A Brother's Price

mobile he was.
    “This isn’t decent,” Cira growled. “You don’t treat menfolk like this.”
    “I really need to wee-wee and poo.” Jerin added the second to buy himself more time. He had to get free before one of them decided to rape him.
    “There’s the piss pot.” Fen spit into it to point it out.
    “For gods’ sake, give him privacy.” Cira brushed past Fen and went into the next room.
    “Fine with me.” Fen caught the loop of rope serving as a doorknob on the crude door. “We were told not to touch him. That’s what they’re paying well for. and I’m not going to nick this deal by not giving them what they want.”
    As the door shut, Cira said, “If we take him now. straight from the palace to his aunts’ store, then everyone can count on their fingers and know that there wasn’t time for rides on the side.”
    Jerin held still, waiting for the answer.
    “We?” Fen’s voice was muffled now, but he could tell that she had brushed off the suggestion without giving it any serious thought. “There’s no ‘we’ here. There’s us and you. Don’t come crowding in here, after the work is done, with yer hand outstretched.”
    Jerin lifted the loop of metal, ran it down the headboard to its farthest reach, and slipped out of the bed. He relieved himself in the chamber pot.
    “Who got you out of that mess in Sarahs Bend?” Cira countered. “You would have been hung if I hadn’t bribed the Queens Justice.”
    “That’s the only reason,” Bert said, “that I didn’t plug ya dead when ya waltzed in here unannounced like.”
    “I’ve seen you shoot,” Cira drawled. “I wasn’t in any danger.”
    As the women laughed like baying dogs, Jerin slipped his lockpick out of his stash pack, stabbed the stiff wires into the keyhole, and fished about carefully, while his heart hammered in his chest. All the winter days he and his sisters spent playing thieves, hiding in the shadows, seeing who could pick locks the fastest, and he never dreamed he’d have need for the skill.
    “Iffen we’re doing this sister thing,” a new speaker said, making the count of women to be eight, “maybe we should count Cira in too. We could use someone with book learning and smarts like her.”
    There was a moment of silence from the other room.
    The click of the lock springing open seemed loud as thunder. Jerin paused, listening, poised to fall back into the bed and pretend helpless innocence.
    “Sister thing?” Cira asked.
    “When we git this land,” Dossy said, “we’re going ta tell folks that we’re sisters.”
    “You seven?” Cira’s voice was full of disbelief.
    “Mothers did it by tens.” Fen meant that they would claim that their “mothers” had visited cribs to explain how they were all sisters. “Been done before. You interested?”
    Jerin stepped quietly to the bedroom window. The shack stood on pier footings, a stone’s throw from the river. A barn loomed against the night sky, some fifty feet away; the soft noises of restless horses came from it.
    Cira said, without any real excitement, “Perhaps.”
    “We’re not making this offer to everyone,” Fen said. “Greddy’s right, though—yer a sharp one, through and through.”
    Jerin wavered at the window. He’d be running blind in an area they knew well. If he just slipped away, the moment they realized he was gone, they’d be on him like a pack of dogs. He might not get any farther than the barn. He needed to throw them into confusion. He turned back to the room.
    “You’ll be the Eldest?” Cira was asking.
    “Ah,” Fen replied. “So that’s it—ya want to be Eldest? Greedy little bitch.”
    “I’ve done second in line,” Cira said. “It doesn’t work too well.”
    “Ha!” Bert cried. “Ya got thrown out for back talking to your Eldest?”
    “Let’s just say,” Cira said, “that some of the parties involved thought I was usurping my sister’s authority and it would be best that 1 leave.”
    As the women howled in laughter, Jerin shoved the limp pillows under the ratty blanket. He unscrewed the top of the lamp and poured its oil out onto the bed. Plucking the hot chimney free of the tines on top that kept the glass from shifting, he carefully he laid the top—lit wick and all—down on the cover. Hopefully the wick would act as a fuse. He was lowering himself out the window when the bed went up in a soft muffled whoof .
    He landed with a jolt that went up his right leg. He folded to the ground with