WINDDREAMER

by Charlotte Boyett-Compo

  "The thing was, he was stronger than I had anticipated. It was his bitch of a mother. She meant a lot to him. He listened to her. In his young ignorance, he absorbed the ridiculous ideals she fostered. He stood strong against the things I tried to show him in the Wind Warrior Society." He raked his long fingers through his hair. "I realized that in order to mold him in the correct fashion, I would have to separate the two of them. Break the bond that existed between them."

  "By bringing him to this horrid place!" Raja snapped.

  "I convinced the King that his son needed specialized training at the Abbey in Corinth. I told the old man Conar had potential that needed to be utilized. It was easy...so easy. Already Conar was showing those powers with which he had been born. Little things, really, like reading minds, or finding lost things. Gerren was in awe of his son's abilities, knowing they came partially from that bitch and her association with the Multitude. By pandering to the King's fatherly pride, I had the papers signed before the woman knew what I was about."

  "Didn't Moira know what you were, Tohre? Didn't she suspect?"

  He shrugged. "She wasn't as smart or as powerful as people thought. She might have suspected my connection to the Domination, but she could not prove it. As long as a Daughter of the Multitude sat on the throne, we of the Brotherhood were careful with our activities. As far as the people knew, I was a High Priest in the Wind Warrior Society, a prelate at the Wind Temple, nothing more."

  "How did you get Conar away from Moira without her causing trouble? Surely she was not pleased to have her favorite son snatched away to the Abbey. Everyone knew that place was of the Brotherhood."

  "She, like Gerren, believed he was going to Century, to the Wind Temple. The Abbey is a few miles away, actually in Lakewood. Once the King had signed the guardianship papers, Conar was legally mine." He smiled. "She never knew he was taken from that Abbey and brought here to the monastery. We used such a powerful magic to block her probing that for seven years the woman had no word of her son at all."

  "And you don't think she was suspicious?"

  Kaileel looked at her. "Oh, she sent men to check on her son, but she didn't know those men were loyal to the Tribunal, and the Tribunal was ever loyal to Tolkan Coure! They returned to Boreas Keep with glowing reports of Conar's progress, and even brought with them notes to his mother, written in his own hand, that he was well." He lifted a thin shoulder. "How was she to know Tolkan wrote those notes?"

  "Did Conar not suspect what you were about? Even as a boy he was very astute. Did he not know what you intended?"

  He sighed a breath of wonder. "Oh, he fought me all the way here! I had to give him something to sedate him. Once here, it became obvious to him that he would receive no help from my priests. He had to be whipped that first night after he awoke from the drug. The brat tried to run away." A merry chuckle escaped Tohre's lips. "He'd never so much as had a palm applied to his backside before that. You can imagine his surprise when I used my belt on his bare rump."

  Raja let out a long breath. "You gave him his first taste of fear and pain."

  "I taught him what it was to be controlled!" Kaileel disagreed. "Did you not wonder why he never told his father what had happened to him at the Monastery? From that first night, I established complete control over him!"

  "You instilled terror in a boy. Not such a major feat. Anyone could do that."

  He glared at her. His voice became an unpleasant sneer. "I taught him respect! To humble--"

  "You call making a child flinch every time you come near him 'humble'? You did your best to break him and found you could not. Not then, and not since. Conar will never buckle under to you until he is so weak he can not lift a hand to gainsay you!"

  "He had to be taught a lesson, and by treating him as harshly as I did, by humiliating him in every imaginable way, by making him do things he found distasteful, I controlled him! The times after that I was gentle with him. I showed him the wonderful side of male love."

  Raja's eyes widened. "You showed a six-year-old boy what it was to be shamed. You raped him! Rape isn't love!"

  "I had not the time to court him, bitch!"

  "Even if you'd had your time to court him," Raja sneered, "he would never have embraced your perverted pleasure. He would've fought you as he has always fought you. It is that spirit that has kept him sane all these years!" Raja had a vision of a young boy, lying tearfully on her bed so very long ago, shamed by what had been done to him, afraid to let a woman touch him for fear she would hurt him in the same horrid way.

  Getting up from the window seat, Kaileel seemed to stagger a bit from his memories. His face had become white, and a slight tremor played along his thin lips. "It was that spirit, as you call it," he said in a wavering voice, "that brought him to the notice of Tolkan Coure." He turned bleak eyes to her. "If Conar had only given in, if he had not caused so much grief for me within the Monastery, Tolkan would never have taken note of him. As it was, he had me bring 'the troublemaker' to his chambers one eve. Tolkan questioned Conar, and it was the boy's answers that brought about what happened to him later."

  "Don't put the blame on Tolkan! You had the same plans for Conar. You just didn't want to share him!"

  Kaileel's face filled with rage. "I did not! I would have brought him around eventually. I would have made him see reason. If it had not been for him meeting that ill-spawned Jah-Ma-El and having Tolkan take an interest in him, Conar might well have listened to me."

  "What did Jah-Ma-El have to do with it? The man is ineffectual, at best."

  "Conar gathered strength from that skinny runt! They communicated. Jah-Ma-El has more power than we give him credit. When he tried to kill himself, Conar saved him." He closed his eyes. "And garnered for himself a beating that almost cost him his life."

  "And brought him to the point of trying to take his own," Raja said.

  A look of despair crossed Tohre's face. He walked back to the window, bracing his hand on the stone ledge. "It was the hardest thing I had ever been forced to do. Tolkan was furious after Conar's beating. He said the time had come to initiate him. I tried to stall, to tell Tolkan the boy wasn't ready, that the initiation wouldn't take, but Coure wanted Conar a part of the Brotherhood by the first of the year. Against my pleas and warnings, Tolkan had the ceremony arranged for the next week, as soon as Conar could get up from the beating. I watched them prepare the ceremonial coffin, the drugs and instruments. They brought him to the chamber, kicking and screaming, struggling so violently he fainted against them." His eyes grew dark. "An initiate has to be beaten first, to remind him that the Brotherhood has always been persecuted. Conar's back was still raw from the beating he'd received for saving Jah-Ma-El's worthless life, but they woke him anyway and beat him until he fainted a second time. I, myself, lifted him into the coffin, a physical reminder that he would always be alone in his quest to the higher powers of the Dark."

  "And that was when you made him deathly afraid of being in closed, tight places," Raja said in disgust.

  "He didn't like the coffin." Kaileel's voice went low, soft, pained. "He woke inside, screaming, clawing at the wood. I could hear him pleading with me to get him out."

  "That must have made you feel powerful," she grumbled.

  He turned haunted eyes toward her, while tiny lines of grief creased his brow--the first sign of humanity she had ever seen displayed on his face.

  "When he was brought back to me, there was such a piteous look on his face, and I used that feeling he was experiencing to put more holds on him. I told him he was a part of us, like us, and once he was on the outside, going about Domination business, he was to never reveal what had happened. If he did, he would be brought back to remain here for the rest of his life."

  A tear fell from Raja's eye. She angrily brushed it away. Her heart, black as it was, ached for the innocent boy of so long ago. She knew now why he had never uttered a word to his father about what had been done to him. It was more than the shame of it; it was the terr
or that it might happen all over again.

  "A year later, Jah-Ma-El was sent to Norus and Conar tried to kill himself." Tohre closed his eyes to the memory. "He managed to escape."

  "How?"

  "I don't know, but I suspect one of the priests allowed him to. He went home to Boreas. He arrived late that evening, surprising the guards. No one thought to wake his father to let him know Conar had returned. He had asked them not to, saying morning would be time enough to surprise the family. Who ever thought to question the Prince Regent? If one of the servant girls hadn't wondered at the look in his eyes, Conar might well have died that night. As it was, she woke Hern Arbra and that son-of-a-bitch did something right for the first time in his worthless life--he went to Conar's room. It was him who found Conar with his wrists slashed open by a dagger he had stolen from the armory. He sent the girl after Cayn, and the Healer was able to save Conar's life."

  "No thanks to you. It's a wonder you didn't storm the keep and demand his return."

  "The King would not allow him to come back to the monastery. We tried. Tolkan even suggested kidnapping him, but I warned against that. Gerren McGregor would've had every soldier within a thousand miles on our doorstep. The Tribunal feared that Conar would tell his father what had happened, but I had no such fear. I had taught him well."

  "Scarred him well," Raja shot back. "And have kept on scarring him ever since!"

  "I loved him! Don't you see that? And like any spurned lover, I sought revenge on him. The older he got, the more the revenge seemed impossible. He feared me, aye, but that fear was not the control I wanted over him. He balked at me at every turn, going so far as to fall in love with that bitch of Raphaella's! If she could have been taken from him, he would have eventually turned to me!"

  Raja shook her head with wonder that the man could be so blind in his failings. He would never have had Conar under his total control. There would have always been the tugging of Conar's great, eternal love for Elizabeth Wynth that kept him back.

  "You love him, too," Kaileel accused. "You wanted him and he denied you. How does that make you feel?"

  "It doesn't make me insane with revenge."

  "You want him nevertheless." Kaileel sidled closer to her. "Perhaps when the transmergence is accomplished, I will let you have his body."

  Raja's felt her face drain of color. She stared at Kaileel with shocked, stunned eyes. "Transmergence?" she whispered, not believing what she had heard. "That isn't what you said--"

  "It is what I will do!" Kaileel bellowed. "I will have him totally mine once that conjuring is done."

  "You can't!"

  "I can--and I will!"

  Raja backed away from the insanity in the man's flaring eyes. She did not want to see Conar die--that was not part of either of their plans. To weaken him to the point of death and capture his soul as it began to leave his body, to chain it to them, to make him malleable to their suggestions--that had been the plan. Though that had not been accomplished, she wished with all her heart that Conar had truly died, for she did not want to see him enslaved to Kaileel Tohre in the way the madman planned.

  Transmergence.

  The evil word wound through her head, slithering like an oil slick. Nothing could ever have been planned as revenge so vile.

  Kaileel laughed, his eyes glowing. "It's your choice. You can have his body if you like, such as it will be, but I shall have his immortal soul...merged with my own!"

  Chapter 19

  * * *

  Conar's wounds kept him convalescing for more than two weeks. The old fever returned to debilitate him, sending him into fits of bone-shattering chills and sweat-drenched delirium.

  His anger at being laid low for so long, at having to wait to confront Kaileel Tohre, made his room off-limits for most. But Liza had all but moved into his room, gossip be damned, her pert chin lifted to anyone who tried to talk sense into her.

  At the beginning of the third week, Conar got up, walking unsteadily but gaining strength. In the middle of the week, he ventured outside. And by the end of that week, he rested only when Liza insisted and gave no quarter. During one such afternoon "rest," Conar cried out in his sleep.

  "Conar! Wake up! You're dreaming, little brother. Wake up, now!"

  Brelan shook him until Conar's eyes leveled with his. Sweat drenched Conar's face, and his entire body shook as though the fever had returned yet again.

  "God," he whispered, heaving, pushing himself up. He ran a quivering hand through his hair. "It seemed so real."

  Brelan laid his hand on Conar's shoulder. "I was walking by and heard you screaming in your sleep. It's all right. It was just a dream."

  Conar squeezed his eyes shut. His heart pounded, and he could hear the blood rushing in his ears like the roar of a mighty ocean. His mouth trembled and he moaned, a soft whisper of despair that echoed from deep within his throat.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" Brelan asked.

  "I've had the dream before," Conar answered in a ragged breath. "Many times before. It's always the same."

  "The nightmare from the Labyrinth?"

  "No, one I had long before I went there."

  "Tell me about it. Sometimes it helps." Brelan pulled up a chair and sat down. "Is it about Tohre?"

  For a few moments the silence stretched out while Conar gathered his thoughts. He willed his heart to stop its frantic beat and his body to stop quivering. He felt fear all the way to his gut, and it hurt. He took long, deep breaths until he decided he could talk in a normal, rational way that Brelan would understand. Finally, he looked at his brother.

  "What?" Brelan asked, outwardly alarmed at something he must have seen in Conar's expression.

  "The dream was about Elizabeth." Conar's eyes misted. "And you."

  "There is nothing between us now. I'm going to marry Ammie."

  "It isn't that."

  "Then what?"

  Conar paused, uncertain whether to continue, full of pain, despair--and terror. "Long ago, when I saw the two of you together at Ciona, I felt as though I could have killed you. When the dreams started, I thought it was a natural offspring from that jealousy and hatred. The dreams are always so real, so intense. It's almost as though I'm watching the future. Everything has such a sharp edge, so clear, so concise. It's too real not to be." He lowered his eyes. "I've awakened just like tonight, sweating, shaking, so sure that what was happening was real, I've often thought my heart would explode from the fear."

  Brelan put his hand on his brother's. "Whatever it is, it's just a dream. Nothing more. There's no reason to be afraid."

  "The dreams stopped when I was in the Labyrinth. I haven't had them until tonight. And the gods help me, Brelan, I don't want these dreams back again."

  "We all have dreams. You remember the nightmare I had when I was little? That Hern was chasing me with a giant axe? The damned thing was ten times bigger than him. I could actually feel the air swooshing past me when he swung it. I was, what?--twenty-five, thirty?--when I finally realized what that dream was about." A wicked grin crossed his face. "After Papa gave me over to Hern for training when I was ten, the first thing he did was have me chop this big stack of wood. I was so offended, believing that a servant's job, not a warrior's, I paid one of the stableboys to do it. Hern was impressed with the job and he bragged on me, but I always felt guilty for not having chopped the wood myself." He laughed. "Usually that's what brings on our recurring dreams--memories and guilt."

  "Damn it, Brelan!" Conar snapped. "This is no dream like that! This dream is almost like an insight into what's going to happen!"

  "So now you're clairvoyant? Another gift from Occultus' bag of tricks? Just what happens in this dream? Do I take Elizabeth away from you at last?"

  "Don't patronize me!" Conar flung back the covers. He swung his legs to the side of the bed and bent forward, burying his face in his hands. "It's serious, Brelan. I'm serious!"

  "Tell me about the dream."

  "I don't think--"

&nb
sp; "Tell me!" Brelan hissed, taking Conar's arm and shaking him.

  It took a moment for Conar to make up his mind, but the pressure on his arm, tight in his brother's grip, warned him that Brelan would not be put off. "I'm walking on a beach. Somewhere in Oceania, I think...I'm not sure. The sand is black like in Oceania, as black as the pit. Volcanic. But there are snow-capped mountains in the distance. I can see storm clouds brewing way out to sea, and the air is intense with heat. The waves are coming in so fast and so hard, they nearly sweep me off my feet. I see something lying ahead of me, on the sand in the breakwater. I walk toward it, even though I want to run away, but my feet carry me forward. I try to turn my head, and I can't. I try to close my eyes, and I can't. Something, or someone, is determined that I see what I don't wish to see..."

  "Go on."

  Conar looked into Brelan's eyes. "I move closer to what's lying there and I finally see it. I can hear myself moaning, crying. I want to scream, and I can't. I want to call out to ease the burning in my throat, and I can't. All I can do is watch what's happening in the waves." His lips trembled with emotion.

  "What do you see?"

  "You...you and Liza." The words felt as though they were being torn from him. "Lying in the waves. Making love."

  "It never happened--"

  "Her face is shining with her pleasure as you take her, and it tears through me like a knife. It hurts more than you can imagine, Brelan."

  "You don't have to worry about that happening. Neither she nor I would let it."

  Conar's head fell back and he stared at the ceiling. His voice became lethargic as he continued. "Suddenly the air turns frigid and the sky lowers. Lightning flashes and the thunder drowns out the soft sounds of pleasure coming from the two of you. I try to warn you to watch out for the storm, but I can't speak. And then, as though an unseen hand is turning my head, I look out at the ocean and see a giant tidal wave bearing down on you. I want to pull you out of the way, but my feet won't move."