By Anne Fraser and Barbara Zuchegna
With assistance from Sharon Pickrel and Jean Lamb
Copyright 1999

Chapter Thirty-Two

When she arrived upstairs, reaching Adrian and Jake as they walked away from the door behind which Richard and Liliana were reunioning, T'beth scowled at them. They were both grinning.

They looked like hell. Adrian had finally lost that stupid headband, thank goodness, but his normally gleaming raven locks were filthy dirty, streaked with marble dust, soot, and blood. His shirt was in tatters and splattered with blood. There was a definite bullet hole in one arm. His leggings hadn't been spared, he was more out of them than in. Nobody from the university would have recognized him.

Jake didn't look any better off, though he still had his burnoose. It was ripped and bloody. There was a lot of blood around a makeshift bandage on the anthropologist's leg, but he didn't seem to be favouring it. Right; he was a fast healer, with his changed blood. T'beth was aware that her tank top was equally ripped and blood-bedecked. At least blood didn't cling to leather, and the pants were hard to rip.

"Going to come for a beer, love?" Adrian asked as she joined them.

She smacked him, not as hard as Lily had hit Richard, but hard enough to make Adrian blink.

"There's a little detail we have to look after first, laughing boy," she growled.

"Wha...?" Adrian stared at her.

From a distance, the sound of gunfire. The smell of blood and cordite was so strong that Jake wrinkled his nose. Damn, the smell of blood...

"A little matter of cleaning out this cesspool?" T'beth purred. "No beddy-bye for us vampy-kins ‘til we makes all the nasty bad guys goes away."

"Damn it, T'beth," Adrian sighed. "I'm sick to death of playing soldier."

She narrowed her eyes. "Play the script out, Talbot," she said. "You can't walk off stage before the play's over."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Because I'll fucking skin you," she replied in the same tone he'd just used. "Ditto for you, Jacob. We came here to do a job, and we will do it."

"Besides," Jake added, wearily picking up his rifle, "if we don't, and Richard finds out, he'll go and be courteous to us. Personally, I'd rather be skinned by T'beth."

"That can be arranged," she said, slinging her crossbow over her shoulder. "Come on, Pretty Boy," she cajoled Adrian, "if you do this for me, I'll buy you a drink."

They passed Will and Ed, and told them what they were going to do. Ed agreed to help scour the palace to ensure there were no guards left in it; Will volunteered to look after the women in the harem. He meant in the sense of making sure they were okay, calming them down, maybe getting them fed and secured. Nobody doubted that. You don't doubt something a large blond giant tells you.

"I suppose the king is busy exercising his droit du seigneur," T'beth remarked snidely as the four of them made their way through the palace.

"He's earned it," Adrian replied. He had spotted Shapour darting down a side hall; his own thoughts were running along the lines of how good it would be to sink into that huge bathtub with the big black vampire to scrub his back.

"We've all earned it, Talbot," T'beth snorted. "He's the only one doing it."

Jake swallowed, remembering Nasrin clutching his genitals and promising to make him hard. Two minutes later, she had been vampire confetti.

"Maybe we should split up," he suggested. "I'll take that open courtyard."

The others agreed, not anticipating enough resistance left to make splitting up a stupid thing to do. Ed remained on the second floor, to coordinate with the vampires still up there. Jake, Adrian and T'beth took the nearest stairs down, all of them heading in different directions once they got there.

The courtyard, Jake figured, would be nice and peaceful compared to spending any more time with Adrian and T'beth.

The mopping up was in full progress. They had to be sure that no guards remained lurking anywhere in the palace. Everybody who was still upright was searching every conceivable hiding spot before day broke and the vampires had to bed down in the rooms used by the former vampire residents of the palace. Many of them were hungry; there was an unspoken agreement that any of the guards that were found were dinner.

Jake was trying not to think about blood. He'd seen enough of it spilled tonight, including some of his own; it was making him queasy and excited at the same time. Now was not a good time for his inner vampire to get riled up. Come to think of it, was there a good time? He was definitely feeling prickly around the gumline. Crap.

He'd shrugged off Adrian's offer of accompaniment. He needed to be alone, to try and assimilate the night's events and emotions.

He had killed human beings tonight. He had watched people die, including a woman who only a minute before had been holding him by the family jewels and promising to get to know him better. He should be throwing up, or fainting, or bashing his head against a wall. But he did none of these; he simply kept his rifle at the ready as he set out on a steady sweep of the open courtyard, his enhanced night vision probing the dark recesses behind fountains and pillars.

He, Jacob Fowler, was now a soldier. If this were a real war, he'd probably get a medal. For saving Richard's life if nothing else ... that shot he'd fired ... how had he done that?

A movement and a steady hissing sound made him turn, already snapping off the safety and bringing the rifle to firing position. The movement came again, a flapping motion behind one of the fountains. Steady, Jake, don't jump at shadows...

He heard movement behind him, too. Damn. If he turned, he'd lose sight of the motion behind the fountain, if he didn't turn, he was probably dead. The hissing noise increased, and there was a god-awful smell that reminded him of something...

His booted foot, as he hesitated about which way to turn, hit something very slippery that smelled very bad and down he went, sliding right into one of the ornamental ponds.

A cacophony of hideous noises greeted his ears as he emerged, gasping and soaked, from the unspeakably filthy water. Something was whacking against his leg, something else against his butt, and something else was glaring at him, red-eyed and furious. At eye height, while he was still down in the pond.

Jake had the foresight to throw his arm across his eyes before the furious swan attacked them with its bill. He scrambled out of the pond, sending the large birds flapping out of his way, shrieking their dismay.

The racket of angry swans and dismayed Canadian trying to disentangle himself drew Adrian and T'beth both from the areas of the palace they'd been scouring. The two vampires watched, laughing until their sides ached, as Jake tried to avoid being pecked to death by the outraged birds and ended up taking another header on the slippery droppings. Luckily he avoided landing in the pond again, though he also narrowly avoided cracking his head on a fountain.

"Turkey dinner, Talbot?" T'beth asked, aiming her rifle at the swan nearest Jake, the one that was flapping its wings hard enough to break a leg if they connected.

"Don't you dare," Adrian replied, wiping his eyes. "Aim for that guy over by the pillars, instead, the one who is laughing his ass off."

T'beth nodded, and the gunfire only riled the swans even further. Jake looked surprised as hell when a dead man in a Saravan guard's uniform fell into the pond nearby. He looked across the courtyard and saw Adrian and T'beth. Ed was staring down from the upstairs balcony. For a burnt-out, cynical, tired ex-CIA spook, Ed looked suspiciously like he was laughing.

"Don't just stand there shooting the enemy!" Jake cried out, edging away from the swans gingerly. At his slightest movement, the hissing and menacing beaks and wings started up again. "Get me out of this mess!"

"Sorry, Jake," Adrian replied. "I don't do ballet."

Jake sighed and shrugged out of his ruined burnoose. Flapping this at the swans, he got them to back off enough to move slowly out of the courtyard. He looked like a particularly ineffective trick-or-treater trying to get the last ounce of boo out of a sad-sack ghost costume while being attacked by large angry birds. Once his heels touched the marble of the corridor, the swans gave up the pursuit. Their hissing and honking and general fuss, though, had drawn curious faces from all over the palace. Jake waved his burnoose at his audience. Possibly it was a flag of surrender.

"I am never, ever eating any kind of bird again," he vowed, panting, when he reached Adrian and T'beth. "And thanks heaps for nothing." He glared up at the balcony, but Ed was gone.

"Jake, you were magnificent," Adrian replied. "I'd cast you as the swan prince any day."

"That would be really fowl play, Talbot."

The palace was theirs. Every last corner had been scoured. Every last one of the Ayatollah's old guard was either dead or had surrendered and then had been released on his own recognizance ... usually with severe wounds that would slow him down for awhile.

The successful palace stormers--the survivors of Desert Storm, Junior--gathered in the opulent apartments once occupied by Zanjani, more by tacit agreement than anything else. Jake didn't fail to notice that several faces were missing. Including Will's, and Richard's. He knew where both of them were. Will was helping the ladies in the harem adjust to freedom and Richard was ... Richard was...

Richard was being nursed back to health by a woman who had appeared out of nowhere.

"Um, Adrian," Jake sidled over to the tired-looking actor, ignoring the hot glances that he and Shapour were exchanging. "I just thought of something."

"Down the hall and to the left," Adrian said, without turning.

"Not that," Jake grunted. Though now, of course, that Adrian had mentioned it... "What about Richard?"

"What about him?" Adrian yawned, watching T'beth curse out a couple of Sa'idians who had let their guns get jammed. Ed was shaking his head in amazement.

"Well, that's Liliana with him, right?" Jake asked, fighting his own yawn.

"You know it is," Adrian replied. "I'd know that perfume anywhere; I've been smelling it on our king often enough."

"Then how the hell did she get here?"

Jake's question fell into a sudden silence in the room. Even though a lot of the Sa'idians didn't understand English and hadn't been listening, every conversation in the room chose that moment to stop. Jake's tone was understood, if not the words, and everyone looked to Adrian for an answer.

To Adrian. Who looked poleaxed.

"How the hell would I know?" he demanded petulantly.

"That sounds like bedtime," T'beth said.

"I'm not a child," retorted Adrian sulkily, "and Jake's right ... how did Liliana get here? So quickly?"

T'beth shrugged. "Magic?" she asked. "What does it matter? She's here, she's what Richard needed, and what all of us need is a bath and bed." She turned to Shapour, and said in passable French, "Pick up the actor with delusions of grandeur, and dunk him in the bathtub, will you? What you do with him after that is up to you."

She collared Jake as Shapour, grinning, obeyed her. Adrian's protests fell on deaf ears, and Shapour half-carried, half-dragged him out of the apartments towards the sumptuous bathroom.

"So who is this Liliana, really?" T'beth asked Jake.

"I'm not sure," Jake replied. "She's something called an Awakened, I think."

"Magic," T'beth snorted. "C'mon. Adrian's not the only one who needs a bath and bed."

Most of the Sa'idians had come to that conclusion; the vampires were drifting towards the quarters that their fellow Exalted had used during the Ayatollah's reign. Jake was too tired to argue with T'beth, but he had a nagging feeling that whatever it was the Awakened were, it was wrong to dismiss it as magic. Or them as magic. Or something.

"What about Khelat?" he asked as T'beth pushed him into the bathroom, where several others were already playing or scrubbing in one of the three enormous pools.

The faint perfume of the waters in the extravagant tubs wafted out across the opulent blue tiles, the decor of suns, stars and moons identical to the pattern on some drinking glasses Jake owned. The wall had been opened, so that anyone passing by along the gallery would be treated to the sight of naked, frolicking vampires. Jake closed his eyes and pretended not to see Adrian's slim, beautiful dancer's body being tenderly washed by Shapour ... who was also naked but could not be described as either slim or beautiful. They were in the hottest of the three tubs.

"What about it?" T'beth asked as a few heads came up at the name of the fortress. "Come on, get those clothes off; we're all naked here." She herself was struggling out of those damned leather pants as she spoke.

"Well," Jake replied, mortified, "don't we have to go clean it up, too?" He reluctantly started shedding clothes, knowing full well that T'beth would do it for him if he hesitated. And a bath would feel good, he admitted to himself, though not as good as bed. Alone, dammit.

T'beth looked at him levelly, faint surprise in her expression. "Yes," she agreed, "I suppose we do. But Our Leader seems to be a bit laid up."

"I hope he's not getting laid, up or otherwise, with that head wound," Jake interjected.

His bare butt got itself smacked by T'beth. "The pun was unintentional!" she said, as Jake rubbed his injured pride. He slipped into the water of the middle pool, sighing as the heat soaked into sore muscles.

She looked over towards Adrian, who showed signs of enjoying himself far too much. "Hey, Vambo!" She joined Jake in the water.

Adrian looked up lazily, running a finger down Shapour's splendid abs. "Mmm?"

"Want to go retake Khelat?"

"Maybe in another lifetime," Adrian replied. "Why, Jake, you're naked." His eyebrows went up, but Shapour did something Jake couldn't quite see, and Adrian's attention went back to his big black companion. "T'beth," the actor said after a minute or two in which he was simply gasping, "the play's over. Let Richard storm Khelat if he wants to."

"I think Richard will be out of action for awhile," T'beth said. "Adrian, we can't leave those vampires there, or there won't have been any point to what we did tonight."

Adrian sagged into Shapour's arms. "No more," he begged. "Not tonight. I'm planning on not having a headache."

"Don't think for a minute that I didn't see you eyeing Lily's bare backside."

Donalore sat, exhausted, at a small, beautifully inlaid table in the library-cum-den adjacent to the bedroom where her patient lay. She was breathing in the fragrant steam of another cup of the damned herbal tea everyone seemed to think she should drink ... in this case, zapped up by Stephen to relax her. She had never felt less like relaxing.

Stephen, damn him, smiled serenely at her. His appreciation of the back view of Liliana was something she had mentioned, caustically, many times, and he was perfectly willing to admit his guilt. He adored Doni, and she knew it, but he was a man. "I was just pleased," he said judiciously, "to see that it hadn't lost any of its ... appeal ... without the tight blue jeans."

Doni glared at him. "You be sure to discuss it fully with her damned king. He will very probably carve your heart out."

Stephen was quiet for a moment, sipping his own tea. He hated the stuff; she knew that. But he would drink it rather than allow her a decent cup of honest-to-god coffee. Couldn't any of them get it through their heads that she wasn't pregnant now ... and when and if she became so, she would be the first to know? But he said, soberly, "Why do you keep doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"Calling him 'her damned king.' 'That damned king.' Doni, the man's name is Richard."

Her scowl deepened. "I will be happy to call him that," she said, "the first time I see him when he isn't dying because of his own damned arrogance and stupidity. What do you suppose the odds are on that happening?"

They had been here, in this godforsaken place ... and they still had no idea where it was, for more than five hours. Bella had come and gone, and in the next room, Liliana lay fast asleep ... with a little help from Doni...beside her damned king. The said king himself was still alive, and would very likely suffer no ill effects from his adventures of the night. But Doni had a right, Stephen conceded, to be annoyed with him.

They had arrived in this place, following the mental link Lily had established with her frantic scream for Doni. The room in which they had abruptly found themselves was huge, with softly glowing marble floor and walls and a carved and arched ceiling supported on thick malachite pillars so highly polished that the swirls of black looked like clouds drifting in depths of intense green. Intricately patterned oriental rugs in rich jewel colors lay here and there across the floor, and exotic cabinetry, of dark woods inlaid with metalwork and semiprecious stones, was scattered all around. Arched windows, set high up all along the rear wall, were opened wide and revealed a night sky of unrelieved blackness. Light spilled softly from a row of lamps suspended from the ceiling on what looked like golden chains, through shades of what might have been translucent, pale coral colored shell.

But Doni's eyes, and Stephen's, were drawn immediately to the vast bed, set on a low dais and half hidden behind flowing sheer curtains in ombre shades from off-white to deepest coral. The curtains had been drawn apart on the near side of the bed, and through the opening, they could see an entirely naked Liliana on her knees, her back turned to them, desperately holding an equally naked Richard Plantagenet to her breast. Richard was totally unconscious, his every muscle limp, his mind so greatly diminished that Stephen could hardly sense it. Doni was beside Lily, pulling the man's body from her, at once.

He was dying, and Doni could take time only to throw a brief, "Get Bella," over her shoulder to Stephen before she took over his failing heart, his guttering respiration. Her hands on his body sent out their searching probes and found with no difficulty the broken veins inside his brain, the growing pool of blood whose pressure, forcing the brain itself against the unforgiving hardness of the skull, was killing him. Doni knew how to heal it, but there was no time. She could not release his heart, his lungs, long enough to re-knit the veins and devise a way to drain the pooled blood.

Bella appeared, in answer to Stephen's urgent call, took one look and said, with a heart-felt sigh, "Him again?" to no one in particular, and then to Stephen, "Get Liliana out of the way ... and for god's sake, get some clothes on her."

"Clothes" for someone else, weren't all that easy to do. Stephen settled for creating a large sheet of white terry cloth and wrapping it around Lily as he pulled her from the bed. She didn't fight him. Filthy, covered with dirt and sweat and blood that was not her own ... and not smelling very good, she allowed Stephen to push her down onto a low, cushioned stool near the bed. But she would not release his hands. Her face grim, her eyes haunted, she said, "Show me."

He understood. Through his bond with Doni, he could 'see,' if he chose, what she and Bella were doing inside Richard's head. He said, "Lily, you don't need to see it." But her eyes were implacable, so he opened the link with Doni and shared the images he received with Lily.

They weren't pretty. Bella judged that there was no time for finesse. This man never seemed to allow her time to do her best work. She tore the tough tissue of the dura, the covering over the brain, and constructed a drainage tube from it, then punched brutally through the thin bone into the sinus cavities to provide a passage. Blood, dark as wine, gushed from Richard's nostrils for a long moment, and then slowed to a sluggish, pulsing flow as Bella exerted her own pressure on the shrinking pool inside his skull. Stephen watched while she worked on the torn veins, one by one, re-knitting the delicate tissue. He caught Bella's exasperated thought to Doni: "It's a wonder he wasn't dead within fifteen minutes of receiving this injury. The man has remarkable stamina." And Doni's sour reply: "He was too busy to die." There was a flicker of amusement from Bella, as she began to repair the damage she had done to bone and internal tissue.

Richard stirred, and a low moan escaped his lips. Lily's hands tightened, convulsively, on Stephen's. Bella said, aloud, "Knock him out," and Doni, giving over control of his heart and respiration to Richard's own body, sent her mind questing into his and triggered the synapse that would keep him unconscious.

Bella worked quickly, returning the dura tissue to its proper place and reknitting it into the adjacent tissue, then reconstructing the chipped bone. It was delicate and exacting work, and couldn't be superficially done. Satisfied eventually, she did a last, careful examination of the brain itself, noting where cells had died from lack of oxygen, and decided that the man had lost no capacity. When she had finished, she stood back, sighing. "I'll leave the external wounds to you, Donalore." Doni nodded, and Bella said, "I would recommend a bath. The man smells like an abattoir."

She stepped back away from the bed and turned to Lily. There was a stern look on her face, but a softening understanding in her eyes. "You should have called for us sooner, Liliana. Within moments, we might have lost him."

"I know." Lily's voice was a lost sigh.

Even the stern look vanished as Bella reached out and took Lily's face between her own bloodied hands. "Never mind," she said, smiling. "You will be pleased to know that his first thought, as his mind reawakened, was of you. He loves you deeply, Liliana. For that, I can forgive him much." Her hands dropped away, and she said, more soberly, "But very soon, you must bring him Home. You are bonded to this man, and he is not one of us. That must be dealt with."

"I know," Lily said again. Bella was one of the Council of Elders. This was not a request.

Stephen disengaged his hands from Lily's at last. "Go on," he said to her gently. "You can go to him now." To Bella, he said, "If we could speak privately...?"

They went into the adjacent room, a sort of study or den, with a vast desk and low, comfortable furniture ... and walls of bookcases. Stephen concentrated briefly and handed Bella a glass of her favorite white wine. She took it, smiling. "A bribe?" she said.

"Yes." He grinned at her unabashedly. "I don't want the bond between them broken."

She sipped the wine thoughtfully, and then said, "What has happened here is not natural. The man is human, and he cannot sustain the bond Liliana has somehow established. In time, and very little time, it can damage her irreparably." Her wise old eyes regarded him quizzically. "Did you think I would be unaware of the damage she has already done to herself? If Donalore had not intervened, she might have killed herself or her child. That cannot be allowed to go on."

"I know. Bella, I want this man to join us. I want Joanna to awaken him."

Her eyebrows lifted, and Stephen went on, quickly, "Not just for Liliana's sake. I have wanted him to join us since long before she bonded with him. Bella, I need help at the Compound, and I know of no one who could help me more ... if he was awakened. He was not only a king. He was a general. We have access to no one else with his skills. We are under attack, Bella, and we are not ... we have never been ... warriors. This man is, and he was a leader for all of his life."

She was shaking her head before he was half done. She said immediately, "Stephen, you must present this to the full Council ... and you had better have a strong case. We have allowed Joanna's ability to initiate awakening to be used just once ... with the man Tallant. And that was a fiasco of the most serious sort. We are not human ... and it may be that a forcibly awakened human is still a human, and unable to exercise the power of an awakened mind sanely."

"Gabriel Tallant wasn't human. He was a vampire. And his ... aberration was most probably rooted in that, and in the deep-seated defects within his own personality. Bella, one failed experiment shouldn't mean that we abandon the attempt. This man is worth the risk."

She sighed. The wineglass vanished. "As I said, you must take this up with the Council as a whole. If you like, I will prepare the others and ask them to give the idea some thought before the issue must be decided. You can present your arguments to us all, singly or in council, when you wish. But Stephen ... be certain this is truly something you need, and expect resistance. Tallant's failure was a disaster that must not be repeated. And..." She hesitated, and then went on determinedly. "And if the Council's decision is that this should not be allowed, the bond Liliana has established with the man must be broken. She is too valuable to risk."

"Lily is at greater risk if she loses Richard Plantagenet than she is from any other possible cause," Stephen said, very certainly. "They are unique, and we need them both."

She sighed again. "Then bring them Home," she said, "and convince the Council."

Without another word, she vanished.

Now, sitting with Doni after seeing to cleaning the restored but still deeply sleeping Richard, Stephen wondered just how much support he would get from Doni herself when he faced the Council. Doni loved Lily ... and she loved Anne. And although she knew Richard was not truly responsible for causing two women to love him so deeply, and for the pain each of them had suffered because of him, her resentment of him was obvious. Doni wanted to be happy for Lily, but she could not yet deal with her feelings of disloyalty to Anne.

And, quite suddenly, she vented those feelings by throwing her teacup across the width of the room and seething, "Damn the man! Why can't he be Shakespeare's nasty little hunchback with the withered arm?"

The cup landed, shattering, on the marble floor near the door to the bedroom. And standing in the doorway, looking down at its remains, Richard Plantagenet said mildly, "I can do nothing immediately to acquire either a hunched back or a withered arm, lady, but if it would in any way lessen my debt to you, I can be, I promise you, very nasty indeed."

He should not have been awake for hours. He was not simply awake; he had been awake long enough to have found clothing to replace the tattered, bloody rags he had left scattered on the floor of the adjacent bedroom.

He was wearing some sort of soft black pants, his own scuffed and stained hiking boots, and, incredibly, a loose, long-sleeved shirt of black velvet heavily embroidered at the open throat with soutache braid and inset with glittering stones of deep blue and purple. Impeccably neat and clean after the bath Stephen had given him while he was unconscious, and as insufferably aloof as ever, he lifted the hem of the shirt with some distaste and said, "Forgive the costume, please. The tastes of the former occupant of this suite, whoever he may have been, ran to the ostentatious. I assure you, this was the most conservative item I could find in his dressing room, but if you think it might be more appropriate, I could as well choose to appear in glories of white satin encrusted with rather poor quality emeralds or scarlet brocade trimmed with sable. Either struck me as a bit frivolous." He stepped carefully around the shattered pieces of teacup and it's spilled contents and came toward them. "Mistress Donalore, I'm quite certain my restored health has deepened my great debt to you. Thank you. But I must ask both of you to excuse me for a moment."

He had started to walk on past them, and Stephen said quickly, "Richard, I'd like to speak with you for a few minutes."

Richard hesitated. Courtesy warred with responsibility, and responsibility, as it usually did, won. He said, "This will take no more than a moment, and then I will be at your complete disposal." He walked over to the corridor door, threw the bolt, and jerked it open. A man in a flowing burnoose and head scarf damned near jumped out of his skin as he whirled around, his hands tense on the rifle he carried across his chest. Richard said to him, in a voice of unmistakable command, "Find Vaje Will and Vaje Ed, and say that they are to report to me here at once."

The man, dark-skinned but with the aquiline features of the Middle East, bowed almost reverently and said, in thickly accented English, "It will be done, Vaje Richard."

Richard closed the door in his face and came back to the table where Stephen sat with the scowling Donalore. There was another spindly gilt and tapestry chair nearby. He drew it with him and sat down, saying, "Stephen, as grateful as I am to your lady, I think I would be almost as grateful to you if you could supply a cup of black coffee." It appeared on the table before him, steam curling upward, and he smiled. "Thank you. And if you will bear with me a moment longer, I would like to ask your lady about Liliana's health." His dark eyes moved to Doni. "She denies that she is ill, but I think she is not being entirely truthful with me."

Doni took a deep breath, and through their bond, Stephen felt the broadside she was about to launch. He cut in, quickly, to say, "Lily will be fine, Richard. She was ill, but she is already improving."

Donalore had no intention of being denied. She said, "Are we to understand that you actually mean to take time out of whatever the hell it is you've been doing in wherever the hell this is to pay attention to Lily? Or is this part of your usual severance package for discarded playmates?" She assumed a sudden air of feigned surprise. "Or maybe I'm misunderstanding here, and you're genuinely concerned that she should be strong enough to be entertaining when you feel like fucking her?"

There was a small moment of silence. Stephen could have intervened, but thought better of it. Doni had to get this off her chest, and Richard was a big boy. He decided to stay out of it.

Richard sighed lightly. "I am concerned, Donalore, for her well-being and that of the child. Why is surely my own business, and hers."

Doni's hand came down on the table hard enough to make the cups jump. "I'll be damned if it is!" she said furiously. "So long as I'm the one who ends up keeping your playmates alive when you decide to abandon them and go on to the next one, it's my goddamned business, too! Wherever you go, all hell breaks loose and anyone who isn't made of cast iron ends up getting hurt. Or hadn't you noticed that Anne is suffering as much as Lily ever did? But no ... of course you hadn't. You haven't bothered to check on what's happening to her at all, have you? Or the child she's carrying."

His mouth tightened, but he said, with careful patience, "If Nan was in any danger, I'm certain you would already have told me of it." His eyes held hers implacably. "You know already how deeply in your debt I am and will remain to the end of my life. If this conversation gives you some satisfaction, I must, of course, endure it. But what is between me and Nan, or between me and Liliana, is in no way your province, and I will not attempt to justify or explain anything I have done. You will have to accept that."

"Oh, I do," Doni agreed. "I'm not interested in your explanations, and there can be no possible justification. Lily very nearly killed herself and her baby because of whatever happened between you in Maine, and Anne has been ill ever since your blood, tainted with Gabriel Tallant's, mingled with hers when she cut her own throat to save your bloody life." At the sudden, harsh tightening of his face, she said, "But there's no need for you to be concerned, Your Royal Grace. We have Healers enough to keep them both alive, no matter what you do to them, and I'm sure you'll be happy to know that if screwing Lily begins to pall, Anne will be waiting in the wings."

This was going a bit too far, even for Stephen. He opened his mouth to try to stop her, but Richard's hand closed on his arm tightly enough to grate the bones together. To Doni, Richard said, in a voice suddenly lighter and virtually expressionless, "For what you have done for both of them, thank you. Tell me about Nan."

There was something in his eyes now that caught Doni up short. The anger she already knew wasn't justified was fading fast. "You’re quite sure you can take time out of your busy schedule to listen?"

Richard would not be baited or distracted. In the same unnatural voice, he repeated softly, "Tell me."

Doni couldn’t sustain her anger, but all her grief for Anne welled up into her voice as she faced the man she held responsible for it. "The fever you had after Tibet was caused by your body's fight to destroy the symbiote that lives in Gabe Tallant's blood," she said. The satisfaction she felt at his reaction to the name, the grim tightening of his mouth, was only momentary. Doni was hurting him now, and knew it, and it outraged every atom of her Healer’s being to do it. "Because your blood's different than his, it couldn't survive in you. But Anne has the same blood type as Gabe, and it has survived in her. There's nothing I can do to correct that ... at least until after the child is born. Both she and the child are infected."

Stephen was forced to exert his own mental energy into the muscles of his arm to keep Richard's hand from breaking the bones there. Richard said, so lightly it was hardly more than a breath, "And their lives are at risk?"

"No." Doni shook her head quickly. She was already deeply regretting this, but there was no way to stop it now. "No," she said again. "Richard, Anne's body is slowly assimilating the symbiote, and she will eventually suffer no ill effects." She could not bring herself to tell him, now, that Anne could not become awakened without also becoming what Gabriel Tallant was.

"And the child?" he said in that same toneless voice.

"Is healthy and growing normally." She wasn't sure, yet, of anything else, and she wasn't about to tell him about her ugly speculations.

Richard's eyes closed briefly and then opened again, and something of the effort he was making to control himself was there for a moment before he could conceal it. "Thank you," he said again, and then turned to Stephen, "What was it you wished to discuss with me?" Clearly, he would not discuss either Lily or Anne any more.

There was no point, now, in trying to bring up what Stephen had discussed with Bella. More and more, Stephen felt he needed Richard fully involved at the Compound, and he had an idea that if he raised the issue now, the answer would not be what he wanted to hear. He was afraid to push Richard into taking a position now that it might not be possible to get him to back down from later. So he said, "I wanted to ask where we are. I've been looking at some of the books here, and although there are a some in a number of different European languages, most are in a language I don't know."

Richard settled back in his chair. It was as if the conversation about Lily and Anne hadn't taken place. He said, "It is called Farsi. We are in the palace that is the administrative center of the city of Saravan and the province around it, in eastern Iran."

That explained the great difference in temperature between this place and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stephen knew his geography; this area was one of the hottest and driest of the world. Late fall or early winter here was only slightly cooler than the hellish summer temperatures. "Can you tell us what brought you here?" he asked. "It's obvious some sort of battle has been going on. For a while after Doni and I arrived, we could still hear occasional shooting, somewhere not too far away, but that was several hours ago. It's been very quiet since."

Richard hesitated, but then seemed to decide there was no reason not to answer. "I came here with a man who had befriended me to free another friend of his, a lady who was being held against her will. We had help from some of the local people, and since we shared the same enemy, we joined in their fight to overthrow him. Last night we attacked this place and took it over. Today, our local friends will begin to rebuild their government. I have agreed to assist with this."

Stephen's jaw tightened. This was exactly what he'd been afraid of. He did not want Richard committed to someone else's fight, or to a continuing involvement with someone else's problems. If Richard had made such a commitment here, the Listeners might already have lost him. Almost afraid to say it, Stephen asked, "For how long?"