Lord Pyrte Fitral settled into his plush, wing-backed chair and gazed into the fire. Once in a while, a gust of wind would tear over the chimney and make it howl, but thankfully the flue just before the opening into the fireplace proper prevented the weather from disturbing the flames. The light they gave off seemed to bathe the man in luxury; they enhanced the rich red-brown of the mahogany furniture, and the wine-red tapestries on the wall. It made the brandy in Pyrte’s glass seem to glow.

At this point, supper had been over for a good while. The sounds of servants scuttling, dishes clanking in the kitchen and folks coming and going down the halls had died roughly a candlemark ago, and Pyrte and his fellows – a few lords from other local holdings that had been caught indoors by the foul weather – could now enjoy the sounds of a crackling fire and their own voices in privacy. One of them, a young upstart who was meant to take his father’s place as Lord, was currently pacing the room like a caged animal. Pyrte had thus far managed to ignore the youth, and thanks be to the gods that the floors here were covered in so many plush rugs, else the constant tread of the man’s booted feet would have irked Lord Fitral’s temper. As it was, he cast a lazy glance toward the lad and frowned. “Why do you pace so, boy?” he demanded gruffly, breaking the silence that had settled over the room.

The boy came to a stop. He fiddled with the glass in his hands, still as full as it had been when a serving man had poured it for him. “This weather, Milord,” he replied, after an uneasy glance out of the nearest window. The thick, bubbly glass didn’t give him much of a view of the outdoors, but it did nothing to stop the flashes of lightning that brightened the sky at intervals. “It’s uncanny. I’ve prickles up the back of my neck.”

“Ah, come off it, lad,” an older gentleman – the youth’s father – said from his place in a beaten leather chair. Here and there, stuffing poked out of the upholstery, visible even beneath the gentleman’s wide body. He turned toward Pyrte apologetically. “The boy’s superstitious as they come,” he explained. “His mother’s doing, I’ll wager. She still follows some of the old ways. Got him thinkin’ there’s evil ‘round every corner.”

Around them, the others chuckled, sympathizing with old Lord Garnir even as they remembered their own women-folk at home. Garnir’s son, Hiram, stopped pacing, obviously bristling over his father’s comments. “Now, see here, you old goat,” he jabbed an accusing finger in his father’s direction, “You name me ONE time you’ve ever seen a storm this bad last as long as it has, and I’ll eat my hat!” Silence followed his comment, and as one, the men in the room turned toward the room’s only window. Suddenly Hiram’s uneasiness didn’t seem so far-fetched.

The door burst open.

“Da!” There was a little girl standing in it, dressed in nothing more than her night gown. She had stopped dead a few paces inside the door, as though she’d intended upon running straight for her father, but thought better of it when she’d spotted the others in the room. She looked around at the others, then cast her eyes down at her feet and waited.

The others, as surprised by the intrusion as Pyrte, turned their heads toward their Host and waited to see his reaction. One or two of them had their eyebrows raised nearly to their hairlines, and Hiram was caught between laughing at the child or at the expressions of the gentleman in the room. Of them all, Pyrte was the only one who seemed at all irritated with the child. His face was pulled into a frown, the brandy glass hung almost forgotten in his hand; the muscles of his jaw worked tensely. For a few, brief moments, the tension in the air was tight as a harp string. The other Lords watched Pyrte with apprehension, for they – perhaps better than any other of Fitral’s peers – knew of their friend’s explosive temper.

With some effort, Pyrte schooled his face into a mask of patient exasperation. His fellows breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“Kayatice,” he said, with feigned kindness coloring his words, “What brings you here - and at such a late hour, no less?” He placed the brandy glass on a small table next to his chair, and got to his feet.

Kayatice clearly recognized the underlying current in the tone of her father’s voice, for she seemed to shrink in stature, though she neither moved from her spot near the door, nor ceased looking at her feet. She fidgeted long enough to form a response in her head, seemed to think better of it, and then raised her eyes defiantly to meet her father’s.

“You TOLD me to come and tell you when those riders got here,” she reminded him forcefully. “I came in here to tell you…. But I forgot to knock on the door.” That last came out as a mere squeak, and the child looked at her feet again. “I’m gonna go to bed now!” She was gone before her father could think of anything else to say to her.

Pyrte throttled down his irritation, turned his most professional smile upon his fellows, and excused himself from the room.

He smelled the stables long before he reached them. As was custom long ago, manors and Keeps like this one were built with the stables butted right up against them. When all that separated a wing of the Keep from the stables was a thin wall and a door, a man wasn’t forced to head out into unpleasant weather just to greet guests or look after his horses. Of course, it meant that the wing closest to the stables became servants’ quarters and other utility rooms, but Pyrte had weighed the pros and cons of this and found that the cons were far outweighed.

As he walked, it occurred to him that he had next to no idea what to expect on the other side of the door. All he had received from the family he’d been in communication with these past few months had been basic descriptions of age, height… None of which would make any real comparison to actually seeing the boy for himself. He liked to imagine he’d be coming face to face with a boy who had seen his fair share of work, one who knew his place around men of rank.

What he found when he opened the door, however, severely disappointed him. Pyrte disciplined his face into a mask of pleasantness. “You must be the Shonar boys,” he greeted what appeared to be a pair of drowned rats masquerading as young men. The larger of the two got to his feet and thrust out his hand. “Brendan and Magnus of the Shonar holding, Sir.” Pyrte clasped the boy by the forearm and gave it a mighty squeeze, and his estimation of THIS one, at least, rose a few notches when the boy returned a firm grip himself.

“You boys braved quite a storm,” he enthused, taking stock of the situation. The smaller boy – which he assumed was the one he was supposed to be taking in – belatedly rose to his feet when he realized that he had been presented to the Keep’s master. Draped as he was in the simple clothing they’d been given, he seemed pitifully scrawny. “I trust my servants saw to your wellbeing?”

Brendan nodded vigorously. “We’re dry, clean, and we’ve something warm in our bellies. I apologize for arriving at such an hour. The storm soaked through what shelter we could find, and our sup—“

“No, no. Think nothing of it. I’d hate to be out in that gods-be-damned storm, myself.” In this, at least, Pyrte was being honest. “Please, let me escort you to a room. We can talk more after you’ve had a meal and a night of sleep to refresh yourselves.”

It was a room in servants’ quarters, housing nothing more than a pair of cots with a trunk at the foot of each, and one small window on the far wall. No doubt, Pyrte thought, it’ll have been one of the nicest rooms they’ve ever slept in. He stood outside the doorway while he ushered them into it – mostly because if they had all three tried to cram into the room, there wouldn’t be enough space to turn around in. “I hope you don’t mind the lodgings,” he drawled, “But I was not expecting you for at least another day.” And with another of his condescending grins, he closed the door on them and left.

“Why didn’t you tell him that these clothes are itchy!” Magnus wanted to know, plopping unhappily onto the cot he had chosen for himself – not that there was any real difference between the two in the room. They were both hardly more than linen bags stuffed with straw and lavender, resting atop planks that had been fastened to the walls. Brendan seemed blithely unaware of this fact, and nestled himself into the mattress, pulling the blanket up around his shoulders. Magnus looked around himself dubiously. “And this bed feels like—“

“The first soft, dry thing you’ve had the opportunity to sleep on since we left?” Brendan interjected, watching his cousin pout over their sleeping arrangements. “We could be out there in the rain, still, and frankly I’d rather sleep in the stall with Ginny than out in the mud another night.”

“Well, yeah, but your mum at least has feather mattresses, and—“

“My mum lives on a farm with a million chickens. Of COURSE she has feather mattresses! Now if you keep spouting whines from that mouth of yours, I’m going to have to find the cook and ask her for some cheese and a pair of wine glasses. Go to sleep.” He didn’t dare voice his thoughts to the little boy who was going to be staying here at the keep for a good portion of his childhood, if not clear into adulthood. It would not do to make the lad feel uneasy about his stay, and anyroad, Brendan figured that he was certainly NOT in any condition to make a clear judgement about Lord Fitral. Sure, the room they were given was in the servants’ quarters. Sure, their beds were straw and lavender – but it was dry, it was warm, and if Lord Fitral hadn’t provided them with clothing out of his own closet, well, at least he’d given them more than the potato sacks they’d dried off with to clothe themselves. And before Brendan could think much more about what their welcome meant, he was fast asleep.

Brendan awoke when an errant beam of sunlight shone directly through the only window in the room and struck him right in the eye. After several sleepy attempts to swat the offending sunlight away from his eye, realization seeped into the lad’s foggy brain and made his eyes jump open. Sun! Though he half expected to glance out the window and find a clear blue sky, he discovered – when he finally managed to roust himself from bed and actually take a look – that dark and heavy rainclouds still scudded across the sky. Here and there the sun actually broke through, and this was what had reached Brendan through the glass. It wasn’t ideal weather, but at least that accursed rain was gone! He lobbed his pillow at Magnus’ head.

“Wake up, you! There’s SUN out there today!”