The Swordmage Trilogy Bundle, Volumes 1-3 (2 page)

Darcy brought her hands together and slammed her wrists into the other girl’s face. There was a sickening crunch, and blood sprayed across Darcy’s face. There was a thin wail from the dark-haired girl that abruptly turned into a choking gurgle as Darcy brought the shackles down again and again. By the fifth blow, even the gurgle had stopped, but still the little blond girl continued her savage, animalistic attack.
To Tiadaria, the entire thing happened skewed to one side. She couldn’t move, or even raise her head to gain the proper perspective.

Finally, the girl seemed to come to her senses. She sat astride her victim, blood
, bits of hair and flesh clinging to the chain between her shackles. The other girls had cowered in the far corner of the room, clinging to each other in shock and terror. All the color had gone out of them and deep inside her, Tiadaria sympathized. The part of her that was nearer to the surface, however, rejoiced in Darcy’s savage revenge. Tiadaria’s only regret was that she hadn’t been able to be a part of it.

On the periphery of her senses, Tiadaria was aware of shouting from outside the door. Her eyes were fixed on the blood that was slowly soaking the straw under the dark-haired girl’s head. She heard the bar being lifted from the door and tried to lift her head
but found she couldn’t. Tia wondered, without much real concern, if the girl had left her paralyzed, unable to move for the rest of her life. She found that she could wiggle her toes in her thin boots and was reassured, just a little.

Hysteria and her sense of the absurd suddenly clashed together. Here she was, laying in a pool of her own vomit, a dead girl bleeding onto the floor not ten feet away, and she was thrilled that she could wiggle her toes. A thin rail of laughter burst out of her and the girls huddled together in the corner started to scream.

The door burst open and Cerrin dashed in, two other men on his heels.

“What the hell
--” The slaver’s outburst was cut short as he caught site of Darcy, who still hadn’t moved from her place straddling what was left of the dark haired girl. She looked up at Cerrin and smiled. Her smile sent an ice cold shiver up Tiadaria’s spine.

Whatever was inside that girl, it was no longer human. It looked up at them with no more reason or remorse than a wild animal. She just sat there, covered in blood, staring and smiling, smiling and staring. The slaver backed away, taking up a position near the door. His eyes darted from the girls in the corner to the murderous creature in front of him. He seemed not to notice Tiadaria for a long time. When he did, he swore under his breath. He turned to one of the men who had entered with him.

“Get her out of here, into another cell...and get a cleric. If she dies, I’m out twenty crowns and two prize beasts.”

The man grabbed Tiadaria by the chain between her shackles and began to drag her across the floor to the door. Before he had pulled her into the hallway, she heard Cerrin speak again.

“Leave those two here. Move that one into another cell...and do something with the dead meat. There’s a river down in the valley. We don’t need the landlord asking too many questions. I’ve lost enough crowns today already.”

Tia passed out, succu
mbing to the welcome blackness.

~~~~

There was a knock at the door and Royce looked up from the pile of parchment he was working his way through. It was the Magistrate, a man who looked far too much like a weasel for the Constable’s peace of mind. He stood in the doorway, a rat in men’s clothes, his robes blocking out most of the sun that streamed in behind him.

“Constable,” the Magistrate droned in his bee-like voice. Royce ground his teeth. “The executioner is ready to begin.”

Royce flicked his hand and dropped his eyes to the parchment before him. “So let him begin.”

The Magistrate sighed, a drawn out sound of long-suffering.

“Your presence is required, Constable. The executions cannot begin until you have taken your customary place on the platform.”

Royce would have loved nothing better at that moment than to tell the Magistrate exactly where he could shove his custom and what he could do with it
,
when he got it positioned there. He sighed. Still, the man wasn’t wrong. It was the customary duty of the Constable to attend every execution to see that every aspect of the king’s law was followed to the letter.

He dropped the parchment and scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands. Why, oh why, had he retired from the army and come to live in this tiny little town of absolutely no consequence
, in the middle of nowhere? Furthermore, how was it that his little hamlet had managed to produce not one, but two criminals worthy of execution?

To be fair, he hadn’t even looked at the death warrants. Royce had simply counter-signed the documents below the Magistrate’s signature and filed them in the pile to be sent on to the capital. He supposed that he should take more pride in his work, but he was so tired of taking pride in anything. The entire reason he had picked this particular posting, out of all those that the
King had offered him, was that it was sparsely populated and people would leave him alone. That way he could continue dying, slowly, in peace. In theory, at least.

“Fine,” Royce finally acquiesced with a sigh. “I’ll be there momentarily. Please go and let the executioner know that we will be proceeding as planned.”

“As you command, Constable.” The Magistrate accorded him a half-bow and withdrew, leaving the door standing open. One day that man was going to get his comeuppance, Royce thought bitterly. He only hoped that he was still around to see it when the happy day came to fruition.

Standing brought a fit of coughing that shook his fighter’s frame. In a few moments, the fit subsided. The taste of copper was thick in the back of his throat. He took a vial from his belt pouch and swigged it down, grimacing at the vile taste. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, the cloth coming away from his lips tinged pinker than he would have liked.

His vigor drained, Royce walked out on the wide porch that surrounded the tiny, single room office. He pulled the door shut behind him and walked slowly toward the square and the throng of people who had congregated there. He was in no mood to deal with this nonsense today. Best to get it over with, and quickly.

The executioner was already on the platform, a hulking vulture of a man with the wardrobe to match. He was clad head to toe in the traditional black sackcloth vestments of his trade. His instrument, a wicked ax with a blade as long as Royce’s arm, was slung over his shoulder, gleaming in the morning sun.

As Royce climbed the short steps, he was struck by how surreal the scene before him was. Normally the prisoners brought before the blade were the type of ruffian one would expect: murderers, thieves, rapists and the like. The girl that stood on the platform between two heavily armed guards couldn’t have possibly been a threat to anyone.

Five feet tall if she was an inch, she was a mousy little thing, unsteady on her feet and swaying from side to side. Royce wondered if she might not be entirely in control of her faculties. She stood facing execution and yet seemed not to have a care in the world. She stared off into space, her eyes glazed, and her fingers twitching along to the songbirds nesting in the trees at the edge of the village.

If Royce had been pressed to pick the person least likely to be slated for execution out of the crowd, this girl would have easily made the top of the list. Something was wrong here. Perhaps he should have paid closer attention to the death warrants that crossed his desk. The crowd fell to a murmured hush as the Constable crossed the platform to his customary position near the Magistrate.

“What’s the meaning of this, Magistrate?”

“The meaning of what, Constable?” The Magistrate withdrew his spider-like hands from the folds of his robe just long enough to motion for the executions to proceed.

“You know damn well the meaning of what,” Royce seethed. “If that girl is a day over fourteen, I’ll turn into a dragon and fly away.”

The Magistrate spared him a sidelong glance before his eyes returned to the executioner, who was fitting the little blond girl with a hood.

“I wasn’t aware that age had any bearing on the ability to commit a crime, Constable. You signed the death warrants yourself. Surely you don’t dispute their validity now?”

“I don’t give a lead crown over validity,” Royce snapped. “What did this girl do to end up with her neck on the block?”

Finally the Magistrate turned, according the old soldier with his full gaze. His large watery eyes were full of contempt.

“She murdered another girl in cold blood. Are you going to argue that murder is no longer an offense that carries the penalty of death?”

Royce tugged at his lower lip. The executioner raised his blade.

“Wait!”

It was the right of the king’s law for the Constable to commute any sentence, even death, but it was rare enough that only a handful of the elder folk in the crowd could remember such an occurrence. Royce had never nullified a sentence. Most of the people who ended up on
the platform deserved it. With this one, he wasn't so sure. Maybe his curiosity was getting the better of him, but there was something here. Something he could feel at the back of his neck and the base of his spine.

He approached the girl and raised the hood from her head. It was then that he noticed the witchmetal collar around her neck. He sighed. She was a slave. That changed things. The girl’s eyes seemed to look through him. He snapped his fingers in front of her nose until her lazy gaze met his.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Darcy,” she said in a sing-song voice that sent a chill up Royce’s spine.

“Did you kill a girl, Darcy?”

The little blond girl smiled a smile so wide and white that it put Royce in mind of the predatory fish that sometimes washed up on the shore at Blackbeach.

“Oh, yes. I killed her dead. I beat her down until she bled. In the head! Now she’s dead.” The girl cackled. “Dead! Bled! Dead! Bled!”

Royce shook his head and dropped the hood back over her head. He nodded soberly to the executioner and retreated to his station. The blade man pressed the girl’s head to the block and an instant later, the crowd roared with approval. The executioner kicked the body off the platform, into a straw-filled cart parked below. Royce felt sick.

“Justice is done,” the Magistrate remarked.

The Constable remained silent.

The village crier called for the next condemned and there was a commotion at the foot of the steps leading to the platform. There was a girl in chains, desperately fighting against the guards who struggled to keep her in place. Though she was shackled at wrist and ankle, she still fought, trying to tear the weapons from the belts of the men-at-arms attending her.

As the guards tried to march her up the short stairs, the girl went to ground, falling so quickly that the men had little time to react. When she hit the ground, she scrambled away as quickly as her bindings would allow. She was quick, but not quick enough. One of the guards ran her down and taking a blackjack from a belt loop, thwacked her soundly in the back of the head. The girl went limp, face down in the dirt. They lifted her under the arm
s and dragged her up the steps onto the platform, her feet dangling between them. They dumped her at the executioner's feet.

Royce watched as the ax man lifted the girl’s body and placed her head in the block. The blow to the back of the head had knocked her senseless. Though her eyes were open, she was staring at some point far across a distant horizon. She also wore a witchmetal collar, its thin gray band a stark contrast against her pale skin. Her eyes were a deep, clear blue; the color of sapphire. Hair the color of corn flax dropped to her shoulders in a tangled mass. There had obviously been neither comb, nor brush, nor looking glass in whatever dank hole she had been assigned to for the night before her date with the sharp end of the blade.

She was definitely pretty, for a slave. Her nose was straight and unbroken, her eyes not sunken by years of abuse and neglect. She was newly collared then. A slave's life was notoriously hard and short, no matter how pretty they were. In fact, sometimes being pretty made it worse. There were those who would pay a premium for the chance to break such a lovely creature.

This one's high cheekbones and thick frame placed her in the far north before her capture. The Frozen Frontier, or very near, unless Royce missed his guess. He didn't. He was rarely wrong. There was something about her that piqued his curiosity. Something he couldn’t quite place his finger on. There was a resonance about her, something that made the hair on his arms stand on end.

The girl had roused enough to start to struggle again. Rather than suffer through a repeat of her games with the guards, the executioner locked her shackles to the block, rendering her thrashing mostly ineffective.

Royce went rigid as the executioner offered the girl a hood, which she declined in a spate of colorful curses and epithets. She turned her head as far as the block would allow and attempted to spit at the blade man.

“Don’t,” the Magistrate said quietly. “This one deserves it too, just as the last one did.”

The old soldier wasn’t so sure. He watched as the girl tried to spit at the executioner a second time. It was a futile gesture, but enough to earn her a backhanded slap across her high cheekbones with a thick leather gauntlet. The executioner put his boot between her shoulder blades, pressing her neck into the edge of the block. The ax gave a dull ring as it was drawn across the platform and lifted to his shoulder.

The executioner hefted the blade and Royce found himself riveted. Most people closed their eyes in that final moment, or opted for the hood. She didn't. She kept her eyes open and fixed on the platform mere inches beyond her nose. The ax man’s arms tensed for the swing and Royce sprang forward, landing on the balls of his feet. His hand flashed out, arresting the ax mid-stroke.

“Hold your blade,” he said quietly but firmly. The crowd groaned. They were growing tired of the interruptions in their entertainment. Two executions and both stopped at the penultimate moment. Their dissension spread like wildfire through those who had assembled.

A swarthy little man with a bulbous red nose waddled onto the platform, his face suffused purple with rage.

“Enough! What's the meaning of this? She needs to die, and die now! She's filth. Vermin. A pestilence to be destroyed.”

Royce eyed him up, studying the fine cut of the tunic, the flash of the large gems on each finger, the full purse tucked into his belt, the neck twisted and folded over to ensure that no coin could find its way out until it was called upon. He didn't know the man, but he knew the type. Royce raised an eyebrow and the ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“Who are you, tiny creature, to question the Constable, former Knight of the Flame and Sergeant-at-Arms to the One True King?”

Rocking back on his heels, the man seemed to deflate, his face going from rage to confusion, to fear. He was obviously used to barking orders and expecting them to be followed without challenge. Probably backed by the bite of a whip. Slavers. Royce snorted derisively. They were all the same.

“My name is Cerrin, Mi’lord. I am a purveyor of...resources, foreign and domestic.”

“What did this vermin do to have her neck placed on the block, slaver?”

The tips of the man's ears went red and he stammered a moment. He snapped his mouth shut and swallowed convulsively, then seemed to find his backbone.

“She’s a menace. She attacked one of the other girls without provocation. Killed her in cold blood that one did. She cost me good crowns and I’ll see to it that the others learn their place.” The girl’s spine went rigid as she fought against the restraints that held her down. It wasn’t hard for Royce to believe that she had killed another slave. She fought like a caged animal.

“I didn’t kill anyone, you filthy lying pig!” Spittle flew from her lips as the girl screamed at the little man. “
Darcy was only defending me and you know it!”

“Do you dispute her claim?” Royce asked, almost conversationally. He fixed such a piercing gaze on the slaver that Cerrin went white.

“Err, no. Not exactly, Mi’lord.”

“So she didn’t kill directly? She was merely the cause of the, ah, altercation?”

“Yes. Yes! That’s it precisely, Mi’lord.” A smile flickered across the slaver’s face. “She was an accomplice!”