The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  It was a hollow pleasure, when he found his completion. He couldn’t, daren’t do any of the things he longed to, and shouldn’t even have done this much. Because, while it had scratched the first itch, it just ignited several more. Not all of them were physical itches, either. Lust might be just lust…but sometimes lust led to the dangers of love.

  When he came again to her room, it was evening; both moons were up, casting odd, double-silvered shadows through the windows. He smacked the new tray on the desk, checked the old ones to make certain all the food was gone, and took them out with him again, all without a word. Kelly looked up briefly from her hand-stitched re-tailoring—tedious, but necessary—and watched him stomp around the room, glare for barely a quarter of a second in her direction, presumably to make sure she wasn’t doing anything strenuous, then stomp out again.

  Five seconds later, the door banged open again, and he stalked back inside, glaring at the floor underfoot as if she had committed the highest offense in his land. “You scrubbed it!”

  “I don’t like leaving jobs half done,” she returned pointedly, managing to stay calm in face of his fury. “I finished scrubbing the floor, and ate a ridiculously large amount of food, compared to what I’ve been used to. Since then, I have been sitting here, sewing. Just working on the sewing I need to do.”

  He planted his hands on his hips, narrowing his gray eyes. “Where are they?”

  She picked up the tiny embroidery scissors that had come with the remarkably well-stocked sewing chest he had brought, and snipped a thread. Sewing and embroidery calmed her, were familiar to her in her new, unfamiliar surroundings, even if she didn’t have a sewing machine and plenty of electricity to power it at hand. “Where are what?”

  “The bucket and the brush. If I take them away, you cannot use them!”

  “They’re under the sink. But do not snarl at me because your housekeeping abilities leave so many things to be desired,” she added piously, knotting the thread remaining on her needle and shifting to the next seam to be taken in. As soon as she had a little more to wear in the way of decency than a chemise and skirt, she would start on a pair of harem-style pants, full enough to pass for a skirt but much more comfortable in the way that trousers were. Not to mention some underwear. The two Nightfall brothers had certainly brought her enough thread and fabric to make herself a decent number of clothes on their embarrassing visit. No matter that the cloth was aged a bit in both durability and coloring. “I cannot help it if my realm holds higher standards of hygiene and cleanliness than your own.”

  He snarled something under his breath, yet another curse to that “Jinga” person she had already heard about a couple of times before, and stalked into the bathroom. When he stalked back out, brush rattling in bucket, the curved handle of the latter clenched in his hand, she spoke again.

  “I will require a bath sometime soon. That ‘refreshing room,’ as you called it, doesn’t exactly suit my needs. Do you have baths in this version of existence?”

  Gritting his teeth—for he was growing hard just being in the same room as her, proof he should never have unleashed his long-neglected needs by releasing himself mere hours ago—Saber crossed over to one of the windows and pulled away a broad section of jointed, carved wood covering a stone box she had mistaken for a platform, or maybe an odd-looking table of some kind, though it had steps on one side leading up to the carved surface.

  Rising from where she had curled up on the bed, pillows piled behind her against the headboard for back support, Kelly padded over in curiosity as he swiped the cobwebs out of a large, stone-lined bathing tub. Yanking on the chained cork jammed into a dry waterfall-spout like the one in the bathroom, he swatted the rest of the cobwebs out of the way as water began spilling forth.

  Saber leaned over as she approached and pulled out another cork, one down at the bottom of the basin. “It won’t do to fill the tub before it has been rinsed, at the very least,” he said. “To stop the water, you simply cork it, like this. To make it cold or hot, you turn this.” A wiggle of the lever, a splash of his hand under the flow to gauge the temperature, and Saber frowned. “Great. The spell’s worn out.”

  “So’s the one in the bathroom—uh, the refreshing room,” she corrected herself, since these people apparently had a different meaning for the first term. Kelly had seen a similar handle next to the sink faucet, but had lost interest in it when it had failed to control the temperature. She peered into the grimy tub and reached into the bucket, wrinkling her nose. Cobwebs, dust, and probably a patina of soap scum, too. “I’ll need that brush for just a few more minutes—”

  “Jinga’s Balls!” he exploded, grabbing the brush back from her. Saber gritted his teeth, turning a little reddish in the face in his effort to control his temper. Yanking the bucket out of her reach, he pointed at the bed, carefully mastering his volume, if not the force of his words. “You. Will. Sit. There. I will scrub the damned tub!”

  “Fine! The soap’s by the sink!” Flouncing around him, she stalked back to the bed and crawled back onto it. Flopping down against the pillows, she glared at him as he stared at her. “Well? If you don’t do it, you know that I’m going to!”

  He glared at her, then threw the brush in the bucket and carried it out with him. Biting her lower lip to hide her smile, Kelly returned her attention to her sewing. A tiny part of her attention. The rest of it snuck many glances at him as he came back a few minutes later, muttered something lengthy and complicated-sounding that made the water quickly steam as it splashed along the fall, and corked the waterfall again. “I’ll fetch you a new cork for the sink in the refreshing room.”

  She had to bite her lower lip hard to control her smile as he walked away three steps, then quickly darted back to the edge of the tub, grabbed bucket, soap, and brush, and took them with him to make sure she couldn’t do anything with them while he was gone. Choking, she averted her face as he stalked out, slamming the door shut behind him. She really shouldn’t laugh at him, but it was funny, and Kelly bit her lip and quivered with suppressed laughter until she was sure he was out of earshot, then had to wipe tears away from her eyes as gales of laughter rang through the octagonal room.

  When he came back, stripped off his boots and tunic, and crawled halfway into her tub to scrub it, she didn’t feel like laughing for long. Drooling, sighing, moaning, and grabbing maybe, but not laughing. Lightly tanned muscles rippled, dusted with dark blond hairs in front, streaked with a faded white scar in back that was jagged like it had come from lightning, down past one shoulder blade. Or maybe it had been caused by the rough-slashed tip of someone’s sword or dagger, given the kind of universe he lived in. As she watched, breathless from the view, his muscular arms flexed over and over, his firm backside lifting into the air as he scrubbed the near side of the rim. Those near-full, entirely kissable lips muttered as he worked.

  Unfortunately, he must have been muttering a cleansing spell, because it took him less than two minutes to make the damned stone tub gleam like it probably had during its very first polishing. Judging from the amount of accumulated grime, she figured it would have taken her at least an hour to achieve the same results. Swiping at it one last time with a scrap of cloth, he thrust that cloth into the emptied bucket with the soap and the brush and headed for the door.

  “I’ll need the soap to wash myself,” Kelly pointed out quickly. “And a rag to wash with, and clean towels to dry myself with. And if you could use your cleaning-spell thing on…these…clothes…”

  The heated, dark look he aimed her way made the words dry up in her throat.

  She swallowed. “Never mind. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  He muttered the Katani version of “too late” under his breath and stalked out the door. Forgetting his shirt and his boots, his dark gold hair rippling halfway down the taut, flexing muscles of his back.

  As soon as he was gone, she flung herself back against the pillows with a grin and a sigh, running her hand up from her thigh to
her breast, needle and garment abandoned on her crossed legs. There was something exhilarating about sparring with him, now that she wasn’t frightened, confused, or exhausted. And something even more exciting about being in the same room as a half-naked him. She just wished this world didn’t have to believe in Curses, or it could have been his hand cupping her breast. Without that silly verse and the local fears against such things, she could well have been the sheath for Saber’s sword. Certainly he was the first man in a long time to even tempt her…and oh, boy, was he a temptation.

  She just didn’t have time to do anything about it right now, not when he was due to come back soon.

  Ah, well, a girl can always dream…

  Kelly was sedately upright and working once more on her stitching, still smiling to herself with secret amusement when he came back a little while later. The wizard Saber—though he looked more like a warrior to her, especially coupled with that name—set half a dozen bottles on the edge of the tub. He added a stack of plain cotton sheets from the crook of his elbow, though they were not the terry cloth towels she was used to. He tromped into her bathroom to shut off the constant flow of water, using a large, oval cork-stopper he took from a pouch on his belt. Then he came back and started rapping on all of the lightglobes in the chamber, with the spiral-carved stick that had been hanging on a hook by the door.

  The chamber needed the light, Kelly realized; the two moons didn’t shine brightly enough, and the single globe she had lit was inadequate for illumination.

  She had studied the scenery beyond the windows, earlier, taking in the semitropical forest that cloaked the castle, its grounds, and the line of water beyond the greenery, glistening in the distance. It was more or less the same view, she had already learned, whether one looked east or west out of the walls of the octagonal room. A couple of miles of land sloped down to both the east and the west, away from the peak that the towered outer wall, donjon, and palace wings perched on; horizonless water lay beyond that. They really were exiled on an island far from anyone else.

  To the north and south, the island rose into much more mountainous peaks than the modest saddleback hill the brothers’ exile-home sat on, stretching the island out across an unseeable distance in those directions. It was a large castle, and, from what she could tell, it was a fairly large island, certainly big enough to have supported a medium-sized town, even by modern standards. That included enough space for farmland, if one cut down some of the jungle out there, but she had yet to see any other signs of civilization beyond Nightfall Castle itself.

  One thing was for certain, though: She was in the southern hemisphere of this world. At least, from her perspective, the sun seemed to be traveling from east to west across the northern part of the sky, and that suggested a land that lay south of the local equator. There was also the spell or whatever it was that was allowing her to understand everything translated as being that way: east as east, north as north, and so forth.

  I suppose I could be in a miniature, magical version of New Zealand, though these boys don’t seem to have the right accent.

  As he knocked the last lightglobe into glowing, Saber returned the rapping stick to its hook on the wall, fetched his discarded tunic and boots, then gestured in the direction of the bottles he had placed around the stone tub. “There are your soaps, and some scented oils, too. Do not blame me if they turn out to be dried beyond use.”

  “Thank you, Saber,” she murmured, making him pause at the door. Kelly had done a bit of thinking that afternoon. “I do appreciate this…and I apologize for being a trial these past few days. My only reasoning is that maybe the troubles I’ve been suffering lately have cut my temper a little too short.”

  He stayed there, one hand on the door handle, absorbing her words. Finally, he spoke. “Trevan swears his rare but hot temper is linked to the red in his hair. And Koranen agrees about his own, calling it as heated as a flame. I…apologize for being related to them.”

  Kelly bit her lip, trying not to chuckle at his roundabout apology. She nodded and kept her gaze carefully on her stitching. “I understand.”

  “Kelly of Doyle…”

  She looked up at him and lost the urge to smile at the sobriety in his gray eyes.

  “Do not fall in love with me. Do not make me fall in love with you. Do you understand?”

  She gave his warning, his order, his request due consideration. “All right. No falling in love,” she added in clarification, staring out the western windows beyond the foot of the bed. “I have no problem with that.” Then she looked at him, shod but still shirtless, and said the first thing that came into her head. “Want to have hot sex instead?”

  He twitched. The eyelid, the throat, and the chest muscles, the whole left half of his body twitched. Somehow he left her room. Somehow he shut the door behind him. Quietly. And roared something she did not want translated, before he descended the stairs beyond the solid panel between them.

  Morganen heard that roar in a way that would have done his sound-oriented brother, Evanor, proud, and smiled. Evanor cocked his light blond head and one of his golden brows, and eyed their beaming youngest sibling. Morganen shook his head and addressed the others assembled in his workroom while their eldest was distracted and safely out of the way.

  Everyone was there, except for Saber, of course, and Rydan, who was even less happy about the idea of women on Nightfall than the eldest of them was. Their night-loving brother didn’t care for the claim made in his particular verse, that he would fall into ruin at the hands of his own female-sent Destiny. Still, Morganen’s remaining five brothers weren’t nearly as woman-shy, not even the arrogant Dominor, who fancied himself his Prophesied namesake, the sole Master of his Destiny. Morg smiled again, this time just from looking at the five older men in his workroom.

  “My dear brothers, this is working beautifully. Especially since our eldest is so unenamoured of the thought of any of the rest of us attending her, and maybe falling for the woman, he’s forcing himself to spend more and more time with her.”

  “You may be the most powerful of us, Morg,” Wolfer asserted in his low voice that was half a growl, “but is it wise to tempt the Curse that is our Destiny?”

  Morganen met those golden eyes levelly, wisely with his younger, aquamarine ones. “It is our Destiny; thus we cannot escape it. We can, however, control it. So when the ‘Disaster’ comes, as foretold in Saber’s verse,” he added, “the rest of us must be prepared for anything. We will not be able to rely upon aid from the mainland to help us in dealing with it, here in our exile—even if the threat could possibly destroy the whole of Katan, it will be up to ourselves alone to handle it, so we must be ready.

  “If I read the verse right, this woman Kelly will be linked somehow to the Disaster that will appear shortly after Saber’s eventual claim of her. If and when he falls for her, it is her heel, after all, which is linked to its appearance—though not, as some might assume, the cause of it,” he added as even his twin scowled, unhappy at the possibility. “If that were so, the verse would have claimed ‘from her heel,’ as a result of something she did, not ‘at her heel,’ something that follows or chases after her of its own volition. A difference of simple, coincidentally timed circumstance, and not through any deliberation on her part.

  “I have two excellent reasons, then, to forestall returning the woman to her own universe: to get the coming Disaster over with, and to make certain the woman associated with it is on hand to be able to help us recognize and handle it. Because make no mistake, she is linked to it, even if she won’t start it,” Morganen reiterated. “Delaying her return to her own homeland will buy us time, and wear down Saber’s innate, stubborn resistance. But I can only stall for so long. So do what you can to throw the two of them together…and to maybe prick his protective jealousy. Carefully, of course.”

  Some of the brothers smiled wickedly at that last part. Some frowned with worry. One, Dominor, sneered slightly. Morganen dismissed them before their eldest c
ould think to search for any of them and wonder that all were missing from their usual haunts at this hour. They scattered.

  Only Koranen lingered. The redhead waited until they were fully alone before speaking. “Morg, are you sure this is a wise thing to do?”

  “Of course it is, Kor,” Morganen reassured him confidently, moving to crack open one of his spellbooks.

  Koranen shook his auburn head. “No, not the defiance of Destiny—I mean, starting the whole thing off.” He eyed the door, closed behind the heels of Dominor, last of the others to leave, and shook his head again. “I don’t think the others have yet realized what I instantly knew.”

  “And that would be…?” his slightly younger twin prompted.

  “Once Saber falls for a woman, the rest of us will topple, one right after the next.”

  “What’s the problem there? I’m actually looking forward to it,” Morganen added, grinning and briefly rubbing his hands together in anticipated glee. “I like women!”

  His twin perched on the edge of his stone-topped, experiment-scarred worktable, swinging his legs in their gold-and-red boots and trousers. “Have you considered how rough some of the wooing will be? We can all hear Saber and this woman Kelly going at it, and that’s just verbally. Wolfer’s too strong, too intense to be trusted with any but the toughest of women physically, but we obviously don’t have any female warriors or women smiths on the island.

  “Dominor would need someone who could simply match him, let alone best him, and he’s the third-best mage in the family, which means one of the best in all of Katan itself, beyond all others, save for yourself and Rydan. But Rydan’s power surges that great only with the coming of a storm, and he doesn’t bother to play competition games with any of us, least of all Dom, so Dom’s the equivalent to second strongest.

  “He certainly has the attitude to match his strength. Dom’s woman would have to be a virago of power, competitiveness, and manipulation.” Koranen arched a skeptical brow at his sibling. “Not exactly a recipe for a gentle wooing, Brother.”