Escape from Cabriz

Mai was not among them.

“What the hell?” Kristin gasped, bolting upright and trying to scramble off the bed, but the women wouldn’t let her pass. They gripped her arms and legs, and one of them clasped the back of her neck in strong fingers. She struggled, but there were too many of them, and they subdued her. “Who are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”

“Open mouth,” one of them ordered. Gone were the gentle, subservient tones that had always been used with her before.

“Let go of me!” Kristin ordered. “Right now!”

When the women ignored her, she threw her head back and screamed Jascha’s name.

Her right arm was wrenched behind her back and pulled painfully upward. The command was repeated.

Kristin had no choice but to obey. She parted her lips, and a bitter-tasting wine was poured onto her tongue. Not daring to spit it out, she swallowed convulsively. “Stupid,” she muttered, addressing herself, coming face-to-face with a reality she’d refused to consider before. “Stupid!”

The women were stripping her clothes away, but when Kristin moved to fight them again, she found that her muscles had turned to rice pudding. She was helpless.

Her eyes filled with tears of frustration and fear. Jascha had lied, both to her and her family. These women were his wives.

She was raised from the bed and propelled into the prince’s private bath, where an enormous tub of inlaid tiles waited, filled with steaming, scented water.

The women—she tried counting them, but could not think clearly—lowered her into the tub and, remarkably, began to bathe her. They surrounded her and their swift, firm hands were everywhere, soaping her arms and legs, lathering her hair.

After a while Kristin was lulled into a state of half consciousness. They lifted her from the tub and dried her as carefully as they’d bathed her, and then she was ushered back to the bed again.

She felt silken sheets against her bare back as they laid her down. Now, she thought dreamily, they would let her rest.

But they didn’t. They began rubbing scented oil into her skin, covering her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. Something stirred in Kristin; she felt herself drifting through space, back to another time and another place.

“Zachary,” she whispered with a soft smile.

Her skin was powdered, her hair dried and brushed. Kristin lost track of time and reality.

A familiar masculine voice disturbed her erotic dreams. “Okay, princess, wake up. We’re going home.”

Slowly, Kristin opened her eyes. For a moment she thought she was still sleeping, because Zachary’s shadowed face was looming in the darkness, only inches from hers. “Zachary?”

“That’s me,” he replied, reaching under her and lifting her off the mattress. “It’s a good thing they used powder after they greased you,” he said, holding her up with one arm and pulling rough cotton trousers onto her with the other. “Otherwise you’d be slippery as hell and I’d probably drop you right on your hard little head. Not that it would make any real difference in your thinking processes….”

The effects of the drug the wives had forced on Kristin were just beginning to wear off, but she still felt woozy and very unsteady on her feet. She shook her head. “Zachary, is that really you?”

“It’s really me, princess. And keep your voice down. If His Highness finds me in the royal boudoir, I’ll be in for a rough three or four days in the dungeon.”

He pulled a shirt over her head and forced her arms into the sleeves. Then she rested her cheek against his chest, yawning. “How did you find me?”

“That’s a long story. We’ll talk about it when we’re at least fifty miles from this place.” He caught a curved finger under her chin. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re stoned out of your mind,” he confided. “We’re about to climb down over the terrace, and there’s always a possibility one of the guards might wake up. Whatever you do, princess, hold on tight and keep that legendary mouth shut.”

Before Kristin could lodge any kind of protest, Zachary hoisted her over one shoulder and headed toward the terrace doors. It was dark and the ebony sky was littered with stars. When she saw the stone railing approaching, Kristin squeezed her eyes shut and sucked in a breath.

“Now remember,” Zachary told her in a rough undertone, “be quiet.”

There was an awful jostling sensation, and Kristin caught hold of the back of Zachary’s belt and hung on with all her strength. The fact that she’d been drugged did nothing to ease her fear when she opened her eyes and saw that they were descending a thin rope into the dark courtyard.

If she hadn’t still been holding her breath, she would have screamed her lungs out.

Presently they reached the ground and Zachary set Kristin on her feet, where she teetered for a moment, to flip the grappling hook loose from the terrace railing and wind the rope around one hand. Kristin lifted her hand to her mouth to stifle another yawn. “You’ll never believe what just happened to me in there—”

Even in the thin light of an autumn moon, Kristin saw the muscle tighten in his jaw. “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” he responded. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

Once they’d gained the palace wall, Zachary flung the grappling hook over the top, then wrenched on the rope to make sure it was secure.

“Not again,” Kristin protested.

“Get on my back,” Zachary ordered impatiently. “And for God’s sake, stop bitching. In case you haven’t noticed, your ladyship, I’m doing all the damn work!”

Kristin put her arms around his neck and climbed onto him piggyback style. “Think of it as just recompense for all the times I had to carry out the garbage and wash your socks,” she replied sweetly, her head clearing by the moment.

He started up the wall. “You never had to wash my socks,” he retorted, his voice sounding choked.

Kristin loosened her grip slightly. “It was a metaphor,” she whispered back.

“You know,” he grunted in response, straining to pull them both up the rope, “the prince probably deserves you. Maybe I should take you back there and let them finish the ritual.”

They’d reached the top of the wall, and Kristin could just rely make out the outline of a Jeep below.

“Jump,” Zachary instructed her. “We’re like ducks in a shooting gallery up here.”

Kristin’s heart hammered in her chest. “I’m not jumping!” she protested. “It must be ten feet to the ground!”

“Aim for the bushes,” Zachary answered, and then his hand pressed into the small of her back and she went sailing off the wall. He landed in the shrubbery only a moment after she did.

She flew at him, hands flying, bones aching from a jarring touchdown.

He caught her wrists and stayed the attack, and his perfect teeth flashed in an acid grin as he looked down at her. “No time for gratitude, princess. It won’t be long before they miss you.”

Kristin started to say that she didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but the memory of Jascha hurling her onto the bed stopped her. If Mai hadn’t come in when she had, Prince Charming would have slapped her senseless and then raped her. Anything was better than a lifetime of that. “If we hurry,” she said with a meekness she didn’t feel, “we can get to the Canadian embassy before Jascha’s servants sound the alarm. It’s just around the corner.”

Zachary thrust her into the jeep and got behind the wheel. “There isn’t any Canadian embassy,” he answered as they drove quickly away from the palace wall. “Not anymore. Hold on to your pedigree, princess—we’re leaving Cabriz the hard way.”

2

Zachary wheeled the Jeep through dark, narrow streets Kristin didn’t recognize. The city seemed strangely quiet. Empty.

“Where is everybody?” Kristin asked, raising her voice to be heard.

“Hiding. This is a military Jeep.”

Kristin swallowed and brushed her tangled hair back from her face with both hands. “You mean, people think we’re soldiers?”

“Probably.”

Uneasily, Kristin ran her hands down her thighs. She was wearing the pajamalike garb of Cabrizian peasantry, male or female. “Where did you get it?”

“I stole it,” he answered with exaggerated politeness. “Given your station in life, I tried to get an embassy limo with little flags on the hood, but they were all booked up—it must be prom night.”

Kristin’s temper rose steadily as they left the ancient city behind and started up a nearby mountain. As far as she could tell, there wasn’t any road. She folded her arms across her breasts. “Still jealous of the advantages I’ve had,” she replied. “Honestly, Zachary, envy doesn’t become you.”

The Jeep stopped with a jolt. “Let’s get one thing straight, princess. Anybody who wanted your life—” he jabbed at his temple with an angry forefinger “—would have to be one can short of a six-pack. And if you wouldn’t mind, how about a little gratitude? I didn’t have to take this job, you know!”

Kristin subsided, stung. She hadn’t had a chance to prepare for this encounter with Zachary, and the pain was intense. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to leave,” she observed in a more moderate tone of voice.

Zachary guided the intrepid little vehicle into even more inhospitable terrain. There were towering pine trees all around, and enormous boulders. “Well, excuse me,” he replied dramatically. “I’ll drop you off at the next corner!”

“Stop yelling,” Kristin said with a sigh. Zachary hadn’t changed in the year and a half since she’d seen him. He was still bristly and uncommunicative—the dedicated agent through and through. “We’re going to be together for a few hours, so we might as well try to get along.”

The Jeep came to another lurching stop, and Zachary turned to her, smiling in amazed amusement. “A few hours?”

“Sure. There’s a helicopter hidden around here somewhere, isn’t there?”

He gave a hoot of derisive laughter.

“What’s funny?” Kristin demanded.

“You are. There isn’t any helicopter, your ladyship. We’re going to travel through the mountains on horseback. If we’re lucky—damn lucky—we’ll be over the border into Rhaos in five days.”

Kristin gulped. For a moment she actually considered turning back, going through with the marriage to Jascha. Held up alongside the prospect of five days with Zachary Harmon, under the harshest of conditions, life in the palace didn’t look so bad. “Oh,” she said.

Zachary jammed the jeep into gear, and they were moving up the mountain again. When they’d traveled for what seemed like hours to Kristin, in relative silence, he finally brought the vehicle to a stop. In the glare the headlights she could see two horses, saddled and tethered by long ropes to a tree. Nearby were canvas packs.

When Zachary shut off the lights, everything disappeared for a moment. Kristin waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, but her recalcitrant rescuer immediately got out of the Jeep and started moving around in the darkness.

“I don’t see why we have to take horses,” Kristin reasoned as she lowered herself delicately to the running board and then the ground, “when we have a perfectly good Jeep.”

“There are some places,” Zachary told her, untying one of the nickering, restless animals, “where only a horse can go.” He handed her the reins, and Kristin stood there looking at him, shivering. She hadn’t been in the saddle since she was five years old and staying with her mother’s parents while Alice and Kenyan put the embassy in order. Her grandfather had taken her for a pony ride at the beach.

Without her having to say she was cold, Zachary brought a fleecy jacket from one of the packs and handed it to her, along with a pair of sturdy boots and heavy socks. Only then did she realize she’d been barefoot through the escape from the palace.

With a little shake of her head, Kristin dropped the reins and sat down on a nearby stump to put on the socks and boots. Between those clodhoppers and her ill-fitting, scratchy cotton pajamas, she’d be a sight.

Zachary snatched back the reins and held them impatiently while she prepared to travel.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she told him sheepishly. She’d never even been to camp, let alone roughed it in a foreign wilderness, and all those trees were giving her the willies.

“Pick a bush,” Zachary responded.

Kristin started to protest, then stopped herself. It was clear enough that Zachary still thought she was a spoiled, immature little rich girl, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing weakness. “Thank you,” she said with dignity, rising to her feet and walking regally across the small clearing.

When she returned, Zachary was waiting to strap a pack on her back.

“What’s in this thing?” She frowned as she tried to hoist herself into the saddle, pack and all. The horse sidestepped nervously, and the saddle tipped. The next thing she knew, Kristin was between the animal’s legs, and it was prancing in a frantic effort to keep itself upright.

“You been gaining weight lately?” Zachary asked as he caught the horse by the bridle and then soothed it with a pat on the neck.

After scrambling back to her feet, and out of the way of the horse’s hooves, Kristin glared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

He shrugged and then made a beckoning gesture. “Come on, I’ll help you into the saddle.”

Kristin was still insulted. “If you’re sure you won’t get a hernia from the effort,” she replied stiffly.

He laughed. “It may be too late. After all, I just carried you down a rope and up the palace wall.” With a sound meant to indicate herculean effort he lifted her into the saddle, and she clung to the pommel with both hands, hoping he wouldn’t see how afraid she was.

It didn’t help that he swung into his own saddle as easily as a TV cowboy. “Relax, princess,” he said, and it was the first kindly tone he’d used since he’d awakened her in the palace. “These animals are hardly more than plow horses. They’re not going to hurt you.”

Kristin lifted her chin. “I’m aware of that,” she lied in a lofty tone of voice.

Zachary chuckled and shook his head, then spurred his horse toward a break in the trees. “Follow me, your ladyship.”

Her lips moving in silent mimicry of his remark, Kristin gave her mount a nudge with one heel. “How did you know which room I’d be in back there?” she asked when about fifteen minutes had passed. Even though she didn’t like Zachary—indeed, he was the last man in the world she would have wanted to rescue her—she was curious. Besides, five days was too long to keep quiet.

His broad shoulders stiffened in the bright moonlight. “That didn’t take a genius—you were about to marry the guy. I looked up an old friend who used to work in the palace, and he sketched the floor plan for me.”

Kristin was silent for a few moments, absorbing the fact that Zachary thought she’d been sleeping with Jascha. She didn’t know why, but it hurt.

“I did get there before the wedding, didn’t I?” he asked, glancing back at her.

Kristin sighed. “Yes. But I wouldn’t have gotten married anyway—I’d already told Jascha the ceremony was off.”

“I don’t think he was convinced,” Zachary replied.

She ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch, and her nostrils were filled with the sudden and paradoxical scent of Christmas. “Why not?”

“When I got there you were naked as hell, and you’d been powdered and perfumed for a night of pleasure, that’s why.”

Kristin blushed, remembering the strange, decadent sensuality of the experience. She’d grown up in Cabriz, but there were a great many things about its culture she didn’t understand. After all, she’d always been very sheltered, living within the embassy walls, taking her schooling from a governess. She didn’t speak.

Zachary looked back at her again, but the expression on his face was unreadable in the thin moonlight. “They were the Cabrizian equivalent of a harem, princess. It’s their job, among other things, to prepare a new bride for their husband’s enjoyment.”

Kristin had already come to that conclusion, and she was ashamed of her naïveté in believing Jascha when he’d promised she’d be his only wife. “I know that, Zachary,” she said quietly. “You can spare me the Cabrizian culture lesson.”

He reined in his horse to ride beside her, even though the path was really too narrow. “If you knew, why the hell did you agree to marry the bastard?”

She sighed and ran one hand through her hopelessly tousled hair. “I didn’t figure it out until tonight,” she confessed, unable to meet Zachary’s eyes. “Jascha promised—”

“Jascha promised,” Zachary interrupted, and his voice conveyed such contempt that Kristin began to feel defensive.

“He was there for me when I needed him, Zachary,” she said evenly.

Zachary glared at her for a moment and she saw the muscles in his throat work, then he rode ahead of her again.

Typical, Kristin thought. Whenever the conversation took a direction Zachary didn’t like, he simply clammed up. In all the time they’d been together he’d never told her anything about his childhood or his family, if he had one. All she knew for sure about his past was that he’d never been married and that he’d joined the agency right after he left the air force.

“What if I hadn’t wanted to leave Jascha?” she asked.

The path was broader there, but Zachary didn’t wait so she could ride beside him. “I wouldn’t have forced you,” he replied quietly.

“Even though your orders were to bring me back no matter what?”

She saw the broad shoulders tighten under his battered leather coat. “I’m not here under anybody’s orders,” he answered.

“Not even Dad’s?”

Zachary permitted himself a raspy chuckle. “Well, he did offer an opinion.”

“I can imagine,” Kristin replied ruefully. She and her father were certainly not close—she’d never, to her knowledge, done a single thing that pleased him—but she liked to think the man cared about her, at least a little.

The glimmer of the moon showed a rocky plateau up ahead, followed by another steep incline. “Why did you do it?” Zachary asked hoarsely. “Why did you come over here, when you knew the country was in an uproar? Did you love him that much?”

Kristin bit her lower lip, searching her mind for satisfactory answers. God knew, those were questions she’d asked herself often enough during the past few weeks as the fighting had grown worse and Cabriz’s relations with other governments had collapsed. “A year ago, when Jascha and I started seeing each other again, in New York, things weren’t so volatile over here. And there was the fairy-tale aspect of it all—we were on the covers of magazines, and Jascha sent flowers every day….” She stopped and glanced at Zachary, trying to read his reaction in the set of his frame, but he gave her no sign of his feelings. “I got swept up into the storybook-princess element of the thing, and it wasn’t until I came over here that I began to have doubts.”

For a long time the only sounds were those of night creatures prowling the nearby woods and of the horses’ hooves on the stony ground. Then the question came again.

“Did you love him?”

Kristin had been stalling, but she still wasn’t prepared. “I don’t know, Zach.”

He didn’t reply, and they began the ascent up the side of the mountain. Kristin felt as though the weight of her backpack alone would pull her over the horse’s rump and onto the ground.

Finally they reached fairly level ground again. “Where are we going to sleep tonight?” she asked, breathless from the effort of holding on to the pommel of her saddle.

Zachary gave her a sour look. “The Ramada Inn,” he answered.

Kristin felt anger swell inside her, but she was too tired, cold, hungry and frightened to give free rein to it, so she just rode quietly until her temper had deflated a little. “There’s no need to be snide,” she pointed out.

Holding the reins in one gloved hand, he bent in a mocking bow. “I beg your pardon, your ladyship. I’ll try to keep a civil tongue in my head from now on.”

Tears pressed behind Kristin’s eyes and clogged her sinuses, but she held them back. “I haven’t had my dinner, you know,” she said, keeping her chin high.

Zachary produced something from the pocket of his leather jacket and shoved it at her.

She took the item from him with trembling fingers. It was a candy bar—her favorite combination of chocolate and coconut—and though it was a little squished, it looked like a feast to Kristin. She thanked him, unwrapped it with awkward haste and indulged in a bite.

“Want some?” She felt duty bound to offer, though she hoped Zachary would decline.

He shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll have something when we stop for the night.”

So they were stopping. Kristin was relieved to hear that. “Umm,” she said, enjoying her candy bar.

Zachary spared her a grin. “Did you think I’d forgotten what you like?”

Her throat constricted with unwanted emotion. It was just like him to remind her of old times, when they’d lived together. He’d left her favorite candy on her pillow in those days, or tucked it into her pocket, or hid it in her camera case.

She blinked several times and swallowed hard. “I doubt if you’ve given me a thought since the day I moved out of your apartment,” she said evenly.

They were moving into the trees again, and Zachary rode ahead, forcing Kristin and her horse to fall in behind. He spoke in a terse voice. “Then you’re wrong. I’ve thought about wringing your neck a million times.”

Kristin sighed. Despite the jacket Zachary had bundled her into, she was cold, and the candy bar had only taken the edge off her appetite. Worse, she was beginning to consider the reprisals Jascha might use if they were caught. “If you hate me so much, why did you come into Cabriz to get me?”

He didn’t look back. “Because I get a kick out of sneaking into countries with names that sound like a line of sportswear,” he answered tartly.

“Jascha will kill you if he catches us.”

“You’d better pray he doesn’t, princess. He’s probably not real fond of you right now, either.”

Kristin remembered the look on Jascha’s face when he’d been about to force himself on her, and she shuddered. “I don’t know what’s come over him lately. He was always so sweet, and so gentle.”

Zachary’s tone was wry. “Little things like the overthrow of a throne tend to upset a guy.”

Kristin’s weary mind had gone on to other possibilities. “What will they do to Jascha—the rebels—if they do overrun the palace?”

He waited a long time to answer, and when he spoke his voice was gruff with reluctance. “They’ll kill him, princess.”

The grief that surged through Kristin shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Jascha had been her friend, if not her lover, for a very long time. After she’d lost Zachary, the prince had dried her tears and listened patiently while she tried to work out the things that had gone wrong.

Her shoulders hunched under the heavy load of the backpack and tears trickled down her cheeks.

Zachary must have known she was weeping—try as she might, she couldn’t seem to cry quietly—but he didn’t make any comments. He did take the reins from her and lead her horse behind his.

By the time he brought both horses to a halt in the shelter of a small circle of trees, Kristin had recovered some of her dignity.

She felt abject relief when Zachary reached out, still mounted on his horse, to unfasten and remove her backpack. “I can hardly wait till we get the fire built,” she said with a sigh, summoning up a tremulous smile.

He swung down from the saddle, carrying her backpack, and tossed it into the leaves that covered the ground. “No fire tonight, your ladyship,” he answered in clipped tones. “We’re still too close to Kiri, and there are probably patrols out looking for us right now.”

Kristin shivered and glanced around at the woods. They looked eerie in the silver glow of the stars and moon. “Do you really think so? It would make better sense if they started out in the morning.”