The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  The eldest of them did just that, lifting Kelly out of the bed and out of the way, as Morganen and Wolfer climbed in to take her place. Evanor, too agitated to help, clutched at the side rail of the cart bed; Koranen held his shoulders, giving the missing brother’s twin some moral and physical support. Kelly clung to Saber as long, tense minutes passed, as the two brothers muttered and gestured and did things over their brother.

  Finally, Wolfer sat back on his heels, and Morganen stood, bracing his arm against the back of the driver’s bench. The youngest of them blotted sweat from his forehead. “He’ll live, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  As the others relaxed, the second eldest of them lifted something red and green and slimy on his fingertips. “I’d like to know how he got seaweed in the wound, myself…”

  Kelly paled again at the unsettling combination of colors.

  “He apparently transformed on the deck when he landed, was shot and fell overboard, then managed to transform into a seal to swim back to shore,” Evanor explained. “I had to choose between saving him, and going after Dominor…It’s my fault!”

  His hands slammed in fists against the side of the wagon. The brother lying on the bed jerked and cracked his eyes open with a groan. “Dom…”

  Guilty that she hadn’t heeded her instincts when Dominor had been so proud of his trading agreement—the opportunity to lure him onto their ship—Kelly looked at the others. “Can’t we go after him?”

  “With what?” Koranen asked her bitterly. “We don’t have a ship! Not even a rowboat. We are exiled here on this stinking rock!”

  “And Trev is the only one of us with a useful flying form,” Wolfer added. Kelly noticed that his cheeks were flushed slightly, his gaze averted. His fingers were also rubbing the braid of hair around his wrist. That hand was clenched in a white-knuckled fist.

  Saber shook his head, forcing himself to think rationally. “Lord Aragol said his people have few male magicians among them. If they took Dominor, it is because they want his services as a mage. They will keep him alive for that. We have to believe that.”

  “It’s my fault. First I come here, bringing the first Disaster of the Mandarites arriving here, and now this new Disaster,” Kelly muttered, looking at the once again unconscious Trevan. “I thought there was something odd about the proposed trade. I should have stopped him! I should have listened to my instincts, that there was something fishy about this suddenly friendly trading deal…”

  Saber turned her to face him and lifted her chin. “You are no more at fault than any of us. Destiny is Destiny, in this universe. We can only do our best, even if it is not enough. You are not a Seer, to know the future, or to read the intent in a man’s mind. Not even Morganen can do that. And Evanor, you did the right thing. If you had not brought back Trevan, we would have lost two brothers…and one much more certainly to death than the other. They will keep Dominor alive for his powers,” he repeated. “If he keeps his temper and arrogance in check and bides his time until he has a sure chance to escape…he will escape and return to us.”

  “He is smart enough to do that,” Wolfer agreed, climbing down from the back of the wagon, sighing. “Koranen, help me find materials to make a stretcher. Trevan is too weak to be moved without one.”

  “It will be a difficult, uncertain recovery, with so much blood lost,” Morganen agreed grimly.

  “Well, I’m a type O; you could give him some of mine,” Kelly offered. At the other’s blank looks, she reminded herself there were plenty of differences still left between her old world and this new one. Patiently, she explained. “That means I’m a universal donor. If you give someone the wrong type of blood, it could cause an immune reaction. But type O doesn’t. I just have to make sure I only get type O, because all other types will cause me to have a reaction and die.” They eyed her a little oddly at her remarks, and she shook her head. “It’s too complicated to explain in detail, but trust me, you could give him a pint of my blood, about a small mug’s worth at most, and it won’t hurt me. That should be enough to help him recover.”

  “There is a spell to do it, to transfer blood from one person to another,” Morganen agreed thoughtfully, “but it doesn’t always work; maybe this ‘type’ thing is the reason why.”

  “Technology’s knowledge harmed him. Maybe technology’s knowledge can help him,” Kelly agreed, then looked up at Saber as the head of their family, and ultimately responsible for Trevan’s well-being, when he wasn’t in any shape to respond. “Can we at least try?”

  He nodded, troubled with the worry over both brothers, but a little relieved she knew about and could do something to help at least one of them. “Do what you can for him.”

  “Then we’ll take him to my workroom,” Morganen stated. “Kelly, come ahead with me; we’ll need to prepare for his arrival. As soon as the others bring him, I’ll do the spell, then he can be carried straight to his chamber to recover. Evanor, fetch some juice. Both of them will need it when the transfer is over, according to what I have read about this spell in my books.”

  Nodding numbly, Evanor moved away in compliance. It was a good thing, giving the shock-numbed twin a task to complete; he looked like he needed distracting. Morganen and Kelly headed to his tower just a short distance away, while the others moved to help Wolfer and Koranen enchant a temporary stretcher to carry Trevan.

  Kelly sat on a stool, drinking greedily at the mug of juice Evanor had brought. She felt a little dizzy and would have liked to lie down for a few minutes, but she had given blood before—if not in a chanted, no-needles kind of way—and at least knew what to expect afterward. Except it felt like she’d had two mugs’ worth drained from her. The others had carried Trevan off, worried in that silent, supportive way men often had when one of their own was wounded. Only Morganen remained behind with her, putting jars of ingredients back in their places; ingredients for the blood-transfer spell, and ingredients for a scar-removing poultice he had packed onto both sides of his brother’s magically sealed wound.

  This was the same workroom she had arrived in, and the workroom she had been in the night before. The mirror Morganen had used both times as a Gate between universes still stood in its cheval stand. It wasn’t reflecting the room, however, but a scene from her own world, the gun shop where they had “borrowed” the gun that was still tucked at her back. Setting the mug down on the worktable beside her, she removed the gun and its beltline holster. She had never actually owned one, and she didn’t ever want to again. Not after seeing the mess a bullet had made of Trevan’s chest.

  Stupid, testosterone-riddled things… “Morganen?”

  “Yes, Sister?”

  “Can we put this back?” she asked, lifting the nylon-holstered gun.

  “Certainly.”

  “Um—just let me remove the fingerprints, first,” she added, taking the weapon out and removing its clip, and the bullet in the chamber. Morganen passed over a couple scraps of cloth from a shelf, and she rubbed the bullet, the clip, and the gun. Using the cloth, she pushed the spare bullet into the spring-loaded clip with a bit of effort, yanked out the wrinkle caught by the mechanism, and nodded at the two pieces, clip and gun. “Okay. Guns don’t hurt people on their own, but I don’t want the wrong kind of person getting their hands on this and hurting others with it, in this realm. It’s bad enough the Mandarites have their own version, however crude.”

  “Give me a moment.” Morganen muttered, finishing his tidying, then fetching out a pot of greenish powder he had mixed in bulk the previous night.

  Kelly, warned by his performance of the night before, quickly stuck her fingers in her ears. As he cast the powder at the glass surface of the mirror, he shouted several mystical words that still made no sense to her, but which rolled like thunder. Only when he had cast the fourth handful of powdered whatsits at the glass and it had flashed did she take her fingers away from her ears.

  “Put it there, on that back counter, while the clerk is still busy with a customer,” s
he directed.

  He stretched out his hand, snapped a command, and the gun floated easily into the mirror, rippled through it, and, as Morganen strained, hand trembling, the gun eased quietly to the counter. He repeated the procedure, and the clip followed it through. He dropped his hand just a second after the clerk turned around, about a second before the gun shop worker noticed the gun on the back counter. Normally there wasn’t sound in a scrying mirror unless it was specifically enspelled for it, but this was a partial doorway between the two worlds. They could hear, if a little muffled and faint, the man’s exclamation; first that the gun was out there at all, then in recognition of it as the missing weapon, and then a third time that it had been fired, and that four bullets were missing.

  Morganen blotted at the sides of his nose, where the headband on his brow didn’t catch the sweat. “Your universe is very hard to work magic in. I can only be thankful I’m here, not there, where it would be even harder. Here, at least, I can draw on various sources to augment my power. Over there, it’s like moving through…what did you call it last night? That gray, stone-like stuff your people use to build things?”

  “Concrete?” Kelly offered.

  “That’s it. Con creet.” He shook his head, leaning back against the worktable beside her. After a moment of watching the clerk punching buttons on a device called a fone, some sort of audio communicating device like a scrying mirror for the ear, he glanced at her. “Is there any place or person you want to see, before I close the link?”

  Kelly started to shake her head. Then changed her mind. “Yes, there is. You showed me what’s left of my house, but we didn’t run across anyone who actually knew me,” she stated, thinking only briefly of the burned timbers and bits of metal appliances that had survived the inferno. “Hope. I want to see my friend Hope.”

  Morganen stiffened slightly as she spoke, so she explained why, worried he didn’t think it was worth the effort to locate Hope. “She was my closest friend in the medieval society, there. All of my old friends back in the Northwest have pretty much forgotten me, and my distant kin and I were never all that close…I should have attended three events in the last month and a half, ones that she would have been at as well; I want to make sure she’s all right.”

  “You’ll have to direct me,” he reminded her, moving away from the worktable and over to the frame of the mirror. He cast a different kind of powder at the mirror, and it stabilized, cutting off the sound but not the view.

  “You remember how to get back to the highway from the gun shop?” Kelly asked, staying on the stool, since she still felt a little unsteady from the blood transfer and watching over his shoulder from her perch.

  “Yes—this way?”

  “No, no, to the left, not the right. To the right is City Hall. There it is, in the distance. Head north—the way you’re pointing—and get off two rampways down the road.”

  It was odd, navigating by what was essentially a double-width, full-length, wooden-framed, crystal-clear video; at least, that was what it looked like to her as he brushed frame and surface to control the view, now that the surface was solid and he couldn’t pass his hand through it. Kelly judged the time of day, the lack of afternoon rush-hour traffic, calculated the passage of the days…and realized what day it was back on the other side of the looking glass.

  “Keep going north!” she ordered, as he started to veer the view to the right, following the ramp. “I just realized where Hope is; she’s at the fairgrounds. There’s a medieval faire going on, if today’s the Saturday I think it is.”

  “Just tell me where to go,” he agreed amiably, adjusting their heading. “I am at the service of my queen.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “There aren’t any visitors to impress, anymore.”

  “Then I’m at the service of the first of hopefully many more sisters-in-law,” he corrected himself, smiling.

  It didn’t take long to locate the fairgrounds. The tents on the civic playing field in the distance drew them. So did the line of vehicles heading that way and the people getting out of their cars when the image in the mirror arrived at the site. Not just the ones already out there, clad in medieval garb, from tunics and trews to elaborate Rennaissance wear, but also the ones dressed in T-shirts, and baseball caps, jeans and sunglasses.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago, but she remembered those dark, bigoted scowls all too well. The citizens who had harassed her to the point of burning her in her bed were converging on her friends in the Society. Her breath caught in fear as she realized why the local bullies were there. “Good grief! Three Disasters!”

  “What’s wrong?” Morganen asked, unsure why people going to a fair would upset her, however oddly dressed half of them were.

  “Those are some of the same people who harassed me just for being in the Medieval Society! The ones who thought I was a witch—oh, my god!” Kelly slipped off the stool, eyes wide, as she hurried to Morganen’s side.

  “That looks like a longish version of a gun-thing,” he murmured, focusing the view on the man taking a long metal object out of his pickup truck.

  “It’s a rifle, and you bet your sweet backside it’s a type of gunthing!” Kelly shot back, staring at the scene displayed before them. “This is not good…”

  “If they harassed you to the point of burning down your home around you, then they’re not here to discuss the weather,” he agreed tightly. “We should do something—”

  “I’m going back.” Even as she said it, Kelly knew she was crazy. “Get that mirror open again; I’ll be right back—I have to go get something.”

  “Kelly?” he questioned as she headed for the door. When she looked back at him, he stared at her with troubled eyes the color of her own. “You’re leaving us? You’re leaving Saber?”

  Surprised, Kelly stopped and blinked at him. She knew. It was a liberating feeling, a bit shocking, but wonderful enough that she smiled. In fact, she outright grinned. “Not on your life, Morg—be ready to pull me back through at my command, too. I’m staying in this realm, when I come back through.”

  Nodding, he let her go. With a little smile of his own, as soon as she was out of his workroom, he thought, Just as I’d hoped she would decide. One down, six more to go, before it’s my turn.

  I must remember to have her point out this friend of hers to me, too.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Trevan was going to be all right. Saber reminded himself over and over of that. Evanor, still guilt-ridden about the only choice he could have made, was tending his younger brother. Koranen was hovering, and Wolfer had gone to lope down to the eastern beach in wolf-form to fetch back the second cart. It was Saber’s duty to wake Rydan and inform him of the second Disaster that had happened.

  A streak of strawberry-topped aquamarine raced across the garden, as he walked along the ramparts. It was Kelly, in a hurry to get somewhere. To get back to Morganen’s tower, he realized. But there’s no reason for her to be in such a hurry; there’s nothing anyone can do for either Trevan or Dominor, since we don’t know that ship well enough to scry into its interior…

  Unless his little brother was attempting to pull off a miracle. Informing Rydan could wait; the oddest of the eight of them was sometimes difficult to summon from whatever nook in his tower he hid in to sleep. Rydan was often also unpleasantly uncommunicative when he was summoned during daylight hours.

  Hurrying back through Trevan’s northeast tower—their injured brother slept like most of the rest of them did in the comforts of the donjon wings, with the only exception their night-loving brother—Saber made it to Morganen’s tower and started down inside. He heard his brother calling out a powerful, unfamiliar spell, the words thundering up the stairs toward him, as he descended the last curving flight. The spell was beyond Saber’s ability to cast, that was certain.

  Only by the miracle of some very strong aether-shielding spells was whatever Morganen was doing not affecting the weather outside. It was that strong of a spell. In fact, Saber wouldn’t
have even known about the spell, had he not entered Morganen’s heavily shielded tower…and had the door at the bottom of the stairs not been standing open. Reaching the partially open door, he winced back from a flash of light, then peered cautiously around the corner, too much of a mage to abruptly interrupt whatever his brother was doing, in case the enchanting was at a delicate stage.

  It didn’t appear to be, though. Morganen and Kelly stood in front of his main scrying mirror, the large one that never left this chamber. She had something bundled in her hands, and his brother was eyeing her warily.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Morganen asked his sister-in-law.

  “Very sure. Ready?” she asked, looking at him. Neither of them saw Saber at the door off to the side.

  “Always. Step on through,” the youngest of them said.

  Saber realized the image in the mirror was not of a ship, interior or exterior. Was not, from the many odd items in view, of any place in his known realm. Which meant it had to be her realm.

  Which meant she was leaving him.

  Shock held him still, as his wife stepped through. With her burned pajamas bundled in her hands.

  The mirror stopped rippling the moment she was completely through, releasing him from his immobility. “No!”

  “Whoa!” Morganen caught him, as he lunged across the room, reaching for her, trying to catch her. “Saber—Saber!”

  “You bastard!” Saber snarled, knocking his youngest brother away, as he stared at the enspelled mirror and the strawberry-haired woman on the other side. His fists shook with the need to do something, anything to get her back. “How could you let her go?”

  Sprawled on the floor, Morganen laughed—laughed! Torn between needing to go after his wife and throttling his brother, Saber glanced anxiously at the former and glared furiously at the latter. His brother sat up and shook his light brown head, still chuckling. “Relax, Saber. She’s coming back.”

  “What?” Saber looked between the two of them again, the image of his wife on the other side, shouting and raising her bundle, her words faint but audible, and his brother still half-sprawled on the floor. “She’s coming back?”