To The Princess Bound (40 page)

“No,” Matthias said, smiling.  “We’re not.”  He offered nothing more.

Disappointed, Adjudicator Keene nonetheless tried to keep it from showing.  “This friend she is staying with.  I’ve already run down the lists and found no one that matches.  None of the noble houses have taken a new maid.  None of the large merchants have taken on a new tradeswoman.  It’s like she simply disappeared.”

Matthias snorted, and leaned back against the opposite wall with a smug look.

Adjudicator Keene found himself irritated with his son’s insolence.  “You don’t actually think that, wherever you have hidden her, she can stay there for long, do you?  A princess has expensive tastes.  She’s going to betray herself sooner or later.  The Constable of Numbers has her account flagged.  As soon as the soft, silly-minded fool breaks down and tries to improve her lot with a few credits here, a few credits there, she’s going to get caught, dragged back to the palace, and publicly executed.”  He scoffed.  “Besides…  A noblewoman who is terrified of men will stand out in cultured society.  I have my men combing the cities, looking for her.  There’s nowhere she can hide.”

Matthias continued to look smug.

Adjudicator Keene narrowed his eyes.  “Regardless of what you think, Matthias, you are not going to be rescued.” 
Or survive your sister’s capture, for that matter.
 

His son raised an arrogant brow.  “I’m not?”

Adjudicator Keene felt his blood pressure rising.  Despite his every efforts to find Victoria, his men had all come back empty-handed, and it made no sense to him.  He didn’t like it when things did not make sense.  Life was a game of math.  After all the little additions and subtractions had been tallied together, the sum should remain in balance.  This was not balanced.  Growling, he said, “You will
die
down here, boy, if you do not help me.”

“Oh?” Matthias asked, shifting against the wall.  He appeared bored.

Adjudicator Keene snarled a curse at the boy’s conceit.  “You do not have as much control over your own men as you might think, boy.  I have several operatives in high places in your army—one who sits at your very own table.  How else do you think I thwarted your plan?”

Matthias only smiled at him.  “Who says it’s been thwarted?”

For a brief moment, Adjudicator Keene felt a bolt of panic, wondering if there were something he had overlooked.  Then he narrowed his eyes, realizing that, chained in his dungeon, the boy could only be bluffing.  “I can have my Inquisitors cut the information from your skin, if I need to, boy.”

“Father,” his son calmly said, dropping his air of sneering arrogance as if it had never been, “In the last ten minutes, you have told me how little you really know about my plan, what crude methods you’ve used to determine where Victory might be, how many Praetorian are still in the palace, the fact that you have absolutely no idea where my sister is, and that that fact scares the piss out of you.” 

He
played
me?
Adjudicator Keene thought, watching his son’s calm confidence in disbelief.   
All that was an
act
?
 

Matthias smiled, his green eyes flashing.  “Oh, and it also told me that you don’t actually plan on letting me out of here.  You’re desperate because she’s eluding you.  It’s the only reason you’d resort to threats, much less come down here to speak with me personally, when you find the experience so distasteful.” 

As Adjudicator Keene found himself unable to do anything but gape at his son, Matthias cocked his head at him, smiling.  “You always did tell me that silence was more productive than words, Father.”

Adjudicator Keene stumbled backwards out of the cage, staring at his son in horror. 

The goosebumps on his arms and the odd tingling at the back of his neck made him want to order the boy’s execution,
now
.  Something was wrong, here, and the feeling that Keene was looking at someone other than his son was a thousand times stronger, now. 

You made him, Keene,
his own mind chided. 
You spent the last twenty-two years shaping him to your image.

Peering at the boy, Adjudicator Keene again wondered if the boy could possibly have planned everything so far. 

He isn’t intelligent enough for that,
Adjudicator Keene finally decided.  It was a shame, but the boy and his sister simply did not have a First Generation’s analytical capability.  The Royal blood had diluted with his Fourth Generation wife.

Even back then, he had known he should have taken a First or Second Generation Royal to mate, but emotion had gotten into the way and blinded him.  Now he was left dealing with the consequences.

Grimly, he decided that it was not too late to find himself a First Generation Royal, certified as a First by the Imperium, rather than a woman whose mother claimed a Third, without even real proof.  He was rather sure he could attract a decent mate, even this late in life.  Mercy was a miserable ball of rock without even a respectable ocean, but it was lucrative.  He could attract a woman on the sheer numbers, alone.

And, once he did, he would go about rectifying the situation with new heirs.  This time, of course, he would give her a clinical pregnancy, with male children only.   Then, once the new Empress had served her purpose and given him two new children—hopefully in the same birth, to save time—she would have to follow in the footsteps of her predecessors.  It was a shame to waste the genetic material of a good First Generation, but females, as Victoria and her mother had proven many times, were simply too soft to rule. 

Without a word to his guards, Keene turned and stalked from the dungeon.

The Womb Rama

Dragomir opened his eyes to the sound of birds chirping in the trees outside.  Sun was streaming through the window, warming the bare earth and shelves that had been cooled by the night before.

Groaning, Dragomir moved his arm to get up, but froze when he found something beneath it.  Lifting his head, he gingerly peeled the covers back.

Victory was there, her back to his front, snuggled tight to him, asleep.

By the gods’ hairy backs,
Dragomir thought, staring at the sleeping princess.  He lowered the blanket gingerly, leaving only her face exposed.  Settling his head back to the pillow, he watched her, feeling a glow starting in his heart rama, spreading throughout his chest.  Even if she didn’t want to admit it now, she trusted him. 

At least,
he amended, getting goosebumps where his arm was exposed to the sharp cold of morning,
Enough to crawl under a cover to stay warm.
 

Victory opened her eyes to sun streaming through the window.  She’d been sleeping a lot, lately, with very little else to do.  A couple times, Thor had brought her some project—like washing eggs or pulling brambles out of the woolly fur he had sheared off of one of the fuzzy, long-haired goats—but the majority of her time had been with her sitting on the bed, bored.

That, and sleeping.

She had tried to spend the first night on the floor, but after an entire sleepless night of shivering—and Thor laughing at her for it in the morning—she had finally decided to start curling up with the Emp.  The others’ somewhat rabid faith that he would never hurt a fly contrasted sharply with the fact that he had apparently beat a man to death with his own bloody knuckles, and then lied to her about it, but in the end, Victory decided to take her chances.  It got
cold
in the mountains at night, and these peasants apparently didn’t have enough stone to build fireplaces in every room.

Or buy window-panes, for that matter.  The gaping hole in the wall where a window should have been was irritating to Victory.  Why not just wall it off to conserve heat?  Why not build shutters, at the very least?  If they were going to leave such huge, gaping holes in the walls, why not simply drag the bed out into the fields and sleep with the goats?

She sighed, deeply.  Perhaps he simply didn’t know how to properly build windows.  Perhaps he was just—

“Did you sleep well?”  The low, masculine voice came from the pillow not three inches from the back of her head.

Victory shrieked and tried to roll away, but he had locked his big arm around her waist, trapping her to his body.  She panted, once again feeling every hard line of his muscular form, and where it touched her, and how.  Unbidden, she felt herself shudder at the heat that automatically began to build in her loins.

“You ready for the next rama, Princess?” he asked softly.  She felt the gentle rumble of his chest against her back.  His big hand settled on her lower abdomen.

“No,” Victory whimpered, already acutely aware of the unwanted changes from the first rama.  “I’m fine.  Really.” 

“You’re not fine,” he whispered to her.  “I can see that much every time I look at you, and I’m going to help.”

As she felt the warmth start to build under his hand, she whimpered.

He made a soft sound, soothing.  “Not going to hurt you,” he whispered.  “It will be like last time.  The pressure will build, likely start to hurt, then the rama will snap open.  You’ll face all those moments that blocked the flow of gi through its center, experience them over again, and then release them.  I’ll be here the whole time.”

“I don’t
want
to experience them again!” Victory cried, trying to struggle away again.

But his arm might as well have been made of titanium for all the budge it gave.  “It’s going to make you feel better, Princess,” he swore, “I promise.”

After another few moments of struggle, she eventually dropped back to the bed in resignation.  Victory found herself staring at the window, tense, as the warmth began to build within her womb, heating and spreading outwards until her whole abdomen felt like someone had dropped a hot coal amidst her guts.  “It hurts,” she whimpered, but she didn’t try to fight him again.  The sensation was so deeply intimate, leaving her feeling so terrifyingly exposed.

“I’m a healer,” he whispered, as the pressure built.  “I’ll be here, and this is going to make you feel better.  Trust me.”

And then, just like last time, the dam broke.  She felt the energy rush into her body, the images once again clogging up her mind.

Her father, giving her a disappointed scowl when she showed him her first picture, in wax-stick. 
“Don’t you have problem sets to be doing, girl?”

Her father, yanking her half-finished afghan from her lap and throwing it into the fire. 
“You will not waste your time on such useless projects in my house.”

Her father, taking her journal from her when he discovered she was writing stories in it. 
“Kiara told you no fiction.  A ruler does not have the leisure to engage in such frivolousness.  Learn that, or you will never touch a writing instrument again.”
  He had then taken the electronic device and smashed it once against his desk, cracking the screen in half, then threw it out the window, to dash against the Gorgarian Cliffs below.

Her captors, mistaking her poetry scribbles on the sides of her cell for messages for help.  Beating her until blood was running from her mouth and she couldn’t move.  Making her wash them off afterwards with broken fingers.

A stone-faced native doctor, reaching inside her, pulling her baby free, dropping it, still kicking, into the trash.