To The Princess Bound (36 page)

“Wait!” Victory cried, running to catch up.  “I was only joking about the fetish house!  I’m sure we can find you some nice noble family willing to take you on as a personal servant.”

Dragomir stopped the horse and looked down at her, blinking.  “You are serious, aren’t you?”

Victory frowned at his stunned expression.  “What, you would rather live in your
hovel?
  Raising
goats?
”  She snorted.  “Personal servants get all sorts of benefits, especially if they are smart—” she hesitated, looking up at him.  “Well, you’d get a few benefits.  But what I’m saying is you’d have a clean bed to sleep in, nice clothes, a roof over your head that didn’t involve grass stuffed between slate…  No more of this plain-potatoes-for-breakfast nonsense, either.  They’d give you pepper, at the very least.”

Dragomir turned and stared ahead at the road for a moment.  Then he seemed to shake himself and kicked the beast forward again.

“Wait!” Victory cried.  “I’d try to find you a merchant’s household.  They always have a good spice selection.  I spent a night at a trader’s house on a journey, once, and they fed us an eighteen-course meal using thirty different spices.  And that’s the kind of food they ate every day.”

“What kind of trader?” Dragomir asked.

Victory reddened.  “Uh.”

He glanced down at her.  “Slaves?”

“My feet hurt,” Victory said.  “I think they’re infected.”

“So you would have me eat pepper on my potatoes while serving a man who eats eighteen-course meals on a nightly basis because he’s profiting from the sale of honest men and women just trying to make a living on a planet that rightfully belongs to them.”

“The chicken manure must have worked its way into the blisters.”

He kept the horse plodding down the path in silence.

Muttering, Victory eyed the length of chain, then grabbed it and jogged up beside him.  “You really should let me back on the horse,” she warned.

“Why?” Dragomir asked, sounding bored.  “Because you’re going to sell me to a marble mine if I don’t?”  Then he brought a hand to his face in mock horror.  “No wait!  Because your
brother
is coming, and if I don’t do
exactly
as you tell me, you’re going to have him chain me to your bathtub and use me for a footstool.”

“Last chance,” Victory growled. 

“No wait,” Dragomir said, still gesticulating at air, “You’ll hang me naked in the kitchen and feed me gruel, so that I must live out the rest of my days smelling the wonderful aromas of good food without having the pleasure of tasting any of it.”  Then he tapped his cheek thoughtfully.  “But then again, if you did that, you wouldn’t be able to chain me to your
bed
so you can use my naked body to fulfill your newfound carnal urges.”  He tisked.  “That’s gonna be a tough one.”  He held up one hand, palm up, weighing.  “Would you focus on torment, getting back at me for all the horrible things I’ve done to you…” he held up the second palm, balancing them on either side of himself like some thick and muscular statue of a Justicar.  “Or would you delight in my helplessness as you pleasure yourself with my inhumanly sexy body?  Hmm.”  He raised a single finger with a shout.  “Oh wait!  I know.  You can chain me in the kitchen during the
day,
and then take me to your
bedroom
at—”

Gripping the chain as hard as she could, Victory took off at a run in the opposite direction of the horse.  When she hit the end, she wrenched, hard.

Dragomir made a startled grunt as he jerked backwards off of the beast.  He fell into the mud, hard, and the horse whinnied and danced away from him.

For a long time, Dragomir simply lay in the road, staring at the sky.  Victory almost felt a twinge of concern, but then realized his chest was moving.  His horse, still dragging the goat, wandered to the edge of the trail and started munching on grass.

Seconds passed, then minutes, and still he lay there.  Still at the end of her chain, Victory peered at him, wondering if she had somehow disconnected his inadequate brain-cells from voluntary motor control.  She tiptoed around him at the full extent of the tether, trying to get a better look.

After a moment, Dragomir lifted his hand and dropped it to the chain around his waist.  Tightening his fist around it, he pulled.

Victory stumbled forward.

He grabbed it with his other hand. 
Pull.
  She cried out and tried to drag him backwards, but she might as well have been dragging a ton of steel. 
Grab.  Pull.  Drag.
  Victory flailed and struggled as he pulled her within range, then screamed in panic as a big hand found her ankle.  Then he was pulling her down, dragging him down on top of him.  She shrieked and tried to wriggle free, but he held her pinned to him with a big arm around her spine, their faces almost touching.

To her surprise, he looked amused.  “You,” Dragomir said, “Are a pain in my ass.”

“Literally, this time,” Victory giggled.

Then he was pulling her head down, dragging her forward for a kiss.  Victory’s eyes went wide, but a moment later, all of her resistance drained from her in a rush of heat and excitement, pooling between her legs in a delicious, tantalizing, overpowering wash.  She moaned and squirmed on top of him, enjoying the solid feel of his body beneath her, reveling in the way his big hands felt on her sides, her back.  She returned the embrace, digging her hands into his hair, devouring his kiss, slipping a hand under his shirt to feel his rippling chest as her passion built to a crescendo—

“Fancy finding you two here,” a deep male voice said, almost identical to Dragomir’s.

Victory gasped and rolled off of him—

—or tried to.  Dragomir’s muscular arm held her solidly in place as he cocked his head to peer around her.  “What the hell do you want?” he growled up at Thor.  He sounded breathless.

Thor tugged the leash he held.  “This little vixen, here, made it pretty clear to me last night that she wanted to make sure her, uh…”  He hesitated, eyes catching on Victory, “…
friend
was all right.”

Twisting as far as she could in Dragomir’s grip, Victory saw Whip standing beside the brute, staring at her as if she’d grown tentacles from her nose.  Then she realized that a good portion of both thighs and part of her rear was showing, where Dragomir’s hand had been caressing it.  Blushing furiously, Victory did her best to tug the shift back down to her knees, as much as she could while hindered by the steel-plated arm that held her.

“We weren’t doing anything!” she cried in Imperial.  Then, flushing harder, she amended, “I mean, he was accosting me!  Didn’t you see it?”

Whip, who has always been more softspoken than her sisters-in-arms, lowered her head with a small grin playing on her lips.  “Glad to see you feeling better, Princess.”

“This was
his
doing!” Victory cried, slapping the brute on his muscular chest.  Then, in the native tongue, she snapped, “Let me up!  Now!  Before I pound your kidneys into pudding!”

Dragomir sighed and released her.  “You’ve got about the best timing on the planet, Thor,” he growled, getting up.  “The
polite
thing to do would’ve been to turn the hell around and go back home.”

Thor snorted.  “I would have, but
this
one, here,” he tugged Whip’s chain, “wanted to make sure all those weird sounds her very good friend, here, was making weren’t somehow caused by you smothering her to death with your mouth.”

Victory blushed harder and started wiping the hair back from her face, smoothing down her shift as she tried
very
hard to ignore the stare that Whip was giving her.

Dragomir grunted and retrieved his horse.  “How is she…”  He gave Whip a wary glance.  “…holding up?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure she’d rip my eyes out of their sockets, if she had her hands free, but other than that, she’s been pleasant enough.”  Thor gave Whip a knowing grin, and Whip narrowed her eyes at him but said nothing.  Turning back to Dragomir, he said, “So where were you two headed before…uh…?”  He gestured at the muddy patch of ground.

“The market,” Dragomir growled.  “The wench ate my breakfast this morning.”

Thor’s eyes widened.  “Uh-oh, wench.”  Thor gave Victory a serious look.  “Don’t mess with his food.  He gets cranky.”

“Call me a ‘wench’ again and you’ll lose a testicle, you musclebound oaf,” Victory snapped.

Thor raised both brows at her.  “Feisty little thing, isn’t she?”  If he thought it strange she could speak flawless Native Barbarian, he never mentioned it.  Victory narrowed her eyes, looking first at Thor, then at Whip, who remained quite thoroughly helpless despite a very docile attitude.

“You
told
him,” she cried.

“Of course,” Dragomir said, throwing the reins over the horse’s head and leading the smelly beast over to her.  “He’s my brother.  You think I would I drop a Praetorian on my brother without so much as an, ‘oh, by the way…’?”

“It’s my
life!
” Victory cried. 

Dragomir shrugged.  Thor, for his part, seemed to be looking her over, analyzing her the same way someone would inspect a business partner of dubious intent.  “So you fix her yet?” Thor asked.  “She certainly looks a bit more…relaxed…than she was when she got here.”

Victory choked, even as Dragomir chuckled.  “Just one, brother.”

“Her core,” Thor said flatly.

Dragomir actually got a sheepish look.

“Gods,” Thor said.  “There are entire levels of hell for what you’re doing.”

“It was an
accident
!” Dragomir cried.  It was the first time Victory had heard the big man get defensive.  “She had a spark and I wanted to, uh…”

“…let it out to play?” Thor suggested.

Dragomir shoved a big finger at his brother.  “You mind your own damn business.  I said I’d heal her.  How I go about it’s up to me.”  He shoved past Thor, dragging horse, goat, and human along with him.

“Do you want me to kill him, milady?” Whip called, her voice utterly pleasant.

At this point, Victory would have been happy with a decent pair of shoes.  “Just keep your head low, do as your told,” Victory said.  “Perhaps you can lull the oaf into doing something stupid.”

“Already my plan, mistress,” her Praetorian said, bobbing her head and smiling like they were talking about bunny rabbits and rainbows.  “Perhaps we can add the brother to your collection.  He is quite…” she looked up at Thor, considering.  “…Pleasing to the eye, milady,” she finished.

Victory laughed, delighted.  “What a wonderful idea.  Perhaps we can teach them to carry a sedan chair.”

Whip’s smile was genuine.  “A matched set, milady.”  She beamed up at Thor, nodding.

Victory giggled.

“Don’t pretend you weren’t just discussing how to kill me,” Dragomir said, eying her over his shoulder.

“No, something much worse,” Victory said.  She gave him a measuring glance.  “Just how much
can
you lift, anyway?”

Dragomir shrugged.  “Two-fifty easy enough, though I can get three and a half off the ground if I have t—”  He stopped, giving her a suspicious frown.  “Why?”

Snickering, Victory said, “No reason.”  To Whip, she said, “They would be
perfect
.”

“We could hitch them to a cart and dress them in thongs,” Whip said. 

Victory scoffed.  “Thongs?”  Smiling at Dragomir, she said, “Why waste the material?”

“Their talking is making me nervous,” Thor said.  “I think I’m gonna go sit down here a few minutes, let you two go on ahead.”

“Agreed,” Dragomir said.  “I will see you at dinner?”

“That was the idea.”

A minute later, they were out of earshot, plodding along beside Dragomir’s huge black horse.  Irritated, given no other real alternative, Victory trudged along behind the goat, falling into a morose silence.  Dragomir tried several times to initiate some form of conversation, but Victory ignored him utterly, waiting for the moment when her brother and his armada would drop from the sky to ruin his morning.

Dragomir eventually stopped trying, and they walked in silence back to the little cluster of sod-and-stone hovels huddled together along the river feeding out of the valley.  Off to one side, there was a smaller cluster of blankets and tables spread out on the ground, with people sitting around them doing various chores like knitting, weaving, carving…

Dragomir went right to the tiny cluster of blankets and stopped at a young boy sitting beside a cluster of cages.  Inside the cages were various fowl, mostly unattractive shades of reds and browns.

“I need laying hens, Fell,” Dragomir told the boy.  “How many you give for a good milk goat?”

The boy—he couldn’t have been more than six or seven—got out of his chair and came over to walk around the goat, eying it thoughtfully.  “She’s in milk right now?”

“Just milked her this morning,” Dragomir said.

“Five hens,” the boy Fell said.

Dragomir snorted and started walking to another blanket.

“Ten,” the boy cried.  “And rights to breed her back to a buck of our choice in the fall.”

“Twelve,” Dragomir said, “And I get to keep a doeling if there’s twins.”