Crossbow Hearts

The ogre had my leg.

Not by the ankle, which I could have twisted free of, but by the calf, its fingers wrapped all the way around the muscle like a fat man gripping a sausage. I'd been kicking it in the face for the better part of a minute and it had done nothing but blink at me, slow and stupid, its breath smelling of rot and wet earth.

I was going to die in a blackberry patch. That was the part that stuck with me. Not the dying. The blackberries. I'd spent the last hour filling my apron with them, staining my fingers purple, thinking about how I'd tell Marta I found the good patch up the ravine and no, I wasn't going to share the spot, she could find her own. And now I was on my back in the brambles with a two-hundred-pound ogre trying to pull me apart like a roast chicken.

I screamed. Not a helpless scream. A furious one. The kind that comes up from your heels.

The first bolt took it in the shoulder. The second went through its eye.

The ogre made a sound like a sack of turnips falling off a cart and toppled sideways into the briars. I scrambled backward on my elbows, thorns raking my arms, until my back hit a tree trunk and I couldn't go any further.

A man stood at the top of the ravine with a crossbow.

Not a hunting bow. Not the crude things the lord's men carried. This was something else. Short, heavy-limbed, with a stock of dark wood and a metal mechanism I didn't have a name for. The man holding it was medium height, broad through the shoulders, with brown hair cut close to his skull and the flat, patient expression of someone who'd done this before.

He looked at the ogre. Then at me.

"You're bleeding," he said.

I looked down. My calf had four puncture wounds where the thing's nails had gone in, and the blood was running into my shoe. "I noticed."

He came down the slope in three long strides, slung the crossbow over his back, and crouched beside me. Up close he smelled like woodsmoke and oil and clean sweat. His hands were wide and calloused, the knuckles scarred in a dozen places, but when he took my leg to look at the wounds his touch was careful. Almost gentle.

"Not deep," he said. "You'll want to wash it. Ogre nails carry filth."

"I know what ogre nails carry." I pulled my leg back. "I've lived here my whole life."

"Then you know you're lucky I came along the path when I did."

I did know that. I hated knowing it. "I had it handled."

He looked at the dead ogre. Then back at me. One eyebrow went up, just slightly, and something in his face shifted. Not a smile. Close to one.

"Did you," he said.

I should have been afraid of him. A strange man with a weapon, alone on a back path, and me with a torn leg and no one within a mile who'd hear me scream. But I'd spent the last three years being afraid of the man who owned my labor, and my fear had worn thin. What was left underneath was mostly anger.

"I'm Dorada," I said. "I work the flocks for Master Henrick, up at the high pasture. Or I did, until this morning."

"Until this morning."

"I left." I said it flat. Daring him to ask.

He didn't ask. He pulled a roll of linen from his pack and started wrapping my calf, his fingers quick and sure. "Jonz," he said. "Artificer. I'm bound for Argentia."

"That's a long walk."

"It is."

I watched him work. The linen was clean, the wrap even, the knot tied off at the side where it wouldn't rub. Whoever he was, he'd done this before too.

"Master Henrick will send men after me," I said. I don't know why I told him. Maybe because he hadn't asked, and that made it easier. "He'll say I stole from him. I didn't. I took what I was owed and not a copper more. But he'll say it anyway."

Jonz sat back on his heels and looked at me. Brown eyes, steady. The kind of eyes that didn't hurry.

"Then you'd better not be here when they come," he said.

He stood, offered me his hand. I took it. His grip was strong enough to pull me up without me doing much of anything, and I'm not a small woman. Solid, my mother used to say. Built for weather.

I tested my weight on the leg. It hurt. It would hurt worse tomorrow. But it held.

"Where's Argentia?" I asked.

"Three weeks east. Maybe four, on the footpaths."

"And you're going there to sell that." I nodded at the crossbow on his back.

"To sell the design. To the Queen, if she'll see me." He said it like it was a reasonable thing to say. Like queens saw artificers every day.

I laughed. It came out rough, half from the pain. "You'll never get past the gate."

"Probably not." He shouldered his pack. "But I'll get as far as the gate."

He started walking. East, up the ravine, toward the ridge path. He didn't look back, and he didn't tell me to follow. He just walked, like the world was a simple place and he had a place in it.

I stood there with my torn leg and my apron full of blackberries and my whole life sitting behind me in a heap.

Marta would take my flock. She'd say I ran off, and she'd be right, and she'd say worse things too, because Henrick would pay her to. By tonight there'd be men on the road with dogs. I knew Henrick's dogs. I'd fed them scraps a hundred times and they'd still tear my throat out if he told them to.

I looked at the dead ogre. Then at the path east.

Then I picked up my apron, dumped the blackberries in the dirt, and followed the man.

He heard me coming. Of course he did. I wasn't trying to be quiet, and the path was all loose stone and dead leaves. He didn't slow down, but he didn't speed up either. Just kept his pace, and let me catch him, and when I fell in beside him he glanced over once and said nothing.

We walked for an hour without talking. The sun moved down toward the western ridge and the light went gold through the pines. My leg throbbed in time with my heartbeat, but I'd walked on worse. Blisters, stones, a twisted ankle in the spring flood. My body knew how to keep going. It was the rest of me that was the problem.

"You'll need to earn your keep," Jonz said finally.

"I figured."

"I don't have coin to spare. I have food, and I have a tent, and I have a mule staked back at the crossroads. If you come with me, you carry. You cook. You keep watch when I sleep."

"And if I don't like it, I leave."

"Any time you want." He looked at me again, that flat steady look. "I'm not your master."

I believed him. I don't know why. He hadn't done anything to earn it except kill an ogre and wrap my leg and not ask me a single question about what I was running from. But I believed him.

We reached the crossroads at dusk. The mule was where he'd left it, a gray, sour-faced thing with a pack saddle and a bad attitude. It looked at me the way the lord's steward looked at me. Like I was a problem to be managed.

"The mule doesn't like me," I said.

"The mule doesn't like anyone." Jonz untied the lead and handed me the rope. "Her name is Prudence."

"Of course it is."

He almost smiled then. It didn't quite reach his mouth, but it reached his eyes, and I felt something turn over in my chest that I didn't have a name for and didn't want one.

We made camp a mile up the eastern path, in a hollow between two boulders where the wind couldn't reach. He built a fire with practiced hands and set a small iron pot over it, and I watched him work and thought about how a man learned to do that. How he learned to kill ogres and wrap wounds and talk about queens like they were people you might meet.

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Nowhere you'd know."

"Try me."

He stirred the pot. Barley and dried meat and something that smelled like onion. My stomach growled loud enough that he heard it, and this time he did smile.

"North of the Marches," he said. "A town that isn't there anymore. Plague took it when I was twelve. I apprenticed to a smith, then to a locksmith, then to a man who made siege engines for a duke who lost his war. I learned what I could from each of them and moved on."

"And now you make crossbows."

"I make things that work." He handed me a bowl. "Eat. We've got a long walk tomorrow."

I ate. The stew was plain but hot and there was enough of it, and I hadn't had enough of anything in a long time. The fire crackled. The mule snorted in the dark. Somewhere out in the trees an owl called and another one answered.

"Jonz," I said.

"Mm."

"Thank you." The words came out smaller than I meant them to.

He didn't say anything for a while. He just sat there with his bowl in his hands, looking into the fire, and I watched the light move on his face and thought about how strange it was that I'd woken up this morning in a world I understood and would go to sleep tonight in one I didn't.

"Get some rest," he said at last. "I'll take first watch."

I lay down by the fire with my cloak under my head and my torn leg stretched out, and I listened to him move around the camp, checking the mule, banking the coals, doing all the small quiet things that people do when they know how to survive. And I thought about Argentia, and the Queen, and the gate he said he'd never get past.

I thought about how I'd never seen a city. Never seen a queen. Never seen anything but the high pasture and the village and the road to the market and the inside of Master Henrick's house, which I'd scrubbed a thousand times and hated every board of.

I fell asleep thinking about gates.

When I woke, it was my turn to watch, and Jonz was asleep on the other side of the fire with his crossbow beside him and his face gone slack and young in the dark. He looked different when he slept. Softer. Like a man instead of whatever he was when he was awake.

I sat up and put another log on the fire and looked east, where the path went, where the trees ended and the world began.

I didn't know what was out there. I didn't know if I'd live to see it. But I knew one thing, sitting there with the fire warm on my face and the mule breathing slow in the dark and the man asleep a few feet away.

I wasn't going back.