Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3)

by Margaret Foxe

  When the silence stretched for too long—or what passed for silence, what with the little man fervently reciting some sort of prayer for deliverance under his breath—he realized he was staring a little too intensely at her hair. He met her eyes, which were no longer flashing with anger. In fact, she had the wary, wide-eyed look of an animal that had come face to face with a predator. She was, just like the man, frightened of him.

  Well, he wasn’t the one who’d tied the rope around their wrists. He didn’t know why they would be frightened of him and not the people who had imprisoned them.

  He scowled at her.

  She scowled right back, anger quickly overtaking her wariness, and he felt a spark of admiration for her unexpected mettle.

  “You’re awake,” she said, then cringed, as if she regretted a statement of such obviousness.

  “You’re American,” he said. He’d not met one of them in years. They’d rather curtailed their visits to the Old World since the Crimean War. Not that he could blame them. The war had been…devastating.

  Yet another thing he remembered. He’d been a soldier, perhaps, since just the thought of the war conjured up vague images of blood and gore, the clash of weapons, and the boom of incendiaries. Though that didn’t make much sense, considering it was 1897. He’d have been an old man by now if he’d fought in that war…

  “You’re not,” she replied, narrowing her eyes, pulling him out of his muddled thoughts. “I would say you’re British from that fancy accent of yours.”

  He shrugged. That sounded about right, though he couldn’t be certain of anything at the moment.

  “But you just emerged from a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, so I’m not sure what you are,” she continued conversationally.

  That, however, did not sound right at all. Feeling suddenly faint, he sat back down on his cot and scratched the nape of his neck.

  “I don’t think I’m Egyptian,” he said rather lamely.

  The woman, who was currently attempting to soothe the little Arabic man, looked at him as if he’d suddenly grown horns.

  “That was what you got out of the conversation? That you don’t think you’re Egyptian? What about the tomb?”

  “I don’t remember a tomb,” he said. “The last thing I remember is…” Well, how to finish that statement, he had no bloody clue. He settled on shrugging rather helplessly.

  “You don’t remember,” she said flatly. That wary look hadn’t left her eyes, despite her bravado.

  “I don’t remember,” he confirmed, just as flatly.

  “Nothing that happened in the tomb? Me?” she demanded.

  “Should I?” he countered. “Do I know who you are?”

  She hesitated, something shuttering in her eyes. “No,” she finally said. “You don’t know me, and I certainly don’t know you.”

  He had a feeling that the woman was normally a splendid liar, but that pause had given her away. She wasn’t telling the whole truth, but he decided not to press her on the matter. Not yet, at any rate.

  The enormity of his predicament was just beginning to sink in, and that vise-like dread in his chest was only growing stronger. Everyone in this tent was shackled in some way, and he didn’t even know if he could consider the others his allies or enemies. He couldn’t even say where he was, or why he was there. He couldn’t even say who he was.

  It was harrowing, waking up into the world a blank slate, certain of nothing.

  “My name is Rowan,” he said at last. For that was one thing in the world that he was certain of. Maybe.

  She looked taken aback by the simple admission. But she had said she didn’t know him. It seemed only polite to introduce himself, the British thing to do, even in such trying circumstances.

  He gave her a wry smile. “It’s the only thing I seem to recall,” he said. “I think it must be my name.”

  “Definitely not Egyptian, then,” she murmured. “I’m Hecuba Bartholomew, and this little lying crook is Omar,” she said, indicating the man next to her, who seemed to have recovered his wits enough to sit back on his heels instead of digging his head in the carpet and weeping. He still looked terrified every time his gaze landed on Rowan, however.

  “Miss Bartholomew—”

  “Everyone calls me Hex,” she corrected, settling on the carpet near the table. She began to snack on the food as if she hadn’t a care in the world—though he noticed that her clever eyes never once left him.

  “Hex,” he said dubiously, for, really, what sort of a name was that? “I believe I am at your mercy to explain what is going on, since I seem to have lost my memory. What’s this about a tomb? Why are we being held captive? And why is this man—and you, for that matter—so frightened of me?”

  Hex paused before popping another olive into her mouth and sent him an arch look. “Why indeed,” she said. “You’re not going to believe me when I tell you.”

  MISS BARTHOLOMEW HAD been half right. Rowan certainly didn’t want to believe a word she’d told him, but aside from that one earlier attempt at prevarication, he was fairly convinced that all she had told him was the truth—or at least what she believed to be the truth. Omar nodded frantically whenever Rowan looked to him for confirmation on the more preposterous aspects of Miss Bartholomew’s tale. Like the sealed four-thousand-year-old tomb he’d popped out of. And the shot to his chest that had left him completely unmarked and uninjured.

  “The bullet must have missed me,” he insisted after she’d finished, refusing to let that part of the tale go. He just couldn’t credit it.

  “Perhaps,” Miss Bartholomew said, though she and Omar looked supremely unconvinced of this.

  “And surely I didn’t toss that stone as you said I did. Perhaps there was some mechanism in the doorway that shifted it.”

  “Perhaps,” Miss Bartholomew said again, though he had a feeling she was just humoring him at that point.

  He groaned and rubbed at his tired eyes. There had to be some explanation of events that did not cast him in the role of a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy come to life, but damned if he could think of one at the moment. His head was spinning from all that she’d told him.

  He tried to focus on the most pressing details of the story: namely being stuck between Harlan Janus’s mercenaries and a Bedouin army. According to Miss Bartholomew, the uneasy alliance between the two factions had begun to fracture shortly after the strange events inside the tomb. Janus had been blocked from gleaning anything of value from the burial chamber by the sheikh’s men, so the mercenary had decided to return to Cairo with Rowan as his spoils.

  But the sheikh and his men seemed just as unwilling to let him take Rowan as they were to let him plunder the tomb. They had been at an impasse for hours while Rowan lay unconscious, and tempers were fast fraying on both sides.

  “So Janus wants to take me with him, and the Bedouins want to keep me for themselves,” he said.

  She shrugged, as if she were used to people being treated as commodities. He didn’t like the implications of that at all. “Something like that,” she said. “As far as Janus is concerned, you’re his plunder. I’m not sure what the Bedouins want with you, but that sheikh scares the hell out of me. He won’t let Janus leave without a fight. Which means I can’t leave, since apparently the sheikh thinks I’m in league with Janus.”

  Miss Bartholomew was nothing if not honest about her own self-interest.

  Suddenly, the canvas entrance to the tent was shoved aside once more, and a pair of Bedouins stalked inside. He could almost smell their fear underneath all of their posturing and brandished weapons. They spoke a few sharp words at him in that dialect of Arabic Rowan couldn’t quite parse but never once met his eyes.

  “The sheikh wishes an audience with you, Magnificence,” Omar said, shakily climbing to his feet with Miss Bartholomew’s help.

  “An audience, you say,” he said dryly. “Well, by all means, then.”

  The guards hesitated for a moment, then started forward t
o unlock his restraint. Before they could reach him, Rowan reached down and yanked at the chain himself. It snapped easily, as did the metal shackle around his ankle, but his actions had the Bedouins stopping in their tracks. The color drained from their faces as Rowan tossed aside the paltry excuse for a restraint. One of them even pulled out a pistol and aimed it at him with a shaking hand. That seemed uncalled for.

  “What?” he asked mildly. At a loss to explain their fear, he turned to Miss Bartholomew and Omar, who had once again collapsed in a heap of nerves.

  Miss Bartholomew, also suspiciously pale beneath her sunburn, just shook her head and swallowed heavily. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing at all.”

  He gestured for Miss Bartholomew to precede him, staring down the guards until they stepped aside. They stepped even farther back when Rowan passed them, the Red Sea parting for Moses. His mind balked at the idea he was not…well, normal, as Miss Bartholomew had suggested, but the fear that he seemed to inspire in those who were supposed to be his captors could prove to be very useful indeed.

  His confidence wavered the moment he stepped out into the desert, however. All around him stretched an alien, monochrome vastness. With no clear memories to lean on, he faced the world as if for the first time, and it was…big. His sense of perspective had been lost along with the rest of who he was, and suddenly he felt very small indeed and more adrift than ever.

  How was he ever to find his way back home…if he even had one?

  A sleek and rather compact dirigible hovered over the immediate foreground—Miss Bartholomew’s Amun Ra, he assumed—and several scruffy-looking tents were set up in the shadow it cast across the sand, a handful of what must have been Janus’s men milling about, casting suspicious looks in his direction now and again.

  The tent from which he’d emerged was situated just out of range of the airship’s shade, in some sort of neutral zone set squarely between Janus’s men and the Bedouin camp behind him. That camp was a far larger and more elaborate bivouac, complete with paddocked pack camels and warhorses and sleek open-air awnings full of elaborately carved furniture set amidst colorful rugs and pillows. The Bedouins certainly knew how to travel in style.

  The guards led them to the largest tent at the center of the encampment and gestured Rowan inside. They attempted to bar Miss Bartholomew and Omar from following, but something inside Rowan balked at this.

  Miss Bartholomew was not exactly his friend, but her bracing frankness had grounded his overwhelmed senses in the few minutes he’d known her. Though he was unable to articulate exactly why he felt this, he didn’t want to be separated from her. He paused inside the doorway and stared the guards down until they broke and allowed Miss Bartholomew through.

  Omar looked content to stay where he was, however, clearly preferring hostile Bedouin guards to Rowan’s company. Rowan was happy to let him be, having no desire to give the poor man an apoplexy by forcing him to remain in his company.

  “We’ll need him to interpret,” Miss Bartholomew murmured as they stepped into the shaded, fragrant interior. The tent was much like the one he’d just left, though larger and better shaded, filled with the smell of coffee, incense, and tobacco smoke.

  “No you won’t, Miss Bartholomew,” came a deep voice from the other end of the tent.

  Rowan’s eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom and located the owner of that baritone drawl, the accent nearly as perfectly British as his own. The voice…the man was so damned familiar. For one second, the memory of flashing amber eyes, a crooked, barely-used smile, and the laughter of small boys flitted through his mind, but the images were gone in a flash, leaving his head dizzy and aching.

  He gripped the top of a high-backed ebony camp chair to keep himself upright and focused on the figure in the shadows. The man sat cross-legged upon a colorful carpet, white robes swirled about him, a black-checked keffiyeh wrapped around his head. A pair of blue-tinted sun spectacles obscured his eyes, as out of place in his present environment as his perfect accent had been. The smoke of a cheroot swirled above his head.

  “You speak English,” Miss Bartholomew said, her eyes narrowed reproachfully on the figure before them.

  The sheikh’s lips quirked ever so slightly at one edge. Another jolt of familiarity passed through Rowan, and his head began to pound even harder. He could feel the man’s eyes upon him, sharp as a hawk’s beneath those damnable spectacles. Who the devil wore sun spectacles indoors anyway?

  “How very astute of you, Miss Bartholomew,” the man drawled, stubbing out his cheroot in a silver dish next to him.

  “But you’re a sheikh.”

  That grim smile grew. “Am I? Cannot a sheikh have a command of languages?”

  “You hid it before,” she said accusingly.

  The sheikh shrugged. “Why make it easy for my enemies? They are so much more forthcoming with their information when they think I don’t understand them. Times change, and I must change with them. Do you not agree?” That last question was pointed unerringly in Rowan’s direction.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he managed.

  “Ah,” the sheikh said, nodding, as if he had expected this. “It is disconcerting, is it not? To lose your memories?”

  “How did you…” Rowan began, then shook his head against a spike of pain. His grip turned white-knuckled against the chair, fracturing the wood, and he abandoned his question. Doubtless the sheikh had his spies. His earlier conversation with Miss Bartholomew could have been easily overheard. Canvas walls weren’t exactly impregnable to eavesdroppers.

  “One thinks it might be a relief to forget. But it isn’t, is it?” the sheikh continued.

  Rowan’s skin crawled with the knowing look the sheikh cast his way. As if he knew him. As if he truly understood.

  “Who the hell are you?” Miss Bartholomew snapped.

  The sheikh cocked a brow, thoroughly unmoved by her belligerence. “I am the man who is going to allow you to return to Cairo, unmolested by Janus and his men, Miss Bartholomew.”

  “Oh, you’re going to allow it, are you?” she bit out.

  He didn’t look impressed by her cheek. “Some of my men will die, Miss Bartholomew, in the effort. I suppose I should not expect gratitude from you, though. I’ve yet to find any evidence that you are capable of such a thing, but I do live in hope,” he said, the last word coming out with a bitterness that made Rowan flinch.

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” Miss Bartholomew demanded, even more recalcitrant than before.

  “Not yet. Perhaps not ever,” the man muttered.

  Miss Bartholomew exchanged a glance with Rowan. She looked utterly outraged. He suspected he just looked baffled.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Miss Bartholomew pressed, taking the words right out of Rowan’s mouth. “What is your problem?”

  “You are my problem, Miss Bartholomew,” the sheikh growled. “You have complicated everything when I was so close…” He stopped up short, his hands balled into fists on his lap. Even from several meters away, Rowan could feel the man’s furious frustration.

  Miss Bartholomew must have felt it as well, for she immediately backed off, reining in her temper in what Rowan suspected was a rare moment of self-preservation.

  A fraught silence filled the tent as the sheikh struggled to come to grips with some great emotion. All the while, his eyes remained fixed on Rowan, as if searching for something. Finally he let out a defeated sigh, and his attention flickered back to Miss Bartholomew.

  “Shall you accept my help, Miss Bartholomew?” he ground out.

  She narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “What do you want in return? My gratitude?” she spat.

  Rowan held his breath, half expecting the sheikh to jump to his feet, cross the tent, and strangle Miss Bartholomew for her impertinence. It was as if the woman couldn’t help herself even when faced with as obvious a predator as the sheikh.

  Instead the sheikh let out a snort of exasperation. “You are nothing if not consistent
. No, Miss Bartholomew. I don’t require your gratitude. I do have three requests of you, however.”

  “Typical,” she muttered.

  ‘The first request I make to the both of you,” the sheikh continued, opening a small enameled tin and pulling out rolling papers and a pouch of tobacco. “All I require of you is an answer—an honest answer—to a problem that plagues me.”

  Miss Bartholomew met Rowan’s puzzled glance with a skeptical one of her own, obviously still suspicious of the sheikh’s intentions.

  “That sounds…reasonable,” she allowed grudgingly.

  The sheikh fixed his attention onto Rowan expectantly, and Rowan nodded in agreement.

  “It’s more of a dilemma, really,” the sheikh continued, rolling out one of the papers and filling it with loose tobacco. “And I can ask no one else for advice on the matter, as it involves someone…close to me.”

  “Is it a tribal matter?” Rowan hazarded.

  The sheikh’s mouth quirked. “Precisely. A tribal matter. It concerns my brother. He is in a dangerous predicament, one that I must resolve for him. Yet it can only have two outcomes, and both of them are...intolerable.”

  “What are these outcomes?” Rowan asked.

  “On the one hand, I risk the death of my entire tribe should I hesitate to act. On the other hand, I risk…no, I ensure the death of my brother’s two children, at the very least, if I do act. But how do I choose? How can I choose, the many over the few?”

  The sheikh’s voice was earnest by the end, his hand even trembling a little as he lit the end of his cheroot with a taper from his bowl of incense. Rowan’s stomach dipped with sympathy and a little bit of dread as the sheikh’s eyes bored into his own, as if willing an answer from him. As if his opinion mattered.

  “Why are you asking us this?” Miss Bartholomew demanded with her usual directness.

  “I’ve no one else to ask,” the sheikh murmured.

  “It’s an impossible question—” Miss Bartholomew began.