The Invisible Ring (4 page)

The other guard grinned as he opened a large sack and poured coarse-grained salt into the half barrel of water. Using Craft, he raised the half barrel and guided it across the room.

Jared closed his eyes as the half barrel floated toward him. He ignored his quivering body.

He would make a brutal dive down into the abyss until he reached the full strength of his Red Jewels. He would gather every drop of strength he had.

And as he dove, he would place a Red circle around the building to form a psychic boundary. Then he would unleash all the power he had gathered.

That Red strength would hit that boundary and turn back on itself. Even if someone survived the initial unleashing of that much dark power in a small space, the backlash would finish the destruction. They would all die— and so would he, because he wasn’t going to hold back any of that Red strength to shield himself.

I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry.

He dove into the abyss.

The wild stranger rose to meet him, smashed into him, stopping his descent.

Damn you, LET ME DIE
! Jared screamed as he tried to slip past the part of himself that had become his enemy and reach his Red strength.
Let me
—

The half barrel of salty, frigid water flooded over him. Jared’s muscles locked around his lungs. The open lash wounds burned. He couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe.

With a scream of rage, the wild stranger dove back into the abyss, going so deep he could no longer feel it, could no longer find it.

Sagging, Jared felt the pull in his shoulders as his arms took his weight.

The plan he’d had a moment ago to destroy himself became less than a memory. The past nine years of slavery pressed down on him until he thought his shaking body would snap under the weight.

He wasn’t broken. His psychic power was still there, but, somehow, the wild stranger had taken away the will to use it.

I’m a Shalador Warlord. I am Blood.

The words sounded pathetic and empty now.

The guard removed the gag, pulling out strands of Jared’s dark hair that had gotten caught in the buckles.

Jared absorbed the new pain, idly wondering if a soul could bleed to death, if that’s why he felt so weak and hollow.

He was dimly aware of the guards untying him, half dragging him into the next room, then cuffing him to another set of iron posts. The steward appeared in front of him and said something that sounded sharp, but the words were murky smears, and he couldn’t hold on to them long enough to understand them.

Someone removed the wide leather collar.

His chin sank to his chest.

His mind drifted until fingers gently lifted his chin and he found himself captured by hard gray eyes. They looked into him as if his inner barriers were completely crumbled, and there was nothing he could call his own—no thought, no feeling she couldn’t examine and discard as a worthless trinket.

He cringed as memories of his family kept trying to surface. He didn’t want her to have his memories of his younger brothers, his aunts and uncles, his cousins, his father. His mother. No, he didn’t want her to have his memories of Reyna, especially not the last memory of her standing there, bleeding from heart-wounds his brutal words had caused.

The gray eyes still held his, but the fingers drifted down his shivering body, brushed over the hair at his groin, gently circled him like a different kind of Ring, and finally circled the Ring of Obedience. He felt the tight band of gold expand until he felt nothing at all.

Turning slightly, she flicked her right hand toward the wooden table in the room. The guards’ startled gasps didn’t completely muffle the other sound—

like a heavy coin spinning, like a child’s hoop that finally loses speed and circles round and round, lower and lower until the ground claims it.

“Lady!”

The shocked exclamation meant something, but Jared felt too empty to react. His body hurt so much it didn’t even register the usual discomfort that came from the Ring of Obedience—the discomfort that effectively kept a man’s attention focused on the threat of pain.

“Hell’s fire, Lady, Ring him!”

The psychic scents of the males in the room stank of fear.

Jared frowned and wished his thoughts weren’t so fuzzy. Ring him?

He slowly realized it wasn’t a heavy coin on the table, but the Ring of Obedience. The one he’d worn for the past nine years.

Before he could even try to shake off the emotional lethargy and physical weakness, to comprehend what it meant, Grizelle’s fingers closed around him again and squeezed lightly. He gasped as pain shivered along his nerves.

Light flashed from her fingers, blinding him. A clap of thunder shook the building. The unmistakable feel of power filled the room.

Grizelle stepped back and calmly stared at the nervous guards, the shocked escort, and the sweating, hand-wringing steward. “You have nothing to fear,” she said. “He wears my Ring now.”

The steward pointed a shaking finger at Jared’s groin. “B-but, Lady, there’s no Ring.”

“Ah,” Grizelle said. There were so many nuances in that small sound, so much ice in the calm smile. “But there is. He wears the Invisible Ring.”

Jared’s heart began to pound. The Invisible Ring?

The ghost of a memory drifted just out of reach.

The steward chewed his lip. “I’ve never heard of such a Ring.”

Jared had. But how? Where?

“The witches in my family have been using it for generations,” Grizelle said. She gestured toward the Ring of Obedience lying on the table. “It’s ten times more powerful than that little toy.” Then she paused. “Would you like a further demonstration?”

The men hastily assured her there was no need.

Jared closed his eyes. Hell’s fire, Mother Night, and may the Darkness be merciful. Ten times more powerful. Ten times more painful. How was he supposed to survive that?

He wasn’t.

No one survived being owned by Grizelle. And now he knew why.

He let his mind drift again, no longer interested in what was happening in the room. More senseless smears of words. Female anger boiling up like a violent storm on the horizon. Whimpers. Hands untying him, walking him to the final room. He stood where he was placed, passive.

Ten times more powerful, and he couldn’t even feel it. Maybe he was numbed by too much pain. Maybe it was too subtle to feel after so much agony.

If only he could remember what he’d heard about how it worked, or why it was different from the Ring of Obedience.

Then again, maybe he should be grateful that he didn’t remember.

The door opened behind him and the escort, who had stayed in the room to keep an eye on him, snapped to attention. “Lady?”

Damn. Something had happened while his mind had drifted. The escort’s voice held cautious fear, a familiar tone that meant a dark-Jeweled witch’s temper was one careless word away from exploding.

“The clothing you requested will be here any moment,” the escort said.

Jared heard the man swallow. “Is there something else, Lady?”

It took all of Jared’s self-control not to turn around to see what she was doing. It took all of his concentration to identify the quiet sound of a lid being unscrewed from a jar.

“I want to look at those wounds,” the Gray Lady said. “They need to be properly cleaned and this healing salve applied. I’ve plans for this one. I don’t want him dying before I get any use out of him.”

Her voice made Jared’s skin crawl. Her psychic scent unnerved him. Even without the wild stranger’s presence, it produced a kind of lust in him that went beyond the body’s desires, the kind of lust a dark-Jeweled male felt in the presence of a dark-Jeweled witch. It made him crave her touch, made him want her hands on him.

He hated her for that most of all.

The escort hesitated, then said, “I can take care of it, Lady.”

Relief flooded Jared when Grizelle left the small room. It would be better to feel another man’s rough hands than have those gentle fingers touch him again.

When the guards delivered the clothes and the healing supplies a few minutes later, Jared’s world narrowed to a fierce craving for water. He thought of asking the escort if he could drink from the basin—he would have drunk anything at that moment, no matter what had been added to the water to clean the wounds—but the man’s angry growl killed the words before they could form. As he suffered the sting of warm water and cleansing herbs while the escort washed his back and belly, he wondered if Grizelle had known what kind of torment this would be or if she simply didn’t care how long he’d been without water.

Jared endured the cleaning in silence, but he gasped when the escort smeared the healing salve into the lash wounds on his back. It felt icy after the warm water. It also quickly numbed his skin.

Released from a little more pain, he started remembering the advice Daemon Sadi had given him the year they had spent together.

Daemon had called it balls and sass. If a male went into a court cringing, for whatever reason, and regained a little strength or showed a little temper, it would be regarded as defiance by the Queen and the witches in her First Circle, and as a challenge by all the other males who feared losing their place in the court’s pecking order. However, if a male went in with balls and sass, forcing the Queen and the other witches to remember that the danger of a dark Jewel couldn’t be dismissed just because a man wore a Ring and was called a slave, he was treated more cautiously, faced fewer challengers among the males, and was thought of as a chained predator instead of as prey. In some courts, it meant the difference between surviving or not.

“I can do that,” Jared croaked when the escort started smearing salve on the belly wounds. He wasn’t sure about that, wasn’t even sure he could stand up much longer since he was quickly reaching his threshold of physical endurance. Balls and sass were a fragile shield, but, right now, they were all he had. “I can do that,” he said again.

“Shut up,” the escort snarled as he hurriedly applied the salve.

Jared studied the grim face, the shadows in the eyes that avoided his. The escort was a Warlord who wore the Purple Dusk Jewel. How did he survive looking at the bruised, naked bodies of his Brothers? How did he survive looking at the ones who had been maimed or broken or shaved? Did he go home to a lover or a wife he felt some affection for? Did he have children he cuddled and played with and loved? Or had he picked up a witch at the auction one year, one already broken and barren, whom he mounted without considering her feelings or well-being? What did he think of the males bought and sold here? Had he ever looked up one day and seen a man he’d called a friend standing on the auction block?

Ah, the shadows in the eyes. The worry behind having to escort someone like the Gray Lady around the slave fair.
Look well
, Jared thought as the man finished applying the salve and stepped away.
Look at the price you may
have to pay for one error in judgment
.

As if the thoughts had been sent on a psychic spear thread, the escort looked Jared in the eyes. Seconds passed in strained silence. “You’re nothing but a pretty mouth, a dangle for the Ladies to play with,” the escort snarled.

Jared smiled savagely. “I’m a Red-Jeweled Shalador Warlord. I’m stronger than you’ll ever be, can unleash power you can only dream of. And I’m still here.”

The escort’s jaw tightened. His breathing became harsh. “Get dressed.

Your dangle’s for private viewing now.”

The clothes had been dropped on a rough bench next to the small table that held the basin. Jared forced himself to look away from the basin full of dirty water, but not soon enough.

With a fiercely pleased look in his eyes, the escort used Craft to vanish the basin. “You may wear the Red, but you’re still a slave, you’re still Ringed. I might not know the power you wielded when it was yours to command, but I’ll walk out of here a free man, have a cold dipper of water whenever I want it, have a tankard of ale once I’ve seen the Gray Lady safely onto a Coach, and tonight I’ll mount a woman like a man’s entitled to. And you? You would have gotten down on your belly and licked the bottom of my boots for a sip of fouled water.”

“I won’t deny it,” Jared said. “But you, free? For now, maybe. The only difference between service and slavery is a circle of gold. If the Red can be chained, how long will the Purple Dusk stay free? If the right amount of gold marks changed hands tomorrow, how long do you think it would take to turn the handsome escort into a handsome slave?”

The escort’s face flushed a dull, angry red. He raised a fist.

Jared didn’t speak, didn’t move. He just glanced at the door leading into the hallway and smiled knowingly. He watched the escort fight to hide the clashing emotions, saw the moment the man realized he wouldn’t be able to justify the “discipline.”

Lowering his fist, the escort spat out words like they were gristle. “In five minutes, I’m chaining you and taking you out of here.” He flung open the hallway door but stopped in the doorway and stared at Jared with burning eyes. “I hope she cuts you apart a piece at a time.”

“I imagine she will,” Jared said, after the escort slammed out of the room.

By force of will, he managed the couple of steps needed to reach the rough bench. Spreading the shirt, he sat on it carefully, grateful his shaking legs didn’t have to support him for a minute.

Jared, if you’re going skin-swimming at the pond, remember to spread
the towel on the log before you sit on it or you’ll have splinters where you
least want them.

Where’s that, Mother?

Ask your father.

So he had. Belarr had studied his son for a minute, muttering something about why couldn’t they have had one girl so he could return the favor. Then Belarr had sighed and explained what he thought Reyna meant. That’s the way Belarr always phrased it:
I think what your mother means is . .
. As if, despite being a strong Warlord, he felt the need to hedge when it came to explaining a woman’s words, especially the words of the woman he’d married.