Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan (7 page)

“Had he been worried about you?”

“No,” he replied. “He knew what was
happening inside me. He’d spent over fifty years in Cell Two. He understood. He
told me that when Cair Ghrian had brought him back to Theristes, he’d undergone
the same manic desire to be constantly with his people but then had come the
day when he needed to go off on his own. Thankfully Bahiya understood and
allowed him his space.”

“A wise woman,” she said.

“He told me if I wanted to spend some time
alone that was my right. I could go off and find a place of my own and know
that there would be no bars, no locked doors to keep me in that place. I would
have freedom to go and come as I liked with no one to deny me.”

“And so you found the cave.”

“That first night in the cave, I realized
that all my life I’d been imprisoned in one way or another,” he said. “When I
was a child, I was kept in the nursery away from my parents—most especially my
mother—and when I was old enough to walk and talk, I was sent to my
grandparents who were wonderful people but my grandmother was so afraid
something would happen to me that there were always guards around me watching
every move I made. When I went to the military academy, it was like being in
prison. You were told when to get up, when to eat, when to bathe, when to go to
bed. Every facet of your life is controlled by the school. Fleet Academy was
worse yet and even after I had a modicum of freedom on my father’s ship, I
wasn’t free to come and go as I pleased and I was answerable for everything I
did, every decision I made—right or wrong—and if that decision did not meet
with my father’s approval, I was punished for it.” He shrugged. “I was in a
prison there too, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

“It must have been liberating in the cave.”

“I found peace there,” he said. “When I’d
get lonely for company, I’d trek across the mountain to the village, spend a
few hours or days and then come back. There is another man who visits me but he
comes very rarely. I was as content as I knew how to be but…”

“But something was missing,” she said.

“And now I know what it was.”

She said nothing for a long while and when
she finally spoke, she felt the tension gathering in his body.

“I will have to go back to Riezell,
ehemann
,”
she said. “General Strom gave me a month’s leave that started from the day I
arrived here. He will expect me to return. I won’t be free of my duty for
another two years.”

“Can’t you resign your commission?” he
asked. “Ruan Cosaint’s lady as well as Cair Ghrian’s left the Guardians. Why
can’t you?”

Shanee tucked her lower lip between her
teeth. She didn’t know how to explain to him that it was her destiny to be a
Riezell Guardian, that she had given up much just to be allowed the opportunity
to try out for the elite assignment. She was a warrioress and that was what
gave her life meaning.

He pushed up from the ground and moved so
he was sitting beside her. “You like the danger,” he accused. “The adrenaline
rush of being a Guardian.”

“It’s more than that,” she said, also
sitting up. The ground was getting cold and a light breeze had sprung up to
chill her. She wrapped her arms around her bare breasts.

Without a blink of his eyes, he waved his
hand and a black shirt and britches appeared to cover her flesh. Another wave
and he was clad once more in a breechclout.

“Thank you,” she said softly. She raised
her knees and laid her head down on them. “Can I tell you why I don’t want to
give up being a Guardian?”

“You can tell me anything,” he said, but
she could hear the hurt in his voice.

“How much do you know about Amazeen?” she
asked.

“Very little,” he said then cast her a
glance. “I was surprised you had both breasts. I’d heard your people took off
one.”

Shanee nodded. “Most do,” she said. “If you
are right-handed, it would be the right breast and the other way around if
you’re left-handed. It is considered expedient in the use of a bow.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Makes sense.”

“It is left up to each woman if she wants
to have it done. I didn’t. I knew I wanted to be a warrioress but I knew my
fighting would be with dagger, laser or crossbow and with a crossbow, you don’t
have to worry about getting your tit caught in the string.”

“Are you good with those weapons?” he asked
quietly.

“I am an expert with those weapons,” she
replied. “My mother saw to it. She is the defense queen.”

He nodded again as though that information
had been expected.

“Amazeen do not like to truck in the
affairs of other worlds,” she said, digging her bare toes into the sand. “We
keep mainly to ourselves although there are other female groups with whom we
interact.”

“Like the Hell Hags and the Multitude,” he
said. “My mother belongs to the Multitude.”

“I thought as much. She has that air about
her,” his lady commented.

“So how did you get permission to join the
Riezell Guardians?” he asked.

Shanee looked out across the stream. “I
didn’t get permission,” she said. “I left and cannot return. As far as my tribe
is concerned, I am dead. I became an outcast when I stole my mother’s Fiach
runabout and journeyed to Riezell.”

“Did being a Guardian mean that much to you
that you would throw away your heritage?” he queried.

“It was more than that,” she said. “I had
very strong feelings about the Border Wars. For the most part Amazeen stayed
out of the conflict though we sided with the Alliance. Had my mother ever
gotten the chance, she would have taken Ryden Bakari captive. She is very
enamored of the Burgon.”

Ailyn smiled. “He has his problem with
women, doesn’t he?” He nudged his chin toward the mountain. “There are over a
hundred women here from his seraglio. He never laid a hand to a single one of
them but they speak of him as though he were a veritable god.”

“My mother and her sister think he is,” she
told him. “You were Coalition captured by the Alliance yet you went with Rory
Quinn and the others to fight for the Burgon.”

“I admire Ryden Bakari. Had it not been for
him, we might all still be locked in con cells on R-9. He not only put an end
to the making of new Reapers, he gave us our freedom. Like all the others, I
owed him. When his family was massacred by the New Coalition, I felt I should
help out of respect for Bakari.”

“He deserves that respect and allegiance,”
she said.

“So you wanted to make a difference in the
outcome of the war,” he said. “How did you wind up in Riezell then if you
were…?” He stopped, blinked and gave her an astonished look. “You were sent
there by the Alliance.”

She cocked one shoulder. “I was killing two
birds with one stone as I saw it. I was aiding the Alliance and I was joining
the Guardians. Life was beginning to turn as I wanted it to.”

“And now?” he asked.

She met his gaze. “You can come back to
Riezell with me,” she suggested.

“To be your kept man?”

Shanee frowned. “No, as my husband. You don’t
have to let your mother know you’re there.”

“There is no way under heaven or above hell
that she wouldn’t find out,
ionúin
,” he said. “Nothing happens on that
planet that her spies aren’t privy to.”

“Even so, you don’t have to see her. Primä
One and Primä Two wouldn’t allow anyone into my quarters without your direct
consent.”

“Primä One and Primä Two?”

“My cybots,” she answered. “They had been
assigned to me by General Morrison when I was sent after Rory Quinn to arrest
him and when Morrison decided to off himself, I asked for permanent custody of
P1 and P2. There was some finagling but the ’bots are mine.” She laughed. “I’ve
reprogrammed them and they are as loyal to me as if I had given birth to them.
They’re my babies.”

“Class 10s, huh?” He drew in a long breath.
“That’s seven feet of pure power. There was one on the Tiogar’s ship and I
stayed well away from it. They only had Class 2s when I graduated Fleet
Academy. Those things scare me.”

Shanee made a rude sound with her lips. “As
if anything could scare a Reaper,” she said then winced at labeling him such
since he’d asked her not to.

“There is one thing that every Reaper is
scared shitless of,” he said.

“Other than water and fire?”

“Well, aye,” he corrected himself. “But you
can stay the hell away from fire and water can be overcome. This can’t.”

“What is it?”

“Ghorets,” he said.

Instinctively Shanee glanced down at the
ground, half expecting to see one of the three-foot-long silver and green
vipers with florescent blue venom—the bite from which could kill a human in the
blink of an eye.

“There are no snakes on Theristes,” he told
her. “Lizards, but no snakes and the lizards aren’t venomous.”

“I don’t think there is a humanoid alive
who isn’t terrified of ghorets,” she said with a shudder. “Their bite can’t
kill you though, can it, like it can the rest of us?”

“No, but I’m told you will wish you could
die after being bitten by one. Tariq said when he first arrived on R-9 and they
began experimenting on him, they put a juvenile ghoret in his cell to see what
would happen when it bit him. He was sick for days afterward. He said if it had
been a full-grown specimen, he would have been much sicker and the illness
longer-lasting.”

“You very neatly changed the subject,
didn’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not going back to Riezell ever again,
Shanee,” he said.

“But, Ailyn…”

“No,” he said, and the word left no doubt
in her mind that it was final.

Chapter Four

Elspeth Harmattan-Jost could barely breathe
as she lay in her huge four-poster bed and stared out at the snow falling
gently over the gardens of her new husband’s estate. Her head throbbed brutally
and as she lifted a hand that shook worse each day with the palsy that was
killing her, the simple action seemed to take all her waning energy.

“What can I do, Mother?” Felix asked, his
eyes filled with worry. “The Riezell Guardian has gone after Ailyn. Please try
to hang on until he gets here.”

Giving her youngest son a faint smile,
Elspeth closed her eyes. “Pray he arrives in time, Felix.”

Realizing his mother had slipped once more
into the slumbers that claimed her more frequently and for longer periods of
time, Felix hung his head. He had taken leave from the new military transport
to which he’d been assigned to be with his ailing mother, though there didn’t
appear to be anything he could do for her. Much of the time she preferred her
privacy and would not allow even his stepfather into their bedchamber.

“She is fading fast,” the vice-counselor
had told Felix. “I have been on the horn every day with Command Central but
there’s been no word from Iphito.”

“She would only have reached Theristes in
the last day or so, Father,” Felix reminded the man, almost choking on the
title his mother insisted he give Jost.

“I expected daily reports!”

“Reports of what?” Felix had countered.
“What the Amazeen was doing on board the LRC? What good is that?”

The vice-counselor had cursed and then
stomped out of the room. He cared as much for Felix as the young man did for
him and therefore there was no love to lose between them. If anything, Felix
hated Jost almost as much as he did his oldest brother.

“I know it was him,” Felix said to his
sleeping mother. “I do. He saw me and I saw the recognition in his eyes. I
might have been young when he disappeared but he’s a Reaper now and I know gods-be-damned
well he read my thoughts. He
knew
who I was.”

Getting up to leave, he took one last look
at his mother. She looked as though she were already lying in her casket. She
was the only thing he had ever loved in life and the thought of losing her was
almost more than he could bear.

“I’ll bring him back to you, Mother. I
swear I will, if it’s the last thing I ever do!” he said before closing the
door quietly behind him.

He did not see the humorless smile that
tugged at his mother’s lips.

* * * * *

General Maximillian Strom had never known
his mother or his father either, for that matter. He had grown up in a
state-run orphanage on Esvaria, escaping that hellhole when he was fourteen.
Stowing away on a cargo transport dropping off supplies for the orphanage, he
had been overjoyed to find himself on Riezell. He’d made a beeline for the
Coalition Forces training camp and enlisted, lying about his age. Since the
conflict with the Alliance was not going well and every able-bodied male was
needed to churn the wheels of the war machine, no one questioned him and he was
sworn in as an infantryman.

Rising up quickly through the enlisted
ranks on bloody battlefields, one particularly heroic act of courage and
selfless bravery had earned him a promotion to lieutenant and from there until
the peace treaty with the Alliance was signed, Strom had steadily advanced up
the ladder until the golden star of a Fleet General now rested on his broad
shoulders.