The Invisible Ring

height and tucked his thumbs into his wide leather belt. “It’s Garth.”
    Jared turned to face Brock at the same moment Randolf exploded out of his chair.
    “I warned you!” Randolf shouted, throwing himself at Jared with enough force to send them both to the floor. “I told you that bastard was tainted! Damn you, why didn’t you listen to me? We might have gotten her home if you’d listened to me!”
    Randolf threw a couple of punches before Blaed and Talon pulled him off Jared.
    By the time Jared got to his feet, Brock had disappeared.
    “Hold him,” Jared said as he rushed out of the tavern.
    Spotting Brock walking purposefully down the road in the direction of the landing place, Jared ran to catch up to him. “Brock! Brock!”
    When Brock turned around, Jared stopped abruptly, stunned by the bitterness in the other man’s face.
    “Even now, when he’s barely half of what he used to be, you choose to believe him, to trust him,” Brock said. “Even now.”
    Regret cut deep into Jared’s bones. “I trusted you.”
    “Not enough to be useful,” Brock snapped. “You trusted the Warlord Prince whelp and the Black Widow enough to tell them we weren’t slaves, but not me. It might have been different if you’d trusted me.”
    “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Jared said coldly. “You’d already chosen whom you serve.”
    “It might have,” Brock insisted. His face twisted with conflicting emotions. “Do you know how I came to be a slave? My Queen sold me to Hayll. The Territory Queen is getting old, and the bitch I served wants to rule more than a small Province. So she traded twenty of her best males for Hayll’s influence in choosing the next Territory Queen. She sold our freedom, our lives for ambition.”
    “When a male serves, he puts his life into his Queen’s hands,” Jared said. “It’s hers to do with as she pleases. That’s the risk we all take, Brock.” Remembering Talon, he added, “His life, but not his honor. You had that much choice.”
    “Who are you to talk about honor? You’re a pleasure slave, a nonman pretending to be a Warlord. A Queen killer . Where were you hiding your honor when you butchered her ?”
    “I was owned by her. I didn’t serve her.” But the verbal thrust hurt as much as a knife in the gut.
    “You’re splitting hairs, Jared,” Brock said harshly. “But if that’s how you want to split it, then as far as I knew, I was owned by the Gray Lady. What’s the difference between you killing the bitch who owned you and me buying some kind of freedom for myself by helping the High Priestess get rid of a rival? All I had to do was lead the marauders to her if she escaped the trap at the Coach station.”
    Brock’s lips curled into a sneer. “Hayll didn’t want her killed by a newly purchased slave because it would make all the other witches nervous about going to Raej to buy their pretty toys. I wasn’t going to have a Queen’s blood on my hands.”
    Jared felt a weight settling in his chest. “Who was Garth before Dorothea did that to him?”
    “The Province Queen’s Master of the Guard. A leader. Men trusted him, listened to him. Even our father always listened to him,” Brock added bitterly.
    “Garth’s your brother ?”
    “My older brother. Always stronger. Always better at everything. After the High Priestess broke him back to his Birthright Purple Dusk and sealed him up inside himself, he wasn’t stronger or better anymore, was he? No one was going to listen to him anymore, were they? But they still didn’t listen to me, either.” Brock looked at Jared with eyes full of hatred. “The others would have listened to me if you hadn’t been there. I would have been the dominant male in the group if it hadn’t been for you . She would have trusted me.”
    Jared studied Brock. How could the strong man he’d known on the journey become this whining boy? “The link with Garth,” Jared said slowly. “It not only hid your true nature, it also helped you act as Garth would have acted, say what he would have said.”
    Brock nodded, his mouth curving in a sly, nasty smile. “I’m the one who thought of that after the Priestess put the compulsion spells around me that would make sure the Gray Lady bought me. Being brothers, it was easy to make a link that would meld our psychic scents so that the bitch-Queen couldn’t separate one from the other. I even made him place the first couple of buttons, since no one paid any attention to the mind-damaged male. But he started fighting me, defying me. After a while,