WindBeliever (30 page)

“He’ll not know I’m here until I am ready for him to know, Guil. He will not know what has happened until his blood is flowing from a saracen blade!”

“I’ve been asking around about him,” Guil said, nodding as Rasheed Falkar passed by them.

“He’s bested five men this morning.”

“He’s bested five incompetent, bumbling fools!” Jaleel jeered. “None better than that fat slug speaking to him now. McGregor will not see any real competition until he duels with you.”

Guil agreed. “All the same, I wish you would not come out in public like this. It was bad enough you going to that whore’s room. What if that bastard brother of hers had caught you there?”

Jaleel snorted with contempt. “Sajin Ben-Alkazar is of no more threat to me than that Outer Kingdom pig bending McGregor’s ear!”

“You underestimate him, Jaleel,” Guil warned his friend. “That is dangerous.”

Jaborn turned a fierce scowl on the man sitting beside him. “I have made it my life’s work to know everything there is to know about Conar McGregor.” He glared at Guil. “I know his habits.

I know his weaknesses, and I know what makes the man prowl the battlements at night, unable to sleep.” He jerked his chin toward the man they were discussing. “I know his hopes and his dreams. I know his fears and his strengths. There isn’t anything I don’t know, and understand, about him!” He turned to stare at his enemy. “And when the time is right, when I have him where I want him, I will do what Kahlil Toire and that bungling group of profligates calling themselves the Domination could not do. I will destroy Conar McGregor!”

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“Having fun?” Conar asked Sajin as that one bent over the horse trough and scooped up water to pour over his sweaty neck.

Through the cascade of water flowing down his neck and cheeks, Sajin chortled. “Did you see how far Barishnakov’s nag threw him?”

“The man broke his tail bone. I can tell you from personal experience that hurts like hell and it always will whenever he sits long at a time.”

Sajin shrugged. “Serves him right,” he groused. “The bastard actually nicked me on the fourth turn.” He glanced down at the rent in his chain mail and frowned. “I owed him.”

“Who are you dueling next?” Conar asked, handing Sajin a dry towel to blot his sweaty face.

“Some brute from the Northern Climes.” He squinted. “I think his name’s ‘Dumb Shit’ from the looks of him.”

“That one there?” Conar asked, pointing at a giant of a man with a thick chest, bushy head of coarse red hair and the features of a bull. At Sajin’s look and nod, the Serenian grinned. “This I gotta see!”

Catherine smiled politely at the men gathering in the music room of the palace. It had been a long, tiring day for most of them and the morning would see a start to another long, tiring day of more jousting, fisticuffs, and archery. Turning her head to the musicians who would be playing that evening, she nodded at the flutist, her old teacher.

“We need an evening of gentle music to calm these savage beasts,” someone whispered in her ear and she looked up to see Prince Guil of Rysalia standing behind her. He bent down as she lifted her hand to him and graced her with a feather-soft kiss on her wrist.

“I was hoping you would bring your sister with you,” she told him as she withdrew her hand from his tight grip.

“Jasmine would have been bored to tears during these tourneys,” he pronounced, taking the seat beside her although she did not bid him do so. He smiled at her look of annoyance, not seeing it, and continued to tell her why his half-sister was not inclined to come to such events.

“She didn’t actually ASK that pompous ass to sit with her, did she?” Sybelle whispered to her brother as Sajin escorted her into the music room on his arm.

Sajin shook his head. “I don’t believe so.” He looked around, trying to find Conar and not doing so, let out a heavy sigh. “I was hoping McGregor would be here to help me wile away the excruciating squeal of this Outer Kingdom music.”

“Sajin, please!” his sister admonished him. “Their music is no worse than our own. If anything, it is more civilized.”

“Civilized?” Sajin grumbled. “What do you call all that jumping around and spinning in the air and squatting down and sticking out their legs and ….”

“I call it dancing and that’s not what they’ll be doing here tonight and you know it. Their musicians will be playing chamber music and ....”

“Chamber music?” Sajin groaned. “By the Prophetess, Sybelle, I may puke!”

Conar put his hand on his friend’s shoulders and shook him gently. “Buck up, nomad. We’re suppose to enjoy this.”

Sybelle saw the Serenian prince glance down at her and she felt an unease crawl over her backbone. She looked away, her smile slipping and with a near-groan of shock found herself looking into the hot eyes of Jaleel Jaborn, dressed in the loose garments of a servant, as he WINDBELIEVER

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passed by her with a tray of refreshments.

“Fruit juice, Your Grace?” he asked her, his eyes lowering.

Sajin, having never met the man who had been sleeping with his sister for nearly thirty years, reached out and took two glasses of orange juice from the tray and handed one to his sister, wondering at her pale face and quickly averted gaze.

“Are you all right?” he asked, looking down at her trembling hand as she accepted the glass.

“Yes,” she whispered and had to say the one word again to be heard. “Yes. I am fine, Sajin.”

“There’s three seats here!” Rupert Von Schlesendorf called out, drawing their attention.

“Come! Sit with me, Conar!”

When she heard the man call out, Catherine looked away from Guil Ben-Shanar Gehdrin, not overly concerned that he was still speaking to her, and watched Conar, Sajin and Sybelle take their seats directly across the room from her. She smiled at Sybelle, nodded at Sajin and let her gaze linger a long moment on Conar although neither of them acknowledged the other with anything other than their eyes.

“I hear he is directly responsible for his late wife’s death.”

Catherine turned and stared at Guil. “I beg your pardon?”

Guil glanced across the room. “The Serenian,” he said as though the word were a bad taste in his mouth. “It is because of him she died.”

Here, she thought, with a heavy pounding of her heart, was a man who might answer the questions she had about Conar McGregor. She schooled her face into nothing more than polite inquiry and asked him to explain his rather cryptic remark.

“Well,” he said, eager to gossip, “you know, of course, he was married before his Tribunal sent him to prison for sedition?” he asked. At her nod, not suspecting the woman had known no such thing, he commenced to tell her the particulars of the Serenian’ confinement and what happened when he was released.

“I wonder that I have never heard of The Raven,” she commented. “If I understand you correctly, he is a hero to his people.”

Prince Guil sneered. “Peasants! Riffraff from the Outland! As a friend of mine just recently told me, it would not take much of a hero to instill blind allegiance in trash such as that!”

“And you say this woman was forced into marriage with his brother,” she said, feeling the hurt Conar must have known at what could have only seemed like a betrayal of the highest order to a man like him.

“The woman was a whore,” Guil stated. “She had children,” he said that word as though it were a loathsome insect crawling on his tongue, “by three of his brothers, including the one who died with her when she fell from that ledge.” He lowered his voice. “I’m told she was carrying McGregor’s bastard offspring when she died.”

Catherine moved slightly away from the man, sickened by his viewpoint of what must have been a great, overpowering love between Conar and the woman named Liza.

“He was devastated by her death!” Guil chuckled, seemingly pleased that such a thing had happened. “Took to his bed for weeks on end. Wouldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. But then, of course, his mistress had her brat and that seemed to bring him out of his mourning. At least for awhile.”

Catherine looked across the room, found Conar staring at her, a look on his face that said he was curious to know what the two of them were discussing. She tore her gaze away.

“He had a mistress?” she asked, wanting the matter clarified.

“Oh, the woman was his before he got back in his ex-wife’s bed!” Guil told her.

“Nevertheless, he got her with child. They say she bled to death after the birth and he was once WINDBELIEVER

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more laid low by the event.” Guil’s tone of voice said no such thing would ever cause him trouble.

Catherine thought of the day of the fire when Conar had carried the peasant woman to the wagon and had so lovingly taken her trust. She could still see the hurt and fear on his face as he had listened to the poor woman’s screams.

“It bothers him, still,” she said, not realizing she spoke aloud, flinching as Guil jumped on her words.

“Well, I would say he deserves to suffer, don’t you? After all, the man is a walking baby factory, or so it would seem to me. He has to do little to get a wench with child!”

“I suppose that is why he came to visit here,” she mumbled.

“He came here to get away from his eldest brother before the man had him committed to an asylum for the mentally deranged,” Guil confided as though it were no secret.

She turned and stared at the man sitting beside her. “What are you saying?”

Guil threw his hand out. “He tried to kill himself. Climbed atop the barbican and was ready to jump to his death in the waves of the North Boreal Sea.” The man scowled. “Had it not been for the old woman ....”

“Meggie,” Catherine whispered, returning her gaze to Conar, who was still watching her.

“I don’t know. Maybe that was her name. She became the new cook at the keep.” Guil paused, trying to regain his line of thinking, frowning with annoyance when he could not grasp onto the dwindling yarn of his tale as it slid away from him.

“He’s led a tragic life, hasn’t he?” Catherine asked, her gaze intent on Conar.

Guil sighed. “I suppose you could say that, but the man has deserved everything that has happened to him.”

“They’re discussing you,” Sajin said as he leaned toward Conar.

“It would seem so.” Conar switched his attention from Catherine’s strange-looking face to the man babbling in her ear and wondered what the fool was telling her about him.

“I’m going to break his arm tomorrow.”

Conar turned to look at Sajin.

“I am,” the nomad warned him. “On the very first pass.”

Sybelle looked at him. “If you do, then there will be no one left for you to duel with but McGregor!”

Conar and the Kensetti looked at one another and grinned.

It was all Catherine could do to keep from laughing. She brought her hand up and covered her trembling lips, already pursed together to keep any sound from escaping. Her eyes flared and she nearly choked as another spasm of laughter threatened to burst forth.

“It’s disgraceful!” the man at her side hissed. “Positively rude!”

Catherine had to look away before she ruined everything by erupting into loud chortles of positively uproarious laughter. She found her father frowning. Her mother’s face filled with exasperation and many a lord and lady darting surreptitious glances toward the Outlander.

“Oh, Conar!” she heard herself mutter, shaking her head at Guil when the man asked if she had spoken. She looked down at the floor, but found her gaze going unerringly to the man across the room from her.

Sajin noticed Catherine looking their way and dug his elbow into Conar’s side.

“Huh?” he heard the Serenian grunt.

“Wake up!” Sajin hissed.

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Conar opened his eyes wide and tried to focus, tried to keep his drooping eyelids from closing. He sniffed, swallowed and tried to stay awake by shaking his head vigorously. Reaching up, he plowed his fingers through his hair and then cupped his neck to massage the aching muscle there. His eyes found Catherine’s.

Her face was a funny shade of pink, he thought. The woman looked as though she were trying not to laugh.

By Alel, he thought with a pang of guilt, she was trying not to laugh at HIM!

He drew himself up in the seat and deliberately looked away from her and settled his annoyed regard on the five musicians playing the slowest, most uninspiring, hardest-on-the-ears music he had ever had the misfortune to have to listen to.

Catherine watched him cross his legs. Uncross his legs. Shift in his seat. Look around him.

Up at the ceiling. Anywhere but at her.

“Be still!” Sajin snapped at him.

“All right!” he ground out and crossed his legs again. He folded his arms over his chest and glared at the musicians.

Keeping a watch on him, realizing he didn’t know she was doing so, Catherine saw his eyelids begin to lower. She felt like chuckling aloud when she saw him snap his lids open and stare wide-eyed around him. Then the lids began to lower again. And his head began to sag toward his chest. And then his eyes closed. And his head fell down only to be brought up with a jerk when he became aware he was dozing off again.

“Positively rustic,” Prince Guil proclaimed. “The man has no manners at all!”

Catherine saw the process of impending sleep beginning to claim the Serenian once more and she held her breath, waiting for his head to fall to his chest, but before it could, she saw Sajin jab the man painfully in the ribs.

“WHAT?” Conar shouted, coming fully awake.

It was the last straw and Catherine’s laughter was a shriek of amusement, hastily cut off and blocked by her restraining hand as she saw her parent’s squinting at her.

He glowered at her, at those who were staring at him, glaring until they turned away. He turned to give Sajin a fierce look and then returned his attention to Catherine who was daring to grin at him from behind the constriction of her hand.