At least this time her eyes didn’t fill up with tears, and she didn’t look like she pitied him either. Sara snorted at him instead, sounding an awful lot like Rolph at his most derisive.
“Just… stop that right now Tor. I’m getting sick of your stupid “no women will have me” line. Yeah, you’ve had some hard knocks, but it’s still bullshit and you have to know it by now! My mom seriously tried setting up a marriage for you and I, you know. Because I asked her to. This was even before you were Countier Lairdgren of muckity-whatever or even “The Tor”. Just my friend. Do you think that Ursala wouldn’t have married you when you asked, if they’d all known it would have been within the three steps? Hell Tor, she’d marry you now I think. I know that Rolph was worried about leaving us alone with you when he left, because you might steal both of us away.”
Now it was his turn to snort.
While it was kind of her to say, it wasn’t true, he knew. Rolph, for one thing, didn’t worry about having girls stolen away from him and didn’t have too. He was, well… him. Even if his friend hadn’t been the Prince of the realm and all that nonsense, all the girls would still like him. Everyone did. Besides… Trice and Maria had both said that Tor wasn’t good enough.
Trying to hold his voice to wry, he mentioned that.
“So? Trice would do anything she had to in order to protect her friends and family, anything, if that means losing you, you know that she’d do it. You two are just alike that way. Granted, she should have told you first. I get that now, but back then, after the thing with Maria, I doubt she thought you could handle it. It was stupid of her to think that way, true. I mean, we both saw how you went in to that middens after that boy, and she’d seen you fight a man three times your size, who was in a full combat rage, to save a woman you didn’t even know. There’s probably not a lot that you can’t handle if you know to prepare for it, but in her own way she was probably trying to protect you….” Sara, brushed her hair back, a habit developed from a life time of actually having some. Right now her hair didn’t even hang down into her eyes. It was a sensible cut for her current line of delivery person at least. It looked cute enough. Rolph hadn’t complained at least.
“But… Tor, that’s beside the point. The fact is, you shouldn’t listen to them. Even if you don’t want me or… Ursala… or even want to play with your new little friend Sorlee, not one but two members of the royal family have shown extreme amounts of interest in you. Enough to get people to talk. Right now you’re really bordering on being cruel yourself with a bunch of people you know.”
From the back of the transport a voice holding a low chuckle chimed in.
“Darn straight! If you don’t want to do us all, well, that’s… Actually kind of silly. All of us are wonderful in our own ways, even Sorlee is more than worth having sex with I bet, I’d give her a shot if she offered… But it’s your decision; still you need to at least make sure you aren’t being unkind. At least learn to play back a bit even if you don’t want to engage. You did manage to kiss Varley well enough, but really, how do you think the rest of us feel, you doing that and ignoring all the signals we’re sending out?”
“Um, signals?”
They were sending him signals? How? Smoke? A tapped military thing? Some secret code no one had ever taught him? He wondered for a second if this was all some kind of game they were playing with him right now. Luckily at about that time the transport landed, a much faster thing this time, since they were expected and all that, plus no Royal Guards were hanging around waiting to take the transport out of the air if it moved too fast. Not that he knew of at least.
It was, at least nominally, his house. True Rolph owned the property, but he was kind of renting it, in exchange for his work with the military, wasn’t he? So you’d think that any arrangements like that would be run passed him.
He laughed at himself when he finished the thought.
Right, even if everyone agreed with him, when would they have done that? It wasn’t fair to require people to ask for his permission to do things if he wasn’t going to really be able to talk to them for days or weeks at a time. No one seemed to really, agree with him, all of them still calling it a military base, worse “Tor Base” a name which made him shudder a little when he heard it. Maybe if he made a sign and hung it out front? What could he call it though? “Tor’s house” was just as bad as Tor base. Nearly at least.
Rich people named their houses sometimes, didn’t they? It was in the stories at least.
Maybe the compound needed a name. What could he call it though? There wasn’t anything around that really stood out, just a bunch of empty lands. He’d have to think about it. Tor asked Sara and Ursala if they could come up with something better than “Tor Base” before he crawled into his bed and tapped the light plate stuck to the wall over the head of his bed. The plate, just copper with acid etching of course, making a green design in the middle, sat recessed into the wall. Someone had carved that out while he’d sat right there working?
Amazing. He’d never even noticed at all. They would have had to sit on his head or something while they worked practically. For a few seconds he envisioned exactly that happening, some military guy sitting on him while working with a hammer and chisel, but it was more likely that they’d just moved him out of the way first, then used a specialized cutter for the job, taking only a few minutes. When he worked he was pretty much gone, Tor knew, so it wouldn’t have been hard.
When he got up the whole place had gone dark, so pulling shoes on carefully, his light plate set to its lowest level, Tor made his way out carefully. He could hear heavy breathing coming from behind the other screens as he moved. He didn’t know what time it was really, but it felt like time for all good little bakers to be getting a start on the day at least. No one seemed to be out and about that he could tell, so he used the restroom and then went to the bath house. Inside the lights had been left on, which made sense. After all, there was no oil wasted, and the place didn’t have windows, so even during the day it would have been pitch black without them.
The tub gurgled full pretty fast. At this point in the system a pipe, one about four inches around emptied directly into the huge bath. It was so big that it had to have a bench all the way around the inside of it and really, as long as the people weren’t as vast as the biggest nobles, three or four people would be able to soak in one at once. He’d seen people sharing a few times, which Rolph had assured him were a normal bathhouse thing. You showered first, then shared a tub to warm up after. They hadn’t done that at home or at school, but they didn’t have tubs like this either.
Right now though, he didn’t have to share with anyone at all. The tub, big as it was, filled in less than a minute, a lot less. He selected a warm setting for the water, tapping the plate on the side, and after getting his clothing off he gingerly climbed the little ladder that let him get in. As easy as baking was, given his health at the moment he found himself more than a little sore from the previous day’s labors. Kolb would have beaten him back into shape most likely at this point. Since he wasn’t around he’d have to buckle down and do it himself, an idea he dreaded. For the moment though, a hot soak was better than nothing and he had a few minutes to just sit and enjoy the water before he needed to get to the kitchens.
Eyes closed he heard other people coming in, and the showers towards the back get turned on. That took guts he knew, because the showers didn’t have heaters yet. Even with the weather being decently warm, the water felt cold enough to make a body shiver. Really, he just needed to make a plate or two for it like for the tubs and the roof cistern could be warmed easily enough. It kind of surprising to him that no one had just stolen one of the heaters from a tub to do that with already. That… he could do it later in the day. It would only take about an hour after all, and people in a hurry shouldn’t have to freeze. Tor thought that he could get to it after lunch without anyone getting mad at him, if he was quick about it, even if he was supposed to be taking a break from hard work.