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 nothisman.”
Hiswas 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 keepmymouth 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. “Valeriusindeed. 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 comingback, all of them. They’ll want to talk to you.”
The meaning oftalk to youwas as clear as the identity ofthem. 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.”
