WinterofThorns (4 page)

“Where. Is. Lord. Seyzon’s. Room?” he bit
out, squeezing her neck to punctuate each word.

“Th-there, Your Gr-grace,” she managed to
reply. She pointed to a door two down from where they stood in the corridor.

“Go to your room and wait for me. Allow no
one in save me and speak to no one.
No
one,” he ordered. “I’ve business
to attend to before I see to you.”

She tried to smile but he was cutting off
her air. In her foggy mind, she reasoned that all was not lost. She might yet
be able to win herself a position at court.

He released her throat and gave her a tight
smile. “Are we clear?” he asked.

“Aye, Your Grace,” she whispered, gazing up
into the hard planes of his handsome face.

“Then go,” he said and stepped back. As she
sidled warily past him, he reached out to smack her hard on her more than ample
ass. She giggled like a schoolgirl though his hit had stung like fire. She did
not hear the word
slut
he tacked on as she hurried down the corridor to
her room at the far end.

Hands on his hips, the prince watched until
the woman was safely inside her room before he went to Seyzon’s door. He didn’t
knock. He simply reached for the handle and opened the portal.

Jana stiffened the moment the door opened.
Her heart skipped a beat as she turned to find the prince standing just inside
the room. Her eyes popped wide as he closed the door behind him then almost as
an afterthought reached behind him to twist the dead bolt into place. Door
secured, the edges of her world rippled as he dropped his hand to the broad
black belt at his waist.

* * * * *

“You know he will not hurt her, Seyzon,”
Gilbert Tohre, the Primary Elite Guard, said as he walked beside Seyzon on the
way to Riverglade’s dungeon.

Seyzon couldn’t speak. He was terrified of
what Vindan might do. He cared next to nothing about himself, was thinking
entirely of Jana, and fear for her was like a sea urchin hatching inside his
gut.

“From your lips to the goddess’s ear,”
Alden said. He was as pale as Jana had been. His nervousness was exhibiting
itself in the constant fiddling with the collar of his dress shirt as though
the thing was choking him.

“The prince is a good man,” Gilbert said.
“Is he not, Seyzon?”

“He can be,” Seyzon answered. “He can also
be a mean—”

“I would not finish that thought if I were
you,” Gilbert cautioned.

They had arrived at the cells. In the
distance Seyzon could hear the steady drip of water, and closer by, the squeal
and scampering of rats. Under foot, the stone floor was littered with filth.

“It has been decades since anyone was
jailed here,” Alden said. “There has been no need.”

Along the way they had picked up the
elderly man who had been in charge of the dungeon when Lord Alden’s father was
the overseer of Riverglade. Though he hobbled along and mumbled to himself, he
seemed competent. The large ring of rusty keys he had plucked from the damp
wall at the nadir of the long stone stairwell that led down to the dungeon
jingled in his arthritic hand.

“Ain’t got no bedding left for the cot,” he
told Alden from a mouth devoid of most of its teeth. What was left was a
sprinkling of broken, pitted and darkly stained remnants. He fumbled a key into
the cell door’s lock. “Rats done got to that long ago.”

“Smells like shit in here,” Gilbert
observed. “When was the last time that shitpot was emptied?”

The old man shrugged. “Ain’t got no notion
of that and don’t rightly care. Jails is for those what break the law and they
get what they deserve.”

“I want that pot emptied, you old coot,”
Gilbert ordered. He was peering through the bars at the porcelain vessel
sitting in the corner. Its dark interior told a tale of its own.

Seyzon looked at the bare cot and ground
his teeth. The piercing shriek of the cell door being drawn open ran down his
spine like a dull razor. Other than the cot and the filthy chamber pot, the
cell was empty. The walls were black as pitch and he prayed that was the
stone’s natural color and not mold clinging to it.

“I’ll get you a mattress,” Alden said. “And
a pillow and blanket. It gets cold down here.”

“You been down here often, have you,
milord?” Gilbert asked.

“My sister and I used to play hide and seek
here when we were children,” Alden answered. “She once locked me down here
overnight so I know how frigid the damp can be.” He looked at Seyzon. “And how
dark.”

“We’ll leave several lanterns for him,”
Gilbert stated. He set the one he was carrying on the floor in front of the
cell.

Seyzon turned his head toward Gilbert and
silently thanked him. The man knew he had a dislike of dark, enclosed places.

“His Grace didn’t say anything about food
and water but I’ll see that you are provided with both,” Alden said. “It is the
least I can do.”

“Don’t antagonize him,” Seyzon warned his
new brother-in-law. “You do not want to make an enemy of Prince Vindan.”

“I don’t intend to make an enemy of him,” Alden
said.

“Then get his permission before you provide
me with any manner of comfort,” Seyzon told him. “As you can see he’s big on
getting permission.”

Alden nodded. “I would like to go now. Jana
may need me.”

“Tell her…” Seyzon began then shook his
head. “Just take care of her for me.”

“I will,” Alden vowed.

When he was alone, Seyzon perched carefully
on the edge of the extremely uncomfortable cot and winced. The springs sagged
almost to the floor and were jagged spikes in some places. There would be no
way to lie atop it without getting gouged by the rusty ends. He put a hand to
the wound in his abdomen and sighed tiredly. Despite the ungodly throbbing that
had not lessened between his temples, the pain of his incision and the
horrendous worry making his heart ache miserably, he thought himself to be one
fucked bastard.

* * * * *

At that moment Vindan Brell was climbing
the stairs to the battlements. He was in a state of fugue that had him putting
one foot ahead of the other and being unaware where it was he was going.

And not caring.

His hands were clenched tightly into fists.
His jaw was set, teeth clamped so tightly he was giving himself an earache.
Feet dragging, the scrape of his boot heels on the stone as he advanced up the
steps echoed down the curving stairwell. Each step was harder to take than the
one before it so that when he reached the archway leading onto the parapet, his
legs felt like wet hemp. His entire body ached.

His soul ached.

Atop Riverglade Castle, the wind howled
with fury. It lashed at him with icy fingers that made him squint as he went to
the half-wall where the crenellations set like the teeth of a monster across
the battlements. The discomfort was punishing and he reasoned he deserved no
less.

Hands on the stone wall, unseeing eyes on
the distant horizon, he let the cold, brisk wind whip his hair around his head.
Though it chilled him to the bone he stood braced there as the wind buffeted
him, pushed against him like an invisible hand. He almost wished it would wrap
its stinging fingers around him, pluck him from the wall and dash him onto the
jagged rocks that poked up through the water of the moat.

It had been years—
years
—since he felt
as he did at that moment.

And he knew it would be years before he
could live with what he had done.

If he ever could.

* * * * *

Jana lay in a fetal position in the middle
of her husband’s bed. The pillow she clung to still bore the scent of Seyzon’s
cinnamon-spiced cologne and the cedar soap with which he’d bathed. She cleaved
to the pillow as though it were a lifeline, the only thing anchoring her to
reality. The silken slip that covered it was wet from her tears. Beneath her,
the sheet—and her thighs—were stained with a mixture of her blood and the
prince’s seed.

He had not hurt her. Had taken great pains
not to. The entire time he had been with her he had apologized.

He had begged her forgiveness for what he
was about to do.

“Forgive me, milady,” he’d said before he
began.

He felt guilty for what he was doing even
as he thrust gently through the barrier that was not his to breech.

“I am sorry.”

And before he left, he begged once more for
forgiveness for what he’d done.

“Please forgive me, Lady Jana. I am sorry
this had to be done.”

But she could not forgive him. Would never forgive
him. Would never grant him the absolution for which he had pleaded.

“It was either you or him and I could not
allow it to be him. I love him too dearly to have stripped the flesh from his
body,” he had said, his eyes grave, lips tight. “I could not hurt him in that
way.”

Yet he could tear the soul from Seyzon
Montyne by taking from him what was rightfully his.

“As punishments go, this one will stay with
him far longer than any tear in his flesh or the shedding of his blood,” he had
told her before closing the door.

Blood
had
been shed,
she thought as she moaned into the pillow. Whether there had
been a sharp, brutal piercing or a gentle easing that stung for barely a
moment, blood had flowed.

Worse yet, he had done something to her
that was so shameful, so degrading to her spirit she wanted to curl into a
tight ball and cease breathing altogether. Something that had been her
husband’s right to do. Vindan Brell had taken something very precious from both
her and Seyzon.

The goddess help her, he had made her enjoy
what he was doing to her, take pleasure in her first mating—with a man not of
her choosing—and for that she would hate him ’til her dying day.

* * * * *

Alden had made good on his word and had
sent a servant down to the dungeon along with the jailer. The mattress was
lumpy but it covered the springs. The pillow was as soft as mush but if balled
up just right, it levered his head from the mattress enough that his headache
was somewhat eased. The blanket was scratchy but it kept at bay the chill that
permeated the damp cell. Two more lanterns had been placed outside his cell so
the darkness had been chased away but the light illuminated the beady-eyed
rodents who came to stare hungrily at him. As low as the cot’s springs sagged
to the floor, he feared if he fell asleep the gods-be-damned things would
scurry all over him.

He’d pulled the cot away from the stinking
wall—concerned that what was growing there might drip on him. The stench from
what he now knew for certainty was black mold made him acutely uncomfortable. Breathing
in the airborne spores was not a healthy thing to do. The thought of them
entering his lungs made him shudder. Only the gods knew what that might do to
him.

Cursing, he turned to his back and flung an
arm over his eyes, wondering how long he would be jailed. Vindan was angry with
him but Vindan had been angry with him in the past. The difference this time
was he had gone against a royal edict—no matter that it made no rational
sense—and his old friend needed to make an example of him.

“You know he will not hurt her.”

Gilbert’s words had stuck in his mind. Of
course he knew Vindan would not hurt Jana. It wasn’t in the man to ever hurt or
harm a woman. Vindan loved women. Perhaps too much. His conquests were almost
as legion as those of his father—and that was saying something. The difference
being that King Nolan was married and Vindan was still playing the field at the
age of thirty-eight.

“Too many women; too little time,”
Vindan often quipped.
“And only so much of me to go around.”

As he lay there listening with one ear to
the scampering rats and the steady, monotonous, irritating plink of water, he
couldn’t help but wonder if it was the actual Joining that had pissed off Vindan
and not the fact that he hadn’t gotten permission.

“We’ll be two old bachelors sitting in
the garden at Wicklow and musing about our dalliances,”
he’d once remarked.
“We’ll swap sordid stories of how many
fillies we mounted and broke.”

There had never been any serious female
relationships in Seyzon’s past. He—like his boyhood friend—was a
love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy.

Until he’d met Jana.

“Jana,” he said on a long sigh.

He should be lying beside her, her sweet
body spooned close to his. Her head would be on his shoulder, his arms around
her, their legs entangled. He could almost smell the gardenia perfume she
preferred and feel the supple softness of her arm as he slowly trailed his
fingers along it. His body clenched and his cock throbbed at the thought of
what was supposed to have happened this night.

Vindan had ruined his wedding night. No
doubt he had sat Jana down and lectured her—as only Vindan could—until he’d
made her cry. Pressing home the seriousness of the offense he believed her
husband had committed, he would then send her on her way to spend the most
precious night of her life alone and lonely. He knew she would be worried
heartsick over him, locked in her room so she could not go to her husband’s
aid.

“Damn you, Vin,” he hissed.

He had no doubt that Vindan was sharing a
bed with some woman. The bastard had never known a solitary night since he
reached puberty. It was a wonder the princedom was not overrun with royal
bastards but then its prince was a cautious man. To Seyzon’s knowledge, no get
of Vindan’s was running around out there.

“I’m not like my father,”
Vindan had told him long ago.
“I’m not an irresponsible baby
maker, scattering my seed willy-nilly. Serves him right he can’t produce
anything save females. The best of him shot out to make me.”

Seyzon doubted his friend would marry until
forced to. Upon his father’s death, he would need to take a wife before he
could claim the crown. The woman would be young and pretty and have the hips to
give Vindan an heir—hopefully a male heir—with ease. Not that a wife would
curtail the prince’s randy nature. There was little that could do that.