Read an Excerpt From Freya Marske&#8217;s <i>Swordcrossed</i>

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Swordcrossed, a new enemies-to-lovers romantasy by Freya Marske—available now from Bramble.

Chapter 1

Matti laid his fingers on the polished edge of the bar’s wooden surface and forced himself to stop counting sheep. And yards of twill. And looms in need of repair, and outstanding debts.

Instead, he counted today’s collection of ink smudges, bruise-black on the brown skin of his hands: six. He counted the number of blue dyes that would have been used in the fabric of the bartender’s layered skirt: four, possibly five if the palest shade was true dimflower and not just the result of fading.

The tense throb of pain like a fist clenched in his hair eased, grudgingly, to a quiet ache. Bearable. Normal.

It was busy in the drinking house, the post-dinner hour that usually found Matti heading back to his study to finish the paperwork that a member of his family had tugged him away from in order to eat. Matti counted the number of flavoured jenever bottles on the shelf behind the bar—fifteen—in the time it took Audry to finish serving her current customer and sweep her sky-coloured skirts to stand in front of Matti.

“And here’s a face we haven’t seen in a while! Something tells me you’re here for a celebration, Mr. Jay.”

Matti hoped the smile he’d pulled onto his face wasn’t the wrong size, or the wrong shade of abashed. “News travels fast.”

“Mattinesh Jay and Sofia Cooper. A match surprising exactly no one.”

Matti kept the smile going. There was a silence in which Audry politely didn’t say, Pity she’s in love with someone else, and so Matti didn’t have to say, Yes, isn’t it?

Audry said, “Wait here a moment. I’ve got something in the back that I think will do nicely.”

Matti cast a glance over the room as Audry disappeared. His cousin Roland made an extravagant sighing motion and pretended to check his watch when Matti’s eyes landed on their table. A burst of laughter came from a dark-skinned woman nearby; she was wearing a dress that rode high at the knee to reveal a fall of lace like frothing water, a northern style of garment that Matti’s own northerner mother seldom wore these days.

At the closest table the Mason Guildmaster, Lysbette Martens, was deep in conversation with a senior member of the Guild of Engineers. Martens met Matti’s gaze with her own and nodded brief acknowledgement. He was sure she was weighing his presence as consciously as he was weighing hers. This was a place to be seen, after all.

“Here you are. Red wine for young lovers.”

Matti turned around again. Audry named the price for the bottle as she uncorked it and set it on the bar. Matti paid her, ignoring the lurch like a fishhook in his stomach at the amount on the credit notes he was so casually handing over. Mattinesh Jay, firstborn of his distinguished House, had no reason not to indulge in one of the finest bottles of wine that money could buy.

No reason that anyone here would know about, anyway.

Matti took the bottle in one hand and hooked three glasses with the other. Making his way over to the table, his mind circled back to dwell on the wrong sort of numbers. The money in Matti’s purse was painstakingly calculated: enough for the first round of engagement drinks, and enough for him to hire a top-of-the-range duellist who would step forward in the awkwardly likely event of someone challenging for Sofia’s hand at the wedding itself.

Matti’s skin prickled cold at the very thought of what might happen if Adrean Vane challenged against Matti’s marriage to Sofia and won. His family’s last hope would be gone. Matti would have failed them in this, the most useful thing he could do for them.

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Swordcrossed

Freya Marske

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Swordcrossed

Freya Marske

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He was so caught up in this uneasy imagining as he wove through the room that he collided, hard, with another person’s shoulder. Matti was both tall and broad, not easily unbalanced; the unfortunate other member of the collision made a grab for Matti’s coat, couldn’t get a good grip, and tripped to the ground with a caught-back “Fu—”

Matti tried to step backwards. They were crammed into a small space between tables and there were people moving around them. His first panicked instinct had been to keep the wine bottle upright and the glasses safe, so he didn’t have a hand free to steady himself on a chair.

He wasn’t quite sure what happened next, except that he ended up wobbling and stepping forward instead, and he felt his boot come down on something that was not the floorboards. A small, pathetic, grinding mechanical sound crawled up Matti’s nerves, heel to head, and reached his ears even amidst the noise of the busy room.

“Sorry!” he said at once. “I’m sorry. Was that— Oh, Huna’s teeth.”

The man on the floor jerked his head up, staring at Matti, and Matti stared back.

For a moment all that Matti could see was the wide, straight line of the man’s mouth, set beneath an equally straight nose, and the frame that set off the whole: the dark, luminous copper-red hair that seemed to be trying to grow in about ten different directions.

The man’s tongue darted out in a nervous mannerism, wetting his lower lip. Something in Matti’s own mouth tried to happen in a yearning echo.

“Would you please lift,” the man said precisely, “your godsdamned foot?”

Heat flooded Matti’s face. He snatched his foot backwards with enough force that his heel collided with a chair leg.

The redheaded man stood, his fingers closed convulsively tight around a small velvet bag. His brown coat was shabby and made of a coarsely woven fabric, though his shirt was good and his trousers had probably been equally so before they’d been overwashed into a patchy shine.

“Fuck fuck shitting—fuck,” the man said in tones of despair, with a lilt to his accent that placed him at least one city-state farther east: Cienne, or possibly Sanoy. He shook the contents of the bag into his palm and ventured into new realms of inappropriate language as he did so.

Enough people had witnessed their collision, or had their heads turned by the stream of expletives, that there were a fair few necks craning to see what was in the man’s hand. Matti, at whom the shaking fingers of this hand were pointed most directly, couldn’t help seeing for himself the ragged, glinting pile of cogs and jewels and glass. Only the intact cover—monogrammed in a swirling, engraved H—spoke of this pile’s previous existence as a pocket watch. A very expensive pocket watch, by the look of it.

The man’s breath hissed out through his teeth. “Guildmaster Havelot is going to use my arm bones as a fucking lathe. He only had it made to order, and he only trusted me to pick it up, didn’t he? Two hundred gold. Fucking fuck.”

“I’m so sorry,” Matti said again. He recognised the name: Havelot was the Woodworker Guildmaster in Cienne. “Truly. I can—” He stopped. The abrupt lack of his words created a silence that seemed to suck noise into itself, as conversations died to murmurs and the onlookers sensed something interesting.

The man looked straight at Matti with a stubborn lift of his chin. His brows, the same absurd colour as the rest of his hair, had sprung up into the beginnings of hope; as Matti’s silence grew longer, they lowered again. And then lowered farther. He swept a look down and then slowly up Matti’s own outfit, and now pride warred with scorn in the way those maddening lips pressed together.

Matti felt sick. His own coat was made of the finest wool, a midnight blue cut perfectly to his figure, and the rest of his clothes were of the same quality. He was holding a bottle of extremely good wine. Anybody looking at him would make immediate assumptions about the amount of ready money that Matti might have, and the ease with which he would be able to reimburse a poor clerk, if he’d just ruined a pricey piece of artificer’s skill that the man’s employer had trusted him to travel all the way to Glassport to collect.

Of course they would make these assumptions. That was the point.

Matti swallowed and felt the burning heaviness of his purse redouble. He’d be left with enough to a hire a duellist, yes, but not one of the highest skill. It wouldn’t buy himself and his family the absolute security they needed.

His friends were looking at him. It seemed like every pair of eyes in the drinking house was looking, and in another moment the murmurs of curiosity would turn to murmurs of disapprobation. I thought Matti Jay had more honour than that, they would say. What’s two hundred gold to someone like him?

Besides, the plain fact of the matter was that Matti had broken the watch. And he couldn’t pretend that he and this man with his proud mouth and poor coat, patched at one elbow, were on an equal footing. Even if he were left without a bronze, Matti would still have influence, connections, the weight of his family’s name. That was still worth something. For now.

So that was that.

“I—I really am sorry.” Matti set the wine and glasses down on the corner of the nearest table and pulled his purse from inside his coat. He kept his gaze on the man’s face, on a pair of eyes that were either grey or brown—impossible to tell from this angle—and urgently willed them not to look away. To a degree that seemed irrational, he wanted to banish the judgemental expression from the man’s face. “Of course I’ll cover the cost. Two hundred gold. Who did the work?”

The man glanced down at the metal scraps in his hand, as though the answer might be hidden in the pile. “Speck,” he said at last. “Frans Speck, in Amber Lane.”

“He’s a fair man. Tell him what happened and he’ll rush through the repair job,” Matti said. He held out the century notes.

The man tipped the wreckage of the watch back into the bag and closed his hand around the money, slow and wary. His fingertips had rough patches that scraped against Matti’s own, sending a tingle up Matti’s arm.

“I appreciate it,” the man said. He looked less cold now, though still nowhere near warm. “You’ve saved my life. Really.”

Matti forced himself to smile. Forced himself to say, “It’s nothing,” as though it really were nothing.

The man nodded awkwardly at Matti and tucked both money and bag into a pocket. Then he turned and was gone, headed for the door.

Matti somehow made his way to his table and sat down. His heart was pounding so loudly that he could barely hear anything else, and he wanted to shout at his own blood to be quiet and let him think. He needed to be alone in his study. He needed to contemplate his options, and make lists, and pore over the accounts for the thousandth time, in case they transmuted themselves into a picture of prosperity instead of the ugly, desperate reality that nobody outside of Matti’s immediate family knew about.

“Two hundred gold,” he said, before he could stop himself. “Two hundred.”

“We saw. Hard luck,” his cousin Roland said, making a face.

Perhaps it was stretching the term to call Roland and Wynn his friends, but they were the closest thing Matti had to members of that category, and the only people he’d been able to think of to form his wedding party. At least the three of them never found it too hard to pick up their acquaintanceship again, even if it had been months since their last conversation.

Wynn turned the bottle of wine to inspect the yellow butterfly on the label. “How appropriate that we’re drinking wine from your betrothed’s own winery.”

“Audry’s idea of a joke, I think,” Matti said. The word betrothed had landed in his ears like a piece of music played in an unfamiliar key; his mind was still turning it over, trying to decide how it felt about the melody. His hand was shaking as he poured the first glass, sending the stream of dark wine shivering and slipping. He’d steadied it by the time he poured the second.

“Huna smile,” he said, opening the toasts by lifting his own glass. “Thanks for agreeing to stand up with me, you two.”

“Drown your sorrows in this one, and by the time we hit the next bottle you’ll remember that you’re here to celebrate. And that once you’re married to Sofia Cooper,” Roland went on, lowering his voice sympathetically, “Jay House will be rolling in enough money to replace a hundred watches.”

Except that Matti had to get himself successfully married in the first place. And he’d just lost his best guarantee of doing so.

He let the old, gorgeous wine flood down his throat until a good third of his glass had vanished. He felt lightheaded; it had to be panic, because the wine couldn’t be working that fast. Panic and a sense of becoming unmoored. And the image of the man’s face, pale and sharply beautiful, gazing up from where he was kneeling at Matti’s feet.

“A fair effort,” Wynn said, when Matti put the glass down. “But I’ll show you children of Huna how it’s done.” He raised his own glass. “Agar fill your plates and cups.”

Matti smiled and drank again, accepting the toast. Maybe the wine was working after all. He could still feel his panic, the wound-up watch of his worry, but he shoved it away into a recess of his mind: its own small, dark velvet bag. It would be safe enough there. It would last until tomorrow. Matti’s ability to worry was shatterproof.

For now, he was going to drink.

* * *

The sun was making a personal project of finding Matti’s eyes as he walked through the Glassport streets the next morning. Every gap between eaves and chimneys was a new opportunity for glaring rays to assault his eyelids. His head felt like one of the snow-baubles you could buy in the winter markets, flurried and shaken into a confusion of water and oil and small flecks of metal, and fragile. Prone to cracking. The sunlight was one source of cracks; the rumble of carts and carriages, raised voices, the rattle of machinery— the everyday racket of city life, which Matti could easily ignore on a normal day—was another.

Matti was not a drinker, as a rule. His family brought out the occasional decanter of good spirits if a deal was being struck or they had particular reason to please someone. On those occasions Matti had learned to spin out a glass across hours, to honour the work of Maha’s children by rolling each sip over his tongue, and to forget that alcohol had any ability to muddle the thoughts.

He’d also managed to forget that the state of existence known as Maha’s Revenge awaited anyone who had, for example, spent the previous night sharing two bottles of wine among three people and chasing all of that with glasses of rosemary jenever. Not that Matti could remember the jenever portion of the evening. He’d made an educated guess at that upon waking, based on the smell of his wrinkled shirt.

Matti had escaped his house relatively unmocked for his delicate state. His family knew where he’d been and what he’d been celebrating. The slight change in the set of his father’s shoulders, the new and terrible light of relief in the communication-dense glances his parents exchanged… those were a form of celebration too. A piece of lowered horizon glimpsed after a long, long uphill trek, whispering at the possibility that soon their feet might find the road sloping downwards.

Matti had awoken to the twins hurling themselves onto the lump of him in his sheets, delighted to find their older brother abed at a time of day when he’d usually have been awake for hours. Joselyne had chased them away and brought peppermint tea, which had helped the uneasy roil of Matti’s stomach but hadn’t done much for the head-bauble.

As much as Matti would have liked to stay in bed, or even to sit in his study with a plate of greasy spiced potato dumplings at his elbow, there was something he had to do this morning.

Matti ducked his head to avoid another piercing sunbeam and rounded the corner into the street that held his destination. The city’s only agency of swords-for-hire had its office tucked incongruously above an apothecary’s shop front, with a narrow flight of stairs leading up from street level. Matti passed through a doorway with the symbol of Pata, patron god of soldiers, guards, and duellists, set as a plaque above the doorframe. The room it led into was small, with a single window looking out onto the street, and it was dominated by a pair of wooden cabinets set on the opposite wall. A man with thinning blond hair sat behind a desk in front of the cabinets, and he was climbing to his feet even as Matti walked in.

“Mr. Jay,” he said. “What can I do for you, sir?”

The man’s face was vaguely familiar, but even Matti’s trained memory couldn’t attach a name to it. “I’m afraid you’ve got the advantage of me.”

“Tolliver.” He extended a hand and Matti shook it. “Hardy Tolliver. I stood swordguard for your sister’s naming ceremony, several years back. This was my father’s agency. Now it’s mine.”

“I need to hire a best man.”

“Of course. Is there reason to expect a challenge?” Hardy Tolliver’s voice was polite, his face impeccably blank. Matti didn’t have the energy to try to work out if Tolliver was being deliberately obtuse, or just displaying professional courtesy. If he knew who Matti was, he might well know more than that, and it wasn’t as though Adrean Vane made any secret of either his feelings for Sofia or his enthusiasm for the blade. He’d even set those feelings to music. There’d been a time last year when you could barely walk down a street in the city without hearing someone whistling “Wildflowers Under Glass”; it was the kind of tune that nestled merrily in the ear for days on end.

“Yes, there is,” Matti said.

“I can think of a few people on our books who would do nicely.” Tolliver waved Matti into a chair, and turned to open one of the cabinets. He began to flick through folders.

“I should probably tell you,” Matti said, “I can pay four hundred gold, and not a bronze more.”

Tolliver turned back to him, surprise splashed across his face. “We aren’t, ah, in the habit of bargaining—the Guild allows for rates to be set—”

“I’m not trying to bargain with you.”

Tolliver still looked bewildered. Matti steeled himself and gathered his most businesslike voice. It was the voice of a man who’d grown up in a townhouse in the Rose Quarter, who could count back eight generations of his House’s current trade, and whose father was currently in his second three-year term as elected Guildmaster.

It was Matti’s voice, even if these days Matti himself rattled around in its cadences like a slim foot in a shoe of overstretched leather.

“Jay House is having a rough quarter. I would appreciate it,” he said, “if this fact were not to become public knowledge.” He could only hope that wielding this little power would be enough to suppress the Glassport instinct for gossip; if not, a rough quarter was more forgivable than the truth.

“Four hundred gold?”

“Four hundred.”

“That does rule out a lot of our most talented people.”

“I thought that might be the case.” The memory of century notes leaving his hands bounced queasily inside Matti’s rib cage. “I’d appreciate anything you can offer me within that budget.”

Tolliver sat. He opened a leather folder and flicked through some loose pages, moving each one neatly from one side to the other. Then he looked up.

“There’s someone. He’s new to town. No prior duels to his name in Glassport and I only put him on the books two days ago, so I can’t give you a full reference, I’m afraid, but I tried him out. He’s not bad; he’s certainly better than what he’s charging. Probably the best value you’ll get for that price.”

It took Matti a moment to recognise the second layer of generosity there, no matter the truth of the “value” that Tolliver was offering. Someone new to town and unfamiliar with Glassport society might not recognise Matti as anyone significant. They might not bat an eye at the fact that Matti was paying midrange rates for a best man. It was another way to contain the gossip. It wasn’t an outright guarantee of Tolliver’s own silence, but it was a gesture. A statement of faith that one day Matti would be in a position to return the favour.

Matti nodded, trying to convey both understanding and appreciation. “Could I meet him before deciding?”

“Absolutely.” Now Tolliver smiled the relaxed smile of someone close to a sale. “Right now, if you’d like. He’s renting the attic from my wife and me, while he waits for a room that’s coming free in a boardinghouse at the end of the week. We’re just a few doors down. Wouldn’t be a moment to fetch him.”

Matti could see no reason to object, and Tolliver’s feet were fading on the stairs within a minute. In the sudden lull of thought and speech, Matti’s head began to remind him again about the jenever. He stood up and paced in the small space, taking deep breaths that smelled of dust and leather and, faintly, acrid herbal scents seeping up from the apothecary. He felt clearer by the time he heard Tolliver’s feet on the stairs again, this time accompanied by a second pair.

“Mr. Mattinesh Jay,” Tolliver said in tones of announcement as he entered. “And this is Luca Piere.”

Matti’s first thought was one of irrational despair: that Huna had decided to twist her knife, because far from assuming Matti to be a man of modest means, the man was now going to think him even more cheap.

Then reality elbowed him in the brain, and he felt his expression freeze onto his face.

Luca Piere was no longer wearing his brown coat with the patched elbow. He was wearing his good shirt and his thin trousers. And along with those, as he stood frozen behind Tolliver’s shoulder, he was wearing an expression of guilt so naked and obvious that Matti remembered, abruptly, that the man worked for Havelot. That he was visiting the city to pick up a watch.

Except that he clearly was not.

Matti’s heart leapt into his throat and then slammed back down again. He brimmed with a feeling of foolishness rapidly bubbling into fury. It was a con as old as the very idea of marketplaces: “break” something already broken, and demand compensation. And Matti had fallen for it simply because this man had had the gall to try it on a scale of two hundred gold, with a full audience of Glassport’s finest looking on.

Matti opened his mouth to say something—what exactly, he wasn’t sure—but before he could, that guilty expression widened into panic, and Piere took a smart few steps forward.

“You’ve told Mr. Jay he’d be taking a chance on me, Hardy,” Piere said. “How about you let us into the practice room and I’ll give him a bout, so he can see to his own satisfaction what he’s paying for?”

Matti stared at him. Piere’s head tilted towards the other door in the room, a mute and desperate invitation. His lips were pressed together hard enough that the already pale skin around them was bone-white. Matti, feeling the power in the room shift palpably in his own direction, found it easier to breathe and to think.

Tolliver looked dubious. “Have you done any duelling, Mr. Jay?”

Matti had never lifted a finger in a violent pastime in his life. But right now, experiencing the unusual palm-tingling urge to get his hands around another person’s throat and squeeze, he quite fancied the idea of picking up a weapon. Even if he hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with it. And he could feel his own sheer curiosity rising like a vine from the rich mud of his rage.

“I’ll give him a try,” he said shortly.

He followed Piere into a long, narrow room that stretched back away from the street, with light coming from a single street-end window and a series of skylights. The floor was heavily scuffed, and bolted along one wall was a rack of swords.

Luca Piere had stopped in the middle of this room. As soon as the door closed behind Matti, he turned, as though the click had triggered some small mechanism within him. In the daylight, his hair was a riot: a true, bright copper. It looked as though he’d sat in front of a mirror with a curling iron and painstakingly coaxed small pieces of it to curl in different directions. Or else he’d crawled out from a pile of pillows and not bothered to run a comb through it, and gravity had been so amused at the sight that it hadn’t interfered.

Matti’s hands, which were still tingling to be placed against the vulnerability of Piere’s pale throat, now began to take on an edge of interest in the hair instead. About how it might feel for them to be buried in it. About how ideal that length was for pulling.

Matti closed them both into fists, and ignored them.

“All right,” Matti said. “Now start talking.”

Chapter 2

Luca cursed the instinct that had led him to stand in the centre of the room. It was a natural response, after years of training, to seek a good vantage point. But he’d forgotten that he was unarmed, that he hadn’t bothered to strap on his own sword belt before leaving the house to meet a potential client, and now he’d left Mr. Mattinesh Jay closer to the sword rack. If the man on whom Luca had handily sprung the pocket watch con decided to snatch a weapon from the rack and come at him, Luca would be at a disadvantage. And if someone was angry enough, the fact that these were mostly tipped and dulled practice swords wouldn’t make a lot of difference in terms of the damage that they could do.

“All right,” said Jay. “Now start talking.”

He didn’t look like he was going to reach for a sword. In fact, the glance he gave the rack of weapons suggested he was uncomfortable just being in the same room as that many blades.

So of course Luca decided to say, “Pick up a sword.”

“What?”

Luca went and chose himself one. Jay’s dark eyes followed Luca warily as he tested grip and weight. Luca allowed himself one long held glance, trying to gauge just how angry the man was. He tried for neutrality, he really did, but it still came out sounding like a schoolmaster sarcastically spelling out the obvious when he repeated: “A sword.”

“I can’t actually use one,” Jay said, dry.

“Yes, I’d gathered that. But Tolliver’s going to expect to hear swords clashing, and I’m not keen on trying to have a fight with myself.” He added, “You can take off that nice coat, if you’re worried about getting a hole in it.”

Something unreadable flashed in Jay’s eyes. Then he let out an irritated sigh, turned aside, and began shrugging the coat off.

Luca took the opportunity to look his fill while Jay wasn’t looking back. When the coat came off and the man tugged his shirtsleeves awkwardly up, Luca realised that Jay was both taller and more solid than he’d appeared the previous night. The coat was near-black and tailored to fit like a possessive pair of hands, giving an illusion of a slimmer build, and Jay’s round-shouldered posture pulled him in on himself. Luca itched to get in close and curl his hands around those broad shoulders, like his own sword master had done for him, tugging them back and straight. He could spider his hand between the man’s shoulder blades, dig in his fingertips, and say, Now imagine a piece of string.

Luca shook his head and busied himself with turning the sword in his hand. He was getting carried away with nonsense because Jay… drew the eye, that was all, with his clear brown skin and his black hair, long enough to hint at the promise of curls if left untrimmed. Jay was too far from Luca now for the equally dark lashes to be visible, but up close in the drinking house they had been stunning.

Jay folded the coat and hung it over one edge of the rack. He reached for a sword, clearly at random; Luca could have told him that it was too short for his height, but it wasn’t like any of that mattered. This was just for cover. Jay walked into the centre of the room, lifted the sword like a stack of plates, and faced Luca down the length of both blades with a renewed look of stubborn nerves.

Luca rolled his eyes. “Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Oh, so you’re no more a duellist than you are working for Guildmaster Havelot?”

“No, I am a duellist.”

“Just supplementing your income with petty theft.”

Luca, feeling that needle further under his skin than he’d like, gave a tap with his sword against the one held in Jay’s too-stiff arm. “Yes. I tricked you. All right? I needed the money.”

“You think I didn’t?” Jay tried, clumsily, to tap back. Luca let his wrist absorb the jarring force.

“Look, Tolliver’s agency has a buy-in. I wasn’t expecting that, I thought he’d just let me start work and take it out in commission. So that took most of the ready money I had, and I needed something to pay for food and board.”

“And meanwhile you’ve wrangled yourself an invitation to stay with your new agent,” said Jay. “You do move fast, don’t you?”

“Hardy Tolliver’s a decent person,” said Luca. “Most people are.”

“All the better to take advantage?”

“I’m not— Oh, would you stop holding it like you’re trying to chop down a tree, Pata wept—”

Unsurprisingly, this accomplished nothing more than a further darkening of Jay’s expression and another stubborn clash of his sword against Luca’s.

“I don’t give a damn about your buying-in fee, your board, or any other excuse,” Jay said. “That was my money. What did you— why did you have to pick me to try your tricks on?”

Luca gave him an incredulous look, stepping back and letting his sword tip lower. “Are you joking? You bought a bottle of Cooper Ruby, and you were wearing the best clothes in the room. I do know what money looks like.”

Jay’s sword arm sagged back against his side. Now he didn’t look angry so much as despairing. This wasn’t making any sense.

“That two hundred gold was for this. For a best man. I’d set aside six hundred, in all. And scraping that much together meant weeks of my family tightening belts that were already tight, which was a fucking laugh to explain to my brother and sister, who are all of five and don’t really understand why hiring some stranger with a sword is more important than having sweets at the end of dinner. I’m not a damn miser. I’m desperate.”

Luca’s pulse had picked up, and he didn’t know what kind of excitement it heralded. Jay had seemed an obvious choice last night: a handsome face, deep pockets. And he’d been so eager to apologise; so desperately wanting to please. This voice, deep and rough around the edges with poorly suppressed emotion, was something different.

“I need a best man who will win any challenge. Guaranteed,” Jay went on. “So you’re going to hand me my money back, or I’m calling the city guard and they’ll haul you up in front of a magistrate.”

Luca bit his lip against hysterical laughter. The fucking irony, to flee the consequences of his actions in Cienne only to be arrested his first week here in Glassport.

“Or maybe I’ll call them anyway,” said Jay.

“No! Shitting fuck. Look—” Luca did the only thing he could think of to do, which was raise his sword again. Jay raised his own, startled. Luca stopped messing around with pretence; he stepped in close, engaged their blades, and twisted the sword out of Jay’s grip in a matter of seconds. It fell to the ground with a thud and a bounce, off to Luca’s left.

Jay stepped back. Luca followed.

He set the dulled point of the sword to Jay’s throat, watching the undulation of the skin there, where the line of the neck emerged from the loosened collar of the man’s shirt. As soon as the metal touched his skin, Jay went still. Now Luca could see those eyelashes, and those eyes as well, opening wide. Jay’s lips parted in something that was almost certainly fear, but which Luca’s nerves interpreted as something else. Arousal gave an interested twist in Luca’s stomach.

It had taken a few seconds at most. There was no reason for Luca to feel breathless, beyond the fact that Jay had given another nervous swallow, and Luca couldn’t decide whether to look at his eyes or at the place where the dull bronze of his skin met the white of the shirt.

“Give me the rest of the money,” said Luca.

Jay’s eyes fell to the sword, then rose. “Are you trying to rob me again? How exactly do you think that’s going to work?”

“Hire me,” Luca said. “As your best man.”

“Hire you? Are you mad?”

“You’ve already said you planned to pay six hundred. Pay it to me.”

“Yes, that’s what I budgeted. For someone very good.”

“I am extremely good.” Luca gave a deliberate dart of his eyes to where Jay’s sword lay, a fair distance from their feet. Jay did not seem impressed. Fair enough. Disarming an inept beginner was hardly an accomplishment.

“Tolliver said you’re… not bad,” said Jay.

Luca let the sword drop again. “Tolliver is a middling swordsman who, if I’m any judge, stepped gratefully behind a desk as soon as the opportunity arose to become a businessman instead. I was barely trying when he tried me out.” He was exaggerating, but not by much.

Jay’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re worth six hundred, as you claim, then why are you charging less?”

Luca couldn’t exactly say, Because I’m trying to keep a low profile. “Because I’m new. I haven’t any record to rely on; there’s no point in my entering the market at the top, untested. I need to build my reputation. I can always raise my price once demand is established.”

That was the kind of business sense that any child could understand. Jay nodded slowly, but the suspicion hadn’t vanished from his face yet. Luca needed to press his advantage before Jay could start poking holes in his story. Or talking about magistrates again.

Now that the sun was higher in the sky, it was warm in this room, which pulled sunlight in through the skylights but had no cracked windows to allow for an exchange of air. Luca wiped his brow. His best idea was going to require some exertion.

“Hold this for me,” he said abruptly, and tossed his sword up— showing off—to adjust his grip, catching it by the guard as it fell. He offered it to Jay, hilt-first. It was a thin gesture of trust, here between the two of them where there was no trust at all and no reason for it to exist. Jay took the sword probably more out of instinctual politeness than anything else.

Luca pulled his shirt off over his head, exhaling in relief as the air found the moisture on his skin and set about cooling him. He took the sword back from Jay’s unresisting hands, swiped back a few hanks of hair that had tried to fall over his forehead, and went back to his position in the centre of the room. He fell into a ready stance.

“What are you doing?” said Jay.

“Showing you what your money’s worth,” Luca said, and began.

To someone as ignorant as Jay, Luca could only hope that what he was doing was recognisable as proficient. He was tempted to make it showier, to add a few flourishes and tricks, as though he were fighting off a host of imaginary opponents. But he could hear Master Carriere’s heavy, uncompromising voice telling him that this was not a game, that there were no shortcuts, and that respect for the weapon and the body were the only keystones. Luca believed that theatrics added spice to most areas of life, but this wasn’t one of them.

He did the simple forms as a warm-up, then the advanced ones. He did them in a perfect line. He did them very, very quickly.

The sun in his eyes was an annoyance, so he closed them. Blood hammered in his feet. He could feel the familiar ache that wasn’t pain, but acceptable stress, in his wrist and in his shoulder, after five minutes had passed without his ever lowering the blade fully.

A knock sounded on the door to the room.

Luca whirled, the sound like a hammer on the pulled-tight anticipation of his reflexes. He heard in the silence the quick pant of his own breath.

Jay was staring at him, one of his hands trying to clench around the fitted fabric of his trousers. His gaze dragged across Luca’s bare chest before rising, and Luca felt the heat of it even on his overheated skin.

“Is everything satisfactory, Mr. Jay?” came Hardy Tolliver’s voice.

Luca held very still. He felt balanced on the edge of a knife; he had no idea which way he might fall.

“I can do this for you,” Luca said, low. “You’re not the only one who’s desperate. Please.”

It seemed half a century before Jay nodded and raised his voice. “Everything’s fine, Mr. Tolliver. We’re just talking. I’ll be out in a moment, to sign the contract.”

Luca exhaled. His heart eased itself away from the battering it had been giving his ribs. “Thank you.”

“Not so fast,” said Jay. “I have a condition.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll pay you the six hundred, as a duellist’s fee. And in exchange for not telling anyone the truth of what happened last night… there’s something else I want.”

Luca curled and uncurled the fingers of his sword hand, uncertain. Jay looked embarrassed. No matter what it was, Luca would have to have a good reason to refuse. Jay had a far better bargaining position, and they both knew it.

“Yes?”

“Sword lessons. I want you to teach me.”

“You think you can be your own—”

“No, don’t be stupid.” Jay waved a hand. “It’s only a few months until the wedding. Obviously I can’t learn more than the basics in that time. I don’t expect you to turn me into a master. But”—his voice firmed, his shoulders straightened—“it’s something I’d like to try.”

It wasn’t an unreasonable request. There was no way Luca would get enough work through Tolliver’s agency to fill his days entirely. He could spare a few hours to show this man how to hold a sword.

“Done,” Luca said. “Now, I’ve got a question. Why do you need a best man worth six hundred gold?”

“My betrothed. Sofia. She has…… an inconveniently talented paramour.”

“Ah,” said Luca. “And you wish to ensure the match between yourself and this Sofia is untainted by any suggestion that the gods might not approve.”

Jay gave a sudden, unsteady burst of laughter. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if they simply don’t. They seem to be doing everything they can to make it impossible. Including shoving you into my path.”

Luca smiled, and felt un unexpected squirm of delight when Jay’s mouth twitched towards the beginning of an answering smile.

“Think of it this way,” Luca said. “They then shoved you right back at me. And—look at that! You’re still getting what you need.”

“I don’t need sword lessons.” The note of tentative shame buried in Jay’s voice told Luca a lot.

“And something that you want, on top of it, for the same price. See? Good fortune.”

“Don’t push it,” said Jay, but now he was almost smiling outright.

Luca was lightheaded with relief. He wasn’t sure which god to thank for the fact that this encounter had managed to swing around from Jay looking ready to bludgeon him with the wrong end of a sword, to this, where Jay was agreeing that it was almost lucky that Luca had conned him the night before. But Luca wasn’t about to question his good fortune either. He rubbed grateful fingers on both the hilt of his sword and the waistband of his trousers, sending out a silent twinned prayer. “When do you want to start?” he asked.

“Tomorrow? Early mornings suit me.”

Luca made a face. “How about evenings? After dinner?”

“I’m the one paying you,” said Jay.

Luca grinned. “Not for this, you’re not. Technically.”

Oh, Luca knew his role in this: the hired sword, bought into the service of this son of a grand House. His role was to be accommodating. To uncomplainingly do what he was told.

Luca had never been very good at doing what he was told.

“I’m paying you, and I say mornings,” said Jay. “Just after sunrise. It’s the only time I can spare.”

“All right,” said Luca. “Just don’t expect sparkling conversation.”

Luca returned his sword to the rack. He picked up his shirt and narrowly stopped himself from using it as a rag to wipe the sweat from his face and neck; he did have to wear the thing, after all, and didn’t have many spares. He contented himself by wiping one palm on his trousers. A spark of mischief, a desire to push further, let him walk right up to Jay with his shirt still bundled in his hands. He watched to see if Jay’s eyes dropped again to his chest.

They did.

Luca said, “Let’s make this formal. A pleasure doing business with you, sir. My name is Luca Piere.”

“My name is Mattinesh Jay.”

They shook hands. Jay’s hand was broad, smooth, and uncalloused as it engulfed Luca’s. It was a hand that matched the coat, matched the bottle of wine, and didn’t match at all the terrible urgency in Jay’s manner, or the way his voice had sounded as he talked about his family. Every House went through rough patches, but Luca had never seen anyone with such a disconnect between the way they appeared and the things they said. Jay had no obvious reason to lie. He was a man with almost no money, who’d turned up to a sword agency and was prepared to gamble on a newcomer who might or might not be worth more than what he was asking, simply for—

Ah.

“She’s rich, this betrothed of yours,” Luca realised. “You need the bond price. That’s why you’re prepared to throw far more than you can afford at a best man.”

Jay’s lips parted in that distracting manner again. A faint tint entered his cheeks; Luca suspected it would have been a flood of annoyed scarlet in someone of Luca’s own complexion.

“Yes,” he said, stiff.

“Well, there’s no need to worry,” Luca said. “I’ll stand beside you at your wedding, Mattinesh Jay. And I’ll win.”

Excerpted from Swordcrossed, copyright © 2024 by Freya Marske.