The Sword (12 page)

 

M
organen slammed against the stone wall of the upper level of the north wing, back-first. Saber's hand had gripped his throat the moment they reached the bottom of the steps up to the lord's room. “You will leave her alone.
Is that understood?
”

“Let…go—” Morganen choked, grabbing at the fingers threatening to crush his windpipe, “or…turn…you into…
toad
…”

Saber let go. Then slammed his brother against the wall again, this time grasping two fistfuls of his tunic, rather than his throat. Gray eyes bored into aquamarine. “I
mean
it, Morg! You will stay away from her!”

Morganen shoved his brother's grip away, though it jerked roughly at his dark blue tunic. “Stop thinking of yourself, Saber! She's free to choose or not choose as she damn well pleases!
I
merely wanted her to know that
I
was interested, if she ever decides to be interested in me—which I am perfectly free to be!” He straightened his tunic and started for the stairs leading down into the rest of the castle, speaking without turning his head. “Frankly, given how you've yelled and bullied and treated her, Saber, I'm not surprised at the way she reacted to you, with your constantly telling her what she can and can't do.”

“Morganen—” Saber warned him in a growl.

His youngest brother, twenty-three going on fifty-three, turned and pointed his finger. “
You
listen to me!
There is no escaping Destiny.
Fate arranged itself that I caught sight of her predicament while I was idly scrying through the other universes out there. And by the touch of that distant, Threefold God, I was forced by my conscience to rescue her, and thus bring her here, since I could not make my magic work well enough in her own universe to send her immediately elsewhere there.
If
she must be
here
, then it is plainly Fate's will that she will complete the verse for one of us. And if it is not to be you, then I have a one-in-seven chance of it being
me
.

“I
like
women,” Morganen asserted. “I liked being around them back when we were still in Corvis lands. I liked being with them, conversing with them, seeing the pleasure in their faces as I gave them flowers and little trinkets, back in our old home. I liked the way they usually insist on everything being clean and neat—instead of a mekhadadak's nest, like this place—and how sweet they smell when they are freshly bathed, and how pretty they look when they are neatly dressed. I like the way they think, and how they talk, and their sense of humor!

“Kata's Breasts!” he swore, clenching his hands toward the ceiling. “I have every
right
to want to have a woman in my life, Destiny or no! So if
you
discard her by word and by deed,
I
have every right to woo what you leave behind. As do all of your
other
brothers,
Eldest
,” Morganen added, slashing his hands between them. “You cannot kill us for exercising our rights as living, breathing men. And if you
ever
attempt to threaten me again, I
will
turn you into a toad!”

“I am the first of the brothers in that damned Prophecy,” Saber growled as his sibling turned to head for the stairs again. “The first maiden goes to
me
.”

Morganen stopped and turned around. He gave his eldest brother a contemptuous, disgusted look. “What makes you think she
is
a maid, Saber? Have you
asked
her about her level of chastity, or even if her culture and people value such things? Have you asked her
anything
that hasn't been punctuated by a demand or a shout? Perhaps that is the way
you
woo, but for myself, it is not! And it has not been so long, nor myself so young at the time, that I cannot remember what women
do
like in their courting!”

Turning once more, the youngest of the brothers entered the north wing stairwell and descended out of sight. Frustrated, Saber took himself along a different path to his own tower. To think on Morganen's blunt words, to not think; it didn't matter. No one could do either successfully, not with their thoughts in the kind of chaotic currents his own were drowning under.

 

S
he didn't care when no one brought up her supper by the end of the day. She still had enough food left over from breakfast, eaten partially by lunchtime, to have for her evening meal. And plenty of sewing to occupy her attention, including reworking the neckline of the blue gown to fit a lot better than the shapeless way it was originally designed, stitching it into something much more flattering for her figure. But when no one came up with breakfast shortly after dawn, as Saber had done before, nor for a while afterward, Kelly hitched up the rehemmed skirts of her completely reworked gown, and went in search of sustenance.

Or rather, tried to. The first obstacle was a door that wouldn't budge. She found an age-worn bronze brooch in one of the drawers of the otherwise empty desk, and attempted to jimmy the lock with its pin. That didn't work, but that was no surprise, because she really didn't have more than a vague idea how to go about it, other than it involved somehow shoving tumbler-levers this way and that. Failing at that, she peered out the windows assessing her next option.

Aside from the sloping, forested hills and the distant water, there was the view of the castle itself: the octagonal outer walls that had to be fifty feet tall, each massive tower at the corners rising a good thirty or forty feet more above the top of the encircling guard wall. She could tell that much by counting arrow-loop windows and gauging the size of the doors at their base and the doors she could see that opened onto the ramparts; by comparing the evenly sized crenellated battlements lining each side of the rampart walkways to the overall view of the outer wall.

As a seamstress, she had learned long ago to gauge measurements by eye. Yet the towers and outer wall didn't look all that imposing, because the whole of the compound was so large-scaled overall. But taken as a whole, the place was a veritable palace of sprawling stone. Neglected gardens filled in the space between most of the main wings of the castle and that outer wall; the wings themselves were built interestingly—kind of like a snowflake, she decided, with four and eight branches.

From the octagonal main tower her room was perched on top of, there were four wings of four floors each, if one counted the high-sloped attics with their gable-style, glazed and shuttered windows. Those four main wings spread out due north, east, south, and west. If one didn't count the fact that there would inevitably be at least one basement level, that was already a very large number of rooms to explore. The height of each floor had to be at least twelve to fourteen feet on top of that, with high ceilings designed to keep either candle smoke out of the eyes, or the heat of summer away from the inhabitants; it wasn't as if Kelly knew what season this place was experiencing, though it felt like summer.

After about a hundred yards or so, each one of the four main wings branched into a
Y
-shape for about sixty or seventy yards more. From there, columnar towers supported sculpted sky bridges that stretched out to the rampart walls, with carved wooden drawbridges that could be retracted in times of war—beauty and efficiency, all in one. The bridges looked fairly sturdy, too, despite their gray-weathered age. Most of the rooftops of the wings were peaked and stoutly tiled in a darkish, gray blue glazed pottery, much like the homes of the southwest desert of her own world, but each roofline that she could see had a broad parapet walkway at the edge of each section, and little towers at the corners that looked like stairwells.

Her room was perched on a curved roof, as opposed to the straight-angled ones of the outlying wings. A bit of leaning out and looking down confirmed that the dome the room perched upon did terminate in a walkway parapet, the same as the straighter rooflines. Shoving the window open, Kelly hitched up her skirt, made sure her loaned leather slippers were secure on her feet, climbed out onto the almost flat surface up at the top where the room was located, and started inching her way down. Heights had never bothered her, thankfully. She did have to half-slide, half-fall the last few yards to the parapet around the domed roof, cushioning her landing with bent knees, but she didn't hurt herself.

Straightening up and shaking out her skirts, she made her way to the right, exploring as she went. The walkway, like all of the others, was broad enough for three people to have walked along together, with gray blue tiles to one side and light gray granite stone to the other. The battlements staggered up and down like little steps, and where each peak rose head-high to her, there was an arrow-loop carved into the stone; between each stepped peak, the gaps were only waist-low at most. Even though it wasn't likely that many people would go for a stroll all the way up here, the edges of the parapet were beaded and carved with weather-worn, elongated stars.

Stars with eight points, I see,
Kelly realized with a touch of wry amusement.
These people really take the number eight seriously!
She found one of the four stairway towers set next to the main tower and tried the lever-style door handle. It opened easily. Skirt in hand so she wouldn't trip—she couldn't wait to make herself a decent pair of pants—Kelly descended the age-worn steps.

Sounds of conversation lured her out at the first landing, into a hall and through an ornately carved, center-pointed archway that led to a broad balcony. One that overlooked the great hall of the castle, apparently. In the sunlight streaming in through the southeastern windows, clearly seen from above the carved railing in front of her, six of the eight brothers were seated at an octagonal table set up in the middle of the floor far below her.

Eating breakfast.

Or rather, the remains of breakfast. Yet no one had brought any up for her! Growing mad, Kelly found the square-spiraled stairs again, hurried all the way to the ground floor, and strode into the great hall, ignoring the attractive patterns of the polished stone tiles underfoot. Ignoring the beauty of the stained glass windows on the four ordinal walls of every level of the hall's balconied tiers. Ignoring the artistry of the carved columns, balustrades, and archways. She was too angry to truly appreciate the architecture at the moment.

Kelly stomped down the final four steps between the column-lined section under the broad balconies and the main floor of the hall and strode straight for the men, who had fallen silent at the approaching, clearly angry
slap slap slap!
of her slippered feet.

Forks hovered in the air. Mouths were caught quirked to one side in the act of chewing. Six pairs of eyes, ranging in shade from brown to blue—lacking only in gray and black—stared at her as she approached them across the great, broad floor of the hall. Six handsome men. None of them the one that she wanted to be the source of her ire, but all of them qualifying as substitutes.

None of them swallowed. None of them spoke. None of them did anything but watch her storm right up to the table. Then again, it might have been the way she had restitched the front-lacing gown to conform to the flare of her hips, past the nip of her waist, up to the full roundness of her corseted breasts. And perhaps especially the sweetheart neckline that replaced the boring, high-necked, rounded collar that had been there before. The carrot-haired brother stared the most, in fact, but that only irritated her further.

Planting her hands on the blue cotton cupping her hips, Kelly glared at them, taking advantage of their stunned silence. “First you rescue me from a fire, then you kidnap me from my home universe, then you yell at me to eat, and now you lock me in my room and
starve
me? What the hell kind of men
are
you?”

Morganen swallowed the mouthful of bread he had been chewing and thumped the nearest of the other five in the ribs, shoving quickly and politely to his feet. The others did the same, belatedly being gentlemen. Morganen spoke as chairs scraped back. “It was not our intention to starve you…and I was not aware that anyone had locked you in that chamber, my lady.”

“The door might have simply been stuck,” Koranen added quickly, looking at his brothers, then at her with a shrug. “Many of them do, in the donjon and its wings. Even sometime out in the towers.”

Kelly, not entirely appeased, held up her hands and ticked off her fingers. “Lousy housekeepers, lousy groundskeepers, lousy gentlemen, and lousy
hosts
—you
really
need a woman to straighten you out!”

Dominor took her challenge, folding his arms across his dark blue–clad chest. “And you think
you
are that woman?”

“Since I'm the only one here, it has to be me,” she pointed out sardonically, and flipped a hand at the table. “No woman in her right mind would allow their home to turn into such a pigsty—just look at this table!”