The Golden Dynasty
Kristen Ashley
Published by Kristen Ashley
Copyright 2011 Kristen Ashley at Smashwords
Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley:
Rock Chick Series:
Rock Chick
Rock Chick Rescue
Rock Chick Redemption
Rock Chick Renegade
Rock Chick Revenge
The ‘Burg Series:
For You
At Peace
Golden Trail
The Colorado Mountain Series:
The Gamble
Sweet Dreams
Fantasyland Series:
Wildest Dreams
Fantastical
Other Titles by Kristen Ashley:
Lacybourne Manor
Mystery Man
Penmort Castle
Sommersgate House
Three Wishes
www.kristenashley.net
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
*****
Author’s Note
The land you’re about to be introduced to has its own language. In order not to disturb the look and flow of the book, I have not italicized this fictional foreign tongue. I have, however, translated within the narrative or, if not, the dialogue is annotated and the translation is included at the end of the chapter. For your reference, I have included a Korwahk dictionary at the end of the book. This dictionary includes definitions of Korwahk words as well as explanations of the different countries, regions and seas of my fictional alternate universe.
In order to move the story along, I also took liberties with the amount of time it takes our heroine to learn the new tongue and our hero to learn hers. Our Circe is a clever girl and our Lahn is fabulous but no one is that clever and fabulous… except in a fantasy.
Welcome to Korwahk. I hope you enjoy spending time there.
Kristen Ashley
*****
Prologue
Running
I was running.
Running on those stupid, flimsy little sandals.
Running for my life.
He was on his horse, I could hear the beast’s hooves pounding behind me, hear this mingled with my own, panting, ragged, panicked breaths – and they were getting closer.
I was covered in blood. Not mine. It was still warm from spurting from that man’s body.
I didn’t know where I was or how I got there. I wasn’t certain what was happening. I went to bed in my bed in a world I understood and I woke up here in a world that was entirely foreign to me, everything about it, and not one thing about it was good.
And now I was running for my life.
The horse’s hooves got closer; I knew they were almost upon me. Frantic, I glanced back and saw I was right. Not only were they close, the man, the rider, so huge he seemed giant, had leaned so deeply to the side, his body was in line with the horse’s middle.
And his long arm was stretched out.
I faced forward and tried to run faster.
But I couldn’t go any faster and I certainly couldn’t go faster than a horse.
I cried out when the arm hooked me at the waist, closed around and lifted me clean off my feet before my ass was planted on the horse in front of him.
Without thinking, I screamed bloody murder, twisted on the horse and prepared, instead of running for my life, to fight for it.
Chapter One
The Parade
One hour earlier…
I was in a pen, a kind of corral.
Yes, a corral. Like you keep animals in. Except basic, not modern, primitive – tall, thin but sturdy-looking stakes woven with leather bands all around.
There were enormous, extremely muscled men standing guard every four feet around the corral wearing nothing but pants made of hide, their upper bodies painted with black and white streaks. And the inside of the pen was filled with women dressed like me.
Flimsy sandals and wisps of thin, silky material of all shades curved around our bodies and held together at two ends at a kind of ring-like necklace at our necks.
Their faces were made up to extremes. Heavy kohl eyeliner. Pink, purple, green and blue eye shadow. Penciled in brows. Rouge. Deep red, pink or berry lips.
And everyone had lots of hair. Lots and lots of it. Out to there.
I suspected I looked the same.
Truthfully, if I hadn’t been in that corral wearing a light blue wisp of material and a silver ring-like necklace, I would have thought they looked cool. Whoever did their hair and makeup was a master. It was phenomenal.
But I was too terrified to think anything was cool.
There were people milling about around the corral looking in but not getting too close. They were not getting too close because the guards weren’t letting them get too close. We girls in the pen were off-limits, it was clear. They could look but they couldn’t touch nor could they speak to us.
Some of these onlookers wore weird clothing; the men, hide pants like the guards but some had loose vests on top or wide leather bands around their chests (only the guards had the black and white paint, however). Some women wore what looked like sarongs at the bottom, attached to and apparently held up by belts mostly made of woven material or leather or some were made of metal, silver or copper, but there weren’t many of those. Up top they wore bandeau-style or halter bikini tops, some a folded piece of material that went straight across the tops of their breasts, the bottom coming down to a point.
There were other men looking in too, these men dressed in old-fashioned clothes, breeches, boots, flowy shirts, vests, wide-brimmed hats with feathers.
There were no women wearing old-fashioned clothes, just the men peering in.
It was clear there were two types of people there. There were those, like the warriors, with deep tanned skin, dark-toned eyes and black hair. These were the women in their sarongs and the men in the hide pants.
They looked at us with curiosity.
The men wearing old-fashioned clothes were different. They had all colored hair and eyes.
All of them were looking in with curiosity too but this wasn’t benign or indifferent. It was lewd.
And it scared me.
Outside the pen, beyond the onlookers, I saw big, round tents and torches. Beyond that, it was dark because it was night but it appeared the ground was dirt or sand and stone broken by intermittent thrusts of dark brush. It looked like a set from Gilligan’s Island but not fake and therefore definitely unfunny.
I had woken up there not an hour ago, panicked and freaked way the fuck out mainly because I was not in my bed in my townhome in Seattle which would freak anyone out but waking up here meant I was freaked way the fuck out.
This caused a minor sensation when I surged to my feet and started to act exactly what I was, scared out of my brain, panicked and freaked way the fuck out. This was not looked upon favorably by the painted, muscled guards. In fact, they made it very clear my freaked out, panicked behavior was highly unwelcome. Luckily, an unknown sense of self-preservation kicked in and I quieted immediately, sat on my behind, pulled my shit together and decided to get my bearings.
At first, I thought it was a dream. In fact, I decided it had to be a dream. This kind of shit didn’t happen to people, right?
But, unfortunately, after repeatedly pi
nching myself and coming to the understanding that in dreams you didn’t think you were in a dream, I realized it was not.
It was something else.
And that something was way bad.
So as I surveyed my surroundings, I decided that I had to get out of that something bad but I was in a pen, for goodness sakes, being leered at by icky men and looked over by people who appeared to be natives of some weird, foreign fantasyland.
And furthermore, to get out I had to know what I was in.
So I paid attention and took in my surroundings.
And the thing I noticed, outside what was going on on the outskirts of our pen, was that there were different kinds of women in the pen. There were those with black hair, dark eyes and tanned skin – in fact, this was the vast majority of the women. And they did not seem panicked or scared. They seemed content, some chatting to others in a language I didn’t understand, others holding themselves separate and eyeing their compatriots in a guarded or even calculating way (and it made matters worse that a lot of these kinds of looks were aimed at me). Some even preening for the onlookers.
Then there were others who were not like them. Not many, I counted three.
These women looked scared out of their brains.
These women were like me.
And once I made this realization, I decided what I was going to do first. I had no clue what I was going to do second but at least I knew what I was going to do first.
And that was, find out what the fuck was going on.
It appeared we had freedom to walk around and talk so I decided my target, got up and started to walk over to her.
This was a mistake. The guards hadn’t forgotten my minor freak out and dark, forbidding eyes came to me. Also, onlookers who had witnessed my freak out turned their attention to me likely because they were keen to see what happened next. And further, nearly every black-haired, dark-eyed woman in the corral pinned her eyes on me and they did it in a way that didn’t feel all that great.
Um… yikes.
Cautiously, I persevered and walked across the pen to a woman with pale skin, light brown hair and light-colored eyes. She didn’t look panicked, as such. On closer inspection, she didn’t even really look scared. She looked resigned and she looked wired. Like something was about to happen and she was mentally preparing for whatever that was in a way that took all of her concentration.
I made my way across the pen and jumped when one of the black-haired women reached out and pinched me, hard, on the sensitive skin behind my arm.
“Ouch!” I snapped, my hand going to the skin, my eyes going to her.
She leaned forward and hissed at me from between her teeth sounding like a snake.
I jumped further and scuttled away.
Jeez, what was that all about? Bee-yatch.
I glared at her as I backed away and when I was out of her reach, I turned back to my target. I saw she’d stopped concentrating on whatever she was concentrating on and had her eyes on me.
“Hey,” I said quietly when I got to her, her brows drew slightly together, her head tipped a bit to the side and she replied hesitantly, “Erm… hey.”
“Do you, um… mind talking?” I asked.
“No,” she said softly.
Awesome, she spoke English.
Then I watched a small, weird smile play at her lips. “Especially not since you’re the first person I’ve talked to from Hawkvale since I was taken.”
Oh no.
Taken?
Oh no part two.
Hawkvale?
I was getting the distinct impression she had not woken here from a dream. Not like me.
Her hand came out and captured mine, holding strong, her eyes searching mine, she whispered, “It’ll be good knowing, once we’re claimed, someone close will be from home.”
Um.
On no again.
Claimed?
She’d spoken two sentences and we already had a lot of ground to cover so I prioritized.
“I’m not from Hawkvale,” I told her and her head tipped further to the side.
“Bellebryn?” she asked.
Okay, there it was again. I was thinking she wasn’t like me.
“Um… no, listen –”
Her face changed before she cut me off to say with some surprise, “Middleland?”
“No, I’m from Seattle.”
This time, her brows shot together and she asked, “Where is that? Is that across the Green Sea?”
“Yes,” I lied swiftly in order to move things on. Then I asked, “Where are we?”
Her body started and her face went slack. She stared at me a moment and then her hand in mine squeezed and she pulled me closer to her.
When I was near, she took my other hand and got closer to me, declaring, “You were sheltered.”
“Sheltered?” I asked and she nodded.
“My father travelled, my mother died when I was a child, so he took me with him. He shared with me many things…” she got even closer and her voice dropped to a whisper, “including tales of Korwahk.” Then she looked around and squeezed my hands.
“Korwahk?” I prompted and her eyes came back to me.
“Where we are now.”
Korwahk.
It could not be said I was a geography whiz but I was thinking I had no freaking clue where Korwahk was. Or Hawkvale, Bellebryn, Middleland or the Green Sea.
What I knew was, none of them were home.
I already had a feeling I was screwed, seeing I was in sacrificial virgin attire and in a corral. But now I was thinking I was way screwed.
My attention focused back on her when she went on to say in a dire tone, “The Wife Hunt.”
Uh-oh.
“The what?” I asked, my voice breathy.
She dropped a hand, kept the other one and slid an arm around my waist so we were even closer before she asked, “What’s your name, my lovely?”
“Circe,” I answered.
She gave me her small, weird smile and whispered, “Circe… that’s pretty.”
“What’s yours?” I asked.
“Narinda. I’m named after my great aunt who, they said, looked like me. Though, I wouldn’t know because I never met her.”
“That’s pretty too,” I told her and her arm at my waist gave a squeeze.
Then she continued in a gentle voice, “So, the tales of the Korwahk Horde were kept from you.”
“You could put it like that,” I replied and she nodded with understanding.
“Many girls, my father told me, were sheltered from this information. It’s understandable. I spent my life mostly on ships with men. I was loved,” again with the small, weird smile, “but not sheltered.”
I knew what that was like.
“So you know where we are, why we’re in this pen?” I asked.
“Indeed,” she whispered but before I could ask more, a strange, expectant vibe stole through the crowd, most of the girls in the enclosure came alert and then suddenly there were drums. The steady, deep, thumping beat of very loud drums.
Oh crap. I did not get a good feeling about that.
“The parade,” Narinda breathed.
Oh crap!
“What parade?” I asked but her eyes weren’t on me though she kept her hands on me. She was looking outside the corral so I shook her hand. “What parade, Narinda?”
Her eyes came to me and she said urgently, “We’ll walk together and we’ll talk. Stay close to me. We’ll try to hide you. You do not want the Dax to see your hair.”
“What?” I whispered but the girls were moving, pushing in toward a swing of the stakes that was being opened by a guard.
Narinda moved me with the girls, keeping me close, her hands on me, her eyes scanning.
“We will not be able to hide you from the warriors. They will see you. The Dax, though, I hear does not leave his podium and gives scant attention to the parade. It is said he is prepared each Hunt to claim his bride, should he see something he
likes, but he has never seen something he likes. We should try to keep it that way.”
We moved through the opening and out being jostled by some of the girls who clearly could not wait to start the parade.
Very weird.
“They don’t seem scared,” I whispered to Narinda as she kept us moving ever forward, a line of onlookers forming at both our sides.
“They are Korwahk,” Narinda explained. “Some, daughters of The Horde, others from the villages and settlements of Korwahk. They feel this is a great honor, to be chosen for the Hunt. They grow up wanting nothing more than to be chosen, paraded, hunted, claimed and taken as wife by a Korwahk warrior.”
There were a lot of words I didn’t like in that statement but I didn’t dwell. We were walking through tents and moving toward an area that was much better lit. I didn’t have time to dwell.
“And you and me?”
“Scouts sent out to faraway lands. I don’t know this Seattle where they found you. I did not know they travelled beyond the Green Sea. I have heard they scouted in Hawkvale but rarely. King Ludlum is not a big fan of this and will, if a scout is captured, deal with them harshly so they usually find women like you and me who are travelling. I was with my father on a ship on the Marhac Sea. We’d anchored at a Korwahk port. Father left me with two guards who were overwhelmed and I was taken.”
“Kidnapped?” I hissed in shock, her eyes came to me, she didn’t smile her small, weird smile; she just looked in my eyes, kept us steadily moving forward and nodded.
Oh crap. This had not been pleasant. Even in the torchlight dancing, which did not exactly illuminate the space like a football field, I could see this had not been pleasant.
“I’m sorry, Narinda,” I whispered on a squeeze of her waist, “so sorry.”
“It has happened, it is past. I must look forward. Father taught me that. What has been has been but what will be is what you make of it.”