The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

  Torrie nodded, understanding why she wouldn’t want to go into it, not in front of strangers, and had covered with a quick story about fixing the tractor.

  Wolves were a protected species, and while farmers were willing to live with having them around, should one or another lone wolf decide that it would prefer to raid livestock rather than hunt for, say, wild rabbits and prairie dogs, the only choices would be to put up with increasing losses—something a farmer wouldn’t like; to have the Department of Natural Resources try to livetrap and remove the wolf—which they were too damn slow about doing, when they did it at all; or to have the wolf dealt with, informally but effectively.

  Which also explained what Dad and Hosea were doing out there. Dad was fond of Sandy Hansen’s fried chicken—so was Torrie; his mouth watered at the thought—but he was even more fond of the time that Sven had come along during a blizzard to pull Mom’s stuck car out of a ditch. Dad liked doing favors for neighbors, but the Hansens were special.

  Torrie shuddered. He didn’t much like wolves. They figured too prominently in some of the scarier of the old stories that Uncle Hosea told.

  “It’s okay, Mom, really. We’ll settle in, grab a shower, I’ll show Ian and Maggie around.”

  “Can you?” She glanced at her watch and took a step back up the stairs. “I’m putting together an options order, and I have to get it in on time or I’m going to have to start all over again with the morning quotes—can I be a horrible hostess and let Torrie settle you in?” she asked, turning to Maggie and Ian. “I promise we’ll have plenty of time later in the day to get to know each other—I’m not the one in this family who doesn’t like to make promises—but this is a workday for me, and—”

  “It’s okay, Mom, honest.”

  “That will be very nice,” Maggie said.

  “No problem, Mrs. Thorsen.” Ian smiled.

  Mom turned and walked up the stairs slowly enough for it not to be a retreat, and Torrie deliberately didn’t watch Ian watching the tightness of her jeans. There was something vaguely obscene about it.

  Her door closed behind her; Torrie started up the stairs, the other two following in his wake.

  The third stair creaked, just like it always did. Step on the left side, then quickly stomp on the left side of the fourth stair, and the fourth stair would swing up to reveal another of Uncle Hosea’s abditories, this one containing an old Colt Military & Police .38 revolver and a roll of Charmin toilet paper.

  Both of which were silly. Mom and Dad kept fully stocked on staples—it wasn’t like they were a bunch of city folk or something. Torrie had never had call for the emergency roll of toilet paper any more than he had for the .38 revolver, but when his father had declared him a man at age fifteen, Uncle Hosea had shown him where all the family weapons were, and Dad had taught him to use each one to Dad’s not-particularly-easy-to-earn satisfaction.

  At least, Uncle Hosea had implied he’d shown Torrie where all the family weapons were. You could never quite believe everything he said, and he never quite told you everything.

  Maggie cleared her throat. “Well?”

  “Er … sorry. I wasn’t listening. You were saying?”

  “I said—I mean, I asked: and she makes a living doing this? Out here? In the middle of nowhere?” She smiled. “No offense intended, honest.”

  “None taken. And, well, yeah.”

  “And what was that about she isn’t the one who doesn’t like to make promises?”

  Torrie pursed his lips. Nothing wrong with talking about it. “It’s my Uncle Hosea. He doesn’t like making promises. He’ll do what he says he’ll try to do just about a hundred times out of a hundred, but he won’t promise.” He shrugged. “It’s just the way he is.”

  Mom’s fingers were clickity-clickity-clicking on the keyboard in her office, down the hall to the right; Torrie led the other two down the hall to the left, past the closed doors to Uncle Hosea’s room and his own.

  “Maggie, you get the Guest Room,” he said, dropping her bag inside, keeping his voice low enough not to bother Mom, although that was hardly necessary. When she was concentrating on a column of figures, it would take more than conversation to distract Mom.

  “Ian, you’ve got the Sewing Room,” he said, swinging the door open at the room at the end of the hall. “Nice southern exposure.” They’d always called it the Sewing Room, although it was just another guest room, a bit smaller than the official Guest Room, but otherwise just as pleasant. The walls were painted in the same off-white with just a hint of peach for warmth, and the wooden floor was stained a warm light brown and coated with that high-tech plastic gunk that Uncle Hosea liked so much.

  The battered oak dresser and matching vanity had been Mom’s, back when she was girl, and they were due for a stripping and refinishing, but they were still serviceable.

  Ian felt at the green plaid quilt covering the bed. “Your Mom?”

  Torrie shook his head. “Actually, no. My grandmother—and you should find the bed comfortable; the mattress is a Posturepedic. Bathroom’s at the end of the hall, and another one’s just across from my Mom’s office. Plenty of towels in the hall closet; help yourself.”

  The rooms were well set up for visitors; during the winter, on those two or three days when the risk of imminent blizzards made it too dangerous for the schools to let the farm kids take the bus home, the Thorsen house was capable of taking on a half a dozen overnight guests without any problem. That was always fun, staying up half the night with, say, the Thompson kids and the Gisselquists, listening to Uncle Hosea’s stories about the Vestri and the Aesir, little Toby Thompson asking for the hundredth time for the story of Thor’s encounter with Utgarda-Loki, or Honir’s Run.

  “A shower would be great.” Ian stretched. “After all that sleeping on the drive up, I think I need a shower and then maybe a nap.”

  “And then maybe some rest, and a snooze?”

  Ian grinned. “Yeah, and then maybe some relaxation and a siesta. So I’ll be ready to rest after supper before it’s time to go to sleep.”

  Torrie grinned back. “Good idea.” It was good to see Ian kicking back a little; he probably could use a vacation more than anybody. Ian was just too intense most of the time.

  Ian raised an eyebrow. “Er … if I get bored, is that fencing studio in the basement open for general use?”

  Torrie forced his frown into a smile. That short rest had quickly become a possible workout. “Sure. Stairs lead down from the kitchen; light switch at the top of the stairs, on your left. Help yourself.”

  “Bath and nap first. Gotta keep the priorities straight.” He was already unbuttoning his shirt.

  Torrie was grinning as he closed the door and headed down the hall and down the stairs. Trust Ian to reduce even a vacation to a balance of priorities.

  Torrie brought another load up the stairs, dropping his own backpack off in front of his room before bringing Maggie’s small case to the Guest Room. He set the suitcase on the floor, over by the old rolltop desk. “You should be comfortable here,” he said, quietly. “One of my favorite places.”

  Torrie liked the Guest Room. Back when he was a kid, when his own room got too messy to live in, he would often bring a book in here and stretch out on the double bed to read—at least, until Dad caught him at it, and made him go clean his room, or, more precisely, ordered him not to come out until it was clean. Dad would lock up the Guest Room then, never having realized that Uncle Hosea had shown Torrie the secret door behind the bureau, the one that led from Torrie’s room to the back of the Guest Room’s closet. Torrie would take the small bent piece of wire from the top of his dresser, poke it through the almost invisible hole that looked even on close examination like a small gap in the joining of the paneling, then swing the door and the bureau out of his way, go through, and finish his book before cleaning his room.

  “It’s very nice,” she said, leaning back against the door. Her smile was perhaps a touch too broad. “You didn’t mention
that your mother looked like a Playboy Playmate,” she said. “I mean, the bit with the glasses and bun? Was I supposed to think she looks plain with her hair back?”

  He had to smile. “She’s a stock investor.”

  Maggie touched the tip of her tongue against the corner of her mouth. “My Dad has a stockbroker. He’s a bald little guy with a potbelly and bad digestion.”

  Torrie shook his head. “No, not a broker. All brokers do is buy and sell stocks for other people, and try to get them to turn their portfolios over as fast as possible, like a blackjack dealer wanting you to play a dozen hands at once.” He stooped to pick up his knapsack and Maggie’s suitcase. “She’s an investor—Mom picks the stocks out herself, and invests her own money. Well, hers and Dad’s.”

  “Does she make a living at this, or does your father’s farm bail her out?”

  Torrie tilted his head to one side. “If you want to examine the family tax records, I think she’s got all of them in the file cabinet in her office.” Which was better than saying yes, or pointing out that of the farmland they owned, all except the five-acre family garden was rented out to the Norsteds.

  It was family business, and private, although not secret.

  The origin of the strange golden coins that were the source of the family fortune was a secret, and one that Torrie had often wondered about. But he would be told what he needed to know when he needed to know it. So Mom said, so Dad said, so Uncle Hosea said, and of all things, Torrie believed them.

  Meanwhile …

  Torrie slipped an arm around Maggie’s back, and tugged at the hem of her sweater. She tilted her head up, and he kissed her, at first softly, and then hard, her tongue warm and wet in his mouth, his hand lifting the hem of her sweater and sliding inside the scooped neck of her shirt, down into the bra, cupping her breast. Her nipple was hard against his palm as her fingers toyed with his belt buckle for just a moment before pushing him gently away.

  “Torrie! Your mother’s just in the next room, and aren’t your father and uncle around?”

  He didn’t remove his hand from her breast. “She won’t hear anything while she’s working, and if they’re out this late, they won’t be back until late afternoon, as you’d know if you’d ever tasted Sandy Hansen’s fried chicken, or seen how she stacks it on a plate, and you’re just stalling.”

  And besides, even if Mom heard something, she wouldn’t have heard something.

  He pressed her up against the door, and kissed at her ear and the side of the neck. She smelled of Ivory soap and lemon and roses, with just a slight overtone of sweat.

  He hooked a finger inside her belt. “I’m a nice guy, and I’ll take a no, but you’ve got to say no.”

  “And the idea of doing it with your mother down the hall turns you on in a way that I doubt my father the clinical psychologist would find particularly healthy,” she said, as though he hadn’t said anything.

  “That wasn’t a no.”

  She was fumbling in the back pocket of his jeans. “I see we don’t have to go hunting for a condom.”

  “I used to be a Boy Scout.”

  She smiled as she unbuckled his belt. “You tear it open with your teeth this time.”

  “Fair is fair,” Torrie said. Which, after all, sounded better than About Fucking Time.

  Chapter Two

  Thorian and Hosea

  Wearing only a jockstrap, a pair of cotton shorts, and the faded yellow Dartmouth T-shirt he had won on a bet, the padded mat cold beneath his hairy thighs, Ian Silverstein bent himself almost double, stretching his hamstrings until he thought they would snap.

  Warming up was the secret of not hurting yourself with this stuff. Despite the reputation that fencing had—usually among people whose only exposure to it was sitting on their butts in front of the TV screen, watching Basil Rathbone pretend to lose to Errol Flynn (Rathbone was an Olympic-class fencer; Flynn, even sober, couldn’t close his low line if his life depended on it)—fencing was about as dangerous as checkers, and much less so than baseball or basketball. A baseball player could catch a foul tip; a basketball player could collide with another jock or come down wrong on an ankle. Hell, a swimmer could wham into a pool wall, and any idiot who went out on a football field deserved what he got.

  You had to keep your priorities straight, when all you could count on was yourself. The real danger in fencing was in hurting a muscle or tendon by not having warmed up properly. Ian Silverstein couldn’t afford health insurance beyond the student infirmary, and he couldn’t afford to spend a week recovering from a minor injury or most of a year getting over a major one, so he stretched himself until he felt like Reed Richards before he opened his gear bag.

  Ian hadn’t suspected that Torrie was lying about the basement salle d’armes, not really, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that Torrie wasn’t even exaggerating: instead of the usual concrete floor, the basement was floored in wood, and well-lighted with overhead fluorescent panels, and fully equipped, from the regulation two-meter-by-fourteen playing strip to the racks of foils and epees and sabers and some strange practice swords that Ian didn’t recognize, to the electronic timing system that seemed a bit smaller and a bit slicker than the one at school.

  Must be nice to have money.

  Three more years, kiddo, and we get to start finding out. No, make that three and a half. Finish up the B.A. this year, spend another summer teaching intermediate foil for D’arnot—with a nice, juicy ten percent bonus if he came out first in the citywide, twenty percent for a zone win—then three years of law school, and then after the money.

  Be a lawyer, just like your Dad, eh?

  Fuck, no.

  He’d have more tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off than Ian liked to think about, but he had a plan that wouldn’t only pay it off but would help get back some of his own.

  Ian knelt on the playing strip. Nice wood, lacquered evenly and marked like a skinny basketball court: a thick green stripe across the strip marked the center, and two thinner ones the en-garde lines, while two red lines—plus a third one that Ian wondered about—marked the warning lines for first the saber and epée and then foil. The retreat zone beyond either end was in darker wood, which Ian thought was hardly enough of a difference to be useful until he stepped on it: with every step on each board, it squealed, like chalk on a blackboard. That would give somebody plenty of time to slow down before whanging into a wall.

  Ian didn’t take a foil down from the racks—he would sooner have borrowed a toothbrush without asking. Instead, he unzipped his gear bag and pulled out his sneakers and his favorite practice foil.

  Not quite as spiffy as his electronic sword, but the grip was identical, and the snap of the blade was even nicer, really. It was also a lot cheaper to replace if it got bunged up.

  He left his mask, trousers, and plastron in the bag, but took out his glove. No need to burden himself with all that when there was nobody facing him.

  He slipped on the glove and gripped the hilt of his foil loosely, then came to attention, heels together, right foot pointed down the fencing strip, left foot at right angles to it, palms turned outwards. Form is everything in foil. Learn to do it the right way, in proper form, and let speed and control come later; it will all fall into place.

  He came on guard, then brought his foil up to sixte, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to lunge at the slightest—

  He pushed with his left leg, the heel hard against the floor, and took a long step forward with his right foot, coming to his full extension, his wrist lifting to keep his point traveling along a line from his shoulder through his wrist, toward just inside where an imaginary opponent’s armpit would be.

  The ideal line. It was nice to be able to touch something that was ideal.

  “Very nice, sir,” sounded from behind him.

  Even a year ago, Ian would have stumbled at the sound, but tournaments were full of unexpected sounds, and you had to learn to ignore them, or you�
��d be distracted by the slamming of a door and find somebody less twitchy scoring off you, and Ian gave up zero, zip, and no points without fighting for them.

  So he lowered his point and turned slowly, smoothly.

  It wasn’t hard to figure that the fiftyish man was Torrie’s father: he had the same frame, small-boned and of only slightly more than medium height, the same shock of light-brown-verging-on-blond hair, framing a face whose jaw was almost as square as the toes of his work boots. Overdeveloped thigh muscles bulged against the tightness of his jeans, and he wore a white pullover woven cotton shirt that looked like something out of Old Sturbridge Village, although Ian had seen the Deva catalog they came from, and similar shirts on Torrie.

  Not that they could have been mistaken for brothers: years of sun and wind had carved lines into a sun-darkened face, and what should have been a straight nose had a slight quirk in it, as though it had been badly broken at one point. And there was a scar running down the right side of his face that looked something like the Heidelberg scar the ex-Nazi who coached the Dartmouth team probably touched up with red makeup.

  Except that a Heidelberg scar was thin and white, expertly closed, with no sign of stitchery, and Torrie’s dad’s looked like he had a long white centipede stuck to his face.

  It made his smile look threatening. “You would be Ian Silverstone?” he asked, his voice deeper but smoother than Ian would have thought.

  “Yes, sir,” Ian said, tucking his sword under his arm so he could remove his glove. “Ian Silverstein, sir. Torrie said it would be okay if I used the room.” He gestured at the fencing strip.

  “I am Thorian Thorsen,” the older man said, taking Ian’s hand. “I apologize for mispronouncing your name; I tend to translate names. And of course you may use the room, and be welcome; you are a guest in our home.” His hand was hard with callus and muscle, and his grip was firm, but he wasn’t into squeezing contests.

  Ian figured he could live with that.

  Thorsen tilted his head to one side. “You are a foil player exclusively? Or did I see a bit of saber in your recovery?”