great god is punishing me,” he said softly, “for my crimes. I cannot go to his hell, and so he has sent a woman to torment me.”

“Well,” he said. “The dead aren’t saints, merely because they’re dead.”

“That sounds like plain good sense.” “Perhaps there’s so little of that to go around that they had to make it divine.”

“No one really keeps goats, do they? They just have goats. Like having in-laws, if your in-laws climbed on the roof and kicked.”

“Can your husband not speak for himself?” “I can,” said Sarkis. “Then why don’t you?” “My wife talks enough for both of us.”

She had always been a poor liar, particularly to herself.

One of the grimmer realizations of Sarkis’s youth had been the discovery that knowing you were being an ass did not actually stop you from continuing to be an ass.

“You’ve got a rather large sword for a woman,” said Scar, looking over at her. “Yes, but I’m told it’s not the size of the sword that matters,” said Halla. She frowned. “Although my husband used to say that, and do you know, he never told me what it meant?”

“Some men do not like defiance,” rumbled Sarkis. “It eats at them like poison.”

“Many madmen walk among the sane, and the lines are blurred beyond all recognition. And many people who we would consider sane wreak unimaginable harm in the world, so people call them mad.”

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

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

“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.”

If hours had passed, then Halla could have been hurt. Not killed—he’d know that immediately—but tortured or terrified or god forbid, one of the bandits had taken liberties, and if they had, Sarkis would carve out that man’s heart and place it at her feet.

“The world tries to break everyone,” they said gently. “But sometimes when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

“He’s already dead.” “Do you think that will stop me? Give the word and I’ll hunt him across the great god’s hells and tear his soul out through his bowels.”

“You are beautiful, and if you deny it, you are insulting my good taste and I will be terribly offended.”

“Few of us are at our best when we are angry.”

“Only the first family is blood. The rest are made by time or love or battle.”