The Invisible Ring (21 page)

“since you were the only other Queen in the family, and the Gray Lady’s successor, you decided to do this yourself.”

She eyed him warily. “Yes.” When he started swearing again, the kind of inventive curses that were designed to make another man flinch, she snarled at him. “Why are you so snappish about my father?”

“What kind of man would stand back and let you do this?”

“What would you have done if your Queen ordered you to let your daughter go?”

“I would have fought it!”

“He did! He lost.” She winced and wrapped her left arm around her belly.

“And now he’s going to yell at me when I get home. He’ll hug me and get teary about the bruises, and then he’ll yell at me.”

Since he wanted to do a bit of yelling himself, Jared leaned forward and patted her shoulder gently. And found he now understood his father’s outbursts while still able to remember how it felt to be on the receiving end.

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Getting yelled at when you’ve already been through a hard time and survived it.”

She shook her head and sniffed.

The pats changed to soothing circles.

Jared hesitated. “There had to be other ways of letting Dorothea know the Gray Lady is still a formidable adversary. Was going to Raej to get a few more slaves really worth this risk?”

Her eyes became brutally hard. “There are no slaves in Dena Nehele,” she said coldly, and shifted just enough to let him know his touch was no longer welcome.

Hurt by the withdrawal, he matched her coldness. “Well, if you keep your precious Territory clean of the stink of slavery, what
do
you do with the slaves you buy?”

“Send them home, of course. That is, if they want to go home.”

That stopped him.

Stopped his brain, stopped his heart, and withered his anger.

“Home?” Jared’s voice broke. His heart started again with a leap. “You send them home?”

Cupping both hands around her mug, Lia finished the brew. “Yes, we send them home—or invite them to stay if ‘home’ is no longer a safe place for them.” She closed her eyes for a moment and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Dorothea SaDiablo wants nothing less than to control the entire Realm of Terreille. That’s been her goal since she became the High Priestess of Hayll centuries ago. Since outright war would have devastated the Realm, she had to find a different way of waging war on the rest of the Blood.”

“Fear,” Jared said softly. “Over time, fear between the genders would undermine a Territory.”

Lia nodded. “And she
has
time since Hayllians are a long-lived race. The seeds of distrust are sown village by village while she nurtures the lighter-Jeweled witches who have the same twisted nature that she does. Strong males who might not submit to one of her pet Queens are usually Ringed young, before they become ‘dangerous.’ Mature males who challenge the new rule are declared rogues and are either hunted down and killed or go into hiding. All of the dark-Jeweled witches and most of the Queens are broken young so there’s no one left for the males to bond to except Dorothea’s chosen.”

Jared set his mug on the floor and clasped his hands tightly, unable to say anything. Would slavery have been his fate even without that youthful mistake? Would the Shalador Queens have demanded he submit to a Ring of Obedience in order to control his Red strength?

No. Not in Shalador.

“It happens slowly,” Lia continued. “Over several generations. On the surface, nothing seems to change because it’s so subtle at first. A new interpretation of Protocol. A wariness when dealing with the stronger witches. Rumors. Stories of mistreatment. The alliance with, and dependence upon, Hayll grows and grows until the day comes when one of Dorothea’s pet Queens rules the Territory. By breaking or enslaving the strongest and the best, they keep the rest of the people submissive, too afraid to fight or speak against them.

“For a long time, Gran couldn’t see any way to fight Dorothea except to form strong alliances with the Queens in the neighboring Territories. Then, a few years ago, a Queen’s nephew was taken from the court where he was in training, along with three other young Warlords. She searched for weeks, trying to find some trace of him. She’d almost given up when she received an unsigned note that said the young Warlord was unharmed and continuing his training—in the High Priestess of Hayll’s court. If the Queen welcomed Hayll’s next gesture of friendship by agreeing to meet with the Hayllian ambassadors to discuss some ‘concessions,’ her nephew would continue his training, unharmed. If she refused, as she’d been doing for several years, her nephew would be sold as a slave at the Raej auction.”

Feeling chilled, Jared wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. “She refused.”

Lia nodded. “One of the witches in her First Circle volunteered to go to Raej to buy the Queen’s nephew. She took two guards with her. None of them came back.”

“So the Gray Lady went the next time.”

“Yes. Besides wearing the Gray Jewels, Gran can be very intimidating when she wants to be. Her friendships with Queens outside of Dena Nehele have always been discreet, so there was no reason to believe anyone at Raej would connect her with the young Warlord.”

Jared’s heart thudded against his chest. “She bought him?”

Lia shook her head. “He wasn’t there. Not that time. To justify her presence, she bought a couple of other males, choosing by instinct. Once she got them to Dena Nehele, she offered to help them return home. At first, they didn’t believe her and kept looking for a trap. When they finally
did
believe her, they didn’t want to go home because, at best, it would put their families at risk and, at worst, they’d end up dead or enslaved again. So they stayed.”

“And the Gray Lady continued to buy slaves.”

“It became a subtle way to fight Dorothea. Some of the males went home, fiercely determined to keep Hayll’s taint from spreading. Others settled in Dena Nehele or one of the surrounding Territories.”

Jared cleared his throat. “Did she ever find her friend’s nephew?”

Lia shuddered. “Yes. The fourth time she went to the auction.”

Someone hesitantly knocked on the wagon’s door. Grateful for the interruption, Jared answered swiftly.

“Here,” Blaed grumbled, thrusting a plate of sandwiches and apple slices at Jared. “Thera got hungry. She also wanted another mug of that brew you made.”

“I prepared two more gauze bags before I came out here,” Jared said as he took the plate and the two filled mugs.

“I know. The brew’s in one of those mugs, too.” Blaed scowled at the mugs and then shrugged. “You’ll know which one when you taste it.”

Jared thanked him and hoped Blaed made it back to the stone building before he fell asleep.

They ate in companionable silence. Jared didn’t want to break the easiness between them, but Lia had only told him the first half—the half, he noticed, that didn’t have much to do with her.

Jared rubbed his face, willing himself to stay awake a little longer. “All right. The Gray Lady needed to make one more appearance at Raej. I understand that. Sort of. But, Lia, once you’d purchased the slaves, why didn’t you buy passage to a Coach station closer to Dena Nehele’s borders?”

“I was going to but . . .” Lia bit her lip. “The message came, and I got scared.”

He remembered the note she’d been given just before she went into the ticket station. And the fear in her after she’d read it. “What did it say?”

“ ‘They’re waiting for you in the west.’ ”

“Do you know who sent it?”

Lia shook her head. “A masculine hand, but I didn’t recognize the writing.

I thought it might be a trick, too. That’s why . . .” She waved a hand to indicate the wagon, supplies, everything. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You did well, Lady,” Jared said with warm approval. “But wasn’t there a Coach station near the inn where you got the wagon and supplies? Why didn’t we take another Coach from there to Dena Nehele instead of making this journey?”

Lia turned her face away from him. Her fingers worried the blanket. She nibbled her lower lip.

Jared felt the warning prickle between his shoulder blades. His heart began to pound painfully against his chest. “Why didn’t we take another Coach, Lady Ardelia?” he asked softly.

“Everything cost more,” she said hurriedly, defensively. “You have to hire two guard escorts if you’re going to buy slaves so that one can stay with the slaves while the other accompanies the buyer, and they charged me a third more than the witch ahead of me. I couldn’t go into the auction grounds without the escorts, and when I argued about it, that bastard in charge just smiled and said, ‘That is the fee, Lady.’ And the bidding went higher than we’d anticipated, always more than the person’s ‘working value.’ ”

She was no longer talking to him, explaining to him. He wondered how many times over the past few days she’d argued this with herself.

And what, exactly, was she trying to justify?

“I think some of the other buyers were just bidding against me to force the price up,” Lia continued, sounding more and more desperate. “But it was the last time, don’t you see? I couldn’t walk away from the ones we’d been asked to look for. I couldn’t. I tried to fool them by bidding on a few slaves and stopping when the price started to climb, but it didn’t work, and after buying passage for the first Coach, there weren’t enough marks left to buy passage again so I had to do something else, didn’t I?”

Jared considered the expense of purchasing the horses, wagon, clothing, and supplies for this desperate gamble. Outfitting them for this journey probably cost her half the fare for herself and twelve slaves.

But that still wasn’t an answer. In his youth, he’d given enough explanations at breakneck speed to know when someone else was trying to provide a smoky truth to hide the real reason for something.

He leaned over and covered her hands with his. The moment he touched her, he knew.

“How many were you supposed to bring back, Lia?” he asked softly, baiting her. His anger was rising again. And beneath the anger was grief.

So
close
, he thought.
So close
.

“We didn’t set an exact number,” Lia mumbled.

“How many?”

She trembled beneath his hands and wouldn’t look at him.

“Who were you asked to look for?” Jared asked, struggling to keep his voice gentle.

She swallowed hard. “Eryk and Corry. Blaed and Thayne. Polli.”

Jared’s hands tightened until she made a small, hurt sound. Not trusting himself, he released her and shoved his fists into his pockets. “If you were supposed to bring Polli back, how could you give her to that rogue bastard?”

Lia’s head snapped up. “Prince Talon is
not
a bastard— of any kind,” she said hotly. “He’s a good, honorable man. Besides, he’s Polli’s uncle. Since he was the one who asked us to look for her, why shouldn’t I send her with him when there was the chance?”

Jared stared at Lia and then shook his head to clear it. That hard-eyed Warlord Prince was Polli’s uncle? Well, that explained why she’d been willing to go with him.

“That’s how I know the message wasn’t a trick,” Lia said, bristling. “The escorts who were waiting for us at the western Coach station were attacked.

When we didn’t meet Talon as planned, he and some of his men started looking for us.” Tears filled her eyes. She slumped, as if her body couldn’t stay upright once anger no longer supported her. “My uncle was leading the escorts who were supposed to bring us home.”

Jared moved to her bench and put his arms around her. He stroked her hair and rocked her, murmuring soothing noises while she cried out the fear and grief she’d had to hide.

When she finally quieted, he called in a handkerchief and let her sniffle into it for another minute before slipping a finger under her chin, forcing her head up.

“Want to tell me the real reason you didn’t buy passage?” he asked gently.

Before she could say anything, he pressed a finger against her lips. “Let me tell you what I think happened. You arrived at the auction ground as soon as it opened and spent the day going from auction block to auction block until you found all of the people you’d come for. Probably took you the best part of the day, too. I imagine you bought a couple of the others while you were searching so that it wouldn’t be obvious you were waiting for particular slaves to come to the block, but you would have been careful not to overspend at that point. Then, once you had the five you came for, you still had enough marks to buy three or four more slaves. But you wouldn’t have settled for the first ones who came on the block after that. You would have looked for people who could still appreciate the gift of freedom. Since there were so many and you could take so few, making those hard choices took some time. Right?”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

“Now, by the time you’d made your next-to-last purchase, there were still plenty of gold marks left to buy the double passage that would get you to a Coach station close to the Tamanara Mountains. And don’t give me any nonsense about the escorts bringing the marks with them for the next step of the journey. I had originally trained as an escort, Lady, and no man who serves in that capacity would have let you leave without making sure you had the means to get home on your own.” He raised his voice to drown out her indignant sputters. “So there must have been a secondary plan if you couldn’t meet them as agreed. Which meant you had the funds for that second passage.”

“I told you—”

Jared pressed his finger against her lips again. ‘“You came to buy five, and they were expensive purchases. Brock and Randolf would have been expensive, too. But Garth? You might have paid more than a simple, expendable laborer was worth, but it wouldn’t have lightened your purse by much.” When she started to protest, he held his hand firmly over her mouth.

“Raej might be the prime slave fair and slave-owning might be an aristo indulgence, but even there a young, half-Blood male like Tomas wouldn’t go for much. With the way aristo Blood males have been mounting Ian-den females, you can go into just about any village and buy a starving little bastard of either sex. And little Cathryn— a pretty Blood female that an aristo male would use as a breeder after his broken wife produced the one child she’d be capable of bearing. But Cathryn’s only nine, and if healthy offspring are the intention, she isn’t going to be useful for several more years.