by Jean Johnson
“Cursed brothers, fated mates, prophecies, yum!
A fresh new voice in fantasy romance.”
—Robin D. Owens,
RITA Award–winning author of Heart Dance
Romance lovers are falling for the Sons of Destiny
“Enchantments, amusement, eight hunks, and one bewitching woman make for a fun romantic fantasy…humorous and magical. A delightful charmer.”
—Midwest Book Review
“A must-read for those who enjoy fantasy and romance. I so thoroughly enjoyed this wonderful…novel and eagerly look forward to each of the other brothers’ stories. Jean Johnson can’t write them fast enough for me!”
—The Best Reviews
“I love this world and the heroes and heroines who reside there…a lively, wonderful, and oh-so-satisfying book. It is long, beautifully written, and entertaining. Light and dark magic are everywhere…fantasy romance at its best.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“A complex fantasy-romance series.”
—Booklist
“A fun story. I look forward to seeing how these alpha males find their soul mates in the remaining books.”
—The Eternal Night
“An intriguing world…an enjoyable hero…an enjoyable showcase for an inventive new author. Jean Johnson brings a welcome voice to the romance genre, and she’s assured of a warm welcome.”
—The Romance Reader
“An intriguing and entertaining tale of another dimension…quite entertaining. It will be fun to see how the prophecy turns out for the rest of the brothers.”
—Fresh Fiction
Sons of Destiny novels by Jean Johnson
THE SWORD
THE WOLF
THE MASTER
THE SONG
The SWORD
JEAN JOHNSON
BERKLEY SENSATION, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
THE SWORD
A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2007 by G. Jean Johnson.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0710-9
BERKLEY® SENSATION
Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY SENSATION and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SONG OF THE SONS OF DESTINY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must thank my parents, Deni and Tom, without whom I would not exist. They probably won’t ever read this book (it’s not their cuppa), but they have encouraged me to write through the years. I definitely need to thank Stormi, AlexandraLynch, and NotSoSaintly, for their talents as beta-editors; these ladies are jewels! And, of course, I would like to thank the Mob of Irate Torch-Wielding Fans, for waving their torches in my direction to encourage me to write faster (and for obeying the local fire safety codes while doing so); Iulia, Marius, and Tibi, for their encouragements from afar; Cindy, for asking me if I had anything original I wanted to submit for publication; and JustJeanette, Piper, Stellarluna, Liz, Nylima, Longtail, Alienor, Okonchristy, Qestral, Seth, HD, Poobah, and Pern, for being my sounding boards. Plus Alienor again, and Jensthe Tubbles Jr., Milady Blue, and Daisy Jarvey for the errata-finding.
…If anyone is interested in joining the Mob of Irate Torch-Wielding Fans (and is eighteen years or older; sorry, but you have to be an adult to join), you can visit us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MolTWF.
Hugs,
Jean
ONE
The Eldest Son shall bear this weight:
If ever true love he should feel
Disaster shall come at her heel
And Katan will fail to aid
When Sword in sheath is claimed by Maid
What have you done?”
“Who is this woman?”
“There’s a woman in here?”
“Why is she here?”
“Dammit, Morg, you know the Curse! I don’t care if the rest of us have it better, you know what Saber’s gonna say!”
“Hey, I’m not too eager for my own part of the Curse! But shouldn’t we listen to the brat? He is the most powerful of us.”
Morganen folded his arms across his chest and waited while the six of his seven brothers finished griping and grumbling. When they were all staring at him expectantly, silently, he finally spoke. The youngest of the eight, he was the most gifted of all their people, and they knew it; what they could do to him physically for this, he could do to them eight times over magically. It was simply his duty—his part of the Curse, after all—to see that, at the proper time and place, the whole thing was set in motion. And so it begins…
“Koranen, if you’d get your head out of your cinders, you’d notice this woman has been badly burned. Since fire is your expertise, I suggest you start using your powers to heal her. And be circumspect,” he added as his twin eyed the lightly clad female sprawled unconscious at their feet. “She might be your sister-in-law soon. You don’t want one of the rest of us beating the trakk out of you for impropriety if she turns out to be one of our Destined wives.”
The second youngest, Morganen’s older
twin, rolled his eyes and knelt by the woman lying in the middle of Morg’s workroom. Sparks flickered up from his hands as his fingers began to glow, hovering mere inches over her singed flesh and clothes. Morganen looked away from his twin, up at the others in his workroom.
“As for the rest of you, I suggest we do everything we can to avoid Saber for a little while.”
“Why do you wish to avoid me?”
The remaining, unoccupied five brothers instantly clustered around the youngest two twins, in front of the body on the floor. Doing their best to shield it from their eldest brother’s view, even Rydan moved, though he was the slowest to do so.
Saber fixed his eyes on his brothers. Each one was different in coloring, even though all eight had been born in four sets of twins. His steel grey eyes and honey blond hair were different from his twin’s golden eyes and brown hair, though Wolfer had the same chest-length locks he bore. The next set of twins, Dominor and Evanor, were as different as night and day, for Dominor had blue eyes and dark brown hair, and Evanor had brown eyes and light blond hair.
The third set were also an unlikely pair: Trevan had coppery-strawberry hair and green eyes; Rydan had blue-black hair and eyes so dark he looked like the night personified…and it was odd that the light-shunning sixth son was there, given the midmorning hour, though he had probably come up through the basement passages linking all of the castle’s outer towers to the main keep.
Koranen’s rich auburn hair could barely be seen through the tangle of his brothers, his hazel eyes fixed on whatever the others were shielding. The youngest of all the twins, Morganen, stood on the far side of the group, arms folded defiantly across his chest, his light brown hair pulled back in a knot to keep it out of his way. The dark band of cloth keeping his hair out of his aquamarine eyes was visibly damp from whatever major magic working he had somehow managed to cast without Saber noticing. Reminding Saber for a moment that Morg was not a young man to tangle with, even if he was the youngest of the eight of them.
None of his seven brothers spoke, though Saber could sense Koranen doing something beyond that tangle of lower limbs. What it was, he couldn’t tell…but something stuck out just a little beyond Evanor’s calf. Something out of the ordinary. Saber glanced down and focused on it.
It was a foot. A small, bare foot. With a shapely, if soot-smeared, ankle. Not a bony one.
It was not a male foot.
His brothers were attempting to hide a woman from him, when women were strictly forbidden on Nightfall Isle.
It didn’t take much effort to figure out how she had arrived on the island that the eight of them alone occupied. Since exiling the brothers to the isle, none of the mainlanders would even think of sending a woman, let alone allowing one to come here. Which left his youngest, sweat-sheened brother as the most likely culprit for her presence. If she couldn’t arrive easily by physical means, then she had to have arrived by magical ones…and Morganen was the most powerful mage among them. He could easily cast some sort of transportational spell without Saber noticing.
And they were in Morganen’s tower, after all.
“Morganen.” Saber held the eyes of his youngest brother, kindhearted but reckless, in his opinion. Dangerously reckless. “Send her back. Now.”
“I cannot.”
“I don’t care what you think you can or cannot do—” Saber broke off in frustration.
Their siblings stood in the way, trapped awkwardly between the youngest and the eldest. Even the stoic, normally expressionless Rydan looked a little uncomfortable, as Morganen replied, “She will burn to death, if I do. Shall I send her back, only to hear her screams echoing through time and space for my effort? She has lost her home and her livelihood to her enemies, Saber. She has no family to go to, no one to turn to, no sanctuary to hide in but here.”
Saber threw his hand at the brother-shrouded figure on the ground. “Her presence could threaten the end of Katani civilization! Isn’t it enough that we have been condemned simply for being born the Eight Brothers? Do you want more? Should I kill myself so the Song cannot come true, just so you can have a woman living on this island?”
None of the others answered him. No one dared look at him, whose verse in the Song was the most threatening. Save Morganen, who dared quite a lot, sometimes.
“Would you condemn her out of your fears as surely as the others have condemned us out of theirs?” the youngest countered calmly, if pointedly.
“Send her back,” Saber growled, disliking the comparison. “For her own safety.”
“She will die.”
“Send her elsewhere, then!”
“She has nowhere else to go, right now. Like us. At least, not until I can scry for a safe place to send her.”
Saber wasn’t a cruel man. He could smell the odor of soot and char in the air. He also knew his second youngest brother was finishing the healing of the damage that distant fire had done. And he knew his youngest sibling wouldn’t have risked the Curse of the Eight for anything less than a life-or-death need for the woman in question. “Then keep her away from me. She may stay, temporarily…but only if you find a place for her to go. Quickly. And keep her out of view of the merchant ships!”
The others scattered, none wanting to claim responsibility. Even Koranen fled a few moments later, as soon as his work was done. Leaving Saber alone in the stone-lined workroom with the unmovable Morganen. And the woman.
He really didn’t want to look at her, though he did anyway. It was his duty as the eldest to know all of the dangers to their family and do what he could to remove or to minimize them. Having a woman on the island wasn’t exactly minimizing their difficulties. Dangerous though it was, Saber needed to know exactly what he and his brothers had to face, ever since they had been exiled to Nightfall three years ago…when the meddlesome Morganen’s powers had come into full strength and sealed the interpretation of the Curse of the Eight on all of their heads, by the will of the High Council of Mages of Katan.
Reluctantly, warily, Saber glanced down again; this time, there was no one between him and the figure on the floor to block his view of her. The woman was breathing unsteadily, as if caught in a nightmare. Here and there, her skin was flushed pink from Koranen’s healing efforts. One set of fingers was curled in a fist near her head, and her strawberry blond hair still looked a little singed in places.
She was clad in loose, striped trousers, light blue and white, with some kind of matching, buttoned tunic that covered her from throat to wrists. It, too, was singed and blackened, and bits of her skin showed through, mainly the reddish-pink patches that would fade back to freckled pale like the rest of her flesh in barely a week or two. Koranen had done his usual good job of healing her burns, from the look of things. Nothing indecent was exposed, but she was restless, and there was a patch of striped fabric missing on her ribs that threatened to shift higher with each twitch.
Against his will, Saber moved closer. He watched that brow furrow, that strawberry mouth tighten, could see those fingers whiten as her muscles twitched and tensed. She was lean, not overly curvaceous…and she was beautiful, despite the fading burns and soot and the odd clothes on her body.
Morganen watched his brother, careful to conceal any signs of satisfaction from his expression and posture; he was younger than the rest of them, but no fool. Any moment now, the temporary sleep spell he had placed on the hysterical woman—her screams had summoned his other brothers, and belatedly their eldest—would wear off. Any second now, she would wake up and start their Destined fates rolling.
Her brow pinched, her teeth sinking into her lower lip.
“Is she in pain?” Saber murmured, as she twitched and whimpered, unable to help himself.
“She was badly burned,” Morganen confided, equally quiet. “Her home was collapsing around her; she was trapped in her bedroom, awakened too late in the fire to save herself. Part of the roof collapsed on her; that was what woke her up, I think. I do not think she has any broken bones, but m
y twin only had time to heal the damage done by the flames; not her bruises, nor her memories. Just the burns she has suffered, though that is more than enough, for now. His skill with burns is something all of us have been thankful for at one point or another, living with him.”
“Why is she not awake now?” Saber demanded under his breath, looking up at his brother from where he had crouched near the woman. Careful to not speak too loud.
Morganen didn’t let any of his satisfaction show. Three years without a woman, and his twenty-nine-year-old brother was drawn to her even more than any of the other siblings. Morganen had studied this woman long and carefully to make certain she would be perfect for Saber. “I think she is still caught up in the nightmare of her near-death. Such a trauma requires comforting, to ease its pain.”
Saber snorted and rose. “She can comfort hersel—”
The woman jerked and screamed even as Saber moved, scrabbling to get herself at least somewhat upright. She ended up twisting onto her knees, slapping at her flesh, at her hair and clothes, screaming repeatedly…The harsh yells trailed off quickly, as her eyes finally registered the real world around her, not the nightmarish one she had apparently been reliving.
Her breath caught as she stared at the border of white marble and light, at the granite stone floor under her palms, the stone walls lined with glass-fronted stone shelves that were stuffed with books. She turned to look around her. At the sight of Morganen less than a body-length from her, she shrieked again, throwing herself back and away from the unexpected, too-close apparition, and scrambled to her feet.
