WindBeliever (35 page)

He was hurt deeply by her insinuation. “That’s not fair.”

“Life is not fair, Conar,” she reminded him. “You above all others should know that.”

“What do you want from me?” he shouted. He pushed away from her and got up, walked WINDBELIEVER

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away from her and the threat she presented.

“I want you,” she told him as she joined him, not allowing him the self-indulgence of his moroseness. “Just as you want me.”

He turned, his breath coming in wretched pants, for his nerves were rapidly fraying and his loneliness crushing him. “For the love of Alel, Catherine ....”

“No. For the love of Conar,” she answered. When he didn’t stop her, she slipped her arms around his waist and pressed against him, laying her head on his chest. She closed her eyes. “For his love I would do anything.”

Reluctantly he closed his arms around her. “This is a mistake, Catherine,” he told her. “We will both regret this.”

She didn’t look up at him. “Do you love me?” she asked.

His arms tightened. “Aye, Cat. I love you.”

Catherine sighed. “Then show me.”

For what seemed an eternity he stood still as stone, looking out over the silent garden, his vision sweeping across the plantings. He was searching desperately for an answer to the inner turmoil that made his heart thud so hard in his chest.

Help me, Liza, he pled inwardly, show me what to do.

Catherine felt a slight breeze touch her cheek almost as though she had been caressed and she lifted her head, smelling a faint aroma of lavender. She frowned for there was no lavender within miles of the palace grounds. Her mother was allergic to it. She looked up at the man who held her and saw him staring blindly across the garden.

“Conar?”

He was staring intently at a bush near the fieldstone walkway and she turned her head to get a better look at what he was seeing. “Do you have such roses in Serenia, milord?”

Conar flinched, tearing his gaze from the bush he didn’t even realize he’d been looking at.

“What?”

“The rose bush by the walk,” Catherine prompted. “It is a hybrid species brought here from one of the Outlands. They say elsewhere it has no thorns, but here it does. Do you see the bramble near the garden gate?”

When he slowly turned to look at what she was pointing at, he viewed the twisted, forlorn bush with a tiny trickle of unease mixed with the faintest hint of hope.

“There’s a story about the rose and the thorn and how they came to mate,” he heard Catherine explaining. “It tells of a man who loved a woman so dearly he died when she could not be with him. After they buried him, she also died, mourning him. They buried her beside him and say on her grave grew a red, red rose and on his grew the briar. They twined and twined up the garden wall until they were joined forever in a true love knot, never to be separated in death as they had been in life. According to the legend, whoever picks the rose for his lover, and finds no thorns on the rose, will know the love of his lady for him will never die, that she will wait for him forever.”

There was a garden behind the protected walls of Boreas Keep where once a young man, long, long ago had told a pretty young girl of another legend of roses and thorns.

He had not forgotten that day. Or the pretty young girl.

And she had not forgotten it, either.

“Conar?”

He looked down at Catherine’s worried face. “Is something wrong?” she asked him for there was a look on his face that concerned her.

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Let me go, Conar
, came the gentle whisper on the breeze,
it is time to move on, milord
.

Catherine saw his shoulders sag, but then he seemed to come out of some dark thoughts. He looked down at her for a long moment.

“Do you smell that?” he asked in a soft voice.

“The lavender?” Catherine nodded. “I can’t imagine where it is coming from. There is none anywhere near the palace.”

For the first time that evening he smiled. The words he spoke were music to her ears.

“If you will have me, Cat,” he said in a husky voice, “I want to ask your father for the privilege of courting you.”

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Sajin didn’t want to take the smile from his new friend’s face, but he thought the man had a right to know what he’d found out.

“Out with it, nomad,” Conar demanded. “If you keep it in much longer, you’ll burst.”

The Kensetti prince frowned. “You’re not going to like it.”

Conar paused in lacing his shirt and looked at Sajin through the mirror. “Rupert and Cat eloped during the night and are going to name their first born after you.” He wagged his brows and grinned.

A snort was the only comment Ben-Alkazar made to the asinine remark. He sat down on Conar’s bed. “It’s about that bastard you dueled with yesterday.”

“Did you find out who he was?” Conar reached for his leather jacket, which was lying in a heap by the hearth and shrugged it on.

Bidding for time, not wanting to tell the Serenian what he’d learned, Sajin looked about the room. There were clothes all over the floor, on the drapery rods, on the backs of chairs and settee alike. A pair of socks were stuffed into the top of a porcelain vase, a shirt lay crumpled in one corner of the room. There was even a pair of breeches dangling from a portrait over the massive mahogany bed. He shook his head. “You’re a pig, McGregor.”

“So I’ve been told,” the Outlander commented dryly. He put his booted foot on the coverlet beside Sajin’s leg, leaned forward and crossed his arms over his knee. “All right. You’ve got my attention. Tell me.”

Sajin let out a long breath. “The man you crippled yesterday was Jaleel Jaborn.”

Conar stared at the Kensetti. He didn’t say anything at all, did not even blink. His face, for all the expression it held, might well have been carved from stone. When he finally straightened up and placed his foot on the floor, his hands on his hips and continued to stare down at the nomad, his dark eyes began to fill with an unholy light of pure fury.

“Did you know this yestermorn when I was fighting the son-of-a-bitch?” Conar growled.

Sajin shook his head. “I thought his voice sounded familiar when he was shouting at you, but I didn’t put it all together until after he was being helped from the field.” He didn’t want to tell Conar Yuri had suspected all along who the man was. If Yuri wanted him to know, Yuri could tell him. “If I’d told you then, you’d have gone after him and ....”

“Aye, I would have!” Conar bellowed. “Where is the motherfucker now?”

The Kensetti could answer with a great deal of relief. “Gone, both him and Guil. They left by ship as soon as the doctor was finished stitching Jaborn’s shoulder.”

A rumble of rage erupted from Conar’s throat. “And I don’t suppose you thought of having them stopped for me, did you?” His gaze narrowed. “Or were you giving your countrymen time to escape?”

Sajin’s face turned hard. “You know better than that!” he snapped. “They are not Kensetti, Conar. They are Rysalian and I have about as much love for that hell-spawned country as you do for Diabolusia!”

“You knew I would have killed him if I’d had the chance, didn’t you?” Conar shouted at him.

When the nomad didn’t answer, the question was bellowed again in a tone reserved for the acutely hard of hearing. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes!” Sajin shouted back. “And seen you sent to one of this frozen country’s gulags for your troubles!” He stood up, facing his friend with an equally angry look. “Tzar Thomas would have had no choice but to have had you arrested for killing the bastard. You’d already wounded WINDBELIEVER

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him. As far as Outer Kingdom law goes, that is the only thing they would have allowed. Believe me, if the Tzar had for one moment suspected the two of you were seriously intent on killing the other, he would have stopped the contest.”

“Did it never occur to that man that Jaborn was trying to kill me?” Conar spat.

“No one, not even Prince Guil, I suspect, thought Jaborn could do that. You did what everyone knew you would do--you wounded him seriously enough to stop the fight. He’ll bear that wound the rest of his life.”

“Aye, and let it fester along with his hatred for me! This won’t end between him and me until one of us is dead, Sajin!”

Ben-Alkazar reached out and gripped his friend’s shoulder. “I have no doubt of that. The die was cast between the two of you long ago, but if you’re going to go after him, Conar, go after him somewhere where you won’t be imprisoned for taking his life.”

“Like

where?”

“Serenia.” Sajin nodded at Conar’s narrowed look. “Or Virago or Chale or Ionary or one of the other countries where you know you won’t be arrested for murder.” He stared hard at his friend. “Because we both know that is what it will be.”

“He tried to have my wife kidnapped, Sajin! Twice!” Conar reminded the man with a raging shout. “If what I suspect is true, he’s also directly responsible for the death of one of my Elite and damned near caused MY death in the bargain! Not once, but twice, in Serenia and in Chrystallus. Because of him a good friend was wounded and another lost his twin brother.” His face turned hard as stone. “I have a lot to make that bastard atone for!” He ground his teeth together and forced his words through the constriction of his jaws. “For all I know he might well have had something to do with my daughter’s death!”

Sajin’s heart missed a beat. “Your daughter?”

Conar turned away, the pain of Nadia’s death still an agonizing ache in his heart. “My little girl was taken from the keep.” He swallowed, the memory of that flooding his eyes with tears.

“My brother, Brelan, found her in the loft of the stable where Liza and I met.” He flinched, seeing the pitiful burden Brelan had brought back to him from the Hound and Stag.

“How had she died?” Sajin asked quietly, already suspecting the answer and praying it would not come.

“Her ....” Conar shook his head to rid himself of the horrible memory of what he had seen that day outside the walls of Boreas Keep. “She’d been ....”

The Kensetti knew the man couldn’t say it, so he said it for him. “Her throat had been cut.”

At Conar’s silent nod, Sajin squeezed his lids tightly shut. He hoped the Serenian wouldn’t ask him how he had thought of that particular atrocity and he didn’t.

“If I ever find the man responsible for Nadia’s death,” Conar said, “I’ll cut the flesh from his body, strip by bloody strip.”

Sajin opened his eyes and looked across the room at the man who was staring down into the courtyard. There was a vibration of primal emotion strumming through the room and Conar McGregor’s body was as rigid as steel as he stood there at the window. It was a long time before the Outlander spoke again.

“You did the right thing in not telling me who that bastard was, Sajin.”

Ben-Alkazar exhaled a long, worried sigh. There was no way he dared tell this man of the rumors about Prince Jaleel Jaborn that were common knowledge in the Inner Kingdom emirates.

Of how the man, deep in his cups one night, had bragged of slitting the throat of an enemy’s child and watching that child bleed to death in his hands.

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Of how Jaborn had bragged that he would one day have his enemy’s wife and do to her what had once been done to the only woman Jaborn had ever loved.

“I’ll make her suffer as my Cyle did,” he had promised. “I will take his woman time and time again, making her scream with the taking, and then I will send her broken body home to him for him to bury what is left of it!”

“Did you hear me?”

Sajin jumped, focusing on the man across the room from him. He stared at Conar, wanting to protect this man from the knowledge he, himself, had of Jaleel Jaborn, for he knew, without any doubt at all, that Conar McGregor would move heaven and earth to find the man who had murdered his child.

“I heard you.”

“Will you help me?” Conar wondered at the strange look on Ben-Alkazar’s face, “to lure Jaborn to Serenia?”

The Kensetti knew he’d never tell Conar Jaborn had been to Serenia many times. “What of Catherine?” he asked, wanting to forestall any further discussion of the Rysalian.

Conar smiled, but it was not a smile that spoke of having his thoughts turned from the subject at hand.

“I’ve asked for permission to court her.”

Sajin’s left brow shot up. “Are you aware that I have, as well?”

There was a slow nod of acknowledgement. “Aye, but I don’t think you stand a snowball’s chance, my friend.”

Ben-Alkazar shrugged. “I’m going to give it my best shot.” He cocked his head to one side.

“I bet you a gold Ryal against one of your copper Sentis that I’ll win her in the end.”

McGregor walked away from the window and came to the Kensetti, draped his arm around the other man’s shoulder and squeezed Ben-Alkazar against him. The smile became real on Conar’s handsome face as he leaned sideways and whispered in Sajin’s ear. “I’ll take that bet, nomad.”

Sajin chuckled. “May the best man win,” he admonished, jabbing a playful fist into Conar’s side.

“He will,” Conar shot back. He took his arm away and then looked Sajin in the eye. “Now, are you going to help me get that nomad jackal to Serenia or not?”

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Wyn walked between his brothers, not speaking, but listening to the eldest of the two telling him about what had been going on at Boreas Keep since he’d been gone. Now and again, he would look at the younger boy and listen as that one added a comment or two or his own. That the boy could not meet his eyes, told Wyn the child had not accepted him as yet, but that he wanted to be as much a part of Wyn’s world as Tristan did.

“Do you think we should go after Papa?” Tristan asked his older brother.

Conar McGregor’s oldest son shifted the child in his arms and bent his head to nuzzle the little boy’s strawberry blond curls. “What do you think, Bre? Should we go after our missing sire?”