The Sword (15 page)

“Saber, Lady Kelly wishes to infor—”

“Shut up, Wolfer.” Saber stared down at her, his hands braced on the ends of her armrests. She refused to look at him, peering deliberately over his shoulder as she ate her strange meal of cheese, crumbly eggs, and bread slices. “Look at me. Look at me, Kelly!”

“Lady Kelly, I believe my brother has conveyed a request for you to observe him directly.”

Kelly cleared her mouth, calmly reaching for her mug of juice and sipping from it, ignoring the cage of his arms. “Did your brother say ‘please' in this request?”

Saber tightened his grip on the armrests of her chair, but played along. To have wrestled all night long with his hard-awakened desire for her, with his fear—yes,
fear
—of the Curse hanging over their heads, to have finally given in and gone to fetch her breakfast from the kitchen to take to her, however belatedly…only to find her gone, completely gone, with no clue of where she had gone or how, had made him sick with dread.

Any mage familiar enough with Nightfall and strong enough to have sent so many of the mekhadadaks and other creatures to plague them over the past three years could have used memory, or even a painting, to scry and spy with and look in upon their activities. If they were strong enough, that same enemy-mage could have somehow discovered her presence. His brothers and he made damned sure all of the mirrors in each and every room, even the ones they never used, were enspelled against scrying to prevent such attempts on their lives…but two hundred years ago, Nightfall had been a thriving duchy, and not just an island used to exile the most unwanted of Katan. Someone clearly had a painting or two of the castle left over from that time, one marked with identifying images still good enough to transport creatures via spells.

Good enough to maybe realize there was a woman in the castle and snatch her away…or perhaps even kill her. Finding her gone when Saber had expected her to stay put had nearly stopped his heart. So, faced with her obstinate, incomprehensible female behavior, he played along with it.

“Wolfer, would you kindly pass along my request to the Lady Kelly, here, that she
please
look at me?” he asked graciously as she finished her sandwich and drained the last of her juice.

“Lady Kelly, my brother waxes eloquent in his request, replete with a most courtly ‘please,' that you favor him with your full attention.”

“If he is gentlemanly in his behavior, then naturally I shall acknowledge him,” Kelly allowed, wiping the corners her mouth with her fingers, since there were no napkins—another oversight she would have to correct as a part of her womanly duty to more or less uphold civilized behavior wherever she was. She shifted her gaze from one of the abstract stained glass windows of the hall to the man whose shoulder blocked half of that windowed view. “See how easy it is to get my attention, Saber? Even
I
deserve some display of kindness.”

Her words, accompanying that shift of aquamarine blue into his steel gray, pierced him with her simplicity. With her soul. Saber forgot how to breathe as he drowned in that clear blue green gaze, as the world shifted around him abruptly, primed by his unwilling proximity to her and nudged by the sudden fear she had left. He didn't want to breathe; not on his own. Not looking into her eyes.

There was a tie between them that made each of her exhaled breaths an indrawn one of his own, each exhale of his, her inhale. The scent of her body, musky and feminine, and the faint aroma of
tisi
flower oils mingled exotically with each breath she gave him, drew him far more than any need for oxygen could. He had been drawn to her from the first, against his will, in spite of his will…because of his will. Just a shift of his hands, and he could touch those blue-clad arms, where her elbows rested on the armrests and her forearms draped into her lap. An inch, maybe two, and he could touch her.

Claim her, in the ways his imagination had come up with, despite his resistance to everything she stood for. Sitting there, still too hardworn and thin but ripe with curves, blatantly woman, with a will as strong as his own and a determination to face the disasters of her own life head on, Kelly of Doyle was worth risking the Curse for. Worth loving and caring for…and Saber was a world-class idiot for ever thinking otherwise.

She was right, though. He had treated her like a brute. He didn't deserve her, and not just because of the Curse. Because he ran from his fears, while she did her best to face hers. If he loved her, she could be killed by the other Katani in fear of the Curse, by the Disaster foretold and now quite possibly linked to her, or taken from him by his youngest brother and returned to her rightful home. Because there was most likely nothing she wanted here.

Not even him. A base brute.

“You wish to ask me something, Saber?” the outworlder woman prompted him as he continued to stare at her, keeping his expression completely unreadable and everything he was feeling carefully on the inside, where it could freely reel and shift everything into a confused mess he knew he would have to climb out of somehow.

There was no escaping one's Destiny; Saber realized that now.

He shifted away from her and her chair, unable to meet her gaze anymore. “Never mind.”

Confused, Kelly watched him turn and walk away. She arched a puzzled brow, but he didn't explain his actions. He just left the hall.

“If you will not be needing me until the assigned time in half an hour, Lady Kelly,” his slightly younger, more muscular twin rumbled in that deep voice of his, “I'll need to attend to a couple of things before I report for housecleaning duty.”

She craned her head over the back of the chair and looked at him. “Thank you, Wolfer. I
think
I got through to him finally…but I'm not sure.”

“Perhaps you did. Perhaps
he
is the one who is not sure,” the second eldest of the Eight murmured, his golden eyes wolf-wise. Of all of the brothers, he was the one who knew his own twin best, after all.

The others wisely said nothing.

E
ven Dominor cooperated. Reluctantly and with the assertion he was doing it because it was
his
opinion that the castle needed cleaning, and thus needed the strength of his magic to help…but he cooperated. The first day, the brothers, under her direction, scrubbed the floor of the great hall, eradicated its cobwebs and dust, scrubbed and polished the table, cleaned and polished the chairs, and made the large kitchen a short distance away positively sparkle—a chore greatly enhanced in its ease and success by the application of their version of magical elbow grease.

Cleaning the kitchen was her biggest priority, once the main hall was done. That at least ensured that their meals would be up to Kelly's otherworldly standards of hygienic preparation…which was a big relief to her. Once it was all done to her satisfaction, Kelly delivered a lecture to all of them about frequent hand washing and safe cooking practices while handling and preparing different kinds of foods. The last thing she needed was a bout of Montezuma's revenge, or worse.

On the second day, counting from the point she escaped her room and joined the household in full, the six of them—minus Saber and Rydan—marched behind Kelly, accompanying her back up to her given chamber after breakfast. They not only cleaned her rooms more thoroughly than she already had with the aid of their magic, they redecorated, stripping away the not-exactly-inviting scheme the room originally presented. At Evanor's suggestion, and under the most domesticated brother's direction, they cast several spells in her chambers to alter colors and lighten the overall feel.

It was fascinating to watch them work their magic. A flick of a wrist, a mutter of strange syllables that her ears couldn't translate, and they methodically altered everything in the room. From the dark, dirty red velvet curtains, which were replaced with shades of pale blue and green, heavyweight linen rescued from a storeroom by the fourth-born brother and cleaned with their ubiquitous cleaning cantrips, to scrubbing and painting the stone walls a room-brightening shade of chalk white, it was all done with sparkling lights and shimmering waves, and the occasional sizzling sound.

Painting and dyeing literally with magic, the six brothers enthralled their nonmagical guest with this display of their powers. They quickly took some pride in competing with those powers, too, as she stared, wide-eyed and wondering. Her amazement even drove them into cooperating in rearranging the furniture and removing some of it so that it wasn't as cluttered with chests and tables as before, but rather had better flow around the largish room.
Amazing,
she thought as she watched them working on restoring the suite to its former glory,
what one can do with a properly appreciative audience to spur them onward…

They left the bed where it was, though they moved the massive piece of furniture via magic just enough to make sure the wooden floor was scrubbed and wax-polished directly underneath it, at Kelly's insistence. The head of it faced to the east, and the foot to the west, leaving the entry door to the north and the refreshing door to the south. To the right of the bed, they removed a moth-eaten tapestry from the wall and uncovered a modest fireplace set in the corner of two of the eight-sided walls, over by the refreshing room door.

They made that corner into a sort of sitting area, with a carved and cushioned loveseat couch Trevan located from somewhere else in the palace. Kelly admired it; the small couch had just the right kind of leather-padded, curved arm perfect for leaning on while curled up with a book. Not that she expected to be loaned a lot of books, but what was good for reading was also good for sewing.

Wolfer added a matching chair from somewhere. Both the chair and the loveseat were scrubbed soundly with more cleaning spells to remove the dust, and the dark, cherry-like wood was polished with beeswax to restore its shine. The hearth and its furniture stood on the left of the refreshing room door. To the right of that door, clockwise, was the bathing tub in the southwestern corner, which Saber had already cleaned. Of course, Dominor—ever the perfectionist—gave it a second going-over just to be sure it was up to his standards…once his standards had been roused by the challenge of Kelly's own exacting level of cleanliness.

Koranen brought up two folding screens, silk painted with snow capped mountains and flying birds, for an illusion of privacy, once they were positioned between the door and the bed and bathtub. When Kelly described what terry cloth was like, compared to the plain, sheet-like cloth they used for drying themselves, Evanor disappeared for two hours and came back with cotton cloth he had magically rewoven to approximate what she had described. He then promptly found himself promising his brothers, on threat of torture, to make more of the marvelous material for each of them. It was an immediate hit when Kelly demonstrated how much more effective the loop-nubbed, cotton cloth was at mopping up water, compared to what they had been using.

By the time he came back with the first try at the new cloth, the others had shoved the desk out of the middle of the room and into the northwest corner between the tub and the entryway door, clearing out some of the dusty chests that had cluttered that area. The brothers then helped her fix up the northeast corner between the door and the bed as a working nook for her various sewing projects. Well,
helped
was a misnomer. Wolfer picked her up and set her aside, insisting on doing all of the physical labor after a pointed look from Morganen, when she tried dragging around one of the tables herself.

When most of the room was settled, the six brothers brought in piles of clothing for her to mend. They did so while mock-complaining that now they had nothing to wear worthy of the fancy donjon below her chamber, now that the main hall had been cleaned. Joking with each other, the six of them started competing to see which one had the garment with the most holes in need of repair. Kelly had begun to take note of each brother's personality in her observations over the past two days, and she noticed that Dominor was not only arrogant, but competitive as well.

The third-born brother bested the others by finally dipping his hands into his sack of laundry, bringing out his fingers so that they were partially pinched together, and holding his hands up in the air about a foot apart. With nothing dangling between them but his smirking expression, he smugly explained, “Your shirt is mayhaps
second
worst, Wolfer, but I defy this woman to fix
my
undertunic! Why, even the holes clearly have holes of their own!”

As the others gave the arrogant mage dirty looks and laughed, Kelly tossed a cushion at him. “I'll have to stitch your very hide, then, you utter fraud! Come here, so I can set my needle!”

The amount of sewing they had brought was overwhelming, a rounded mound on the floor almost as tall as Kelly herself. She complained that she didn't think she had enough thread and such, and they listened. The six of them trooped down the stairs, cleaning the stairwell as they went, promising good-naturedly to tackle the sewing room next on their list of chores.

True to their word, that was the thing they did the very next day, Kelly in tow. She came up with a list of how she wanted the longish room remade once she saw it, then the rest of that floor in that section of the palace wing. Each brother attended to his best-suited task. Koranen cleaned every hearth in the room and tended to all of the lightglobes, making sure they were still good, and polishing their stands. Trevan polished all of the wooden furniture, and Wolfer took care of bringing down and setting up the curtains and tapestries between laundering them with Dominor's help, being the tallest and most muscular of them; he also worked on restoring the cracked leather coverings of those furnishings that were not cushioned in cloth.

Dominor polished the windows and replaced the cracked and missing panes, removed the grime from the oil paintings, and tackled those cushions that were made from fabric. Evanor scrubbed the floors and walls quite cheerfully, even scrubbing at the ceilings with the aid of a levitating mop, humming as he worked. Morganen did most of the wall-painting. He was faster and neater at it than the rest, and seemed to have an endless supply of whitewash paint to cover the plaster, as well as plaster to repair the occasional crack or flake.

And, in every room they entered and worked, the six of them plopped Kelly down in a comfortable chair as soon as they had cleaned a spot on the floor for her, with a small table at her side full of supplies and tidbits of food, and piles of clothing waiting to be mended at her other side. At least one garment at all times was constantly in her lap and an enchanted needle in her fingers—one that set four short stitches for every long one that she actually made, courtesy of Evanor. Indeed, she was refused the chance to get up for anything but a trip to the nearest refreshing room, so that she could eat, rest, and pay her way, according to her own rule number three, while they did all of the hard labor.

The brothers also did their best to clean up their language around her, but they were delighted, if a little unnerved, when she gave as good as she got in both good-natured insults and cleaner jokes alike. And though she made up a pair of skirts for herself out of spare fabric found in one of the chambers and a pair of long-hemmed blouses to belt over them, they grew used to the way she preferred wearing pants to a skirt whenever possible, once she made herself a set of trousers. Indeed, the whole mood of the castle brightened, not just with each room cleaned, but by the efforts of the cleaners themselves.

Evanor inevitably sang as he worked, for he claimed his magic was based in resonances. That made the work more bearable, for he had a smooth, sweet tenor voice. Of course the others got into several makeshift competitions to see who could clean the best and the fastest. Dominor led the main competition: Who could come up with a creative idea to make what supplies they had work best for restoring each room, while repositioning the antique, eclectic tastes of other eras into some arrangement that all of them liked.

The only rooms her chair, table, and self weren't placed into as the days of rapid, magic-speeded cleaning turned into one week, then into two, were the personal chambers of each brother. There, she was left out in the newly cleaned and painted hall in that section or wing, and allowed only to supervise by general advice from the hallway.

“Because it isn't proper for a lady to be in a man's bedchamber, if you aren't going to be wed to him soon,” Morganen had explained with a little smile. And then promptly spoiled it with a grin and a tongue-in-cheek, “So, which bedchamber would you like to go into?”

Saber's
, her unruly mind had instantly asserted. Except Saber never quite got close enough to join the others. That was the only pall cast on her days, aside from occasional bouts of homesickness. Sometimes he left them alone for hours at a time; sometimes she caught glimpses of him. He acted like a ghost, hovering a little way away, usually just beyond an open door. Watching his brothers laugh and have a good time in her company. But he didn't come near, and she didn't seek him out. She looked for him, but she didn't go to him.

So, Kelly replied simply, if a bit tartly, “My own, of course.
Alone
.”

She felt a little confused, actually. She wanted Saber, but he aggravated her. She missed him, but she didn't want to get into yet another argument with him. And she missed sparring with him, but couldn't back down from the stance she had set. Nor could she see a way to bridge the distance between them. It wasn't hard to understand his fears about that Curse-verse looming over him and so clearly associated with her if he took her into his bed, but Kelly still wished this universe didn't have to take such things so seriously.

His brothers were fun to be with, once they were all more or less being nice to her. But as fun as these cleaning sessions were, they were…well, just a little bit flat.

 

S
aber hated his brothers.

He knew they assumed the woman among them was destined for him as the eldest, and he actually wanted her to be destined for him…but there was a gap between the two of them now, and he didn't know how to close it. So he spent part of his time working on projects for the suppliers, and part of his time taking out his frustration on the practice pells in either the salle or the training courtyard where the brothers exercised their nonmagical defensive skills. And he spent part of his time following their progress through the wings of the donjon palace.

He had to take most of a day off to ferry all of their completed projects from the storage room at the western gate down to the shores of the western cove. That was so that when the new moon meeting-time came and passed, he would be ready to barter with the traders who came by. Unfortunately, without his brothers' help, he found himself repeatedly driving one of the several horseless wagons his youngest brother had created for their own use back and forth to get everything down to the trading warehouse.

All on his own, Saber bartered for the goods they needed and hauled those goods back up to the castle in the magic-powered wagon, while six of his seven brothers catered to Kelly's cleanliness and orderliness whims. Of course, the last one slept through the day, as usual, but that was still six brothers too many who were not paying attention to the usual twice-monthly trading routine.