“What about the Prince?” someone asked.

  A dull ache started in the region of Alexi’s heart. “He’ll understand.”

  “But he’d be a might pissed if he got blown up, nevertheless, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  Alexi spun around, grinning from ear to ear as he saw Conar stumbling toward them, a wiggling, slurping half-breed clutched tightly to his chest. The little dog’s long neck was arched backward, affording his tongue a good lick at the dirty neck of the man carrying him.

  “Will one of you take this mutt?” Conar grumbled, although his expression belied his ill humor as he scowled down at the whining dog. “He’s licked the skin off me now.” The little mutt yipped and slurped his pink tongue across Conar’s chin. “You brat!” the Serenian chuckled.

  Andrei rushed forward, taking the squirming little ball of fur from Conar’s hands. He looked

  up quickly at the slight moan that issued from Conar’s mouth. “Milord?” he questioned. “Get him to his master, Andrei,” Conar ordered. “We’ve got work to do here.” Alexi knew Conar’s hands were paining him. The bleak look of misery in the man’s dark

  face came from the blistered, running, raw flesh of the palms which were curled slightly at the

  Serenian’s side. “We’ll get those hands looked at,” Alexi promised. “When we’ve done what we have to,” Conar agreed. “We’ve got a salve that will take away the pain,” Alexi assured him. “By Alel, I hope so,” Conar murmured. His palms hurt so bad he was shivering despite the

  raging inferno behind him. “Count on it!” the Outer Kingdom man swore.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wind rushed toward the group on the road, shoving against them as gray ash swirled in dervishes around them. The sound of the explosion was louder than most would have dreamed possible, ear-splitting successions of booms that shook the ground and frightened the already terrified horses and mules. It took brute strength to keep the animals in control as the aftershock reached the straining beasts.

  “Here they come!”

  Peter Steffensberg glanced around and saw Alexi and the Serenian walking side by side, heads down, shoulders sagging and knew the men were bone-weary, hungry and more than a little held in awe by the villagers who had stopped to wait for the two men. He looked beyond the men and saw the fire, knew it had been stopped by the intrusion of the explosion in its path and smiled with relief. Bringing his hands up, he began to clap his thanks. Soon every hand available had joined the young Tzaravitch in his praise.

  Alexi glanced up and grinned. His strong white teeth shone in the blackened halo of his face. He nudged his tired companion and chuckled. “We’re heroes, Outlander.”

  Conar looked up, saw the crowd, scanning the gathering until he found the one face, the one pair of hands that were giving him their approval and he let out a weary sigh.

  Marie Catherine stopped applauding when Conar McGregor’s gaze dropped away from her. She watched him stumble with fatigue, saw Alexi’s hand go out to steady him, noticed for the first time that his hands appeared to be injured. Burned, no doubt, she thought with annoyance. She was about to step forward, to gather her supplies to go to him, when she saw her mother rushing forward, her arms going up to embrace the startled man.

  “Conar!” she heard her mother gushing. “You have saved the village, son! How can we ever thank you?”

  A deep red blush swept furiously over Catherine’s face when those tired sapphire eyes seemed to automatically leap to hers at her mother’s inane question. That alien gaze held for a fraction of a second then lowered to the woman whose arms were around him. Catherine didn’t hear his reply, but she heard Alexi’s and her attention lowered to the quarry foreman who had dropped to one knee at her mother’s approach.

  “He’s hurt, Highness,” she heard Alexi tell her mother.

  “Hurt?” Charlotte Steffenovitch’s screech of dismay caused every voice to cease. “Where?”

  “His hands,” Alexi informed her.

  “Conar, let me see!”

  The Serenian held his hands out, palms up.

  Catherine let out a deep breath as she saw her mother examining the Serenian Prince’s hands, winced at the small cry of shock her mother uttered. One of her sisters rushed forward with salve and bandages and before Catherine could take another breath, Conar McGregor was sitting on the back of one of the carts having his hands tended to.

  “Such a fuss over a minor thing like scorched palms,” she muttered.

  When the small procession of stragglers finally reached the Palace of the Tzars, servants rushed out to help those who would be staying the night. Cots and pallets were hastily laid out in spaces available within the keep. An aromatic stew was already bubbling in a large cauldron in the inner bailey. Plank tables made from slabs of timber and sawhorses had been erected to feed the mass of people. Jugs of ale and cider sat off to one side along with a small table piled high with loaves of freshly-baked bread. Hampers of apples and pears flanked the steps leading up to the guard house. Queuing up, the villagers began to pile tin plates full of the piping stew.

  “Hungry, Cat?” Mikel asked his sister. He’d been busy all day supervising the procession of villagers into the keep.

  “I’ve had some sandwiches,” she answered, arming the sweat from her brow. “I’ll get something later on.”

  Mikel thrust his chin toward Conar McGregor who was climbing down from a cart which had just rolled into the inner bailey. “How’d he do?”

  Catherine shrugged. “Well, enough, I suppose.”

  “If there’s any truth to what I’ve heard from people all day, he’s something of a hero.” Mikel waved at the man he was discussing with his sister.

  “He’s a man,” Catherine snapped and turned away from her brother’s look of surprise. “Nothing but a man!”

  Conar waved back at the younger royal son, thought again how much the boy reminded him of his youngest brother, Dyllon, and wondered how the two of them would get along. He grunted. The two of them would get along just fine until they got their skinny little butts into mischief. Mikel Steffensberg had the same look in his hazel eyes that Dyllon had. It would be a toss up as to who would accept blame for their mischief making.

  Wearily he walked away from the cart on which the Tzarina had insisted he ride, and went to a cool, quiet corner of the keep’s north wall and slid tiredly down it to sit on the slightly damp ground. He brought his legs up, laid his wrists on his knees, closed his eyes and hung his head.

  He was tired, so tired he could barely stay awake. So tired he didn’t feel like climbing the steps up into the palace much less to try to make his way up the staircase to his bedroom. He’d love a bath, hot and relaxing, but he didn’t think he could stay awake long enough to take it. He was hungry, but his hands hurt him so badly he knew he couldn’t hold on to the fork or spoon.

  He was thirsty, too, but just didn’t have the strength it took to get up from where he sat to trod over to the water barrel. And his head ached from the smoke inhalation, from hunger, from a day spent in anxious worry.

  And he was so lonely he wanted to cry.

  Oh, he thought with a tired sigh, they had been so good to him here. He was granted anything he could possibly want. He was treated with a deep respect that seemed to be growing every day. The men he worked with had treated him like one of their own. That alone, he knew, was as high a compliment as any they could give.

  And yet he was withering inside from the loneliness he was feeling at that moment.

  Although he was being fed well, better than he had ever been fed, his meals nutritious and so different from what he was use to that each feasting was an experience, he was slowly starving to death for what he ate could not feed the hunger growling within his soul. Neither could the fine wines and delicious spring-fed waters slake the terrible thirst that was slowly evaporating the juices of life that had sustained him. Nothing seemed to satisfy him. He was restless, discontent, bitterly lonely, and brooding on the past. He allowed himself to become morbid, melancholy, his attitude one of indifference. His rich baritone voice had become toneless, though softer, he thought. Too soft, he acknowledged, with little or no inflection and far less emotional energy than he knew himself to possess. He was becoming a wimp, he thought with a snort.

  He knew he was slowly losing touch with reality here in this wonderland of gentle, caring people. Nothing had as yet been said about his past, although he knew the Tzar and his sons, perhaps some of the aides, knew of it. They treated him as though his long imprisonment in the Labyrinth, as well as the reason he had been there, had never occurred. To them, he was the King of Serenia, by birth and by right, and they treated him as such—an honored guest. None of them, with the exception of that damned woman, he thought with a pang of annoyance, treated him like he was a human being.

  He liked the people of the Palace well enough, but it was like it had been when he was growing up in the keep at Boreas. He’d hung around with the du Mer brothers, Teal and Roget, with the Loure brothers, Thom and Rayle, with a few other sons of members of the guard and staff simply because he hadn’t liked being by himself after seven years of enforced solitude during his internment in the Monastery. He hadn’t really enjoyed the company the men of the keep had provided him with, but he needed the companionship of other human beings.

  There had always been, and he thought most likely always would be, a complex, never to be understood, emptiness yawning inside him that kept true friendships at bay. The closest he had ever come was with Sentian Heil. He suspected his childhood in Kahlil Toire’s sinister clutches might well be at the root of his peculiar phobia against forming close personal attachments, but he truly didn’t know for sure. Whatever had caused him to always stand outside the circle, looking in with hungry, longing eyes, would continue for as long as he drew breath. He only prayed the emptiness would be filled after that last breath was taken for he feared he would never find that bond between him and another human that he so longed to have. And that knowledge made his loneliness at the Palace of the Tzars that much more annihilating.

  And yet he once had known brutal, unremitting loneliness much worse than what he was feeling at that moment. That loneliness had claimed him, sucked the very life from his body, leaving him an empty shell of a man, numb, disassociated, barren of both energy and substance. Despair had driven him to his knees during that time. Depression had kept him there. He had dwelt on the fringes, beneath the ebb and flow of human existence, a being alienated from, and separate of, humanity. He had known a darkness so great during that time that it had blinded him to life. And yet he managed to rise above all that, to start his life over, to live again.

  So why now, at this point in his life, could he not seem to take charge of his destiny once more? Why was he allowing other people to run his life for him? He plodded along from day to day, taking what was there, not striving to bend from the ordinary. He was bored and becoming boring. His time in the Outer Kingdom had tamed him, domesticated him to such a point he hardly recognized himself. He had become too civilized. If anything, time had begun to emasculate him.

  Nor had time closed the gaping hole left in his soul with Elizabeth’s death, nor had it stitched together the bleeding wound of his heart. It had merely prolonged the healing, made the infection of his pain open up fresh sores of loneliness and he knew there was no potion known to man that could cure him, no pharmacist could brew a salve to ease that suffering.

  What shocked him, though, was the meanness he felt of late. He felt meaner than he ever had. He was far more argumentative with that little air-headed bitch of a Tzarevna than he could ever remember being with any woman, at any time. The woman annoyed the hell out of him, brought out a side to him he never knew existed. One moment he wanted to turn her over his lap and pommel her ass ‘til it was black and blue. The next he wanted to toss her to the ground, throw her skirts up and ….

  “Prince Conar?”

  Vaguely he heard a noise interrupting his train of thought, but he pushed it aside, instead brooding on the fat cow’s insistence at tormenting him. Didn’t she KNOW what she was doing to him? Hell, yes, she knew, he thought with a vicious twist of his lips. She knew exactly what she was doing to him. She was driving him crazy and enjoying herself in the process!

  “Excuse me.”

  He heard that noise again and drove himself deeper into his thoughts to block it out. He had things to sort out, things to put in the proper prospective. He had to figure out why the little bitch got to him so easily. Always having prided himself in his ability to ignore a woman’s intrusion if he was of a mind to, he found he just simply could not ignore Marie Catherine no matter how hard he tried. Insistently, insidiously, infuriatingly she was slipping beneath the shell of his self-erected detachment and was slowly making a place for herself.

  He did not want to accept the fact that the woman was having a profound effect on his natural urges, either. That was a control he always thought himself capable of maintaining. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Those urges had not been acted upon for a long, long time, and Catherine was probing at them like a tongue to a sore tooth. And it sure as hell got his attention.

  He just damned sure wasn’t ready to admit to himself that Marie Catherine Steffenovitch was getting next to him!

  “Prince Conar!”

  He flinched, looking up quickly. As soon as he saw who was intruding, he frowned, his face becoming hostile and angry.

  “What?” he snarled.

  Catherine stared at the man. The incredible force of his personality, the awesome power of his presence, seemed to attack her on such a primal, almost sexual level, that it took her aback. Why had she never noticed how fierce his eyes could be?

  “Do you want something or are you here just to aggravate me, woman? Haven’t I had enough trouble today without having you create more?” he snapped at her.

  Her spine stiffened. She held up the bucket and dipper of water she was carrying. “I was sent over here to offer you something to drink.”

  That wasn’t true. She’d taken it upon herself to do it, but she didn’t want him to know it.

  His attention shifted down to the bucket, narrowed, and then slid back to hers. “What’d you do? Poison it first?”

  “Yes, but at least you will die with your thirst slacked,” she shot back.

  Conar snorted. He held out his hand for the dipper, keeping his teeth locked together to keep from crying out as the woman handed him the dipper and he took it in his injured right palm. He brought it up to his lips and drained it, feeling the cold, refreshing liquid slide down his throat. A small stream of water slipped down his chin, wetting his throat and he sighed as he handed the dipper back to her.

  “You want more?” she asked in a voice that hoped he didn’t.

  “Why not?” he grunted. “If you used the right kind of poison, I’m already a dead man.”

  “A situation devoutly to be wished!” she hissed as she refilled the dipper and handed it to him once more.

  He eyed her over the rim of the dipper as he drank. When he’d drained the dipper, he threw it past her as hard as his injured hand would allow. His lips twisted with anger.

  “Why did you do that?” she snapped at him.

  “You know, a man can take just so much shit being flung at him before he starts to fling it back!”

  Catherine slowly turned her head, looked at the tin dipper lying in the dirt and then just as slowly returned her gaze to the Serenian. There was an infinitely bored expression on her prim mouth.

  “You are the most detestable, despicable, ill-mannered, uncouth lout I have ever had the displeasure of meeting. I was amazed at how easily you were able to fool our people into trusting you this afternoon. I don’t know what you hoped to gain by doing so, but I am sure the real reason behind you pretending to be just ‘one of the people’ will be exposed before too long and they’ll see you for what you are.”

  Conar snorted. “And just what am I, you stupid cow-faced bitch?”

  “An opportunist who thinks to insinuate himself into the palace to gain my father’s trust in the hope of obtaining a large settlement for not marrying one of his daughters!”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” he snarled. “You don’t know me!” He turned his face away from her. Her scathing tongue was shredding his pride again.

  “I know enough to know I don’t want to know any more about you. You aren’t worth thinking about. Nor talking to! You were disinherited by your father because you couldn’t be trusted to look after the kingdom that was your birthright!”

  A look of stunned shock came over Conar’s face as he jerked back around to face her. “Is that what you really think?” he asked in a subdued voice.

  “It is what I know!” she hissed at him. “And I’ll tell you something else I know. I would rather see my sisters dead and buried than have them turned over to the likes of you! You miserable, disfigured gnome!”

  Her anger cut him, lashed across his heart like a rapier’s blade. The suddenness of it, the precise viciousness left him stunned, shocked at how very cruel this woman could be. Involuntarily, he lowered his eyes from the grimace of contempt on her twisted face. He wondered, with growing hurt, what he had done to cause her to hate him so much. But then his pride reasserted itself and he lifted his head defiantly.

  “Think what you will,” he said with bitterly. “Your opinion of me means about as much as gnat shit!”

  Catherine turned her face and spat on the ground. “You’re worse than gnat shit!”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you make me ill just looking at you!”

  His anger turned to acute hurt. “What the hell have I ever done to you, woman?” he shouted.

  Catherine smiled at him, a vicious, malicious smile. She lowered her voice to a soft coo. “You were born, you son-of-a-bitch! Your mother must have gagged at the sight of you!”

  “Do you,” he asked in a quiet, soft voice, “really think I deserved that?”

 

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