The Devil's Concubine (13 page)

Uttering a sob, she grabbed a handful of her skirt, balled it and pressed it against

the wound in his chest. “You fool!” she sobbed. “It doesn’t please me at all to have you dead!” Bending over him, she lay her cheek against his, wishing she could think of

something to do for him.

The chest wound, she knew, would be fatal. If it had only been the arrows in his

side and thigh, he might have had some chance.

She wasn’t certain of how long she lay like that, sobbing against his neck, but she

finally became aware that he’d gone perfectly still. Lifting her head, she brushed the tears from her eyes with the back on one hand. His golden eyes opened, gazing up at her keenly.

It took all she could do to keep from bursting into tears again. He was too weak

even to shift into man form again.

She covered her mouth when he closed them, certain that he was dying right

before her eyes, that he would breathe his last. Instead, as she watched, he began to change before her eyes, his body shifting. At first, thinking that he was convulsing, a hot then cold flash of fear went through her. As she sat trying to blink the tears from her eyes, though, she saw his beak and feathers vanish, and then his head and body contort and change shape. Within moments, Talin, the man beast lay in her lap.

It was almost more frightening that he had shifted. Did they change to human

form when they died, she wondered? Or had he used the last of his strength to change because he knew she felt only revulsion for the man beasts and he wanted her to see him as a man?

She didn’t know, but he still breathed and she became abruptly determined to do

whatever she could for him to make him comfortable. When she looked around for help, she discovered that everyone in the courtyard seemed frozen in a tableau of horror,

unable to move.

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56

Her ladies were no longer bound. Their gags and blindfolds had been removed,

but they stood as still as statues behind her, their expressions bewildered, as if they weren’t completely certain they were awake and not dreaming.

“Help me with him!” she said commandingly.

Both of them blinked, as if coming out of a trance, but neither moved. Before she

could leap to her feet and slap them to bring them out of it, several men rushed forward.

Grabbing Talin, they lifted him from the ground. Dismissing her maids abruptly, Aliya hurried to follow them as they moved Talin into the palace. “Be careful with him!” she said sharply. “He will begin to bleed again if you jostle him!”

In truth, she didn’t think that he had ceased to bleed, but it would certainly not

help at all for him to be battered and jostled by his men. The procession had reached the king’s suite before she realized her ladies had followed, as docilely as puppies. “Find something that I can use to bind his wounds!” she snapped at them, rushing to grab the basin and fill it with water. “If only I had my medicines,” she muttered.

“I brought the chest,” Lady Leesa responded hesitantly.

Aliya glanced at her. “Then find it, and be quick about it!”

Without even glancing at the men who’d brought Talin up, settled him on the bed,

and stripped his tunic off, she made a shooing motion in their general direction as soon as she’d settled the basin on the floor. He was conscious, she saw as she wet a cloth and began to carefully bathe the blood from his chest. Trying not to think of the pain he must be in, she focused on bathing the blood off until she could see the wound. Relief so profound it made a hard, painful knot in her throat went through her when she was finally able to see the wound. Instead of the great, deep hole she’d expected to find, she saw that it was not at all deep, a good deal more than a flesh wound, to be sure, but she could see that the arrow head had not penetrated beyond the muscle tissue.

Sniffing, she flicked a relieved glance at his face. “It is not nearly as bad as I had feared,” she said reassuringly. “You will live.”

Something flickered in his eyes when she spoke to him, but his expression was

bemused. Smiling, she stroked his cheek reassuringly. “Really! It is not bad. I have herbs that will help to keep infection away … and more for fever if needed. In a few days, you will be fine. I am certain of it.”

She wasn’t, though. The herbs helped, but they did not always keep wounds from

becoming infected. As often as not, the wounded survived the wound but died of the

fever that came later.

Vaguely aware of a commotion behind her, Aliya dragged her attention from

Talin to see what was going on. Several men had trooped into the room with the satchels she’d seen the golden falcons carrying. As they dropped them onto the floor and turned to leave, Lady Leesa and Lady Beatrice hurried to the packs and opened them, disgorging the contents all over the floor.

Recognizing her belongings, Aliya glanced at Talin again. “You risked your life

for … things?” she asked with a mixture of remorse and disbelief, remembering with

shame the things she’d screamed at him when she’d seen her friends so roughly treated, remembering that she’d flown at him and tried to pound him to death with her fists.

He shook his head slowly. “So that you would not miss your home so much.”

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57

Aliya felt her chin wobble. Resolutely, she clamped her lips firmly together and

rinsed the cloth again. The water, she saw, was red with blood. Setting the cloth aside, she went to the chamber pot to empty it and returned for fresh water from the pitcher.

“We will attend him,” Lady Leesa said, rushing to the bed as Aliya reached it

once more.

Aliya studied her friend for a moment. “No,” she said finally. “I will see to his

hurts. He was hurt because of me.”

“Your grace! He is the next thing to naked,” she whispered.

A faint smile curled Aliya’s lips. “I have seen him completely naked,” she

whispered back. “I will not faint.”

“It is not … fitting for a maiden to tend a man--especially not a future queen,”

Lady Beatrice exclaimed in a hissing whisper.

Anger surged through Aliya. Why, she wondered, had she never noticed what

snobs they were? “I will never be a queen now. I am King Talin’s concubine.”

Both women gaped at her in horror. “He … he
dared
to … to ravish
you
? And you mean to tend his hurts? You should leave him to die! Or better yet, slit his throat while he is weak.”

It was only with a great effort of will that Aliya refrained from slapping Lady

Beatrice at her cold, unfeeling comment. “Beyond taking me from my home, he has not

forced
me to do anything!” she snapped angrily. “And that is probably more than could be said of those who had come to fight over me … as if I was a bone and they dogs to

snarl over my carcass! Do you think any one of them would have hesitated at all to claim me, willing or not, once I had been given into their keeping?”

Both of her ladies fell back as if she’d slapped them, staring at her as if they had

never seen her before.

Perhaps she
was
a stranger to them, she thought wryly. Maybe they had never

really known her at all. “You can make yourself useful by putting away my things,” she said tightly, dismissing them abruptly and returning her attention to Talin.

He was watching her intently, she saw. Ignoring the questioning look in his eyes,

she picked apart the tie that held up his loincloth and tossed it, almost defiantly, in the general direction of her ladies, who had moved to kneel beside one of the satchels. It smacked Lady Beatrice in the back of the head.

Biting her lip to keep from smiling, Aliya opened her chest of medicines and

packed the wound she’d cleaned, folded a pad over it carefully and wrapped a strip of linen around his chest to hold it in place.

“Why did you bind them?” she asked abruptly.

He was silent so long, she glanced up, meeting his gaze. “To keep them from

falling.”

Guilt flushed her cheeks with heat. She had immediately thought the worst of

him when she really had no reason to, she realized. She had been his prisoner for almost a week, and except for the rough beginning, which she had come to believe truly had

been a misunderstanding, he had behaved surprisingly well. True, he had taken liberties he should not have, but she felt fairly certain that any of the men who’d vied for her hand in marriage would not have shown even that much restraint if she had been at their

mercy.

She began to wonder why he had not claimed her body.

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58

He seemed to desire her.

Was she wrong in believing that?

“And the blindfolds?” she asked after examining the wound in his side, just above

his waist and finding that it, too, was no more than a shallow wound. He must have been nearly out of range when he had been hit she decided as she set about packing herbs in the gash and carefully bandaging that wound as well.

“To keep them from being frightened of the height.”

She sent him a suspicious glance, but she could see nothing to indicate he spoke

less than the truth. “I suppose the gags were also to protect them?” she asked dryly.

A faint smile curled his lips. “Those were to protect me.”

A chuckle escaped her before she could prevent it. She shook her head as she

finished binding the second wound and shifted to examine his thigh, trying hard to keep her gaze from straying to his genitals.

She found that impossible though she took care to examine his man root

surreptitiously as she cleaned his thigh. It looked soft and she wondered at that, for she had been certain when he had lain upon her that it had been hard, and bigger than it

appeared now.

Maybe that had just been her imagination, though, because she had been unnerved

by the notion of him pushing it inside of her to lay his seed at her womb?

The thought alone was enough to bring a flush of awareness to her body, to make

her belly clench, as if it was eager to grasp his manhood. Her hands trembled as she tended the wound and finally, to her relief, finished bandaging it.

“Why did you tell them you were my concubine?” he asked curiously, when she

would have risen and moved away.

Embarrassed that he’d overheard, she focused on closing up her chest of

medicines. “You said that you would claim me as your concubine,” she said evasively.

“You allowed them to think I already had, though.”

For a moment, she met his gaze. She found she couldn’t sustain it, however.

“They believed you had. I could see that.” She thought it over for a moment. “Even if I could somehow go back now, no one would believe I was still a maiden.”

Talin shifted, frowning. Thinking his wounds must be causing him pain, Aliya set

her medicine chest on the floor and settled beside him on the bed, smoothing his hair from his cheek and stroking it soothingly. “I … feel so badly that you were hurt trying to please me.”

“Don’t,” Talin said harshly, grasping her hand and placing a kiss in her palm. “It

is not your fault. None of the things that have happened are your fault.”

Aliya sighed dejectedly, but made no attempt to retrieve her hand. “I fear that it

is, or at least that I have become the pawn that everyone had been seeking for many

years. It is because of me that they have found an excuse to make war.”

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59

Acutely aware of the subdued voices of the women across the room, Talin lay

staring up at the ceiling with a mixture of a dread, irritation, and more than a touch of resentment that he had, all unwittingly, found himself in an untenable situation.

The unpalatable truth was that he’d gotten himself into a hell of a mess and could

think of no way to dig himself out of the hole.

Aliya was going to want to slit his throat when she figured it out, and she was

bound to realize her mistake before much longer.

Grinding his teeth, he turned over, putting his back to the women. The moment

he did so, he heard Aliya’s quick step as she rushed over to the bed. Her hands settled on his shoulder and waist. “You mustn’t move around!” she said chidingly. “You’re liable to reopen the wounds.”

Squeezing his eyes closed in vexation, he rolled onto his back again.

“Poor darling,” Aliya said soothingly, stroking his cheek. “Are you in very much

pain?”

“No,” he said through gritted teeth.

“I should give you some herbs for the pain.”

That was all he needed! To have his wits addled by some drug when he was

already in a hell of a fix and couldn’t figure a way out. “No!” he said harshly.

A look of hurt crossed her features, but after touching a hand to his forehead, she

finally returned to her seat on the opposite side of the room.

He was going to go mad, he thought angrily. He wasn’t certain which was worse,

being confined to bed when there was nothing wrong with him, or having to endure being constantly stroked and petted--and aroused. It took all he could do to refrain from

snarling at her to keep her hands to herself before he did something they would both

regret.

Damn it to hell! He thought, disgusted all the way around with the situation. He’d

been so blinded and mindless with pain by the time he’d landed in the exercise yard,

however, he’d hardly known what he was doing. Except for his stunned dismay that

Aliya, far from expressing joy at the gift he’d nearly died trying to bring her, had instead pounded on his pain wracked body until he’d thought he would pass out. He couldn’t