Brothers: Legacy of the Twice-Dead God (35 page)

I don’t know how long it actually took before
the shaking stopped. I could still hear the room outside, barely,
but there was no real frame of reference in here. I stretched out
slowly in the darkness, accepting Kieran’s ministrations on my face
until the feeling returned and the energy receded. I stood and
pushed back into myself.

And blinked at the brightness of the room.
Kieran helped me sit up. Peter was looking at me oddly. He held a
shiny red spiked spell between the fingers of his left hand ready
to push into my shoulder where he touched me before.

“Guess you don’t need this, then,” he said,
chuckling, and push the spiked spell into the floor.

“Why? What was it?” I asked, a bit
groggily.

“That was the ‘wake-up’ part of the stasis
spell I put you under,” he said. “To stop the pain.”

“It worked. Thank you,” I said, meekly.

“What did you do to her that pissed her off
so bad?” asked Peter.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, shaking my head.
That was a mistake, I realized, as the world shook far longer than
I did.

“He felt sorry for her,” Ethan answered.

“Oh,” said Kieran, knowing. “Yeah, that would
upset her.”

“What’s to feel sorry for?” asked Peter.
“They’ve got everything they could ever want.”

“No,” I whispered, glancing around the room
to find the Princess again. I wanted to stay away—well away—from
her for the rest of my life.

We were once again the epicenter of attention
in the room. Small wonder. The room itself had grown in size. The
back wall was somehow moved back when the elves arrived and almost
doubled the space. Chairs, sofas, and tables to accommodate the
height of the elves were moved into that side of the room and most
of the elves stayed in that area. I suspect that wasn’t the only
reason, but who was I to judge? I spied a cluster of Summer elves
in the far corner of the room, in back, around the Princess,
calming her anger and sluicing away the liquid heat that was
pouring off of her now like a waterfall.

Conversation started up again and the looks
started to become more furtive as people realized the show was
over. Ethan stood and grabbed the chair the Summer Princess had
been sitting in. The seat was scorched. He took it away.

I was aware she approached this time. I felt
her coming and stiffened. The polar opposite of the Summer Princess
arrived just as Ethan set a new chair in place of the old and sat
delicately down on the seat.

Like the elf before her, she was beautiful.
Her raven black hair falling lushly down along her pale exquisite
features. Her porcelain white skin gave her silver lips an awesome
offset in color, matching the gradient color in her eyelids. Her
dress was black, silver, and gray, shimmering as if by moonlight.
While it covered more of her body than Summer’s dress, it defined
her with the promise of seduction, not the heat of passion. It
hinted at what lay beneath in the sultriest ways, glimmering in
silver as if it might show something delicious, only to slip away
into the darkness of the night.

The Winter Princess had arrived.

“Whatever did you say to get such a marvelous
reaction from her, dear boy?” she asked me directly. Ethan shrugged
to us and sat down on the couch opposite us again, but with a more
ready-to-move stance. He didn’t want a replay and I didn’t
either.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Apparently, she didn’t
like my face.”

The Princess giggled softly, high yet still
sultry. I didn’t understand how that was possible, but there you
had it. I steeled myself with vivid images of her mother and looked
at her, hoping my face didn’t crack like it did with the Summer
princess. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. Many of the same issues
saddened me for her as it had with her counterpart. They were
almost exact mirror images of one another.

“How is it, Seth McClure, that you can sit
before me so calmly yet the Challenge in your name is unbroken?”
she asked, crossing her legs at the knees. Her dress split to
accommodate, revealing long, curvaceous legs down to bare feet. It
didn’t take much to imagine them wrapped around me, but apparently
the memory of Summer’s slap kept my hormones in check for a
while.

“I don’t know,” I replied quietly, “but I’m
afraid I must decline the offer. I would offer little entertainment
value against any champion you would set against me. I have only
just apprenticed myself and my master has said no.”

“A master now, Ehran McClure?” she shifted
her attention to Kieran, who simply smiled and nodded. “We were not
even aware that you had survived your fall from grace until
recently. Do you have them? Tucked away somewhere special that we
can’t see?”

“Have what, your Highness?” Kieran asked.

“What is ours,” her tone changed on that. It
was hard and cold and brittle.

“As Seth told Master Cahill earlier this
evening,” Kieran said, sharply, “outside of our clothing, we have
nothing of elven make in our possession.”

“Do not get snippy with me, human,” the
Winter Princess said coolly, the threat implicit in her
delivery.

“Then don’t get snippy with me, elf,”
responded Kieran with equal precision.

The pause between them stretched and
stretched until I thought time would snap before the tension
did.

“The resemblance to your father is uncanny.
Your other brothers were not as similar, by far,” she said,
relaxing into the chair and pulling her dress over her knee to
distract herself.

“Were?” Kieran asked, dully.

“Yes, were,” she said, “You two are the last
in your line. Perhaps that is why Mother wants Seth so badly: to
remove the thorn that has been in our side for millennia.”

Ethan and I had the same thought at the same
time. We both stood up, arms crossed in front of us looking down
imperiously at the elf bitch and in unison said, “It’s time for you
to leave.” Seriously perfect harmony, too.

Her head fell lazily back against the chair
as she looked up at us.

“Don’t even dream about ordering me about,
little boys,” she said, softly, her eyes half closed as she
looked up at us.

The Stone hummed lightly in my mind and I
reached down, unspooling energy from my battery and forming it into
the spell the Stone gave me. I didn’t look at it; I knew what it
was before I pushed it out onto the energy plane. A very thin plane
of power formed under the Winter Princess, insinuating itself under
the chair’s legs and raising it a micron at a time until it was
strong enough to hold her.

I leaned in close to her and said, “I am a
McClure and my father’s son. Go away.” Then I sent the sheet of
power that held the chair flying backward ten feet, turning at a
right angle, buffeting her hard, and shot it again back another
fifteen. I kept her moving backward and turning at right angles
until she and the chair were both in the back corner of the room
before dissolving the thin sheet of power. A solid wall of ice
cordoned off the corner for a brief moment, only to be shattered by
a high pitched scream of anger. The roar of the cracking and
falling ice was almost deafening.

I turned to Kieran to see MacNamara standing
behind Peter’s chair with his pale suited shadows on
either side of him. He was smiling in his multicolored silks,
totally at ease.

“Making friends…” said the right elf.

“I see,” said the left. We were back to that
routine. Maybe if I ignored it…

I shrugged. “She was being a bitch.”

“Oh, they… do that well,” MacNamara said,
chuckling. Okay, ignoring the left and right could work.

“Are you all right?” I asked Kieran, softly,
sitting down beside him. I wished I could empathize more with him,
but I didn’t have any relationship at all to them. Just words.
That’s all they were to me, not like Kieran. Or Ethan or Peter.
That would hurt. “Do you want to go?”

“We can’t. Not yet,” he whispered. His aura
was a wreck. He was taking the loss hard, grief weighing heavy
along with guilt and frustration. He wasn’t crying but it was close
and I wished he would to release that tension.

I knelt down in front of him and looked up
into his green eyes and said, “We can if you need to, brother. A
few hours won’t hurt us.”

A bell rang throughout the room.

“Ah, Dinner… is served,” said MacNamara
through his proxies. “I will… rearrange the table… so that you… are
more safely situated.”

Kieran hugged me briefly and strongly. “Thank
you, Seth, but I’ll be fine. If we don’t follow this through, we
may miss something important and then our family may have died for
no reason. This is becoming more important than just Father and
Olivia.”

He stood and we joined the flow of people
moving toward the back of the room. Our path was supremely easy as
we were directly behind MacNamara and everyone cleared in front of
him. The banquet room was as enormous as the previous room with a
table in a u-form with MacNamara at the head of the table. Each
party was greeted by name by an elf at the door and escorted to a
specific position at the table. Without pause, the seating went
quickly and evenly as people arrived at the door, elf and human
alike. We were escorted to the inside of the table to the head,
directly opposite MacNamara. And we were the only people on the
inside of the table.

“Talk about conspicuous,” muttered Peter, as
we sat down and looked around at the rest of the table.

“You ain’t just whistlin’ ‘Dixie’,” responded
Kieran under his breath, eyeing the Summer elves over the table to
his right. They were politely ignoring him as they settled in,
leaving the most ornate chair empty, presumably for the still
missing Princess or perhaps, the Queen. I looked to the right to
see Winter elves sitting rigidly still and a similarly empty chair
in their center.

“Do you suppose they’re off together plotting
our demise?” I asked quietly.

“Together? Not likely,” answered Peter.
“Separately, I’m sure that they’ve each got at least a hundred
different ugly but methodical plans already in motion.”

Ethan chuckled at that one. I just
grimaced.

MacNamara sat down before us languidly, still
smiling.

“I have not… had such a… delightful time at…
the games in four… hundred years,” he said. It was like talking to
a man with a stutter.

“I do hope we aren’t monopolizing your time,
your Grace,” I said, trying to mimic Kieran’s style when he spoke
the elf-king. I wanted to take some of the attention off of Kieran
for a while and give him some time.

“Not at all, McClure!” he exclaimed. “I
actually wish… I had seen… the Princess’ visits… from the
beginning! … Wonderfully dramatic… Both of them… did their Mothers…
proud.”

“So I assume the Queens will not be joining
tonight’s supper?” I asked.

“No, nothing… as mundane as … my
celebration,” he responded. “And the Princesses… well … We shan’t
wait… on their petulance.”

With that, doorways on the sides of the long
hall silently opened and elves wearing gray waistcoats hurried out
carrying silver trays with large silver domes and stepped up behind
and to the left of each guest. As one, they removed the silver
domes creating a light ring that tolled through the room like the
bells of a cathedral. They slid the plates in front of their
respective guests and stepped back to the kitchens. A few of the
elves nearer us still had their plates covered with the servers
pressing down on the covers and were slowly taking control of the
covers from the servers with a look of growing anticipation and
glee.

We were the last to be served, along with
MacNamara. Ten elves came out of the side doors in a row carrying
large wooden paddles on sticks in the air in front of them. One
split off and turned toward the outside of the table to MacNamara,
the other nine turned to the doors then swerved in to the inside of
the table to us. We couldn’t see what they were carrying on the
paddles, but it could only be one thing: pizza.

The first elf quite elegantly flipped twelve
plates onto the table, one in front of each of us and eight more in
a semi-circle around us. Then very quickly, each of the remaining
elves slid the steaming, oven-hot contents of his wooden paddle
onto the arrayed plates, freshly and evenly sliced. Looking over
the eight pies, not only was the topping selection a nice mix,
they’d varied the style: thin crust, deep dish, Chicago-style,
whole wheat crust. I was drooling, I know I was.

I looked up to MacNamara. He was gnawing on
what looked like a turkey leg, kinda grossly too, but Mama taught
me never to comment on my host’s manners and I only wanted to know
if it was okay to start eating. I heard an animal’s squeal to my
left when I was asking Ethan for a slice of the Deep Dish on his
side, but decided I didn’t want to watch the elf eat his live
animal. At least I understood why the humans didn’t mind being
separated from the elves at dinners. There wasn’t much by way of
dinner conversation, even though MacNamara’s proxies didn’t eat at
all, so I assumed he would have no problems speaking through them.
I guess he was distracted.

A door at the far end of the hall opened with
a bang against the wall. “Ah, one of… our errant supper… guests is
returning,” said MacNamara, wiping his face and hands with a large
white cloth napkin. From the stomping coming up behind us, I was
pretty sure it wasn’t one of the Princesses. I stretched out my
awareness and felt for whoever it was, rather than turning my back
to my host: grandfather.

I stood, pushing the chair back, and faced
him as he came up between the tables directly for MacNamara. Kieran
turned in his chair, glancing up at me then watching St. Croix
finish his stomping trek to the front of the room. I was wrong
about his target, though. He stopped at Kieran, not MacNamara.