The Invisible Ring bj-4

by Anne Bishop

  He wasn’t dressed for an aristo outing, but even so he was a good-looking man, tall and well built, with that golden Shalador skin—not brown like the long-lived Hayllians or fair like other races, but sun-kissed, gold-dusted. A pleasing shade when combined with the dark-brown hair and brown eyes of the Shalador people.

  Except his eyes were the rare Shalador green—eyes that could be traced back through the bloodlines to Shal, the great Queen who had united the tribes into one people.

  Reyna’s eyes.

  He was the only one of the three boys who had her eyes.

  He had been willing to destroy himself, but now that he was still alive, he wanted to survive. Sweet Darkness, he had to find some way to survive long enough to get home, long enough to talk to Reyna and take those words back.

  Balls and sass. It was the only weapon he could safely use. He was wringing himself dry, squeezing what was left of his physical endurance, but he had to last until they reached the slave compartment in the Coach, had to make Grizelle believe he was still a male to be reckoned with. For a little while longer, he had to hide the fact that he was nothing more than a hollow man.

  Raising his trembling hands, Jared ran his fingers through his hair. It was a bit shaggy now, but with a little Craft, shaggy could be altered to bedroom disheveled. The Gray Lady was an old woman, but he was a bed-trained slave who had a few sweets he could offer that might entice her, might distract her, might help tip the scales to his advantage while he tried to figure out how much control this damned Invisible Ring had over him.

  His stomach churned at the idea of encouraging the Gray Lady to enjoy him. But if it made her lower her guard, it might be possible to slip away and ride the Winds to Shalador.

  Without warning, the escort opened the door and stopped short, unable to hide his surprise at the transformation of the naked slave he’d left into the Warlord who turned away from the mirror and smiled at him.

  Pleased that he’d managed to unsettle the man, Jared walked toward him and held out his hands as if bestowing a favor. “If you’re going to chain me, get on with it. The Gray Lady’s waiting to dance.” He hoped the escort would mistake the exhaustion in his voice for boredom.

  “She didn’t specify chains,” the man said grudgingly.

  “No, I didn’t think she would. She strikes me as a discreet Lady, and chains tend to call attention to themselves, especially when the sound they’re making becomes rhythmic. Don’t you think?”

  The escort’s lip curled in a sneer. “I’ve never worn chains.”

  “I wasn’t implying that you had worn them.” Jared waited for the insult to sink in and then shrugged. “Or that you needed them. I just thought that since you earned a living restraining people, you might know a few interesting positions that aren’t considered common in the courts. But perhaps not. Things like that are a bit like mounting a woman dog-style. It isn’t to every man’s taste.”

  Fury blazed in the escort’s eyes. “You know what I can do to you?”

  “Not a damn thing.” Jared bared his teeth and added softly, “Come on. Try it. Let’s see if this Ring really can hold the Red.”

  “Is there a problem?” Grizelle’s voice settled over both men like a cold rain.

  The escort reluctantly stepped into the hallway. “No, Lady.”

  “Then what’s the delay?”

  Jared gave the escort a smug smile, knowing it would infuriate the man because there wasn’t any way he could respond to it.

  Time to play the last act.

  Mother Night, don’t let my body fail yet.

  Jared stepped forward, forcing the escort out of the way. He bowed to Grizelle, making sure the bow was exactly what Protocol dictated as proper for a Red-Jeweled Warlord to make to a Gray-Jeweled Queen.

  If the Warlord wasn’t a slave, that is.

  The escort growled in anger.

  Grizelle stared at him, but Jared thought he caught a flicker of amusement in the hard gray eyes.

  So she liked balls and sass. Thank the Darkness.

  Draining the little psychic strength he could summon in order to project the feel of a sensual man eager to please, Jared offered his right hand, palm down.

  Grizelle hesitated a moment before lightly placing her left hand over his and allowing him to escort her out of the building.

  Jared bit back a grin. The escort was now trailing behind them like a resentful, forgotten puppy.

  It was full dark by the time they hired a pony cart and headed out of the auction grounds. Instead of going directly to the official landing place, they took a side road that circled around the low, flat-topped hill until they reached the ticket station, and the Coaches and drivers that could ride the Winds.

  “Wait with the others,” Grizelle said, as Jared helped her from the cart. She didn’t bother to look at either of them as she walked toward the ticket station.

  Jared held on to the cart, hoping the escort didn’t notice how much he needed to lean on that support to stay on his feet. He wasn’t sure his legs would get him to the Coach before they buckled.

  “I don’t know where the others are,” he finally pointed out.

  “This way,” the escort growled.

  As they walked toward the man’s partner, who had been guarding the other slaves, Jared glanced over his shoulder and saw a messenger boy hand a slip of paper to Grizelle just before she reached the ticket station. The boy ran off immediately, not even waiting for the usual coin.

  Feeling a warning prickle between his shoulder blades, Jared stopped and watched her read the message.

  So still. So silent. So gray. Nothing about her seemed different, so he didn’t understand why he instinctively opened his first inner barrier and sent out a delicate Red psychic tendril. Even if her inner barriers hadn’t been stronger than his, the tendril was too delicate to probe even surface thoughts, which meant there was less chance of it being noticed. But it would be able take a sip of her emotions and give him some warning about her temper.

  He wasn’t prepared for the blast of fear that raced back through the tendril and crashed into him.

  Something had happened. Something had changed.

  The fear hadn’t been there during the ride here. He was sure of that. Hell’s fire, he’d touched her, sat beside her. Even she couldn’t have hidden feelings that strong while there had been physical contact between them.

  The message, then. The mes . . .

  As he watched Grizelle tuck her hands into the sleeves of her robe and walk into the ticket station, his waning endurance finally gave out. The world became fuzzy and slow.

  So hard to walk, despite the hand on his arm leading him. Words began smearing again, mashing together and stretching out until they became a language of nightmarish shapes. Bodies appeared in front of him, out of nowhere. Someone tugged on his arm. He stopped walking. The smells of blood-bright fear and sickly brown sweat oozed around the word shapes.

  Water.

  Why did that have to be the one word that still made sense?

  “She’ll be taking . . . west-going Coaches?”

  He thought that was one of the guards speaking, but couldn’t be sure since the voice kept fading in and out.

  “Bound to . . . Territory’s west . . . Tamanara Mountains.”

  “That’s what . . . figured . . . brought the rest . . . here.”

  Except they were walking again, endlessly walking, while the escorts swore under their breath and their blade-sharp anger cut into him.

  Where were his inner barriers? Where . . .

  Someone pulled at his arms.

  “Ssiiitt.”

  His legs folded under him.

  A gray voice. The word “water.”

  A cup at his mouth. Water trickling past his lips. He held it for a moment, savoring the wetness, before he swallowed. Then he tried to grab the cup and gulp, but hands pulled it away from him.

  “Sslloowlly.”

  He obeyed. It was so important to obey, so impo
rtant that this female voice that wasn’t gray didn’t take away the water.

  Finally enough.

  Ballsansass. That was important, too, although he couldn’t remember why.

  He slid sideways. The water had melted his bones. He hadn’t known water could do that. Whiskey could, if you drank enough of it, but water? Who would have guessed?

  Then he was melting and sliding, melting and sliding, sliding, sliding away into the safety of the night, into the sweet Darkness.

  Chapter Four

  “She took the bait,” the Fifth Circle guard reported with barely restrained eagerness.

  Krelis leaned back in his chair, dropping his hands below the desk to hide the trembling he couldn’t control. Dorothea’s compulsion spell must have worked, which made him feel easier about the other spells she’d woven for him—not that he doubted the High Priestess’s ability.

  “While she was in Raej, did the bitch buy anyone who might be of value to us?” Krelis asked, watching the young man who reminded him of himself not that many centuries ago.

  The blank look on the guard’s face only lasted a moment. Then he stiffened and focused his eyes on the back wall of the Master’s office. “My apologies, Lord Krelis. I didn’t think to obtain a list of the slaves she bought.”

  “Nor did Lord Maryk think to include it in your instructions,” Krelis said smoothly.

  The guard squirmed a little, recognizing the trap within the words.

  Krelis understood being torn between loyalty and survival. As a boy, he had loved Olvan, who had been a gentle but firm parent as well as a respected teacher and scholar. As a youth, he’d felt desperate to get away from the taint surrounding the frightened, withered man his father had become after that day at the tree. No one had needed to tell him that the longer a connection remained between father and son, the more distrustful the influential Queens would be when the time came to serve in their courts.

  Forced to choose between loyalty and survival, he had chosen survival. Loyalty, he discovered, could be bought easily enough.

  So he waited to see which the guard would choose— loyalty to Maryk, who was not only an aristo but an experienced second-in-command, or survival by giving full allegiance to the new Master of the Guard.

  Finally, the guard said in a low voice, “No, sir, Lord Maryk did not include obtaining the list in his instructions.”

  “No matter,” Krelis said with a dismissive gesture. “Lord Maryk had more pressing duties to consider.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I return to Raej and obtain the list?”

  “Yes. By the time you return, Lord Maryk will be here with the slaves. We’ll keep any that may be of interest to the High Priestess and send the others back to Raej to sell on the last auction day.”

  The guard saluted smartly and left.

  Krelis rubbed his hands over his face. Maryk should be back by nightfall, the task completed. Then, perhaps, he could get some sleep.

  Chapter Five

  His stomach growled and threatened to chew his backbone.

  Jared ignored it.

  His muscles ached and begged to be stretched.

  He ignored them, too.

  The fierce need to piss had him swinging his legs over the side of the narrow bed. He pushed himself into a sitting position and fuzzily tried to remember what came next.

  Rubbing sleep-crusted eyes, Jared looked blearily at the dark-eyed, dark-haired boy sitting cross-legged beside the bed.

  “Davin?” Jared said hoarsely, knowing it couldn’t be even before the boy’s expression turned wary. His youngest brother would be nineteen now, not the ten-year-old he’d cheerfully said good-bye to before he’d torn his life apart.

  “I’m Tomas,” the boy said. “There’s no Davin here.”

  Thank the Darkness for that.

  There was something peculiar and faint about the boy’s psychic scent, but Jared was too preoccupied to figure it out. “Where—”

  “We’re in the guest servants’ quarters.”

  Jared shook his head and tried again. “Where—”

  “Don’t know what Territory—”

  “Where’s the damn chamber pot?”

  “Oh.” Tomas pointed at a door in the wall. “Over there.”

  Despite the urgency, Jared hesitated, finally awake enough to realize he was naked and only had a wadded sheet covering his groin.

  Tomas grinned. “They’re all outside, and Ladies don’t care if you show your dangle to other males.” He scratched his head. “Other males don’t care either.”

  “Sometimes they do,” Jared muttered, remembering confrontations between pleasure slaves that had turned bloody because desperation had pushed someone over the edge. “Sometimes they care very much.”

  Tomas’s grin faded. His face paled. He scrambled to his feet and bolted for the door. The jerky movement and the fear that now filled his dark eyes told Jared more than the fading bruises on the boy’s bare arms, more than the old scars on the stick-thin legs that poked out of a pair of ragged short pants. And he realized what the boy’s diminished psychic scent meant. Tomas was a half-Blood.

  Having too much psychic strength to be landen but not enough to be Blood, half-Bloods were outcast bastards, wanted by neither society. If the Blood sire thought the unclaimed offspring showed potential, the child might be taken in and raised as a servant, maybe even trained to become an overseer for a landen village. Most of the time, half-Bloods became the slaves that looked after, and were used by, Blood slaves.

  And sometimes there was no one cruder than someone who was, himself, enduring cruelty.

  Cursing under his breath, Jared followed Tomas.

  The bathroom had two toilets, three sinks, and two bathtubs. There were no partitions to give anyone the illusion of privacy, but at least the toilets were better than stinking privy holes.

  Sighing with relief, Jared took care of business and tried to ignore the boy standing next to him. Tomas might have learned fear in the slave quarters, but the boy was just too brash to have learned caution.

  “You ain’t wearing a Ring,” Tomas said in a hushed voice.

  “It’s invisible,” Jared replied curtly, hoping that would end it.

  “You sight shield a Ring so people don’t know you’re a slave, you’ll get your back whipped off for good.”

  Jared clenched his teeth at the honest concern in the boy’s voice and pulled the chain to flush the toilet. “It’s not sight shielded, it’s invisible.”

  “Well, I can see that.”

  How could he explain something he didn’t understand himself? “It’s an Invisible Ring. It’s like the Ring of Obedience, but stronger.”

  Tomas’s eyes widened. “You have to wear something stronger than a Ring of Obedience? You that dangerous?”

  “I guess so.”

  “As dangerous as the Sadist?”

  Jared started to say something reassuring, but there was no fear in the boy’s face, just a held-breath excitement. Aristos had good reason to fear Daemon Sadi, but not young half-Blood boys. So he said solemnly, “He taught me everything I know.”

  Tomas looked at him for a long minute, his mouth silently forming the word, “oh,” and Jared realized he couldn’t have presented better credentials to reassure the boy he was a “safe” male.

  That grin that seemed to be Tomas’s natural expression flashed again. “You’ll be wanting a bath. We’ve got hot water and everything.”

  As Jared watched the boy dart around the room preparing a bath for him, the full import of their surroundings finally hit him. He wandered over to the tub that was already half-full of steaming water. “Why are we in the guest servants’ quarters?”

  “ ‘Cause the Lady took one look at the slave quarters and threw a polite icy fit.”

  Jared scratched the back of his head. Hell’s fire, he was looking forward to getting clean. “How does one throw a polite icy fit?”

  Tomas tugged on his earlobe and scrunched up his face. “Well,
like the Lady did, I guess.”

  That told him a lot.

  Tomas turned off the water. “In you go,” he said, waving the wash sponge at Jared.

  “Yes, Tomas,” Jared said meekly.

  Tomas hesitated, as if wanting to be sure that the adult male he was ordering around really was teasing him. Then he grinned and dropped the wash sponge into the water.

  Jared settled into the tub, closed his eyes, and groaned in pleasure. After soaking for a couple of minutes, he opened one eye and looked at the boy kneeling beside the tub. “So what did she do?”

  “Well, the innkeeper was pleased enough at first to have a Queen staying at his place, even if it was the Gray Lady. He told her his servants would get her slaves settled into quarters, but she insisted on seeing them before she’d go to her own room. So he showed her the slave quarters and she said, no, they wouldn’t do.”

  “Were they that bad?” Jared asked. Pleasure slaves were usually quartered together in a comfortable “stable” or in tiny rooms adjoining the main bedchambers so they’d be close by to indulge their Ladies’ whims. Since they were also kept fairly isolated from everyone except the court and each other, he really didn’t know what was considered normal slave quarters.

  Tomas shrugged. “Looked like any other as far as I could tell, although the privy holes did stink something fierce. But the Lady said she wasn’t going to have half of us coming down sick with a chill or worse by trying to sleep with no blankets and nothing but bars and broken shutters over the windows. Now, anybody could have told her you don’t seal up slave quarters tight ‘cause breathing the stink would make us sicker than fresh cold air, but the innkeeper just eyed Thera and Polli and told the Lady if she just eased the Rings a bit, the males would keep the females warm enough, and with their blood heated like that, they wouldn’t even notice the cold.

  “Well, the Lady just looked at the innkeeper until he started to sweat, and she said, mild as if she was asking for a cup of tea, ‘Have you ever seen what happens to a man’s balls when you freeze them so deep they’ll shatter if you flick a finger against them?’ You could tell he thought she was bluffing, but he was sweating, too. Then one drop of sweat rolled off his chin. It froze before it hit the ground and bounced up like a little hailstone. And she just kept looking at him. I thought he was going to mess his pants.”