WindLegends Saga 9: WindRetriever (30 page)

"I don't think ...." Balizar saw the command in that piercing gaze and sighed. He read with quiet desperation.

"B:

The gods help me, brother, but I've never in my life wanted to kill anyone as fiercely as I want to kill Kaileel Tohre! If I could get my hands on that scrawny neck of his, I'd rip out his throat and shove my arm down it to pull out that black heart of his. If she hadn't made me promise not to do it, I'd have gone after him the moment she and I laid eyes on our son.

"God, Bali! The boy was nothing but skin and bones! His little shoulders were so thin you could see every vein in his body under that pale skin. He looks like they ain’t been feeding him at all.

"I can't talk now. I'll write more later. I've got to go see to him.

"I'm back, Bali, and as close to being driven out of my mind as a man can get. I don't know if I can stand it, nor if I even want to try. But I'd best explain to you why you won't be hearing from me for awhile.

"He tried to kill himself, Bali. My son tried to kill himself last night. He took a dagger—

the gods help me but it was one of mine—and he sliced open both his little wrists. If I hadn't gone to check on him like I told you I would, he'd have bled to death. As it was, it took Cayn a good long while to stitch close them cuts. I've never been so afraid in my life as I was holding that child to me, cradling him against me as Cayn sewed up them terrible, terrible wounds. Why, Bali? Why would he do such a thing? Does he hate having come home to us that bad?

"I can't go on, Bali. I've got to get to the bottom of this. I've got to understand why my boy would want to kill himself.

"Pray for him, Bali. Pray for your nephew. We've got to help him."

Balizar glanced up and found his overlord sitting there, his striking eyes closed, his hands clutching fistfuls of the sheet.

"I can come back another time, milord. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea."

Conar shook his head although he didn't open his eyes. "Read."

"Milord ...."

"Please." There was pleading in the prince's voice.

The next letter had to have been written on the day Conar had gone to Hern to ask the older man to train him to become a warrior.

"Bali:

The lad showed up at the training field today asking me to teach him to be a man. Those were his words, Bali. "Teach me to be a man, Sir Hern," he asked. "I need to know I can be a Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 135

man." Can you fathom it, Bali? Conar? Of all the McGregor line asking such a thing?

"At first it took me back, but then I reckoned they'd tried to turn him into one of them mincing fops the priesthood has an overabundance of today. I figured he might be thinking that he was weak. That he might not be made of the strong stuff his King was wanting him to be. We've never talked about why he wanted to kill himself that time and I suppose that's the way it's going to be. Maybe him thinking he didn't have the warrior instinct no more drove him to it. When he's ready to tell me why he did it, he'll tell me. I won't push him for it.

"Can you tell I'm happy having him back with me, Bali? Well, I can tell you....come tomorrow morning when I start his training, there won't be a happier man on this earth than your brother. He'll need to be handled roughly at first I'm thinking. If I show him any leniency, he might think this old man has turned soft in his middle age. I can't let that happen, now, can I?

"I'll send you off a letter at the end of the week if the brat ain’t done me in. Take care."

Balizar smiled as he replaced the letter. Glancing over at his overlord, he could see a gentle answering smile on that tired face. "Another one?" the old warrior asked.

Conar nodded. He had gone back to that sweltering day in August, the thirteenth summer of his life, when he had stood on the training field with Hern Arbra and made his request. He could still hear the men exercising, see Hern's stern face as he glowered down at him, warning him if he didn't do well the Master-at-Arms would have him peeling potatoes for supper.

Opening the next letter, Balizar's face paled. "I ought not to read this one, milord," he said and resolutely put the folded page away.

Conar opened his eyes and looked over at him. "Why not?" he asked.

Balizar couldn't meet his glance. "It was written the next day." He started to open another.

"Read it."

The older man shook his head. "I think not." He snapped another page open.

"I think you should," Conar said. When Arbra looked up at him, there was pain in the aging warrior's eyes.

"Milord," Balizar said. "I'd rather not."

Conar thought he knew what the letter might contain. After all, he'd lived through that long, agonizing night after moving a few of his meager belongings into the training hut with Hern.

He remembered well that night.

"If I can stand to hear it, Bali," Conar said, using Hern's affectionate term for his brother,

"then you can stand to read it."

The older man hesitated, not sure if the letter's contents should ever be read aloud for fear other ears, enemy ears might hear and realize what had happened to a young innocent boy so many, many years before.

"Please?" Conar asked, pain in his own direct gaze.

Balizar sniffed, angry at himself for ever having started this. Resolutely, he withdrew the damning letter and began to read. The page rattled in his big hand.

"There has never been a darker night than the one just passed, Balizar. Never has there been a more evil night for this man. Never have I felt more helpless or more enraged than at this moment. Can you not tell from the scribble of my handwriting that I am trying desperately to hold on to what sanity and temper I have left? Do you remember when Papa died? That's the only time I can ever remember crying before last eve, Bali. It ain’t a manly thing to do and I always thought the men who did it were weak and soft. Well, no more. I ain’t weak and I'm damned sure not soft, but I cried like a babe in arms last eve and unless I've totally lost all my wits, I'll dare say to you that I just might be crying again.

Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 136

"I had the lad move into the training barracks last night as I might have told you. Well, he woke me and the others up screaming like a Chalean banshee during the night. Near scared my heart to a standstill, I can tell you. I go running in there and the lad is cowering over in the corner beside his cot, his pitiful little arms over his face like someone was beating him, trembling so hard I could hear his teeth clicking together. That boy's eyes were wild, Bali. As wild as a trapped animal and when I reached down to lift him up, he snarled at me, his teeth bared just as though he were one. It took me a full fifteen minutes to calm him down enough to where he knowed where he was. When he finally recognized me, he shot into my arms like the demons of hell were on his heels. I told you I thought him physically weak....well, them little arms of his was so tight around my neck he near strangled me and me a man full grown.

"Of course there was a whole passel of trainees standing about gawking so I shooed them away and took the lad into my room with me. I had a hell of a time prying them arms from around my neck, I can tell you, but I finally got him to lay down. I thought maybe washing his face would help, giving him something potent to drink to bring the flush back to his cheeks, but when he tried to drink my whiskey, he spilled it all down his nightshirt and I had to help him take the silly thing off.

"Bali, if I live to be an old, old man, something I'm reckoning I'll never do if this lad don't stop scaring me so, I won't ever forget the horror of what I saw on that child's back when I pulled his shirt off. They'd whipped him, Bali. Whipped that boy like he was a commoner. Like he was some kind of servant to be reprimanded with a strap. There was lines crossing his back, some of which I think may damn well be there the rest of his life. And there were some dark spots on his back and shoulders and, being a man accustomed to war and torture, I knew them to be burn marks.

"I'd often laughed at men who said they'd been so mad they'd seen red, but I'll tell you man to man, Bali, my sight went beyond red to blood-scarlet when I realized those bastards up to the Temple had deliberately hurt this child of mine! If I could have left him at that moment, though I dared not do so, I would have fled this keep and burned that evil place to the ground over their heads.

"And that ain’t all they'd done to him, Bali, although I won't ever be telling you the whole of it. Just keep your council, man, and my lad's secret with you to your grave for I know you're perceptive enough to understand what must have happened in that vile place."

Conar looked over at Balizar as the older man stopped reading. There were tears in the pale blue eyes that refused to meet his own.

"You know what was done to me, don't you?" Conar asked quietly. At Balizar's miserable nod, the Serenian prince let out a long breath. "We never talked about it, Hern and me," he explained. "Not even years later when he and Belvoir and Sentian Heil came after me at the Monastery."

Balizar nodded again. "There's a letter that deals a bit with that, milord." He shuffled through the letters until he found the right one. Opening it, he smoothed out the sheet.

"He's home again, Bali," the letter read.

"He's brought his lady back to Boreas. But there's a look in his eye that worries me greatly and I fear once Gerren finds out what the lad has done, the fool will disinherit my boy."

Conar leaned his head back against the headboard. His father and king had done just that.

"But don't you be paying no attention to anything bad you hear about Conar McGregor, Balizar. None of it will be the truth. Well, not all of it, anyway. He only did what he had to do to protect his lady. He'd have given his life for her as I would have given mine for his mother."

A soft smile stretched Conar's full lips as he listened to the words of a dead man defending Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 137

him.

"He'll always be there to protect his lady, Bali. I have no fear of that, although I am thinking he will have to be doing it somewhere outside of Serenia. If that happens, I reckon I'll be resigning my commission with Gerren's Guard and be leaving with my boy."

Conar's head snapped up and he turned to look at Balizar. "He meant to go into exile with me," he said with a gasp of shock.

"To hell and beyond if he'd had to," Balizar agreed.

"He never told me that he had planned to leave with me," Conar said, tears filling his own eyes. "When we were in the Labyrinth together, he never told me that."

"I suppose he thought you knew he would," Balizar replied.

A single silver tear slid unheeded down the younger man's cheek and fell soundlessly to the coverlet.

Balizar looked away from the grief he saw building on his overlord's face. "There are only two more letters after this and they were written before you were arrested. I never got them until someone at Boreas Keep sent me his belongings after he ...." The aging warrior's lips trembled.

"You know. After he was killed."

How well he remembered that day, Conar thought with heartbreaking guilt. He had been the cause of Hern's death in the sandy hell of the Labyrinth Penal Colony on Tyber's Isle.

"Here," Balizar said, wanting to wipe away the shame and hurt he was seeing. "Let me read you this one. It was written just before you met your lady, I think. I don't know why I never got it.

Maybe he thought he'd sent it and hadn't."

"Balizar:

Conar, my bonny warrior-Prince, has more to him that Gerren realizes. The lad may be the very demon with the swaying skirts and the coy lasses who flock around him like flies to shit, but mind you, Bali, the Prince is more a warrior than his King ever was or ever will be. There is fire in Conar McGregor and it's burning a desire in his gut to crush them who've done ill to him and his. I can't tell you how proud of him I am—there ain’t words in any language in the Seven Kingdoms and beyond that can express it to you. But this much I can say, and say with heartfelt conviction: My brave young Windwarrior will be a man to reckon with one day and the heavens help them what think to deny him what is rightfully his!

"He took on a Temple Guard the other day, a man twice his size and nearly as mean, and beat the man into senselessness. I don't know what the bastard had done, but the lad tried to get him hung for it. Well, that high and mighty Tribunal of ours would have none of it, but they did sentence the guard to life at the Labyrinth which somewhat mollified Conar, although he was hoping to see the bastard swing."

"He raped a little girl," Conar said, remembering Lydon Drake all too well. "Holm van der Lar's daughter."

Balizar looked up, wincing. "The sea captain?"

"Aye," Conar acknowledged.

A soft whistle came from the older man's lips. "No wonder he's so loyal to you, lad."

"Go on," Conar said, jutting his chin toward the letter in Balizar's hand. Lydon Drake was a memory he had tried hard to push as far down into his psyche as he could get it.

"I am thinking, brother," Hern had written, "that no man will ever be able to stand up to my lad when the brat has his dander up. He'll be one hell of a fine warrior one day and I mean to be there at his side to see it happen."

Balizar put that letter away and opened the last one in the stack. He glanced up and smiled, Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 138

then started to read.

"Well, Bali," Hern Arbra had opened his letter, "the lad is hitched! I wish you could have seen his face when he realized the 'Toad' as he's called her all these years is really the woman he's been in love with all this time! I didn't dare tell him I knew who she was all along. He'd have never forgiven me for that. But just to see his face the morning after the wedding, see the peace there, the happiness, the love glowing in his eyes, so like those of his dear mother, was worth every time I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling him who she was. I don't know who was happier about it: me or her mother! Of course, Conar was floating too high in the air to have noticed anybody but the lass.