Have Sword, Will Travel

by Garth Nix

  Odo and Eleanor stopped to stay under cover of the tree line and look for Toland.

  There was no sign of the fleeing boy.

  “So what are we going to do?” Odo asked quietly.

  “A frontal assault,” declared Biter. “We will easily prevail against inexperienced smiths with the element of surprise on our side.”

  “What surprise?” Odo countered. “If Toland overheard what we were talking about and told his master that we know about the firestarter, they could already be waiting for us. Besides, people might get killed. We might get killed!”

  “I think we should lie low until dusk and then sneak in,” Eleanor said. “Find out where Fyrennian keeps his firestarter thing and steal it from him, then release Master Thrytin so they can redo their contest of skill. Master Thrytin will be grateful and give us armor. And me a sword.”

  Odo nodded. This seemed a much better plan.

  “Thievery is not among a knight’s duties,” said Biter disapprovingly.

  “Think of it as rescuing someone,” said Odo. “Like a princess.”

  “A princess who sets fire to things and used to live inside a dragon,” said Eleanor with a grin. “That’s my kind of princess.”

  Biter grumbled something about squires remembering their place, but for once Eleanor didn’t mind. Together they were righting wrongs and dispensing justice to those who needed it. This was exactly what she had always dreamed of doing.

  Her grin turned to a squint of intense interest as she studied Anfyltarn. Eleanor had read all her mother’s books about fortifications and defenses, and the tactics to be employed by both attackers and defenders in a siege.

  “See the way the forest suddenly stops here?” she said, indicating an expanse of empty ground between their hiding place and the nearest wall. “It’s been burned away so no one can sneak up too close. That palisade is newly built, and there are hides ready to be rolled down against fire arrows. Someone over there knows what they’re doing. There’ll be lookouts and patrols.”

  Odo felt butterflies swarming in his stomach. This was a far cry from hunting eels and rabbits.

  “What do you think we should do?” he asked her.

  “When the sun goes down, let’s crawl our way to the palisade. I’ll go first. I can climb the corner there, and once I’m up I can help you up. Or you could wait for me to get in and I’ll go and find a rope or something.”

  “I’m not letting you go in there alone,” Odo said. “Besides, I can climb too, you know!”

  “I maintain that a frontal assault would be simplest,” said Biter. “Once the first few are slain, the others will flee.”

  “I don’t think killing unsuspecting people is very knightly either,” protested Odo.

  Eleanor nodded. “Besides, Toland said there were dozens of smiths and apprentices. With hammers, not to mention whatever they make in there, like swords. They may not be knights, but those smiths are grown men and women and probably well armed and armored.”

  Odo nodded, agreeing, but her words had given him a thought. A thought that, the more he pondered it, quickly formed into something very much like a plan.

  “I think Biter’s wrong and right at the same time,” he said.

  “What?” asked Eleanor.

  “Simplest might be best,” he said. “Why don’t I just go up and say I want to buy some armor?”

  “But what if Toland’s talked to Master Fyrennian?”

  “You know, I don’t think Master Fyrennian would listen much to an apprentice,” Odo surmised. “And would he see Toland straightaway? I doubt it. Like this, I can go in and have a look around. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find the firestarter right away. You stay here for now. I’ll report back as soon as I can.”

  He stood up before he could think too hard about what he was doing and stepped out of the tree line.

  “Wait! Odo, get back here!”

  Odo ignored Eleanor’s urgent entreaties and strolled towards the main gate of Anfyltarn, attempting to look calm. His hand pressed firmly down on Biter’s pommel as the sword tried to launch out of the scabbard.

  “Stay in there until I tell you,” hissed Odo. “Don’t you dare make a move or say anything or we’re both dead. I bet Fyrennian’s forge could melt you too, you know.”

  “Ah,” said Biter. He paused, then added in a softer voice, “I hope you know what you are doing, Sir Odo.”

  “Shhh.” Sir Odo really hoped he did too. He hadn’t felt this nervous since … actually he couldn’t remember ever feeling this nervous before.

  The gate opened as Odo approached, and a burly man in dirty leather armor and a blackened steel helmet stepped out of the entranceway. He carried a large double-bladed axe over his shoulder and looked strong enough to use it. Big enough to be a smith, he had a long beard plaited in two strands, too long for him to be an actual smith as his hair would soon catch fire if he worked a forge. A guard, then, not someone who did any skilled work.

  “What’s your business?” the guard asked suspiciously. He looked Odo up and down, taking in his peasant clothing, so at odds with the great sword on his hip.

  “Well met,” said Odo in as firm a voice as he could muster, imagining his great-grandfather standing tall in his shoes. Not knowing if the miller knight actually was tall, let alone his name or how long he had survived his knighthood, meant it didn’t help much. “I’m … I am here to buy armor.”

  This was where his plan would either stand or fall. It all depended on whether Toland had talked to Fyrennian, or if Fyrennian had listened. Odo tensed, ready to turn and run. Biter, under his hand, shifted slightly, and Odo knew that the sword really wanted to snap out and take this guard in the throat before he could swing his axe.

  The guard looked past Odo, over to the trees. For a moment the boy thought Eleanor had been spotted, and his heartbeat accelerated. He almost bolted away before the guard spoke again.

  “Where’s your boss?” the guard asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your boss,” the guard said, looking down his nose. “I mean, you can’t be buying armor for yourself.”

  Too late Odo remembered he didn’t look like a knight. He looked like a muddy miller’s boy of unusual size. “No, uh, for my knight, Sir … Eldwyn. He sent me ahead. I’m his squire.”

  “You don’t look much like a squire to me.”

  “I fell in the river … My good clothes are being laundered by our servant.”

  The guard frowned. Though clearly not the smartest of fellows, he was still not convinced. Odo suppressed a rising desire to flee back home, where people didn’t often hurt him for getting something wrong.

  Sudden inspiration struck him.

  “Sir Eldwyn’s been teaching me swordplay.” He stepped back several paces so as not to alarm the guard. “Watch this.”

  Hoping that Biter would follow his lead, Odo drew the sword and mock-parried and mock-dueled back and forth in front of the guard, doing his best to remember what he had learned. Biter stayed silent and subtly added flourishes that made Odo look much better than he was.

  “Stop that. Wait here,” the guard said. The gate closed behind him with the rattle of an enormous bolt.

  The moment he was gone, Odo let out a gust of air in relief. So far, so good. Peering behind him, he made out the patch of cover Eleanor was hiding behind, and gave it a surreptitious thumbs-up.

  A leaf twitched in reply. He took that as a good sign.

  Five minutes later, the bolt rattled again, and the gate opened.

  “All right,” said the guard. “You can come in.”

  Odo went through, the guard drawing the gate closed behind him. His plan had worked. All he had to do now was see what there was to be seen …

  … and get out again.

  Eleanor bit her thumbnail as Odo stepped through the door. As easy as that! It seemed like cheating, but she had to admit that his impromptu plan was inspired. Only now they were separated, and she had no way of knowing wha
t was going on. And he expected her to stay hidden until he came out again, if he ever did!

  Except … the guard was momentarily distracted by the new arrival, and soon everyone else would be too. If she moved quickly …

  Eleanor swept her gaze along the palisade. There were no sentries visible and no one at all on the walkway behind the wall. Slipping the paring knife into her boot, Eleanor broke cover and ran to the northwest corner, the most shielded from view. Hunkering down on the mound below the palisade, she pressed herself against the wooden poles and listened.

  She half expected every beat of her racing heart to be answered by a cry of alarm or perhaps the clarion call of a sentry’s horn. But there was nothing. The sound of hammering and bellows went on as steadily as before.

  Eleanor waited until her heart was steady and her breath came easily again. Then she shimmied up the palisade, sticking hands and toes in the gaps between the poles — which had been badly caulked with mud, she noted, and the poles were not as tightly placed together as her mother’s books would recommend. The palisade was intended to give more the look of a strong defense than the reality. This was mildly comforting.

  Over the palisade, she dropped flat on the walkway and looked and listened once more. Under cover of the working noises coming out of the open windows of the big stone building, Eleanor rose to move but then instantly dropped down again as a woman came out of the central smithy and crossed to a washing line spread between two of the wattle-and-daub huts.

  As soon as the woman was behind a flapping sheet, Eleanor moved again. Crouching low, she sprinted to the closest hut, looked about again, then sprinted once more to the side of the smithy, near one corner. There, she stood flat against the shadowed gap between the corner buttress and the wall, feeling the warmth of the stones against her back.

  To the west, the sun was setting. Through the stink of iron and sulfur, Eleanor could smell fresh bread and some kind of stew. Dinner was likely not far away. That would further increase her chances of not being seen.

  Turning to face the wall, she began to climb, using the angle between the buttress and the wall to her advantage as her fingers and toes found gaps in the loose mortar between the stones. No one saw as she climbed as swiftly and silently as a sucker-footed lizard up onto the slate roof.

  The roof was low-pitched and the slate tiles inexpertly laid, so there were gaps between them as wide as her finger, many of them issuing smoke that had failed to find its way up and out one of the many chimneys. Eleanor crawled across the roof, pausing to press her ear to the cool slate so she could hear what was going on below.

  “Pass me the swage, lad.”

  “Quick, dowse it!”

  “If you don’t sweep out that clinker by sun’s set there’ll be no gruel for you.”

  It seemed to be just smiths talking to their apprentices. There was no sign of Odo, so Eleanor scampered lightly across the roof to another section of the smithy. Here the slate was much warmer, and the nearest chimney was billowing black smoke, indicating there was a furnace below.

  “Huff!” someone called, in the age-old cry to keep the bellows working, forcing air into the forge fire. “Puff!”

  Still no Odo. Skirting a patch of the roof that was too hot to touch, she finally came to a section where men spoke as equals, or at least more so, and there at last she found her friend.

  “We have, I mean, my master Sir Eldwyn has heard of your work here,” he was saying to someone, possibly Fyrennian himself. “He has his heart set on some of your famous armor, which is much talked about by all the knights of the land.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Eleanor whispered. “This place is just upriver from us and we never heard of it.”

  But Fyrennian, if it was he, seemed only pleased by the praise.

  “My boy, you have come to the right place.” The voice was rich, deep, and warm, and sounded like it belonged to a man of considerable stature. Eleanor pictured him receiving Odo in a palatial room bedecked with rich tapestries. Sir Halfdan had a tapestry in the hall of his manor, but it was only the size of a blanket, and quite threadbare. “Step forward and let me take the measure of you.”

  Eleanor wished she could see what was happening, but she wasn’t going to dangle upside down from a gutter in order to peer through a window, no matter how dark it was getting. However, wriggling along the roof, she found two loose slates that almost gave her a view of the room below. With extreme care, afraid of sending dust raining down that would alert the smiths to her presence, she slipped the point of the paring knife into the chink and levered the two tiles farther apart.

  Pressing her eye to the gap she had made, she could at last see the room below.

  There were no opulent tapestries, but there was a selection of sturdy leather chairs with cast-iron legs on flagstones worn from what looked a thousand years of passing feet. A fireplace burning scented wood occupied almost the whole of one wall. Odo stood before it, being examined by a man who talked tall but was hardly a giant.

  Fyrennian came barely to Odo’s waist. He was dressed in boots and a black, calf-length smock under a thick leather apron that didn’t hide the fact that he was nearly as broad around as he was tall. He had no hair at all. The fire gleamed off his polished scalp and from a gold hoop hanging from his left earlobe. Eleanor couldn’t see his face properly, but she could see his hands perfectly well. They were huge and covered in a mess of thick, old scars. He didn’t look half as scary as Eleanor had imagined, based on Toland’s description. Apart from those hands.

  Odo submitted himself to the dwarf’s examination with nervous discomfort, swiveling from side to side.

  “Master, don’t you think —” someone started to say, a man standing just out of Eleanor’s line of sight.

  “It’s not your job to think,” snapped Fyrennian. He turned to Odo. “You’re in luck, boy. If your knight is indeed much the same size as you, then we have a full hauberk of the finest mail available with a minimum of adjustment necessary. A customer didn’t pay the full amount, so their down payment is forfeit. That is your good luck.”

  “What is the fee?” Odo asked, and Fyrennian quoted a figure that made Eleanor’s head spin: a hundred gold nobles. She’d never even seen one gold noble. A hundred was enough to buy the whole of Sir Halfdan’s manor. All that for a mail coat?

  “Haggle,” she whispered. “Don’t make it too easy.”

  Odo knew about haggling; he was good at it, and often negotiated with villagers at the mill when his father didn’t have the patience. He came back with half Fyrennian’s asking price, pointing out the timing was good for both of them. They set to bargaining, and eventually arrived at the marginally less astronomical sum of seventy-two gold nobles.

  “When will your master grace us with his presence?” Fyrennian asked.

  “Tomorrow,” said Odo. “In the evening, I expect. Sir Eldwyn has something he must attend to at … um … Ablerhyll, and he sent me ahead. Would it be too much to request board for the night?”

  Fyrennian waved away the possibility of inconvenience, and no wonder, Eleanor thought, for such a sum. “We would be honored. Ramm here will show you to your quarters, where a meal will be brought to you. Unless perhaps you would like a tour of the smithy first?”

  Ramm stepped into view. He was the guard from the gate, the big one with the axe.

  “Say no,” Eleanor whispered. “Don’t seem too keen to stick your nose in.”

  “Thank you, but I am weary from travel,” Odo said. He gave an awkward bow, which Eleanor recognized as being copied from Sir Halfdan. Since Sir Halfdan only had one foot, it looked a bit strange when Odo did it. However, it was more than a miller would do, so she supposed that it was good enough for cementing his appearance as a squire. “Tomorrow, when my master arrives, I’m sure he’d like to take a look around.”

  “Of course, of course. Until then.” Fyrennian nodded to Ramm, who indicated that Odo should follow him.

  Just before they moved out of
sight, Fyrennian held up a hand.

  “One moment.”

  Odo halted in the doorway.

  “Your sword caught my eye,” Fyrennian said. “May I look at it?”

  “Of course.”

  After a barely perceptible hesitation, Odo drew Biter from the scabbard and held him out hilt-first for Fyrennian to inspect.

  Eleanor suppressed a groan, although there was nothing else Odo could have said or done. To deny the request would arouse suspicion. She crossed her fingers and hoped that Biter wouldn’t talk, or move of his own accord, or reveal his enchanted nature in some other way.

  “Interesting,” said Fyrennian, taking Biter and holding him gently across his palms, then turning him to catch the light. “A gift from your master, I presume? If so, his generosity is only exceeded by his taste. This is a very old sword, with highly … unusual properties.”

  Eleanor hardly dared breathe. She was confident that Biter could look after himself, if it came to that, but what about Odo? He was standing too close to the beefy Ramm and his axe. If Biter was stupid enough to do his frontal assault thing, Odo was sure to be killed!

  “Unusual properties?” asked Odo, but not before swallowing once.

  “Yes, see here.” Fyrennian leaned closer, holding the sword up for Odo’s inspection. “The ricasso is asymmetrical, and so are the terminals. The steel seems very fine, very fine indeed, but there is a nick right here, halfway along the blade. I am surprised to find that in a sword of this apparent quality. Maybe that is why it is in your service, and not Sir Eldwyn’s. The steel looks to be the best, but it cannot be, for such a notch would have been impossible. It is flawed.”

  With a superior smile, as though Fyrennian had solved a mystery to his satisfaction and delivered a slight insult in the bargain, the master smith returned the sword to Odo’s waiting hand and waved him away.