by Jean Johnson
She really weighed too little for her size; she needed to put on at least another twenty pounds, maybe thirty before she would look good. Saber tried not to think about it once he realized that, but it was like being told to not think about pink bears. One inevitably thought about rose-tinted ursinoids.
Mounting the steps that followed the curve of the vaulted ceiling when he reached the next floor, he headed up to the door and used a spare fingertip to press on the lever, nudging it open with his shoulder. It didn’t budge very far, though it wasn’t locked. An awkward swirl of his hand, his arms still burdened with the woman’s weight, and an application of magical force opened the stiff, edge-warped panel.
Cobwebs hung here and there in the chamber, for the room had been pretty much untouched since they had explored it upon their arrival three years ago, and the whole keep had been abandoned for twenty or thirty years before that. No one lived on Nightfall Isle anymore, unless they were a royal or noble family in exile. Just like their own exile.
Naturally, no one had bothered to clean anything when the brothers had been all but tied up, carted across the Inner Sea, and dumped on the western shore with a pile of their belongings. And none of them had really bothered to clean up much of the castle since their arrival, including this remote, highest chamber. Even the bedding on the broad bed before him was visibly dusty.
Too dusty to set her on. Even if Koranen had done something to heal her lungs from any smoke inhalation or searing from her ordeal with fire, they would still be tender. Reaching the bench chest at the foot of the large poster bed, Saber balanced the limp woman on his arm and braced knee and concentrated.
A slow sweep of his hand, a mutter under his breath of one of the spells he and his brothers admittedly used less frequently than they probably should, and the dust and cobwebs slowly stripped away from the bedding. The neglected feather mattress, matching pillows, and woolen blankets fluffed as the spell drew dust out of their interiors, too, pulling it out and pushing it aside in a thickening wall of brownish gray.
Saber had plenty of power in his magic, more than many on the mainland of Katan, but his was more oriented toward the spells of war, offensive and defensive magics, not housekeeping ones. Still, their mother had taught a number of household cantrips to all eight of her sons the moment their powers had manifested. It had been her way of assigning punishments to her rambunctious sons.
It took concentration to open the nearest window on that side of the room and “sweep” the cloud of grime out, without dropping the woman, but he managed. Then, because he vaguely remembered women being squeamish about such things—namely, their mother, Annia, who had passed away nine years ago, when her youngest set of twins had been only fourteen and he and his twin were twenty—he added a rodent-insect-spider-repelling spell. Enough of those squeaked and chittered and buzzed out the window to make even his skin crawl a little, though at least none were dangerous. A fact for which Saber was thankful; they’d had plenty of other, not-so-pleasant infestations to contend with over the past three years as it was.
The woman cradled on his knee and arm sighed, mumbled something under her breath that no translation spell could have interpreted, and snuggled into his chest. Trustingly. Saber stilled. How long had it been since a woman had rested so trustingly against him? More than three years, that was certain. Speculation about the eight of them had always been running since Morganen and Koranen had been born, back when Saber was six years old.
Two of the estate’s castle servants had been willing to introduce him to the ways of lovemaking in his teens, and a young woman from a family his parents had approved of had been growing interested in him as potential husband material. But at about the same point in time, Koranen had started displaying a magical affinity for fire when puberty had struck the last pair of twins late, at around the age of sixteen or so. That had started the rumors in full, backing every female off from all eight of the brothers, not just Saber. Morganen’s confirmation as a potentially very powerful mage just a few years later had only scripted the final page on the fear the others around them had, because of the ancient “Song of the Seer” that now cursed his family.
To have this woman cuddling against him reminded Saber of two uncomfortable things: how very long it had been since any woman had pressed herself so closely and trustingly to him, clothed or otherwise…and how very dangerous it was to let her get close.
He didn’t just dump her on the bed, though. Instead, he cast one more spell, a freshening cantrip to make sure the bedding wasn’t damp or musty, though the room didn’t have any signs its roof had leaked in the past three years. There were still cobwebs and dust films around the edges of the room, but the bed was clean and fresh-smelling when he shifted her into both of his arms again.
Slipping her frail body into the bed, Saber covered her up with a single blanket, since it was a warm early summer day. Then he dusted off a chair, conjured one of the books from his study in the northwest outer tower, and cracked it open. There’s no sense in bothering my brothers to look after this woman. They might do something lethally stupid, like fall in love with her.
With the weight of his part of the Curse over him—the only one actually worded as a curse in the whole of the Prophecy, his Curse to bear, though some of the other verses sounded bad enough on their own—he certainly wouldn’t think of doing it.
THREE
Ahorrible dream, Kelly decided, refusing to open her eyes as she snuggled her head deeper into her fluffy feather pillow. Her alarm hadn’t gone off yet, after all, and she had set it, surely. She always set it. A horrid dream, of fire and pain, confusion and fear, and it was all just a dream, thank god…though that blond brute was rather gorgeous. When he wasn’t scowling…
A feather shaft was poking her in the cheek. She brushed at it with her hand, rumpling it back down into place with the others in the pillow…which she didn’t have. Her grandmother’s place had once had feather pillows, but that had been while Granny Doyle was still alive; they had been too flat and under-filled for her to continue using, so she had replaced them with cheaper ones stuffed with a synthetic material. No, Kelly simply didn’t have any feather pillows anymore.
If I’m sleeping in a bed with feather-stuffed pillows… Prying her eyes open, Kelly held herself still, assessing her surroundings. This…wasn’t her bedroom. It wasn’t the guest room at Granny Doyle’s, either. Or any other room she had ever been in before, in the whole of her life. That included the bizarre, frightening dream that apparently wasn’t a dream, no matter how much she wished it had been.
What first caught her eye were the velvet curtains roped back from the six sets of windows in what looked like an octagonal room. The color of the velvet, perhaps dark red, was grayed with dust and traced with equally dirty, fuzzy cobwebs. There was plenty of wall space between the wide, multipaned windows, with bookshelves built into the walls and wardrobe cupboards, dresser drawers, chests, padded, carved chairs, and even a hassock footstool. Everything was ornate, richly carved, decorated, and appointed…and apparently neglected for what had to be untold years.
The bed she was in had been cleaned and aired at least somewhat, and there didn’t seem to be any bugs or creepy-crawly things to worry about immediately. However, there was one unnerving aspect of the room she was in, beyond the neglect and the lingering grime. She spotted it as soon as she cautiously sat upright. He was in the room.
Sitting in one of those padded chairs, in fact, his boots resting on a footstool, his elbows on the armrests, and a medium-large, leather-bound book propped up in his lap, one knee raised slightly higher to support the old-fashioned, hand-bound spine. Dust motes danced over his shoulder, drifting through a shaft of sunshine slanting at a low angle through one of the windows, probably the western one, given that the sun had been higher in this odd world the last time she had seen it, back in that hallway with the door that had closed on its own and the tiny, arrow-loop-style window at the other end.
The sun
made the specks of dust look like dancing stars. It also made his dark blond hair look highlighted with fine-spun gold. As she watched in silence, uncertain whether his presence meant ravisher or jailer or whatever her confused mind couldn’t think of just yet, he moistened his forefinger and thumb, eased up the corner of the next page, and slowly glided his hand to the center of the edge. A pause as he finished reading whatever was on that side, and he gently flicked the sheet over. Giving her a glimpse of printed characters that weren’t English, though her mind struggled to perceive them as it did English.
The slight headache at the back of her eyes was proof enough that there really was magic at work around her, that she really was no longer in Kansas anymore—so to speak—and not just caught in a dream-induced delusion. She rubbed at her forehead and temples, then drew in a breath and spoke when he didn’t acknowledge her movement. “What am I doing in here?”
“Staying in here.”
“So I’m a prisoner?” Kelly asked warily.
“You’re a nuisance. And a danger. As soon as my brother has recovered, he’ll find a place to dump you and send you there.”
“Oh, like I asked to be yanked from my home and off to a universe full of magic,” she snapped back, irritated at the decidedly unfriendly reply to her enquiry. “Mind you, I’m damned glad I’m not dead, burned to a crisp by those bigoted, close-minded, asinine fanaticals, but I haven’t exactly had a comfortable time since I arrived here, either, you know!”
He frowned over at her, abandoning his book for a moment. “What do you mean by that?”
She gaped at him. He didn’t know? “First you attack me, then you yell at me, then you attack me again, make me drink a horrid potion, and now I’m your prisoner in this less-than-Best-Western room, and you ask me why I’m not comfortable with all of it?”
He snapped the book shut, dropping his legs to the floor to sit forward and glare at her. “I meant, what do you mean by ‘yanked from my home and off to a universe full of magic’?”
“My universe doesn’t have magic potions that make communication in bizarre languages instantly possible! Most people don’t even believe real magic exists, where I come from,” she added pointedly. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I wasn’t suffering from it firsthand, today. I’m grateful to be able to communicate, don’t get me wrong, but all of this has been happening without my knowledge, or my fully disclosed consent.”
He stared at her. And stared at her. And stared at her.
“What?” she demanded defensively as he kept staring at her with those hard gray eyes.
“I am going to kill my brother,” the man stated flatly. “He knows damned well that transdimensional crossings are forbidden, when one of the realms has no magic!”
“Excuse me?” Kelly returned, arching her partially singed brows. “If he’s the one who did the bibbity-bobbity-boo thing and dragged me here across the multiverse or whatever, then if you’re going to kill him, I sincerely hope there’s someone else who knows exactly what universe to send me back to. Hopefully not to the exact moment I left, though. I’d rather stay here in loopy Wonderland than go back and die in a really bad case of murder by arson, thank you very much!”
That made him scowl. But not at her. “Someone deliberately set a fire to kill you?”
“Well, I don’t exactly have proof,” she pointed out. “But there were a bunch of prejudiced, ignorant bigots living in the town I’d moved to, idiots who thought I was involved in witchcraft—whether or not that’s a respectable career here, it certainly isn’t considered to be by most people back in my universe.
“They also hated me simply because I was involved in a group that liked resurrecting the old ways and cultures of our history for fun. So they harassed me, harassed my customers, ruined most of my business, and sent me anonymous hate letters.”
The bitter tale spilled out of her as he listened. Even with his lingering irritability, he was still far more receptive to her than the local law enforcement had been, back home. Golden and Irritable was listening to her and even seemed troubled by what she was telling him.
“Then they started sending even more threatening notes, about historical witchcraft trials, and how the guilty had been stoned, hung, or burned alive at the stake. And just last week, someone put up a hangman’s noose on my front porch,” she added, as his eyes narrowed at the gruesome punishment “witches” had received in her world’s past. “I found it when I went to open up my shop.
“Maybe the masked man who attacked me last month was just a random mugging attempt and not a deliberate targeting of me, but seeing that made me angry,” Kelly said. “But I didn’t think they’d go so far as to actually burn down my house—not with me still in it!”
Damn. The wobble in her voice and the tears were coming back. Tightening her jaw, she looked away and did her best to glare out one of the less-than-clean windows, although there wasn’t enough clarity to the glass to be able to see anything.
He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t dare look at him, in case he returned to glaring at her. She’d had enough of hate being aimed her way with the idiotic folk of that one ignorant town. Kelly didn’t want to have to deal with any more, today. Not until the urge to cry had passed again.
For his own part, Saber wanted to throttle her neighbors, even if they were in some other universe only Morganen knew how to find. It was the same kind of unreasoning fear that had forced the eight of them into exile, ordered off the ancestral Corvis land and onto Nightfall Island. Except—if he understood her correctly—magic didn’t exist in her home dimension, save in stories and superstitions. The fears of her neighbors were imaginary ones, and not the very real, prophecy-directed ones that haunted his own family. Making the reason for her troubles utterly senseless, and thus an even greater tragedy.
Saber now felt like a brute for adding to her misery, listening to the serious troubles she had already gone through. Running a hand through his hair, he tried to think of something to say to change the subject. He found one as he eyed her profile, doing her stubborn best not to cry, though he could see the reddening of her eyes, the way they gleamed with moisture. When her jaw finally relaxed, he spoke.
“What is your name?”
“Kelly. Kelly Doyle.” She did her best to clear her nose without a telltale sniff, but of course there was one. Doyles didn’t cry, though, not over little things like prejudice and attempted murder, and bullying strangers from other universes. In other universes. Composed as much as possible, given her bizarre situation, she finally looked at him. Trying to be polite despite her circumstances and immediate past with the man, she asked, “What’s yours?”
“Saber. Of Nightfall.” He waited for recognition to dawn, but of course it didn’t. “My brothers and I were exiled to this island. Our neighbors were afraid of us, too.”
That made her blink and narrow her eyes with a touch of wariness. “Why?”
“We fulfill the Curse of Eight Prophecy, that’s why. Eight sons, born in four sets of twins, all on the same day two years apart each time. Each one fitting in demeanor or gift the verses of the ‘Song of the Sons of Destiny.’”
She pulled the covers a little closer, though they were meager protection. “What do you mean, ‘Curse’? Do you turn into werewolves, or drink other people’s blood, or spawn baby demons if someone gets you wet?”
He frowned, opened his mouth, then shut it and shook his head. For a woman from a land that supposedly didn’t have any magic, she had some odd notions of what a Curse was. “No. Not that kind of Curse. My own verse in the song states quite clearly if I fall in love, a disaster will immediately befall the whole of Katan…and that is a large land, home to more than a million people.”
It was her turn to frown at him. “That’s it? No details? Just some unspecified disaster happens if you fall in love?”
Saber scowled at her. “It’s more complicated than that!”
“Really? You mean there are specific details such as, ‘if
this man, Saber, falls in love with a blonde, locusts will plague every field from spring to fall, and none shall have anything to eat’?” Kelly challenged him. “Or ‘if this man, Saber, falls in love with a brunette, the seas shall rise up in salty flooding, and every mountain spring shall flow red with soured blood for a full month’? That kind of complicated?”
“I mean, in this universe, Curses are real. Prophecies are real. It was written by the Seer Draganna over a thousand years ago, and she has never once been wrong.”
“What, precisely, was written?” Kelly demanded. “You know, where I come from, about three hundred years before, people were accusing other people of witchcraft, of setting Curses to make the cows dry up and not give any more milk, to wither the crops with a drought or wreck them with a heavy rain and flood, and they were hanging people, because of these accusations.
“But you know what?” she demanded rhetorically. “The damned cows dried up because they needed to be studded with a bull again so they could drop another calf and produce milk for it, and droughts and floods are simply a natural part of the weather cycle! So maybe these people of yours got all bent out of shape thinking they knew what this Prophecy thing was all about, simply by a misinterpretation egged on by ignorant fear.” She glared at him, then folded her arms across her breasts, wishing her pajama top wasn’t as holey as it was, and in almost indecent places. “Besides, exile doesn’t compare with murder by arson!”
“Well, here, a Curse can dry up a cow or blight a crop with flood or drought,” he pointed out. “The Council of Mages do their best to keep such things from happening, but people do have to take Curses seriously!”
