By the Sword (26 page)

She started for the bathing chamber—and realized she was still holding her sword.

That's odd.
She frowned.
I could have sworn I hung her up.

She turned back toward the wall rack, and tried to place the sword in its cradle. Tried.

She couldn't make her hands let go.

“Oh, no you don‘t,” she muttered. “You've done that to me once. No more.”

She put the sword in the rack, and concentrated on freeing her left hand, one finger at a time.

Let. Go. Of. Me.
She stared at her hand as if it didn't belong to her, concentrating until she had a headache, a sharp pain right between her eyebrows.

One by one, she loosened her fingers; one by one she pried them off the scabbard. As she released the last of them, she felt something in the back of her mind stretch, and snap.

She pulled her right hand away, quickly, before the sword could take control of her again.

“I'll thank you to keep your notions to yourself,” she told it frostily, ignoring the incongruity of talking to an inanimate object. Then she turned, and walked deliberately back to the bathing chamber. She “heard” something, as she “heard” thoughts, faint and at the very edge of her abilities to sense it. It sounded like someone grumbling in her sleep ... disturbed, but not awakened.

She ignored it and drew her bath.

Whatever it was, it went away while she was undressing, and by the time she slid into the hot water she wondered if she'd only imagined it.

But as she lay back, relaxing, she began to feel a kind of pull on her mind, as if something had hold of her and was trying to tug her in a particular direciton.

Since the direction was her bedroom, she had no doubt who that “someone” was.

She ignored it, and it grew more persistent; then painful, like a headache in the back of her skull. Stop that, she thought sharply, sitting up in the bath. The pain eased off, but the tugging was still there. She sat back and thought for a few moments, then she put up her very best shields, the shields even Warrl had not been able to break through.

The tugging stopped. She waited for several moments, but whatever the sword was doing did not seem to be able to penetrate the shielding.

You ruled my grandmother, sword. You're not going to rule me.
She closed her eyes, leaned back again, and let the bath relax all her muscles for her.

Finally the water cooled, and she felt relaxed enough to sleep. She opened her eyes and stared at the wall, thinking.
I can't keep shields like this up forever. If I‘m lucky, I won't have to. If I'm not, though, this is going to be an interesting little power struggle.

She lowered her shields, slowly, waiting for the sword to resume its insistent nagging.
You may be older, with all manner of magic behind you,
she thought at it, but
I'll
bet
I'm a lot more stubborn than you are.

Nothing.

She waited for a moment, then left the shields down and climbed out of her bath.
This is too easy. It's not going to let me off this easily.
She dried herself, and went back into her room to lie down on the bed. If I were
Need, what would I do? A straight-on attempt didn't work ... anytime she starts on me again, I can bring my shields up and block her out. So the next logical move would be to try something subtle.

It occurred to her, as she pulled the covers up a bit tighter around her ears, that it was possible she had inadvertently weakened the sword's hold on her by not using it during the first few moons she'd owned it.

Those books of Grandmother‘s—they had something about soul-bonding in them. I think I still have them, in fact.
She sighed. The bed was so warm—and the room was already getting chilly. And she was so awfully tired....

Still—I need the information more than I need the sleep.
She gritted her teeth and flung back the covers resolutely, flinching as she swung her legs over and put her feet on the cold floor. At least the Tower was heated a lot better than the Keep. There, this deeply into winter, she could put a mug of water down beside her bed, and it would be frozen all the way to the bottom by morning.

She wrapped herself up in a robe, groped for the candle on the table beside the bed, and took it to the fireplace. She scraped away enough of the ash to expose a coal and lit her candle at it.

The books were right where she thought she'd left them; pushed into the corner of the bookcase next to her desk, ignored in favor of the volumes on the history of warfare and strategy and tactics that Tarma had given her to read. She'd been working her way through them with the interest and enthusiasm she hadn't been able to muster .for the books of poetry and history her tutors had assigned her.

I think it was the red one,
she decided, studying them as she tried to recall which one held the information she wanted.
But—oh, never mind. There're only three of them.
If there was one thing that studying under Tarma had taught her, it was never to discard a book. You never knew when something in it—even in so innocuous a volume as a book of poetry—could prove useful.

She pulled them out and scurried back to bed with them, putting the candle-holder beside the bed, and pulling the blankets up over her legs.

She began leafing through the first book, looking for the section on enchanted objects and soul-bonding. It was where she remembered it, and she read it carefully this time, paying special attention to anything that might apply to Need.

Finally she closed the book, put all three of them on the table, and blew out the candle. She turned over onto her side and watched the embers glowing in the hearth, while she thought about what she had read.

It seemed that, by her determination to learn sword- work on her own, she had inadvertently weakened the blade's hold on her. According to several sources quoted in that book, the first few moons were the critical ones in a soul-bonding. Close physical proximity was required after the inital contact, as well as frequent use of the object in question.

So the soul-bond had been set in, but lightly. Had Kero been a magic-user, this could have been an unfortunate situation. It might even have been a disaster, depending on how much the magic-user in question was likely to depend on the sword's ability to take over and provide fighting expertise. It was probably just as well that Kethry had been deeply soul-bonded to the thing, given some of the stories Kero had heard from her, and from Tarma.

But to protect Kero from
magic,
it simply needed to be in physical proxmity to her. Which meant it probably didn't need to be bonded to her at all—

It probably wasn't going to like that, though. Given what Kethry told her about the way the sword had behaved in the past....

Kethry had never said anything about the sword deciding to switch owners before the present owner was ready to lose it.

It could happen. All it would have to do would be to decide that it doesn't want to protect me right at the moment some sorcerer has me targeted.
Well, that was true enough—except that would also be violating the blade's own purpose.

That still didn't answer the question of whether or not
she
wanted to be rid of the thing.

It was getting harder and harder to keep her eyes open, especially since there didn't seem to be a good reason to stay awake any longer.

But as she drifted away into sleep, she couldn't help but wonder just how much of a fight the sword was going to give her. And who was going to come out the victor.

The next four weeks were a constant reminder that a potent Shin‘a'in curse was, “May your life be interesting.”

The moment she fell asleep at night, she dreamed. Vivid, colorful dreams of women in peril, in which she rode up, and put their peril to rout. Dreams of a life on the move, in which all innkeepers were friendly, all companions amusing, all weather perfect—in short, a life right out of the ballads.

Finally, on Warrl's advice, she took the sword down off the wall, and unsheathed it. With it held in both her hands, she thought directly at it, unshielded.

I'm not thirteen, and you're not going to gull me with hero-tales, she told it
firmly.
Save them for minstrels and little children.

Was it her imagination, or did she hear a sigh of disappointment as she hung the blade back up on the wall?

In any event, the dreams ended, only to be replaced by darkly realistic ones. Night after night, she was witness to all the evil that could be inflicted on women by men. Abuse and misuse, emotional and physical; rape, murder, torture. Evil working in subtler fashion; marriages that proved to be no more than legalized slavery, and the careful manipulation of a bright and sensitive mind until its owner truly believed with all her heart in her own worthlessness. Betrayal, not once, but many times over. All the hurts that could be inflicted when one person loved someone who in turn loved no one but himself.

This was hardly restful.

And during the day, any time she was not completely shielded, the sword manipulated her emotional state, making her restless, inflaming her with the desire to be out and on the move.

But she wasn't ready, and she knew it. Even if the blade didn't.

Every day meant fighting the same battle—or rather, mental wrestling match—over and over; the sword saying “Go,” and Kero replying “No.”

And to add the proper final touch, Daren was all-too-obviously becoming more and more infatuated with her. And infatuation was
all
that it was, Kero was pretty certain of that. She had a long talk with her grandmother about the differences between love and lesser emotions, and to her mind, Daren did not evidence anything other than a blind groping after someone he thought was the answer to all his emotional needs.

Or as Tarma put it, much more bluntly, “He's barely weaned, and you're a mature doe. In you, he gets both mate
and
mama. I hate to put it that way, child, but emotionally you're years ahead of him.... Young Daren isn't in love with you, little hawk, he's in love with love.”

Kero hadn't said anything, but she'd privately felt Tarma had wrapped the entire situation up in one neat package. Daren would make someone a very good husband—when he grew up. She was fairly certain that when he did so, it would happen all at once—but he'd have to be forced into the situation.

Meanwhile, he wasn't going to. Not with someone like her around.

He was making some hints that had her rather disturbed, hints she hadn't confided to anyone.

Hints that he would be willing be actually marry her, if that was the only way he could keep her. As if he thought she could be kept! That was keeping her awake at night as much as the dreams were.

Then, one night, he did more than hint. He told her that he would talk to his father about ennobling her if she'd just come with him to the Court. And there was only one reason for him to make that offer that she knew of. He was serious about her.

And she didn't love him. She liked him well enough, but her answer to the question “Could you live without him?” was most decidedly “yes.” If he left tomorrow and she never saw him again, she would miss him, but she'd go right back to her sword-practice without a second thought, and her sleep would hardly be plagued by dreams and longing.

She got up early the next morning, after a particularly bad night, to pace the cold floor and try to get herself sorted out.

It was at least a candlemark till dawn, but she just couldn't lie there in bed anymore. She lit the candle and got dressed in the chill pre-morning air, and began walking the length of her room, pacing it out as carefully as if she was measuring it.

But the sword had filled her few sleeping hours with some fairly horrific scenes. And if she married Daren, there was no way she could do anything about problems like the ones the sword was showing her.

That's really what it came down to: privilege, or freedom? The relief of being “like every other girl,” or the excitement of being like no one else, of setting her own standards? Power and wealth, or the ability to, now and again, right a wrong?