Dad Hears My Thoughts novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Stitches

Tristram felt me go stiff and turned his head.

He saw them, and he pushed me behind him into the doorway.

"Go," he said. "Run home."

"They're between us and home."

The first man came in low and fast with his knife held point up.

Tristram didn't have a sword. They'd taken it at the hearing.

He had his cloak.

He whipped it off his shoulders, soaked and heavy, and threw it over the knife and the arm and the man's head all at once.

Then he hit him through it. Twice. The man went down on the cobbles in a tangle of green velvet.

The second one was already coming.

I had my hand in my coat pocket.

My father's hammer was there, the small cleaving hammer I'd carried every day since he died. His name was burned into the handle.

The second man slashed at Tristram's side. Tristram twisted, and the knife went along his ribs instead of in.

He caught the man's wrist and slammed it against the doorframe beside my head.

The knife didn't drop.

So I brought the hammer down on that wrist as hard as I bring it down on a rough stone.

Something cracked. The man screamed and the knife rang off the step.

The third one stopped in the rain, looking at his two friends.

"Take the paper off her," the man with the broken wrist gasped. "He wants the paper."

The third man came for me.

Tristram put his body in the way.

The third man looked at the blood on Tristram's shirt, then at the hammer in my hand.

He ran.

The other two scrambled up and ran after him.

The one Tristram had hit left his long coat in Tristram's hand.

Under it he'd been wearing a livery coat. Dark blue, with a silver badge on the breast.

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