Dragon Lord (29 page)

He had not once considered that Simon would be willing to give up everything to go back to Raina.

As he had planned to do.

“You are not thinking clearly,” he responded finally, feeling more than a little ill.

To his surprise, Simon smiled. “I have not been thinking clearly since I first saw Raina,” he said wryly. “There is nothing new in that.”

“What do you mean to do, then? Turn about? Leave our supporters to try it on their own? Order them to stand down? They will not do it, you know. They are gathered. They are ready to fight.”

Simon got up from his bunk. “Nay. I am not so sunk in my own concerns that I would fail them. You should know me better than that. Even if it were not for that, regardless of what I said about the people, I can not leave them any longer to Jaelen’s tender mercies. I set about to free them from his tyranny and I will. I set out to avenge Evangeline and I will.

“And then, when I have done all that my conscience requires of me, I will do what
I
want. I will go home to Rainie and see if I can convince her to take me back.”

“Schalome is home,” Audric said hoarsely.

Simon shook his head. “Rainie is home.”

Chapter Seventeen

Raina could hear the drone of voices. At first, she was certain they were part of a dream, or maybe a nightmare, but there were no images floating through her mind in association with the voices and somehow that didn’t fit her understanding of a dream, despite the thick fog that clouded her mind. When she swallowed, pain drove the little thought she could manage from her mind. Her throat was as raw as if someone had shoved sandpaper down her throat and scoured the flesh. As that pain subsided a little bit, she became aware that it wasn’t the only pain. She was a mass of pain.

The pain in her throat didn’t seem quite as bad after she’d swallowed a few more times--still bad, but more manageable and it made it easier to inventory the rest of the hurting. It was general overall ache, she decided.

Fever? Sore throat. She’d been sick?

She must still be sick, delirious, maybe, because even though she’d aroused and was certain she was actually hearing the voices, not in her mind, but with her ears, she still couldn’t tell what they were saying.

Why would there be voices around her anyway?

She must be sick and in the hospital, she decided, not sick in bed at home.

The bright lights drilling holes in her eyelids seemed to support that.

Why
did she ache and hurt all over? She wondered plaintively.

She couldn’t remember getting sick.

She didn’t feel hot. She felt as if she was freezing to death.

Almost on top of that thought, she felt the shivering begin from deep inside of her and work its way outward until it felt as if the shivers were going to shake her apart. It grew worse and worse until her jaw spasmed with it and her teeth began to click together.

The voices stopped abruptly. She didn’t realize it at first. She was too focused on trying to control the tremors wracking her, but as the pain and shivering brought her more awareness and she tried to stretch her aching, cramped muscles, she also realized there was suddenly silence around her.

The silence and the discovery that she couldn’t stretch, could barely move at all, cleared the heavy fog until she was able to expand her senses beyond her body. She struggled to lift her eyelids when she’d studied over what she could smell, feel, and hear and realized that nothing entering her mind through those senses identified her surroundings as anything even vaguely familiar.

She wasn’t lying on a bed. The surface was hard and completely unyielding. In fact, she wasn’t actually laying at all, not like she would’ve in sleep. She was curled on her side into a tight little ball and she couldn’t move more than a few inches without hitting something that kept her from moving more. The lights against her eyelids weren’t like the bright fluorescents in a hospital, or the soft yellow/white glow of her bedroom light. The smells weren’t like a hospital--or home.

She couldn’t lift her eyelids at first. Her eyes felt as if they’d been glued shut. Finally, after several tries, she managed to get both open a tiny slit. Her eyes watered immediately, filling with burning tears that prevented any attempt to focus. She closed them again, squeezing her lids tightly to dispel the water and then tried again.

A wavering image filled her vision when she tried again. His lips moved. A voice emerged, but she didn’t understand a word he said. The tone, she understood. It was commanding, a demand of some kind.

The face swam away and another entered her vision. Hands clamped around her arms, pulling and it felt like her joints were separating from the sockets as she felt herself lifted. She groaned involuntarily at the pain that enveloped her. The effort tore at her throat and sent her into a fit of coughing.

She was still coughing when she felt the soles of her bare feet touch what felt like a sheet of ice as she was lowered. She tensed, partly from the cold and partly from the instinctive urge to catch herself as she descended. Pain shot through her muscles but they responded sluggishly and weakly. She slowed her descent, but she wilted into a heap anyway on the freezing surface.

She heard the voices again and thought they were discussing her. She wasn’t sure why or how she arrived at that except that they surrounded her and she felt hands plucking and poking at her. When she managed to get her eyes open again, she saw a man crouched beside her and there was something about his expression and the gleam in his eyes that told her he was the one poking and prodding her--like a malicious, sadistic little boy examining an injured animal and poking at it to see what it would do.

She let out a hiss of pain as he grabbed her wrist and pulled it, straightening her arm, and he chuckled.

She couldn’t see much besides the man, but she saw enough of the room she was in to realize her senses hadn’t betrayed her. Neither the man nor the place was familiar to her and that discovery added a taste of fear to the confusion.

He rose after a few more minutes of tormenting her--when she refused to make another sound to amuse him, barking an order. Another man bent over her, pulling at her and jostling her and finally lifting her off of the floor.

She was naked. She’d dimly registered that, but it had fallen so far down the list of discomforts that she hadn’t done more than register awareness of it. Her discomfort over that fact climbed higher on her list as she was carried across the room and discovered there were people everywhere--men, all of them staring at her with taut faces and yellow/gold eyes.

A kaleidoscope of images and impressions pelted her, adding to the chaos of misery from her cold and pain, confusion, and her embarrassment to be naked and completely exposed to the people they passed. They looked her over with the avid interest of people viewing a side-show freak. She didn’t know the man carrying her any more than the others. She’d refused to acknowledge him after one glance at his stony expression, but she curled a little more closely to him, trying to pull into herself to shield herself from those eyes that followed her, trying to hold onto some warmth.

The man descended stairs into a darker area. No natural light filtered here. Only dim artificial light that hurt her eyes. After striding down one long corridor after another lined with doors, he finally shouldered his way through one, dropped her unceremoniously on a hard, narrow cot and left her, bolting the door behind him.

It was darker inside the tiny room than the corridor had been. Feeble light spilled through a tiny widow high up on the door, but there was no light inside the cubicle. It wasn’t much
more
than a cubicle, maybe the size of a large elevator--just long enough for a cot, which went wall to wall in one direction. There was a hole in one corner, from which eye watering smells emerged that identified it as a crude latrine. A small pipe emerged a few inches from the wall above the hole, dripping fat drops of water that hit the edge of the hole and dripped into it.

She was in a prison cell and it was way worse than any jail cell she’d been a guest in on Earth.

Shivering, she looked down at the thin, stinking cover on the bed and finally drew it up and wrapped it around herself.

The shaking from cold never actually went away, but it eased after a long while, leaving a shuddery, shimmying feeling in the pit of her belly that was more fear than cold. She didn’t make a conscious effort to analyze any of the thoughts drifting around her mind. She had no desire to assess her situation. She wanted to blank her mind and try to ‘hide’ from the fear, but eventually her brain sorted the puzzle pieces and began to fit them together regardless of her wishes.

The moment real awareness finally penetrated her mind, she jerked the cover from around her and stared at her belly. The confusion of chaos instantly descended over her again as she stared at the basketball sized mound with total incomprehension and fear induced panic. Slowly, it penetrated her mind that her baby had to be alright and that a great deal of time had passed since she’d been aware of anything at all or the baby wouldn’t have had time to grow so much.

Months. She’d been unconscious in a drug induced coma for months.

Instantly, fear assailed her again that whatever she’d been given had hurt her baby, but she tamped it. The baby was growing. Surely it wouldn’t have been if they’d damaged it?

She didn’t completely believe that, but she couldn’t bear to allow herself to think otherwise and she shoved it from her mind determinedly. A flutter of movement inside her stomach gave the fear an additional shove in the right direction. She stared at her stomach, her breath suspended in her chest. The movement came again, a shifting sort of sensation. A small knot appeared on the rounded mound of her belly and moved across it. A choked laugh escaped her as it dawned on her what that small knot was.

A hand … or maybe a foot.

She burst into tears of relief then, looping her arms around her swollen belly and rocking herself. He was alive. He was moving. That had to mean he was alright, didn’t it?

She calmed herself with an effort when she realized the baby was moving agitatedly, as if her distress had communicated itself to him. Rubbing a hand soothingly over her belly, she crooned the few words she could remember from the only lullaby she could recall and dried her eyes with her other hand, sniffing until a sense of peace stole over her and with it a flicker of happiness and hopefulness.

For a while, she basked in it, allowing herself to fantasize about the baby, trying to imagine what a baby sized replica of Simon would look like.

The thoughts of Simon led her mind away from the pleasurable fantasies about the baby and her mind took off like a runaway train, snatching at puzzle pieces and slamming them together.

She was on Simon’s world, surrounded by his enemies. There was no doubt at all in her mind of that--and that could mean only one thing. She’d been brought to his home world for one reason--to be used against him.

“Welcome to Schalome,” she muttered to herself.

* * * *

Excitement threaded Simon’s veins as he drew back on the reins of his mount and brought the
naybst
he was riding from a canter to a sliding halt on the brow of the hill. The sun was just rising above the distant mountain range, bathing the landscape with its orange-red glow, and the morning dew that had collected on the foliage twinkled like gems as the prisms of water captured the light. The village below them, cloaked in a wispy morning mist, was as still as a painting.

He sucked in a deep, sustaining breath, drew in the smells of home and felt it flow through his veins like wine.

“I can see Schalome from here,” Jorell murmured low, but despite the quietness of his voice, or mayhap because of the near reverence of the pronouncement, his excitement was evident.

Simon glanced at him, and then at the faces of the others that he could see from where he sat on his own mount, Audric and Elden. Rama and Haig had stayed behind to take the ship to a secure location after they’d landed and disembarked. To a man, and despite their efforts to contain it, they wore expressions of absolute joy, as if they were staring at the gates of
Hadan
, the home of the gods, instead of their homeland.

He didn’t stop to analyze his own feelings. He knew what had sent a rush of excitement through him and it was not the same thing that had affected them.
He
saw Raina as he stared out over the countryside at the peaks that formed Schalome’s southern border.
He
saw the task at hand finished and felt the narrowing of time and space that separated him from her. Soon now, he realized, he would face his enemy for the last time. Soon he would feel the thrill of battle that was like nothing else--fear, excitement, challenge, victory, all rolled into one--and more, because at the end of it he would be that much closer to
her
. And then he would be done and he would have nothing more to do but clean up the mess and he could go back to her.

He could not entirely dismiss the fear that she would forget him, or that she would be too angry with him for leaving her without any explanation to take him back, but he had hope. He had determination. Somehow, he would win her back.

Audric grinned at him. “I do not believe I have ever seen a more beautiful sight!”

Simon smiled faintly, his gaze distant as he summoned the image of Raina’s face to his mind’s eye. “I have,” he murmured.

Audric’s smile flattened. Pain filled his eyes and he looked away.

Discomfort moved over Simon, but he shook it off. “I do not know about the rest of you, but I am looking forward to getting down off this beast,” he said easily. “My ass begins to feel sorely abused.”

The other men chuckled, shifting in their saddles uncomfortably as if they’d only just then recalled the stiff muscles and numbed regions from three days of hard riding.

“You are waiting for an invitation?” Simon asked, grinning at them as he kicked his
naybst
into motion. “Alright then. Welcome home!”