by Jean Johnson
That earned him a dry, sardonic look. “I’m still not going to teach you, Dominor.”
The dark-haired mage sat down, smiling. “I can wait.”
Saber opened his cloth-wrapped package first. Inside was a pair of bellows. “You did it! You bas—uh, you impertinent son of a mage!”
“What did he do?” Kelly asked, eyeing the squeezable contraption of accordioned leather and hinged pressure plates. The blockish, somewhat geometric figures of Katani writing were embossed into the steel plating covering the wooden pressure plates and wrapped around the handles, but they didn’t form words of any language she was familiar with. Saber was too busy playing with the pump-action, puffing air that ruffled the fur quilt in front of him to answer her question, so she glanced at the others for enlightenment.
“They’re magic-enhanced forge bellows,” Dominor explained, as Saber murmured over them, tracing the words, the design. “Enchanted—with a little help from Koranen, whose specialty it partly is—against fire and heat. So they should not only last a very long time, they’ll last at the highest temperatures our dear brother can forge. He has only to speak the first of the words inscribed on them, plus the number he wants, and they’ll pump air at the level of the numbers inscribed along the length of the handles. The higher the number, the faster and harder they will blow. Until he speaks the second word on the plate, and then they’ll stop.”
“This will free up my hands at the most intricate spell-smithing moments, so I won’t have to call on the others,” Saber added, leaning past his wife to thump his brother in the shoulder with his fist. “You told me it’d be another three months!”
Dominor leaned back out of range and brushed his upper sleeve smooth. “Morganen is not the only mage in the family who can pull off a miracle or two in a short period of time.”
Unsure what Dominor could have gotten her—except maybe a box full of dirt—Kelly unwrapped her own cloth-covered package. It was a book, with beautifully tooled white leather and golden cornering plates studded with jewels. She was growing used to reading Katani, which was a little more disorienting than just speaking or hearing it, since ears didn’t get dizzy like eyes did for the first few moments under the effects of the translation spell. But it didn’t take her very long to puzzle out the title, just the few seconds it took her eyes to adjust to the Katani script.
“Prime Millenium: The First Thousand Years of the Empire of Katan. It’s one of the history books I’ve been looking for, these past few weeks! How did you know I was looking for this particular book?”
“As you once said, ‘I have been paying attention,’” Dominor returned smoothly. “And it did not tax my genius to believe an intelligent woman such as you would want to know at least some things of our history, so that you understand us better. You are an intelligent woman, after all. If an ignorant one. It’s not the original, though; this is your own personal copy. You’ll have to teach me how to ‘eat dirt’ if you want personal copies of the other volumes.”
“This is a wonderful gift, Dominor, and very thoughtful. Thank you very much,” Kelly added, choosing magnanimously to ignore his afterthought of a gibe, especially prefaced by a compliment as it had been.
“My turn, I think,” Evanor stated. He fetched his gift and passed it over, as the others helped gather all of the gifts together in the middle of the table. He set it between them, and Kelly gestured for Saber to open it.
It was a small box, carved like many of them in the castle were, but this one was barely a handspan across, half that in width, and maybe a fingerlength deep. Saber opened the lid, curious to see what was inside. Music spilled forth. It was the sound of several instruments and Evanor’s voice; they wafted with delicate clarity from within. Both eyed the box, then its giver. Evanor shrugged modestly.
“You told me, Kelly, what a raydeeoh was—a box that, when one activated it, allowed one to hear all different kinds of music without needing musicians constantly around. So I enspelled this box to be a music-playing box, to replace the raydeeoh you can no longer hear when you sew.” The lightest blond of the eight brothers poked his finger at the metal squares inserted in the grooves lining the box. “Each of these brass tokens contains the music for two songs, one on each side, and their titles and the general meaning of their content is also inscribed on the plates on each particular side, so you’ll know what they are and which one you may want to listen to.
“If you flick this little lever here, in the lid, the magic plays the songs from left to right, and to here, from right to left, and here, this third position, left to right and back again, over and over, for as long as the lid is open. The fourth position randomizes the songs entirely. And they can come out, too, the tokens. It holds sixty pieces of music, in thirty token-squares. I’ll make more of the tokens for later—you know, I think I could even sell these,” he added, touching Kelly’s shoulder. “Your raydeeoh idea could really revolutionize minstrelling and storytelling.”
“Uh, you might want to hold off on that idea,” Kelly warned him, as he started to wax enthusiastic. “In my universe, people got so enamored of hearing their favorite musicians, it turned those musicians into celebrities, and that’s usually not a good thing. What a celebrity gets put through makes a mekhadadak loose in the house seem mild.”
“You sound as if you’re talking about some type of evil magic,” Saber stated with a slight frown.
“Just because we don’t have magic or accurate Prophecies doesn’t mean we don’t have our own versions of Curses. But this will be perfect to accompany me in the sewing hall, Evanor. And your voice is wonderful to listen to, either in person or from a box,” Kelly added, closing the lid and ending the lyrical song. “Thank you.”
“A question, Evanor,” Saber mused, rubbing his chin and eyeing the music box. “Why is it a wedding gift for the both of us, when she is the one who will be listening to it the most?”
Evanor grinned. “Because all of the songs on the tokens in that box are romantic, Brother. You will benefit, trust me.”
All of them had a laugh at that, even Saber and Kelly…though it was Kelly’s turn to blush.
Trevan’s gift came next. Kelly half expected it to be something risqué, since he was a bit of a rogue, maybe their version of lingerie, or maybe bath oils, but it wasn’t. Dragging the largest, bulkiest present forward with a scrape of wood over stone as Kelly and Saber twisted in their chairs, he grabbed the cloth draping the object and whisked it away with a flourish. “Enjoy!”
It was a chair. A broad, two-person couch, almost too small to be a loveseat, but too big to fit just one person. Like all of the other furniture she had seen, it had cushioning on its seat and back, the aquamarine silk tacked in place with tiny, round-studded, polished brass nails in the same fashion as most of the other furniture in the overgrown castle. Ornate, fluid carving had been added around its edges.
Kelly narrowed her eyes at the strawberry blond male. “I thought a couple yards of my silk had gone missing!”
“All the better to help the two of you blend into the furniture,” Trevan quipped back fearlessly. “This is for the two of you to sit upon together when taking your meals—you may not know this, Sister,” he added to Kelly, “but it was a custom of our mother’s province for married couples, especially from the nobility, to sit on the same seat together when they ate. It helped to show that the pair was united in all things. It was not the custom in Corvis lands, but occasionally Father and Mother would sit on a seat like this one during feasts, especially when hosting her kin.”
At a gesture from the fifth-born son, Saber and Kelly stood. Wolfer and Dominor as the closest brothers snatched their seats away, and Trevan scooted the double chair close for them to try it. Kelly sat, bounced a couple of times on the springy cushioning of the seat, and smiled. “This is actually comfortable, Trevan! Thank you.”
“Yes, it is; thank you, Brother,” Saber added. He glanced down where her overskirt brushed his thigh, and smirked. “Now we
can do things under the table without having t—”
Kelly elbowed him and he grunted. “Yes, Trev, this is wonderful, not having any armrests to get in my way.”
The copper-haired man laughed and sat back down. Everyone glanced expectantly at Rydan, next in line of the brothers of Nightfall. He sighed, set down his goblet, and rose, heading for the gift-table. A moment later, he came back with two small packages, handed them over, and sat back down again without a word.
When the newlyweds unwrapped them, they uncovered nearly identical steel-and-iron plaques, no bigger than Saber’s palm. The metal was shaped in swirling figures around the edges and the Katani characters for each of their names cast into the center. Saber caressed the metal with a slight frown of concentration, then smiled. “Thank you, Rydan! Now I know what you have been doing in my forge late at night.”
“What are they, exactly?” Kelly asked, turning hers over in her hand, mystified. They sort of looked magical, like oversized amulets…or maybe they were trivets for resting hot dishes on. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell.
“They’re ward-sigils, to hang over our bed,” Saber informed his bride. “No harmful magic aimed at either of us will be able to reach us when we sleep—it’s Rydan’s way of assuring our protection throughout the night.”
Kelly beamed at the man who had created them. “Thank you, Rydan! It makes me wish I had some magic of my own, so I could make the same for you, for during the day.”
The light-shunning, dramatically colored, black-clad, unsmiling man…smiled. Actually, honestly, openly smiled. The shift in his expression from shuttered to smiling transformed him from broodingly handsome to stunningly gorgeous. Unnervingly so; the simple transformation startled his brothers into giving him wary, dubious looks.
“I thank you for the sentiment, Sister.” He said nothing more, his expression smoothing out blandly once again within moments—though Kelly noticed a slight softening that continued to linger in his dark eyes, afterward.
Koranen shrugged and got up, the next in line. His pair of packages looked exactly the same as Rydan’s. And were almost identically the same once unwrapped, except these metal sculptures were cast in an attractive mingling of copper and bronze and had a somewhat different pattern to the outer design.
Koranen explained their purpose immediately to his magic-ignorant sister-in-law. “These have been crafted to ward against fire in your bedchamber. I made them so you will never need fear waking up in an inferno again, Sister.”
“That is a very thoughtful gift,” Kelly murmured, deeply appreciative of it, as she fingered the polished design. She still had a few murky nightmares of that moment, between waking and being rescued, brief dreams to accompany her brief memories, but all of it felt like it almost belonged to another lifetime, as well as another universe. She traced the entwining, flame-like lines of metal around her name characters. “I think we can hang these from the four posts of the bed…assuming Morganen didn’t make us a third set.”
“No, I didn’t,” Morganen chuckled.
“Indeed, we’ll hang them right away. Thank you, Kor,” Saber added. Then looked at Morganen. “Well?”
Morganen fetched the last box, a very small one, from the table off to the side. It wasn’t even half the size of a fist. He set it on the table between them and returned to his seat.
Saber opened it cautiously and eyed the contents of the box. “Finger rings?”
“In watching the aether of Kelly’s world in these past few weeks to check how it was settling, I noticed that their wedding ceremonies include the exchange of finger rings. Apparently, they don’t use neck-torcs,” he explained.
“They’re to symbolize the unbroken, eternal circle of love that enfolds each spouse,” Kelly explained at the puzzled looks of the brothers. She touched the thin torc at her throat as Saber fished out the smaller one and examined it, stroking her neckpiece the same way he had the steel set of ward-sigils from Rydan. “Like these torcs you wear, it helps identify who’s married and who’s not to the others.”
“They’re not magic,” Saber stated dubiously, examining the one in his hand.
“They’re not meant to be,” Morganen returned. “And I tell you, it is not easy getting someone’s ring size without them knowing it, since I didn’t use a resizing spell like the one you put on her coronet—it goes on the third finger of her left hand, Brother. The one next to the littlest finger.”
Saber lifted Kelly’s hand, started to push the ring on, then looked up at her. “Is there anything I should say, any ceremony your people use?”
“Most of it is similar enough in spirit to your own ways, though not in the actual words, but, at this part, you just say, ‘With this ring, I thee wed,’” Kelly explained to him, touched by Morganen’s thoughtful gift.
“With this ring, I thee wed,” he repeated, pushing it past her knuckle. Lifting the whole of her hand, he kissed the ring, her flesh, then held up the box with the remaining, larger ring still inside. “I presume I wear one, too?”
“Yes, you do.” She wasn’t going to give him the option of refusing. She had always believed both husband and wife should wear rings. Picking it up, she slid it carefully onto his finger. “With this ring…I thee wed.”
Her fingers trembled as she finished it, making their marriage even more real, with this token of her world’s ways. Saber folded her hands in his, lifting them to his mouth. His gaze grew dark and heated, and she knew he was feeling that much more bound to his otherworldly bride, too.
“Okay, break it up!” Koranen mock-ordered. “Any hotter, and those amulets I made will have to start working!”
Wolfer kicked their double chair in the nearest leg with his boot heel for emphasis. “Take it upstairs, you two.”
“As you wish.” Standing up immediately, Saber tugged Kelly up, then scooped her over his shoulder. She shrieked and thumped his back with a fist…but not nearly with as much vigor as she had at their very first meeting.
Her lips brushed his back in a kiss, not in a bite, before she pretended to demand, “Put me down, Saber!”
“You heard my twin. Not until we’re upstairs.” He strode for the north archway, then did a U-turn back to the table. Grabbing the four ward-sigils, he tucked them into his overtunic, adjusted his bride on his shoulder, and took his burdens out of the hall.
FIFTEEN
Saber crossed to the bed as soon as the door shut behind them. The covers, just a sheet and a blanket to ward against the cool summer nights, had been turned down slightly on both sides, while bedposts and headboard had been wrapped with real garlands of sweet-smelling flowers. Tossing the bedding down over the flowerless footboard, he lowered Kelly from his shoulder to the floor, then fished the sigils out of his tunic. Sorting them out, he handed her the ones with her name.
“I think on opposite posts would be best,” he murmured, gesturing at the diagonally opposed ones. “I’m not certain which side either of us will end up sleeping on, night after night; I have no preference, myself, and this way the wards will enclose both of us completely.”
She nodded and crawled onto the bed instead of going around, pausing only long enough to toe off her ankle boots at the edge. He eyed her backside, draped in soft aquamarine silk, then shook his head and quickly hung up the fire-ward sigil on one of the nearer posts. Saber then bent and removed his own boots and crawled onto the bed to reach the far post to hang up the night-peace amulet. When he sat back on his heels, the task done, aquamarine-clad arms slipped around him from behind.
“This silk may be lightweight…but I’m feeling rather warm and overdressed,” Kelly murmured in his ear. “How about you?”
Just feeling her warm breath against the curve of his ear made him hot. Feeling her palms flatted against the muscles of his chest, stroking upward, then down again, brought him to an instant boil. Because her fingers went all the way down to his belt and started working on the buckle. “Kelly…”
“I may be physically a virgin,
but I paid attention in my sex-education classes,” she murmured with a smile, tossing his belt away. “Did I tell you it was my favorite subject?”
Turning in her arms, Saber cupped her face and kissed her. Sweetly. Gently. Doing his damnedest to go slow instead of now, now, now like his body demanded. “We have all night, Kelly…and we may only have one time of it before the verse is fulfilled.”
“If your universe knows what’s good for it,” she asserted in a low, feminine growl, “that damned Disaster will stay away until after dawn.” She shifted her fingers to his overtunic, which laced down the front.
Out of self-defense, Saber pulled her fingers away. “You are the one wearing the most clothing; we will remove your garments first. Though I am not sure what to call your odd mix of clothes.”
“I thought I’d start a comfortable fashion trend,” she sighed against his lips, leaning forward to kiss him again.
“Women wear skirts, in Katan,” he pointed out between kisses.
“We’re not in Katan. We’re on Nightfall Island,” she reminded him, pulling back so he could attend to the laces of her tunic-vest. “And I like pants more than skirts; my thighs sometimes get chafed, in skirts.”
He stopped with the ties halfway loosened to glance down at her aqua-clad thighs. Her legs were shapely, feminine and wonderful, the kind meant to wrap around his hips…
“Chafing my thighs is your job,” Kelly added with a grin.
Saber closed his eyes on a groan. When she chuckled, he snapped his eyes open again. She was drawing out the laces the rest of the way, teasingly sliding one out of a hole, then the other, then back to the first for the next hole down the row. It aroused him; not because it was an innocent, ordinary undressing action, if done torturously slow, but because her smile while she was doing it was pure feminine temptation, knowing exactly what he was longing for beneath the slowly removed garment.
