The Golden Dynasty

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 pinching 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.”

Well, that was a positive way to look at it.

Still.

“I just hope the warrior who chooses me is kind,” she said softly, her eyes were now peering at the sidelines from under her brows.

I did too.

“And I hope we can keep the Dax from seeing you,” she continued.

“Why do you keep saying that?” I asked.

“You are fair,” she replied. “You are the only fair woman in the parade. You stand out.”

Oh no.

“And you have great beauty,” she went on.

That was nice. Or it would have been nice at any other time in my life.

Not this one, obviously.

“Does he like blondes?” I asked and she shrugged.

“I do not know. What I do know is that they do not have any females who are fair in the Southlands, Korwahk or anywhere. You will stand out.”

She wasn’t wrong, glancing at the girls, I definitely stood out.

“Who is the Dax, anyway?” I asked, moving my gaze to the sidelines then back to the girls around us, some preening, smiling at the onlookers, nearly skipping with excitement. The few, like us, dragging their heels and moving forward warily.

“King Lahn,” she answered and I looked at her. “They do not use our language. In Korwahk, ‘king’ is ‘dax’,” she explained then shivered before going on. “He is a savage. Tales of his exploits have spread wide. Very cruel. Heartless.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about that either considering we were walking through a village of tents and torchlight, people wearing hides and wisps of material. I figured they were all relatively primitive. “Savage”, “cruel” and “heartless” upped that ante by quite a bit and were not a words I liked.

She looked forward and suddenly her manner became urgent, her hand slid from mine up to my forearm where she grasped it and pulled me closer even as we kept walking.

“We are about to enter the avenue of warriors, so you must listen,” she said swiftly, sounding just as urgent as she was acting and a thrill raced up my spine and it was not a good one. “The Wife Hunt is what its name says it is. The warriors of Korwahk are strong and fierce. They are respected. To be a warrior, you must train from a little boy and endure many trials. Only the most powerful men will be allowed into the Korwahk Horde. To give your life to this training and then go out on raids and make war with the Dax, you are promised riches, booty from pillaging and war and also participation in the Wife Hunt which offers you the opportunity to claim a great beauty as your bride.”

Okay, it was safe to say that things were not getting better.

Narinda continued. “As you can see, we are being paraded through the Daxshee, or the Dax’s village, his camp where he lives with his warriors. We will be paraded in front of his warriors. They will look us over, decide who to take as wife. Once the parade is finished, they will mount their horses while we are taken outside the Daxshee. There, we will be set free. And there, they will hunt us.”

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

God!

“What?” I cried and she shook my forearm.

“Circe, quiet! Listen,” she hissed. “This is important.”

I was trembling and I was listening. Hard. So hard my ears hurt.

Narinda carried on. “They will hunt us and they will claim us.” Her fingers gripped my forearm and she pressed closer. “They will claim us like any husband claims his wife on their wedding night.”

Oh shit. Oh God. Oh shit. OhGodohshitohGod.

She kept at it. “They will bring us back to the village, naked and claimed.”

OhshitohGodohshit.

“And then the wedding rite will be held before the Dax.”

I didn’t want to know. I really didn’t

But I asked, “What’s that?”

“Settle, my lovely,” she said softly, hearing and reading my tone even over the loud beat of the drums. “It is whatever the warrior wants it to be. Mostly, they just present the Dax with their bride. Then there is dancing, drinking, eating and revelry.”

“Do we…” I swallowed, “do we get to put clothes on for this, uh… revelry?”

She nodded. “After presentation to their king, we will be clothed in clothing our warrior provides us.”

That was good.

But I wasn’t going to get to that part.

Not me. No way. I was going to run. I was going to hide. I was going to fight. I was going to do whatever I could do to get away, find out what in the fuck I was doing in this crazy, freaking place and get my ass home.

“I see you are frightened,” Narinda called my attention to her and my eyes snapped to hers.

“Well… yeah,” I bit out.

“Do not, Circe, listen to me now, do not do anything foolish,” she said quickly, her eyes again scanning the crowd, the lit space getting closer, I could see the urgency on her face.

“And foolish would be?”

“Do not fight the claiming. Don’t. It is their tradition. They don’t see anything wrong with it and look at the Korwahk women. Circe, look at them. They can’t wait.”

I looked at the Korwahk women. It was true. It was insane but it was true.

They obviously couldn’t wait.

Then Narinda went on to advise, “Take your warrior and endure the claiming and hope, hope, my lovely, with all your heart, that you get a warrior who is soft under all that hardness.”

I was trembling head-to-toe and I wanted to bolt. I wanted to run.

But it was too late.

We were entering the avenue of the warriors.

I knew this because the onlookers had disappeared. The only thing left were two lines on either side of us, shoulder to shoulder, of men wearing nothing but hide pants, their glistening, brown-skinned bodies painted. Some had painted white streaks in addition to black, not many, a few. More had red. About the same amount had a deep blue. Some had a combination of all of these colors. But there were some only painted in black even though those painted solely in black was nowhere near the majority.

And it was scary. They were scary. This was because they were huge. Not big, not tall, huge. They were all lean and muscled, not a little bit, a lot. Some had scars. Some had seriously nasty scars. All of them had black hair, all of it long and pulled back from their painted faces. All of them were wearing what looked like a long looped chain that was wound around their waists. All had massive swords in scabbards at slants on their backs and all had two knives in sheathes at either side of their waists.

They looked like warriors and they looked like savages.

The place was lit with tons of torches and some big fires. The drums were still beating, louder now, the sound pummeling my skin. I walked in front of the warriors and I became glad the Korwahk women wanted these men. I was glad because they also knew I would draw attention because I was blonde and they wanted that attention. Warrior eyes came to me but the minute they did, a Korwahk woman moved to get in front of me, catch their eyes. They leaned in to show their faces, leaned back to show their bodies, pressed their arms together to push out their breasts.

Thank God.

“Circe, close to me, duck your head without looking like you’re doing it. We approach the Dax,” Narinda warned under her breath but over the drums and I moved even closer to her and tried to duck my head without looking like I was ducking my head.

And come to the Dax we did. The drums were so loud they were all I could hear. Each beat felt like it was hammered against my body. And the Korwahk women around us became frenzied. They flooded the area to our left side and did everything to put themselves on display.

I leaned forward and peered through the undulating bodies trying to see but all I caught were scraps. Nevertheless, those scraps were not good.

A vast, wide dais, some ten steps up. On it what looked like a huge throne made almost entirely out of colossal, black, curling horns that shot up and rounded in an array at the back, the same for the armrests and seat. The feet, though, looked like elephant feet.

Um… not nice.

Behind the dais there was what looked like a stream of fire that danced the length, illuminating it. To either side of the throne, massive fire pits then huge drums that were at least the height of two grown men and the men banging the drums had to run toward it and hurl their mallet with the flying weight of their whole body, drop to their feet, run away and then run back again. They were glistening with sweat for their efforts.

That was all I caught. No man was sitting on the throne. There was no one there.

No one.

Until I saw him.

Standing at one side and up toward the edge of the dais looking down was a giant of a man. A beast of a man. Taller than any of the extremely tall warriors on the sides of the parade, broader, more muscled, more savage.

He was looking down the dais not at the parade but at a man in robes who was gesturing up to him. His strapping arms were crossed on his brawny chest, his chest and face painted in streaks of black, one going clean across his eyes. He wore no other colors.

And he appeared bored.

That was all I saw before frenzied Korwahk girls, calling out in their strange language, closed in front of me, jumping up and down like they were at their favorite boy band concert.

“He doesn’t intend to take a wife this Hunt, thank the Gods,” Narinda breathed at my side and her relief was so great, it communicated itself to me. I relaxed and she moved us forward hurriedly but I could tell she was trying to make it not look hurried.

Then I did something stupid. I don’t know why I did, but I did.

When we were passed the dais and the girls started to circle me again to deflect the attention the warriors were giving me, I looked back at the savage Korwahk king.

And when I did, I looked right into his dark, painted eyes.

Oh fuck!

I twisted back around swiftly and sucked in breath.

“Circe?” Narinda called, hearing my breath even over the drums.

“He saw me,” I whispered.

“What?” she asked.

“He saw me!” I cried. “The Dax!”

Her eyes got big and she cried in return, “Oh no!”

I shut my eyes tight.

“All right, all right, my lovely, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he –” she tried, clutching my arm.

“He did,” I whispered as we moved beyond the avenue of warriors into another sea of onlookers.

She gripped my arm. “Maybe he didn’t.”

I nodded. “Maybe he didn’t,” I said softly.

But he did.