by Jean Johnson
“I’ll speak to Saber. The traders are due here tomorrow—not that they’re going to be very happy, after tomorrow,” she added with a little shrug. “We get the fresh water from the ocean, through some sort of water-purifying thing in some buildings down by the west shore that extract the algae and the salt. The algae’s apparently great for fertilizer, once it’s composted a little while, and the salt’s been just taken for free by the traders, in these big, coffin-sized blocks,” Kelly explained, stretching out her arms to indicate the huge size. “But I’ve declared all of the resources of Nightfall to belong to its citizens, which means they belong to the eight brothers and me—and now you—so we’re going to fight to keep the salt and start trading it for profit.”
“That might be difficult,” Alys agreed. “No man likes having to pay for something when he’s used to getting it for free. Cari told me that.”
“A smart woman. Saber’s still cautious about advertising my—our—existence here, but the way I see it, Katan threw them away and this island with them; they don’t have any right to anything on or immediately around this island anymore. Not the fish in its reefs, not the fruit on its shores, and not the salt blocks its water system makes.” She braced her hands against her hips. “So I’m going to fight for it. This is my home now, and I say what goes on in my home.”
“You’re . . . rather fierce, aren’t you?” Alys ventured hesitantly. And watched as the other woman blushed.
“Yeah, I guess I am.” She eyed Alys, then smiled. “I know what we can do . . .”
Eyeing her hesitantly, Alys wondered what that could be. “What?”
“I’m going to do you a favor and introduce you to the art of kung fu. You’re going to love it—and if you ever encounter your uncle again, and he’s nasty to you, he’s going to hate it. Trust me.”
“My uncle only cares about art if it’s worth a lot of money; he neither hates it nor likes it,” Alys stated.
Kelly laughed. “It’s not really art, like a painting on a wall. Just trust me, you’ll love it. But the first thing we have to do is pick a room, get it cleared of furniture, make some practice mats to pad the floor—well, actually, I think for you a tour of the castle would be the first thing to do, right?”
“I suppose so,” Alys agreed. “I’ve never been here before, and it looks large enough to get thoroughly lost in.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Kelly promised. “I learned where everything was by bullying the brothers into cleaning the place, and it was a disgusting mess at the time. I am very glad they did the vast majority of it, using their magic and their muscles; I tried my hand at doing it the hard, nonmagical way, and I’d much rather bully them any day. Come on; I’ll show you all around.”
Hips. Hips that swayed. Hips that sashayed. Arms that hovered in a bent, almost clasped position at the base of her ribs, just above her waist, so that the hands were close together. Emphasizing the dip of that waist just below them, the flare of those hips . . . the breasts mounding soft and full above by the lacing of her undergarment, underneath her somewhat tight tunic.
“Wolfer?” Alys repeated, leaning in a little closer with a concerned look. “Are you all right? I just asked you a question.”
Wolfer blinked and tore his mind—or rather, a part of him that had nothing to do with his mind—away from her body. When had she grown up? When did she become a woman? Why the hell didn’t I notice all those years ago? He looked at her eyes, just over half a foot lower than his; at the same height as Kelly. That made her seven inches shorter than his six-foot-one. Still within reasonable kissing height. “What was the question?”
Alys liked the depth of his voice, the way it rumbled from some deep, secret place in his chest. It made her own chest expand in pleasure . . . and his gaze slipped down again for just a moment. “I said, could you come and help Kelly and me move some furniture?”
“Furniture?” he repeated, then blinked and shook his head, frowning. “What is it with that woman, anyway?” Wolfer demanded. “We just moved the Gods-be-damned furniture, last month!”
“Kelly needs to empty your twin’s old suite of all the furniture, so we can have a . . . ‘kungfoo’ room, whatever that means.” Alys frowned herself, looking up at him. “Do you know what that means?”
“How should I know?” he growled irritably. “Saber’s the one who married her! It’s probably some strange, otherworldly thing of hers—and why are you wearing trousers?”
Alys straightened and gave him a look that bordered somewhere near brave and unbudging. “I like trousers. Kelly convinced me to try them, and they fit, and I like the way they feel on me. So I’m not taking them off!”
His golden eyes darkened slightly, his lips parting on an indrawn breath as he thought of her without any covering on her legs at all. The way he had glimpsed them out of the corner of his equine-shaped eye for just a brief moment on the beach that very morning. He licked his dry lips; her gray eyes caught the movement and stared in fascination, almost as if she had never seen a man lick his lips before. Wolfer instinctively did it again. More slowly. Her own lips parted; her tongue came out, touching her own rose-pink softness, which he longed to lick himself—
“There you are!” The moment was ruined, shattered by Kelly’s cheerful call. She came over and clasped her hands around one of Wolfer’s biceps. Well, as much as the redhead could, considering the size of his arm. “So, are you going to flex these muscles and help us clear out Saber’s old room?”
Alys didn’t like how at ease the other woman was with touching Wolfer. Especially when she longed to do just that herself. “Did you find your husband and ask him to help us?”
“Saber’s already clearing out the last of his personal stuff,” Kelly said. She frowned slightly, eyed Alys, arched a brow . . . then smiled, just a little. A sly, secret-holding, feminine smile. She patted Wolfer’s arm then let go of him. “Since Saber’s under my command, you can command his twin, here, to your heart’s content. Wolfer, you will promise to obey her every whim, won’t you?”
He eyed his sister-in-law suspiciously. “What do you mean by that?”
Kelly gave him an innocent look as Alys blushed. “Exactly that. She and I are moving that furniture, but we need your muscles, so if she asks you to move a chest or move the bed, you’ll move it, right?”
Remembering what Cari had told her about men, ego, and flattery, Alys nudged her shyness into boldness and stepped forward, touching his other arm. She half-caressed it with her palm, her fingertips, making him glance down at her. “That is what men have muscles for, isn’t it? To make them big, and hard, and to use them to make a woman happy by . . . by moving the bed, when asked nicely?”
She couldn’t . . . she didn’t just . . . Wolfer choked inside, colored outside. His bicep twitched under the stroke of her fingers, the resting of her palm, bulging into her touch.
“You’re so much bigger than I am,” Alys added, blushing a little, rubbing his impressively sized muscles with her thumb, unwilling to stop touching him. “I can’t make the bed move without your help.”
Jinga’s Balls, I want to make that bed move! he swore silently. But not across the floor—not unless it was from the sheer strength of him thrusting into her. His blood pounded in his ears, pooled in his groin. Certain parts of him were certainly willing to try.
“Bring him along, Alys,” Kelly ordered, turning on her heel and walking away. “Now, Alys,” she added over her shoulder, as neither of the other two moved.
Alys stroked her fingers over his skin again. He caught her hand as her fingertips trailed down toward the sensitive skin on the inside of his elbow. Wolfer growled softly at her. “Don’t play with me.”
Golden brown lashes lifted, and soft gray eyes looked up at him. Her lips pursed, forming half-whispered words. “But we’ve always played with each other.”
He wanted to curse—she sounded innocent, now. He forced himself to gently remove her hand. “We’re adults, now. We cannot play with
each other as we used to do as children.”
I know, Alys wanted to say, but he stepped around her and strode down the hall before she could. She watched him walk away . . . and found herself admiring the strength of his shoulders, the flexing of his muscles, his easy, graceful, masculine gait. Sighing, she followed him. She was always following him. She needed to take the lead sometime soon.
If she could find the bravery to do it in full, instead of just in little snatches, that was. Alys feared it would take full-time-bravery to snare the Wolf, and she wasn’t a full-time-bravery kind of woman.
An hour later, she didn’t care about being brave. Wolfer had taken his shirt off. Instantly, the intensity of her beach ride came back to her. She felt the trembling heat return, the ache she had felt while staring at his blatantly aroused shadow.
With the noon heat radiating through the open windows, even on the southern side of the northwestern wing at the split end of the western spoke of the palace, it was hot in the room. Longing to strip off her own clothes, she wiped at the sweat on her face, which was beading from the effort of carrying the smaller items—stools, cushions, pillows, and bedding—from Saber’s old room to another of the guest chambers in that end of the wing. Now that he apparently lived in that fancy chamber on top of the great hall’s dome, the eldest of the eight brothers had no need for the room. His wife did, however.
Not all of the rooms were completely furnished, though the larger items had been left behind by successive generations of exiled families. Alys and Kelly both learned from stray comments of the two men that others who had been exiled had usually lived on Nightfall until they died and the isle was abandoned again. The heirs and those servants allowed to accompany them—none in the brothers’ case, and especially no women—were allowed to leave at any time. They usually removed themselves when the exiled persons died, to go take up the estates held in pro-tem trust until the death or return of the exiled members.
In all of the wings, the practical rooms were in the straight sections closest to the donjon at the heart of the palace. Those included the herb room, kitchen, dinning hall, sewing room, and ale room in the north wing—though technically the kegs were kept in the basement of the donjon—along with other storage rooms and even a dungeon, replete with cells, keys, and chains. Kelly and Alys had both wrinkled their noses at that particular part of the tour, though at least the brothers hadn’t needed to do much work to scour everything clean. Whatever horrific use the chamber had been built for, it had been a long time ago.
The armory and indoor weapons salle lay in the west wing, along with rooms filled with crumbling maps and charts of the island, the waters around it, and the minor continent of Katan. The ballroom, the grand solar, and the painting gallery lay in the east wing. The audience hall, library, and light-globe storage room were found in the south wing, with small sitting rooms and salons scattered all around the four main wings. The bedrooms, most of the refreshing rooms, and bathing chambers were usually in the long, split ends angling out from each wing.
There had to be more than a hundred bedchambers, Alys decided, some with attached sitting rooms, private bathing chambers, and refreshing rooms. Some held just private refreshing rooms, though most of those without the extra suite-like chambers were up in the attic, where there were communal refreshing and bathing chambers for the servants who would have lived here long ago. Plus there were the larger bathing chambers, with several soaking tubs, the stairwells, the refreshing rooms every so often—the straight sections of the wings ran on for roughly a hundred yards, the wings two-thirds of that length.
Even taking into account the stout thickness of the outer stone walls and the thick stone separating and defining each chamber with the privacy of insulated quiet from its neighbors, the castle was huge. And that wasn’t even counting the eight huge towers guarding the slightly curved, eight-sided outer wall; each had several levels, and most of them, workrooms and storage rooms for each of the eight mage-gifted brothers. Add to that a few outbuildings, stables, a barn, woodwright shop, smithy-forge—chicken coop included—and several gardens. Plus the four courtyards nestled between the four Y-endings of each wing. It was an echoingly huge home for the eight brothers to have lived in alone for three long years. Nine people, with the arrival of the strange but nice woman Kelly, and now ten with Alys staying among them.
Alys watched Saber remove his shirt as well, his own tanned flesh about as sweat-slick as his broader-chested twin’s. She tried not to stare at him as he whispered to Kelly, moving over to the other woman’s side as the two men worked on dismantling the bed. Alys waited patiently until Saber kissed his strawberry-haired wife and moved back to the bed, their murmuring apparently a moment of shared endearments before the elder of the twins went back to work.
Only then did she whisper to the other woman, “Kelly . . . why are we clearing out this room, when there are plenty of sitting rooms we could be using?”
“One, it gets Saber completely out of this room and into mine, making him feel more like it’s his room, too, at the top of the great hall—men like to feel important, in their wives’ lives,” Kelly added in an aside. “And two, this room has its own bathing chamber and refreshing room. The bathing chamber is like yours, big enough to change in, as well as use the facilities. That makes it perfect for changing into something fit to work out in, do our exercises, getting all sweaty, bathing afterward, and changing back into something clean again.”
“Oh.” Alys still didn’t quite understand what Kelly was talking about. But she certainly didn’t mind that all of this effort was making Wolfer’s smooth, lightly haired chest ripple with flexing muscles. He looked very manly. He smelled manly, too; her shapeshifter’s nose could smell the musk of his sweat. It was more . . . more earthy, a scent more masculine, yet more pleasant than his brother’s. Alys supposed from the way Kelly would inhale and smile at her husband now and again that Saber’s scent had its own special attractions for the other woman, but Saber didn’t draw Alys like Wolfer did.
The bed was the last piece of large furniture to go. The men took down the railings of the stripped canopy supports, and the two ladies dutifully moved forward to carry these lighter parts into one of the bedchambers in the attic that lacked a bed, no doubt inhabited by some servant long ago, one that could at least fit a bed of this size. When they came back, both men were straining at the side rails, the mattress already moved aside. They were trying to remove the rails from their slots in the headboard, with the footboard already removed. The tongue-in-slot joints, however, had swollen and split with age. Saber’s finally came out with a mutter of magic and a jolt; the boot he had braced against the headboard thrust him back with the release of the sideboard, dumping him on his backside.
Kelly immediately hurried over and fussed over him, while his slightly younger brother cursed and struggled to support the headboard and its remaining sideboard. Alys quickly leaped over the downed footboard and threw herself at the headboard, helping Wolfer support it.
“Thanks, Alys,” he managed tightly, shoulders and arms bulging, abdominal muscles tight above the waistline of his breeches. His side wasn’t budging, though.
Saber let his wife help him to his feet and moved to support the large headboard. Kelly shifted closer to Wolfer, wrapped her hands as best she could around the board next to Wolfer’s, braced a leg blessedly not encumbered by a skirt on the panel, and added her own pull to the second eldest brother’s. Leaving the eldest to push against the headboard.
Saber tried using a subtle touch of magic on it again, the same as he had for the other side. It didn’t move. None of them made any headway. The problem with using rougher magic was that Saber didn’t want to destroy the bed frame, in case it was ever needed again. That meant finding some other, less damaging way. Trevan was the brother who had the touch with wood, but Trevan’s chore was fixing their lunch today.
“Enough! It’s not going to budge,” Wolfer said, as the other two relaxed their efforts.
“We can’t take it up the stairs like this,” Saber reminded him. He looked over at his wife, who was coiling the rope that had been strung tightly under the feather mattress and the thickly stuffed wool-and-cotton tick that had lain between mattress and ropes. “Kelly, fetch the dagger from my waist and see if you can shave either piece of wood.”
Nodding, she plucked the knife from its belt sheath, inserted herself in front of Alys and Wolfer as the two of them shifted back, Alys quickly moving around to Wolfer’s side of the board. Kelly poked and scraped at the opening. It took a while, but finally she finished and moved herself out of the way, carefully wiping the sharp-edged blade of dust shavings before resheathing it at her husband’s waist. “Try it now.”
It took effort; Alys wrapped her arms around Wolfer’s waist to give him more leverage, and with the other two both pushing away the headboard while they pulled on the side—it finally popped free. Only because Alys was ready for it did she manage to keep herself and Wolfer on their feet, while Saber and Kelly bumped with the headboard into the wall behind it.
“Thanks,” Wolfer murmured as Saber braced the thick, carved headboard so it wouldn’t fall and injure anyone. He wished Alys would let go of his waist a little faster, a little more circumspectly. Instead, she released him by stepping back, her hands sliding briefly across his skin above the waistband of his breeches. He also perversely wished her arms would linger on his bare flesh a little longer, that her soft breasts were still pressed into the hard muscles of his back.
Alys didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. Not with her throat tight, with her lips pressed together against the urge to find out what Wolfer’s sweat-slick skin tasted like. Taking the side panel from him so he could manage the heavy head- and footboards with his brother, she headed for the attic. As she walked, breathing deeply as she managed the awkward piece of timber, Alys discovered that her clothing now carried his scent. It made sense; her clothing was slightly damp from embracing his sweating skin.
