Hearts and Swords: Four Original Stories of Celta

by Robin D. Owens

  “No?”

  “No. That is a Celta phenomena.”

  She knew that but didn’t mind hearing it from him. “So?”

  His smile was slow and his expression so loving she knew her pulse would always race when he looked at her in such a way. She returned the love in her smile. He seemed caught in the moment, the quiet moment that they shared. An autumn moment of contemplation and gathering in to home.

  Again he stroked her cheeks. “Summer Queen,” he whispered.

  She wouldn’t always remain summerlike, but with him, she didn’t fear growing old. “Beloved.”

  “Yes,” he said, cleared his throat. “The Earthans didn’t have HeartMates, but they had soul mates. That’s what we are. Soul mates.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wishes do come true.”

  “Yes.”

  “Happy New Year,” he murmured with another kiss.

  “Happy New Year,” she whispered back, pressed her body against his, smiled under his renewed kiss. “A year full of possibilities,” she said.

  “A lifetime full of love,” he answered her with the truth.

  She stroked his hard and still watchful face with her fingertips, feeling the slight coarseness where his beard grew. A strong man. A real man.

  Finally a man for her? “I want you.”

  “You have me. Always.”

  Noble Heart

  One

  DRUIDA CITY, CELTA

  411 Years After Colonization

  Winter

  Walker Clover must have caught a fever, probably from his student, Nuin Ash. Mortifying that a seven-year-old boy could bring down a twentyseven-year-old man.

  His weathershield spell against the frigid cold heated until it pressed on him like a damp and searing cloth. He couldn’t get enough air. Going home after work had never been a challenge.

  Now it was. The street angled up, then down. Buildings warped. He had to get home. He couldn’t just fall.

  But he did. Even as his feet slid on ice and he hit the pavement stones, he heard curses of people he’d fallen against on the way down. Pain shot through him, his wrist, arm, knee, head. Then he knew.

  He wouldn’t make it home.

  Heated darkness washed away his vision.

  Home was beyond him. He hoped survival wasn’t.

  Nightmares claimed him.

  He awoke, mouth dry, to see the strangely misshapen faces of his parents, then the FirstLevel Healer Lark Holly. An expensive Healer instead of one provided by AllClass HealingHall. How much was he costing his family?

  His mother squeezed his hand, and he realized his fingers were twined with hers in a desperate grasp. He knew he was bruising her, but he couldn’t let go.

  He moaned and tears leaked from her big, big blue eyes and rolled down canyons in her cheeks.

  “Passss. Grrr. Saaa. Stt!” his mother said. The nonsense syllables echoed around the room, seemed to fly up to the ceiling and paste themselves against it like the stars she’d painted against a night sky. His bedroom. He was in his own room, on his own bedsponge, and should be happier, more comfortable.

  His entire body ached. His nerves throbbed as if shocks ran up and down them in an endless cycle. He felt as if a hot stone was wedged in his chest, making breathing difficult, crisping his throat so it dried shut. He blinked rapidly to try to focus on the Healer. “Wha—?” he rasped.

  “Pass—igg,” she said. Her voice was quiet but he still didn’t understand.

  “WHA—?” he shouted.

  “Passage,” his father boomed back, and Walker’s ears rang with the sound. He knew the word, a dreamquest that tested a person’s mind and emotions as it freed the psi power within him. But he didn’t understand. He had minimal psi power, Flair, just enough to use the Flair technology in everyday objects. He was a Clover, a Commoner. None of them had more than medium Flair.

  “You’ll make it through,” the Healer said. His mother put a tube of liquid to Walker’s cracked lips, tipped it, and nasty drink flowed across his tongue and down his gullet. “Argh!”

  “You’ll make it,” his father said.

  Blackness swept over Walker before he could spit.

  Every guilty feeling he’d ever had, every mistake—omission and commission—haunted him.

  The climb up the steep mountain was everything. He didn’t know why he climbed, only that it was vital.

  He moved rocks—pebbles that shifted under his feet, twisting his ankles and bringing him to his knees. The rocks laughed at him with grinning faces. He moved boulders that he had to set his shoulder against and grunt to dislodge.

  He thought he heard the piping childish voice of the boy he tutored, Nuin Ash. Crying. That hurt, too, yanking at his emotions. He wasn’t able to help the boy.

  Sweat rolled down Walker’s body. With one last effort, he reached the top of the mountain, a dangerously small space. Wind buffeted him from all directions, whistling eerily as if with words just beyond his hearing. Stuck in the middle of the meter-square rocky summit was a sword. The sword had a golden handle with the hilt curving down on each side like wings of some creature, the rest of the beast curled around it. A huge red ruby heart was the pommel. Engraved in fancy letters on the blade was Flair, as if that was the sword’s name. The weapon seemed to sing, too, and it bent in the wind, flexible. A great prize. Yearning filled him. He wanted it.

  His chest worked like bellows to draw in air, puff it out in ice crystals. His mind spun. He reached for the hilt of the sword, and the minute his fingers closed around it, they were fused in searing cold. He cried out.

  He couldn’t let go of the handle, even if he wanted to. But he had to master the sword. The sword was a weapon, a tool. He used it. The sword did not use him. He controlled it.

  The mountain, the wind, the sword. Deep in his bones, the back of his mind, he knew them for metaphors, images of something different. No time to think of that. The sword was leaching away his body heat, throwing it to the winds to scatter to the stars. If he didn’t stop the drain, he would die.

  Gritting his teeth in a grin-rictus, he wrapped his other hand around the rest of the hilt, and pulled. Yanked. Swore and set his feet and screamed and jerked.

  The sword came free and he toppled off the mountain, falling, falling.

  He knew he could use the sword to save himself, but not how. As he swung it through the air, the sword cut swaths of the scenery and it peeled away. Illusion!

  He wasn’t falling.

  No. He was on solid ground. He would not fall, hit, break. Firm land was beneath his feet. He wasn’t in a mountain range, scaling the highest peak. He was in the courtyard of his home, Clover Compound, practicing swordplay.

  No, he didn’t grip a sword, it was a quarterstaff.

  His mouth relaxed. This he understood. He was a Commoner, knew more about staves than swords. Automatically, his hands shifted on the wood, twisted, thunked the bottom of the staff on the ground. And he was home and all was right around him.

  The sun angled in, lighting the opposite wall of the west wing, painting it a deep golden. Leaves from the trees rustled and dropped their spring blossoms, and he smelled the scent of his favorite season, looked around him at his favorite place.

  He was home and the staff was in his hands and he lifted it and twirled it smoothly, lightly, moving in a pattern he knew perfectly. At the end of the last figure, he thumped it on the ground again, held it in one hand while he bowed to an unseen opponent. Then the staff melted into him, his forever, his Flair found and mastered, and the courtyard whirled around him . . . and he woke once more.

  A deep breath shuddered into his lungs. The air was warm from his bedroom fireplace, drying the sweat on his face. Logs fell with a muted clunk. Walker strove to lift the weight of his eyelids.

  The window curtains were open and showing the bare branches of trees in the central courtyard of the Clover Compound and a cold, clear, late-winter morning.

  “You’re back,” his father
said.

  “Thank the Lady and Lord!” cried his mother in a choked voice, putting a hand on his forehead. Her cheeks looked thinner, not as rosy. He slid his gaze to his father. Gray creases lined his forehead.

  Ma. That’s what he meant to say, he thought his lips formed the word, but only a raspy croak came from him.

  His father slipped a strong arm behind Walker’s shoulders, lifted him. His mother held a tube of water to his lips, tilted it so the sweet fresh liquid trickled down his throat. Water from the well in their own sacred family grove. Nothing could be better. He gulped.

  Then his mother wiped his face, and the crust around his eyes vanished and his breathing steadied. “Wha’ happened?” he asked. “Fever? Did Nuin Ash infect me with something?”

  “Something like that. Nuin is going through his First Passage to free his Flair.”

  “He’s seven.” Walker vaguely recalled that he and the Ashes had been expecting Flair fugues.

  His parents shared a gaze, then his father met his eyes. “His Passage triggered yours.”

  Walker’s body went weak, he leaned heavily on his father, his neck felt wobbly. “Passage! I don’t have enough psi magic for such a dreamquest to pummel me.”

  “Yes. You do,” his mother said. “Ease him down, Nath. It’s time we explain everything to Walker.”

  His father winced, then his face went into serious mode. He shifted Walker back to recline against stacked pillows. “Maybe we should wait.

  He’s already had a bad shock. Shocks. When a guy undergoes three Passages at once, it takes a toll on a man.”

  “Now, Nath,” his mother said. “We’ve put off telling him for years. Now.”

  A bad feeling coated Walker’s gut. It wasn’t often that his mother demanded her way, but when she did, there was no forestalling her. His stomach rumbled from emptiness and new acid.

  His mother’s face softened. “I’ll go get him some clucker soup and bread.”

  Walker would rather have had furrabeast steak.

  “You tell him, Nath,” his mother said. “He should know.” She narrowed her eyes. “And I’ll be sending Pink in, like we discussed.”

  Why would Pink Clover, the head of the Clovers, be coming to talk to Walker? Swallowing bile, he shoved away resentment. He was being treated like a child—adults discussing heavy matters about him while he was sick, coming to decisions, with no input from him. But a thin and cold coat of perspiration slicked his body, and he didn’t feel up to protesting.

  His mother came over, put her hands around his face, and kissed him like he was Nuin Ash’s age. Her blue eyes were bigger again behind tears. “You’ve always been my child, my boy, Walker.”

  Then she left.

  He turned his neck, heard it crack as he looked at his father.

  His father’s jaw clenched. He glanced away from Walker’s gaze, rolled his shoulders as if donning a heavy pack, ran both hands through his thick hair. It looked more silver than it had a week ago.

  Silence buzzed in the room, a counterpoint to the crackle of the fire.

  Walker shifted, too; the sweat had dried and itched. “What?”

  His father reached over and took one of Walker’s hands in both of his own. “You’re my son, Walker, but you aren’t Fen’s.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Clearing his throat, his father grimaced, said, “You’re not Fen’s biological child. Before Fen and I were married, I had an affair with a noble GraceMistrys. She’s your biological mother.”

  “What?” Walker said blankly.

  “You have noble blood in your veins, and your biological mother came from a strongly Flaired Family, so you’ve picked up her psi power, too.”

  At that moment the door opened and Uncle Pink came in carrying a tray with a big bowl of soup, which steamed clucker smell throughout the room, and a half loaf of dark bread. He was the Head of the Household, the large Commoner Clover clan.

  “Boy’s awake? Good.”

  “I’ve told him,” Walker’s father said heavily.

  “Everything? That he’s my heir? I’ll be stepping down?” Pink asked.

  “What?” This had to be a dream, a fever dream. Walker must have picked up a bug from the Ash children.

  Pink beamed at him. “Three Passages at once! Your Flair has manifested, for sure. You’ll be the strongest Flaired person in the family. You’ll be Head of the Household.”

  “Nooo,” Walker moaned as blood pounded like a hammer against his brain. He couldn’t face that everything he knew about his mother, his whole past, was nothing like it seemed.

  His place in the family he loved wasn’t what he thought. His brothers and sisters not completely his blood. His mother not his mother!

  Couldn’t comprehend his father and mother lying to him for so many years. How could they love him, she love him, and not trust him with this knowledge?

  Were Pink and his parents really expecting Walker to take responsibility for the whole family? He couldn’t think of that, too much to comprehend. “Why...”But Walker couldn’t finish his sentence, couldn’t think.

  “Why didn’t we tell you? Because it didn’t matter. Didn’t seem as if you got any major Flair since you didn’t show it, didn’t go through Passages at seven or seventeen or twenty-one.”

  “Makes no sense,” Walker grumbled.

  “Stop whining,” Pink said, putting the tray down on Walker’s lap. “You’ve got Flair from your mother’s—”

  “Biological mother’s,” his father corrected.

  “Yeah, yeah. Biological mother’s Family, the Heliotropes,” Pink said.

  Walker tried to think of that Family, who the woman might be, but his wits were as scrambled as the streaks of egg in his favorite clucker soup.

  The older generation just kept yammering at him.

  “But we Clovers have been getting stronger in psi Flair, too,” Pink said. He clapped Walker on his shoulder, picked up a spoon, and jammed it in Walker’s hand. Walker decided to eat. Maybe if his stomach was full he could think better.

  “Everyone’s been watching us for years to take that next step up the social ladder.” Pink hooked his thumbs into his trous pockets under his round belly. “We’ve been associated with nobles for over a decade now. In the family we’ve been wondering who’d be goin’ through testing to become the first lord or lady.”

  Walker choked. He reached for a softleaf and rubbed his mouth. “That should be one of cuz Trif’s children.”

  “You, Walker,” Pink said. “Your combined Passages were hard enough to free some major Flair power inside you.”

  “I don’t feel any different.”

  “You are, though,” his father said quietly. “We’ve talked to your former employer, T’Ash, about testing your Flair, to find the strength and type.”

  “I don’t feel any different,” Walker repeated, his voice hard. He chewed a small chunk of clucker.

  “You will,” Pink said.

  Walker ripped off a piece of bread with his teeth, savored the earthy taste of dark Commoner bread. He’d had no ambition but to be the best man he could, the best teacher he could, and to fit into his family. His Commoner family who had little Flair.

  Apparently he now had great Flair and that set him apart. Like his having a different mother than he’d thought set him apart. Now everything had changed.

  Too damn much to be expected to cope with on an empty stomach. He stared at Pink. “You knew about my...biological... mother, too?”

  “Yes,” Pink replied.

  “Just how many people know about this?”

  “Since your Passage, everybody.” Pink shrugged thick shoulders. “Before that, most of your father’s and my generation and elders.”

  Finishing the food, Walker set aside the tray, rose from the bedsponge, uncaring of his nudity. He locked his knees as they threatened to give way. Weak. “What day is this?”

  “You’ve been abed a full five days,” his father said.

  W
alker waved a hand at them. “Later. We’ll talk about this later.” He needed time to process that the foundation of his life sifted away from under him, dumping him on his ass.

  “We’ll talk about it now,” Pink said.

  “No.”

  The door opened and his mother—the woman he’d thought was his mother—came in. “You’re shouting. Everyone in the courtyard can hear you. Walker, you should get back in bed.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t use that tone,” his...mother...said. “Be courteous.”

  He stared at her, then at his father, then at Pink. “You all lied to me. All. Of. My. Life. Since when does that show respect for me?”

  His mother made a strangled, hurt noise that stabbed at Walker, but he was awash with a maelstrom of anger and pain.

  “Walker!” His father’s face was red and furious. Nath swung an arm around his wife.

  Pink scowled, too. “Not well done of you.”

  “I can say the same.” Walker flicked open his hands, but his body was unruly and his arms jerked wide. “Outside this room everyone in the family is talking about me, knowing my circumstances earlier than I do myself. Speculating about who I am or am not.” He didn’t know who he was, either, and that had fear lacing through all the other churning emotions.

  He was even older than he’d thought, than they’d told him. Must be. “You haven’t shown me much courtesy.”

  “We are your elders and your parents,” his father stated. “We raised you and loved you all your life. Your mother reared and loved you.”

  Walker meant to touch fingers to heart, but his hand thumped his chest. “That doesn’t mean what I thought it did.” He ignored the darkening expressions. So much was going on, nothing else could touch him. “I don’t remember any other mother, woman.” No one, except this one who looked at him from haunted eyes, but who had lied to him every day of his life.

  Pink stared at him. “She gave you to us within a septhour after you were born, left to live on her Family’s estate in the south. Her Family didn’t want to raise you. Your father and Fen—we did.”

  Walker had thought he couldn’t feel more. But he did. As if the knife in his guts twisted. “Who?” He grated the word from a dry throat.