WindLegends Saga 9: WindRetriever (53 page)

"Haven't you slept at all?" Chaim asked as he brought in the Serenian's breakfast.

"No." There was no use trying to hide it from the servant.

"The dream still?" Chaim set the tray down and turned to look at the prince. The man looked terrible. It bothered Chaim.

"Aye, the dream," Conar sighed. He ran his hand over his face, then went to the table and sat down. He looked at the food, but had no appetite despite the delicious smells wafting up to him from the tray. He pushed it away, put his elbows on the table, threaded his fingers together, then dropped his head to his clenched hands. "The eighth night in a row that I've had it."

Chaim chewed on his lip, not wishing to disturb the prince, but realizing the man was near the edge of endurance. "Your Grace?" he asked, coming closer, "what can I do?"

Conar shook his head. "There is nothing anyone can do for me, Chaim." He lifted his head and stared into the distance. "Not anymore."

"What bothers you so?" Chaim asked. He seated himself across the table and reached out to put a comforting hand on Conar's wrist. "Perhaps I can help."

"I wish you could," Conar whispered. He bowed his head again, speaking as though to the table. "I feel trapped, Chaim. Cornered. I'm like an animal run to ground. There's nowhere for me to turn."

"You should not feel that way, Your Grace," Chaim told him. "My lady loves you."

Conar looked up, straight at Chaim, ignoring the last thing the man had said. "I can't help feeling like this because it's happened so many times in my life. Other people have put me in this same position that Sybelle has, and I can't deal with it any better now that I did then." His face turned bleak. "I'm a prisoner here, Chaim, and the chains are getting heavier and heavier."

Chaim's hand tightened on Conar's wrist. "But don't you see the difference?" He swept his free hand around the re-decorated room. "This is no prison, Your Grace. This is luxury. It is ...."

"A silk-clad prison with satin sheets instead of burlap throws, and vine-covered walls instead of bars." He let their gazes lock. "But a prison, nevertheless."

"You can't let yourself think that way," Chaim admonished, withdrawing his hand. "It will only make things more difficult for you to accept. You know it. I know it. So why do it?"

Conar smiled, but the smile was hard and brittle, cold as the snow-capped mountains of his homeland. "I can't stop doing it, Chaim," he whispered. "It's in my nature to brood and brooding is what I do best."

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"Develop a new talent, then," Chaim muttered. "One that does not require making your friends feel guilty." He got up from the table.

The Serenian looked up. "Why should you feel guilty, Chaim?" he asked. "You've gone out of your way to make me comfortable here."

"Yes," Chaim growled, "but nothing I have done has taken the sadness from you, has it, Your Grace?"

Conar glanced down at the golden band that circled his finger. The slender manacle was a forceful reminder of freedom lost. He stared down at it, lifting his hand to get a better view. He turned it with the thumb and little finger of his left hand, worked it around his flesh.

"I don't think it's possible for me to exist without sadness, my friend," Conar said quietly.

"The gods decreed that punishment for me a long, long time ago."

Chaim flinched at the hopeless tone in the younger man's voice and had to turn away before the Serenian caught sight of the tears beginning to well in the servant's dark eyes.

"Eat your food before it gets cold," Chaim ordered as he hurried from the room. There seemed to be nothing he could do to help.

Conar stared down at the ring, hating it, hating what it had made of him, what it had done to him, what it would continue to do to him. He had once tried to remove it, but the band was smaller than his knuckle and would not come off. Conar had likened it to a shackle, Sybelle's shackle on his unwilling flesh, and had grown to detest the shiny gold ornament. The feel of it on his finger was almost evil and it, like the chains of his silken prison, was getting heavier and heavier with each passing day.

"Stop it, McGregor!" he snarled, pushing back from the table and getting up. "Feeling sorry for yourself ain’t gonna help!"

He paced the room, his restlessness growing with every step, his depression sinking in with vicious claws that were rendering his identity to shreds.

He was furious with himself, now. Ever since Sybelle had told him of the child, his child, which she was carrying, he had been going out of his way to be nice to the woman. To care for her. To smile at her. To speak gently to her and laugh with her and cater to her smallest whim.

Since she no longer required the use of his body, he could breathe a small sigh of relief, but what was to happen after the child came, he wondered bitterly? What then, McGregor? Could he pretend to be the loving husband and doting father to a woman and child he despised?

"The child is not at fault here," he had reminded himself, but even saying it aloud did not make it so in his mind. The child was just another stone laid on his living grave and a mill stone around his neck, dragging him beneath the waters of oblivion. He didn't hate the babe, but he didn't love it, either. Could not force himself to think of it with anything other than despair.

Sometimes, when he wakened in the cold hours of the desert night, shivering and sweating, his forehead beaded with moisture, the nightmare lingering just at the periphery of his consciousness, he wished he could clasp his fingers around Sybelle's neck and squeeze until there was no life left in her deceitful body. He knew he wouldn't, but he knew he could if he let himself.

She had trapped him. There was no mistaking that. And for that, he loathed her. The child was a trap. He understood women well enough to know that. How many had come to him over the years with their bellies burgeoning with life? Telling him that the child was his? Expecting him to do the right thing by them? And hadn't he? Hadn't that been part and parcel of what Conar McGregor was? Randy stud and generous impregnator?

Aye, he thought with seething hate. He could kill her, his honor be damned. His promise not to leave her would end with her death. None of her servants would dare try to keep him there Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 238

once she was gone. He might even be able to outrun her brothers, get back to Serenia somehow, before the noose was drawn tight around his neck. Even if he paid for her death with his own life, his neck separated from his body by a headsman's ax, it would be worth it to be free again. To be his own man, again.

Aye, he could kill her. He daydreamed of doing it.

Sometimes he even planned how he could do it. He was capable of killing without remorse.

He didn't think her death would bother him all that much. Once, he had beaten a man to death with his bare hands and had enjoyed doing it. If the motivation was there, as it had been back then at the Cave of the Winds when he had ended Tymothy Kullen's worthless life, he could do it again without compunction.

But each time the thought settled in his mind like a spitting viper, the innocent face of the unborn child looked back at him with sorrow and he knew he would never be able to kill Sybelle for in doing so, he would destroy the child. His child. His wayward seed that had taken root in fertile ground that he had never intentionally sown.

He'd made one woman abort a child of his. Never again. The pain was bad, the guilt was agony, the shame of ordering it something he would never be able to atone for.

And then there had been the unborn child that had died with Elizabeth.

Conar's eyes welled with inexpressible agony. "Oh, Liza," he whispered. He had been the cause of that child dying as surely as though he had pushed her mother and Brelan over the edge into the Abyss. As he had been the cause of Nadia's death.

No. He would never have another child's death on his conscience.

Sinking to the floor, his back to the wall, he drew his legs up, resting his wrists on his knees. He stared out across the plush accommodations of his suite and knew a helplessness, a hopelessness, that had often plagued him. It was the inability to control his own life, his own destiny, and it was a torment that burrowed under his skin and slithered its way to his heart, deadening that organ as it had once been numbed to the horrors of the Labyrinth.

"What are you doing?" Sybelle asked him as she entered the room. She was looking down at him with ill-disguised irritation.

He glanced up at her and shrugged. "Nothing."

Sybelle frowned. McGregor never answered her questions. "Chaim tells me you didn't sleep again last eve." Her lips puckered. "I think I should give you something to make you rest tonight."

It was on his tongue to tell her no. He had a fear of drugs, a consequence of a time that had nearly destroyed him. He had once sold his soul to the sweet oblivion such potions could give him.

The price had been exacting and the cure had almost killed him. He had not forgotten his time in hell.

"I will not be gainsaid, McGregor," she warned him, seeing the tell-tale signs of denial flitting through his expression. "Tonight you will sleep."

He lifted one shoulder, giving in. What difference did it make? She'd have her way, regardless. "Whatever you think best, Sybelle."

She looked at him, studying his face, trying to decide if he was going to cause trouble. He'd been so good of late, so docile, she was beginning to be concerned. Were the nightmares so horrible that they had tamed him for her?

"I wish you'd tell me what it is you dream," she said. She put her hand on the wall above his head. "Perhaps I can help you understand them."

"It doesn't matter," he sighed, heaving himself to his feet. He stood there, hands on his hips Charlotte Boyett-Compo WINDRETRIEVER 239

and cocked his head to one side. "Can we go riding in the mountains tomorrow?"

Sybelle's eyes narrowed, suspicious of this abrupt change in the course of the conversation.

"Why?"

His smile was sardonic. "Because if I stay one more day in this pile of stones, I'll go stark, raving mad, Sybelle." He arched one thick brow. "You don't want a raving lunatic for a father to your child, do you?"

The Kensetti woman's face turned hard. "If you think to try to run away ...."

He had her pinned to the wall, her eyes wide with sudden fright as he loomed over her, before she could cry out.

"Listen, bitch!" he snarled from between teeth clenched and jaw tight. "I didn't run the last time you took the hide off my back!" His hands were painful on her soft shoulders and his grip would leave bruises. "I gave you my word I wouldn't do it and I haven't tried, but if you don't stop accusing me, I'll damned sure give you reason to next time!"

Sybelle tried to lift her chin, but his hand was too quick, grabbing her jaw so quickly, she hadn't even seen him move. He clamped her lips together.

"The only thing I want to hear out of you is, 'Yes, McGregor. We'll go riding tomorrow if you like.' Otherwise, don't bother to say anything!"

"Let....go...of…me!" she hissed at him as his grip loosened.

"With pleasure," he snapped, then moved quickly away from her. He had shoved her against a wall once before and it had been a move he had bitterly regretted for she had planted her knee in his groin with enough power to drop him to his knees, retching at the pain.

Her eyes flared as she stood there, trembling, glaring back at him as he stood a good ten feet away from her, watching her, waiting, anticipating the attack that might come. The flying body hurled at him, the gouging nails, the kicks and scratches and biting and spitting in his face that had often marked their fights before she became pregnant with his child. She took a step forward, saw him tense, his body going rigid, his hands curling, coming up, and she threw back her head and laughed.

"You're afraid of me, McGregor!" she chortled, putting her hand to her belly for the laughter hurt it was so forceful. "You're afraid of a woman!"

"A she-cat," he grumbled, never taking his eyes off her, for he'd learned that even when the woman was amused, she was dangerous and just as liable to jump him as not.

"All right, McGregor," she said, reaching to wipe the tears of laughter from her cheek with the heel of her hand. "We'll go riding." She turned away, meaning to leave, then looked back over her shoulder. "Laudanum?"

He frowned. "What of it?"

"You have no allergies to that, do you?" Her laughter was gone and she was back to being his keeper.

"No," he snapped.

"Good. I'll send Chaim with it after we sup." She grinned and flung her long hair behind her as she moved from the chamber. "Dress for the occasion, McGregor."

"Shit," he snarled as he spun around. Her idea of dressing meant cocooning himself in the robes of her people and he found them unbearably hot and burdensome, heavy and scratchy. The last thing he wanted to do was 'dress' for his supper.

"The black robe, McGregor!" he heard her call back to him from further down the hall.

"Bitch!" he hissed. That particular robe was worse than the others.

Sybelle had also dressed for their evening meal. Her diaphanous gown of ice-blue silk and antique ivory lace was an Ionarian creation she had ordered through a modiste in Asaraba. It was cinched with a braided cord of silver satin interspersed with copper thread and the gown hugged her lush figure like a second skin. She wore nothing under it and the only other adornment on her person was the wide golden marriage band marking her as Conar McGregor's legal wife.

"I am sorry to bother you, milady," Chaim apologized as he bowed at her. "But I have learned something you should know."