A Brother's Price

on the shoulder. “Go on to the hackney. You can gawk through the window.”
    He and Eldest pushed their way through the crowd to the closed carriage. While he climbed into the hackney. Eldest waited outside for Summer and Corelle to catch up. He scooted across the battered horsehair-stuffed seat to stare up at the palace. Ren and Odelia’s home. He remembered Ren, standing in the Whistlers’ kitchen, watching him cook. How poor and lowborn he must have seemed to her.
    He was aware of someone staring at him, and he looked down.
    The young woman with the wide-brimmed hat stood before him, shielded from Eldest and the others by the hackney. She looked at him with neither envy nor the open speculation that he had grown used to during the trip, that ‘T wish I had him“ or ”Can I get him without being caught?“ She seemed, instead, stunned by some surprising news.
    Jerin gazed at her, wondering why she sought him out, what was so surprising about himself. He could find nothing familiar about her face, no hint that he might have known her long ago. True, the silvery line of a scar ran from the corner of her left eye down the line of her chin to the edge of her mouth. The skin lay smooth; the healing had been perfect despite the fact she had nearly lost her left eye with the wound. The scar, thus, did not disfigure her beyond recognition.
    In fact, he would not say it disfigured her at all. At one time, her face had been a harvested field under a winter sky: barren of good features, containing no bad. Plain. Neither beautiful nor ugly. It had existed.
    The scar gave her plainness character, like a thick choker, or a large bold earring. It spoke to Jerin of strength and determination.
    The woman had tensed when their gazes met. a look like fear going through her eyes. He had thought Raven might be the cause for her alarm, but then the woman didn’t glance to see where the captain was. or what Raven was doing. Instead her eyes widened slightly, and Jerin realized she had been somehow afraid of him, and now she wasn’t.
    She stepped forward, reached out, and lifted his veil.
    Time stopped.
    They froze there. He half leaned out the window of the hired coach. She held the veil up with both hands. Her eyes were green, green and changing as summer wheat, one moment dark as velvet, next light as silk, with long thick dark eyelashes. Gorgeous eyes. How could he have thought her plain with such eyes?
    She gasped, as if surprised, and then kissed him.
    He hadn’t expected it, and sat stunned during the touch of warm lips, the fleeting exploration of her sweet cinnamon tongue, the brief touch of fingertips on his check.
    Then she was gone, his veil drifting down, the calliope blasting forth into the silence that had surrounded them.
    The hackney rocked, and Summer climbed in beside him. She leaned against him to look out and up at the palace on the cliff. “To think, after all these years, the Whistlers are going to be guests there.”

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    Chapter 8

     
    The hackney cab jostled and swayed through town, and climbed the cliff road. At the palace gate, Raven leaned out to have them passed through. All the while, Jerin found himself pressing his hand to his mouth, feeling again and again the kiss of the stranger on his lips. What was wrong with him? Why did he let a stranger kiss him? True, he had not expected the kiss, but still, once it started, once he was aware it was happening, he should have stopped it. Was he in truth a slut, unable to resist any woman’s advances? Certainly, prior to Ren, he never had to resist a woman; his sisters kept all comers at bay. Ren certainly hadn’t taught him anything in the way of resistance.
    All this time he thought—actually, he still believed— he was in love with Ren. If he loved her, why had he let that woman kiss him? Gods above, he didn’t even know the woman’s name!
    Eldest finally noticed his silence, the hand pressed to his mouth. “Are you sick?”
    Sick? Well, mental illness would explain his actions. “Perhaps.”
    “Should we stop and let you throw up in the gardens?” Eldest asked. “It would be better than spilling your accounts in the palace proper.”
    “If he goes, I go.” Summer looked slightly green from the jostling.
    “Ah, Whistlers at their finest hour.” Corelle earned a cuff from Eldest.
    “I’ll be fine,” Jerin muttered, blushing. Certainly with his family pressed so close, he would be able to resist the next woman who tried to kiss