Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (107 page)

“
Carpet?”
I ask, stifling a laugh as I
picture Syr Phillip’s dad fighting a bear pit round wearing a suit
of burnt-orange shag.

“Yeah, carpet. The SCA used to allow carpet armor.
You just cut up old pieces of carpet into standard armor shapes and
wore them backing-side out. If you couldn’t manage to construct
buckle fasteners, you just held them onto your body with duct tape.
Ugly, not at all medieval, but hey, it worked when and where you
needed it to. I learned to fight in carpet armor myself.
Anyway—What’s so funny?”

I’m cracking up at the thought of Syr Phillip
wearing anything remotely resembling a rug. “Sorry. I just think
the idea of you wearing carpet is hilarious.”

“Lisa, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to tell a very
serious story here.”

I bite my lip to keep from laughing. “I’m sorry. Go
on.”

Agitated, Syr Phillip guzzles the dregs of his beer
and tosses the empty into the fireplace, where it shatters. “Where
was I?”

“Carpet armor,” not commenting on the reckless beer
bottle display. “And something about your brother Steve being a
brat.”

“Right. That’s an important point. My brother Steve
is still a brat, by the way. That’s never going to change. Anyway,
after we’d all been going to SCA events for a year or so, my dad
got squired to a knight out of Akron named Thorvald the Traveler.
Syr Thorvald really took to my dad, and it got to the point that
Dad was spending almost every single night of the week over at Syr
Thorvald’s house—which was almost two hours away—doing squire
stuff. Polishing his armor, re-padding his shields, stuff like
that. And once Dad got on Syr Thorvald’s good side from all that
grunt work, Syr Thorvald started training my dad to become a knight
himself. But that didn’t go over too well with my mom, as you might
imagine.”

“No, I can’t imagine,” I say, fiddling with my empty
coffee cup. “You’re rambling, Phillip. I’m not following you.”

Syr Phillip flops down on one of his Italian leather
armchairs. “I’m sorry. I’m just no good at telling this story.”

I glance at my watch. “Well, you better start
getting good at it, or I’m leaving. I didn’t come all this way to
watch you hem and haw and tell me how you’re no good at justifying
your own shitty behavior towards me.”

Syr Phillip puts his face in his hands and sighs.
After a moment, he goes on. “What was I talking about? My mom,
right. So, while my dad is spending every night of the week over at
Syr Thorvald’s house learning to be a knight, my mom was at home
getting depressed and taking it out on us kids. She enjoyed the
SCA, sure. She was good at sewing and crafts, and she was able to
find an outlet for those talents in the SCA. She got into costuming
and card-weaving, and she won a few honorable mentions in the local
arts and sciences competitions by the time she’d been in the SCA a
year. I think when my parents first got involved in the
organization, they found all the pomp and pageantry and
courtly-love tradition romantic. But that didn’t last. By the time
my dad got squired to Thorvald, he’d started spending so much time
at fight practice and messing around in the garage trying to build
himself a decent suit of metal armor that he got fired from his
job. He was only a grocery store manager, so it wasn’t like he made
a lot of money in the first place, but it obviously became a strain
on the family to lose that income. My mom hadn’t worked outside the
home since before she was married, but with my dad following Syr
Thorvald around like a puppy and basically being completely
irresponsible towards his family, Mom had to take matters into her
own hands.”

“Like how? You’re making it sound like she had him
beat up or something,” I say.

Phillip resumes his nervous pacing. “Not exactly. My
mom knew she couldn’t rely on my father to earn a living anymore—at
least not until he got knighted. So she started selling real
estate. And she became very successful at it very quickly. Within a
few months of getting her real estate license, she was earning
twice as much as my dad ever did, while still having plenty of time
to spend at home with us kids. Pretty soon Mom was making enough
money to cover all our bills and then some, and she started feeling
good enough about herself to take her SCA costuming and
card-weaving projects to the next level. She won several major arts
and sciences competitions, including a prize at the kingdom level
called the Order of the Evergreen which is one step below becoming
a Laurel—and that made my father insanely jealous. In addition to
her winning some local SCA notoriety for her costuming and crafts
and being one step closer to becoming a Kingdom Peer than Dad was,
Mom was outdoing Dad in the financial arena, too. Our family’s
standard of living went up substantially, and Mom used some of the
extra money to get all us kids outfitted in better garb and
enrolled in all the SCA’s extracurricular programs for
kids—including putting me and Stephen in youth fighting training.
But our relationship with Dad deteriorated, and pretty soon going
to SCA events stopped being very much fun, because Mom and Dad
fought almost the entire time. After the family had been involved
with the SCA for about a year and a half, Mom and Dad were
basically at war with one another. And us kids got caught in the
middle—we started feeling obligated to take sides.”

“Whose side did you take?” I ask, although I think I
already know the answer.

A look of deep pain crosses Syr Phillip’s face. He
stops pacing, and leans heavily against the fireplace mantel.
“Mom’s, of course. Holly and I both sided with her. Holly and I
were very, very close growing up. Like I said, we were practically
twins. And not just in terms of the nearness of our ages. We
thought and acted alike most of the time—we had almost a psychic
connection. And we both took after Mom’s personality more than we
did Dad’s. Steve, on the other hand, took more after Dad, and he
was Dad’s favorite, too. He always took Dad’s side, even when Dad
was being a totally irresponsible, selfish ass. Do you realize that
idiot brother of mine actually
defended
my dad when he
missed my sister’s final dance recital in favor of polishing Syr
Thorvald’s collection of steel breastplates? Not to mention Steve’s
insisting that forcing my mom to support the family by herself was
justified as long as my dad ended up getting knighted? For a
nine-year-old bratty kid, my little brother was a real know-it-all
of marital relations, let me tell you. And that wasn’t even the
half of it—” Syr Phillip trails off, and bangs his bare fist
against the brick fireplace so hard he swears.

“There’s something else you’re not telling me, isn’t
there?” I ask gently. It’s all I can do not to rush over to Syr
Phillip and kiss his wounded hand. But I’m sticking to my
guns—business is business, and playing hard-to-get is playing
hard-to-get.

Syr Phillip rubs his fist and grimaces in pain that
is probably more than just physical. “Yes, there is, Lisa. This was
right around the time that Dad started having his first
affair.”

“With who? Duchess Danyel?” I ask, innocently.

“Oh, no. Dad didn’t hook up with her until
after—well, until after Mom died. This was well before that. He
started seeing a woman from Middle Marches named Isabel, or Isolde,
or something like that. I didn’t know too much about her, and
didn’t much care to—after all, she was a home-wrecker who was
hurting my mother and our family. But Steve didn’t seem to mind
that. In fact, he
loved
Isabel. He even started calling her
‘Mom.’”

“Ewww,” I say. Now I’m embarrassed to have felt any
attraction towards Syr Phillip’s younger brother.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on him about it
now,” Syr Phillip says thoughtfully. “After all, he was just a
little kid at the time, and he didn’t get along well with Mom,
Holly, or me even then. So I suppose it was natural for him to take
Dad’s side, and maybe even gravitate towards Dad’s new girlfriend a
little too. The fact that my dad openly flaunted his affair with
Isabel when he was still married to my mother was pretty shameless,
but it’s not like we kids had any say in it. I can’t exactly blame
Steve for my father’s bad behavior. But even so, that doesn’t
excuse Steve for what happened next.”

“So, what did happen next?” I ask. But based on the
snippets of Syr Phillip’s tragic family past that I already know,
the picture is already beginning to take shape.

“Steve got to know Isabel or Isolde or
whatever-her-name-was because Dad started taking Steve with him
over to Syr Thorvald’s a lot, and his new girlfriend would visit
him over there. Rumor has it that Syr Thorvald let them shack up
together over there, too—and if it was true, he could well have
been asked to give up his knighthood—but nobody knows for sure. Dad
was definitely shacking up with her somewhere, but I suppose it
could have been the local Motel 6 just as easily as it was Syr
Thorvald’s house.

“Well, it came to pass that Mom made Dad an
ultimatum. Either he dumped Isabel, got a job, and started acting
like a proper husband again, or she was filing for divorce and
keeping us kids
and
the house. She made the ultimatum the
week before Pennsic 14—that was in 1985—and gave him two weeks to
comply. The whole family went to Pennsic together at Mom’s
insistence, but most of the time, Dad stayed at Syr Thorvald’s
encampment—presumably, so he could spend more time with Isabel, who
was a member of Syr Thorvald’s household. But as it turns out, Dad
wasn’t Isabel’s only boyfriend. Dad found out that she was also
sleeping with Syr Thorvald and several
other
knight and
fighter types, too. People can be pretty cavalier about having loud
sex in tents at Pennsic, and I suppose that’s how Dad found
out.”

“Ouch,” I say. “But it sounds like he probably got
what he deserved.”

“At first it might seem so,” Syr Phillip says. “But
it got more complicated. The same day that Dad found out about
Isabel and Thorvald and all the others, he got sent on his knightly
vigil by King Wurmvald. That’s an all-night prayer ceremony that’s
a precursor to being knighted. The rub was, since Dad was Syr
Thorvald’s squire, Syr Thorvald had to oversee Dad’s all-night
vigil. And after just finding out that Syr Thorvald was sharing
beds with Dad’s girlfriend, you might imagine Dad didn’t take too
kindly to this.”

“Uh huh,” I say, stretching my legs. “But didn’t
your dad still have to act all, like, chivalrous and nice and stuff
since it was a knight’s ceremony?”

“Well, technically, yes, he did. But that’s not
exactly what happened. Granted, I wasn’t allowed to be a part of
his vigil, so I never saw what happened first-hand. But what did
happen during my dad’s knightly vigil is the stuff of legend in
Midrealm lore. To this day, more than twenty years later, there are
still people who think that my father never should have been
knighted because of what happened on his vigil. Not to mention what
happened the day
after
his vigil.”

“So, what
did
happen, exactly? And what does
all of this have to do with your kid brother being a brat?”

“Well, there was a bit of a. . .scuffle, to put it
mildly, between Syr Thorvald and my dad. Several of the other
knights who King Wurmvald had assigned to keep vigil with Dad that
night had to break it up.”

“This is all very confusing,” I remark.

“I know—I’m rambling.” Syr Phillip pounds on his
temples with his fists. “This is the part of the story that gets
really hard for me to tell.”

“Why?”

Syr Phillip comes to sit next to me on the couch.
I’m shocked to see that his eyes are tearing up. “I’m getting close
to the part where Mom and Holly die. Dad and Steve were directly
responsible for their deaths, you know.” The caustic acid of
twenty-plus years of rage boils just behind Syr Phillip’s eyes. All
at once, I finally see the
real
Phil Dawson, the
flesh-and-blood human being underneath all the froth, romance, and
ceremony he hides behind in the SCA. My heart goes out to him, but
I stop just short of meeting his lips. Whether or not our
relationship ever gets rebuilt into what it once was, I know that
the key to getting Syr Phillip back on the Midrealm throne is
implicit in his getting at the part of himself that he keeps locked
behind layers and layers of anger, resentment, and frustration
towards his father and brother. “I should really stop blaming my
dad for Mom and Holly getting killed,” he says. “In the final
analysis, it was really
all
Steve’s fault. Innocent
nine-year-old kid or not, he was the one that made Mom and Holly
leave Pennsic that year the way they did.”

I chew on this for a moment. I have a very hard time
believing that a nine-year-old kid can be solely responsible for
the deaths of two people. Since I’m an only child, I don’t much
understand the bitter rivalries that can brew up among siblings.
But one thing I
do
understand is assigning blame, rationally
or not, when someone close to you dies. After all, I’ve been
blaming myself for my own parents’ deaths for years.

I look up and find Syr Phillip staring straight into
my eyes. “What are you thinking right now?” he asks, his voice
tender.

“I’m thinking that your emotions are really wrapped
up in this, and maybe that keeps you from seeing the whole
picture,” I reply.

The words sting him. “You haven’t even heard the
whole story yet,” Syr Phillip snaps. “At least reserve all your
cruel judgments until I’m finished.”

“I—I’m sorry,” I mumble. “Keep going.”

Syr Phillip gets up and starts pacing the room
again. “I didn’t get to the part about what happened the morning
after Dad’s knightly vigil yet. That’s kind of where everything
started to fall apart.

“Dad showed up in our family encampment the morning
after he finished his vigil. Somehow, Mom never found out that Dad
had been tapped for knighthood the night before, so she naturally
assumed that he’d just spent the night away from our encampment
because he was off screwing Isabel. And that was a pretty
reasonable assumption on her part if you ask me.”