To The Princess Bound

by Sara King

“Feel better?” he asked, still looking across the room.

  Victory’s mouth fell open. “You’ve been making me angry. On purpose.”

  When he turned his shaggy head to look at her, his blue eyes were dancing. “How else you think I managed to keep you talking for three hours straight?”

  She stared at him in utter flabbergastation. “You were provoking me? Trying to get me to bludgeon you to death?”

  He was grinning widely. “Better than you screaming and running away like I’m gonna somehow grab your head between my toes and twist it off.”

  Victory glanced at his toes with apprehension.

  “They’re big,” he said, giving the appendages an appraising look, “But not that big.” He wiggled them, cocking his head to watch them with a small frown. “I could probably only manage a small child, at best.”

  Victory laughed, despite herself. “You’re a cad.”

  He blinked at her. “A what?”

  “A boor.”

  He continued to peer at her.

  “An oaf, a lout, a fool, a scoundrel, a heel, a rake, a rascal, a—”

  “Okay,” he said, grimacing, “I get the point.”

  “A barbarian, a buffoon, a churl, a philistine—-

  “Oy!” he cried. “Ignorant native gets lesson in humility by well-learned Imperial, showing off words he didn’t even know in his own language.” Then he cocked his head. “How do I even know that’s my language, and you’re not just making it up?”

  “You want me to pick a different language?” Victory demanded, crossing her arms. “Which one? I know six.” Then she cocked her head. “Well, nine, if you consider Latin, Greek, and Mandarin, but no one but scientists use those these days.”

  He sighed and thunked his head again, hard. To himself, he said, “I want to go back home. At least there, I could show off my big muscles and cool Emp powers to pretty girls and feel special. Here, the pretty girl just thinks I’m an ill-informed, harebrained oaf with bouts of delusional schizophrenia.”

  Victory narrowed her eyes. “You knew what a cad was, didn’t you?”

  “People have used it on me a time or two,” he said. “Though most weren’t in this lifetime.”

  Victory’s interest was piqued. “Who were you?” She cleared her throat. “Last lifetime, I mean?”

  “Me?” Dragomir sighed. “I was a violent, war-mongering bastard. I needed to be an Emp this go-around to balance things out a bit. Lots of black marks on my Karmic tablet, so to speak.” He laughed disgustedly at the ceiling. “Hell, I probably signed up to be dragged from my home by Praetorian, beaten within an inch of my life, screamed at by an asshole, and chained, naked and helpless, to a pretty young woman who hates my guts.”

  “You’re not helpless,” Victory growled.

  “Ah yes,” he said, lifting his head to look at his feet, “Completely forgot.” He wriggled his toes. “My secret weapons.”

  She giggled, despite herself. “You don’t really think I’m going to unshackle your hands, do you?”

  He rolled his head against the headboard to look at her. “How badly do you want to find out what I can do with them?”

  Victory froze. I know what you can do with them. She repressed a shudder, the revulsion working its way back to the surface.

  “I killed a rapist, you know.” His eyes had never left her face. “This Praetorian went on leave, decided to go on a hike through the Snowback chain. Fancied himself a mountaineer. He caught one of the girls in my village out in a meadow. Had his way with her, continued on his hike. Once I was finished repairing the damage, I went after him.”

  Victory watched him with a wary look.

  “Tracked him by the energy he left behind. Kind of like a wolf tracks a deer through the woods, except this deer smelled like pain and violence. I caught up with him when he was camped up in the pass. And, well, I’m here and he isn’t.”

  “You killed a Praetorian?” She couldn’t hide her disbelief. Praetorian were trained from birth to be the Imperium’s best…

  Dragomir gave her a sheepish grin. “Don’t know if you noticed, but I’m a big guy.” Then his face took on a thoughtful look. “Though it helped I shot him a few times, first.”

  “You shot a man in cold blood?” she demanded, offended.

  “Uh,” Dragomir said, “I wasn’t about to walk up to him and say, ‘Gee, I’m pretty pissed off about what you did to Meggie the other day. Would you please engage me in hand-to-hand combat?”

  Victory stared at him, utterly shocked. “You really are a boor,” she said. “That man trained his whole life—”

  “—so he could go rape some girl in a mountain meadow?”

  Victory shut up.

  “The way I see it,” Dragomir said, “You’ve got nothing to fear, so stop pussyfooting around, unshackle me, and let me help you.”

  The way he said ‘help you’ left Victory to believe he meant more than just her ankles. “What are you saying?” she asked, wary.

  “I said your ankles were the easiest,” Dragomir said. “But there’s other gi blockages, some in some rather…uncomfortable…places. So you’ll have to learn to trust me before I can work on those.”

  Victory went utterly still. “You mean you think I’m actually going to let you—” She couldn’t finish. Had to look away, clear her throat. “Touch me?” A squeak.

  He snorted. “You’re going to have to, if you want me to work on your ankles.” He made a dismissive shrug. “As for the rest…eventually, we’ll work up to it.”

  Victory could only stare.

  “Now,” Dragomir said, jingling the shackles behind his back, “Would you please take these off of me?”

  “No,” Victory said.

  He made a disgusted sound and thumped his huge body back against the headboard. The bed shook with the impact. “Fine,” he said. “I’m going to sleep.”

  Victory frowned. “What about me?”

  Without opening his eyes or turning to her, he said, “Sleep beside me or sleep on the floor or, hell, go get your Praetorian buddies to fling my huge ass outta bed and make me sleep on the rug, I don’t care. I’m tired and irritated as all hell and my shoulders really hurt. I dislocated them both doing something stupid when I was a kid and all the ligaments are torn and shredded and it feels like someone’s ramming stakes through my back every time I breathe.” He heaved a huge, frustrated sigh. “Good night.”

  Victory nervously watched his breathing settle, watching the rise and fall of his big chest until it had fallen into a slow, easy rhythm. He began to snore, and it was obvious as his body relaxed that he had been utterly exhausted, but doing well to hide it. Feeling a bit guilty, she cleared her throat and asked, “How did you hurt your shoulders?”

  To Entertain a Princess

  Dragomir was dreaming of a one-eyed woman from the past, a torrid love affair many lifetimes ago, when he heard someone speak. He opened his eyes blearily. For a moment, he thought he was back in his home, having fallen asleep in his chair. Then he saw the gauzy purple curtains, the roaring fireplace, the black marble walls and ceiling. His heart sank when he felt the strain in his shoulders, the cold steel around his wrists and ankles. He turned his head, searching for his captor.

  It took him a moment to locate her—he hadn’t been allowed much sleep in the last five days—and when he did, he found it difficult to focus. “Huh?” he asked, more a grunt than a word. His exhaustion was definitely catching up with him.

  She cleared her throat and said, more loudly, “How did you dislocate your shoulders?”

  He gave her a long, mouth-open look. Was she closer than she had been before?

  She touched his shoulder. “You said you dislocated it?”

  He looked down at the crest of his arm, then grunted again. He licked the drool out of the corner of his mouth. “Someone bet me I couldn’t jump off a tree-fort and catch myself holding the climbing-rope behind my back. Think I was like eight, and pretty sure I was invincible. Wrapped it a
round my fingers real good, then jumped.”

  She winced at him. “Sounds like it hurt.”

  “Not as much as hanging there did, once my shoulders came out.” He yawned. “Got caught around my wrists. Couldn’t make my fingers work to unwrap themselves. They had to cut me down.”

  She grinned at him, and Dragomir actually forgot how tired he was. She was beautiful. Alabaster skin, freckles, green eyes, and the most raven-black hair he’d ever seen on a woman.

  “Sounds like something my brother would do,” she said, beaming. “He was always doing stupid things like that.”

  Dragomir gave an indignant grunt. “I said I was invincible, not stupid.”

  She peered at him like he was a poor, flattened bug on the sidewalk. “That sounded pretty stupid to me.”

  Dragomir sighed. “Maybe a little. Taught me something, though.”

  She cocked his head at him in curiosity. “What’s that?”

  “Taught me not to jump off a tree and catch yourself with a rope behind your back, that’s what.” He grunted, wishing he could ease the strain in his shoulders. “Uh, miss, is there anything I can do to assure you I’m just a harmless, six-foot-seven poodle?”

  She raised both eyebrows. “Poodle?”

  “Poodles are funny, not ferocious.” He grinned weakly. “I think of myself as being funny.”

  “I used to own a poodle,” she said. “It bit the butler on the rump. A lot.”

  Dragomir grinned. “Well, I’m more the fluffy, primped-up, lazy version of a poodle.”

  She snorted, but gave him an appraising look. “Tell me about one of my past lives. Then I’ll think about it.”

  Demoted to entertainment for a princess, Dragomir thought with a sigh. Still, it was worth a try. Anything to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. He closed his eyes and concentrated, seeking out the residual images and drifting emotional tags that, once he snagged with his consciousness to examine deeper, revealed a door into the past.

  He randomly pulled one of the stronger ones from her au and began to delve deeper. He ducked through the door of that particular soul-bead and watched her life replay before him like one of the Imperium’s vid-chips, looking for something interesting to tell her.

  He watched her born to a hard life in a mining-family on some unknown planet. He wasn’t even sure that, throughout her life, she ever knew the name of her planet, so backwater was her home. He watched her grow up, watched her build forts with the boys and run through the upper mine shafts, playing. He watched her poke out her eye on a broken branch, while playing tag. He watched her grow into a beautiful woman, with sleek curves and long, flowing red hair. He watched the village boys ridicule her, turn away from her because of her missing eye. Then he frowned, watching the land darken in the valley below, a mass of soldiers. He watched villagers scream and run for the rocky clefts above their home. People marching, by the thousands, their armor gleaming in the sun. He watched a man on horseback thunder up, sweep her, screaming, onto the back of his horse. He felt her hands bound behind her back, her ankles lashed together. He watched her turn, saw the man’s face for the first time…

  “Oh shit.”

  The princess perked up, leaning forward intently. “You saw something?”

  “Uh,” Dragomir said. “No.”

  She frowned. “No?”

  “I mean yes,” he said quickly, “But you don’t want to hear it.”

  The princess growled. “Tell me.”

  “Uh,” Dragomir said, frantically trying to come up with something that would satisfy. “You had one eye. You were very ugly and dirty and people laughed at you.”

  She scrunched her face. “One eye?”

  “Uh huh,” he said. “One eye. Yep. That’s it. That’s all I saw.”

  She gave him a long, narrow look, but let it go at that. “You going to go to sleep, then?”

  “Plenty of room for two up here,” Dragomir said.

  Snorting, she said, “No, thank you. I’m not sleeping tonight.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dragomir grunted, sliding down to lay on his stomach, trying to ease some of the pressure in his shoulders. “Would you mind tossing a cover over me?”

  For a long moment, she gave him a suspicious look, like he had asked to see her underwear. Then, slowly, she inched forward just far enough to flip the cover over him before she quickly backed away.

  And, miracle of miracles, a Royal Princess of the Imperium sat there on the floor, watching him in silence as he fell asleep on her bed.

  When Victoria opened her eyes, she was in a fetal position on the sheepskin rug, her body being bathed by the warmth of the sun. She groaned and sat up slowly, her body aching from sleeping on the floor.

  She froze when she saw the deep blue eyes, watching her.

  “Morning,” the man said.

  Victory screamed and flailed backwards across the rug.

  The Emp yawned and flexed his huge shoulders. “Hope you had a better night than I did. Feels like someone’s tearing my arms off.” He cocked his head at her. “Hungry? I think they were calling for you to come eat, earlier. You slept through it.”

  Victory blinked. She had fallen asleep? With a man in the room? It was beyond comprehension. “Did you coerce me?” she demanded. “Force me to relax with your powers?” Yes, that’s what had to have happened. The Emp had manipulated her.

  Dragomir laughed at her. “With how exhausted I was yesterday?” He snorted. “Princess, I was passed out. Completely. You could’ve come up here and picked my nose with a fork and I would’ve slept through it.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. The thought of being compelled into sleeping beside a man was more acceptable to her than the idea of doing it by accident. “You’re lying,” she stated firmly.

  But he wasn’t listening. He was peering down at the bedding between his legs. “You know, I was thinking about it while you were snoring, and we could fashion some sort of sarong out of one of the sheets.”

  “I was not ‘snoring,’” she cried.

  “Okay, Princess. You were ‘expelling large quantities of air through the back of your throat while you painstakingly created a puddle of saliva on the stone under your face.” He chuckled. “But honestly, a sarong would make us both feel better. A sheet is a hell of a lot better than getting paraded around stark-ass naked with an entire kingdom to gawk at you.”

  “I’m not wrapping a sheet around you,” Victory blurted. The mere thought of getting that close to him left her trembling.

  He shrugged. “Then have your Praetorian do it. They opened the door this morning to check and see if you were alive, and if I was being a good boy. Gods those women scare me. Like looking into the eyes of a phoenix.”

  “The phoenix is their emblem,” Victory said. “The female units, anyway. The males use the dragon. Combined, the phoenix and dragon is the symbol of the Imperium. It’s an ancient symbol, borrowed from the ancient empire of—”

  Dragomir grunted. “You ready for some food?” The way he said it, he was about as interested in Imperial symbology as he was in paying taxes.

  Victory’s eyes narrowed and she sniffed. Now that he mentioned it, she was hungry. Her gaze once again fell upon his big body and she swallowed and quickly averted her eyes. “I’ll call my maidservants,” she said. She turned over her shoulder and called for Kiara.

  “Speaking of that, funny how you never got those records you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Victory frowned, even as Kiara stepped into the room, towels and clothes in hand, flanked by Jolene and Carrie, Victory’s two handmaidens. The thought, however, was quickly shattered the moment she realized what Kiara planned to do.

  “I’m not in the mood for a bath,” she said, quickly glancing at the huge brute sitting upon her bed. And, for that matter, she wasn’t in the mood to change, either. Grimacing, she said, “Leave me in my current garb, brush my hair, wash my hands and feet, and bring me some slippers.”

  Kiara frowned slightly, bu
t with one look at the massive slave, she bowed low. “As you command, milady. Will you be requiring your medications?”

  “Please,” Victory said, grateful to have the women in the room with her. “With a glass of orange juice.”

  Her servant flushed. “I meant at breakfast, milady. I have been given strict instructions that no edible substances of any form to enter your bedchamber. The Adjudicator…”

  Damn, Victory thought. She sighed. “Very well. Tell the cook to have my breakfast prepared within the hour. I fancy duck eggs. Soft boiled. Sausages. Elk, I think. The bison had an unpalatable flavor last time. A cup of hazelnut and cinnamon coffee, foamed. And one of those pastries she does so well…the ones with the lemon filling?”

  “And him?” Kiara said, nodding at Dragomir, who was watching them alertly, but with a tiny frown of uncertainty. “Will your slave be fed this morn?”

  “Take my meal and double it for him,” Victory said. Then she looked him up and down and said, “Make that triple. With scrambled eggs. I’m not watching some fool try to spoon soft-boiled egg into his mouth, thank you. I fear that might destroy my appetite.”

  Kiara gave her a slightly startled look that, coming from the well-trained woman, was approximately the same as saying she thought Victory was completely out of her mind. “I was thinking more along the lines of porridge, milady.”

  Victory snorted. “Eggs. Sausage. Pastries. And a servant to feed him.”

  Kiara bowed low and hurried off, leaving Victory to sit in the chair that the maids dragged over beside the bed while they primped her as well as possible without removing any of her slept-in garments. They poofed the four-ply, embroidered silken sleeves and fluffed the matching ivory pants, lamenting the wrinkles that Victory refused to let them iron out. They affixed jingling golden anklets with emerald mermaid clasps, then did the same with each wrist.

  She waited as they wove jewels into her hair, then lifted her chin as they placed a large, complimentary emerald necklace around her throat. The aging Adjudicator of a failing colony had given it to her as a birthday present when she was fourteen, over six years ago, claiming that it matched her eyes. It had been a blatantly desperate attempt at courtship, but Victory had kept it, anyway, to use on days like this, when she felt the need to shield herself in her wealth.