Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set

by Jill Elaine Hughes

  “No, I can’t imagine,” I say, fiddling with my empty coffee cup. “You’re rambling, Phillip. I’m not following you.”

  Syr Phillip flops down on one of his Italian leather armchairs. “I’m sorry. I’m just no good at telling this story.”

  I glance at my watch. “Well, you better start getting good at it, or I’m leaving. I didn’t come all this way to watch you hem and haw and tell me how you’re no good at justifying your own shitty behavior towards me.”

  Syr Phillip puts his face in his hands and sighs. After a moment, he goes on. “What was I talking about? My mom, right. So, while my dad is spending every night of the week over at Syr Thorvald’s house learning to be a knight, my mom was at home getting depressed and taking it out on us kids. She enjoyed the SCA, sure. She was good at sewing and crafts, and she was able to find an outlet for those talents in the SCA. She got into costuming and card-weaving, and she won a few honorable mentions in the local arts and sciences competitions by the time she’d been in the SCA a year. I think when my parents first got involved in the organization, they found all the pomp and pageantry and courtly-love tradition romantic. But that didn’t last. By the time my dad got squired to Thorvald, he’d started spending so much time at fight practice and messing around in the garage trying to build himself a decent suit of metal armor that he got fired from his job. He was only a grocery store manager, so it wasn’t like he made a lot of money in the first place, but it obviously became a strain on the family to lose that income. My mom hadn’t worked outside the home since before she was married, but with my dad following Syr Thorvald around like a puppy and basically being completely irresponsible towards his family, Mom had to take matters into her own hands.”

  “Like how? You’re making it sound like she had him beat up or something,” I say.

  Phillip resumes his nervous pacing. “Not exactly. My mom knew she couldn’t rely on my father to earn a living anymore—at least not until he got knighted. So she started selling real estate. And she became very successful at it very quickly. Within a few months of getting her real estate license, she was earning twice as much as my dad ever did, while still having plenty of time to spend at home with us kids. Pretty soon Mom was making enough money to cover all our bills and then some, and she started feeling good enough about herself to take her SCA costuming and card-weaving projects to the next level. She won several major arts and sciences competitions, including a prize at the kingdom level called the Order of the Evergreen which is one step below becoming a Laurel—and that made my father insanely jealous. In addition to her winning some local SCA notoriety for her costuming and crafts and being one step closer to becoming a Kingdom Peer than Dad was, Mom was outdoing Dad in the financial arena, too. Our family’s standard of living went up substantially, and Mom used some of the extra money to get all us kids outfitted in better garb and enrolled in all the SCA’s extracurricular programs for kids—including putting me and Stephen in youth fighting training. But our relationship with Dad deteriorated, and pretty soon going to SCA events stopped being very much fun, because Mom and Dad fought almost the entire time. After the family had been involved with the SCA for about a year and a half, Mom and Dad were basically at war with one another. And us kids got caught in the middle—we started feeling obligated to take sides.”

  “Whose side did you take?” I ask, although I think I already know the answer.

  A look of deep pain crosses Syr Phillip’s face. He stops pacing, and leans heavily against the fireplace mantel. “Mom’s, of course. Holly and I both sided with her. Holly and I were very, very close growing up. Like I said, we were practically twins. And not just in terms of the nearness of our ages. We thought and acted alike most of the time—we had almost a psychic connection. And we both took after Mom’s personality more than we did Dad’s. Steve, on the other hand, took more after Dad, and he was Dad’s favorite, too. He always took Dad’s side, even when Dad was being a totally irresponsible, selfish ass. Do you realize that idiot brother of mine actually defended my dad when he missed my sister’s final dance recital in favor of polishing Syr Thorvald’s collection of steel breastplates? Not to mention Steve’s insisting that forcing my mom to support the family by herself was justified as long as my dad ended up getting knighted? For a nine-year-old bratty kid, my little brother was a real know-it-all of marital relations, let me tell you. And that wasn’t even the half of it—” Syr Phillip trails off, and bangs his bare fist against the brick fireplace so hard he swears.

  “There’s something else you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” I ask gently. It’s all I can do not to rush over to Syr Phillip and kiss his wounded hand. But I’m sticking to my guns—business is business, and playing hard-to-get is playing hard-to-get.

  Syr Phillip rubs his fist and grimaces in pain that is probably more than just physical. “Yes, there is, Lisa. This was right around the time that Dad started having his first affair.”

  “With who? Duchess Danyel?” I ask, innocently.

  “Oh, no. Dad didn’t hook up with her until after—well, until after Mom died. This was well before that. He started seeing a woman from Middle Marches named Isabel, or Isolde, or something like that. I didn’t know too much about her, and didn’t much care to—after all, she was a home-wrecker who was hurting my mother and our family. But Steve didn’t seem to mind that. In fact, he loved Isabel. He even started calling her ‘Mom.’”

  “Ewww,” I say. Now I’m embarrassed to have felt any attraction towards Syr Phillip’s younger brother.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on him about it now,” Syr Phillip says thoughtfully. “After all, he was just a little kid at the time, and he didn’t get along well with Mom, Holly, or me even then. So I suppose it was natural for him to take Dad’s side, and maybe even gravitate towards Dad’s new girlfriend a little too. The fact that my dad openly flaunted his affair with Isabel when he was still married to my mother was pretty shameless, but it’s not like we kids had any say in it. I can’t exactly blame Steve for my father’s bad behavior. But even so, that doesn’t excuse Steve for what happened next.”

  “So, what did happen next?” I ask. But based on the snippets of Syr Phillip’s tragic family past that I already know, the picture is already beginning to take shape.

  “Steve got to know Isabel or Isolde or whatever-her-name-was because Dad started taking Steve with him over to Syr Thorvald’s a lot, and his new girlfriend would visit him over there. Rumor has it that Syr Thorvald let them shack up together over there, too—and if it was true, he could well have been asked to give up his knighthood—but nobody knows for sure. Dad was definitely shacking up with her somewhere, but I suppose it could have been the local Motel 6 just as easily as it was Syr Thorvald’s house.

  “Well, it came to pass that Mom made Dad an ultimatum. Either he dumped Isabel, got a job, and started acting like a proper husband again, or she was filing for divorce and keeping us kids and the house. She made the ultimatum the week before Pennsic 14—that was in 1985—and gave him two weeks to comply. The whole family went to Pennsic together at Mom’s insistence, but most of the time, Dad stayed at Syr Thorvald’s encampment—presumably, so he could spend more time with Isabel, who was a member of Syr Thorvald’s household. But as it turns out, Dad wasn’t Isabel’s only boyfriend. Dad found out that she was also sleeping with Syr Thorvald and several other knight and fighter types, too. People can be pretty cavalier about having loud sex in tents at Pennsic, and I suppose that’s how Dad found out.”

  “Ouch,” I say. “But it sounds like he probably got what he deserved.”

  “At first it might seem so,” Syr Phillip says. “But it got more complicated. The same day that Dad found out about Isabel and Thorvald and all the others, he got sent on his knightly vigil by King Wurmvald. That’s an all-night prayer ceremony that’s a precursor to being knighted. The rub was, since Dad was Syr Thorvald’s squire, Syr Thorvald had to oversee Dad’s all-night vigil. And after just findi
ng out that Syr Thorvald was sharing beds with Dad’s girlfriend, you might imagine Dad didn’t take too kindly to this.”

  “Uh huh,” I say, stretching my legs. “But didn’t your dad still have to act all, like, chivalrous and nice and stuff since it was a knight’s ceremony?”

  “Well, technically, yes, he did. But that’s not exactly what happened. Granted, I wasn’t allowed to be a part of his vigil, so I never saw what happened first-hand. But what did happen during my dad’s knightly vigil is the stuff of legend in Midrealm lore. To this day, more than twenty years later, there are still people who think that my father never should have been knighted because of what happened on his vigil. Not to mention what happened the day after his vigil.”

  “So, what did happen, exactly? And what does all of this have to do with your kid brother being a brat?”

  “Well, there was a bit of a. . .scuffle, to put it mildly, between Syr Thorvald and my dad. Several of the other knights who King Wurmvald had assigned to keep vigil with Dad that night had to break it up.”

  “This is all very confusing,” I remark.

  “I know—I’m rambling.” Syr Phillip pounds on his temples with his fists. “This is the part of the story that gets really hard for me to tell.”

  “Why?”

  Syr Phillip comes to sit next to me on the couch. I’m shocked to see that his eyes are tearing up. “I’m getting close to the part where Mom and Holly die. Dad and Steve were directly responsible for their deaths, you know.” The caustic acid of twenty-plus years of rage boils just behind Syr Phillip’s eyes. All at once, I finally see the real Phil Dawson, the flesh-and-blood human being underneath all the froth, romance, and ceremony he hides behind in the SCA. My heart goes out to him, but I stop just short of meeting his lips. Whether or not our relationship ever gets rebuilt into what it once was, I know that the key to getting Syr Phillip back on the Midrealm throne is implicit in his getting at the part of himself that he keeps locked behind layers and layers of anger, resentment, and frustration towards his father and brother. “I should really stop blaming my dad for Mom and Holly getting killed,” he says. “In the final analysis, it was really all Steve’s fault. Innocent nine-year-old kid or not, he was the one that made Mom and Holly leave Pennsic that year the way they did.”

  I chew on this for a moment. I have a very hard time believing that a nine-year-old kid can be solely responsible for the deaths of two people. Since I’m an only child, I don’t much understand the bitter rivalries that can brew up among siblings. But one thing I do understand is assigning blame, rationally or not, when someone close to you dies. After all, I’ve been blaming myself for my own parents’ deaths for years.

  I look up and find Syr Phillip staring straight into my eyes. “What are you thinking right now?” he asks, his voice tender.

  “I’m thinking that your emotions are really wrapped up in this, and maybe that keeps you from seeing the whole picture,” I reply.

  The words sting him. “You haven’t even heard the whole story yet,” Syr Phillip snaps. “At least reserve all your cruel judgments until I’m finished.”

  “I—I’m sorry,” I mumble. “Keep going.”

  Syr Phillip gets up and starts pacing the room again. “I didn’t get to the part about what happened the morning after Dad’s knightly vigil yet. That’s kind of where everything started to fall apart.

  “Dad showed up in our family encampment the morning after he finished his vigil. Somehow, Mom never found out that Dad had been tapped for knighthood the night before, so she naturally assumed that he’d just spent the night away from our encampment because he was off screwing Isabel. And that was a pretty reasonable assumption on her part if you ask me.”

  “Seems fair enough,” I offer.

  “Dad tried to tell her he’d been tapped for knighthood, and that he’d get officially dubbed by King Wurmwald at War Court that night. But Mom didn’t even give Dad a chance to explain. She just started screaming and throwing things all over the encampment. She told all us kids to start packing and to help her take all the family tents down—even the pup tent where Dad stored his armor, which he was going to need if he was going to fight in the Woods Battle the next day. Steve refused to help, and then just took off. And I was so much in shock at seeing my mom throw a lit Tiki torch at my dad that I just sort of stood frozen. But Holly—Holly was always the strongest of the three of us kids—she started packing everything up right away, taking down all the tents in just a few minutes. I remember Mom threw Dad’s armor out onto the muddy campground road that ran through that part of the huge tent city that Pennsic always becomes by the final weekend. Mom and Holly had the whole encampment disassembled in a matter of minutes, without my or Dad’s help, but we still had to get everything into the car—which is pretty tricky at Pennsic.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Pennsic campground rules require you to keep your car literally a couple of miles away from your campsite, except during designated loading and unloading times. And since Mom was trying to leave in the middle of Pennsic, we couldn’t exactly bring our car into the campsite then.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We brought the campsite to the car. Or rather, Mom and Holly did. I just sort of collapsed into a heap in the middle of the encampment while Mom and Holly did all the work. Dad grabbed his armor out of the mud and disappeared, and nobody knew where Steve went. And nobody seemed to care much, either.”

  “What did happen to Steve?” I ask. “And what, exactly, did he have to do with—you know.”

  “I’m getting to that. Like I said, while all of this was going on, Steve just took off. Disappeared. Granted, Pennsic wasn’t as big back then as it is now, but there were still easily over five thousand people at the site, and the campground itself is huge—about ten square miles. And Pennsic didn’t have all the child-supervision rules in effect back then that they do now, either. So it was pretty easy for a nine-year-old kid to just vanish into thin air. And that’s exactly what Steve did. And to this day, I know that he did it on purpose.”

  “He vanished on purpose?”

  “Yep. For three days. And mind you, Pennsic 14 had some of the worst weather in the history of the War. This was the year of the repeated torrential downpours, high winds, and flash floods. A couple of people drowned in the floods at Pennsic that year, and for the life of us, we all thought that maybe Steve had gotten caught up in one and died himself.” Syr Phillip shakes his head in contempt. “The little bastard had all of us running all over Cooper’s Lake Campground, trying to find him, for three days. And when I say ‘all of us’, I mean Mom, Holly, and me. Because Dad pretty much disappeared, too. Well, I shouldn’t say he disappeared, exactly. Ditched us was more like it. After he stashed his armor and garb over at Midrealm Royal Encampment, he went to War Court, got knighted, and then spent all of the time he wasn’t fighting in the Woods and Field Battles off wenching and drinking. He just left Mom and the rest of us to spend all our time working with the local police trying to find Steve.”

  A strange, distorted picture is starting to form in my mind, one that I can’t quite make out. “So let me get this straight,” I say. “Your mom threw a lighted Tiki torch at your dad in full view of all you kids, and you wonder why your Dad and Steve took off? I mean, I can see that your mom might be a little upset at the situation, but throwing a lighted Tiki torch at somebody is a little extreme—“

  Syr Phillip puts his fist through the wall. “Goddamn it, Lisa!”

  I’m stunned silent. Now Syr Phillip is trembling and choking back sobs. After a moment, he regains partial composure, and exhales in shame at the substantial damage he’s just done to his living room. “Jesus, Lisa, I’m—I’m sorry.” Syr Phillip’s voice is barely above a whisper as he stares at the floor.

  I go to him and place a timid hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to finish the story if you don’t want to,” I say. “In fact, maybe I should just go home now.”

  Syr Ph
illip—or just plain old Phil Dawson as he is right now, all exposed and emotional—places his hand over mine on his angular collarbone. “No, please, just stay a while longer. I—I’ll get a hold of myself. You need to hear the end of this. Otherwise, not much else of what you’re caught up in right now with the Horde will make any sense to you.”

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  “Mom and Holly had already carried off the entire encampment back and forth to the car by the time we figured out that Steve was missing. They were both exhausted and covered with all the mud left over from the rainstorms the night before. But instead of getting in the car and driving home, Mom, Holly, and I had to spend the next seventy-two hours straight searching for Steve. My mom went without sleep for the next three days. Holly and I managed to sleep a little, but with our encampment already taken down and no time to build another, we pretty much had to sleep out under the stars. It started raining on the second day, and it just didn’t stop. Pouring rain, flash floods, and lots of violent thunderstorms. And if that weren’t bad enough, then the temperature started dropping. By the end of the second day, it was down to about thirty-five degrees.”

  “Really?” I sputter. “It was that cold in the middle of summer?”

  Syr Phillip flops down on the sofa. “I’m afraid so. Central Pennsylvania has very bizarre weather in late summer. And since we’d struck our encampment just before Steve took off, we were without a tent and soaked to the skin from searching for Steve in the rain. Our clothes and camping gear were all packed in the car over three miles away, and the only way to reach them was to wade through deep rivers of mud. The local authorities were no help, and Pennsic still had a pretty skeletal public safety crew back then. Now they’re much better at policing the site and providing emergency medical care but—“