Everyone laughed, but Tor didn't see the joke. He wasn't kidding.
Rolph patted his back gently.
“Kind of a high bar, don't you think? Having to be better than Tor?”
“Not higher than they can jump. They're good. All they needed was a chance. Don't underestimate what a poor kid will do for a chance. They'll do it, because they have to. Their lives depend on it. Possibly in a literal sense. Their whole futures are riding on what they do now. It isn't a kindness, pushing them out of their childhoods like we have, like I've been doing, but they won't fail. Not easily at least.”
Of course if they did, it would destroy them, most likely. Tor didn't mention that, he was already a big enough monster in the eyes of his friends. Adding to it wouldn't make him seem any better.
Still, the kids had a chance. In the end it was all he could really give them. They had to do the rest or it wouldn’t count.
The place had no servants, so Dorgal was cooking a roast deer for dinner. One he’d caught himself. The place was fully stocked with food, but like anyone with money, Dorgal had limited culinary skills, and most of his involved cooking meat, which he'd learned on hunting trips as a child, he told them. Well, Tor could cook, and it would give him an excuse to not mope as much, or hide in his reading and work.
He already had about thirty new devices, most in need of testing still. Hundreds of copies just sitting in his trunk too. Luckily they weren’t very big and he didn’t need any clothing.
The rooms were elegant, if simple, and they could redecorate if they wanted. Ali surprised him by putting her things in the same room with him, then shutting the door behind them.
“I'm Sorry.” Her voice came from behind him, when he turned she was on the floor, bowing over her knees, forehead making solid contact.
“I shouldn't have pushed you in regards to Lilli. It's not your concern, it's mine and Karina's and we've been acting badly. Varley explained why you can't say anything, and I won't ask again. But please, forgive me? I-” She started crying.
“I- can't ask…”
Tor picked her up off the floor and kissed her, the tears having not touched her lips yet.
“You don't have to ask forgiveness from me. We're married and even if we weren't, there are no debts between friends. That means hurt feelings too, not just gold. I'm sorry I'm not a better person, a better husband. I kind of suck at life, don't I?”
He chuckled, and tried not to let it sound dark. It just managed, he hoped at least.
“I'll try to do better.”
The easy part about life with Ali was that she readily accepted sex as an apology and didn't require a lot of explanation from him. It was what they were doing when Karina walked in, shut the door and sighed, looking at them.
“Of course, trust Ali to let a little cock make it all better. Well, shove over then, I might as well get some too if the whole silent treatment and withholding sex thing isn't going to work. Didn't think it would on Tor, but had to try, didn't I?” She turned her clothes off and climbed on the bed, her soft lips kissing a trail down Tor’s back, when she got there she bit his buttocks gently.
“I'd do it harder, but it stings when a shield suddenly activates and your touching it, I really don't want to know what it would do to teeth.”
Tor was inside Ali already and hadn't stopped when she'd walked in, so she reached between his legs and fondled what she could reach of him gently. She tried to work her mouth into place, but the angles were all wrong for it. Tor didn't help her by shifting around until after Ali was well pleased, but then he rolled over to service the Princess too. No debts between friends, even if one of them had been kind of a jerk.
So, at that, as if something had been decided, everyone started acting like nothing had happened at all. The next day it snowed, which made everyone happy at first. The girls and Rolph ran out to look at it and play, even though Rolph had seen plenty at Lairdgren. The guards didn't, until the Prince declared a snow war, then suddenly large and complex battlement went up, the order of the day seemed to be the Royal Guards against royals. Tor cooked and made hot chocolate, which he could only do because of some canned milk and a recipe someone had kindly added to a package of brown cocoa powder from the south.
As expected the guards won that day’s event handily, outnumbering and frankly outmatching the royals, who came in soaked and steaming. They didn't get cold, but apparently the tradition was for chocolate. At home it had always been warm cider, but no one wanted that here. Their loss.
George came in a smile on his face.
“Well, the winner gets to pick the next victim, I mean “opponent” by tradition. So, I think that Tor and Dorgal here will serve well enough, don't you?” The other guards all agreed with happy and somewhat vicious sounding chuckles.
Wonderful, Tor thought, but what could they do? It was tradition. They'd start after breakfast the next day.
Yay.
Vacation.
Chapter Ten
The snow war never happened, since over night the drifts had risen, burying first the steps under piles of rounded white and then the bottom three feet of door itself. It wasn't a catastrophe, since the structure could be changed to keep the door high enough to come and go without too much trouble. People were a little uneasy at first, except for Tor, who'd figured out what to do while he was making sweet rolls for breakfast to go with the fried ham slices that Dorgal had planned. Instead everyone stayed in except to tend to the horses, which the guards did for them, not wanting anyone under their care to wonder out into the deep snow, just in case they got lost.
“Especially Tor.” Veren said with a straight face.
“Agreed.” Captain Wensa said, nodding seriously.
Then after a few seconds everyone laughed. Tor got it, he was short and could disappear under the snow. It was funny, in a kind of abusive and slightly annoying way. Three days later he had to help clear and build a tunnel to the barn though, because they really were afraid of losing people. It was just a simple variation of the houses, far more basic though. Heated, but it just made a tunnel that could be bent around as needed and set to any length. It was new, not one of the things he'd been building on the trip, still, he was so bored it had been a relief to have something else to do.
Rolph was spending more and more time with Dorgal, since they used to be friends it seemed, before Dorg had decided to simply hate Tor for some reason, about the time that Maria had been spreading rumors about him. It was probably related, but it just didn't seem important any more. Who cared right? The past was the past.
It wasn't until the night of the attack that Tor realized the two men weren't just chatting in Rolph's room.
The pounding on the door was unexpected, but very clearly a person, no voice came through the door, being a shield even the pounding was basically just a built in signally device, so the guard that sat in the main room opened it and let the two strangers in. One was of normal height, about six foot plus a bit, and wore very warm looking clothes. The other was more lightly dressed and looked like Tor. Enough so that the guard just assumed that he'd been outside. Natural enough idea really, who looked that much like someone you knew pretty well and saw daily?
Tor felt them in his sleep, having been working on the trip to isolate the whole immortal field pattern for a project. It called to him now, familiar and loud, if a noiseless field, a subtle thing at best, could ever be said to have a real presence. Waking with a start he ran to the stairs, stone steps that were neutral under his feet as far as temperature went. As he ran he switched warm and comfortable purple and red sleeping clothes into fighting leathers, something he'd been wearing a lot for practice lately, so he knew the pattern well. Time seemed to crawl as he darted down the stairs, the double of him raising a hand, an empty hand, as he moved.