The Sword (2 page)

The eight brothers' workrooms were placed in the outer wall towers, in case one of the magically gifted brothers did something that might do a lot of damage. The only doors out of each tower were the two letting out onto the curved walls that stretched between the towers and the hidden doors that led to underground passages. This particular level simply let out into a short hall that bisected the tower and gave access to four wedge-shaped storage rooms. All of which were locked, as some of the things Morganen created were too dangerous to come across casually, even by his well-trained brothers.

Saber watched her yank on the handles to the third and fourth doors at the other end of the hallway, then whip around and face him, aquamarine eyes wide in that panic-paled face. She rattled off something in her native tongue that was probably the equivalent to “Don't come any closer!” One hand was thrust out to ward him off. He flinched, expecting her to hurl magic, but she only hurled more foreign words and shook her finger at him, backing up.

There was nowhere to go, though. Even the window behind her in the far wall of the tower was only a narrow, recessed arrow-loop. Big enough to illuminate the hall and its doors with daylight, and to put one of her slender arms through, but not large enough for the rest of her body. Continuing his advance, Saber watched her warn him futilely again, then position her body and hands in a funny stance—like she was ready for a fistfight, sort of, but with her knees bent and her fingers flattened. A strange stance, but graceful. He tried not to notice the way it accented her hip and waist, or the curve of her nearest calf underneath her faded trousers.

He was tired of her incomprehensible shouting and irritated by her unwelcome presence. “Come. I will take you downstairs and have my brother deal with you.” Thrusting out his hand, Saber waited for her to take it. She eyed it warily, only shifting her stance a little for better balance. He gestured with his hand, impatient with her very presence. “Come! Or I will throw you in the dungeon
regardless
of whether you can speak!”

His half-shouted demand made her flinch. And attack. She thrust his hand aside, kicked him in one knee, as he quickly shifted both together to protect his groin—and flipped him again! A preposterous idea, when she was a full half-foot shorter than him and couldn't weigh three-quarters of what he did…but Saber still found himself sprawled on the stone-lined floor. Twisting onto his side, he saw her running for the door back to the stairs, escaping again. He threw out his hand.

“Sh'kadeth!”

The door to the hallway slammed shut in her face and locked with an audible
snick
under his spell-wrought command. The woman gasped and jerked back before she ran into the aged wooden surface, then backed up slowly, whispering something with a tone of deep fear.

Shoving to his feet, Saber stalked up to her silently, swung her around, and threw her over his shoulder as she screeched in shock, anger, and fear. Her fists thumped on his back as he waved his hand past the door handle, disabling the spell and swinging the panel open again. When she hit him again—hard enough to make him wince, since she thumped her double-clasped hands right on his spine—Saber smacked her on her backside, where it stuck up by his chin, ignoring how thoroughly curved and feminine his target was.

Her hollering snapped into a gasp of outrage, and she yelled something else, hitting him harder. He smacked her again with the flat of his hand as he descended the steps, yelling back himself,
“Behave!”

I can't believe Morganen has done this to me. This woman is going
straight
back t—

“—Yeoww!! By
Jinga
!”

Her teeth had somehow managed to sink into the muscles of his back, making him almost miss the last step. She let go long enough to draw in a breath and yell at him some more in her strange tongue as he stumbled. Saber yanked her off his shoulder the moment he had his balance back and was safe on the ground floor. Shoving the staggering woman against the far wall, he pinned her there, growling in a way that would make his twin, Wolfer, proud. She tried to knee him as she struggled; he fixed that problem by pinning her thighs and hips to the wall with his own. Drawing in a breath, Saber prepared to blast her with an angry invective.

The fear in those wide blue green eyes stopped him. Sure, she struggled and yelled at him, but she didn't dare move her lower body. Only her arms struggled where he had her wrists pinned to the stone wall. If she had moved anything lower, Saber realized he would have grown quite hard from the friction and given her a real reason to harbor the feminine fears he could read in her eyes.

It also made him realize that she was bone-thin, maybe even fragile, despite the tough way she had managed to fight. His knee was still throbbing from that strong, well-placed kick…but her wrists felt like too much pressure might make them snap. Holding her tightly enough to still her struggles made him feel like a bully. Just for going after her without trying to calm her down, snapping orders at her, and grabbing her like a thoughtless brute.

It wasn't a pleasant set of impressions. It was made even less pleasant by the way her eyes gleamed, then threatened to water with tears, how her struggles had more or less stopped and been replaced by trembling. Cursing—glad she didn't yet understand any of the less than gentlemanly words he used—Saber pulled back from her, uncomfortable with the remorse he felt.

She wasn't a complete waterpot, though; the woman immediately jerked on her wrists to get herself free. He lost one wrist and almost the other one, as she lunged to the side in her attempt to escape. Swearing again, he yanked her back by her fingertips and the edge of her tunic, which ripped by a whole fingerlength at the nearer armhole. Saber flung her over his shoulder again as soon as he had her jerked back within better reach. Making her yelp, then moan.

Now he felt like a heel, one with a major headache coming on. That headache was clearly labeled Meddling Youngest Brother. When the petite, strawberry-blond hellcat bit him again, Saber spanked her one more time. He did, however, duck slightly as he moved along the hall, to make sure, in her struggles to right herself with an indignant shout and more kicking of her legs, she didn't whack her head on the door frame as they passed through.

“Put her in the octagram. And make sure she
stays
there!” his youngest sibling ordered, not even looking their way as Saber came back into his workroom with his uncooperative burden.

Grumbling under his breath—wincing as she bit him
again
, then thumped that spot with a fist for good measure—Saber strode over to the large expanse of white marble inlaid in the center of the light gray granite flagstones tiling the floor. The octagonal figure had nothing to hold her in place, though. “I'll put a confining spell on her.”

His brother shook his head, not even bothering to look Saber's way as he flipped through several books, looking for the right spell. “Please don't; the energies would only get in the way. This is not a language in the lexicon, Saber; it is not a matter of casting a transposition spell between our language and hers as we can do with all of the other languages known by the Katani. Her language is not known by anyone in this world, as far as I have been able to ascertain.

“No…” Morganen mused as much to himself as to his eldest brother. “It will have to be a very complex piece of translational magic, so that she will be able to understand us, and we her. Ultra Tongue, I think. Most of the other spells in my library rely on the languages being a lot more native than hers.”

“
Fine.
I'll pin her here with a spell just long enough to go get a table or a chair or something…and a bunch of chains,” Saber added half under his breath.

“Jinga's sacred ass!” Morganen exclaimed harshly, whirling on his brother, slapping the book in his hands shut with a bang for emphasis. The sharp sound made the woman pinned over his brother's shoulder flinch. “Are you
really
that insensitive and cruel? She's
frightened
, Saber! Scared out of her wits, utterly alone in completely unfamiliar territory, unable to communicate, completely unaware of how she was rescued from a death worse than fate, and you're thinking of
chaining
her? Oh, that's
really
compassionate, Brother!

“Why don't you just grab your sword while you're at it and shove it through her gut, saving her the trouble of having a stroke or a heart attack!” Normally the Mage, as the youngest of the eight sons was nicknamed, was a kind-spoken soul. But when he was riled, his tongue could cut sharper than his eldest brother's sword. Morganen scowled at his flinching eldest kin. “She's a woman alone in a castle with eight men, with no idea how she got here, bruised and battered and in less than decent clothes by most cultural standards—and certainly with no idea of what we're going to do with her! If the others weren't all cowards and hadn't fled, I would rather have someone more sensitive hold her in place. But no, I have to deal with
you
!”

Saber bristled at that. “I am the eldest brother! You will not talk to me in that manner!”

“Then stand there, hold her, and
comfort
her; don't scare her!” his brother shot back. “It isn't going to kill you—or trigger your gods-be-damned Destiny—to show a little understanding and kindness for a few gods-be-damned moments!” Yanking his book open, he turned his back on the pair of them, muttering harshly under his breath in a less than arcane manner.

The woman, still slung over his shoulder, panting from fear and from her exertions, bit him again.

Swearing, Saber yanked her down from his shoulder. To keep her knees from going for his groin, he pinned her squirming legs in the curve of his arm. To keep her arms from thumping him, he confined them to her ribs with his other arm—but he was not actually cradling her to his chest, dammit! It was self-defense, that was all!

Of course, he didn't want to break her arms and legs, so he had to hold her somewhat gently, but still firmly enough to keep her from squirming free. She certainly tried. Pressing her face up against his shoulder to keep her from squirming out of his grasp got him another bite in the nearest piece of flesh. His chest. Growling from the pain and the aggravation he was suffering, Saber glared down at her. She shrank back in his arms, eyes on his bared teeth, her aquamarine eyes wide and wary, but the jut of her chin belligerent and defensive.

“Oh,
that
sounds reassuring,” his brother drawled sarcastically, attention still buried in his spellbooks. “Stop growling at her!”

“What, do you want me to sing her a gods-be-damned
lullaby
? I could be holding the destruction of Katan in my hands, Morg! You think I'm happy about this?
No women
!” he enunciated. Then had to do his best to keep the woman who wasn't supposed to be there from getting away, struggling hard again at the raising of his voice. “As soon as you're done with this damned spell, you start looking for someplace—anyplace—for her to go!”

“I'll find the right place for her to go, have no fear.
After
I've cast the right translation spell, and after she's had a chance to get her bearings and rest.”

“In the
dungeon
,” Saber muttered, as she tried to pinch him with the hand wedged closest to his chest.

“Saber! Just hold her still,” Morganen ordered him, giving his eldest sibling a dirty look. “It'll take a little while longer.”

“If she draws my blood, I'll—ow!—bind her in chains and throw her into the sea myself, to watch her drown! Stop
biting
me!”

Morganen, his back to his brother, knew in exactly which book to look—not the one in his hands, of course—and carefully hid his smile.
About five more minutes should have both of them calm enough, five past that to continue to “look” for the spell, and five more to gather the necessary ingredients…
Half an hour or so of ensuring their proximity to each other, if he stretched things out a little during the brewing process. If he was careful not to smile where his clearly irritated brother could see it. He wasn't a fool, after all.

S
he was tired, she was bruised, and she was thoroughly pinned to the large stranger's chest. Trapped in a madman's arms, trapped in a madman's house—trapped in a world gone mad—Kelly Doyle finally gave up trying to get free. Neither of the two men seemed to speak plain English, and she had given up trying to remember any of her old high school French, so she couldn't try to see if they spoke that language, either. Of course, they didn't sound like they were speaking French, or Spanish, or German, or any language she recognized. So she lay there, squeezed to borderline bruising, panting and trying desperately not to cry, in the arms of the unnervingly good-looking, overly muscular stranger who was holding her.

It wasn't easy. Some people had bad days. She was having a bad decade. First had come the death of her parents in a collision with a drunk driver, leaving her almost penniless three years before. Then had come the offer of a great job, which had forced her to move away from all of her friends and family, halfway across the country. Then the company employing her had gone bankrupt, and all the employees had been let go a year and a half ago.

So she had tried to profit from her hobbies. She could sew, embroider, and make lace, and had made pillows, framed wall hangings, quilts, rag dolls, and clothing, ranging in style from modern to medieval. The Middle Ages Society had been the one place in her new location and new life where she could make friends quickly through shared interests. Even if the local members started out as complete strangers, she had made a few friends. Such as her closest friend, Hope, who had made Kelly feel more than welcome in the local branch of re-creation enthusiasts.

Her association with the medieval society in the tiny Midwest town had meant being associated with paganism and witchcraft and all sorts of other completely erroneous, bigoted assumptions, even though the Middle Ages Society was actually designed for historical education only.

Anonymous hate mail had started arriving in Kelly's mailbox. And then those notes had been tacked to her door. Whispers around town had driven most of her trade down to what the tourists brought in. And, one evening, someone had shoved her into a wall, while she was walking home from the movie theater. She had whirled on her attacker and fought him off, glad that her parents had enrolled her in kung fu when she was younger. The man had worn a mask and had run away.

When she reported the incident to the police, they suggested she had deliberately done something to draw her attacker's attention. They had sided with the general attitude of the others in the town, preventing her from getting any real help against the persecution mounting against her, and had dismissed her claim to attend to “more important” crimes. In a town where the most excitement was the occasional drunk or shoplifter eating fruit without paying for it at the grocery store, they had dismissed and ignored her complaints.

For a little while, Kelly had hoped that her going to the police had warned off whomever was tormenting her. Then new notes had started coming. And along with them, photocopies of old textbook pages, reciting the history of women who had been accused of witchcraft—hung in England and the colonies, burned in Scotland and France.

She had stepped outside one morning to find a hangman's noose dangling from her porch roof. She had gone outside to sweep off the porch and open the living room-dining room section that she had converted into a shop for her business. The noose had a note pinned to it, demanding in cutout newspaper letters that “the Witch” leave, Or Else. Angry, she had taken the note to the police, but they hadn't done anything beyond eyeing it and pointing out that it neither mentioned her name specifically nor identified what “Or Else” actually meant.

“Or Else” turned out to be waking in bed to burning hot pain a week later, with her house in flames around her. And then, while her lungs had scorched, as her flesh had seared, as the pain had grown unbearable, the flames too high to see any way out of the inferno—something had shaken the world upside down, rattled it around, dumped it out with a jerk…and she had awakened and found herself
here
. She must have fainted the first time, because Kelly remembered herself screaming from pain, shock, and fear, until a blackness had swept through her, blanking out everything for a little while.

Something
beyond her comprehension had happened while she had been unconscious, however. Because though her clothing was still singed, her skin was just barely pink rather than blistered and burning. Now she was in something that had the look and feel of a castle, in the arms of a man wearing breeches and a sleeveless tunic who was arguing with a similarly clad man, all in a room that was lit by glowing white balls caught in claw-tipped iron poles set around the perimeter of the room. Those lights were suspended in their claw-cages in such a way that she could not see the cords that could provide power for their translucent white light…

Maybe they were battery powered or had the power cables running up through the floor directly into one of the supporting iron feet. But that door upstairs had closed
and locked
, with no sign of a spring or a machine or anything, not even a remote control, to trigger it.
That
was creepy to contemplate.

Kelly bit down on her lower lip to keep from crying. She might be bruised half to death, pinned in an uncomfortable mockery of being cradled against a completely unintelligible and thoroughly unfriendly stranger's chest, but she would fry in h—
wrong analogy
, she told herself as her eyes stung again. Just a short while ago, if she hadn't gone completely mad, she
had
been frying in a living hell—along with everything she had owned, the house she had mortgaged herself to the hilt for, and the business she had struggled for a year to keep going, barely able to pay the bills and keep herself fed in a too-hostile world.

At least the man holding her wasn't shouting at her or the other man anymore, and he wasn't hitting her or doing anything else but holding her starved, bruised body. She could only hope that the lack of attention being paid to her was because he and his friend hadn't thought of doing something even worse to her than she had previously experienced. Like raping her. Kelly didn't have much energy left to fight either of them off. For breakfast, she had only eaten a potato and half of a cheap, homemade granola bar. She couldn't always afford lunch and dinner.

She was a pathetic, pajama-clad mess…

Oh, great. Self-pity
, she thought as her eyes stung again and her vision blurred. Kelly shut her eyes, but that only squeezed the liquid out; any liquid out of the eye was a tear, which was bad enough. Two of them would mean she was crying. Which she didn't want to do.

Keeping her eyes shut, Kelly prayed that the man holding her wouldn't notice, or worse, and that her already unsteady breathing wouldn't start to hitch with a sob or two, making it irredeemably official. While she had cried at the death of her parents, she had struggled not to cry at the death of her lost office job. Employment could always be found. Or be made.

She had tried not to cry when the harassing had begun, because her tormentors would have loved to see her break down under their vicious, anonymous attacks. She had tried not to cry when the police had brushed off her account of the attack and her reports of harassment. She had tried very hard not to cry at the noose dangling from her porch, because she was determined to make none of these things worth crying over.

It didn't work. Her breath hitched. She bit her lower lip, then pressed them both tightly together. Her nose sniffled as she drew in a breath. The arms and chest bracing her shifted a little, making her humiliation even worse, because that surely meant he had noticed. Doubly worse, because, as a pale-skinned, freckled redhead, even if only a strawberry blond redhead, crying always made her face blotchy; Kelly was woman enough to hate being blotchy when cradled in the arms of a handsome man, even an unhappy stranger, however frightening her situation was.

The man holding her shifted again, then groaned and muttered. She couldn't understand a word, but the tone was clear, that universal male one used to say “oh, great, now she's crying!” or something vaguely like it. The other man murmured something back in a “don't pay any attention to it” tone—and then something crashed.

She shrieked, eyes flying open, limbs flailing to get her free and away from the frightening, unexpected sound. The man holding her grunted, snarled, and managed to pin her again, this time angled away from him instead of toward him, because of her struggling. She had a view of curved, broken glass that the other man was picking up gingerly from the floor. Something green, dried, and leafy was mixed in with the shards, apparently from a broken jar. The motions of his crouched body were reflected in a rather large, broad cheval mirror not far away.

The man holding her growled something to the other one in a “hurry up, or I'll drop her deliberately” tone, and the other one returned something in a tone so calmly level, so nonchalant and only half-attentive, she couldn't guess what the nature of his reply was. If she hadn't been pinned so effectively, her back against the bigger man's chest, she would have tried to squirm free. If she weren't exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally—from the turmoil of her life over the past few years and these incomprehensible last few minutes, she might have had the energy to struggle in earnest.

Not that Kelly knew where she could have run to. One simply didn't go from a bed in the middle of a burning, collapsing inferno of a house to a medieval castle chamber that looked like some kind of magician's lair. Not in a sane and sensible world. Not in
her
world, at any rate. She wasn't crying anymore—being held so awkwardly seemed to cure her of the urge—but she did have to sniff a couple of times, as the unshed tears in her eyes finished draining into her nose. No doubt her skin was awfully blotchy by now, too.

And why am I thinking about my skin tone, when I'm god knows where, with a pair of men doing god knows what?

The other man finished taking care of the mess made by the dropped jar or whatever, then carefully used the few leaves that hadn't touched the floor in the accident, throwing them with a pair of glass tweezers into a large ceramic goblet that he had been muttering over and filling with other odd things. That goblet was now full of something muddy colored; it puffed a funny, opalescent mushroom cloud when the leaves disappeared below the liquid that rested just under the brim. Kelly stared; she'd never seen that particular trick before.

Shifting away from the workbench he was standing at, the second man carried the goblet toward her, slowed, eyed the man holding her, and shook his head disgustedly. He glared pointedly at the larger, somewhat older man who was holding her and rattled off a string of instructions that got her more or less righted in the bigger man's arms. Into a drinking position.

Eyeing that cup very warily, Kelly had visions of assorted date-rape drugs dancing in her head. When he held it up to her mouth, she shook her head hard, sealing her lips tightly. The man holding the goblet, his light brown hair drawn back in an odd style for a man, in a bun-knot at the back of his head, sighed and muttered something to the man holding her, the one with chest-length, lighter, honey-golden hair.

They argued back and forth a few moments, not very long, then the man holding her allowed the younger one—his brother, Kelly realized, or at least his cousin, taking into account the similarities in their features—to tip the cup to his own lips. This close, cradled upright in his arms again, she could see that he really was drinking the liquid, not just pretending.

She also caught his grimace, as the cup was pulled away, before its milky white contents had been more than half drunk. The younger man holding the goblet nudged his brother's arm sharply, and the muscular one holding her approximated a smile and an “mmm!” sound, as if trying to convince her it tasted good.

“Yeah.
Right
,” she muttered under her breath, then watched as the man holding her winced, tipping his head. He frowned down at her as the wince eased, and shocked her, by speaking in perfectly understandable English.

“What did you say?”

Her eyes flew wide, aquamarine staring up at still-frowning gray. Kelly eyed him. “What did
you
say?”

He didn't reply to her. Instead he looked over at the other man and shrugged, asserting sarcastically, “At least we know it works. Thanks for not poisoning me.
This
time.”

The man holding the chased gold goblet shook his head and smiled, muttering something that, from his rueful expression, sounded like “I can't understand a word you just said, remember?” But
one
of the two men in the room knew what was going on, and that was good enough for her. In fact, she recovered enough of a burst of energy to demand that very fact.

“What the hell is going on? Where am I? How did I get here? Who the hell are you? And put me down this minute, buster!” She kicked her feet for emphasis, since her arms were still tightly pinned to her sides.

The other two exchanged words in that other, incomprehensible language, arguing a bit more, then the one holding her looked down at her as she kicked again. “He says you're supposed to drink the damned potion—and if you bite me again, I'll bite your whole gods-be-damned head off!”