Steel Sirens Read online

Tarin must read my thoughts. He lifts his sword in answer to hers. “I’m not more afraid of you than I am of the Hand.”

  “If we take her to Myranda with that sword…” Legan crouches, eager to conclude his thought with actions.

  The woman laughs. Laughs. I don’t hear an ounce of bravado, though.

  I don’t feel any, either. And I can feel her like an angry wasp cutting between my thoughts.

  “Save your words. I’m here for your souls.” Is she absolutely mad? She can’t be right in the head.

  Legan takes his opportunity.

  He charges right into her. But he’s short his head when the impact happens. It hits the clearing and rolls back the way it came.

  I never saw her swing. I stare at Legan’s neck stump, grey and bloodless, protruding from his helm. It’s not bloody. This churns my guts more than any gore.

  She turns her attention on Tarin.

  “You should know,” he says, straightening his cape clasp, arranging dark silk just so, “This is not the end. This is hardly the beginning. What’s coming cannot be sundered by your blade, or a hundred like it.”

  Her full mouth quirks. “Is that a threat?”

  “No.” Tarin straightens. He has no expression but the one given by his helm, the black mask of a vexed, handsome youth. But his hulking silhouette flows into a posture of resignation. “It’s a warning. A kindness, from one warrior to another.”

  “Thank you.” She bows.

  Tarin bows like the graceful bend of an ancient dying oak.

  Why is this hard to watch? My throat tightens.

  They find their stances, murderous dancers now.

  Tarin is faster than his captain. And something more. His moves are crazed and graceful at once. His sawtooth blade blocks her first strikes; he trades the woman a dozen hits in as many seconds, and their swords ping into one long chime.

  When does it happen? I can’t tell. They move too fast for a steady archer’s eye to tell. They become glimpses, shapes threaded through a palisade of elm and rowan.

  But somewhere across their deadly choreography, Tarin doesn’t raise as high to block. His dodge gets sloppy. Weak kneed. Blood spatters across dry grass and his opponent gains ground. Step after step after step, she hounds him.

  Air around her blurs, shimmers. Her sword is a flash of light and nothing more. I don’t know how, but I can feel her power in my soul, through our bond. She’s moving so fast I can’t see her, now. Sharp nicks and cuts open across Tarin’s face and hands as he spins, wild eyed. Some kind of magic?

  She reappears as a blur, pivoting without warning.

  Tarin falls to his knees. He’s done. Blood paints his armor. It drips prophetically from the heart on his breastplate. His breath grates over broken bones.

  She moves before him with certain grace.

  He buries his sword into the clearing’s rich earth. “Leave it be. Someone will come.”

  I don’t realize I’ve held my breath until she nods.

  Tarin raises his face to the sky. At last I see the glitter of his eyes behind his visor. They reflect the silver channel of her sword.

  Her blade passes like an eclipse.

  Tarin’s head falls and his body topples with it.

  Their dance of blood and blade is over.

  I stumble up behind her. She doesn’t turn. Her shoulders heave.

  “Emeree,” she breathes. “Swordmaiden.”

  She sits heavy inside me on that last word.

  Emeree whips her blade, sending a spray of blood into the air. When she sheathes it, it’s clean as the moment I found it.

  Her face is still but radiant when she turns to me. “I’ve gotten rusty.”

  “Huh…” Rusty isn’t a word I’d choose.

  “Time will sort me out. Ewan, grab your bow. Let’s cover some ground before anyone comes looking.”

  I don’t pick up my bow or cover ground. Instead I turn and stare at Tarin’s prone form. There are slavers and mercs and magicians all around; I know this now. But something about Tarin, his exchange with this woman…

  It all feels like a riddle I know by heart but have forgotten the answer to.

  “How do you know my name?” I call after Emeree.

  A living sword explodes, and a woman pops out and decapitates two dreygur, but this is what I’m focused on.

  Emeree spins back. “I know almost everything about you.”

  I stare at her lips, their shape and the shape of her words. I’m filled with her; my edges blur into her. I feel...it feels like…

  Our mouths slide together like water over stones. She tastes like the wild strawberries of the Wood, even through my blood on our lips.

  She recedes from me with a violence that tears me back physically.

  We pull away.

  I don’t apologize. This doesn’t feel wrong.

  Emeree levels a predatory gaze on my mouth. “I was in that sword a long time.”

  “And you know me…?”

  “I was in that sword a long time.” She bends and hands me my bow. “In that sword, inside your house.”

  Private moments. Nights around the fire as a family. “Hearing us? Gods… did you watch us?”

  Emeree nods. “Mostly hearing.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Hah. Just hearing.”

  “Wait–” I have a lot of questions. They all come at once. “Wait.”

  She grabs a fistful of my sleeve and pulls. “Night’s falling. Let’s move deeper into the wood and make camp. Then you can say ‘wait’ as many times as you like.”

  What is she talking about? I glance skyward. “It’s midafternoon.”

  Emeree winces. “Not for long. My fault.”

  “Meaning…”

  “My ancient powers have been trapped in this beast for part of a century. Cursed into it. You break a curse, it doesn’t pass with a whistle and a wink.” She swirls her hands. Her voice grows comically deep and ominous. “Signs! Portents! Trib-uuu-lations…”

  Dusk falls while she’s drawing out this last word. My skin prickles.

  “And it means some very dangerous people may have an inkling I’m free.”

  I nod at Tarin’s corpse laid out next to his sword. “They’ll know and be terrified.”

  “Or not.”

  This turns me around. “What?”

  “I mean maybe not. Maybe not, but probably they will be.”

  She glances at my gaped mouth. “Definitely. They will be so terrified.”

  I stumble on. Twilight paints a dark sky behind the moon. Songbirds nest for the night and the wood is nighttime quiet. My hunter’s instincts feel ripped apart. “I need to sit.”

  “Go ahead. This spot will do. You sit, and I’ll find wood so we…”

  Emeree’s words become the background.

  My balance fails. My limbs go limp, stomach pitching seasick. My eyes won’t focus.

  She asks me something.

  “Hm?” I slide down the tree trunk with a long scrape. Nighttime dew seeps into my breeches. My head spins.

  Was that my name? “What?”

  She kneels beside me the way Tarin did.

  I keel over, out stone cold.

  5

  I wake to the sound of singing.

  It reminds me of home. I lie for long moments, eyes closed. I can’t make out the words at first, just a melody.

  Undressed to my braes, a fire warms my back. I can feel Emeree in the clearing, know exactly where she is, though I can’t see her. Her voice floats between the trees, growing closer. Melodic, low-pitched and so –

  Four wise men with knowledge so fine,

  created a paradise to their design.

  First was a butcher, full up with wit,

  using a knife, he gave it a slit.

  Next was a carpenter, true to his role

  with hammer and chisel, he gave it a hole.

  Third was a tailor, with shears and pin,

  by using red velvet, he lined it within.
/>   Last was a sailor, a dirty runt,

  Who sucked it and fu-

  “Whoa!” I flail up under my wool blanket, nearly launching it into the fire. It took me until the sailor, I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  Emeree swaggers into view. She stops when she catches me looking. “Clever, right? And the bit about the sailor!” She nods. “Spot on.”

  “I’ll take your word.”

  “Mm mm.” Emeree waves a pronged camp fork at me. I saw what she did to Tarin; this is not an idle gesture in my mind. “That’s no way to live. You should experience it for yourself.”

  “Not really a... sailor kind of man.”

  “Ohh. I see.” Emeree turns back and crouches over whatever game she’s spitted across the flames. “Not every apple has a stem, you know…”

  Twenty-three years old and I’m blushing. But she can’t get the better of me. “Testing the bushel?”

  Emeree meets my gaze, her eyes lit with mischief by flames. “One mouthful at a time.”

  A cough lodges in my throat.

  Her skin is light, bronzed by the fire. Even her cooking is a dance, her movements graceful, certain, and almost sensual. She’s stripped her armor while I slept, clad only in her smallclothes. They’re smooth, pale silk, not the coarse homespun of Braemar folk.

  In the firelight, silk leaves little to the imagination.

  I can’t help what happens. It’s natural to fold hands in my lap, right? In my braes, at a camp, hands folded like we’re at sabbath worship?

  “Anyhow...Good song, isn’t it?” She nods. “I learned it from a Stalvian sailor. She was so much fun.”

  She. Emeree wasn’t kidding.

  “Fun...” I dare. Don’t think about it...don’t think about it...

  “Exactly what you think.” Emeree pretends to cup huge breasts, her cheeks pink. “Ah, that was centuries ago. Anyway, you’re up; come eat.”

  “I think I’ll sit and... come to. Get my head right.”

  “You can do that while you eat.” She pats a spot beside her.

  “I should let my muscles stretch. All that firing and sword play. Can’t be too careful with my draw arm!”

  “We don’t really have time to baby your muscles.” She winces. “Come eat up and let’s move on.”

  I stand and turn as quickly as I can.

  It’s no use.

  Emeree bites her lip, eyes raking me. They stop exactly where I feared. “Was it the song, or the sailor?” she asks.

  I have no words.

  She laughs. “I’m kidding. I know it’s both. I’ve been in your shoes...” She whistles, “Oh, so many times.”

  “Why am I... where are my…”

  I stagger around the fire and the stump, looking for my clothes.

  “You smelled ripe enough to pick! I took them off.”

  She’s stripped me to my short pants and bound my wounds. I finger the gash on my cheek. Hardly sore. Hardly anything. “Hogroot?”

  She clucks, attention on her little wooden spit. “Is that what you call it around here? I’ve always known it as Widow’s Finger.” She hmm’s to herself. “Sounds fancier. Anyway, I thought you’d have some. You mutter when you pack supplies.”

  I do. I spend so much time alone. Sometimes my own voice is enough. “Wait. How do you know that?”

  She raises her wooden spoon to lips I can still taste. “Pepper,” she orders, hand thrust out.

  Nice dodge. I search around the stump and hand her the little wooden bottle.

  She drops in a generous pinch, stirring again, but she’s watching me. “I told you, I was in that house for a long time. I know the first day you finally came back to the cottage. It’d been so quiet and lonely. I was afraid you might not come again. I was afraid of what might…” Emeree pauses, attention fixed on her cooking. She weighs something. “I was in the house when – the fire… the silence after. It almost drove me mad.”

  I press my eyes shut. For a long time, I didn’t acknowledge that losing Mother and Father hurt anyone but me. I forgot about Briet and Keldan. Emeree reminds me how selfish I was.

  She comes around the stump. Her hand rests over my heart, and her touch is electricity in my veins. “I know you, Ewan. Maybe not more than anyone else in the world but in some ways deeper. I didn’t see you and I didn’t always hear you. More than anything...I felt you.”

  “How? Why?”

  Emeree shakes her head.

  If she can’t explain it and I can’t explain it...

  I close my eyes to stop the world spinning. “We should move. More must be close.”

  “They are.” Emeree points into the trees. “Were. Three more, right over there. What’s left of them anyway. And I took three of their horses.”

  “Incredible. I don’t even need to be here.”

  She laughs. “Yes, you do.” She divides the meat and root vegetable onto two broad, dry leaves and passes one to me. My stomach makes its impatience known. It occurs I haven’t eaten in a day. Or is it two now? Too long.

  Emeree cradles her makeshift plate and stares at her food.

  I stop scarfing. “Not hungry?”

  “Just the opposite! This is the first food I’ll have eaten in over fifty years.” She closes her eyes, lifts the meat close and inhales. She takes a small bite, a bit of wild turnip. I can feel it, how long it’s been. Her anticipation doubles my hunger. Her excitement vibrates between us.

  We eat in silence. I want more but Emeree eyes what’s left of the hare. I don’t have the heart to stand between her and seconds.

  She throws her leaf into the fire and mm’s. “I think I can go on now. At least until I fall asleep.”

  Not eating, moving, or speaking to anyone for fifty years. I can’t imagine. “You were trapped inside the blade all this time?”

  She pauses so fully it becomes a flinch. “All this time.”

  “So, you probably don’t know anything about Tarin or Myranda or what the hell is going on.”

  “Oh, I know the Hand. ‘Hand’ meaning they could reach anything, grasp or acquire it. Just...I don’t know them in any form like we saw yesterday.”

  What other form is there? “Tarin knew about my village. About our mayor being slaughtered. They sent slavers.”

  “Slavers.” She spits. “They weren’t always slavers. Or necromancers.”

  This word cuts through me like winter wind. We don’t have magic here in the wilds, of any sort. I don’t know if I believe in it. It’s something that conveniently existed in faraway places according to my mother’s stories. So far away, so often, I didn’t believe magic was real. But after what I’ve seen…

  If what Emeree says is true, magic is both real and waiting in terrible forms.

  “A century ago, the Hand were a mercenary company. They made merc business into a legitimate enterprise.” Emeree takes down the small iron spit, her motions sharp. “They were the best. Something dangerously like honorable, too, if you can believe it – in their own way. Knights of an old church that I have to assume is gone now.”

  “That’s not an endorsement,” I mutter, helping her stack rocks over the fire pit. Trailing wisps struggle to escape suffocation. Wood scraps, rubble, smoke...I stand up and half turn to put our campfire from sight. “We had a church in Braemar. Other villages follow the Church. I don’t see their followers behaving better than anyone else.”

  “I can’t answer that. All I can say for the Hand is, the benefit of being good at your work is the comfort of being choosy. You can hold moral objections when your vaults and bellies are full. And they were. The Hand worked mostly for the Eastern Kings.”

  “What happened?”

  “Their insignia used to be a gold hand cradling a human heart. We can both infer developments from their... change in design.”

  “Also, the necromancy.”

  Emeree snaps and points at me. “That too.” She drums fingers atop a bent knee. “Lord Tarin. Where do you suppose he was lord of? Traveling with a captain or two. A
nd they’re not moving with your slavers…”

  “Legan said the name Myranda. And Tarin called her a merc. I found a woman’s glove in the ruins of my village. Leather armor from a beast I’ve never hunted.”

  “My gut says there’s something much bigger at work. Do you have the glove?”

  I root through my pack. The glove finds me, cool and radiating calm menace. “Here. Stuck on a nail but not torn. It wasn’t so much as nicked.”

  Emeree takes the glove and stands without a word. She grabs up her sword and tries to cut fingers, palm, any part of the garment. After a minute of straining, her blade tip pierces the leather.

  “Do you know it?” I ask.

  “I do, but I can’t believe it. Mine is crafted from the same beast: Minyades.” Emeree turns and holds up the glove, expression fixed. “Creatures of the ancient Southlands. Women cursed as bats for profaning their god.”

  “That’s a fantastic tale. A bat would equal what...one of those gloves? The bat-women won’t miss just one.”

  “No. No. Bats. Each of the three was made a bat, and not the kind that breezes your ear after nightfall. Huge! Have you ever seen a dragon?”

  “Dragons aren’t real.”

  “Hah!” She tucks the glove away in my pack.

  “They’re not. I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen one.”

  Emeree nods. “Haha. All right.”

  “What?”

  “Half an hour ago, you didn’t know there are man and lady sailors. But you believe whatever you like.”

  I land hard atop the stump. “Dragons. Bat people. Necromancers. I just want to trail some normal, mortal slavers. Get my family and village back.”

  “And Toriloth just wanted to feast on honey bread for an eon and not make war on the Groliag for their orgying and octopus fixation. Sometimes the fight is bigger than we are, Ewan.”

  I stare up at her. “Bread and what?”

  “We need high ground,” Emeree declares, hands on hips.

  “Well, we’re in a basin that extends for leagues out into the plainsland and toward the Midlands.”

  “Figuratively.” She picks up her breeches. “We need perspective on what all this means. Where’s that feathered demon of yours?”

  “Talos? Following the slavers. Should be back soon. Why is he a demon?” I’m honestly worried at this point Talos could be an actual demon.