The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  She wrinkled her nose and splashed water at him. He grinned and splashed back. They doused each other, grinning and laughing. Until splashing limbs entangled and their bodies floated too close together. Stilling with a groan, Saber gently pushed her back, forcing himself to abandon the pleasure of her touch.

  “We cannot do this, Kelly…”

  “You want me to change tubs?” she asked reluctantly.

  His answer was very satisfactory. “No. But…we should be more careful. Even if there wasn’t the threat of drowning—”

  “But what a pleasant way to go, you’ll have to admit,” she interjected with a touch of a smile.

  His gray eyes smoldered like the smoke from a forge fire. “I do not think it will be merely ‘pleasant’ between us.”

  When she blushed, he smiled. A mixture of maidenly shyness and mature boldness, she was enchanting, in a nonmagical way.

  “Even if there wasn’t the threat of drowning, I would prefer to be feeling more fit and capable of handling whatever comes afterward…once I, um…once I sheathe myself in you.”

  Her pink mouth parted, her blue green eyes growing dazed for a moment, her freckled cheeks blooming with color. The warm water felt distinctly cool, compared to the heat of the gaze they shared for one long moment. Saber finally broke the look, backing off and bracing his arms along the stone rim of the tub behind him.

  “Right,” Kelly murmured, looking elsewhere as well. She was in a bit of inner turmoil, now that the shock of his barely discussed confession was fading off.

  If he loves me, physically and emotionally, I’ll apparently bring on some Disaster, though no one knows what. If we make love…I might finish falling in love with him. I think. And yet, if I’m to go home again in four more months…

  But there wasn’t much for her to go home to, really. She had everything she wanted here, except for maybe some female companionship. His brothers were fun to be with, and she had always gotten along great with males and females alike in her twenty-seven years. Once she had firmly established herself as the “alpha female” of their otherwise all-male household, as she had put it to his twin, Wolfer, everything had smoothed out and gone great. She just longed for a bit of female companionship, too. Like her friend Hope.

  It was a little stressful, not being able to talk to a fellow female, to commiserate over the more alien ways of the opposite gender, to be able to share arch feminine in-jokes that no male could readily comprehend. But that was all that was really missing, here. She missed her friends and her family, and some of the technological amenities, but that was all.

  Even suffering through her period two weeks ago hadn’t been all that bad. Morganen and Evanor had put their heads together at breakfast when she had come down snappish and miserable from cramps. The pair had dared to ask her a few delicate questions, then had gone off for about an hour and concocted a miracle drink that took care of all her symptoms—and would have made them absolute billionaires back in her own world, if their herbal magic could work there.

  Even using cotton rags and dried sections of sea-sponge instead of more modern products hadn’t been too awkward…though of course knowing how medieval women had handled the whole thing without modern conveniences had helped Kelly a lot in dealing with the matter.

  By now, she could only think that if all her old friends and few distant relatives had heard about her house being burned down, they probably thought she had died and vanished in the fire. Or that she was hiding from the people responsible. As much as her gut twisted with the urge for some kind of vengeance for ruining her house, her livelihood, and the attempt to kill her so gruesomely…she was glad it had happened. After all, she was here, in this wonderfully strange, new world. If only there were other women here. Though I suppose if I get together with Tall, Blond, and Not-So-Surly-Anymore…and we survive whatever the Disaster is…then I’ve got seven sisters-in-law to look forward to meeting, don’t I?

  She scooped a double handful of water over her head and thought some more, trying to see a way out of having to leave this world when the time came.

  “What are you thinking?” Saber asked.

  “That I’m glad to be here,” Kelly admitted quietly. “That…I don’t want to have to leave, in four months.”

  “Kata’s T—!” He broke off before he could offend her with the indelicate oath. Grabbing her shoulders, he twisted her around, the sides of their thighs brushing together as she turned. “I love you and you are going to marry me and stay here! Is that clear?”

  Her hands swished through the water, going straight to her hips as she bobbed on her haunches in the water, doing her best to stay hydrated despite her sharply stirred ire. “Oh, really! And you think I’m going to marry you, just because you tell me to?”

  Idiot! You should know better by now than to rile her temper! Wincing, Saber shook his head to negate his mistake. He drew her close and brushed her mouth gently with his lips, switching tactics completely as he kissed her between words. “Forgive me, Kelly. Please, please, stay and be my wife? Marry me and make me miserably happy for the rest of my life?”

  “Um…well…if you absolutely insist,” she muttered against his mouth, twining her arms around his ribs.

  Someone rapped on the door, breaking them apart with a startled splash. Saber cursed; his brothers were back. They knocked again, but he would be damned before he let them see his future bride naked. “Hold your gods-be-damned horses!”

  Kelly giggled at his choice of phrase. Some things, it seemed, were the same whatever universe one was in, however it was rephrased.

  Giving her a brief, brow-raised look of bemusement at her humor, he dunked himself, then climbed out, grabbed the damp towel she had discarded, and wrapped it around his hips. Padding over to the privacy screen positioned somewhat between the tub and the door, he pulled it more fully into place. Only then did he approach the door, which had been carefully planed and sanded several weeks ago until it didn’t stick anymore.

  As one of his brothers knocked again, Saber opened it a mere crack. Kelly couldn’t quite hear the conversation he was having with whomever was on the other side, and she couldn’t quite see any of them since one of her privacy screens was in the way…but she could certainly hear the tone of their conversation.

  It went something like, “What the hell do you want?”, “Why, dear Brother, are you naked? Are felicitations in order?”, “Mind your damned business, give me whatever you brought, and go away!”, followed by rich male laughter from the other side of the opening as he pulled his head back. Kelly could see the top of the door opening wider for a moment. Shutting the heavy panel, Saber eyed it a moment, and passed his mostly healed hand in front of it, muttering under his breath. Probably locking it with a spell.

  He padded back to the tub with a large pitcher in his hands. With a sigh, he poured the liquid—a fruit juice cocktail, probably rich in a gazillion ingredients since it was an indefinite sort of brown green color—into their mugs and rested the flagon on the steps. Shedding the towel, he climbed in, dunked under, then came up and slicked his rewetted hair back from his face. Kelly had only a few seconds at most to admire his groin; he wasn’t fully erect, but he wasn’t flaccid, either.

  Proportionate was the word that came to mind, in fact.

  He sighed, wiping his face. “Jinga, I think I’m finally beginning to feel human ag—”

  A familiar, funny look rumpled his handsome features, giving her a glimpse of what he must have looked like as a boy when making faces at his younger brothers.

  Kelly grinned into her replenished mug, as he splashed right back out of the tub again. No doubt she would have that urk! expression on her face all too soon, herself…but it was funny for the moment. It was also guaranteeing through their mutual misery that there would be no way the two of them would feel physically awkward around each other. Not by the time the watersnake poison was finally out of their system. Not with the torture it was putting them both through.

 
; Sort of like a case of the stomach-flu, but in our case, it’s trouble from the other end, and caused by a venom, not a virus. Drowning the urge to laugh with more liquid for her insides to absorb, she drank the surprisingly palatable juice and floated in the water, waiting for his return, and for her turn at making a dripping dash for the bathroom. Or rather, the refreshing room. Keep using the local vocabulary, Kelly…

  They touched, little brushes that carefully stayed free of important zones. They made funny faces every once in a while, sometimes from the excess of water that had to come out one way, sometimes from drinking too much of it in the other way. They checked fingers and toes occasionally, to see if anything was beginning to prune.

  And they talked. Of her childhood, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, of what bicycles, television sets, movies, and roller coasters all were. Of his childhood, of his first lessons in riding; learning how to hold a wooden sword; growing up knowing that, as the oldest, the County of Corvis would eventually be his, before it had been taken away with their exile.

  They compared her solitary childhood with his having not only a fraternal twin, but four sets of twins, always having plenty of brothers to play with or pester. He spoke of that special bond of being one of a twin set, the bond of understanding between him and his twin, Wolfer. Kelly spoke of her ending up between the generation gaps in her neighborhood, stuck between the older neighbor kids, who didn’t want to play with her because she was too little, and the younger ones she found herself “herding,” because she was older and therefore responsible for them.

  He talked about his first battle, against bandits at the age of fifteen; she talked about fighting off that mugger and school yard bullies when she was younger. He revealed that the scar on his back came from scraping a tree limb during a fall when he was young and wasn’t supposed to be climbing the tree. He’d hidden the injury, and the local mage-healer hadn’t seen it until a few days later, when he developed an infection fever, after the flesh had begun to scar. She confessed that she’d had a mole lasered off of the underside of her breast, the site of which he just had to see, though very carefully did not touch.

  There was nothing to do but talk, after all, and soak, dash to the refreshing room and back, and soak and talk some more.

  They drank, they ate, they drained and refilled the tub with more water at twilight, as the rain continued to drizzle outside in the lingering edge of the storm; they rapped the lightglobes for illumination as night fell, and talked some more. They had many things in common despite their literal universe of differences, including the way both of them felt they were responsible for themselves and those around them. And Kelly and Saber admitted that, after a bit of teasing and hesitant confession, they both liked sparring verbally with each other. Not all the time, but some of the time they had both enjoyed their battle of wits.

  There was no real way to tell the hours, since the eight brothers had never needed to keep appointments and didn’t need a way of keeping time beyond the general position of the sun. But sometime after midnight, Kelly lifted her hand to cover one of many yawns she had begun smothering some time before. She rubbed her fingertips idly as she lowered her hand again, disliking the texture of them. Wishing they didn’t have to stay in the water all night long, where the risk of falling asleep and drowning was a serious one.

  Saber finished his own yawn, triggered by hers, blinked and stretched—and blinked again, grabbing her wrist with a little splash of lukewarm water. “Prune! Prune!”

  “What?” Kelly woke up a little more and twisted her hand toward her face. Sure enough, the tips of her fingers had finally achieved that wrinkly, pale, waterlogged complexion that she didn’t particularly like. This time, though, it was a wonderful sight. “I’m pruny! I’m all wrinkly and pruny! I can get out now!”

  Releasing her wrist, Saber checked his own fingertips and sighed. Firm and solid-surfaced. “But not me. Not yet. Watersnake venom injected directly into the blood takes longer to flush out than when it is absorbed through the skin.”

  “Would you like me to stay in here and keep you company?” Kelly offered politely.

  Saber shook his head. “No. Go ahead and get out. Dry yourself off—and keep drinking liquids.” He glanced at her, lowering his hand back into the water. “But, if you could still keep me company…”

  “And make sure you don’t drown?” she agreed, floating over to the edge with the steps. “You know, you’re actually pretty fun to be with, Saber, when you’re not constantly yelling at me.”

  He arched a brow at her, soaked but still handsome. “I could say the same for you!”

  She grinned and splashed him. He splashed her back, then dunked under the surface as she started climbing out. He came up in time to squint against the streaming water moisturizing his face, and caught a glimpse of her many feminine parts before she started rubbing them dry with the odd but clever terry-cloth towels Evanor had made. The sight of her made his mouth dry, and he wasn’t entirely sure the watersnake venom had anything to do with it.

  Reminded of their continuing need for liquid, he ordered, “Drink, woman!”

  She peered over her shoulder at his command, then dropped the towel just low enough and jiggled impertinently in his direction, her backside prominently displayed. Even though it was meant as a wordless, rude disagreement, it was an incredible sight. Dropping his forehead to his arm, he groaned. Kelly laughed and continued drying off.

  “Are you certain you’re an untouched maiden?” he demanded, his nose and mouth barely an inch from being submerged in the water, his head still resting on his arm.

  She came back and stroked the top of his damp head. “Poor baby. Not sure if you can handle an Earth-girl, are you?”

  He lifted his head and caught her arm with a snap that proved, toxin or not, he still had warrior reflexes. Tugging her wrist close, he pressed a kiss to her palm. “Not tonight, my dear; I am still feeling the poison. And don’t call me ‘baby.’ I am a fully grown man. Which, since I know you stared at me blatantly several times as I came back from the refreshing room, I know you have noticed by now.”

  She laughed at that and crossed to the wardrobe bureau where her clothes were stored. Drawing out the sleeveless chemise she had made, she donned it. Then she wrapped her hair in a dry towel, dragged a chair close to the tub, sat and poured herself a dollop of the remaining juice from the third flagon brought to them by his brothers. She poured him some, too, and watched as he downed it with a waterlogged sigh. Kelly admired him as he dunked under the water yet again, then sighed herself as he came back up.

  Saber wiped at his eyes and studied her. “What was that for?”

  “Not tonight, dear. You’re poisoned,” she repeated wistfully.

  “Kelly…if you are twenty-seven, and yet you said your culture doesn’t value virginity,” Saber asked, knowing by now after all their talking—and thankful for it—that she preferred more direct conversation than most other people did, “why are you still a virgin?”

  “Overprotective parents, lack of real enthusiasm, busy making a life for myself…” She rested her chin on her hand, her elbow on the rim of the tub, and thought about it. “I did promise my parents I’d try to wait until my wedding day. Maybe…I kind of also felt like I was born in the wrong time. I mean, I went to college, got a degree in business administration and office work, and had a couple good jobs from early on, but there weren’t that many girls my age who were interested in the same things I was, such as when I first got hooked on needlepoint and embroidery at twelve, then interested in the medieval society at thirteen, when a friend’s family took me with them to a local event.

  “Things just deteriorated from there,” she added with a mock-shake of her head. “Sewing my own medieval-style Halloween costumes, making my own prom dress, rather than buying one premade—I’d rather embroider than watch TV, though I didn’t mind listening to the radio. Of course, your brother makes a pretty decent radio,” she added with a little smile, meaning
Evanor. “Especially since I like folk and classical, and that’s the kind of music that he sings.

  “At least, from my perspective.” She fell silent a moment, then eyed him. “Mind you, I’ve kissed and been kissed, and done a little, um, fully clothed fondling, and I’ve had five boyfriends—swains, you’d probably call them, where we indulged in flirtations and light courtings, but nothing overly serious. Plus I had a very thorough theoretical education in the pleasurable arts, thanks to my many friends’ attempts to enlighten me. But I never really felt the urge to pick out a lover and rumple the sheets with him,” she added honestly. “At least, not as strongly as I’ve been feeling around you. You’re rather handsome, intelligent, and even funny—when you’re not yelling at me. I not only find you attractive, I’m also attracted to you. So…how about you? May I presume, being male, you aren’t a virgin?”

  He blushed at that, charming her. Especially since she knew now he was two years older than her. They had talked about a lot of things, after all.

  “No, I’m not. But I’ve only lain with a few. They were castle servants, and it was mostly their idea,” he added. Then shrugged with a twinge of honesty. “Okay, I coaxed some of them into it sometimes, too, but what can I say? It’s quite enjoyable. It has been a few years, though. On top of the exile, I mean,” he added. “I was often too busy or too exhausted, learning how to run the estate from our father, then running it on my own. And I’d even gotten used to it—being celibate—until shortly after you showed up.”

  “Poor baby. Did you have to stop at the self-service gas station of love?” Kelly asked with a sympathetic, feminine purr.

  He quirked a brow in uncertainty at her odd phrase. Some things were translated by that potion she had drunk, but others simply weren’t. “Did I have to what?”

  She grinned, but blushed at the same time. “Did I make you, um…want to touch yourself?”

  He blushed a sort of bronzed red as his lightly tanned face colored deeply. “How did—?”