Galen’s face turned ugly with contempt and rage. "By what right do you give me such an order? This woman is not yours!"
"Nor is she yours! Keep your hands off her!"
He would have retaliated, but Galen could see how Liza shivered with fright, could see the deathly pallor of her skin. He turned hostile eyes to Gezelle. "Get my physician!"
"She doesn’t need a physician," Conar told him, gathering the frightened girl closer as though he could keep anyone from ever touching her again.
"Aye? She only needs you, is that it?" Galen shouted, all semblance of civilized behavior gone from his furious face.
"She has what she needs. She has me and you can get the hell out of here!"
"You know better, Prince Conar! She can’t have you and you sure as hell can’t have her!" His voice went low and dark and contemptuous. "The Tribunal will see to that!"
If he could have reached his twin, Conar would have gutted him, but the quivering girl sensed his anger and clutched at him, clinging furiously. He could feel her thundering heart beating against his ribcage.
"You are frightening her more!" Galen snapped.
"She had a bad dream," Conar thundered. "Nothing more. If you’ll get out of here, maybe she can go back to sleep!"
"Milady, please," Galen pleaded, seeing how the angry words he and his brother were flinging at one another was upsetting her. He lowered his voice to a soft, caressing croon. "Please let my man look at you. Perhaps he can give you something to help you rest, if nothing else. I like not the paleness of your flesh."
Galen wanted desperately to take the girl into his arms. He wanted to hold her, kiss her, keep her safe. When Liza nodded acceptance, his look turned hard with victory as he glowered at Conar. "I’ll send for my physician."
"I’ve already sent for him," a voice spoke.
Conar looked past Galen and saw the burly Master-at-Arms standing in the doorway, his scarred face a study of deep worry. His gaze strayed to Conar, then slid slowly away.
"Thank you, Sir," Liza said quietly to the Master-at-Arms and the burly man nodded.
"That will be all," Galen snapped at Gezelle as she hovered near the bed. "You are no longer required here."
"She stays," Conar said.
Galen turned on his brother with a fierce glower of rage. "Is that so? And since when do you order my servants about this keep?" His spine was taut with challenge; his voice laced with contempt.
Conar smiled at his twin, and it was a smile so evil and so filled with promise, that Galen took a step backward. "The girl belongs to me, Galen, and I wish her to stay."
"She is my servant!" Galen screamed. "This is my keep!"
"No, Galen," Conar said in a reasonable, pleasant voice. "This is my keep." His voice was steady and calm, but shot with triumph. "All the people who serve here, and that includes you, belong to me." He stopped smiling and his eyes went glacial. "It is high time you remembered that, Galen McGregor."
Seething with rage, humiliated by being put in his place, especially in front of Liza, Galen stalked from the room, knocking aside the elderly physician who was just entering. "See well to the lady," he hissed as he thundered down the hall to his chambers.
Conar was ordered from the room, the door closed in his face, as the physician looked to his patient. Twice he would have opened the door if the Master-at-Arms, who stood vigil, had not stepped directly in front of him, silently reminding his Overlord that the physician did not want the young Prince in the room.
When the Healer was through, he came into the hall. "I have given the lady some sleeping powders to take if she should need them. She doesn’t think she will, but they are there for her. Taken with a small amount of wine, the powders are most effective." He pinched his hawk-like nose between his thumb and forefinger and sighed. "The lady will need wine, in any case. It will help her relax."
"I’ll see to it," Conar promised.
"Call me if she should need me," the physician said quietly. "May I suggest you get some sleep, as well, Your Grace? You do not look well." Bowing a head filled with a shock of thick white hair, the old man, his joints crippled and twisted with advanced age and arthritis, hobbled down the stairs on knees whose cartilages had been devoured with time and disease.
Conar was annoyed at the Healer’s observation of the way he looked, although, if truth were told, he felt sick to his stomach. He looked at the Master-at-Arms. "Get the lady some wine."
"I will stand guard at her door."
"Belvoir," Conar began, suddenly remembering the man’s name.
"I will stand guard, Your Grace." He folded his massive arms over his barrel chest, his face carefully blank. His eyes said there would be no discussion. Prince or no Prince, he meant to stay. "The girl can go."
Conar glared at him, realizing the man was not to be intimidated. He sighed. "You think she needs a guard in this keep?"
"I will stand guard."
Looking at the man’s uncompromising face, Conar shrugged. He reached for the handle of Liza’s door, but stopped. "Have it your way, Belvoir, but no one would dare harm the lady while she is in this keep."
"I know they will not, Your Grace."
Conar shook his head. He didn’t doubt the man’s answer for a moment.
"Thank you for your loyalty, Belvoir," he said and saw the man nod once before looking away.
Liza lay in the bed, her long hair fanned out around her on the silk pillowcase. She smiled wanly at Conar as he sat beside her. "I am sorry to have caused you trouble, Milord."
Conar caressed her cheek with his thumb. "No trouble, Milady. Do you think you can sleep now? No nightmare would dare bother you with Belvoir outside your door." He smiled.
Liza’s eyes crinkled with merriment. "They’d be too afraid to enter the room with that good knight there to protect me."
"Aye." Absently, Conar’s thumb smoothed down her cheek and across her lower lip. He scanned that lovely fullness and then slowly raised his eyes to hers. "I am only a heartbeat away from you, Milady."
Her face flushed. "I am grateful, Milord."
"You have had this dream before?"
She glanced up at him. "Many times."
"And called my name to rescue you? I am touched."
She blushed. "My knight of the realm to the rescue, of course."
"Of course."
"I will be fine now. Truly I will. Go back to bed, Milord."
He wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. She wanted to be no bother, to be no cause of his own sleeplessness, but he feared she would be. For many nights to come.
Turning over his hand, he drew his scarred knuckles, knuckles that had encountered many a hard jaw and even harder wall, down her soft cheek. Speaking over his shoulder, he ordered Gezelle to fetch wine from the study.
"And bring me a tumbler, as well," he asked. He had a feeling it would be a long, long night.
After Gezelle had slipped quietly from the room, Liza turned to Conar. "Please go back to bed, Milord. I promise I will have no more nightmares this eve." Her sweet smile melted his heart with its beauty.
"You promise?"
She raised her hand and crossed her heart. "I promise, good sir."
He returned to his room, passing Belvoir, who stood against the wall beside Liza’s door. He mumbled a good eve to the Master-at-Arms and closed the door to his room, leaning against the portal for a long while, wondering why he had not kissed the lady good eve. He had wanted to, felt she would have liked for him to, but something had stopped him, had almost seemed to warn him away from her. He felt again the unease that always troubled him at Norus. His eyes narrowed into slits of worry. What was it about this place that set his teeth on edge? It was more than the old legends. It was more than the nervousness he always felt while visiting here. It seemed to spread over him this night with an all-pervasive stench that smothered him.
There was knock on his door. He jumped, his heart skipping a beat.
"Your Grace? I have your wine," th
e servant girl called.
"Damn it, you idiot!" he cursed under his breath. "Get yourself together, McGregor!"
He opened the door, grabbed the wine goblet, drained it, and handed it back to Gezelle. "I ordered a decanter," he snapped as he slammed the door in the girl’s startled face.
Gezelle stood there for a moment and then shrugged. In her left hand she held the empty goblet that had been intended for the lady; in her right was the full decanter of port His Grace had asked for. Should she knock and give him the decanter or leave him alone?
"I’d leave him alone if I were you, ’Zelle," Belvoir told her as though he sensed her uncertainty.
Gezelle smiled at the big man. "I think so, too, Sir Belvoir."
Without removing his breeches this time, Conar stretched out on his bed and looked at the ceiling. His thoughts strayed across the hall. He thought of the intrusion this girl had brought into his life, and he smiled.
She was a distraction, that was a certainty. Her sweet smile and gentle voice, her angry and flashing eyes, her beautiful face enticed him. Her stubbornness and female logic confused him. Her expertise with the weapons she carried annoyed him somewhat; but her utilizing of them to save his skin made him proud.
She fascinated him as no other woman ever had. He could close his eyes and see her as clearly in his mind as he could the tall peaks of Mount Serenia that he had viewed nearly every day of his life. He could hear her lilting laugh and soft voice; feel the texture of her skin against his fingertips although a full twenty feet or more separated them. He could even taste the silk of her lips on his own.
Aye, he thought with some dismay. The girl had intruded into his life, not gently and insidiously, but like an avalanche.
"Conar’s pretty little intrusion," he thought aloud and grinned, thinking that was the same phrase Rayle Loure used to characterize his wife, Aurora.
He supposed all wives were an intrusion into a man’s life. They came; they stayed; they tormented you. But some, like his Liza, would never make life’s journey dull. She would make him a most invigorating and challenging wife.
He jerked up as though stung by a wasp. Where the hell did that notion come from? Liza as his wife? The thought of her in that capacity shook him to his very core and he mentally tore his train of thought away from such a dangerous idea. Thoroughly aghast, he lay down and pulled the pillow over his face, groaning with frustration.
Within a matter of seconds he was fast asleep.
He never heard the panel across the room from his bed slide open on well-oiled hinges. Never heard the soft, urgent voices speaking as they bent over his unconscious form. Never felt the hands that lifted him and carried him through a secret passageway into the very bowels of Norus Keep.
Across the hall, Liza turned fitfully in her sleep, calling out softly. She had refused the wine Gezelle brought to her, instead, giving it to the servant girl who had never before tasted wine.
Gezelle tossed in her own sleep, smiling, thinking what a wonderful thing was this wine.
Chapter 8
* * *
His head ached with a blinding agony that reluctantly dragged open his eyes. He knew immediately where he was.
"Galen!"
He jerked viciously on the chains that bound him spread-eagle to the uprights on either side of him, but his wrists and ankles were banded with thick iron manacles. Jerking on the restraints broke open the flesh along his wrists and sent pain shooting up his arms.
Another howl of pure rage tore through the darkness.
To be stupid enough to be drugged was one thing. To wake up, trussed like a common criminal, in the dungeon of a keep that by all rights belonged to him, was something else. He screamed in fury and tore at the chains again, feeling a trickle of blood slipping down his left wrist.
"Galen McGregor! You’re a dead man!"
His attention went to a glowing brazier filled with long-handled instruments that glowed in the bowels of the fire. He threw back his head and howled again. By the gods, he would cripple Galen McGregor!
He didn’t feel fear as much as boiling, rigid anger, and then that anger bubbled over into humiliation at the realization that he, and he alone, was solely responsible for his own predicament. Arriving at Norus without benefit of his own personal guard had finally proven to be his undoing. His own ego and arrogance had put him in such dire straits.
Conar knew, without a doubt, that Galen intended to use everything at his disposal to see that his brother abdicated the throne to him. One more look at the torture instruments in the brazier and Conar wasn’t so sure that, come morning, the crown would still belong to him.
And then what? his fevered mind asked. What happens after you’ve been forced to sign away your birthright? Galen could ill-afford to let him leave with visible signs of torture on his body to negate the document he would be forced to sign. Would he be kept at Norus? Caged inside one of the filthy cells that lay beyond the studded oaken door off to his right? He didn’t think Galen would have him killed, but he wasn’t all that sure. Dead men could not challenge a writ of abdication.
He glanced at the instruments again. He knew well how much torture he could stand. His memory had not failed him. He groaned. Maybe torture wasn’t all that Galen had planned. A shadow of evil loomed within his inner vision, a cadaverous face grinning at him out of the darkness, and he shivered.
"Sweet Alel, no!" he whispered. That he could not stand.
He tugged helplessly against his bonds, groaning with fear. Death would be preferable to the things Kaileel Tohre could do to him. He tightly squeezed his fingers together and prayed, beseeching every god he had ever known to let him die before Kaileel could lay hands on him again.
"Good eve, Milord," a sweet voice spoke.
Conar swung his head and stared at the silhouette of a woman striding confidently toward him. Her back was to the burning rushes so he could not see her face, but he knew that voice. His blood ran cold as she neared the brazier with its red-hot tongs and pokers. The light cast from the brazier made her face look evil and deadly.
How could he have been so dimwitted? The thought of her being in league with his brother filled him with despair and he thought his heart would break. When she giggled, his despair turned to bleak and icy rage.
"I am glad you find this amusing, Mam’selle," he growled, stung by her duplicity, in agony over her betrayal. He strained at his manacles, the chains rattling.
Liza placed her hands on her hips and turned her face to one side. "You have this uncommon habit of getting yourself into mischief when you’re around me."
"Aye, that I do," he spat. It was so hard to look at her beautiful face and not feel such terrible pain in his heart.
"Why do you think that is?" she asked sweetly.
"I thought with the wrong head!" he snarled, blowing an angry stream of breath through his bared teeth.
"Isn’t that usual for you, Milord?"
"Normally I’d have better sense."
"But when you’re around me, you forget yourself?" She giggled.
"Leave me the hell alone!" he shouted as he pulled against the bonds. "Haven’t you caused enough damage? Galen will see that he gets the crown. What did he promise you for your part in trapping me?"
"He’ll not get the crown as long as you live, Milord."
A deadly missile of fear ran through his heart. So, they did intend to kill him. He should have realized that. He would always be a threat to Galen if he lived.
"And you’ll watch while they take my life, won’t you, you power-hungry bitch?"
Liza smiled at his silly assumption. "Would you like some help getting free, Milord?"
"Don’t play with me, woman!" he bellowed, pulling fiercely on his fetters.
Liza folded her arms over her chest. "You don’t know a friend when one comes to your aid, do you, McGregor?" She sighed. "I am not one of Galen’s minions, Conar. I was sent to help you, but if you would rather stay here at your brother’s mercy…"
She shrugged one delicate shoulder and started to turn away.
"Wait!"
"Aye, Milord?" she sweetly replied.
Conar shrugged helplessly, hating to admit he needed her help. "If it would not be too much trouble for you, Mam’selle, I would appreciate your help. ’Tis a most uncomfortable position in which I find myself."
"I can see that, Milord. I suppose I could help you, then. I shall have to…" She turned to stare into the darkness, her hand going up to the rune stone around her neck, her fingers caressing the smooth black surface. When he started to question her, she held up her hand to silence him. "It seems I have happened along just in time," she snarled. "They have miscalculated this time."
Conar frowned. "Who? What are you talking about?" Her face was shadowed with fire from the burning brazier and the deeper darkness of the room, but it glowed with an eerie incandescence that made the hair along his neck stir. The green of her eyes was chatoyant, like a cat’s eyes in the sudden glare of light. He watched as she knelt on the floor, her hands out in front of her as though she were searching for something among the rushes. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Come, my Little Ones," she whispered to the darkness. "I have need of you."
Something stirred in the rushes, mewed, hummed. From out of the darkness a soft, pulsing sound rose, rising and falling with husky, grating sighs. Tiny mews came from different directions at once; blending, harmonizing, echoing, and breathing long gusts of purring rhythm. The sound grew into one long, continuous purr of contentment.
"Come. Come and meet our master." Liza’s voice was as soft as the gentle purring.
Small, darting shapes moved in the rushes, rustling across the stone floor, pushing aside whatever was in their way. A sniffing sound stopped somewhere near the large stone ledge on which Conar stood and then moved on to Liza. An inquiring purr came from close by and then the shapes converged, flung themselves at Liza’s ankles, twirling around her feet, rustling her gown, pushing against her legs.
Conar couldn’t make out what the shapes were, for they moved with a blur of motion, but he had the impression of small cat-like beings with green eyes that glowed as they regarded him. Something brushed against his own leg and he flinched, looking down as a shape darted away, its mewling voice raised in question.
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