A Brother's Price

heavily to keep the dirt out. He ordered firmly, “Now, don’t take it off,” and unlatched the lower half of the back door to scoot Pansy outside.
    In the protected play yard between the house and the barns, the other sixteen youngest sisters were playing reconnaissance. Apparently Leia was General Wellsbury; she was shouting, “Great Hera’s teat, you Whistlers call this an intelligence report?” According to their grandmothers, this was the phrase uttered most often by the famous general after their spying missions. Accurate, it might be—but too foul to be repeated in front of the three- through ten-year-olds.
    Jerin shouted, “Watch your mouth, Wellsbury!” and went back to the goose. At least the goose had nothing annoying to say.
    The same, unfortunately, could not be said of Corelle. “You need some nice clothes so we can show you off and make a good match. People are saying you’re not as fetching as rumored.”
    As if anyone cares what I look like, as long as I’m fertile . Jerin made a rude noise and seasoned the goose’s skin. “Who said that?”
    “People.”
    Then it all clicked together. The criticism, the magazine, the clothes, and a certain family annoyed that the Whistlers were landed gentry—despite their common line soldiers’ roots—making them a step above their neighbors. “You’re talking about the Brindles!”
    “Am not!” she snapped, and then frowned, realizing that she had tipped her hand. “Besides, they have a right to see what they’re getting before the papers are signed. None of them has ever laid eyes on you outside of a fair or a barn raising—which is hardly seeing you at all.”
    “You better not be thinking of bringing them here while Eldest is gone. She’ll have your hide tacked to the barn! She doesn’t want them past the east boundary fence unless the whole family is here.”
    “Nay neighborly of ‘er,” Corelle retorted with such an up-country drawl that it could have been straight out of a Brindle mouth.
    “ Not neighborly of her .” Jerin heaved the goose up into the oven and slammed shut the oven door. “You sound like a river rat, half drunk on moonshine.”
    “What does it matter, how we talk?” Corelle deemed herself finished with Kai, now that his bowl was empty. She drifted away from the high chair, leaving the mess for Jerin to clean up. “The Brindles think we’re putting on airs, paying so much attention to speaking correct Queens’ diction. All we’re doing is annoying our neighbors.”
    Jerin worked the kitchen pump to wet a towel to wash up Kai. “Who cares if we annoy the Brindles? None of our other neighbors are bothered by how we talk. And you know why we speak this way, even if the Brindles don’t. Our grandmothers paid with their lives to buy us a better lot in life—for their sake, we don’t give up an inch of what they won us.”
    Corelle made a great show of rolling her eyes. “No one is going to marry you for your diction . They’re going to marry you for your die—”
    Jerin twirled the damp towel into a rattail and snapped it like a whip, catching her on the exposed skin of her wrist.
    She yelped, more out of surprise than pain. Anger flashed across her face, and she started toward him, hands closing into fists.
    He backed away from her, twirling up the towel again, heart pounding. When they were little, only Corelle would risk Eldest’s wrath to hit him. and now their older sisters were far from home. There was the sudden, tiny, fearful knowledge that Corelle was wearing her pistols. “Don’t make me get the spoon!”
    She checked and they glared at one another across the cocked and ready towel.
    “You be civil, Corelle,” he finally managed. “You have no need or place to talk low to me. Eldest will decide what I wear, whom I see, and whom I marry, so there’s no call for you to be fussing at me over it.”
    Corelle pursed her lips together as if to keep in bitter words, her blue eyes cold as winter sky.
    In the high chair behind Corelle. Kai started indignant squawking.
    “Take care of the baby,” Corelle snapped, to give herself the last words of the fight, and stalked out of the kitchen.
     
    Jerin had just put Kai down to sleep when he heard the first rifle shot. He froze beside the cradle, listening to the sharp crack echoing up the hollow.
    Maybe it was just thunder , he rationalized, because he didn’t want it to be gunfire. He replayed the sound in his mind. No, the sound definitely