A Brother's Price

herself, Corelle and Summer, and Jerin.
    Lylia gave Jerin a long measuring look and smiled at what she saw. “A pleasure.”
    Cullen tsked as Jerin blushed. “No, no, you tilt up your chin, raise one eyebrow calmly, and state, i know.‘”
    “Oh, but I like the blush,” Lylia said.
    “If he keeps blushing like that, you’ll have to use a pry bar to get the women off him,” Cullen said. “Arrogance. It’s the only way to have a moment’s peace.”
    “As if you had practice,” Lylia said, tugging on Cul-len’s braid.
    Cullen tweaked her cheek. “I’ll have you know that there are families out there that are willing to overlook a small streak of headstrongness.”
    “Small? Ha!” Lylia rolled her eyes. “I was going to suggest a walk in the gardens.” She tilted her head in the direction of the door. “Just the six of us.”
    “A pleasure,” Eldest murmured.
    Lylia did not take Cullen’s arm, as Jerin expected her to do, but let her cousin lead the way. Summer and Eldest fell into step with Cullen, flanking him. On a hand signal from Eldest, Corelle took Jerin’s arm with a sigh of the long-suffering, and Lylia walked beside them.
    “There are actually several gardens inside the palace walls,” Lylia explained as they strolled down a flight of stairs and several hallways to the porch where the Queen Mother Elder had first met with them. “The family is mad about puttering about in the muck, bending nature to their will. I don’t have the madness, so I don’t quite understand it, but Trini and, strangely enough, Odelia are both crazy about it.”
    The gardens were a riot of color, in full bloom with early-summer flowers. Paths of pea gravel meandered through drifts of peonies to archways leading to other gardens.
    “The back wall is sixteen feet tall and is patrolled night and day. The gardens are as safe as the house.” Lylia pointed out the wall a few hundred feet away. “We can walk around without fear in here.”
    “My favorite area is down here.” Cullen led the way to a well-shaded grotto, where water spilled over a water-fall into a deep, rock-lined pool. “The cliff was built here for my uncle. If you look carefully, you can see the individual slabs of stone they fitted together to make it.”
    Jerin studied the wall several minutes before finding the finger-wide joints of the very natural-looking cliff face.
    “The water is pumped by that windmill.” Lylia pointed to a picturesque structure, its sailcloth arms creaking in the stiff wind.
    “Oh.” Pieces of Jerin’s education came together in his mind. “We’re at the top of a sandstone cliff. The ground is probably too porous to keep water up here.”
    His reasoning seemed to please the princess for some reason. Lylia grinned widely at him. “Exactly!”
    Beyond the grotto, there were lily pools and a hedge maze. They strolled on, he and Lylia falling behind the others, frightening hidden frogs into the water with a soft plop, plop .
    “Does the windmill pump all the water for everything, or just the gardens?”
    “There are several water supplies. Specially lined cisterns collect the rainwater; plus there are several wells. If you look up there, on the roof, there are tanks that the windmill fills. In the family wing, there are indoor privies with running water. Mothers had them installed when I was little.”
    “My aunts needed to build a new wing to their home, so they designed their house to have a indoor privy,” Jerin said. “It’s very clever.”
    “It’s just a tank of water high over a piss pot with a hole in it,” Lylia said, grinning as if she enjoyed the innocent rudeness of the conversation.
    “It’s that the tank fills itself to exactly full and stops that I think is amazing. A human would know that the tank is empty and could fill it and then stop when it was full. It’s like they made it intelligent, yet inside the tank are only little pieces of metal and cork.”
    She covered her mouth on a laugh. “Oh, please, you’ll make me nervous to sit with my pants around my ankles with these ‘intelligent’ tanks of water above my head.”
    He laughed. Lylia surprised him by taking his hands in hers and looking up at him.
    “Kiss me,” she demanded.
    “What?” Jerin blinked in amazement.
    “Kiss me.”
    Jerin glanced around to see if anyone was about to observe them. Where had his sisters and Cullen gone? “Would it be proper?”
    Lylia seemed to consider for a moment, or maybe it was just