WindBeliever (37 page)

What if you lose her, too, Conar, his inner voice probed at his heart. How will you live with that?”

Icy winds skirled down from the Uralaps and wrote melodies of piercing notes through the gaps of the battlement walls. It broke Conar’s concentration and made him turn up the collar of his jacket against the chill. A wry smile touched his lips when he thought of another time, long, long ago, when he had stood atop the battlements of Boreas Keep and watched a ship take away what he had thought was his last chance at happiness.

“Will you take Catherine, too?” he asked the silent heavens. “Will it ever be my destiny to have what I love taken away from me?”

Aye, he thought with sorrowful irony, he had had many such losses in his lifetime. He had experienced first hand that ultimate despair that drove many men to madness. His losses had plunged him down through the abyss of human misery and kept him there a long time. He had hit rock bottom depression once when, for one wild moment in time, he had known no reason to go on living. When he had seen no future for himself save years of crushing loneliness and mind-sickening pain. It had been at one of those low points in his life, when full realization that he had been the sole cause of many of his loved ones dying, that he had meant to end his own life on the craggy rocks of the North Boreal Sea. Had it not been for Meggie Ruck, the love she had for him, and his respect and love for her, he would have done just that, consequences be damned.

Now, as he leaned against the cold stone wall of Catherine’s home, he wondered if he was doing the right thing by courting her.

The gods knew he loved her. They knew he wanted her and needed her. They knew he was lonely and aching inside and ready to let go of his past to embrace the future Catherine promised.

But would They allow him the chance? If his past was any indication of his future, he might just as well step off the battlements and plunge to his death rather than have one more person he cared for suffer because of him.

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

Startled by the intruding voice, Conar jumped. His heart leapt against his rib cage and he shook his head at the man walking toward him.

“If it was your hope to win her hand by giving me a heart attack, nomad, you almost got your wish.” Conar took in a long, steadying breath. “Warn a fellow next time, will you?”

Sajin came to stand beside his friend. He leaned out over the half-wall and whistled. “A long way down, eh?” He looked sideways at Conar. “Thinking of jumping, were you?”

Conar found himself answering before he thought. “That did cross my mind.” He blushed, not daring to look at his companion.

“Stupid way to die, my friend.” Sajin pushed away from the wall and leaned his back against it, crossed his arms. “Cowardly, too.”

“I wasn’t going to do it,” Conar snapped.

“If I thought you had been, I’d have had to do something about it.”

“Like

what?”

“Like telling Cat what you were up to.”

Conar shivered. “A fate worse than jumping,” he exclaimed. He turned to Sajin. “What are you doing up here anyway?”

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“Looking for you.” Sajin smiled. “Sybelle wants to go home. She’s bored here.” He shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to take her.”

“When do you leave?” Conar missed the man and he hadn’t even gone.

“I’m going to leave the horses here and take her home by ship. I’ll come back and we can go on with our quest for Catherine’s hand.” His grin was infectious. “I trust you won’t undermine me while I’m gone?”

“Leave at your own peril, nomad,” Conar growled.

Sajin looked at him for a long moment. “Maybe you ought to sail down the coast with us?

That way I can keep an eye on you.”

Conar laughed. “For what purpose? I had no real intention of flying over the wall, Ben-Alkazar.”

“No,” Sajin drawled, “but I wouldn’t put it past you to pull some dirty stunt to make Cat forget all about me while I’m gone.” He nodded. “But with you along, I won’t have that worry to nag at me.”

“Why not invite Catherine to join us?” Conar asked, eying his friend with humor. “That way neither of us would worry about her.”

The smile slipped from Sajin’s face. “Do you think someone might try to harm her while you’re gone?”

Conar shrugged. “I would hope not, but I know I wouldn’t feel easy if I left her behind.” He looked the nomad in the eye. “Would you?”

Sajin didn’t need to think about that. “No.”

“Then we ask her to go along?”

Ben-Alkazar could hear the boyish hope in his friend’s voice. “Do I have a choice?”

Conar grinned. “Nope.”

“He’s going with us?” Sybelle accused as Sajin told her the next morning.

“Yes,” her brother replied. He folded one of his shirts and placed it carefully into his valise.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“I don’t like him.”

“You don’t know him,” Sajin reminded her.

Sybelle bit her tongue before answering. “I know all I wish to know about that demon’s spawn! He will be trouble for you, Sajin.”

“Don’t start with that again, Sybelle,” he warned her. They’d gone through this the night after Conar had wounded Jaleel Jaborn.

“Did you know that bastard was here?” he thundered at his sister. “Did he come to see you?”

It had taken Sybelle a long moment to answer and when she did, Sajin had not been pleased with her answer.

“We are lovers, Sajin. We have been for years.” She lowered her gaze, hoping to hide the lie of her next words from her brother, but Sajin had heard the falsehood in her words. “He did not know McGregor was here.”

“One of them is going to wind up dead, Sybelle,” Sajin had told her. “And I don’t believe it will be Conar.”

Sybelle had looked up, her face flushed with anger, her eyes flashing. “Jaleel is a great warrior!”

Sajin had heard all he had wanted to hear of the man. “We have been at war with the Rysalians of the Northern and Middle provinces for decades, Sybelle! How can you treat with an WINDBELIEVER

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enemy and call him ‘lover’?”

“The same as you can treat with McGregor and call him your ‘friend’! There are those of the emirates that would see the noose around that man’s neck or have you forgotten that?”

There had been disgust on Sajin’s handsome face when he had answered his sister. “The only bastards who want such a thing are Guil Ben-Shanar Gehdrin and Jaborn, and even then it is over something Conar had no part in!”

“So he tells you!” Sybelle had scoffed.

Sajin had reached out to grab his sister’s arm in a punishing grip. “There was no more love between Conar McGregor and his twin than there was between me and Asher!”

Sybelle had drawn in her breath. It had been years since Sajin had mentioned their half-brother. To have him do so at that moment, was an indication of how angry the man was.

Sajin had let go of her arm, furious at himself that he had spoken the hated name. “You can believe whatever the hell Jaborn and that bastard Guil want you to believe, Sybelle, you will anyway. But I tell you Conar had nothing to do with Cyle Alla-Jemann’s death. He never even met the girl.”

Sybelle said nothing as Sajin finished packing. Her brother was still angry at her for admitting her love for Jaleel Jaborn, for helping to hide the man at the palace until the day of the tourney.

“If what you told me is true,” she said, drawing a frown from Sajin, “McGregor thinks Jaleel means Catherine harm. Why take her with us, too, if that is the case? Do you not fear one of the men Guil left behind will report this and Jaleel will be waiting for us in Kensett?”

“He’d better not be,” Sajin ground out, slamming the valise shut and buckling it. He looked up at his sister. “I won’t stop Conar from killing him if they meet there.”

Sybelle stared at him. “An infidel harming an Inner Kingdom prince on Kensetti soil is punishable by death. Have you forgotten that?”

Sajin smiled, but it was not a smile that held either warmth or amusement. “From the moment we step foot on that ship, Sybelle, I intend to make Conar my personal bodyguard. He need not know that since he certainly wouldn’t find the title endearing, but it will protect him should anyone try to harm me or the lady I am escorting to our homeland for a visit.”

The look on his sister’s face told Sajin she understood well what he was attempting to do.

“So if someone attacks him or he attacks someone else, you can say he was but defending your life.”

Ben-Alkazar’s smile widened. “Exactly.”

A hard gleam of hatred flowed through Sybelle’s lovely face and she turned away before her brother could see the look. Her gaze went to the intricately carved jade ring on her left hand, a ring that had been a gift from Jaleel for sending word to him that Conar McGregor was in St.

Steffensburg. She twisted the ring around with her thumb and little finger, feeling the deep carving of the ribbed edges.

“The ship will leave at first light. What isn’t packed properly, doesn’t go with us.”

“Yes,” she answered, barely listening to him. She stiffened as his hands cupped her shoulders.

“Conar is a good man, Sybelle. If you would but let your heart open up to him, you would see that. He is not the ogre Jaborn makes him out to be.”

Long after she went back to her room to do her own packing, Sybelle thought of what her brother had said. While it was true the two men got along better than most, there was still something between them that Sybelle wished had never been acknowledged--their mutual WINDBELIEVER

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respect for one another.

It was a bond that was going to be hard to break.

The Ravenwind tacked southward off the coast of Oceania and headed for the foggy bank of mist off the leeward side of the sleek black ship.

“Jasmine Cay,” Paegan remarked. “We’ll meet up with the Outer Kingdom ship at the island.”

Chase nodded, but didn’t answer. Looking at the wide, thick bank of fog they called The Sinisters, he felt uneasy. There had always been something about the fog, he thought. When he was a little boy he had feared the shrouds of thick white mist rolling across his homeland’s meadows.

“There be things in the fog, young Prince,” he remembered his old nanny saying. “Best you stay clear of the fog, you do.”

“It had to be fog,” he thought with a sigh.

His back was on fire, blood dripping down his sides and arms as he hung between the uprights. God, he thought with diminishing awareness of his surroundings, how did you stand it, Conar?

Another lash landed across his bare, bleeding shoulders and he cried out, gagging with the pain and the feel of his nails gouging ravines in the wooden post overhead. He clamped his lips shut, clenched his teeth to keep from crying out again. They liked to hear him cry.

Just as Lydon had liked to hear Conar cry.

“Where are you?” he asked as darkness swept up to claim him with its fiery brand of agony.

“Why won’t you come, Conar?”

Storm Jale slipped beyond the pain of his existence and fled to a sweeter, calmer place, a place where tall snow-capped mountains loomed on the horizon, where velvet glades of emerald grass waved in the cool breeze. Where friends gathered and laughed and played and loved and, occasionally, fought. Where life had been good and the world had been right side up.

“Conar

....”

“Take this to His Majesty, now!” Rasheed Falkar told the spy. “Tell him I will find a way to get on board Prince Sajin’s ship.”

The spy nodded, then bowed low to the woman sitting in the shadows of Falkar’s room.

There was no need to see the Kensetti woman’s face to know who she was.

Rasheed waited until the spy was gone before he turned to his visitor. “It was not safe for you to come here, Your Grace.”

Sybelle stood and smoothed the wrinkles in her silken skirt. “I will find a way for you to board, Rasheed. All I ask is that you help me dispose of McGregor before we reach Kensett.”

Falkar’s face went deathly still. “But Your Grace, Prince Jaleel will ....”

“Not meet his fate at McGregor’s hands!” Sybelle snarled.

She glared at the man cowering before her. “Would you have Prince Guil know you could have prevented his dear friend from being harmed and yet stood by and did nothing?”

Rasheed trembled, knowing well enough that if Prince Jaleel were denied killing McGregor himself, there would be one less Falkar in Rysalia.

“Do not think to cause me trouble, Rasheed,” she warned him. “I do not take kindly to interference.”

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The Rysalian’s eyes grew wide as the woman in front of him lifted her hand and fire flew from her fingertips to light the candles by his bed. He watched with horror as she conjured some black fiend from the leaping flame and sent it flying about his room, ducking as the beast flung itself at him with the shriek of a jinn. Dropping to his knees with a whimper of dread and true terror, he covered his face and promised to do whatever she asked.

Sybelle smiled. “I thought perhaps you might.”

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Catherine hid her grin as he came toward her, but her nose quivered at the smell. She saw him smile, a little boy’s silly smirk, and knew he wouldn’t feel so well the next morning when it was time to set sail.

“You are walking none too steadily, milord Conar,” she told him as he stopped before her and bowed, losing his balance, but recovering with exaggerated precision.

“That blasted younger brother of yours tried drinking me under the table,” Conar mumbled, grinning at her.

“And where is Mikel now?”

Conar’s grin grew wicked. “Under the table.” He wobbled on his feet. “Shouldn’t have tried that.”

“And you shouldn’t have been drinking,” she admonished.

He knew, but for some reason he hadn’t been able to explain to himself, he had accepted the glass of brandy from Mikel. And another from Peter. And another from Mikel. It was the fifth one that had set his ears to ringing and his mind to spinning and he realized what he had done.