Book Read Free

WINDDREAMER

Page 29

by Charlotte Boyett-Compo


  "Displease me?" Gezelle asked, her brows shifting upward. She thought about it. It shocked her, amazed her, but, by the Grace of Alel, it certainly did not displease her! She managed a weak smile. "No, Milords. It pleases me well."

  Teal leapt to his feet in a quick bound that startled Gezelle. He plucked the babe from her lap, held it aloft to much cooing and chuckling on both niece and uncle's part, then brought the girl to his chest, where he cradled her lovingly. "We have a sister!"

  Roget cleared his throat and decorously stood. He plucked at his trousers, pulled on the crease, straightened his waistcoat, and aligned his tie. He licked his lips, but his mouth looked frozen with anxiety. A rather sick-looking facsimile of a smile did not please Gezelle all that much. He tried again and did a little better, but he looked as though he was about to mess his breeches.

  Gezelle giggled, seeing his tension and hesitancy. She opened her arms. "Come, big brother," she whispered, joy lighting her face, "and let your baby sister hug you!"

  Tears instantly filled Roget's blue eyes. He rushed forward, all restraint and insecurity swept away. His arms went around her slender body in a protective manner.

  "So," Teal asked, drawing Gezelle's attention. His expression turned grave, erasing the earlier humor and happiness, while his mouth set in a prim, proper line.

  Gezelle's brow crinkled with concern.

  "So, Chand Wynth wants to marry you, eh? Well, we'll have to see about that!"

  His words brought a giggle from her lips.

  "Indeed we will!" echoed the Duke. "And--"

  The door to her room burst open. Cayn stood framed in the doorway, his face as white as a sheet and his hair tousled wildly.

  "Gezelle! Hurry! It's Amber-lea! She's bleeding!"

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  Conar heard the commotion downstairs. He sat up and looked at his door. Something had happened. He knew it, felt it deep in his soul. Slowly he stood and walked to the door. He heard muffled, urgent commands, doors opening and shutting, feet tripping rapidly down the stairs from the second floor.

  He went into the hall, sighing heavily as his guards snapped to attention. At the balcony, he looked into the gallery of the second floor. Someone rushed past under his gallery and issued a mumbled command. Movement on the stairs caught his eye, and he saw Storm and Marsh carrying sheeting and pails of water. He frowned. Gripping the railing with both hands, he leaned out, peering down and saw Sadie and another maid huddled together, their arms around one another.

  "Sadie?" he called.

  The old woman's head snapped upward. The hate and fury in her look took Conar aback.

  He cleared his throat. "What's happening?"

  Sadie ignored him.

  The other maid, however, looked up. "It's the lady, Your Grace. It's Lord Brelan's lady. She started to bleed. The Healer's in with her."

  Conar felt as though he had been kicked in the gut by a Zephyrusian mule. He stepped away from the balcony in abject fear. He stumbled backward until his body slammed into the wall. Slowly he slid to the floor, his arms going around his drawn-up knees. He buried his face in the V of his arms and rocked forward, a low keening coming from deep inside his throat.

  "Ambie, no," he gasped, knowing beyond all doubt the girl would die. "I'm sorry. I am sorry..."

  He never knew how long he sat that way, hunched over himself, his hands clutching one another so tightly they became numb. All he remembered before one of the Outer Kingdom warriors helped him up was that he had heard a shrill, unearthly scream, then an eerie silence. When the crying began, he knew it was over.

  "Come up, Highness," the warrior said gently. "You go bed, now."

  The short walk to his chamber felt like being underwater. He could hear nothing, although the man beside him spoke in broken Serenian. It was like the time when he had been sentenced at the Tribunal. No sound entered his fogged mind, and he guessed that was just as well.

  Conar waited patiently for the guard to open his bedroom door, then stood still as the man unlaced his shirt and pulled it off, unbuttoned his breeches and helped him step out of them. In some distant part of his mind, he wondered why this strange man doing such an intimate act did not unnerve him as it should have, as it once would have. Maybe, he reasoned, it just didn't matter anymore.

  What did it matter what anyone did to him now? Even when the man helped him into bed, drawing the covers over his chest and smoothed the hair from his forehead, he didn't react. He saw the lips moving again, but couldn't hear the words. He understood them, though, for respect and love filled the man's dark face as he bent over to blow out the candle on the night table.

  Turning onto his side, Conar clutched his pillow with both hands, drew up his knees, and lay awake the rest of the night, staring into the dark, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, paying no attention to the many times people came in to check on him.

  Inside he cried so hard he could barely breathe, but to those who observed him, he appeared dry-eyed and still. He did not move when they pushed the hair from his forehead and arranged then rearranged the covers over him. He ignored them as they talked, for his ears remained deaf to the sound.

  His soul ached and his heart died just a little more with each memory as it flitted across his mind's eye.

  He thought he heard childish laughter in the distance. When he threw back the covers and left his bed, he followed the sound to the window. Pushing aside the curtain, he looked into the courtyard and imagined he saw his long-lost sons and daughters sitting along the canopy as they had on the day he wed Liza.

  They waved to him, these ghostlings from his past.

  He placed his hand gently against the windowpane, his attention going to Tia, who had been his youngest.

  "I miss you," he said aloud, though did not hear himself speak.

  Tia ducked her head and swung her little legs against the canopy edge.

  Movement swung Conar's gaze to the far side of the courtyard, and he watched as women he had known long ago strolled past. Shades of this world he knew them to be. Each he had lain with and each had born him a child. Now, they, like their precious progeny, were no more.

  A sharp pain pierced his heart. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his smiling offspring, vanished mysteriously so many years before, and the women who had brought them into the world.

  Gone, his mind told him. All gone into the sacrificial fires of the Domination to punish him, or turned over to the lust of Temple Guards who had no doubt murdered them.

  He laid his forehead against the chill windowpane, his shoulders slumped and his hands clenched into fists.

  How many more had died because of him? Had there been women who had conceived his children who had not told him of his impending fatherhood? Had the Domination known about them and were they, too, only ashes on the foul wind that had swept his homeland?

  Guilt pressed down on him until he dropped to the floor and lay his head on the windowsill.

  His shoulders heaved. He began to cry, to mourn all those who, because their lives had intersected his, had suffered for it.

  When the rosy gold dawn of the new day seeped into his room, a single solitary sound returned to Conar's world.

  He heard a baby crying for its mother.

  * * * *

  Amber-lea Saur was buried in the graveyard of Ciona beside Brelan's mother, Angelique. Every member--save one--of the original Wind Force attended the funeral.

  A light rain misted down on the black umbrellas scattered around the raw, gaping, red clay plot, turning the soil blood red. Overhead, the sea gulls cried in their mournful voices as the cheery wood coffin was lowered into the maw of the grave. Sobbing echoed the dull thump of dirt that Grice and Roget shoveled onto the gleaming red casket. A single yellow rose, a gift from the solarium at Boreas Keep, had been laid on the casket's curved top, but soon it was hidden beneath clumps of red Cionian clay.

  * * * *

  It was a three-day trip back to Boreas
Keep in the drumming rain. The eight black coaches and hearse that had brought them to Ciona made slow time in the rapidly filling ruts along the roadway. The horses blew steam from their nostrils and bobbed their black-plumed heads, their black harnesses and reins jingling eerily in the soft snick of far-off lightning and thrumming thunder.

  "He did not need another tragedy to plague him," Shalu told Chase, Tyne, and Rylan, riding in the coach with him. The Necroman could not see out the window, for the oilcloth covering was tied down to keep out the rain, but he wished he could see. Closed places bothered him.

  "He hasn't spoken a word since it happened," Chase reminded them. "And, damn it! He hasn't eaten a morsel of food in five days!"

  "He can't be allowed to go on like this," Tyne answered. "If he doesn't eat soon, he's going to get sick." He looked at Shalu. "Has he had even water?"

  Shalu nodded absently. "A'Lex sent for mineral water from Corrinth. He made Conar drink two glasses, but the lad never said a word. Just drank it, then laid back down."

  "What the hell do we do?" Rylan reached down to massage his foot. Such weather as this played hell with his old injury. He drew off his boot and lifted his foot into his lap, smiling ruefully at Tyne's wrinkling nose. "Sorry."

  "So am I." Tyne covered his nose with his kerchief, his brows lifting in annoyance.

  Chase sighed. "There isn't anything any of us can do for Conar right now. He's going to have to come to terms with these deaths. At least the babe is healthy and strong. I don't know what we would've had to do to him if the babe had perished, too."

  "Were you there when he went in to see the babe?" Tyne asked Shalu.

  "Roget was. He said Conar didn't say anything to the infant, but he did pick it up and kiss it. He wasn't in there long. He went back to bed and he's been there ever since." Shalu eyes the coach's closed window with disgust.

  * * * *

  In another coach two up in line, Sadie sobbed, dabbing her withered cheeks with the moist handkerchief in her gnarled fingers. "She's with him, now, Senti...with her sweet man, Lord Brelan." A hitch in her throat nearly choked her with its sting. She had loved Brelan Saur like she loved Legion A'Lex and the young ones, Coron and Dyllon. She buried her face in her hands. "At least she's away from...him..."

  "But what I'm saying," Storm stressed, "is that Conar can't be blamed for what happened to Ambie. Cayn, himself, said it was a birth thing. But Conar blames himself, just the same."

  Sadie sniffed, turning her nose up in the air. Her gaze narrowed, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

  No one in this funeral procession might blame His Nubs, but the bastard himself knew where to lay the blame. At his own feet of clay! And Sadie blamed him, as well. His cock had brought about the babe in the first place. His rutting behavior had lain waste to another good girl's life.

  Sadie clutched her fists, digging her nails into her palms. Her toothless gums clenched together so hard it became painful. For five days she'd been trying to get food and drink into the bastard, but he'd touched nothing but that damned iron water A'Lex had provided.

  Well, she thought, sooner or later he'd have to eat, and when he did...

  A vicious smile eased the tension on her gums.

  * * * *

  In Boreas Keep, two Outer Kingdom warriors kept watch outside Conar's door. Another man called Yuri, the leader of this hulking group of protectors, sat in the room with the man he had sworn on his life to defend and protect. He looked toward the bed in which the young man lay, eyes wide and staring.

  "So much grief for such a good man," Yuri whispered aloud.

  He could remember no one from his village in Probst who had suffered such calamity so many times as had Conar McGregor. His thoughts went back to the day he had been commissioned to leave for Boreas Keep, the day Misha had come home to report to the Tzar.

  "Go, now, Yuri Andreanova," the Tzar ordered. "Do your duty as I have commanded. See no harm befalls the young Serenian Prince."

  Yuri wondered why an outlander would so concern the Tzar and Tzarina. But he saw the deep worry on their faces and recalled how they had sent his comrade, Misha Kobliska, to that hellish prison colony the outlanders called the Labyrinth.

  "We have news that Conar McGregor is there, Misha," the Tzar had said months earlier. "He must be protected at all costs. Find a way to be arrested in Virago. There you will join with others who will be taken to the Labyrinth. You will be paid well for your trouble, and should ill befall you, your family will live in luxury for the next three generations."

  Yuri and his fellow captains had marveled at such an enticement. Surely this outlander, a prisoner in his own world, was vitally important to the Tzar with such an order being given.

  But why? No one knew.

  So Misha had gone, only to return with news that the man he had been sent to protect was home once more.

  "And so it begins," the Tzar had sighed upon hearing Misha's report. He flexed his finger at Yuri. "I have a mission for you Andreanova." After explaining where and how Yuri was to enter Serenia, the Tzar added something that confused Yuri. "Do all you can to protect him, to save his life if it should come to that, but do not intervene in any way in what he does with his life. His will is his own and he must never be second-guessed."

  At first, Yuri had strongly disliked the arrogant, self-important outlander he had been sent to watch over. He complained bitterly to the others in their contingent of how the man was little more than an uncouth, violent, licentious peasant--not the great monarch they had been led to believe. Everything the man known as Raven had done annoyed Yuri Andreanova. His whoring and drinking, then ultimately his drug taking, brought scorn from Yuri's lips and venom from his tongue when he spoke with his comrades. Even the fact that, despite their best efforts, the man knew he was being trailed did not impress Yuri. Nothing Raven did impressed Yuri.

  But all that changed the day Raven tried to kill himself.

  "Why didn't you let him die?" one of the warriors had asked. "You don't like him anyway. His Highness could not fault you for allowing the outlander to die."

  "We are to protect his life!" Yuri defended, not sure why he had interfered. It was a gray line and he knew it. If he had not interfered with what Raven had set into motion on his own, the man would have surely died. The lowly outlanders would not have had the stamina he and his men had possessed for standing under the icy waters that had revived Raven.

  Word reached Yuri that the Tzar and his sons were most pleased with his efforts at saving the outlander. And a paragraph in their letter widened his eyes--"He knows you're there. So do his men. You might as well not skulk about. You have our permission to go about in the open, even speak to him, if you have learned their language."

  Now, looking back at the man lying so still in the bed, Yuri sighed. He found he wanted more than anything to speak to this man.

  But he didn't have the words to say that could help.

  He just hoped someone did before it was too late.

  Chapter 19

  * * *

  When he heard the quiet knock on the door, Yuri stood, casting a look at the bed. The prone man had not slept in all the time Yuri had been sitting with him, but he didn't seem as lost as he had when the coaches left the outer bailey for Ciona six days earlier. Yuri opened the door, not surprised to see Marsh Edan.

  "We just received news. Because of heavy rains, the coaches have stopped for the night about two miles from here. They won't be in until tomorrow morn."

  Yuri nodded and made to close the door.

  Marsh put his hand on the portal's edge and cocked his head. "I need to speak to Conar."

  Yuri stepped back to let the former Elite enter. He carefully thought of his words. "Wish you for me to remain?"

  "That's all right. I'll look after him a while." He looked at the bed. "I know you've been here for hours. Why don't you take a break?"

  "What you wish me to break?" Yuri's brows drew together.

  Marsh laughed, then
clapped Yuri on the shoulder, easing him toward the door. "I don't want you to break anything, old man. Just go rest."

  Yuri's face cleared. "This 'break' means 'rest'?"

  Marsh nodded, ushering the Outer Kingdom warrior out the door.

  * * * *

  Marsh pulled a chair close to the bed. He frowned at the unwavering look in Conar's dark eyes. "Anybody in there?" he joked, waving his hand before Conar's face. He saw a flicker of life and shook his head. "If you don't stop playing dead, they're gonna cart you over to Bailswith to the nuthouse." Another flicker made Marsh smile. "You ain't as deaf to the world as everybody thinks, are you?"

  "No..."

  "Well, I hope you ain't got to piss, 'cause I ain't holding no chamberpots for you when you're like this."

  "Fine," Conar rasped.

  Marsh's smile slipped off his face and a look of concern settled there. "I know this is a stupid question, Milord, but are you all right?"

  A slight nod.

  "I'm glad. Are you hungry? You've got to eat something, Conar."

  "Later."

  "That'll have to do, I guess." Marsh sat back in the chair and folded his arms over his chest.

  "What do you want, Edan?" Conar asked, finally focusing on him.

  "Legion and the others are staying the night at Bumsford. The rain down that way is terrible, and it looks like it's heading our way."

  Conar shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

  "Nothing matters to you right now, does it?"

  "Not really."

  "You didn't cause Amber-lea's death, you know."

  Conar's mouth twisted. "I don't want to talk about it, Marsh."

  Edan let out a long breath. "No, I don't suppose you do."

  Irritation flitted across Conar's stony features. "If there's nothing else..."

  "I've been waiting for Legion to return to talk with him about what I've discovered, but since he won't be here until tomorrow, I didn't know if I should wait. I was hoping you were yourself, because what I have to say is important."

 

‹ Prev