Sir Hern Arbra, once the Master Trainer of the Elite Guard and Sergeant-at-Arms of the WindWarrior Society, Master-at-Arms of Norus Keep, felt the bottom of his gut plummet. He took a step back as though he had seen a ghost and barely heard the Healer speaking to him.
"Can you control him, Arbra?" Xander asked. "If you can, for the love of Alel, do it!"
Hern turned a shocked, confused face to the Healer. "How did my boy…?"
"That's not important now. Can you make him understand we mean him no harm?"
The old warrior was oblivious to the tears streaming down his leathery cheeks. His heart beat so fast, he could barely breathe. The ache in his soul that had been there for five years twisted and turned, then seemed to break apart. He gasped in a harsh breath as full realization came. Absolute joy nudged at Hern and spread over him. "My boy is alive," he said on a hitching sob.
"And he needs you," Xander urged, drawing Hern's tearful attention. "He needs you as he never has before."
Arbra's gaze shifted slowly back to Conar, standing some fifteen feet away, panting with fear, and he shivered violently. "My help," he said firmly. He nodded. "Coni needs my help."
"Be careful," Xander warned. "I don't think he even knows who we are."
Hern licked his lips, flexed his big hands, and started forward, a gentle, tremulous smile on his beefy face.
Conar saw the big man coming; he swept his frenzied inspection over the others who were blocking his way back to the camp. He backed away from the menace approaching him, fiercely afraid. His gaze fell on the boulder he had been trying to lift and, in his confused and disordered mind, thought that if he could clear away the rock, they might leave him alone. Otherwise, they would punish him for looking at them, for speaking, for not doing his job.
"I'll move it," he whispered, casting a worried glance at the man. "I'll move it, sir."
"Easy, son," the big man told him, coming toward him with hands raised at his shoulders. "I ain't going to hurt you."
Conar took a cautious look at the man, then threw himself at the rock, colliding painfully with it. He circled his arms around it and heaved with all his might.
"Don't, Conar!" someone said.
But it didn't matter. Conar dug his feet into the sand and lifted. "I'm doing what you said!" he grunted, holding the rock with trembling arms. He could feel his muscles groan in protest, tearing, but he held the rock as steady as he could. "I'm doing what you said!"
Hern came at him like a charging bull. The older man shoved at the rock, grabbed at his old pupil, clasping him around his waist as the rock twisted sideways out of the boy's arms and crashed to the ground.
"No!" Conar screamed, seeing his effort rolling away, feeling the tight constriction of his tormentor's arms around him. "No!"
"Conar!" Hern shouted, trying to get the boy's attention. "It's me, son. It's Hern!"
Conar pulled free of the man's grip. He fell, going to his knees, and scrambled toward the rock, grabbing it, trying to lift it again. "Please," he whimpered. "Please."
Hern caught one of Conar's ankles, pulled him from the rock, slid him over the sand toward him, but a sharp kick to his jaw stunned him. He let out a surprised grunt of part pain, part anger and saw Conar crawling away again.
Conar knew he had to move the rock, had to show them he could do what he was told. He couldn't let something so insignificant as a piece of sandstone bring him down. He crawled toward it. He went only a few feet, stopped, his arms quivering beneath him.
"Easy, son," someone said. "It's over, now."
Aye, Conar thought as he knelt in the hot sand, sweat dripping down his face and chest. It was over. He hung his head, then collapsed, his arms beside his head, eyes wide and staring.
* * *
"Put him down here," Xander instructed and Hern gently laid Conar on a freshly made cot.
"What's wrong with him?" the warrior asked, fear and anger blazing on his weathered features.
"He's had all their torture his mind can stand."
Hern turned white with fury. He pushed past Jah-Ma-El and Roget to go on a rampage in the courtyard. His furious bellows could be heard through the thick walls of the medical facility. "Sons of bitches!" he screamed, fighting men who tried to stop him from going after the Commandant cowering on the porch of his hut. "Rotten bastards!"
Hern swung one mighty fist at Lydon Drake, newly released from two months incarceration for his beating of Conar. A ham-like hand crashed into Lydon's belly, sending him gasping to the ground. A hard foot slammed into Lydon's chin, knocking him out. "I'll kill every worthless prick in this place!" Hern charged into the guards like an enraged bull.
It took ten men to pin him to the ground. After black eyes, split lips, broken noses, and one fractured jaw, he was chained inside the Indoctrination Hut, bellowing his rage. His curses were missiles of hate as he flung them at everyone within earshot.
When Hern was finally released three days later, he vented his spleen on anyone unlucky enough to catch his attention. "How, du Mer?" he shouted as Roget. "How could you have let them do that to your rightful king?"
"If you'll just calm down—"
Hern shook loose Roget's restraining hand. "Calm down, you say?"
Commandant Appolyon was standing in his doorway watching the spectacle with eager fascination. He was vastly amused at the reaction of anyone who found Conar alive at the penal colony. He used their loyalty to the McGregor family against the Prince.
Lydon Drake heard the Commandant's gruff call. He looked up to see Appolyon glaring at him.
"Bring him to me," Appolyon ordered.
Lydon nodded, knowing the Commandant didn't mean the spitting, cursing man arguing with du Mer before the medical hut. Drake made his way to the back door.
"Hern, listen to me!" Roget said. "You don't know what's been happening. Let me explain—"
"Explain, what? Your cowardice?"
Xander pushed past Roget and stood glowering at Hern. "If you don't watch your mouth, they'll lock your ass up!"
Hern was about to yell a rebuttal when he saw Drake shove Conar out the back door of the medical hut toward the Commandant's porch. Hern spun around, his intent clear.
"Dammit, Hern! Don't!" Roget shouted before running after the old warrior.
"Conar!" Hern hollered, coming up short as five guards grabbed his arms in steel-like grips and restrained him from getting any closer to the Commandant or the young Prince.
"Keep that bastard away from me," Appolyon said, "but bring him closer so he can see his old friend."
Hern struggled against the hands holding him, but he allowed them to drag him closer to Conar. What he saw as he took a good look at his young protégé sent a red fog of fury over his vision.
The boy was dressed in filthy breeches that barely covered his lean hips. His bare chest with its accumulated scars was heart wrenching, but the slavish demeanor and listlessness were the most horrible things Hern had ever seen. His rage soared with his pounding blood. "Conar!" he bellowed.
Lydon grabbed a handful of the dirty blond hair and pulled back Conar's head so Hern could see the boy's scarred face and dead eyes.
"Oh, sweet Alel!" Hern whispered, his knees going weak from grief. He was barely aware that, instead of struggling with the guards, he was now being supported by them.
The Commandant snickered. "You see, my good man, he knows what's going to happen. See how he's resigned himself to it?"
Hern couldn't look away from the Conar's ravaged face. The scars were there, like the ones Kaileel Tohre had given him that day in the Punishment Square, but there were other scars, as well. Faint white lines across his nose, a wavering line over his forehead and down his right cheek, crossing over the thicker scars left by Kaileel's whip, a short, broad line along his chin. Ridges of long-ago breaks of his nose, lines of pain and suffering creasing his still face, scars upon scars all over his torso.
"He knows his place, Arbra." Appolyon nodded to Lydon, who pushed
Conar to his knees in the dirt where he knelt, head bowed. "He does what he's told."
Hern took in the dejected shoulders, the posture of subservience, and he knew a raging fury such as he had never known. When the Commandant held his fat hand down to Conar's mouth and the young man kissed the back of it, Hern went insane with fury.
"I'll see you in hell for allowing this to happen to him!" Hern screamed at du Mer and Jah-Ma-El.
Appolyon laughed, "My dear fellow, they have had no say in what I do to my prisoner. If you had listened to them, what will happen now could have been avoided."
Hern stilled. "What are you talking about?"
"The man you called by name no longer exists. He died a long time ago. What you see now is his ghost, a ghost who walks among these men with anonymity. These men don't speak to him, don't acknowledge him in any way. If they should forget—and believe me when I tell you they don't—it is the ghost who suffers, not them." He unfolded his corpulent arms and swept them wide to indicate the compound. "This hell-hole is a grave, Arbra. It is his grave!" He turned to Lydon. "Do what you do best, Drake!"
"No!" Roget screamed, but he went down when a guard hit him in the gut.
Hern saw Xander stopped by guards, saw Jah-Ma-El struck down with the broadside of a sword. He turned a fearful look at Conar and saw the blue orbs lift to his in fatalistic acceptance.
Whatever Hern expected, it was not the horror that followed. His screams of animalistic fury deafened those around him. He threw himself against his captors with a renewed rage that finally brought him a hard fist to his jaw to silence him. When he awoke, he was chained inside the hut where he had been jailed before.
"You see what they're capable of doing, don't you, Arbra?" one of the guards who brought him food asked. "And you also see why we do not interfere. If you love him, and I know you do, you'll learn to pretend he doesn't exist. That's the only way he'll be able to survive."
"The first chance I get, I'm gonna gut that Lydon!"
"It doesn't matter about Lydon—"
"The hell it don't!" Hern bellowed. "His Grace sent Lydon Drake here. I remember what that vile whoreson did! You saw what he did today! For that alone, I'll find a way to slice his throat!" He shuddered as he heard again in his mind the whip hitting Conar's scarred back. "No one hurts my boy. No one!"
* * *
"You can not treat a man as you have treated him and expect him to do anything but crack!" Xander was bent over the Commandant's desk, his face near the other man's. "You can not ravage a man's spirit and expect him to remain untouched."
"I expect you to do your job, Healer!" Appolyon reminded him.
"If he is not allowed to rejoin the human race, we're going to lose him for good!"
"And what do you propose?"
Xander came around the desk and stared down at the man. "You wanted him the way he is. Made him the way he is. Now, with Tohre's edict lying on your desk, you have to undo what you've done. The only way I know to do that is let Conar McGregor exist in this vile world!"
"He may not be called by his former title! That is not part of Tohre's edict!"
"We don't care about that! The boy never liked to be called by titles anyway. What is important is he be allowed to rejoin the living. Haven't you punished him enough?"
Appolyon did not want to appear weak, even before the Healer. He lifted his pig-like nose. "If you wish, he may be allowed to live with the others."
"In du Mer's hut. With du Mer and the other men."
Appolyon ground his teeth. "He must be called 'Traitor.' Is that clear?"
"I will not accept that."
Appolyon's jowls quivered with outrage. "How dare you!"
Xander pointed at the document. "That gives me the right to dare!"
Knowing he was defeated, the fat man turned his head. "No idle conversations. Understood?"
"We'll see."
"No idle conversations!" Appolyon shouted as Xander slammed the door behind him.
Xander's angry footsteps took him rapidly across the compound. He swept his furious gaze over the cage where Conar had slept for five years and shouted at a nearby inmate to tear the gods-be-damned thing apart. "Now!" He wasn't surprised when two men rushed to do as he demanded.
Roget met him at the doorway of the medical hut. "Well?"
Xander slipped past du Mer and stalked to the cot where Conar lay, his body as still as death. Xander looked into the blank eyes that stared back at him without seeing. He placed a soft, gentle kiss on the cool, clean brow. When he raised his head, he glanced at Roget. "You can take him into the hut with you."
"He barely knows he's alive, Hesar."
"Conar has locked himself away where he can't be hurt, du Mer. He's gone deep inside himself. It's a defense mechanism, and he may never come back to us."
"Then, what do we do?"
Xander touched Conar's face. "Show him he is loved."
* * *
Love? Had he heard the word?
There was no word "love" in his world. There was only hate and pain.
Had there ever been such a word in his world?
He thought there might have been once. There was a vague longing in his soul that he could no longer name. That might have been love.
There was a fragment of hope in him that such a thing existed, but even hope was rapidly disintegrating and, with it, that long-forgotten emotion.
If there had ever been love, it was now gone. It was buried so deep inside him that only his battered soul, if he still possessed a soul, knew where it lay hidden. It had been secreted away to a place where no one could see it, touch it, despoil it or take it away. Ever again.
Was it love that had kept him alive all these years? he wondered. Was it that shining light that came in the quiet hours when sleep refused to come, when his body hurt and his heart ached so unbearably and his soul longed for surcease?
Maybe it had been love at the first that kept him sane. Maybe it had kept him from dying despite the many times he had wanted to surrender. Maybe it was still in that secret place and all he needed to do was to dredge it up and hold it in order for it to exist.
But what was it he wanted to bring back into his life? What was the memory that had kept him alive?
Somehow he thought the memory was long and black and flowing. Perhaps it was even green and sparkling. Or was it ivory and coral, rose-tinted and soft?
No, he told himself, a partial memory flooding his aching heart. It had been rich and fragrant…like lavender. The scent filled his senses. He began to cry.
He felt hands on him, stroking, calming, wiping away his tears. He felt tender emotion springing forth from the faces hovering over him. He felt more alone now than ever because he knew the comforting wouldn't last. It never did. It was only there when he was ill. When he was better, it vanished, along with his identity, and he was even more bereft with its passing.
He closed his senses to the world. Shut his ears to his whimpering cries. He didn't want to see the loving faces, for they could not be there. Hern and Thom and Storm and Jah-Ma-El and Roget. They were not in his nightmare world. He was in it alone.
* * *
"What is he saying?" Jah-Ma-El asked.
Roget's face turned white.
"I want to go home, Kaileel," the child-like voice whispered. "Please let me go home." A ragged sob tore through the heaving chest. "Please. I'll be a good boy. I'll behave." The voice turned shy and afraid, conspiratorial. "I won't tell them what you do to me."
"Sweet Merciful Alel," Roget groaned, his voice filling with pain.
"He's reliving his childhood in the Abbey," Shalu said.
"Please, Kaileel," the timid voice said a little louder. "I'll behave. I promise. Just please let me go home. I'll do whatever you say."
His entireties were heart-breaking, made more pathetically so because they were the long-ago words of a lost little boy. One last, gentle sigh of helplessness escaped Conar's lips and he shuddered and lay still.
; "I'll kill Kaileel Tohre if it's the last thing I do!" Hern snarled, flinging himself out the hut, slamming the door behind him.
"What if he doesn't get any better, Xander?" Roget asked.
Jah-Ma-El answered for the Healer. "I love my brother more than anything on earth, du Mer, but rather than see him this way the rest of his life, I will end his life myself."
Roget looked into Jah-Ma-El's fierce black eyes and understood. He would feel the same way about his brother, Teal. Death was preferable to the agony of spirit the young man was now suffering.
Chapter 5
* * *
For more than a week, Conar lay in his cot, his eyes open, staring, blank. He drank what was given him, ate the food spooned into his mouth, went to the chamber pot when it was held for him, but not once in that entire time did he do anything on his own.
He did not respond to the words spoken to him, neither did he speak. The men who cared for him—now numbering nearly two dozen—sat with him, gave him gentle, quiet orders, but did not carry on a conversation with him, no matter how one-sided, for such a luxury was still being denied him. It was at the beginning of his second week of catatonia that Xander could stand it no longer.
"What now, Healer?" the Commandant sighed, annoyed his afternoon tea had been interrupted.
"He is getting no better."
"He's eating? Drinking, pissing? What more do you want?"
Xander ground his teeth together. "You meant to see him the way he is and succeeded. I suppose now that you've accomplished your goal, we can just stop feeding him and let him die." He started to walk away.
"Wait!" Appolyon's fat jowls wobbled as he stood, throwing his linen napkin to the tea table. "He is to be kept alive at all costs!"
Xander eyed the corpulent man with an arched gray slash of eyebrow. "I can't keep him alive in such a condition. He's a burden. It takes eight men to help me care for him." He folded his arms. "I have other inmates to see to, Commandant."
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