WINDDREAMER (29 page)

He walked to her door and lifted his hand to knock, then thought better of it and turned to leave. But he stopped, looking at the worn carpet in the hallway. His eyes lifted to the torchlight on the wall opposite her door, and he watched the flame waver in a slight draft.

Again, he turned, faced the door, and raised his hand. He still hesitated, more unsure of himself than he would have liked to admit. Unsure of his welcome, of her reaction to him, of his own feelings. A part of him wanted to rush into the room, to make sure with his own eyes she was all right. But another part of him wanted to run as far away as he could get, for he was the cause of her being where she was, and the cause of her tears.

He leaned his head against the door's cool planking and closed his eyes. What if she blamed him? What if she didn't want to see him? What if his appearance upset her or caused her more pain?

He pushed away from the door and stared at the handle for a long time, trying to make up his mind. He was about to leave when he heard her voice through the wood.

"Who's there?"

He flinched, looking down the hallway to the stairs. It was late, maybe too late, and he shouldn't be bothering her. When she called out her question again, he answered in a soft voice--"Conar."

After a lengthy pause, he thought she wouldn't speak again, that she did not want to see him. But at last she told him to enter. Before he could run away, he reached for the handle and opened the door.

Amber-lea was sitting up in the bed. A candle on the bedside table bathed her pretty face in an oval of translucent light. She looked pale, tired, infinitely sorrowful, but she held up her arms, beckoning him. It took him a long time to go to her. He eased himself on the mattress and leaned into her arms, laying his head on her shoulder. Her slender arms enfolded him.

"It took me a moment to remember your name, Milord," she said in a weak and hoarse voice. Her fingers smoothed his hair. "I have called you Raven for so long."

"Raven has left this world, Milady."

"With his lady and his brother, Milord?"

He flinched and would have pulled away, but she held him to her.

"No, stay where you are. Let me hold you."

"I am sorry," he whispered, feeling the numbness in his body nearly choking him with its intensity.

"For what, Milord? You are not at fault." She bent forward and planted a soft kiss on his head. Her hands cupped the nape of his neck. "What happened was Alel's will."

He wanted to cry. He
needed
to cry, but no tears would come. He felt as though his heart was breaking, but there wasn't a drop of moisture in his soul for him to dredge forth. He looked across the room to the pier glass that faced the bed and saw them both, lover and mistress holding onto one another, their true loves gone beyond sight and sound and touch. All they had now was each other, and the tiny being they had created together.

As though she had read his thoughts, she smiled, looking into the pier glass, fusing her gaze with his. "Have you seen our son, Milord?"

"Not yet."

Her smile turned tender and dreamy.

"What did you name him?"

"If you have no objections, Milord, I will name him after your brother." Her smile faltered and she tensed, waiting for his reply.

He buried his cheek against her shoulder and closed his eyes.

"If that offends you, Milord, I will--"

"No. It would make me most proud, Milady, for him to be named after my brother."

She seemed to relax. "Then, Brelan, it is."

He opened his eyes, but did not look back at the mirror; he would not--could not--look at her.

"You are well, Milord?" she asked, worry in her voice.

"I will do." He eased out of her arms and gently touched her cheek with his hand. "And you? Are you well?"

She shrugged. "A little sore, a little weak, perhaps, but otherwise, well." She pressed his cold fingers to her soft, warm cheek. "Your son is a most wondrous piece of work. He has your hair and coloring and his eyes are a bright blue."

Conar's brows drew together. "Not sapphire, like mine?"

She shook her head. "A pale blue. Like Corbin's. He even has the tiny row of moles on the small of his back that you do."

He wanted to smile, felt like smiling,
needed
to smile at her remark, but he couldn't. His face seemed frozen, incapable of showing any emotion save pain and sorrow. He looked at her, hoping to convey his pleasure at her words, and told her that all his sons had such a unique configuration of birthmarks. He knew she had understood.

"It
is
difficult, isn't it, Milord?" she asked, obviously trying to make him hear the real question beneath her words.

"The hardest thing I've ever had to endure." Conar kissed her cheek. "Thank you for giving me a new son, dearling." He took her hands in his and brought the palms together, kissed her fingertips, then eased up from the bed. "I shall see him in the morning."

She sat up straighter, a spasm of pain crossing her face. Hesitancy showed in her pretty eyes. "If something should happen to me--"

"Nothing will happen to you! I could not bear it, Madame!"

"But should something happen--" She held up her hand to forestall his protest. "Will you vow that our son will be taken care of?"

"Need you ask?"

"I need to hear the words." She smiled tenderly. "Humor me?"

Conar felt like screaming at her, asking her if she thought he would let anything happen to their child. But Legion's recent accusation hit him in the face--
Like you took care of Elizabeth?

"Aye, Milady," he answered, striding for the door. "On my life I will see that nothing happens to our child."

"Milord?" she called. "I know you will!"

He jerked open the door and fled the room, pulling the portal shut behind him with more force than necessary. He blinked at the loud bang and leaned against the wood, his hands on the handle, and hung his head. Did everyone think him incapable of taking care of his own?

The question stung him. He hurried down the corridor, took the stairs two at a time up to his father's room, and slammed the door behind him, barely noting the two Outer Kingdom warriors who stood at attention when he hurried past. Flinging himself down on the coverlet, he drew fistfuls of the brocade into his hands and turned his cheek into the cool silk.

"I can," he snarled. "I can!"

But a nagging voice at the back of his mind told him it wasn't so sure.

Gezelle stared at the two men. On her lap sat her youngest child, her baby daughter, who tried to gain her mother's attention. But Gezelle's whole being centered on the du Mer brothers as they sat uneasily on the edges of their chairs, facing her. She looked from one expectant face to the other, and what she saw caused her even more confusion.

Duke Roget du Mer looked as though he were about to fall into an apoplectic fit. He perspired, his tongue constantly darting to his upper lip to lick away trickles of salty seepage beading there. Two high spots of color on his cheekbones dotted his otherwise pale face. He wrung his hands in his lap, his fingers constantly twisting around one another. His left leg jumped as though he had just ridden a hundred miles at a stretch before coming to her chambers. His dark gold tresses looked as though he had plowed his fingers through them numerous times.

As rigid and seemingly nervous as Roget du Mer, his brother seemed just that relaxed. A beautific smile lined the gypsy's face and he kept winking at Gezelle to show his apparent good humor. He continuously tapped his right foot on the carpet, while his fingers drummed out a rhythm on his thighs. He looked as though he might spring forward at any moment to clasp Gezelle in a bear hug that would squash the air from her lungs.

He looked more immaculately groomed than Gezelle could ever remember, and his high color and twinkling smile were what caused many a maiden to give up her hymen to this handsome dark-eyed, dark-haired man. Now and again he would whistle, throwing back his head as though he would burst if he did not. When his gaze held Gezelle's, so much happiness filled those gleaming orbs, she felt giddy just looking at them.

"Does it displease you?" Roget stammered, flinching when her attention leapt back to him. He fidgeted, jammed his fingers through his hair.

"Displease me?" Gezelle asked, her brows shifting upward. She thought about it. It shocked her, amazed her, but, by the Grace of Alel, it certainly did not displease her! She managed a weak smile. "No, Milords. It pleases me well."

Teal leapt to his feet in a quick bound that startled Gezelle. He plucked the babe from her lap, held it aloft to much cooing and chuckling on both niece and uncle's part, then brought the girl to his chest, where he cradled her lovingly. "We have a sister!"

Roget cleared his throat and decorously stood. He plucked at his trousers, pulled on the crease, straightened his waistcoat, and aligned his tie. He licked his lips, but his mouth looked frozen with anxiety. A rather sick-looking facsimile of a smile did not please Gezelle all that much. He tried again and did a little better, but he looked as though he was about to mess his breeches.

Gezelle giggled, seeing his tension and hesitancy. She opened her arms. "Come, big brother," she whispered, joy lighting her face, "and let your baby sister hug you!"

Tears instantly filled Roget's blue eyes. He rushed forward, all restraint and insecurity swept away. His arms went around her slender body in a protective manner.

"So," Teal asked, drawing Gezelle's attention. His expression turned grave, erasing the earlier humor and happiness, while his mouth set in a prim, proper line.

Gezelle's brow crinkled with concern.

"So, Chand Wynth wants to marry you, eh? Well, we'll have to see about that!"

His words brought a giggle from her lips.

"Indeed we will!" echoed the Duke. "And--"

The door to her room burst open. Cayn stood framed in the doorway, his face as white as a sheet and his hair tousled wildly.

"Gezelle! Hurry! It's Amber-lea! She's bleeding!"

Conar heard the commotion downstairs. He sat up and looked at his door. Something had happened. He knew it, felt it deep in his soul. Slowly he stood and walked to the door. He heard muffled, urgent commands, doors opening and shutting, feet tripping rapidly down the stairs from the second floor.

He went into the hall, sighing heavily as his guards snapped to attention. At the balcony, he looked into the gallery of the second floor. Someone rushed past under his gallery and issued a mumbled command. Movement on the stairs caught his eye, and he saw Storm and Marsh carrying sheeting and pails of water. He frowned. Gripping the railing with both hands, he leaned out, peering down and saw Sadie and another maid huddled together, their arms around one another.

"Sadie?" he called.

The old woman's head snapped upward. The hate and fury in her look took Conar aback.

He cleared his throat. "What's happening?"

Sadie ignored him.

The other maid, however, looked up. "It's the lady, Your Grace. It's Lord Brelan's lady. She started to bleed. The Healer's in with her."

Conar felt as though he had been kicked in the gut by a Zephyrusian mule. He stepped away from the balcony in abject fear. He stumbled backward until his body slammed into the wall. Slowly he slid to the floor, his arms going around his drawn-up knees. He buried his face in the V of his arms and rocked forward, a low keening coming from deep inside his throat.

"Ambie, no," he gasped, knowing beyond all doubt the girl would die. "I'm sorry. I am sorry..."

He never knew how long he sat that way, hunched over himself, his hands clutching one another so tightly they became numb. All he remembered before one of the Outer Kingdom warriors helped him up was that he had heard a shrill, unearthly scream, then an eerie silence. When the crying began, he knew it was over.

"Come up, Highness," the warrior said gently. "You go bed, now."

The short walk to his chamber felt like being underwater. He could hear nothing, although the man beside him spoke in broken Serenian. It was like the time when he had been sentenced at the Tribunal. No sound entered his fogged mind, and he guessed that was just as well.

Conar waited patiently for the guard to open his bedroom door, then stood still as the man unlaced his shirt and pulled it off, unbuttoned his breeches and helped him step out of them. In some distant part of his mind, he wondered why this strange man doing such an intimate act did not unnerve him as it should have, as it once would have. Maybe, he reasoned, it just didn't matter anymore.

What did it matter what anyone did to him now? Even when the man helped him into bed, drawing the covers over his chest and smoothed the hair from his forehead, he didn't react. He saw the lips moving again, but couldn't hear the words. He understood them, though, for respect and love filled the man's dark face as he bent over to blow out the candle on the night table.

Turning onto his side, Conar clutched his pillow with both hands, drew up his knees, and lay awake the rest of the night, staring into the dark, hearing nothing, feeling nothing, paying no attention to the many times people came in to check on him.

Inside he cried so hard he could barely breathe, but to those who observed him, he appeared dry-eyed and still. He did not move when they pushed the hair from his forehead and arranged then rearranged the covers over him. He ignored them as they talked, for his ears remained deaf to the sound.

His soul ached and his heart died just a little more with each memory as it flitted across his mind's eye.

He thought he heard childish laughter in the distance. When he threw back the covers and left his bed, he followed the sound to the window. Pushing aside the curtain, he looked into the courtyard and imagined he saw his long-lost sons and daughters sitting along the canopy as they had on the day he wed Liza.

They waved to him, these ghostlings from his past.

He placed his hand gently against the windowpane, his attention going to Tia, who had been his youngest.

"I miss you," he said aloud, though did not hear himself speak.

Tia ducked her head and swung her little legs against the canopy edge.

Movement swung Conar's gaze to the far side of the courtyard, and he watched as women he had known long ago strolled past. Shades of this world he knew them to be. Each he had lain with and each had born him a child. Now, they, like their precious progeny, were no more.

A sharp pain pierced his heart. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his smiling offspring, vanished mysteriously so many years before, and the women who had brought them into the world.

Gone, his mind told him. All gone into the sacrificial fires of the Domination to punish him, or turned over to the lust of Temple Guards who had no doubt murdered them.

He laid his forehead against the chill windowpane, his shoulders slumped and his hands clenched into fists.

How many more had died because of him? Had there been women who had conceived his children who had not told him of his impending fatherhood? Had the Domination known about them and were they, too, only ashes on the foul wind that had swept his homeland?

Guilt pressed down on him until he dropped to the floor and lay his head on the windowsill.

His shoulders heaved. He began to cry, to mourn all those who, because their lives had intersected his, had suffered for it.

When the rosy gold dawn of the new day seeped into his room, a single solitary sound returned to Conar's world.

He heard a baby crying for its mother.

Amber-lea Saur was buried in the graveyard of Ciona beside Brelan's mother, Angelique. Every member--save one--of the original Wind Force attended the funeral.

A light rain misted down on the black umbrellas scattered around the raw, gaping, red clay plot, turning the soil blood red. Overhead, the sea gulls cried in their mournful voices as the cheery wood coffin was lowered into the maw of the grave. Sobbing echoed the dull thump of dirt that Grice and Roget shoveled onto the gleaming red casket. A single yellow rose, a gift from the solarium at Boreas Keep, had been laid on the casket's curved top, but soon it was hidden beneath clumps of red Cionian clay.

It was a three-day trip back to Boreas Keep in the drumming rain. The eight black coaches and hearse that had brought them to Ciona made slow time in the rapidly filling ruts along the roadway. The horses blew steam from their nostrils and bobbed their black-plumed heads, their black harnesses and reins jingling eerily in the soft snick of far-off lightning and thrumming thunder.

"He did not need another tragedy to plague him," Shalu told Chase, Tyne, and Rylan, riding in the coach with him. The Necroman could not see out the window, for the oilcloth covering was tied down to keep out the rain, but he wished he could see. Closed places bothered him.

"He hasn't spoken a word since it happened," Chase reminded them. "And, damn it! He hasn't eaten a morsel of food in five days!"

"He can't be allowed to go on like this," Tyne answered. "If he doesn't eat soon, he's going to get sick." He looked at Shalu. "Has he had even water?"

Shalu nodded absently. "A'Lex sent for mineral water from Corrinth. He made Conar drink two glasses, but the lad never said a word. Just drank it, then laid back down."

"What the hell do we do?" Rylan reached down to massage his foot. Such weather as this played hell with his old injury. He drew off his boot and lifted his foot into his lap, smiling ruefully at Tyne's wrinkling nose. "Sorry."

"So am I." Tyne covered his nose with his kerchief, his brows lifting in annoyance.

Chase sighed. "There isn't anything any of us can do for Conar right now. He's going to have to come to terms with these deaths. At least the babe is healthy and strong. I don't know what we would've had to do to him if the babe had perished, too."

"Were you there when he went in to see the babe?" Tyne asked Shalu.

"Roget was. He said Conar didn't say anything to the infant, but he did pick it up and kiss it. He wasn't in there long. He went back to bed and he's been there ever since." Shalu eyes the coach's closed window with disgust.

In another coach two up in line, Sadie sobbed, dabbing her withered cheeks with the moist handkerchief in her gnarled fingers. "She's with him, now, Senti...with her sweet man, Lord Brelan." A hitch in her throat nearly choked her with its sting. She had loved Brelan Saur like she loved Legion A'Lex and the young ones, Coron and Dyllon. She buried her face in her hands. "At least she's away from...him..."

"But what I'm saying," Storm stressed, "is that Conar can't be blamed for what happened to Ambie. Cayn, himself, said it was a birth thing. But Conar blames himself, just the same."

Sadie sniffed, turning her nose up in the air. Her gaze narrowed, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

No one in this funeral procession might blame His Nubs, but the bastard himself knew where to lay the blame. At his own feet of clay! And Sadie blamed him, as well. His cock had brought about the babe in the first place. His rutting behavior had lain waste to another good girl's life.

Sadie clutched her fists, digging her nails into her palms. Her toothless gums clenched together so hard it became painful. For five days she'd been trying to get food and drink into the bastard, but he'd touched nothing but that damned iron water A'Lex had provided.

Well, she thought, sooner or later he'd have to eat, and when he did...

A vicious smile eased the tension on her gums.

In Boreas Keep, two Outer Kingdom warriors kept watch outside Conar's door. Another man called Yuri, the leader of this hulking group of protectors, sat in the room with the man he had sworn on his life to defend and protect. He looked toward the bed in which the young man lay, eyes wide and staring.

"So much grief for such a good man," Yuri whispered aloud.

He could remember no one from his village in Probst who had suffered such calamity so many times as had Conar McGregor. His thoughts went back to the day he had been commissioned to leave for Boreas Keep, the day Misha had come home to report to the Tzar.

"Go, now, Yuri Andreanova," the Tzar ordered. "Do your duty as I have commanded. See no harm befalls the young Serenian Prince."

Yuri wondered why an outlander would so concern the Tzar and Tzarina. But he saw the deep worry on their faces and recalled how they had sent his comrade, Misha Kobliska, to that hellish prison colony the outlanders called the Labyrinth.

"We have news that Conar McGregor is there, Misha," the Tzar had said months earlier. "He must be protected at all costs. Find a way to be arrested in Virago. There you will join with others who will be taken to the Labyrinth. You will be paid well for your trouble, and should ill befall you, your family will live in luxury for the next three generations."

Yuri and his fellow captains had marveled at such an enticement. Surely this outlander, a prisoner in his own world, was vitally important to the Tzar with such an order being given.

But why? No one knew.

So Misha had gone, only to return with news that the man he had been sent to protect was home once more.

"And so it begins," the Tzar had sighed upon hearing Misha's report. He flexed his finger at Yuri. "I have a mission for you Andreanova." After explaining where and how Yuri was to enter Serenia, the Tzar added something that confused Yuri. "Do all you can to protect him, to save his life if it should come to that, but do
not
intervene in any way in what he does with his life. His will is his own and he must never be second-guessed."

At first, Yuri had strongly disliked the arrogant, self-important outlander he had been sent to watch over. He complained bitterly to the others in their contingent of how the man was little more than an uncouth, violent, licentious peasant--not the great monarch they had been led to believe. Everything the man known as Raven had done annoyed Yuri Andreanova. His whoring and drinking, then ultimately his drug taking, brought scorn from Yuri's lips and venom from his tongue when he spoke with his comrades. Even the fact that, despite their best efforts, the man knew he was being trailed did not impress Yuri. Nothing Raven did impressed Yuri.

But all that changed the day Raven tried to kill himself.

"Why didn't you let him die?" one of the warriors had asked. "You don't like him anyway. His Highness could not fault you for allowing the outlander to die."

"We are to protect his life!" Yuri defended, not sure why he had interfered. It was a gray line and he knew it. If he had not interfered with what Raven had set into motion on his own, the man would have surely died. The lowly outlanders would not have had the stamina he and his men had possessed for standing under the icy waters that had revived Raven.

Word reached Yuri that the Tzar and his sons were most pleased with his efforts at saving the outlander. And a paragraph in their letter widened his eyes--"He knows you're there. So do his men. You might as well not skulk about. You have our permission to go about in the open, even speak to him, if you have learned their language."

Now, looking back at the man lying so still in the bed, Yuri sighed. He found he wanted more than anything to speak to this man.

But he didn't have the words to say that could help.

He just hoped someone did before it was too late.