The Sword

by Jean Johnson

  Of pure instinct, of unconscious will alone, his own body moved forward. His hand came up, spread flat…and passed into the mirror.

  On the other side, from her perspective, a hand came out of nowhere. It was strong, supple, and almost as stoutly muscled as the other man’s hand had been. Palm met palm, fingers touched fingers, and she felt the warmth and strength that was that masculine hand. A warm that zinged through her whole body instantly.

  Gasping, Hope snatched her hand back. The hand pulled back before her heart finished pounding hard, just as she started to re-extend her own hand to touch it again. Lowering her fingers, she eyed the air in front of her for a long moment in wide-eyed thought. Then smiled just a little, narrowing her brown eyes speculatively before silently reminding herself to return to her business.

  There were many things that needed to be done before she could go “Elsewhere,” too—her current home and belongings were still perfectly intact and needed to be taken care of somehow, after all. Yes, it would probably take Hope O’Niell up to a year to disentangle herself from this realm, and it was time for her to get started.

  On his side of the mirror, Morganen pulled his hand free and touched his palm to his chest, watching her. Kelly’s friend. Hope. He had heard the words being exchanged while his brother and sister-in-law were on the other side of the looking glass, translated through his own draught of the Ultra-Tongue spell. It would be good to have a Seer in the family.

  I suppose she might do for one of my brothers…

  He watched her straighten her clothes, followed her with a touch of the frame as she went back out to the front of her tent to attend to her customers. She had a natural swing to her hips that no man would ever ignore and enough soft curves to remind him his own body was filled with hard planes by contrast. Those curves were exactly what he liked to see on a woman’s body. With that awareness came a single, whispered thought passing through his mind.

  Or she might do very well for me. Your Destined wife’s title is “Hope” after all. Why can’t it also be her given name?

  But there were a lot of things to do, first: a brother to heal, another brother to rescue…and six more wives to secure, before he could think about walking the eight altars with a woman of his own.

  It was no use tormenting himself by watching her, by entertaining thoughts about her. It seemed destiny had blatantly named her as his hope, but he could not claim her. Not until his brothers were wed so that he could be, too, according to Prophecy. As much as Morganen wanted to continue watching her, this friend of his eldest brother’s wife…he had work to do. Turning and picking up a handful of the red binding-powder that resolidified the border between their worlds, he cast it on the mirror, firming its surface. Then reluctantly murmured the words that dissolved the scrying link entirely.

  Her image, smiling and cheerful as ever as she talked with the other people at the fairgrounds, dissolved slowly into his own, his own face thoughtful and somber as he stood in his workroom. A murmur, a stroke of the frame, and he refocused it on a place in his own world, far enough away that it would have taxed most other mages to reach. Morganen simply drew in more power from the world around him, tapping into energies that only Rydan, of all of the rest of them, could feed upon during the height of a storm. Most of his moments of exhaustion were simply an illusion, after all, a facade to reassure his brothers that he was only a little more powerful than the strongest of them…instead of vastly more powerful than all of them combined.

  Sometimes a little white lie, carefully maintained, was a mage’s most useful spell.

  The first place he looked was empty, no one there. Murmuring, edging the view along cautiously with a protective spell to keep this scrying from being sensed, he went looking for his quarry through once-familiar halls. It was time, and more than time, to start phase two of their Destiny.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I thought you were leaving me.”

  Kelly bit her lower lip at that rough admission. The knowledge that she had hurt him, however inadvertently, hurt her. Proof her discovery was an accurate one. She really did love him. Tugging him to a stop at the landing where they had first fought, where she had first seen magic with the closing of the door there on the landing beside them, she looked up at her husband. “Saber, I have something to say to you.”

  This was it, then. She had given him something last night she had not wanted to give to him, when he had pressed her for her true feelings. He had heard the hesitation, the uncertainty in her voice last night. Cupping her chin to tilt it up, Saber looked into her aquamarine eyes, then closed his own, accepting it. “If you truly want to go back to your home, I will not stop you. Perhaps…perhaps true love can be one-sided, sometimes…”

  Kelly gaped at him as he released her, unable to believe he was…he was…he was giving up on her, that was what he was doing! Just when she thought he was shaping up into proper husband material, he pulled a stunt like this? Her outrage needed an outlet…and it found one as she snapped her hand up and did to him what she had done once before to his now missing brother:

  The Granny Doyle maneuver.

  “Ow!” Saber grimaced as those fingers pinched his ear ruthlessly. She yanked his head down over the half foot of difference separating them, until their foreheads almost touched.

  “I love you, you big oaf!” Kelly half-roared at him nose-to-nose, mad he would give up on her so easily. “That’s what I was going to tell you!” Releasing his ear, she grabbed a fistful of the tunic she had made for him and kept him down at her level, fierce and freckled, unleashing her virago side ruthlessly on the big lug. “And if you think I’m going to let you go, you are an idiot!”

  He blinked, stunned.

  “That’s right, an idiot! This is my home now, Saber—and don’t you forget it! My home,” she growled, yanking him so close by his tunic, their noses bumped awkwardly. “My castle! My kingdom! My husband! Mine!”

  He gaped at her.

  She grabbed both of his ears and kissed him.

  Her possessiveness penetrated his thick skull thoroughly. Wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her off her feet, Saber swung both of them around, until he staggered back against the outer wall and leaned there, holding her up against him, kissing her back with equal fervor. This was his wife, all right—and he had to believe her, for she had yelled like a termagant. Or rather, like a redhead. His wife. Between kisses, he managed to gasp, “Kelly—Jinga, I love you so much!”

  “Mmm—ditto—” she managed through the kisses that peppered his face. Then slowed her assault on his spell-shaven skin.

  Saber pulled his head back, resting it against the stones behind him warily. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve got to tell Rydan what’s happened.” She sighed, grimacing as she stopped kissing him. “And I feel guilty about wanting to toss you to the floor and make love to you, when I more or less created this whole Disaster—Dominor, Trevan, the Mandarites…”

  “Destiny is Destiny,” he reminded her, giving in to the inevitability of fate; he held her against him a moment more, then finally lowered her to the floor. “It would have happened regardless.” Taking her hand, he pulled her up the stairs. “We can hate it and resist it all we want, but it is our Destiny, when Prophesied by a true Seer. Come; we’ll tell my brother together.”

  It didn’t take long to cross from Morganen’s tower in the east to Trevan’s in the northeast, then to Rydan’s in the north, where the northern of the two mountain ranges on the island reached up closest to the castle. Abandoning the ramparts for the interior, Saber led Kelly to the room that was level with the ramparts on the guard wall, the only one Rydan allowed his brothers—and now his sister-in-law—to enter in his tower domain.

  Inside, the window embrasures were all covered with black velvet drapes at their windows. Only one set of curtains stood open, letting a narrow beam of light stream through an arrow-loop slit into the otherwise dimly lit chamber. There were a few unlit lightglobes in
their stands, their milky-white spheres unlit, and a large disc of steel, a gong hanging from a black-painted stand in the center of the room. Kelly thought the black, black, and more black theme was a bit overdone, but it was Rydan.

  Saber strode to the frame, picking up the leather-wrapped stick hanging from a cord on the frame.

  “I’m over here, Brother.”

  Startled, both of them turned and faced that deep-recessed, southeast facing window. Rydan stood in it; with his black clothes and black hair blending in with the black curtains pushed to one side, neither had really noticed him. He stood on the side away from the shaft of sunlight slanting in from the north, looking out at the view of his brother’s tower from the shadows.

  “Rydan, Trevan is…” Kelly tried to say, petering out when she couldn’t quite bring herself to inform this intimidating, brooding man what had happened. It was her fault, in a way, if one believed in Destiny.

  “Do you think I would not know when my own twin was injured?” the light-avoiding mage murmured as they eyed him, both uncertain where to begin.

  “Dominor was kidnapped by the Mandarites,” Saber explained, dropping the wand and moving to join his younger brother. Kelly joined them, as he continued. “Trevan tried to get to Dom, and they shot him. Trev got himself back far enough through the water for Evanor to get him up here, though he was badly hurt. His injury is healing, and he will recover, thanks to some successfully transferred blood from my wife.”

  Kelly reached up and touched Rydan’s arm briefly. That made him look at her in surprise, as if he were not used to physical contact anymore; given she’d never seen his brothers so much as hug him, Kelly guessed that was a distinct possibility. She thought it was sad in a way. “I’m so sorry, Rydan. I keep thinking there was something I should have known better, something I could have prevented. But I seem to be plagued by Disaster, ever at my heel.”

  Oddly, that caused the black-haired man to let out a laugh. Or maybe not so oddly—it was Rydan, after all. Not even his brothers really understood him, from the puzzled look on Saber’s face. His smile was slight and rueful. “Perhaps, now that you have confessed it, no more need come at your heel…and the rest of us can move on and do our best to avoid our own Destinies.”

  “Good luck,” Saber muttered, and got an elbow in the ribs from his wife.

  Rydan shook his head, his black hair sliding over his shoulders. “I could send a storm after their ship…but that would run the risk of drowning Dominor. How is his twin taking this?”

  “Badly,” Kelly stated, remembering how awful Evanor had looked, pale with tension, guilt, and grief.

  “He tends your twin; I think to ease the guilt in losing his own,” Saber added to his night-loving brother.

  Rydan nodded. “I will help Morganen and Evanor make a mirror, tuned especially to Dom…but it will take time, without him here to speed the making and attune it quickly to his presence directly, extending the range most mirrors can scry. It will find him, eventually, and Ev will be able to sing to him between then and now, to let him know he is not alone.” He turned to leave and glanced at his sister-in-law. “He will be relatively safe, in the meantime. The Song of the Sons of Destiny assures it, if nothing else.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Kelly agreed with one last shiver for her new life in a realm filled with magic. She looked up at her husband, and he gripped her hand, comforting her silently with his support.

  Though he could be a little jealous of the attention his brothers gave her, Saber couldn’t begrudge Rydan’s responses to his wife. Something in Kelly drew his taciturn, withdrawn, brooding brother out of his self-imposed shell, just a little bit. That alone was worth the price of watching his brothers admire the only female among them.

  In the act of leaving them, Rydan turned and studied his kin. “Little Sister—do not go beyond this Chamber. Ring the gong, if you should ever have need of me, and I will hear it and come. Or summon me through Evanor. But venture only this far. The realm beyond is not for anyone else to know.”

  “I’ll respect your privacy,” Kelly agreed. She flicked her free hand at the room around them, smiling slightly. “I left each of your towers alone in my cleaning frenzy, didn’t I? Though by rights, since Saber isn’t a bachelor anymore, his is open to my inspection, now.”

  “We will discuss that elsewhere,” Saber informed her, tugging her away, back outside as his brother disappeared down the stairs across from the door.

  It was a long climb to the chamber at the top of the dome. When Kelly reached the top, she went to the eastern windows, the ones she had once crawled out of, thinking she had been locked in by what had merely been a stuck door. Kneeling on the cushioned bench seat, she looked out across the distant sea.

  The ship wasn’t even on the horizon anymore. Dominor was truly gone, snatched by a group of men desperate for a magical advantage over their gender-gifted foe. Kelly shook her head. “Talk about your battle of the sexes…”

  “What do you mean?” Saber asked, standing behind her where she knelt on the benchseat of the shallow embrasure, here at the top of the donjon.

  “On my world, only in the past hundred years have men stopped behaving very badly toward women—that tirade I gave?” she added, glancing back at him. “That was my world…and still is, in many of its kingdoms. We women have had to fight hard to be given the recognition that is rightfully ours, equal to men…and I have to confess that it still doesn’t quite happen that way all the time even in my home country, a partnering of equals in the eyes of everyone.

  “It worried me at first, when I came here. I thought you’d be the same way most of the men in the medieval era of my world would act, the era similar to the way you and you brothers dress. Chauvinistic, condescending, and way too arrogant for your breeches.”

  Saber shook his head. “Men and women are equal. Different, as you said, but equal. Had I been born a woman, I would still be the heir to Corvis. Had I been born a woman, I would still have magic…or perhaps not,” he murmured thoughtfully. “I do not think I could have been born anything else, the same as my brothers; we are the Eight Sons of Destiny, after all.” He smiled at her. “Which makes us rather special, and deserving of special women in our lives.”

  Kelly planted her hands on her hips, looking back at him over her shoulder. But she was smiling as she did it. “Oh, do you, now?”

  Pulling her backside against his hips, Saber smiled. “I will show you just how special you are to me, and how special I hope to forever be to you.” His smile faded a little and was replaced by intensity in his gray eyes. His firm grip gentled and slid from her hips to her belly, cupping her tenderly in the curve of his arms. “Will you bear my children, Kelly? Will you make me happy?”

  “Tirades, pinches, Disasters, and all?” Kelly asked, mulling it over for a moment. But only a moment. “If you can survive me, I suppose I can manage that.”

  He grinned and pulled her off of the bench, tugging her over to the bed. “I know something horrible you can do to me, if you do it in just the right way.”

  “And that would be…?” she asked, intrigued and mystified by what he meant. She hoped he meant hot, passionate romping on their bed. That was one of her favorite parts of this whole marriage thing so far, though she was positive there were even better things waiting for them in the future. Weird as it was, she was getting used to this world.

  His gray eyes gleamed like laughing, desire-hot steel, as he lowered her to the bed, grinning lasciviously as he braced himself on his elbows over her. “Make me ‘eat pillow.’”

  Laughter rang out from the top of the donjon.

  His quarry was leaning over a pool of water, examining the creatures that swam below the surface. She was alone, her brow pinched in a tight, worried frown. Morganen tipped the viewpoint in his scrying mirror until it looked up from the surface, and connected the two with a brief, quiet chant.

  “Oh!” The woman on the other side quickly looked around her, then down
at him again, brushing her long curls out of the way where they had escaped her braid. Her whisper hissed across the distance between them. “Morganen. I didn’t expect you to call…”

  “I know. But it is time.”

  She paled slightly and brushed her hair away from her face again. “Now? This will not put him in a good mood, you know that. I’m…I’m afraid.”

  “But it is your Destiny. Now,” he added firmly, as she hesitated a moment more. “As soon as you can safely get free—and do not delay. There is no telling what he might do, when you have put him off for so long. The odds of Fate are already stretched too thin.”

  Nodding, she twitched, listening to a sound too faint in the connected surfaces of mirror and reflective water for him to hear. Morganen quickly cut the connection. This was a dangerous game both of them played, one they had been playing for three and more years. So close to completion, discovery and failure was not a healthy option. He was patient, and watchful; she was braver than she knew, and very careful.

  It would work. Hopefully.

  And so it begins…again.

  Song of the Sons of Destiny

  The Eldest Son shall bear this weight:

  If ever true love he should feel

  Disaster shall come at her heel

  And Katan will fail to aid

  When Sword in sheath is claimed by Maid

  The Second Son shall know this fate:

  He who hunts is not alone

  When claw would strike and cut to bone

  A chain of Silk shall bind his hand

  So Wolf is caught in marriage-band

  The Third of Sons shall meet his match:

  Strong of will and strong of mind

  You seek she who is your kind