The Blood Princess

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Valuable as we are to our families if unsullied, every First Daughter needs a Runa. I am, after all, but a commodity to be traded to the highest bidder. Like a slave but bowed to and fed better. Heaven forbid if my life was taken. Or, worse, my hymen breached by one of the many goblins, draugrs, upyrs, strigois, rampaging barbarians, or indeed any of the countless other bloodsuckers and c**k-wagglers who stalk the moon-hours here in search of maidens to either dispatch, despoil, possess, or attempt to burst with their erupting seed.

As such, Runa has been trained in combat to the highest levels. This means I gain her protection, and she must pass all her skills onto me. Now I’m supposedly a royal, to my bitter dismay I am barred the spoils, the fame and the incomparable exhilaration of battle. Nonetheless, the obligation to hone my fighting prowess remains, for any potential husband will value a bride who can look after herself. It lessens the chances of getting f****d to a pulp whilst he is off raiding and enjoying himself.

Runa lives whilst I do. She will unhesitatingly lay down her life for mine. Not just because she is my thrall, my sworn bonds-maid, but because she utterly adores me with such steadfast devotion that I can almost feel the constant agony of it ripping at her insides. I am everything to her. She seeks to know my mind better than she knows her own, which is why it takes little more than a look to have her springing into decisive action.

I don’t even move. The dagger held at Eyepatch’s neck is suddenly slicing through the air to spear the arm of the wine servant and prevent Jaromir from drinking. There is great commotion, s**t flying everywhere, swords drawn, people believing I am here to slay the prince.

I am quick to set matters straight. To test my claim, Jaromir himself forces the wine down the servant’s throat. For many tense moments nothing happens. Then, thankfully, the servant duly screeches, spews most of his gizzards out of his nose, turns purple, and dies. Jaromir Wolfskin casts me a look of something close to admiration and gives the slightest nod of thanks.

“I pity the demon that comes across you on your trip to my fortress,” he says. “I look forward to seeing you there.”

Then he grabs a whole roasted chicken off the table and sweeps out, his guards hurrying behind. The other girls stare stunned and defeated at me, wearing faces like they’ve been forced to eat pigswill. Triumph warms my insides.

“What a putrid cunt that man is,” spits Eyepatch, ruining my moment. I grit my teeth and give him a harder squeeze.

“You’re talking about the man whose heart I plan to win,” I remind him.

“Unlikely,” he says, still unperturbed by my grip on him, trying to break it with a renewed swell there. “You or indeed any of this lot here that don’t find their bodies emptied by upyrs out on the Sheet-lands are going to suffer just as great a loss of blood at my hands.”

“Oh really?” I say, humoring him. “Why so?”

“Because Jaromir has been promised as husband to my sister for years.”

“So let me guess, using your looks as a guide,” I say, my hand almost open now in my attempt to contain his burgeoning c**k. “Your sister has a face that the good Prince and many others strongly believe to have been shat out by a troll?”

“Far from it,” he replies, showing no hint of being goaded by my insults. “Jaromir is right to have wanted her. It is she who shows all the reluctance. He was so tired of not winning her over that he forced himself upon her, hoping to plant his seed and hasten the nuptials. The planting worked, at least. He gave her a son. Unfortunately for all, the Prince has since taken a furious dislike to the boy.”

“What can a poor infant do to earn such disdain?”

“It was born with flame-colored hair.”

“What?” I’m incredulous. “He doesn’t like the child because it has red hair?”

“He abhors it and has sworn to all that he could never have fathered such an abomination.”

“Am I right to think your sister also does not have red hair?”

“That’s the thing. She does. And the palest skin, like milk. It is what made Jaromir so smitten by her.”

“And he never supposed their child might take after her?”

“Jaromir does not trouble himself with thought or consequences. He once had a concubine’s arms cut off at the shoulders because she was seen hugging another man. Afterwards he was so furious that his most skilled c**k-stroker could never again do him this favor, he cut off her head. Then he became even more furious when he remembered who used to suck him best.”

“I can’t wait to marry him.”

“And yet it is my c**k you are grasping. Perhaps it is time you let go?”

I pull my hand away, suddenly guilty, aware that we are visible to all here.

“Perhaps,” I say. But I don’t want him to think he is in control. With deliberate vulgarity I bring my fingers to my nose and breathe in any hint of his scent.

If there is doubt as to how someone pure, someone yet to share herself, can do so wanton a thing, then let it be known that forbidding me lust only fires my imagination with it; has my insides raging like a man’s for carnality. Yes, sometimes my dreams have me acting and being treated like a princess. But all too often they have me behaving like the most wretched f**k-slave. Sometimes I am sure a sleep-demon must have possessed me!

“Sadly for you,” Eyepatch says, ignoring my scent-sniffing lewdness, “you cannot marry Jaromir. No one can, and I must see to that. We have a custom here. When a child is born out of wedlock, the mother is obliged to name the father or be burned alive. If as Wolfskin has done that man disputes her claim, he has one year to find himself another bride. If he does not, he is proved a villain. He is forbidden to marry for five years and will be castrated unless he gifts the mother the baby’s weight in gold as compensation.”

“I see,” I say. “And you want your sister to have that gold.”

“She deserves it. Especially as she has borne such great pain in her efforts to feed her son up. The boy is, for now at least, something of a fat little bastard.”

“Clever girl indeed,” I smirk in admiration of her cunning. “But what if I need that gold more than she? What if I believe the tales that when alone with a girl, the werewolf prince sprouts hairs from his great prick that tantalize inside like no other pleasure imaginable? What if this temptation is too great for me and I marry him whatever you say, not really giving a f**k about you or your sister?”

“Then the custom decrees that after the ceremony, the new bride and the mother must fight. If the mother loses, she is proved a liar and cast out with her child to starve.”

“And if she wins?” This won’t happen, obviously, because I am the granddaughter of Sørgen Knotbeard.

“The bride is chopped into thirteen pieces. The father must hand over the gold and is castrated regardless anyway, but not before having been made to f**k a yak. He is also banned from marrying for ten years, if any would have still him. But my sister won’t win.”

“You have more faith in her shrewdness than in her fighting abilities, it seems.”

“Jaromir wants himself an extraordinary warrior for a wife because he knows well my sister’s prowess. I trained her myself. But she took a deep cut to her sword arm in her last battle. It is now too weak to win fights.”

“So she has to rely on you—a brother who wants more than anything to keep alive the man who r***d her.”

“Once she has the gold, then I can think about making Jaromir pay in other ways.”

“And seizing his crown for yourself, no doubt!”

I say it like it’s a bad thing, but in truth he is displaying no greater ambition than any other man of power I’ve known. Fame gets sagas written about you. And although I’m making my scorn for him plain, I can’t deny he seems a better brother than the one I’m saddled with. I think I’m just trying to provoke him, to keep our conversation alive. It is rare if not impossible these days for me to share the company of any man, even if this one is a straggle-haired, one-eyed drunkard who has promised to kill me if we meet again.

“I do not want any crown,” he says. “I’m sick of the politics and treachery of this place. Once my sister gets justice and can see her boy safe, I am going out into the Sheet-lands to hunt demons. I’ll earn my place in the next world that way, not from slaying innocents.”

“A demon hunter!” I can’t help but show my derision. It’s like something a child would say. Our sagas are indeed full of such fearless, peerless warriors—but no one actually does it for real. Well, not without a quick and horrible death.

“I have certain advantages over them,” he tells me, and I cannot see enough of his face to know if he’s being serious or not. “You’ll wish I was already out there when you begin your foolish quest to marry the foulest man alive. Until I catch up with you, of course, and cut you down.”

“You are intent on slaying me then?” I say, still amused at our conversation. “And me such a beauty, such the opposite of a demon.”

“I am,” he says, “if you attempt to do Jaromir’s bidding.”

“That,” I say, drawing myself up, “sounds like a challenge I cannot refuse!”

He nods slowly. I don’t know what he understands of me. Maybe he just thinks I’m like any other boastful, ambitious fool, seeking fame, fortune and power without even half the wit and skill to earn it. Our battlefields are always strewn with such idiots. Maybe in having a sister, he understands some of the pressures we live under; that we are used, robbed of our will and any hope of excitement, locked away until we are traded like pigs.

He surely, however, cannot know my true mind. It would shrink any man to see the darkness, the rudeness in there. I grew up in thrall to the heroes and heroines of our sagas, and I am gripped still. Adventure excites me. Fighting excites me. Blood, yes, excites me. Passion rages within me. It makes me itch with its need. Jaromir might seem only to offer death, but he also offers me something I didn’t think I would see again: freedom, to bring alive the darkness and rudeness of my mind. I might die on a foolish quest to marry a beast of a man, but not before I have become the heroine of my own saga.

“I’ll see you out on the Sheet-lands then,” Eyepatch says with that little smile.

And he will.