A Brother's Price

creaked open; the chamber beyond was musty from disuse. “The dressing room doors give you time to get here and shut this door after you. There’s a lamp here with a box of matches.” She grimaced as the cobwebs on the lamp clung to her hand when she set the glass chimney aside. “Don’t waste time lighting them until you’ve got the door barred solid. There’s a light well here, so during the day you’ll see even with the door closed and locked.”
    He nodded, so solemn. Locks of hair were escaping his braid, spilling onto his face, and he brushed them back absently. Distracted by him, she dropped the matchbox after lighting the lamp.
    “Oops!” She bent down, lantern in hand, to scan the floor for the box. It sat on a pile of burned discards. She frowned at the blackened matchsticks, picked up the matchbox, and glanced into it. Five lone matches rattled about the box, while their spent sisters lay on the floor, covered with dust. The lamp, she noticed now, was almost empty too, the chimney black with soot, the wick badly trimmed.
    She, Halley, and Odelia had been shown the bolt-hole shortly before her father’s death. Eldest made them spend the day taking care of the secret route—a rite of passage, Eldest called it. Together, they secretly cleared the outside door, swept the floor clean, counted the crowns in the emergency purse, and replaced the unused matches and lamp with new. Trini would have been the next to do maintenance on the passage, but by the time she turned sixteen. Keifer was dead.
    There had been no attacks on the palace. No attempted kidnappings. The lamp should be clean and full. The matches unused.
    Keifer had used the bolt-hole.
    Cursing, barely aware of Jerin now, she hurried down the secret passageway. A straight shot back, down a tight flight of stairs, and through a series of sharp turns, she hit the end.
    The door was bolted, but dropping down with the lamp, she could read old evidence of a betrayal that went beyond words. Tracked in from a muddy garden, dusted now with six years of disuse, footprints of various sizes led in toward the sanctity of the husband quarters.
    “Oh. Gods, how could he have done this?” she moaned, sick, sick. She fumbled with the door, stumbled out. and threw up in the sweet, sharp profusion of roses. Jerin followed her out, held her head as she was sick.
    “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    “Keifer! Gods damn the crib bait slut! He was bringing women into our husbands’ quarters! Oh, gods, night after night, he turned us out, refusing us sexual services while he was whoring himself with someone else.”
    “Who?”
    “I don’t know.” She thought of all the spent match-sticks, far outnumbering the number normally found in a box of that size. “Perhaps half the guard by the count I can figure.”
    He nodded, then glanced about the garden. “We should go in, before we give away the door.”
    The door is given away , she almost snapped, but swallowed it. He was right. She followed him back inside and bolted the exit carefully shut. Jerin was silent the whole trip back. It wasn’t until they were in the dressing room that she realized he was holding something back from her.
    “What is it?”
    He refused to look at her. “Ren, you were with Keifer, weren’t you?”
    “Yes.” She was puzzled.
    “Odelia too?”
    “Yes.”
    He whispered so softly, she almost didn’t hear him. “Ren, you two should be checked, before the marriage, so if Keifer passed—if Keifer had—who knows if his lovers were clean? We should be sure. For the youn-gest’s sake, for Lylia’s sake, we should be sure.”
     
    “Ren! What’s wrong?” Queen Mother Elder asked as Ren stumbled into her room and collapsed into the chair before the fire.
    “Keifer betrayed us.” Ren gazed numbly at the fire. Had Keifer died instantly in the explosion, or had he been pinned and burned alive? “When he was refusing Eldest and others services, he was servicing strangers he brought in through the bolt-hole. Jerin—Jerin thinks it would be wise if Odelia and I were checked, since we can’t be sure we’re clean.”
    “Oh, dear gods in the heavens,” Mother Elder whispered.
    “Halley will have to be checked, if we ever run her to earth. And Trini—sweet Mothers—he could have infected her too.” She pressed a trembling hand to her eyes as she realized the true depth of the danger. “I don’t know about these diseases. Mother, how intimate you need to be to pass them.