Read The Sword-Edged blonde for Free Online Page B

around her nipples poked above the hem, and the slit up her thigh went nearly to her waist. She tossed her hair as she turned and gave me the kind of professional smile that promised many pleasant surprises, if my money pouch was heavy enough. Then she looked me up and down the way a butcher might appraise a steer.
    “Hi, handsome,” she said. She held her tray with one hand and put the other on her hip, which emphasized her narrow waist. “Like a table?”
    “No, thanks, I’ll just sit at the bar.”
    “Your loss,” she said with a mischievous wink. For amoment I considered that it really might be. I felt too old, though, to need her kind of distraction.
    One thing I hadn’t expected was how weird it was to hear so many Arentian accents. My own had faded into a kind of neutral regional one, but I was slipping back into it with each word I spoke. Usually if I heard someone say “loss,” or “coin,” or any of those words that really emphasized the way Arentians talk, it would be a novelty. In Arentia, of course, everyone spoke that way, and it inexplicably made me nervous.
    I sat at the bar. It took my eyes a while to adjust to the dimness. I saw a half-dozen fellow patrons, four clustered around a single table, one at a table by himself and one at the far end of the bar. They were from all over: Suamico, Trego, Winneconne. The other guy at the bar had a tattoo on his arm marking him as a wizard from Colfax, even though he wore neither the robe of his calling nor the insignia ring. Either he was incognito and just not very good at it, or he’d broken their vow of chastity and been formally derobed. I suspected the latter, given the speed with which he put away the ale. Poor bastard, that’s what he gets for signing up with a group of men who decried sex as the world’s greatest evil. The moon priestesses, now,
they
had the right idea.
    The woman behind the counter, a tall, cool blonde with a scar along her jaw that somehow made her more attractive, served me without a smile. I downed it in one swallow, asked for a refill and prompted, “Pretty bad about the queen, ain’t it?”
    “Shit happens,” she said as she poured. She wasn’t going to make this easy.
    “I’ve been out of the country for a few years. What’s this Queen Rhiannon like?”
    “Blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous,” she said, as if reciting the ingredients of a recipe. “Sings like a bird, dances like the wind. Can heal the sick, raise the dead, make the young men talk right out of their heads. Or so they say.”
    “She’s a healer?”
    She looked at me with disdain and blew a strand of hair from her face. “That’s exaggeration for effect. Sarcasm, I think they call it.”
    I raised my drink. “Here’s to ‘they.’ ” After I took a sip, I asked, “You believe she did it?”
    She leaned her hands on the bar and fixed me with her best no-nonsense stare. “I don’t care, mister. I thought King Philip was doing a bang-up job before she came along, and if she made him happy, I was happy. Now I just wish we still had a death penalty, because the bitch deserves to hang.”
    That pretty much ended the conversation. I finished my drink and went upstairs, where Anders was already asleep, fully dressed. His sword lay on the floor atop its scabbard, and a dagger handle peeked out from beneath his pillow. I took off my shirt and boots, washed my face in the basin, then dropped off asleep from trail exhaustion more than peace of mind. I dreamed of screams and fire.

 
     

FIVE

     
     
    W e reached the outskirts of Arentia City at noon the next day. Again, I don’t know what I expected—a storybook castle, the brightly colored child’s-eye view I remembered—but what I got was a city like any other, filled with people trying to get by and buzzing with the latest scandal.
    The city walls loomed at the end of the road, a great rectangle across the horizon. Legendary for their thickness and impregnability, they rose from the Eagle’s