WinterofThorns

Charlotte
Boyett-Compo

Growing up together since childhood, Lord
Seyzon Montyne and Prince Vindan Brell had shared everything, but if Seyzon had
what Vindan wanted, the young prince would take it, break it, then toss it
away.

Some things never change. Now grown men,
Seyzon has something Vindan desires more than anything—Seyzon’s beautiful
bride, Lady Jana Reynaud. Locked in a dungeon on his wedding night, Seyzon must
stand by helplessly as Vindan once again gets his way and takes Seyzon’s woman
away with him. But no matter how much Vindan enjoys Jana’s body, he cannot win
her heart.

What happens when a warrior’s woman becomes
the property of another man? Friendship becomes a thing of the past and all
hell breaks loose!

Reader Advisory: This story has graphic
sexual language and scenes—no closed bedroom doors (or other rooms) here!

A Romantica®
futuristic erotic romance
from Ellora’s Cave

Dedication

To my Tommy.

I loved you yesterday. I loved you today. I
will love you tomorrow. You were always my hearth, my home and my heart, babe.
The fire in the hearth may have died and the home may be cold without you but
the flame in my heart will always burn bright.

Lord Seyzon Montyne looked up into the most
beautiful green eyes he’d ever seen. He tried to lift his head but the pain was
too great. Blood ran down his brow to blur his vision but through the wavering
crimson obstruction he caught a gentle smile and a flash of very white, very
straight teeth behind luscious full lips.

“Stay with me, milord,” a heavenly voice
whispered urgently. “Stay with me.”

He felt arms sliding under his back,
lifting him away from the blood-soaked mud and the overripe stench of death
that invaded his nostrils. The crushing weight on his chest lessened and he
could breathe easier though blood bubbled from his lips.

“Please, milord, stay with me!”

Her voice was insistent, filled with demand
and a touch of rising panic as she held him to her, his head resting against
her breast. A cool hand smoothed the hair from his forehead and slender fingers
ran down his stubbled cheek.

“Over here!” she called out and the rumble
of her voice against his ear made him keenly aware of her heartbeat.

“By the gods,” a man gasped. “It is Lord
Seyzon!”

“Quickly,” she said. “Get him into the
wagon. Even now I can hear the beat of the Gatherer’s wings coming for him!”

Rough hands thrust under his knees,
replaced the soft arms that had been holding him. He groaned as he was hefted
between two towering black shadows. As they carried him, he wanted to scream
from the agony of the movement but he choked on his own blood.

“Keep his head up!” she ordered.

As he was lifted into the wagon, he blinked
away the blood and saw her climbing in beside him, hiking her skirt to show a
frilly white petticoat underneath. She sat down at the front end then bid them
lay his head in her lap. The men placed him gently on the hard wooden planks,
and soft hands cradled his cheeks as the wagon jerked into motion. At his gasp
of pain, the tender hands stroked him.

“Try not to hit every pothole between here
and home, Jacob,” he heard her call out.

“Aye, milady,” a man replied.

“Thank you,” he whispered and darkness
closed in on him.

* * * * *

He floated in and out of consciousness on
the jostling trip to wherever they were taking him. A part of his mind pleaded
with the gods that the hands he’d fallen were not those of the enemy. Jumbled
thoughts of torture and imprisonment mingled with those of being ransomed and
rescued, of being sent home to Lavenfeld in a pine box or wrapped in a dirty
roll of canvas, his body torn and mangled. Visions of his mother dressed in
black, mourning him, wailing to the heavens made his heart ache.

“Be at ease, milord,” that sweet, soft
voice told him, and the tender hands smoothed over his forehead. “You are with
friends.”

A long sigh escaped him—hurting his chest
as he exhaled—and once more he fell into blackness only to be awakened by the
sharp skirl of a trumpet. The unmistakable sound of a portcullis being raised
made him clench his teeth for the noise drove spikes of agony through his
temples.

“We’re almost there,” she told him. “Hold
on.”

Hoof beats clopped against wood. The wagon
bed shook as its wheels rolled onto what had to be a drawbridge. Sloshing water
told him they were passing over a moat, and he racked his brutalized brain to
remember which keeps among those he’d visited had moats. He couldn’t think of a
single one.

“Praise be to the goddess. The Lady Jana is
home!” he heard someone yell.

Jana?
he
repeated in his mind but the name did not bring recollection of ever having
heard it before. Forcing his eyes open, he saw soaring sandstone walls then the
metal saw-tooth points of the portcullis as the wagon rolled under it and into
the barbican. The air was cooler inside the stone walls, but when the wagon
left the barbican and began rolling over the fixed bridge that linked it to the
castle, the sun beat down on him like a fiery torch. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“Only a bit more,” she told him, and he
sensed she had placed her hand above his eyes to shield him from the glare.

The wagon stopped. One of the horses
pulling it snorted and tossed its head, harness jingling. There came the sound
of boot heels scraping across cobblestones then the squeal of the drawbridge
being reined in, the portcullis going down.

“Jana, where the hell have you been?” an
imperious male voice demanded. “I’ve had men…” There was a pause. “Who the
hell
is that?”

“Lord Seyzon Montyne,” she told the man.

“Montyne?
Montyne?
” the man
repeated. “By the goddess, woman. What have you done?”

“Linus, have a room prepared for his
lordship and make sure the healer is called,” she ordered.

“Jana, if they find him here…”

“Oh, do shut up, Alden!” she snapped.
“You’re giving me a headache.”

The wagon bed squeaked and dipped. Hands
went under his back and knees again and he was lifted. Agony racing through him
made him cry out.

“Be careful with him, Daniel!” she told the
man carrying him.

“I’m being as careful as I can, Your
Grace,” the man mumbled.

“Hand him down gently,” she ordered.
“Careful, Edwin!”

Being lowered to another set of hands that
shook him, jostled him, brought excruciating pain but he bit his lip to keep
from crying out again. He had caught the worry in her words and did not want to
add to her concern.

“Should the Reivers overrun us, I’ve no
desire to be hanged for harboring a man they are hell-bent on putting in one of
their prisons, Jana,” the man she had called Alden stated. “Or at the very
least lose my lands because of it.”

“They are my lands as well, brother,” she
reminded him. “Father left them to the both of us or have you conveniently
forgotten that?”

Brother and sister landholders,
he thought as he tried to force his mind away from the pain of
being carried. That could mean only one family. He was at Riverglade in the
hands of the Reynaud twins. Though he’d never heard their first names spoken in
his presence he knew quite a bit about them.

“Having an enemy at Rivergla—”

“King Nolan is his Leigelord the same as he
is ours, and he is Prince Vindan’s adjutant general,” she interrupted. “He is
not our enemy.”

“That is beside the point, Jana! We are
surrounded by Selwyn troops! They could attack us at any time!” her brother
snarled. “Once they find out he is here they will come after him and we’ll be
caught right in the middle! We do not have the men or resources to withstand a
long siege.”

“Nor will we need to. I sent word to Prince
Vindan that we have his man,” she said. “He will send troops to our aide.”

“Then you’d best hope they arrive before we
are crushed by the Selwyn war machine!”

“Have faith, big brother,” she said. “All
will be well.”

Those were the last words he heard as he
was jiggled one time too many and the motion pitched him back into the
netherworld of unconsciousness.

* * * * *

“A severe concussion is the least of his
problems,” the healer informed Jana. “He has five broken ribs, and—if you
didn’t notice—a rather jagged hole in his abdomen behind which his spleen has
been lacerated.”

“All of which you can fix,” Jana said
quietly.

“I can bandage the ribs and his head, take
out the spleen and stitch up the hole…” the healer began.

“As I said, you can fix him,” she stated.
She was sitting across the room with her hands folded in her lap, ankles
crossed in the ladylike manner her mother had hammered into her head from the
time she’d been old enough to walk.

“Aye, but he has lost a lot of blood—”

“Which you can transfuse,” she interrupted.

“True, but…”

Jana sighed. “You can do all these things,
Healer Cronin. Why aren’t you doing so?”

“I will as soon as my assistant arrives. I
cannot do it alone and she is with the servant who—”

Jana got to her feet. “Tell me what I need
to do.”

The healer’s eyes widened. “Beg pardon?”

“Tell me what I need to do,” Jana repeated.

“Milady!” the healer gasped. “It is not
fitting for you to…”

“Healer Cronin, do not vex me,” she said
with exasperation. “It has been a long and trying day and I would like to get
to my bed at a decent hour this night. Tell me what I need to do.”

Clamping his thin lips together, the healer
straightened his shoulders, raised his chin then marched over to a cabinet from
which he took a tray of instruments. “I will need to make sure his lordship
remains unconscious while I operate.”

“I would think so,” she agreed. “How do we
do that?”

“There is
trastacáin
in the tall
cabinet beside the sink. Brown bottle with the green label. Beside it is a
stack of clean cloths. Take one, remove the stopper from the bottle, fill the stopper
to the second line then drop the drug onto the cloth in a circular pattern. You
will need to hold it to his nose while I operate,” he instructed.

“Should I keep the bottle at hand?” she
inquired as she walked to the cabinet.

“No need,” the healer replied. “A little
goes a long way. It is the most potent anesthesia in the Megaverse.”

“And he will not feel the surgery?” she
asked.

“Nay, milady. He will not.”

“Good,” she said as she carried out his
instructions. “He has suffered enough.”

For over an hour Jana stood at the head of
the table upon which lay Lord Seyzon Montyne. She tried not to look at what the
healer was doing and instead concentrated on the still face of the Lord of
Lavenfeld. Though his eyes were closed, she had no trouble picturing the
vibrant blue that had stared up at her beseechingly as he lay on the
battlefield. Her right hand holding the pristine white cloth over his nose, she
used her left to smooth back the mop of reddish-brown hair stuck to his
forehead.

“His wife died in childbirth,” she said,
stroking the lines etched into his forehead. “The child shortly thereafter.”

“He has certainly known heartache,” the
healer commented.

“I wonder why he never remarried.”

“Mayhap the Lady Jacqueline was the love of
his life and he cannot bear to take another in her stead.”

“Mayhap,” she said, her eyes roaming over
the face of the warrior.

He was strikingly handsome, she thought.
There was nothing gentle in the hard planes of his face and the strong thrust
of his jaw, yet he had looked up at her with tenderness when she had come to
his rescue.

“Thank you,” she said softly as she eased
her fingertips over one deep line creasing his brow.

The healer glanced over at her. “Pardon?”

Jana shook her head. She hadn’t meant to
speak Lord Seyzon’s words aloud though they echoed in her mind. His voice had
been deep with just a touch of his Meiramanian accent coming from lips the
goddess had created to entice a woman to impure thoughts. She wondered what
those lips would feel like covering her own.

“Jana?”

She turned—mentally chastising herself for
such a consideration—to see her brother in the doorway. “Aye?”

“Prince Vindan’s men have been spotted five
clicks from Riverglade. His outriders have engaged the Selwyn militia that has
been camped in our north pasture,” Lord Alden told her.

“That is good news,” she said.

Her brother frowned deeply. “What is it you
do, sister?”

“Healer Cronin needed an assistant,” she
replied then gave him a point-blank stare. “Pray do not venture your opinion of
what I am about, Alden. Instead, Lord Seyzon will need blood. Will you see to
finding donors for him?”

Alden clenched his jaw. “Well, of course, I
will, sister,” he snapped. “What else do I have to do with my bloody time?”

She watched him pivot on his heel and
disappear. She sighed.

“He loves you,” the healer observed.

“Aye, I know he does but he can be very
irritating,” she stated. “He thinks me ten years old still and not a woman
grown.”

“Such is the manner of older brothers.”

“By two whole minutes,” she complained.

The healer smiled. “The elder just the
same, milady.” He lifted Seyzon’s lacerated spleen from beneath the warrior’s
left ribcage and laid it in a stainless-steel basin. He packed the wound with
gauze then reached for the suturing material.

“How long will his recovery take?” she
asked.

“Four to six weeks,” he replied. “He can’t
be moved for at least a day or two. I pray he does not contract an infection
but considering I cleaned mud from the wound, I am not optimistic.”

“He will live,” she said. Her gaze was on
the slow rise and fall of the warrior’s wide chest beneath a set of broad,
heavily muscled shoulders. She had an overwhelming urge to run her fingers
through the crisp hair that covered his pectorals then tapered into a wide band
that ran past his deeply indented navel and under the sheet draped over his
lower body. She wondered if he was naked beneath the covering.

“Your
sight
, milady?” the healer
inquired, glancing up at her.

“Aye,” she said.

Jana had been born with a caul and
according to the midwife who had delivered her, the
sight
. Not every
unbidden vision came to past but enough of them did to gain her a revered
reputation among the inhabitants of Riverglade. She had foreseen the deaths of
her parents, the suicide of a favorite uncle, the war that descended upon them
with brutal purpose.

And she had seen Lord Seyzon Montyne fall
to a Selwyn blade moments before he ran his own through his attacker’s heart. Dressing
quickly, she had flown down the stairs and through the bailey, mustering
warriors as she ran, ordering a wagon be hitched and her horse saddled. Despite
the frantic shouts of those following her, she had outdistanced the men in her
headlong rush to reach the fallen warrior. Her heart racing, fear turning her
body ice-cold, she had found him right where her vision had shown her and she’d
all but tumbled from her mount in her rush to get to him.