The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  “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.

  She 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 an
ything 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!”

  The six brothers all looked at the tabletop. It was covered in dirty dishes and bits of uneaten food, fruit cores and rinds, bread crusts, and the inevitable stains associated with years of use. From the stains under the placement of the goblets, it looked like their users didn’t care about mopping up spills, and from the browning of some of the apple cores, it was clear that they had not been cleaned away since the last meal eaten in this place.

  One of them shrugged, the one with hair more coppery than her own strawberry blond locks, lifting his green eyes to hers. “What about it?”

  “It’s filthy!”

  “We have been eating off of it,” the tallest, most muscular of the brothers reasoned in a rumbling-low voice, his own brown hair shaggy as it fell in layers to just below his collarbone. “Naturally it is dirty at the moment.”

  “I mean it should be scrubbed and sanded and refinished, rather than let bits of things clump into dark, sticky spots,” Kelly returned. She wiggled her toes in her slipper, letting them hear the almost velcro-like sound of her shoe adhering to a similarly disgusting spot underfoot. One that she had stepped on in her approach. “The same goes for this floor. And I haven’t seen so many cobwebs and dust bunnies since Dracula Needs a Wife, on the old movie channel!”

  “The what?” one of them asked. “And who?”

  Kelly shook her head. “Never mind. If I’m going to be stuck here for five months, I insist on a certain standard of hygiene and cleanliness. And you will be thanking me for it before I am done with you,” she added, pushing up her light blue sleeves in a no-nonsense manner. “Now, the first thing we will do is—”

  “The first thing we will do,” Morganen overrode her, coming around and urging her into the nearest empty chair, “is see that you are properly fed. And then we will place ourselves at your disposal for the rest of the day.” The others started making noises of protest. At a pointed look and an equally pointed throat-clearing from their youngest, they muttered under their breaths and sat back down as soon as she was seated. “It may be a little cool, but the food is still quite palatable, which you will soon see.

  “Of course, Rydan would be here to accept your praises,” Morganen added, serving her on Saber’s untouched, empty plate, “but he shuns the day and only stays long enough to prepare at least part of our breakfast, usually the rising of the bread and maybe one or two other things; he takes his own plate back with him to his tower, which not even we are allowed to enter. Well, not beyond the chamber up at the parapet level. He does join us for the evening meal, though, which we always hold after sundown to ensure we actually get to see him once in a while.”

  “That’s the black-haired one, with the black eyes?” Kelly wanted to clarify, thinking of the grumpy one that had passed her during the mekh-something cleanup, the one who had seemed like a part of the night, a storm of barely contained power sweeping past her.

  “Yes—don’t just sit there like lumps; introduce yourselves!” Morganen added to his brothers, pouring her some more of the sweet-tart, greenish juice she had tasted before. “Everyone, this is the Lady Kelly of Doyle.”

  “I’m not a lady,” Kelly pointed out with quick honesty. That wasn’t entirely true; she had a couple of honorariums from the medieval society that had come with a title or two, but now was not the time to explain the difference between real and make-believe. “I’m a citizen of the United States of America, and thus the equal of anyone else. That’s all I need to be.”

  The one with the coppery-blond hair, darker and redder than her own, if sun-streaked with cream, the one with the cat-green eyes who had ogled her despite the fury of her approach, smiled charmingly. “Oh, but any woman who braves the dangers of Nightfall Isle is the most noble and worthy of women.”

  “Dangers?” she asked, arching a brow. “Little black mekha-whatchamacallits, cobwebs, and sticky spots on the floor, and grumpy men who have let their gentlemanly manners slide into oblivion in, what was it, the past three years?”

  “Mainly the lattermost,” Morganen agreed dryly, resuming his seat. “You have already met me, more or less; I am Morganen the Mage, youngest of the Eight and the one who brought you here.”

  To him, she would be polite. She did owe him her life and the ability to converse with her hosts, after all. “And for my timely rescue, I thank you again, Morganen,” Kelly returned with a polite nod, glad someone was willing to be civilized and talk, not yell, with her. She looked at the man seated on her left, the one with the dark brown hair and the blue eyes, clad in dark blue. “And you are?”

  “Dominor, the Master, third of us. And I serve only myself. Prod the others into aiding you,” he added with cool disdain. “I will not bow to an outlander woman’s will.”

  EIGHT

  Kelly glanced around the table, seeing how the others took his comment. Her determination to stay on top of this bizarre situation hardened the moment she realized most of the others were silently agreeing with him. Morganen was the only one who met her eyes with any real encouragement for her presence among them. He even gave her a slight nod; from the encouraging look in his eyes, she knew it wasn’t an agreement with his brother’s pronouncement.

  Braced by that silent permission, Kelly snapped her hand up and attacked the man next to her in a lightning-fast movement. One taught to her by her grandmother, not by her martial arts instructors. Her fingers pinched the curve of Dominor’s ear in an unshakable grip: the infamous Granny Doyle maneuver.

  “Ow! Let go, woman!”

  Kelly tightened her grip and stood, towering over him, only because he was seated. “Get used to it, buster. Where I come from,” she added, exaggerating quite a bit, “no man would dare treat a woman in that insulting and condescending manner. If I say you’re going to scrub the floor with your favorite toothbrush, you are going to scrub the floor with your favorite toothbrush!

  “Women are the keepers of civilization, and by all the gods of both this world and mine, you will become civilized again!” She jerked on his ear while he tried futilely to pry her hand off of it, and glared at the others. “Do any of the rest of you have a problem with being civilized in my presence?”

  “Let go of my ear, woman, or I’ll turn
you into a toad!” he demanded, glaring up at her.

  Kelly yanked him half up out of his chair by his ear, tugging his handsome, grimacing face close to her own. “Have you ever heard of the word please? Or thank you, or the phrase if you would be so kind? I am sick and tired of being yelled at by you overgrown, immature men!” she yelled herself. A thrust of her hand, and he dropped back into his chair, rubbing at the ear she had roughly released. Planting her hands on her hips, Kelly glared at the rest of them. “I solemnly swear, the next man who raises his voice to me, or threatens me, or behaves with anything less than civil courtesy to me, will end up eating dirt!”

  “And how are you going to make me behave? Especially once I have turned you into the toad you are, woman!” Dominor growled, shoving to his feet to tower over and glare at her in turn.

  “That does it!” A hitch of her skirts, and she kicked with her slippered foot. Not at him, but at the chair behind him, then at the one behind her, scraping them both out of the way. Before either piece of furniture had finished rocking from her rough shoves, she grabbed the bigger man by the arm, whirled, twisted, and flipped him onto the floor. A torque of the arm still caught in her grip, a shove of her slippered foot on the back of his head, and she pinned him face-down, almost effortlessly.

  “Ow! Dammit, woman!”

  She wiggled her foot, making his cheek bounce more or less in the same sticky spot her slipper had found mere moments before. “Do you feel that crud on the floor? Do you like the feel of that crud?” she added pointedly, almost perversely cheerful in this hearty release of all her anger and frustration at her situation. “Congratulations, Dominor! You just volunteered to clean it up!”