WindBeliever (16 page)

Catherine shrugged. “Well, enough, I suppose.”

“If there’s any truth to what I’ve heard from people all day, he’s something of a hero.” Mikel waved at the man he was discussing with his sister.

“He’s a man,” Catherine snapped and turned away from her brother’s look of surprise.

“Nothing but a man!”

Conar waved back at the younger royal son, thought again how much the boy reminded him of his youngest brother, Dyllon, and wondered how the two of them would get along. He grunted. The two of them would get along just fine until they got their skinny little butts into mischief. Mikel Steffensberg had the same look in his hazel eyes that Dyllon had. It would be a toss up as to who would accept blame for their mischief making.

Wearily he walked away from the cart on which the Tzarina had insisted he ride, and went to a cool, quiet corner of the keep’s north wall and slid tiredly down it to sit on the slightly damp ground. He brought his legs up, laid his wrists on his knees, closed his eyes and hung his head.

He was tired, so tired he could barely stay awake. So tired he didn’t feel like climbing the steps up into the palace much less to try to make his way up the staircase to his bedroom. He’d love a bath, hot and relaxing, but he didn’t think he could stay awake long enough to take it. He was hungry, but his hands hurt him so badly he knew he couldn’t hold on to the fork or spoon.

He was thirsty, too, but just didn’t have the strength it took to get up from where he sat to trod over to the water barrel. And his head ached from the smoke inhalation, from hunger, from a day spent in anxious worry.

And he was so lonely he wanted to cry.

Oh, he thought with a tired sigh, they had been so good to him here. He was granted anything he could possibly want. He was treated with a deep respect that seemed to be growing every day.

The men he worked with had treated him like one of their own. That alone, he knew, was as high a compliment as any they could give.

And yet he was withering inside from the loneliness he was feeling at that moment.

Although he was being fed well, better than he had ever been fed, his meals nutritious and so different from what he was use to that each feasting was an experience, he was slowly starving to death for what he ate could not feed the hunger growling within his soul. Neither could the fine wines and delicious spring-fed waters slake the terrible thirst that was slowly evaporating the juices of life that had sustained him. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He was restless, discontent, bitterly lonely, and brooding on the past. He allowed himself to become morbid, melancholy, his attitude one of indifference. His rich baritone voice had become toneless, though softer, he thought. Too soft, he acknowledged, with little or no inflection and far less emotional energy than he knew himself to possess. He was becoming a wimp, he thought with a snort.

He knew he was slowly losing touch with reality here in this wonderland of gentle, caring people. Nothing had as yet been said about his past, although he knew the Tzar and his sons, perhaps some of the aides, knew of it. They treated him as though his long imprisonment in the Labyrinth, as well as the reason he had been there, had never occurred. To them, he was the King WINDBELIEVER

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of Serenia, by birth and by right, and they treated him as such--an honored guest. None of them, with the exception of that damned woman, he thought with a pang of annoyance, treated him like he was a human being.

He liked the people of the Palace well enough, but it was like it had been when he was growing up in the keep at Boreas. He’d hung around with the du Mer brothers, Teal and Roget, with the Loure brothers, Thom and Rayle, with a few other sons of members of the guard and staff simply because he hadn’t liked being by himself after seven years of enforced solitude during his internment in the Monastery. He hadn’t really enjoyed the company the men of the keep had provided him with, but he needed the companionship of other human beings.

There had always been, and he thought most likely always would be, a complex, never to be understood, emptiness yawning inside him that kept true friendships at bay. The closest he had ever come was with Sentian Heil. He suspected his childhood in Kahlil Toire’s sinister clutches might well be at the root of his peculiar phobia against forming close personal attachments, but he truly didn’t know for sure. Whatever had caused him to always stand outside the circle, looking in with hungry, longing eyes, would continue for as long as he drew breath. He only prayed the emptiness would be filled after that last breath was taken for he feared he would never find that bond between him and another human that he so longed to have. And that knowledge made his loneliness at the Palace of the Tzars that much more annihilating.

And yet he once had known brutal, unremitting loneliness much worse than what he was feeling at that moment. That loneliness had claimed him, sucked the very life from his body, leaving him an empty shell of a man, numb, disassociated, barren of both energy and substance.

Despair had driven him to his knees during that time. Depression had kept him there. He had dwelt on the fringes, beneath the ebb and flow of human existence, a being alienated from, and separate of, humanity. He had known a darkness so great during that time that it had blinded him to life. And yet he managed to rise above all that, to start his life over, to live again.

So why now, at this point in his life, could he not seem to take charge of his destiny once more? Why was he allowing other people to run his life for him? He plodded along from day to day, taking what was there, not striving to bend from the ordinary. He was bored and becoming boring. His time in the Outer Kingdom had tamed him, domesticated him to such a point he hardly recognized himself. He had become too civilized. If anything, time had begun to emasculate him.

Nor had time closed the gaping hole left in his soul with Elizabeth’s death, nor had it stitched together the bleeding wound of his heart. It had merely prolonged the healing, made the infection of his pain open up fresh sores of loneliness and he knew there was no potion known to man that could cure him, no pharmacist could brew a salve to ease that suffering.

What shocked him, though, was the meanness he felt of late. He felt meaner than he ever had. He was far more argumentative with that little air-headed bitch of a Tzarevna than he could ever remember being with any woman, at any time. The woman annoyed the hell out of him, brought out a side to him he never knew existed. One moment he wanted to turn her over his lap and pommel her ass ‘til it was black and blue. The next he wanted to toss her to the ground, throw her skirts up and ....

“Prince

Conar?”

Vaguely he heard a noise interrupting his train of thought, but he pushed it aside, instead brooding on the fat cow’s insistence at tormenting him. Didn’t she KNOW what she was doing to him? Hell, yes, she knew, he thought with a vicious twist of his lips. She knew exactly what she was doing to him. She was driving him crazy and enjoying herself in the process!

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“Excuse

me.”

He heard that noise again and drove himself deeper into his thoughts to block it out. He had things to sort out, things to put in the proper prospective. He had to figure out why the little bitch got to him so easily. Always having prided himself in his ability to ignore a woman’s intrusion if he was of a mind to, he found he just simply could not ignore Marie Catherine no matter how hard he tried. Insistently, insidiously, infuriatingly she was slipping beneath the shell of his self-erected detachment and was slowly making a place for herself.

He did not want to accept the fact that the woman was having a profound effect on his natural urges, either. That was a control he always thought himself capable of maintaining. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Those urges had not been acted upon for a long, long time, and Catherine was probing at them like a tongue to a sore tooth. And it sure as hell got his attention.

He just damned sure wasn’t ready to admit to himself that Marie Catherine Steffenovitch was getting next to him!

“Prince

Conar!”

He flinched, looking up quickly. As soon as he saw who was intruding, he frowned, his face becoming hostile and angry.

“What?”

he

snarled.

Catherine stared at the man. The incredible force of his personality, the awesome power of his presence, seemed to attack her on such a primal, almost sexual level, that it took her aback.

Why had she never noticed how fierce his eyes could be?

“Do you want something or are you here just to aggravate me, woman? Haven’t I had enough trouble today without having you create more?” he snapped at her.

Her spine stiffened. She held up the bucket and dipper of water she was carrying. “I was sent over here to offer you something to drink.”

That wasn’t true. She’d taken it upon herself to do it, but she didn’t want him to know it.

His attention shifted down to the bucket, narrowed, and then slid back to hers. “What’d you do? Poison it first?”

“Yes, but at least you will die with your thirst slacked,” she shot back.

Conar snorted. He held out his hand for the dipper, keeping his teeth locked together to keep from crying out as the woman handed him the dipper and he took it in his injured right palm. He brought it up to his lips and drained it, feeling the cold, refreshing liquid slide down his throat. A small stream of water slipped down his chin, wetting his throat and he sighed as he handed the dipper back to her.

“You want more?” she asked in a voice that hoped he didn’t.

“Why not?” he grunted. “If you used the right kind of poison, I’m already a dead man.”

“A situation devoutly to be wished!” she hissed as she refilled the dipper and handed it to him once more.

He eyed her over the rim of the dipper as he drank. When he’d drained the dipper, he threw it past her as hard as his injured hand would allow. His lips twisted with anger.

“Why did you do that?” she snapped at him.

“You know, a man can take just so much shit being flung at him before he starts to fling it back!”

Catherine slowly turned her head, looked at the tin dipper lying in the dirt and then just as slowly returned her gaze to the Serenian. There was an infinitely bored expression on her prim mouth.

“You are the most detestable, despicable, ill-mannered, uncouth lout I have ever had the WINDBELIEVER

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displeasure of meeting. I was amazed at how easily you were able to fool our people into trusting you this afternoon. I don’t know what you hoped to gain by doing so, but I am sure the real reason behind you pretending to be just ‘one of the people’ will be exposed before too long and they’ll see you for what you are.”

Conar snorted. “And just what am I, you stupid cow-faced bitch?”

“An opportunist who thinks to insinuate himself into the palace to gain my father’s trust in the hope of obtaining a large settlement for not marrying one of his daughters!”

“You don’t know anything about me,” he snarled. “You don’t know me!” He turned his face away from her. Her scathing tongue was shredding his pride again.

“I know enough to know I don’t want to know any more about you. You aren’t worth thinking about. Nor talking to! You were disinherited by your father because you couldn’t be trusted to look after the kingdom that was your birthright!”

A look of stunned shock came over Conar’s face as he jerked back around to face her. “Is that what you really think?” he asked in a subdued voice.

“It is what I know!” she hissed at him. “And I’ll tell you something else I know. I would rather see my sisters dead and buried than have them turned over to the likes of you! You miserable, disfigured gnome!”

Her anger cut him, lashed across his heart like a rapier’s blade. The suddenness of it, the precise viciousness left him stunned, shocked at how very cruel this woman could be.

Involuntarily, he lowered his eyes from the grimace of contempt on her twisted face. He wondered, with growing hurt, what he had done to cause her to hate him so much. But then his pride reasserted itself and he lifted his head defiantly.

“Think what you will,” he said with bitterly. “Your opinion of me means about as much as gnat shit!”

Catherine turned her face and spat on the ground. “You’re worse than gnat shit!”

“Meaning

what?”

“Meaning you make me ill just looking at you!”

His anger turned to acute hurt. “What the hell have I ever done to you, woman?” he shouted.

Catherine smiled at him, a vicious, malicious smile. She lowered her voice to a soft coo.

“You were born, you son-of-a-bitch! Your mother must have gagged at the sight of you!”

“Do you,” he asked in a quiet, soft voice, “really think I deserved that?”

“Yes, I do!” she spat, turning on her heel and marching away, her back stiff, shoulders back, head high.

From his place at one of the food tables, Yuri Andreanova let out a hiss of frustration. Didn’t the two of them realize what was happening to them, he thought? There stomped the Tzarevna, her eyes glittering dangerously as she passed him. Over there sat the Prince, his face bleak with hurt. Couldn’t they see what they were doing to one another? They could not resist what they were beginning to feel for one another no more than they could put an end to the persistent attraction that was drawing them together like iron shavings to a magnet.

“She’s a challenge to you, Conar,” Yuri said to himself. “She won’t allow you to intimidate her as you have other women. She refuses to cower before your irrational temper tantrums nor bow her head to your insults. You’ve met you match in her, milord.”

The warrior heard the door to the keep slam shut behind Catherine. “And you, Cat,” he mumbled to himself, “you’ve met a man you can’t beat into submission with that wicked tongue of yours. You’ve finally come up against a force more solid than your own, a man who won’t be budged by that vile temperament of yours. He’s going to wear you down just by the force of his WINDBELIEVER