Biondine, Shannah

by Shadow in Starlight(lit)

  "Nay, you do not overmuch, do you?" Velansare snapped. "Is your imagination so limited you do not grasp the possibilities? If he was present when your king was slain, he knows of the smirch upon my family name! 'Tis all the more imperative to assure his discretion. Send him here at once. And you are to return personally, along with several castle guards."

  Less than an hour later, a sharp rap sounded at the chamber door. Velansare bade the emissary enter when he announced himself, and smiled as he saw the courtier had dutifully followed instructions. How nice to see a man who understood where true priorities lay.

  Young Bryston had indeed been in Greensward. Velansare recognized him, and his delight trebled at the realization that the younger fellow had indeed been soldiering for Cronel. He'd been the spy who alerted the monarchs to the treason.

  This young knight would do more than bend over and keep his lips sealed later.

  He might just have to accompany Velansare back to Greensward as permanent lad-in-waiting. If Velansare was forced to thrust himself into a woman once or twice a fortnight begetting an heir, he should be allowed to thrust himself where he'd derive real pleasure after performing his distasteful royal duty.

  Sieffre Bryston was lean and tender, humming with untried sensuality. "Sir Bryston, is it?" Velansare inquired politely.

  The boy nodded. Oh, aye, little more than a boy. A distrustful lad, but ensnared all the same. "You were lately in mine own kingdom, were you not? Your service to the crown must have been exemplary. Still wet behind the spurs, as they say, and already a reeve. That is quite a feat." The boy had the grace to flush. Quaint. "A fellow of such remarkable talent must have any number of vital uses to a monarch."

  The wary eyes widened. Velansare watched as his suggestive words caused a deeper flush and tightening of the lad's jawline. "I did what was necessary out of loyalty to the throne, in the best interest of my sovereign." To his credit, the lad's voice did not quaver. "However, the new king did not send me here. I am under no command which requires accommodating court visitors."

  Well! A bold stroke.

  Velansare sighed. How tiresome. Visions of an exhilarating wrestling match in his bed with this bit of brawn winked out.

  "I wonder in whose best interests do you speak, then?" Velansare wandered over to the servant bearing food and wine on a tray and sniffed at the fare. He glanced at the emissary.

  "There are dissenters who do not recognize Leif's claim to the Glacian crown. This lad has stated a predilection for making his own mental determinations as to what is in his throne's best interests, as if a lowly youth at the base of council ranks has the discrimination to make such a judgment. He has also proven willing to forsake his direct commander, the very man he's sworn allegiance to."

  "Sire?" The emissary frowned. The guards, who'd been lounging in the background pretending not to eavesdrop, tensed visibly. Velansare had purposely allowed his tone to reflect displeasure.

  "He was the accuser at the tribunal. I recall his face now. He informed against his own men, against the Warmonger, Cronel's Royal Blade. I was given to understand he was one of said Blade's own trusted comrades. 'Tis quite possible this one knew what would befall Cronel upon that platform. He might even have been part of the plot. Mayhap not, but - "

  "Nay, Sire!" Sieffre exclaimed. He turned to the Glacian emissary. "His Highness is mistaken. I did not know the woman meant to strike at the king. I - "

  "The fact remains," Velansare went on, his tone one of idle conversation, "that matters between our realms are as yet in delicate balance. The seat of power here is not yet firm. To have such a man here at court...a fellow whose trustworthiness might be questionable...Is that wise, do you think?"

  The emissary stared at Velansare a long moment, resignation in his eyes.

  "I deem it is not, Your Highness." He glanced at the guards. "Take him to the dungeon. The Prince has denounced him as a traitor and party to the slaughter of the former king."

  "I do regret to be the one to inform you," Velansare lied. "If necessary, I'm more than willing to discuss the matter with King Leif. Not that he is likely to welcome another sovereign pointing out his weakness in discernment."

  "We need not bring this unsavory matter to his attention, Sire," the emissary replied coldly. "I shall assemble another group of maidens after you break your fast."

  With that the guards swept out of the royal guest chamber, dragging a protesting and sobbing young Sieffre Bryston in their wake.

  The chamber door thumped closed. "So young and witless," Velansare announced, shaking his head in mock sorrow. "So dead. Now, what am I to dine upon this evening?"

  The powerfully-built manservant set down his tray and began unfastening his leggings. Velansare watched the servant stroke his member to hardness and nodded with a smile. "Ah, my favorite."

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Preece squinted against the bright sunlight. Someone was headed their way. A lone man slogged along the wave-beaten sand toward where he and Lockram languished. The knights had taken over an abandoned shelter fronting a small, unpopulated cove. Their hermitage was situated a fair distance from the nearest Ataraxian village. By design.

  Preece craved solitude. Lockram, his lone remaining friend and fellow Glacian expatriate, did not. They'd been in this tropical realm barely two cycles of the greatest moon. Lockram was already accounted a raider, a mawkish clown, and a favorite amongst the local womenfolk.

  "The village elder comes." Preece nodded in the direction of the ambling man. "Have you been swiving his daughter or his niece yet again?"

  Lockram lay sprawled on his belly, dozing beneath the pocket of shade under a nearby tree. He grunted and rolled onto his side. "Nay, more's the pity. Haven't seen either wench in a sennight. They found Ataraxian lads to the elder's liking. Horse dung and hot thistles, look at him!"

  At Lockram's growl, Preece turned his head and saw the Ataraxian had dropped to his knees at the base of the shoreline. He held his walking staff balanced across his outspread, open palms, in a gesture the knights had come to understand was the equivalent of an elaborate courtly bow in Glacian terms. Humble submission.

  "He's at your feet, judging by the inclination of his skull," Lockram pointed out. "What have you done of late?" He self-consciously dusted loose sand off his bare torso. He'd abandoned wearing shirts or tunics, and his skin was bronzed from the perpetual Ataraxian sun.

  Preece sighed. He inwardly hoped the elder's visit wasn't some accolade to his recuperation. His body was healing slowly. He'd only been ambulatory for a fortnight or so, whilst Lockram had been hale enough to carouse almost from their first arrival. The day they'd been delivered onto a wide stretch of pearly alabaster shore by Bourke disguised as a great dragon.

  The Ataraxians hadn't screamed or fled in panic. They'd calmly ascertained who their visitors were and from whence they'd come. Their reaction confirmed there was no need for Bourke to tarry overlong. He'd assured Preece that Ataraxians led quiet, simple lives, but they were by no means crude people.

  Many were extremely learned. Most were skilled in hunting and gathering food. Others were trained in varied arts, healing and cabalistic studies among them. Their language was not dissimilar to Preece's own native Waniand tongue, thus Preece was better able to converse than his roughshackle friend.

  "We have leequesh and plenty of food," Preece mused aloud. "I trust he hasn't come to complain that you're hoarding wine casks from the temple."

  Lockram had helped himself to sacred brew early on. They'd both nearly been roasted alive when the theft was discovered and attributed to the Glacian fool with the roving eye and jesting manner. Ataraxians were kindly, but not amused by blasphemy.

  "I keep to what they give us." This Lockram asserted by hissing through his teeth. His lips wore a frozen smile.

  Preece's own face bore a similar expression. Local custom required a prolonged message of welcome. Standing with a smile plastered upon his face in lengthy silenc
e was a most unnatural behavior for Preece. His dark cowls had eliminated any necessity for false grins back in Glacia. His rudeness and abrupt manner had been legendary stamps of his ferocious nature.

  But he could not treat his new hosts to rudeness and disrespect. Not after all they'd done to save his miserable life.

  Lockram hissed again. "If it's about his wife's sister, I wasn't about to swive her. She's uglier than the hind end of a Dredonian ass. I was in the woods with my breeches undone because I had to piss!"

  Preece couldn't help but laugh, which triggered a violent coughing spell. He'd suffered them numerous times, due to the damage to his lungs.

  This time the elder rushed forward, flinging aside his staff. He laid his palms along Preece's ribs. The familiar odd prickling sensation of cold numbness set in, though Preece's thin shirt prevented direct contact with his skin. He closed his eyes in mortification. He had never before been coddled, which Lockram well knew. But Lockram himself had hovered over Preece in their first days here.

  To Preece it had felt as though every human in this new realm had hovered around and pitied him.

  Ataraxian priests and elders had worked to aid his recovery. Preece had arrived beaten and broken, feverish and out of his mind. The Ataraxians fed him, tended him, laid their hands upon his flesh.

  The physical contact caused the peculiar, unwelcome prickling sensation of chilling coldness. Preece had welcomed it when he'd been racked with fever and pain. He endured it now because it brought relief and because he feared insulting the village patriarch. This man was the most powerful leader of the local Ataraxians.

  Preece had lived too long with disdain, had tasted the bitterness of a ruler's enmity. He would not offend this leader. He needed no enemies in this place.

  So he stood on the beach in full view, allowing another male to massage his chest and partially embrace him. Like some puling sodomite or hapless troubled child.

  He longed for a deep, dark cowl.

  For oblivion.

  To forget.

  Only a few nights past the healers had finally ceased their secret visits to his pallet. Lockram's eves were spent in bedsport or drinking. He rarely stumbled back to the shelter he shared with Preece afore daybreak. Even when Lockram lay on his own pallet but a few feet away sleeping, the Ataraxians were stealthy and silent. They always laid palms to Lockram's brow to send him into a deeper slumber.

  Lockram did not know that Preece dreaded darkness. That he took to his pallet sweating and shaking, waiting for the abomination to begin anew. The shameful misery of lying stripped and helpless as Ataraxian male fingers stroked, massaged, and probed in order to restore his loins.

  Cronel had personally come to the prison cell and gleefully squeezed one of Preece's bollocks in his meaty fist. The final humiliating agony to be suffered after he'd ordered the detested Waniand traitor to be starved, beaten and kicked by his royal guards.

  "This is what happens to men who dare to bury their pricks in what is mine," Cronel had seethed. Preece spat in his fat face. Then Cronel closed all six of his fingers and crushed with all his might, until something popped inside Preece's testicle and searing knives of crippling agony ripped through his body.

  As if reading his dark, rambling thoughts, the elder now slowly shook his head.

  Images of the bleak past scattered. "You are strong, Warmonger. You can be whatever you will. Fight, as you were born to do. Not with sword or mace, but with Waniand determination. You must release the pain in your pride as you do the cuts of your body. Do not cleave to that which can only weaken you."

  The tension in his chest was gone. The horrifying memory of Cronel's gloating, hateful face and his cruel fingers dissipated . . .

  Preece opened his eyes to find Lockram scowling at him.

  "So ask why he's come! He awaits your pleasure, you know. Satan's horns, but you pick the oddest times for woolgathering."

  Preece blinked. The elder stood before them, arms at his sides, an expectant look on his face. Preece raised his left palm to signal an end to the prolonged Ataraxian greeting. The natives of this isle seemed very fond of ritualized gestures.

  "Great Warrior, word has spread of your brave act. The child you saved was that of Karnoo, a revered friend and advisor."

  The elder spoke now in a weak version of the Glacian language, Preece realized when Lockram responded. "What child? What's he talking about, Preece?"

  The elder smiled at each knight in turn. "You will come to the temple at dusk. The village feasts in thanks, with esteem for the fighter who killed in defense of one he did not know. Warmonger feast."

  The elder turned, took up his staff, and hobbled away. Preece suspected that part of the Ataraxian healing art involved taking the sufferer's ailments or pain within one's own body. The elders seemed weaker and less graceful after tending him.

  "How could you save anybody, Great Warrior? You can barely walk to yon grove of trees and back to keep from befouling our hut."

  Preece had a sudden urge to smash Lockram's face in. Instead, he merely punched him in the gut and watched him fall back on his rump in the sand.

  Lockram shook his shaggy head of curls and glanced up at Preece in wonder. "You knocked me down. Preece! You knocked me down!" He nearly roared his observation the second time and leapt to his feet. "Do it once more. Go on. I'll be ready this time. Let's see if you can do it again."

  Even though Lockram blocked the blow, Preece sent him sprawling.

  "Good Creator, you might just be the old rogue Waniand I knew and loved again! I shall bring out more leequesh and we'll celebrate. A feast tonight!"

  They split open some breadfruit, poured cups of leequesh, and Preece confessed that he'd recently been in the interior forest on a long walk. He'd decided to pass the time whittling tree limbs into lances and happened to have such a sharpened branch when a young girl child had run screaming into a clearing, a great snorting boar hard upon her heels. Preece threw the lance, calmed the girl, and sent her on her way.

  To him it had been a rather ordinary encounter. Unfortunately, the Ataraxians did not view it that way. They planned a banquet to honor him. What that meant in their formal customs he did not know. "But I think we best bathe and don the good robes they gave us," he advised with a belch. "And no sampling female charms unless they're expressly offered."

  Lockram grinned, seizing a square of cloth he used as a towel and a hunk of soap some woman had given him. Scented soap. "But they so frequently are, good fellow! A banquet for throwing a spear at a boar? These people will use any feeble excuse to dine and drink. I love this place, Preece." The smile left his face. "Dugan would have died here, would he not? Had he survived to see it, the heady brew here would only have been his undoing. In either case, he was doomed."

  Preece knew Lockram referred to the powerful Ataraxian potables. Wine and more particularly leequesh, their strange brew that made a man's mind wander into splendid places of whirling color and ecstasy. Aye, Dugan would have drunk more heavily than ever, and likely besotted himself into deadly oblivion. Preece had been mightily tempted more than once himself, and Lockram drank more than ever he had in days past.

  More than was wise, but Lockram was young and unfamiliar with sustained grief. Preece had lost his parents and learned to live with a blackened, heavy heart.

  Lived with it yet again now because of Moreya.

  Another name, like that of their departed comrade, which was seldom spoken between them.

  "Aye, but he had lived more years than either of us," Preece reminded softly. "Don't use up all that soap."

  Lockram mumbled about heading to their bathing pool, then stopped at the doorway out of the hut. "It's good to see you regaining your strength and making weapons again. You never were one to be idle. I'm gladdened by your recovery. You need to eat. They were right to give you a banquet. Mayhap you'll not turn your face from food, then." He winked and was gone.

  Preece sighed. He couldn't easily abstain from dining on the
fare at his own feast. But truly he had little appetite, little interest, little desire to draw his next tender breath.

  As soon as he'd been awake and alive enough to speak with them and they thought he would understand, the healers explained that he was fortunate. He had suffered massive damage to one testicle, but the other and his scrotum were intact. Had he been gelded with a blade, they could have done naught. As matters stood, they believed they could restore his virility.

  He tried to tell them there was no point. He'd lost his lifemate. Seed would only be wasted. Procreation impossible. They'd ignored his protests. He tried to struggle, but they'd silenced him. Entranced him. Forced him to lie passively as they began to work their mysterious restoration, these Ataraxian men with their intimate, frightening, knowing touches.

  Preece would sooner have been put to the sword or had his toenails ripped out than withstand such cruel "mercies."

  And he'd discovered just yestermorn, awakening with a dream of Moreya evanescing from his mind, that he may have surmounted the rigors of proscribed rutting seasons. He could be aroused by memories of lovemaking.

  With Moreya - wife and lifemate - who was either thousands of leagues away in some dank dungeon, or lying dead beneath the soil of Greensward. He prayed his instincts were yet sound, for they told him such had not befallen her. Then he prayed, oddly enough, that she'd somehow been allowed back into Glacia. It comforted him in some peculiar way to think of her dim purple glow reflected off frost and ice. He liked imagining her there, even if he could not be with her.

  He took another sip of leequesh. If he'd been anywhere but in this bizarre realm, he would have rejoiced over a morning erection. A lifemated warrior's rutting seasons and arousal were closely tied to his lifemate's moon cycles and body energy. Obvious sexual arousal should prove Moreya was still alive.

  But here in Ataraxia - where the priests knew mystical secrets and practiced healing beyond the powers of most mortals - it proved nothing. Except that he was alone and no closer to happiness or peace than he'd ever been.