Hern looked down at his book. "If I did, I wouldn’t tell." He licked his finger and turned a page.
"The demons take you and that wretched son of mine!" Gerren hissed and snatched up his own book, angrily turning to the place he had lost along with his patience.
Silence weighed heavily on the room even as thunder and lightning wrecked havoc outside the mullion windows. Blue-white flashes of light cast the frescoes on the ceiling into sharp relief and made the shadows of furniture and inhabitants swell along the whitewashed walls. Logs cracked in the fire, an occasional snap of pine knot exploding in cadence with the boom of thunder.
"Is he still seeing the girl at Ivor?" the King asked, his spectacles perched precariously on the tip of his nose as his head lowered and raised while he scanned the page.
"What girl might that be, Highness?" Hern inquired, marking his place with a wide thumb and giving his companion a steady look.
Gerren looked over the tops of his spectacles. "You do not have the monopoly on knowing things, my good friend." He smiled and returned to his book. "I, too, have spies at Ivor Keep."
"Isn’t that nice?" Hern quipped and continued with his book.
* * *
They were riding for their lives.
A cloud of sun-streaked dust followed close behind them as they made their way into a copse of trees, ducking under low-hanging branches and around thick live oak trunks, winding through the forest and beyond to the slithering stream that flowed behind the old stone abbey at Rommitrich Point. Water splashed up as the flying hooves sped over the cobblestones in the riverbed and dug into the soft silt at the water’s edge as they crossed on into the old lands that was the abbey’s gardens.
Skirting the weed-grown formal gardens, they cut to a switchback trail and found the meandering stream again, urging their mounts into the water and deeper into a tributary leading off from the main stream. With their horses following the curves of the shallow rock-strewn riverbed, they managed to elude the angry mob of merchants who had caught them stealing goods from a street bizarre in Dulwitch.
Laughing and teasing one another, the group of thieves stopped at the ruined abbey and dismounted, hiding their horses deep inside the tumbled-down nave of the caved-in sanctuary. Keeping their mounts quiet with a hand to the heaving nostrils of the steeds, they listened intently as their pursuers galloped past, close enough to hear the straining horses as they snorted. No one breathed easy until no sound came from the roadway.
"Damn! That was close!"
"Too close for my liking!"
"And mine!"
"No more wagers. We damned near got caught this time!"
They gathered together the spoils of their raid that had nearly cost one of them his left hand and went to sit by the still-intact fountain in the middle of the old nave. Cold, fresh water flowed from an artesian well and fed the fountain with sweet, clear, icy water.
"Where’s the wine, du Mer?" Conar dug into his saddlebag for the great hoop of cheese he had pilfered, holding it up to Liza.
"Well done, Milord!" She laughed.
"Have no fear, my sweet Prince." Teal smiled as he pulled five bottles of red wine from his own saddlebag. "Not a one broken, thank you just the same." He turned to look at Rayle, who was contemplating his left hand. "By the gods, Loure, that baker near lopped off your widget when you grabbed for that last loaf! I thought you were going to be nicknamed lefty for sure!" He bit the cork from a bottle and passed it to Rayle.
Rayle looked away from the ugly bruise on his wrist that was turning a most interesting shade of purple. "I thought so, too, du Mer. Luckily he hit me with the handle and not the blade of that slicer!" He took the bottle from Teal and passed it on to Legion. "Hurts like the very devil, it does."
"You should have been quicker, Loure!" Legion laughed. He held up a whole baked ham still dripping with juice. "Ain’t she a beauty? Near to ten pounds, I would imagine!" He took the bottle and handed it to Conar.
"That’s two pounds a piece for us, then." Liza laughed, taking the bottle of wine from Conar. "Thank you, Milord."
"And where is your loot, Mam’selle?" Conar asked before he took a second bottle from Legion and pulled a mighty swig of the red brew, then wiped his lips on the back of his hand.
A secret smile spread over her features. Liza reached inside the voluminous folds of her cape. Soon apples, pears, pomegranates, oranges, apricots, bananas, figs, peaches, grapes, persimmons, tangerines, and even a small honeydew melon were stacked on the ground with the other booty. She beamed with pride as the men whistled. "I think I did well enough." She smirked at Legion’s wink.
"Not altogether too bad," Legion confirmed. He leaned toward her and grinned. "But you didn’t get those nectarines, did you? I saw that peddler giving you the eagle eye at his stall." Legion had dared her to swipe the rosy orbs from under the nose of the more than watchful old man, who had been eyeing them with high suspicion as they sauntered past the outdoor stalls.
"She may be good, but the lady ain’t that good." Teal laughed. "She tried twice and the old man caught her both times."
Reaching inside her bodice, Liza pulled two rose-blushed nectarines from her gown. "But he didn’t catch me the third time. ’Twas the charm, as they say." She handed the fruit to Legion. "I kept them warm for you, Milord Legion!"
A hardy laugh boomed out of Legion as he took the orbs and nuzzled their softness to his face. "Ah, my Sweeting! They have the smell of you on them still!"
"Enjoy it, brother," Conar snapped. " ’Tis the only smell and warmth of this lady you will ever know!"
A dark cloud moved over the ceilingless abbey, shutting out the light and turning the crisp autumn day colder. A sudden wind howled through the ruins like the moans of a dead man and the revelers shivered with the chill.
Liza looked to Legion’s smiling face and felt a chill deeper than the one that had shut out the light. She shuddered.
"Cold, my love?" Conar asked and took off his cape to throw around her shoulders.
She turned to smile at him, but her face felt frozen with the cold. His dear face was beaming with his love for her and yet she felt as though he was far, far away. In her mind’s eye, she saw him hot and sweating, alone and lonely in a vast expanse of sand and stone. She looked over at Legion, but when his gaze met hers, she thought she could see the same gleam of possessiveness well up in his eyes as was in Conar’s.
"Liza?" Conar questioned, drawing her attention. "Are you all right?"
"Aye," she whispered, forcing a smile. "I am fine, my sweet Milord." She sat on the rim of the fountain.
Teal sat behind her, drawing up his knees and turning his back to Liza and Conar, who had stretched out on the other side.
Conar placed his head in Liza’s lap.
"Why aren’t you drinking, Loure?" Teal asked Rayle.
"I don’t feel well," he said, cramming his big mouth full of ham. Grease dripped down his chin.
Liza chortled. "I can’t imagine why."
Conar looked up. "Feed me, wench," he demanded in his most regal tone, turning his head to wink at Legion, who was still standing near the fountain.
"Listen to the pompous ass!" Legion smirked.
Liza held out her hand as Legion placed a bunch of grapes in her palm. As her lover gazed up at her with rapt attention, she plucked off the deep-purple grapes and popped them into his waiting mouth much as a mother bird would her fledgling. When the grapes were gone, she accepted a handful of figs from a snorting Legion and peeled the fruit. Her fingers oozed milky-white fluid down the palms.
Raising his hand, Conar pulled one of Liza’s hands to his mouth and licked away the milk trickling between her first and second fingers. A fierce gleam of passion entered his face as his tongue traced the curve of her thumb and then sucked the digit deep into his mouth.
Teal peeked over his shoulder at them and made an ugly hiss. "Oh, would you look at this?"
Rayle glanced up and then back to his bread-slicing.
"I’d rather not spoil my appetite, thank you."
With a bland look on his handsome face, Legion looked from his own food and made a disgusted sound. "Conar, have you no sense of honor, at all? If you are going to mentally love the lady in front of us, please do so less conspicuously." He ran a hand over the thick beard he had grown over the summer. "We aren’t made of stone, you know."
Conar turned his head in Liza’s lap and, with a cocky grin, he wagged his brows at his brother, opening his mouth for another fig. His tongue flicked out to lick Liza’s hand and he laughed as Legion scowled.
"Well, that answered my question. You have no honor." Legion speared a slice of ham and poked it toward Teal.
"He’s really shameless," Teal snorted. "The way he carries on is a disgrace to us all. It’s quite immoral, you know. You’d think they were old married folk."
As soon as he said it, du Mer regretted his words. Everyone looked at him and he blushed a deep coral beneath his olive complexion. "I’m sorry," he said, unable to look Conar’s way. "I am truly sorry I said that."
"Don’t worry about it," Conar told him quietly. Hoisting himself up, he pulled Lisa to her feet beside him. Squeezing her hand, he took her with him into the shadows beyond the fountain.
"Legion? Shall we kill the little bastard now, or simply spear him?" Rayle snapped, throwing Teal a damning look.
"I said I was sorry!" du Mer defended. "It just slipped out."
Legion glared at him. "You never think before you open that big mouth, do you, du Mer!"
"I said I was sorry!" Teal snapped. "Stop belaboring the point, A’Lex!"
Legion snorted. He turned to Rayle. "Be sure you tally up what we’ve stolen so those people can be paid back."
"I always do," Rayle said quietly.
"If he didn’t need the distraction, I would put a stop to these pranks," Legion stated. "Prince or no prince, it is an unseemly thing to steal from your people."
"At least Coni’s enjoying himself," Teal mumbled. "These raids keep his mind off the Joining."
"Most of the merchants know by now who’s doing the thieving," Rayle commented. "They aren’t stupid."
"Most know one of us is a woman, too," Teal added.
"I should have stopped it," Legion sighed. "I could have. I should never have allowed it to go on for this long! I dread the day he’ll be hurt by this, and hurt, he will be."
Teal stood, walked to his old friend, and draped an arm around Legion’s slumped shoulder. "You have to let him make his own mistakes. He, alone, in the end, will have to be the one to pay for them. If he is to keep Liza, then he will; if he is destined to give her up, she will be taken from him." Teal squeezed Legion’s shoulder. "You can’t keep him from growing up, and you can’t keep him from being hurt."
Rayle was gawking at Teal. His big mouth was crammed with bread and cheese, his hand raised with another slice of honeydew, ham juice running down his chin. "Since when have you commanded such wisdom, du Mer?" he mumbled around the gob of food.
"What wisdom?" Teal shrugged. "I merely repeated what my father said to me when my brother was sent away." His brown eyes went deep with remembered pain.
"Has there been any word of Roget?" Legion asked, knowing how Roget’s leaving had hurt Teal.
Teal shook his head. "Not since our father died. I guess the Tribunal doesn’t feel I need to know."
"What you don’t know can’t hurt Roget," Rayle murmured, his appetite finally gone. He laid down his food. Roget du Mer had been his best friend.
"He made dangerous mistakes," Legion said. "You don’t go up against the Tribunal and win. Roget should have known that." He glanced at Teal’s set and cold face.
"He was an honorable man. He did what he had to do!" Teal countered.
"Easy, Tealson," Rayle admonished. "Legion was only making a comment."
"He did what he had to do and he is paying for his mistake," Teal repeated. He looked at Legion. "Just as Conar will no doubt do."
"And what if he doesn’t learn from his mistakes, Teal?" Legion snarled. "What if he refuses to stay with The Toad once the marriage is done? What if he tries to flaunt Liza in front of the Oceanian Empire, as is his intention? You know he will, if Liza doesn’t make good on her promise to leave him. The way things stand between them now, I’m not sure she will be able to go. He is her very soul! She is his heart! What if Papa has to keep him in chains to keep him with that amphibious bitch? What kind of lesson will that be for Conar?"
"A hard one," Rayle assured them. "A very hard one, indeed."
Chapter 19
* * *
Conar leaned back against a gnarled tree trunk, his right leg stretched out in front of him, his left wrist resting on a bent left knee. A smile flickered across his handsome face as he gazed at the trio who sat playing cards by the wavering firelight. He had been thinking of the past, of the time at the beginning of his and Liza’s relationship, and the world was mellow with him this chill fall night. A snort of laughter reached his ear and he tuned in to what was being said.
Teal du Mer was losing heavily to Liza. He was flashing a white-toothed challenge as he handed over his gold to her. The firelight turned his dark complexion to a warm caramel. "I fear you have won all my money, Liza-love," he said on a long, heavy sigh.
Legion, however, had face. "I know gods-be-damned well you are letting that guttersnipe win, du Mer!" He hissed at Teal’s innocent look. "One of these days, I will find out how you do it!" he snapped, throwing down his cards and gathering up what was left of his own meager supply of gold coins to turn over to Liza.
"You sorely wound me, A’Lex!" Teal sniffed in his best petulant manner. "I do not have to cheat in order to lose. I fear it comes most naturally to me." Sighing again for emphasis, he stretched out on the ground, resting on his elbows and staring at the clear, crisp sky with its heavy dotting of brilliant stars. "I can see the Bear, Conar."
Legion folded his arms over his chest. "Well, I wish the beast would clamber down from the sky and gobble you up, du Mer! You are as innocent as your gods-be-damned gypsy blood!"
"Have a care, my friends," Conar called to them, "the girl will rob you blind, if you let her."
"I see you sulking over there, Milord," Liza told him, stacking her winnings in a neat column. "You’re just in a fine pique because I won all your money first."
"I’m not sulking, little one." He yawned, stretching his arms behind his head, craning his neck to look into the tree above him where an owl hooted. "I just see no point in losing to you to keep you in a good mood." He lowered his head and looked across to her. "I can get you in a good mood by other, more challenging, means." He smiled widely at her as she puckered her lips and made a face at him.
"I do believe you have lost all control of her, Conar." Legion laughed. "See how the strumpet makes faces and mocks the royal heir? How she disrespects your royal person? ’Tis treason, you know."
" ’Tis sacrilege," Teal chimed in, dodging a card Liza flipped at him.
" ’Tis just her way of saying she loves him and is putting his royal ass in its place," Rayle added as he turned over in his blankets and propped his big head on an open palm.
"Aye, and ’tis grounds for having her smart rear smacked." Conar grinned.
"That is the royal punishment for making jest of your sovereign lord?" Teal asked in mock horror. "How positively dreadful a punishment, Your Grace."
"Try doling out such a punishment, Milord, and see what happens to your royal person!" Liza cooed to her lover.
"Oh, ho!" Rayle exclaimed. "She’s flung down the gauntlet, good knight." He sat up and draped his blanket over his shoulders, huddling into its scratchy warmth. "I fear thee shall have to chastise thy most disobedient subject, Highness."
"Say it is not true, Your Grace," Teal muttered with a falsetto voice. "Say you have not lost all authority over this shrew."
Conar slapped his hand to his heart and looked mortally wounded. "I fear the bawd has sorely hurt my self-es
teem. I have no control over this unruly subject and I fear I never shall." He winked at Liza. "What say you, disobedient subject, will you ever be broken to saddle?"
Liza tossed her long black hair over her shoulder and smiled. "Now that depends on who tries to do the saddling, Milord Conar!" she answered saucily.
Conar lost his smile. His face took on the granite look of a frown. He didn’t like it when she made such remarks, innocent though they might be. He had to admit to himself what his friends already knew. Liza had become the closest thing to an addiction Conar had ever known. He was insanely jealous.
She effected him as no other woman had ever been able to before. When other men looked at her, he felt pride and intense possessiveness. When she looked at other men, as women are likely to do, no matter how innocent the look, he felt something evil stir in his very soul. Looking at her in the firelight, he realized with a jolt of understanding that their lives were now so interlocked, so finely attuned to one another, he would be hard-pressed to live without her.
"Quit frowning so, little brother!" Legion warned, not liking the look on Conar’s face. "No man rides this lady but you."
Under normal circumstances, Legion would not have made such a vulgar remark to his brother, for he knew well how Conar felt concerning such jests within earshot of his precious Liza. But of late, the chill fall days and the silence from Oceania was wearing thin on everyone’s nerves.
Conar glared at Legion. "If you can not speak in a way fitting for the lady’s ear, you had best keep you mouth closed, A’Lex."
Legion returned the hard look, but wisely kept his remarks to himself. He looked at Liza and she smiled at him. "I tender my apology, lady," he said softly.
"None needed, Milord." She got up from her spread blanket before the fire and dusted off her velvet breeches.
Seeing Liza start to walk away, Conar looked up at her. "Where are you going?"
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