Wen Spencer - A Brothers price

There were a few advantages to being a boy in a society dominated by women. One. Jerin Whistler thought, was that you could throttle your older sister, and everyone would say, “She was one of twenty-eight girls-a middle sister-and a troublemaker too, and he-he’s a boy,” and that would be the end of it.

Certainly if a sister deserved to be strangled, it was Corelle. She was idly flipping through a magazine showing the latest in men’s fashions while he tried to stuff a thirty-pound goose, comfort a youngest sister with a boo-boo knee, and feed their baby brother. Since their mothers and elder sisters had left the middle sisters in charge of the farm, Corelle strutted about, with her six-guns tied low and the brim of her Stetson pulled down so far it was amazing she could see. Worse, she started to criticize everything he did, with an eye toward his coming of age-when he would be sold into a marriage of his sisters’ choosing.

She had previously complained that he chapped his hands in hot wash water, that trying to read at night would give him a squint, and that he should add scents to his bathwater. This morning it was his clothes.

“Men’s fashion magazines are a joke,” Jerin growled, trying to keep the goose from scooting across the table as he shoved sage dressing into its cavity. If he hadn’t spent years diapering his seventeen youngest sisters and three little brothers, the goose might have gotten away from him. The massive, fat-covered goose, however, was nothing compared with a determined Whistler baby. “No one but family ever sees their menfolk! How do these editors know what men are wearing?”

“Things are different with nobility,” Corelle countered, and held out the magazine. “It’s the whole point to a Season: to be seen! Here. This is the pair I want you to make for yourself.”

Instead of good honest broadcloth trousers, the fashion plate showed kid-glove-tight pants with a groin-hugging patch of bright colored fabric. Labeled underneath was Return of the codpiece: it allows the future wives to see what they are buying.

Jerin wrestled the goose into their largest roasting pan. “Don’t even think it, Corelle. I won’t wear them.”

“I’d like seeing you say that to Eldest.”

“Eldest knows better than to waste money on clothes no one will see.” Jerin worked the kitchen pump to wash the goose fat from his hands. Much as he hated to admit it, Corelle’s aim was dead-on-he wouldn’t be able to face Eldest and say no. Two could play that game, though. “Eldest is going to be pissed that you went to town and got that magazine. She told you to stay at the farm, close to the house.”

“I didn’t go to town, so there.” Corelle, nonetheless, closed the magazine up, realizing it was evidence of a crime.

So where did she get it? Jerin swung the crying little girl holding on to his knees up onto the counter beside the goose. It was Pansy, when he had thought it was Violet all this time. “Hey, hey, big girls don’t cry. Let me see the boo-boo. Corelle, at least feed Kai.”

Corelle eyed the sloppy baby playing in his oatmeal. “Why don’t you call Doric? It’s boys’ work. He should be learning all this from you before you get married. Your birthday is only a few months away-and then you’ll be gone.”

Luckily Pansy was crying too hard to notice that comment.

“Doric is churning butter and can’t stop,” Jerin lied. “If you want to spell him, I’m sure he’d rather be feeding Kai instead.”

Corelle shot him a dirty look but picked up the spoon and redirected some of the oatmeal into Kai’s mouth. “All I’m saying is that the-that certain families are making noises that they want to come courting and see you decked out in something other than a walking robe and hat. Hell, you might as well be stuffed in a gunny-sack when you’re out in public-at least as far as a woman knowing if you’re worth looking at or not.”

“That’s the point, Corelle.” Jerin had gotten the mud and crusted blood off of Pansy’s knee and discovered a nasty cut. He washed it well with hot water and soap, put three small stitches in to hold the flesh together, and then, knowing his little sisters, bandaged it 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!”