The Devil's Heart - Carmen Carter [49]
When the men had finished their task, she lifted her head high, as if in anticipation of a final killing blow.
Taramuk waved back the guards. “If you were less liked, and less beautiful, I would kill you myself. Instead, I will spare your life if you return to the mud village where my uncle found you.”
“I won’t beg for mercy from you,” she said in a flat voice, “yet give me leave to take a cloak with which to cover myself and a loaf of bread to eat. To do less would shame your House. After all, I was its queen.”
“You were a better baker,” he said with a sneer, but he plucked a cloak from the back of one of his soldiers and threw it onto the floor. “Now go!”
With a clumsy bow of acquiescence, J’ross scooped up the cloak and wrapped the cloth tightly about her body and over her head. Then, taking up her bread basket, she walked past Taramuk with the same bearing and poise that once carried her across a throne room. The House guards hastily stepped back, eyes averted in acknowledgment of their betrayal. She left Garamond’s bedchamber unhindered.
The estate appeared deserted by servants and Family alike, but she sensed eyes following her stately passage through the corridors and heard whispers coming from behind closed doors. Those who would have championed her cause were dead or in hiding.
She strode faster down the halls, through doorways, under arches, over steps and out into the courtyard. From high above her, a wailing of horns announced the king’s death to the countryside.
Impatient to escape the same air that Taramuk breathed, she ran over cobblestones until she reached a dirt road, one that led to the village of her birth.
J’ross waited until the looming towers of the House had faded into the distance before she loosed the laughter welling up inside her. Her feet had grown soft over the last few years of manor house living, and they pained her already, yet she danced barefooted over the rough pebbled surface.
By the time the sun had set, she would be safely home.
“I am a better baker than you know, Taramuk the Mighty, Taramuk the Empire-Builder, Taramuk the Dead!”
The basket she carried was heavy, far heavier than a round loaf of kahla should weigh.
Tonight she and her family would feast on the thin crust of stale bread that covered the Ko N’ya baked inside. Taramuk might dine on fresh meats and wine, but it would be his last meal. The rock he carried into battle had been formed in the heat of a potter’s kiln, and a lump of fired clay would offer little protection to him or his armies.
She and Rume would live to spit on Taramuk’s grave. If even half the stories of the Ko N’ya’s powers were true, her lover would spend the rest of his days making the statues he loved; and Garamond’s infant son would grow tall and strong while the bones of that poor dead child—Taramuk’s own whelp by a cast-off mistress —turned to dust.
J’ross stopped her dance for a moment, struck by an unsettling thought. If old Garamond was to be believed, she herself had a long life waiting to be filled. Regaining possession of the House would not occupy more than a few years of that span.
What, then, was she to do for the next three hundred years? Unlike the king, she had no interest in idle pleasures of the flesh, neither did she intend to end her life alone in a dusty bedchamber.
After a moment’s thought, she had her answer.
Taramuk was treacherous and cruel, but he was not entirely a fool; neither was she too proud to learn from her enemy. She had enjoyed being queen and had run the House with admirable skill; that same talent for organization could work as well for an empire.
Perhaps she could even return the Romulan people to the stars.
J’ross resumed her dance down the path.
CHAPTER 14
“Twenty … nineteen … eighteen …”
Chief O’Brien had started the final countdown, and most of the people gathered in Ten-Forward had quickly joined him.
Geordi La Forge was not one of them.
“Look,” he said to his table companion, “if just one more starship is diverted at the last minute, they won’t meet the five-ship quorum for calling