The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  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.

  Saber 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.

  Then again, Saber’s mind hadn’t been entirely on supplies when he had been bartering. Five days after the exchange, an extra chest still sat in his room, a room the others had swept into and cleaned up without his permission or will, simply because, “It must be done, same as the rest!” an order delivered by Nightfall’s copper-haired, temporary mistress. That chest, tucked neatly to one side of the whitewashed, scrubbed, polished, and generally neatened room that otherwise hadn’t been changed, contained things not purchased to be shared among his brothers, nor things for his own use.

  It contained a silver-chased grooming set of comb, brush, and a hand mirror enspelled against scrying, respelled by his own hands to be doubly sure it was safe to be used by her. Nestled next to it was a box of yards and yards of silk ribbons rolled into looped bundles…for while they did have some old woven trims and scraps of lace, there were no ribbons, and he knew women liked ribbons, especially the ones who could sew. Essence oils pressed from flowers and other fragrant things occupied part of the box, too, bought under the guise of “magic ingredients.” He had carefully selected those scents to go with her personal scent, caught permanently, it seemed, in his memory.

  There were softsoaps for bathing and lotions to soothe her skin after drying, lotions he kept thinking of having the chance to apply to her smooth, freckled skin himself. And a full bolt, over thirty yards’ worth, of aquamarine silk almost the same shade as the blue and green richness of her eyes. It had cost him three expensive vorpal-edged swords and two missile-reflecting shields, items he hadn’t intended yet to sell. Certainly not for silk cloth…and yet the moment he saw it among the goods offered for sale, Saber had bought it without a second thought, heading back up to the palace to fetch the items requested by the traders in trade for it.

  All of these things waited for Kelly Doyle; Saber himself waited for the courage to give them to her.

  He was still awake late into the evening, five days after purchasing the carved cedar chest and its contents, when someone knocked on the door of his chamber. Heart thudding hard at the thought it might be her, however unlikely, Saber closed the book he had been trying to read and opened his door.

  It wasn’t her. Instead, Rydan stepped inside, a foreboding figure dressed in his usual stark black. His eyes swept over the changes in the room, noted the chest on the floor by the window, and finally faced his brother. His night-black gaze silently questioned the eldest of them.

  Saber shrugged defensively, though he didn’t know why. Rydan was an odd one, even for the eight brothers—one of whom was a wolf in man’s clothing, one of them a cat, one a living torch if he wasn’t careful to shield his abilities every single day of his young, adult life, one a nonstop singer, one a determined competitor, one a too-wise, too-young, too-powerful mage…and one who was an overprotective, stubborn, bullying fool, according to a certain redhead. To say, therefore, that Rydan was odd, even for a son of Corvis, was saying quite a lot.

  The sixthborn, night-loving son of the eight of them simply nodded at his brother, then wandered over to one of the windows
in Saber’s room, peering out at the night beyond the reflections of the lightglobes. Probably seeing things no one else could see in the dark of the night. Saber had only asked once what Rydan saw in his night-borne life, since the younger man had finished passing through puberty. His brother had not replied.

  But then, that wasn’t too unusual for the sixthborn of them. Rydan rarely spoke at all these days; he had begun shunning the day and roaming the night more and more when his powers had started to grow in puberty, and he had only intensified his strange habits since being branded a Son of Destiny and exiled alongside his brothers. The darkest-haired of the eight of them had endured the daylight hours of their journey to get here under the constant shelter of a full, dark cloak and a deeply cowled hood. There was no medical or magical need for him to do so. Just his own peculiar preference for it.

  Saber had insisted he join them for supper each night after the sun was down, simply to make sure his brother was still alive, and still in Rydan’s equivalent of “all right.” Kelly had managed to get a few words out of him the past few evening meals, but for the most part he had ignored her. It was simply Rydan’s way.

  Not so the rest of his brothers. Saber, watching from the balcony during the past few weeks of meals, exile within an exile, had watched the rest of them banter with her and recount their days, explain the rules and ways of magic as best as each of them could, though she had trouble, considering her nonmagical background, understanding some of their terms. She’d also had trouble believing some of their tales. His brothers in turn had encouraged her to talk about her own realm, most asking her question after question, trying to understand her very strange, nonmagical, yet magical-seeming world.

  Rydan had been almost as much an outsider as Saber, asking very little, responding to very little…but then, Rydan had always made himself an outsider, by his own choice. Saber didn’t know how to end his own isolation. It wasn’t natural for him, but he couldn’t seem to escape it these days.

  “Perhaps you should shun the daylight, too.”

  Saber jerked out of his thoughts. “What?”

  Rydan turned and looked at him with his dark, dark eyes, then returned his gaze to somewhere beyond the window. “I said, perhaps you should shun the daylight, too. Since you seem to want to have little to do with the others anymore.”

  “I…” Saber didn’t know what to say. That was probably the longest personal speech he had heard from Rydan in half a year. He was in for more surprises, though, for Rydan wasn’t through.

  “Perhaps it is that woman you seek to avoid. You cannot, you know; she is your Destiny. Mine is to rule the night, until I am destroyed by a woman at dawn. Thus I avoid the daylight, and especially the dawn. But I need not avoid her.” He glanced at his brother again. “She is not my Destiny. For which I thank both moons.

  “She therefore must be one of the others’ Destinies.” He fell silent a moment, then shrugged slightly and spoke again. “She is not Wolfer’s Destiny, either; his was begun long ago, before the beginnings of our exile.”

  Considering Rydan rarely shared any of his insights, unlike the ever-cheerful, talkative Evanor or even the occasionally close-mouthed Morganen, Saber didn’t know what to make of that straightforward comment. His own twin had a Destiny already clearly predetermined? Saber couldn’t imagine who it could be. “Are you certain?”

  “Eyes that can see in the dark see the clearest of all, even into the shadows of mystery.” Those eyes stared confidently out into the night beyond the diamond panes of the window in front of him, as Saber studied his sibling.

  That was more like the Rydan his eldest brother knew. But Rydan wasn’t quite yet done. There was more to be heard from this least-communicative of the eight brothers.

  “Morganen will fall the last, and as no other women have appeared to deliver us to our fates so far, she is clearly not the one for him. The woman is not water, so she cannot quench Koranen, and she does not run; she confronts boldly. So she is not Trevan’s.

  “She has a pleasant singing voice, and probably knows many unknown and unusual melodies from her own realm, but she is not Evanor’s Fate; her heart might be lonely for one of us, but even I can see she is not lonely for him. And she is too blunt to correctly master the Master of Manipulation…though I wish I had been there to see her make Dominor ‘eat dirt,’ as the others have teased him about in these past few weeks,” he added with a brief smile.

  Saber felt unnerved by the sight of that unsober curve. The sixthborn Corvis son almost never smiled anymore. Even as Saber considered the shock of that, Rydan sobered again. Or rather, shuttered his emotions, as if closing stout wooden panels against the threat of a high wind or against whatever dark storm plagued him from within.

  “So, if she is not for the rest of us…then she is for you. You were the Lord of Corvis, and now you are the Lord of Nightfall. Why have you not claimed your lady, Brother?” Rydan turned and faced him fully, his dark eyes pinning Saber’s gray. “Don’t give me that trakk about suffering your part of the Curse. We all have our Fates to face, however much we may strive to set them from us as far away in time and place as possible,” he added with a faint grimace. “Seer Draganna has never been wrong. Only Katani perceptions of her words have faltered and needed to be corrected through the centuries. So…why have you not claimed your Maid, Son who is the Sword?”

  Saber glanced at the chest, then down at the scrubbed hardwood floor underfoot. There had been one addition in recent days beyond the paint and the polish and the general cleanliness, and that was a slightly worn but hole-free and still quite usable carpet laid down to cushion the hard wooden floor under his feet. Just one of many examples of what the woman among them had done…and how she had been thinking even of him, in her mass-cleaning forays. Out of kindness, out of pity, he did not know, but she had been thinking of his comfort.

  As odd as it was to be discussing this with Rydan, of all of his brothers, Saber knew he was right. “I don’t know how to, Rydan. I…just don’t know how.”

  His brother, hands clasped lightly behind his back, snorted. It was such a strange sound to hear from the normally quiet, reclusive man, Saber looked up at the scoffing sound. Black eyes met and held gray, in a dark storm of brotherly irritation. “Woo her, you imbecile!”

  “How?” Saber challenged him.

  Rydan gestured at the night-dark world beyond the windows, the simple, sparse gesture showing his agitation far more than all the arm-waving and ranting that could be delivered by any other man. “It’s summer! I haven’t been so long in my realm of darkness to think that flowers no longer bloom in the summertime. If you cannot find anything to say with your lips, speak to her with flowers. Women usually like that sort of thing.

  “Pay attention to the things that she likes to do, the tasks that give her a feeling of accomplishment, and compliment her on them,” Rydan instructed Saber further, surprising his eldest brother with his insight. Annoying him, too, in the next breath. “And then retreat before you stumble and stick your foot in your mouth, for even I have heard some of your shouts all the way out in my tower. In the daylight hours I normally try to sleep through,” the younger man added sardonically. “Women like an air of mystery, so if you keep it short and simple, safely abbreviated, she will be intrigued. Since even I have heard how you locked her in her chamber—”

  “I didn’t lock her in; the door was stuck!” Saber interjected truthfully, if defensively. It was bad enough that he was the recipient of so much eloquence from the most taciturn of them all. Certainly the others wouldn’t believe Rydan could say even a tenth so much, or be so eloquent about it. But he hadn’t locked the door on Kelly of Doyle.

  He’d been tempted, but he hadn’t done so.

  Rydan restated his meaning. “You still ordered her presence confined up there. Take her out in one of the wagons and show her the island. Take her to the eastern beach so that she may safely enjoy the sand, the sun, and the surf without being seen by any passing sailors.
And show her that you do not resent her.

  “If you do not resent her,” his brother added pointedly, drifting toward the door. “She has asked to have the outer wall and towers cleaned, since the others have made such headway on the donjon and its wings that they are almost done. None of us are willing to allow her near our towers and all the magical dangers therein. Not until all of us have met our Fates and the Prophesied damage is done, at the very least.” Rydan paused by the door. “So, she will need something else to keep herself occupied. Until then…there is still the risk that she might be my Destiny, and not yours. As seems clear even to me.

  “It is up to you, Brother, to keep her out of my tower.” He regarded Saber a long moment, then turned away. The door—as did all doors for him—opened of its own volition. “Do keep her out of my realm.”

  Moving as silently as ever, with nothing more to say, Rydan let the door close behind him, leaving Saber speechless but with a lot of thinking to do.

  “Oh! Oh, my,” Kelly murmured as she entered the sewing chamber, with its now thoroughly dusted and cleaned pair of looms, several spinning wheels, other assorted cloth-making equipment, and chests and drawers of cloth-bolts, lace and trims, scissors, threads, embroidery floss, and even jars of dye components. But it wasn’t the sight of her mostly orderly workspace that had caught her attention.

  Someone—male, obviously, since she was the only female on the whole of the island—had brought in two large vases of flowers plucked from the still somewhat wild and overgrown gardens. Roses had been stuck in with bluebells, delphiniums nestled next to eight-petalled, curled flowers that bore a vague resemblance to the normal six-petalled tulips of her own world, interspersed with tiny buds of what looked like pink baby’s breath. The colors ranged the whole palette of the rainbow, even to bits of decorative greenery tucked in here and there among the many blooms. The two vases rested on the broad cloth-cutting table set in the center of the half of the longish room she usually worked in, as Evanor was now using the looms in the other half to make more of the highly popular terry-cloth towels she had described.