WINDHEALER

by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

  Conar stepped away from her for fear he would do her actual harm, as well.

  "Galen was her first. You knew about him, didn't you? I think she waited all of two weeks before she married him. But she was already impregnated with his child. She must have lain with him before you were even lashed to the whipping post. She had a second child by him, too. Two sons. Galen proved he was very much a man, indeed!"

  Conar reached for her, but she scrambled from the chair, putting as much distance between them as the room would allow.

  "She's a whore, Conar! A faithless whore!"

  "I'll kill you," he growled.

  "Best to kill her lover, the father of her third child, her daughter. He's the only one she hasn't been legally wed to. Galen was barely in his grave when she let him slip between her thighs. Ask Brelan Saur if his daughter looks like him or his precious mistress, Elizabeth!"

  "Damn you!" Brelan shouted.

  Conar turned to stare at Brelan, shock on his face.

  "Then there's her third husband, the man she is married to now," Raja hurried on, watching Conar closely as he stood rigid and silent not more than two feet from her. "She has a son by him. I hear she's pregnant again. Galen made her Queen when he married her and she is still Queen. Ask them who sits the throne beside her now!"

  Conar shook his head as though to clear it of her words.

  "Legion A'Lex! It is he who thrusts between her whoring legs. And she loves him for it!"

  Conar lunged, his hands winding around her slender throat. "Bitch! You're lying!"

  "True!" she gasped, digging at his fingers, raking her nails over his flesh. "All true."

  His thumbs bit into her windpipe.

  "Get her away from him before he kills her!" Tran shouted.

  Roget and Brelan tore Conar from her. Conar was beyond caring as he jerked away from them. He rounded on Brelan. "Tell me she's lying!"

  "No lie!" Raja croaked, holding her throat. "Tell him, Saur!"

  Brelan glared. "You've done your dirt and you will pay for it, you whoring bitch!"

  "You're afraid to tell him the truth, aren't you?" Her eyes raked the room as her hands had raked Conar's now-bleeding flesh. "Cowards! You fear what he will do if he knows the truth!"

  Conar looked at the men. Roget could not meet his look; Brelan's face was pained, angry, filled with shame. Occultus' face was blank, carefully so, and Tran's was worried. It was at that one lost moment that Conar knew what the witch had said was true. He looked at Brelan.

  "Let me explain," Saur tried to say.

  Conar shook his head, not wanting to hear explanations. He looked so vulnerable, his eyes sad and fragile as though the answers to his questions might tear him into a million irretrievable pieces. "Is it true?" His voice was as soft as fog.

  Even before he asked, even before Brelan looked into his eyes, even before the actual word was spoken, Conar knew.

  One word. One horrible word. "Aye."

  That was all it took to change Conar's life forever. To alter what could have been and what now would never be. Not Raja's immediate death sentence nor her final words as she was dragged away would alter what happened that fateful morning.

  "I have always wanted you, Conar!" she screamed. "I have your babe already seeded within my womb! Will you let them slay the mother of your child?"

  Occultus probed her with his senses and found she was, indeed, implanted with Conar's seed. "Shall we spare her life?"

  Conar looked at her with hate, hate as cold as the ice on the zenith of Mount Serenia. He gave one word. One quick and decisive word. "No."

  * * *

  The Empress found him later that morning in the portrait room. They had been searching for him for hours. She looked over the devastation and frowned. To destroy such beauty was a sacrilege, but she understood her nephew's pain. She sat beside him on the floor where he knelt, staring moodily at the destruction he had wrought.

  "Are you finished?" she asked. "Is the rage gone?" She calmly took the dagger from his clutched fist. She looked at it and shivered. It was a deadly weapon, two-edged, sharp as sin and twice as lethal.

  "That's a dangerous weapon, Aunt Dy. Be careful."

  She tucked it in the pocket of her gown, then folded her hands in her lap. "A woman's tongue can be a dangerous weapon, too. It can cut deeper than any blade and be twice as deadly. The only difference between a cut this dagger can give and the one Raja slipped into your heart is that her cut isn't mortal."

  "It might as well have been." He drew up his legs and circled them in the protection of his arms. He laid his head on his knees, shutting out the room.

  "I am sorry, Conar." She really didn't know what else to say.

  "You knew all along what Liza had done. You all did."

  "Yes, and several times Brelan tried to tell you, but you didn't want to hear. But I think you suspected something was wrong, else you would have questioned someone about her."

  "I never dreamed she would have betrayed me as she has."

  Dyreil turned from the cold, repressed anger she saw. Instead, she looked at Elizabeth McGregor's ravaged painting. He had repeatedly slashed the lovely, smiling face. Only the marriage band on her left arm was visibly untouched by his fury. "She believed you dead, son."

  "I am dead."

  "You are very much alive." She placed her slim fingers on his thigh. "Only a man so alive could feel the hurt you are now experiencing."

  She could tell he was trying not to cry, refusing himself the luxury of crying. His teeth were tightly clenched, his breathing slow and even, despite his coiled fury. Dyreil removed her hand.

  "I want you to listen carefully, Conar. Don't interrupt. Let me have my say, and when I am through, you may rant and rave all you wish. You may ignore me if that is your desire, but give me the courtesy of your attention because I am your aunt."

  He nodded.

  "At this moment," she began, sitting up straight as an arrow, her spine taut, "you are angry. Furious, and that is well within your rights. You feel Liza betrayed you, that Legion and Brelan betrayed you, as well."

  "They did."

  She sighed. It was best he get this out of his system first. "In what way, child?"

  "You have to ask?" His voice was tight with surprise. "They let her marry Galen! I never would have thought they'd let such a thing come to pass!"

  "If memory serves me correctly, Galen said you asked him to take Liza to wife."

  He flinched. "I didn't ask the bastard; I begged the bastard! And do you know why?" He looked at her. "I was being tortured! Kaileel Tohre threatened Liza's life! I had no choice but to beg Galen to take her!"

  "I understand your reasoning. But you thought Legion and Brelan would prevent that."

  "I thought they would take care of her, Aunt Dy! I thought they would see that no harm came to my lady!" His eyes filled with tears, but he swiped angrily at the telltale moisture. "But Legion A'Lex took care of her in his own way, didn't he?"

  "Would you not have wanted a man you trusted to look after her?"

  "I didn't trust Galen!"

  "Galen didn't hurt her."

  "She bore him a son! Two sons, if what Raja swore was true."

  His aunt nodded. "What she said was true, but there are things you have not been told."

  "What? That she enjoyed sleeping with him? How soon after I was taken away did she have his brat?"

  "Conar, that isn't—"

  "How soon?" His anger was festering.

  Dyreil was not privy to what Brelan knew; she knew only what the public knew about the birth of Corbin McGregor. "Less than a year later."

  "How much less?"

  Dyreil lowered her head. "Less than eight months."

  He stared at her, not wanting to believe it. When he looked away, his face was hard as stone.

  "Are you ready to listen now?"

  "Say what you must and be done with it!" he demanded, his belly turning with nausea.

  Dyreil had a fierce desire to s
lap him, but she kept her hands in her lap and spoke to him as though he wasn't particularly bright. "It was a terrible time. A time of weeping, a time of unbearable sorrow for us all. Those of us who loved you were stricken with horror when you were taken from us. We all thought you were dead."

  "I wish I had died."

  She took his face in her hands and turned his angry visage to her. "Don't you ever say that again, do you hear me? You're stronger than that. You're not some milksop, starry-eyed twit who moons about the place because someone took his favorite toy away! Use that famous anger of yours for something more constructive than self-pity!"

  "Such as? Beating Brelan to a bloody pulp?"

  "If that's what you want to do! Do it before the ceremony tonight because after that you might well kill him and I don't think that's truly what you want."

  "Then you don't know me very well, Aunt!"

  "I know you better than you know yourself! After tonight, you will be the most powerful man in the world and the most deadly. If you can't control yourself now, do you really think you'll be able to then?"

  He jerked his face from her grip and looked at the wreckage of Elizabeth's painting. "If I go through with it."

  "You are our hope. Our champion. The man destined to bring all of us together. We lost you once; we will not do so again!"

  "The only people who care about me are people who want something from me, isn't that right?" His face was granite hard. "For what I can do for them?"

  "When Brelan and Legion took you down from that damned post, the people of Serenia fell to their knees, wailing and moaning in hopelessness. Tolkan had to have known how much you were loved and revered."

  "They'd lost their champion!"

  "Stop being so damned cynical! Those people loved you! They were saddened by what had been done. That's why Tolkan couldn't let you live. He couldn't chance your people rallying to bring you back from exile. The only way for him to win was for you to die."

  "But Tohre wouldn't allow that."

  "Because his unholy love for you would not let you die. So they did the next best thing—sentenced you to a living death in the Labyrinth. And in doing so, Tohre punished you for not returning that unspeakable love!"

  "Maybe I should have." He laughed, but the laugh was eerie and not quite sane.

  She ignored his remark, fearful to probe such a terrible comment. "After you were gone, Liza was inconsolable…"

  "For how long? A few hours? A day?"

  She ground her teeth. "We thought we would lose her, too, Conar. She took to her bed and refused to eat. No one left her side for fear she would harm herself. Gezelle even slept in the same bed with her for days because Liza was so quiet and remote. Cayn gave her drugs to make her sleep; drugs that had to be forced down her throat because she didn't want them. Medea came to Boreas and took Liza back to Oceania; Brelan accompanied them so Liza would have someone she trusted close to her at all times."

  "It's always been Brelan, hasn't it, that Medea trusted with her daughter?" A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Always, Brelan."

  "Medea knew he loved Liza."

  Conar's head snapped around to his aunt. "The son-of-a-bitch has always loved her!"

  "Even before you did, son."

  "So her family kept reminding me!"

  "You were never told this and I hesitate to tell you now, but…"

  He kicked the wrecked painting. "Don't spare me, now! Is there anything that can hurt me any worse than I've already been hurt?"

  "You knew Brelan loved Liza; you knew Medea cared deeply for him. If it had not been for Medea's great love for your mother, and the promise made so long ago between them, Liza would have been given to Brelan as wife." She lowered her head. "Brelan knows."

  Conar stared at her with fury. "That's not true!"

  "Why would I lie? Do you think I tell you this to hurt you more?"

  "Brelan is a bastard son. She is a firstborn Princess. She might have been betrothed to Rylan Hesar or Tyne Brell or Chase Montyne, but never Brelan Saur!"

  She stared at him for so long he felt the hair on his neck stirring. When she finally spoke, her words were like stones dropping into the room. "Liza was not firstborn girl child of Shaz and Medea."

  "She's older than the other girls! Older by several years! Why would you think otherwise?"

  "Because the other girls were Medea's daughters by Shaz Wynth. Liza was not." She waited for him to digest this news. The look on his face was chilling. "Liza is Shaz's daughter, that much is true; but she is not Medea's birth-child. Medea was her mother only by love."

  His brows together in confusion. "Who the hell was her mother?"

  "You're not going to like what I have to say."

  A stunned look crossed his face. "Don't tell me Raja is—"

  "Of course not!" Dyreil hissed a word so unladylike and so out of character it made Conar blush. "If that bitch has ever given birth to anything, it was a suckling demon!"

  "Then who?"

  "Don't interrupt if you want to hear the whole thing. What I have to say is vitally important and I think it will explain to you why all this has happened." When he nodded, she began her tale. "Liza's mother was a powerful sorceress like Medea and your mother. I belonged to the Sisterhood, too, but I never became the magic-maker that those three women became. Some of us never aspire to that sort of thing."

  If Conar was surprised to know his aunt belonged to the Multitude, he didn't let on. She had his full attention.

  "This woman had already seduced Shaz Wynth once before, giving him a son who later died. It was stillborn, if I remember correctly. Shaz had been drugged, much as you were last eve, and when he awakened to find that slut in his bed, he almost killed her. It was Medea who stopped him from doing so. So instead, he exiled the bitch to Diabolusia, but the whore wouldn't remain there for long. She came back and did her evil business again, striving to do what she eventually did—get Shaz in her bed. And that time, she got what she wanted. A girl child, the firstborn girl child of the King of Oceania, was conceived… Liza.

  "Shaz was horrified that he had been tricked again by the woman. He hired assassins to kill her so her blood wouldn't be directly on his hands. But she escaped his noose and vanished. She sent word that if he sent killers after her, she would go to the Tribunal with the whole sordid story. He could not allow that to happen for fear of Grice and Medea being hurt."

  Dyreil felt drained, hot, and her head ached. She pushed back a stray wisp of golden hair.

  "You remember the kind of woman Medea was? In her younger days, she was a force to be reckoned with also. She hired men of her own, men under the direction of her Sentinel, Andre Belvoir—"

  "Belvoir?" he gasped. "My Belvoir?"

  "Aye! She sent these men to find the bitch and had given them strict orders that they were to take her to the worst nunnery they could find and entomb her lying, whoring person there forever. But despite the magic Medea used and the implements she had sent with Belvoir and the others, the bitch escaped the trap.

  "By then it was almost time for Liza to be born. The woman knew she couldn't hide forever and knew it was vitally important for Liza to be brought up as the firstborn daughter of Shaz Wynth. So she contacted Medea through an emissary." Dyreil looked at her nephew. "That lady was your mother. She came to Oceania and asked for a Council at the Shadowlands. What that meant was a gathering of all the Daughters of the Multitude to sit in judgment of what this woman had done." She let out a long breath and continued.

  "We gathered in the Shadowlands three days before Liza was born. Both sides of the story were presented to the Great Lady and the decision of what to do to the bitch was left up to Her. She polled the gathering and found not a single women there who did not want this woman cast out from the Daughterhood. She listened to the evidence, then retired for some time before coming back with Her judgment. When the decision came, though, we were stunned, dismayed. But you must trust Her will, for She is a wise woman. She had decreed that Medea tak
e and accept Liza as her own child."

  "What did Shaz think?" he asked, assuming the man must have been outraged.

  "Shaz trusted Medea. She trusted the Great Lady. She told him the child was destined to be named his firstborn female heir and he accepted it."

  Conar snorted. "Men do stupid things when a woman has her claws on his—"

  "Stop!" She pursed her lips. "I will not hear such filth from your mouth!"

  He looked away, blushing. "I'm sorry."

  "So Medea went off to Ionary to visit Chase's mother. She stayed a year, and when she came home, she had the girl-child with her."

  "How did she explain the child being a year old?"

  Dyreil shrugged. "I think that may have been the true start of the terrible rumor you believed about Liza being deformed. Whenever Medea took the child out in public, she covered her little face so no one would suspect her true age. After six months, it was all right to let people see her. They just said she was big for her age."

  "I can't believe Shaz would go along with all that phoniness, that deception."

  "Liza was Shaz's child. He loved her from the moment he set eyes on her. Do you remember when you first found out that Liza loved your children? Remember how you felt? Well, Shaz felt that way when he realized Medea loved his daughter."

  He wanted to change the subject. "What happened to her mother?"

  "She was punished by the Great Lady. She had dared to interfere with the destiny laid forth by the Great Lady's consort—the Master of the Wind."

  He looked at her with surprise.

  "It's true. Our Patroness is the mate to the Power to which you will be consecrated this eve. The Windmaster had carefully planned the mating of His champion and the Chosen Child of the Sea. But the die that was cast was not the one the Windmaster had thrown. But if the legends are true, the eldest daughter of Shaz and Medea would not have been the mate you deserved."

  Conar was even more confused. "Why not?"

  "Because according to the legends, only a girl-child of the royal seed of Oceania and a Daughter of the Multitude would satisfy the gods and Their ladies as a mate to the Champion of the Wind. Their mating would be a merging of sea and wind, the two most powerful forces in the universe. This whore had taken the power of the gods as her own, replacing the womb meant to conceive the wife destined for you, but she was of the Multitude, herself, and was of royal Oceanian blood, as well. She fit the legends even though she was not the one chosen to bear the firstborn girl-child of the house of Wynth."