Thirty-three

The human body was truly amazing. Sophia had thought she’d been used to working with her hands, and yet she’d gotten blisters after three days with Harry and Gilleis. Her arms and back ached too, but she’d expected that. While she’d done her fair share of sweeping and lifting in her youth, it had been a long time since.

She’d slipped into the castle proper a few times and even made her way, under the pretense of being lost, to the upper floors, but she’d found nothing there that she could use. The man’s bedchamber was anonymous, his trunks contained only clothing, and he had no books, or had left none, other than household ledgers. What questions she’d managed to ask of the maids and men—though she’d left the soldiers alone as much as she could—had been met only with silence: tight lips, white faces.

Much was wrong here. Sophia couldn’t see how to make it right.

Harry had made good on his offers. She’d not lacked for food or safety, and the smithy was warm and clean at night. Sophia had left on as many errands as she could regardless, seeking to learn more about the castle, but by the evening of the third day she’d almost given up. When Harry sent Gilleis to the kitchens instead of her—“They know her better, and the cook’s got a soft spot for her”—Sophia barely had the will to protest.

Sitting on the bench, she opened a small jar of salve that she’d brought with her and began to smear it on her blisters. Her mind was more numb than her hands. Tomorrow she would consider the next path to take, but just then she couldn’t face the effort. She listened to Harry moving about, to the sloshing of water and the clanking of iron tools.

All of a sudden there was silence, and when she looked up, it was into his solemn face. “You’re here for a purpose.”

Caught out, she stammered. “Wha… I—”

“You’d have left otherwise,” he continued, quiet and relentless. “You’ve no family here. This isn’t such good work as to keep you…not when there’s likely plenty of need for a good woman on any other land. And I know you’ve been talking to folk.”

He was large. The wall was at her back. Sophia dropped her blistered hand to her waist, not sure she could reach any of her knives without Harry noticing.

If he saw the movement, he didn’t show it. He raised his hand, and she flinched, but it was to pull at a cord around his neck, drawing out an iron cross. He closed his hand around it. “I swear by God and Saint Clement, I mean you no harm, and you know I’m not his man.”

His was a jerk of the chin toward the castle, and a curl of the lip that Sophia had rarely seen from Harry.

“You’ve never seemed to like him,” she said slowly.

“No.” They hadn’t talked much, though Gilleis had ranted occasionally at the foolishness of this soldier or that dairymaid. Otherwise they’d kept quiet, and now Harry drew a hand across his mouth. “If you’re here… My father was his smith before me, aye? And he thought as I did, once. Your lord’s your lord, and if you get a bad one, well, mostly God sees to it in his time, and it may be the next one is better. Best just to wait, not upset things.”

“That could be,” Sophia agreed. It was a cautious thing, this conversation: another bridge, perhaps, but this one made of ice. “And you stayed.”

“I’m a skilled man. Hard to get another… And iron’s got its own kind of honesty, and its own defense against men like him. I thought…think…I can keep a few people safe, wait him out. Works often enough. But—”

Sophia braced herself and spoke. “But it begins to seem, mayhap, as though there won’t be a next one?”

Harry’s eyes widened. He nodded once, as if afraid to let his muscles move any more than that. Then he reached for a jug of wine.

Silence was best, Sophia decided. Silence let the moment draw out, let him realize that she’d actually said what she had, he’d actually confirmed it, and the world still went on. She lifted her hand away from her waist and stretched it, feeling the pull of the skin on her blisters, but she didn’t look away from the blacksmith.

“My father served his,” Harry said finally, “and his lordship was already a man when I was a boy. Here I’m old enough to have children grown, and he looks no older than me, nor acts it. In a good man, that might be all right.”

She nodded. “He isn’t. And he’s not keeping himself to his own lands either. But you know that, yes?”

“Yes. And that’s why you’re here?”

“It is.” She wouldn’t lie to him, pretend that she’d come to rescue him and his fellows, or that she’d even have given them a thought if Cathal hadn’t run afoul of their lord. Now Sophia wished she could answer otherwise, honestly, but here in the yard of the smithy, she’d do Harry the courtesy of the truth. “Was your father here when he—”

“—took the title? He was. In the village, not the castle. Most of the folk who lived here then died, my da’ said, or learned to hold their tongues and forget right quick. He…pretended he did, at least enough to keep our skins on, but he spoke his mind when he was training me, once I was old enough to know when to keep my mouth shut.”

Sophia felt as she did when she looked over a crucible and saw the mixture start to change. This was working; this had potential. All she needed was the right ingredient at the right time. “Do you know… Did he tell you where Valerius kept his… Where he did his work?”

“Dungeons,” said Harry, and Sophia winced, for she’d never even been able to get close to the stairs that led down beneath the castle. Adney and his friends might be distinctly second-rate, but about certain things they knew their jobs too well. “And I wouldn’t try it, lady. He’ll have left more guards than human ones there, and worse. Nobody opens those doors when he’s away.”

Relief and regret just about balanced, or would have if relief hadn’t come with shame. Sophia was a mortal woman, and she’d do the sensible thing—get away, tell Cathal and Douglas what she’d heard, and put together a plan that included probably magic and almost certainly a man who could actually fight demons. Yet, thinking of the time and effort lost, she looked down at her hands when she nodded, not wanting to meet Harry’s eyes.

“You weren’t sent here to kill,” he said. “I never thought that. One man alone wouldn’t come for that, except in the old stories. A woman never would.”

“No,” said Sophia, then thought of Cathal’s sister and added as much of the truth as she could. “I wouldn’t. I’ve never fought a man, and…another creature…almost killed me. I came to learn. Please, if there’s anything your father told you, even if it doesn’t seem very important, about Valerius—”

Harry snorted. “Valerius indeed. Doesn’t sit well on him, I can tell you that. He talks much about his forefathers being lords in Rome… Well, and so were half of ours, weren’t they? His father never spoke that sort of nonsense. My da’ said that he was a hard man, the old lord, but he was a man, and he’d no ambition to be anything more.”

“Do you know his name?” Sophia asked. With the declaration of her goals, the mood had shifted. Now was the time for direct questions.

“De Percy,” said Harry and scratched his chin as he thought further. “The old lord was John, as I recall, or mayhap James. It’s on the gravestone, if you could get into the chapel tomorrow.”

“That might help,” Sophia said, “but—”

Gilleis dashed in, arms empty and face pale, and kicked the door shut behind her. As the other two turned to look at her, she spoke in a hurried half-whisper, words falling from her mouth like water from a pitcher. “You, whoever you are, you’ve got to get yourself gone. I overheard the guards… You’ve been asking too many questions, and they’re coming back, all of them. They’ll want to talk to you.”

The meaning of talk to you was as clear as the identity of them. Sophia rose from the bench on legs that felt as if they didn’t belong to her at all.

“When?” Harry asked.

“Tomorrow. Evening if the road’s bad, morning otherwise. And Adney’ll be by before very long to see that you’re stuck here until they come. They think you’re here. If you go out the back way, around the kitchens, you might make it. Keep your head down, and tell Peter at the gate that you’re Joan from the village. She’s about your build, and she comes to work the dairy and flirt with the stableboys. We’ll keep them here as long as we can when they come, and the order will take some time to get around.”

Standing outside herself, Sophia felt her heart speed up. She knew that her stomach was clenching and churning and that her throat was tight, but she observed all of that as another process, this one with her body as the crucible. None of those things mattered, regardless. “Harry,” she said. “What was his name? Valerius’s, before…before he changed it?”

“What? Why does it matter?” Gilleis was all action, grabbing Sophia’s cloak and wrapping it around her while she stood waiting for an answer, shoving loaves of bread into a sack, and all the time looking toward the door. “Go, for Christ’s sake.”

“Alfred. Or Albert.” Harry closed his eyes, and a moment passed while Sophia grasped the sack of bread. “Albert. Da’ used to call him ‘Little Bert’ when he was in a bitter mood, when he thought his lordship wouldn’t know of it. Albert de Percy.”

“Thank you,” said Sophia. “Thank you both so very much, and I hope…I pray you’ll not suffer for this. I—”

“Window,” Harry said and grabbed her by the waist, hoisting her up without any effort at all. “Closer to the way out. Luck to you, girl.”

After that, there were no more words, only speed and the growing night.