Penelope & Prince Charming (31 page)

“You do have cruelty, Damien,” Alexander said. He
was silent a moment, then gave Damien an unreadable look. “Very well, I will help you.”

Damien looked at him, slightly surprised. “You agree?”

“As you said, I want a strong Nvengaria. I do not trust you, but I will work for it any way I can. This is much like what I wanted at first, you know—a figurehead for the people to love and worship while I worked for an efficient state. I want Nvengaria, not adoration.”

Damien did not trust Alexander either, but knew he’d be fool to throw away such an asset. Alexander was definitely a man he wanted on his side, and he imagined the Regent’s trepidation when Alexander began to negotiate. Alexander would have the Regent begging for mercy. He was almost sorry he’d miss it.

Damien likewise knew that Alexander would always be watching, waiting for Damien to show signs of becoming his father. Alexander, for all his ruthlessness, truly did love Nvengaria. Damien knew the man would fight to the death to keep it free.

He let none of these thoughts show on his face. “Excellent,” he answered. He rose and took up a flask of Nvengarian brandy. “Let us drink to it. Then I must see to preparations for my wedding.”

He brought the flask and glasses back to Alexander. They each poured their own and examined the glass and fluid closely before they took the first sip, at exactly the same time.

They could never be too careful.

The royal wedding took place on a fine and fair day, in the royal chapel high in the castle of the princes of Nvengaria. A bishop joined the couple in matrimony for the second time—third if Penelope believed the Nvengarian betrothal ceremony was truly a wedding.

Penelope stood in a gown of white silk satin covered with a filmy net of white tulle, Damien distractingly handsome in Nvengarian blue. His medals gleamed, and he wore a slight smile, happy that his plans had at last come to fruition. Prince Charming had won.

Sasha had stood in for the father of the bride, beaming with pride as he gave her away. Egan hovered at Damien’s side as best man, looking a bit shaky from revelry the night before. Damien seemed none the worse for wear, but Egan and Petri had red eyes and white faces and wore expressions of pain.

Penelope reflected that her very low-church father would have fainted to see his daughter marry in this pa
pist ceremony, with the bishop in his miter and cloth of gold robes, chanting over the host, and leading her and Damien to kneel to a statue of the Virgin.

Trappings, Damien had said. A thin layer of Catholicism over the roiling paganism of Nvengaria.

The logosh had vanished as quickly as they’d come. The leader, who called himself Myn, had gazed at Penelope with his strange blue eyes and vowed that if she ever had need again, he and his band would be at her side in an instant.

She was touched, but slightly unnerved by this devotion and Myn’s claim that he could produce a thousand logosh whenever she called. They would respond only to her, he said, not the prince. Then they’d flowed away, and were gone.

Wulf, on the other hand, stayed with Penelope. He had refused to leave with the other logosh, and Penelope was happy to let him stay. She had grown fond of the boy. Damien was more reluctant, but agreed that he had saved her life more than once, for which he’d be eternally grateful. Wulf was given the uniform of a page, but no duties except to follow Penelope and keep her from danger. He attended the wedding today, crouched in front of the pews, watching the proceedings with fascination.

Alexander also attended the wedding. He sat in the front row, his status as Grand Duke of the Council of Dukes unchanged. His small son, a dark-haired, finelooking lad who smiled more readily than his father, sat beside him.

Alexander would be leaving for England the next week. Damien knew that he, like Lady Anastasia, would work for the good of Nvengaria, not Damien himself.

“He’ll enjoy playing spy,” he told Penelope. “I imagine he’ll be very, very good at it. And he will keep his eyes on me at the same time. If he ever believes my father has returned through me, he will be back.”

Penelope knew, however, that Damien had somehow turned Alexander to his side. She’d begun to believe Damien’s ability to handle people was nearly magical.

On the subject of magic—she glanced back at Sasha. The night before, while at a banquet dinner with both Council of Dukes and Council of Mages, Damien had commented under his breath that he’d like his councils to disappear so he could spend the time alone with Penelope. Sasha had said brightly, “I could send everyone to sleep if you like. Except—ah—it might send you and Her Highness to sleep as well.”

Damien had turned to him, gaze intent. “You set that enchanted sleep back in Little Marching?”

Sasha had turned bright red under his beard. “I did.”

“You are a mage? Why the devil haven’t you told me?”

He looked modest. “A humble one only, Highness. I could never, ever be strong enough for the Council of Mages. It was a minor spell, simple. Only—I miscalculated.”

Penelope leaned around Damien, interested. “What do you mean, miscalculated?” she asked.

“It was meant to send the logosh to sleep,” Sasha confessed. “He crept back to the house, and I feared he’d hurt the princess. I meant to do a sleep spell, then alert the guards so they could creep up on him and kill him.” His flush deepened. “But the entire household went to sleep, not only the logosh. Being asleep myself, I could not undo the spell.”

“Sasha,” Damien rumbled.

The small man bowed his head. “I am deeply sorry, Your Highness. You may punish me as you see fit.”

“You old fool,” Damien’s voice softened. “If you ever want to use a spell to protect me again—tell me first.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Sasha said. Then he smiled, knowing he’d been forgiven.

After the wedding ceremony came another long banquet, then a ball. Damien smiled and talked and charmed his way through it, though Penelope’s feet hurt, her head ached, and she could not remember by the end of the evening what she’d said to whom. She’d danced with Damien—the first dance—and then had been passed around through the entire Council of Dukes and Council of Mages, at least those who could stand up long enough to dance.

Egan McDonald had lapsed into playing the Mad Highlander, regaling people with harrowing stories of life in the Highlands and life on the Peninsula during the war, and hopping up and down and kicking his feet wildly when someone demanded to see a traditional Highland dance. The Nvengarians loved him.

As the evening progressed, the resemblance to a cultured ball at a Mayfair home diminished, and the Nvengarian characteristic took over. Wine flowed, the dancing moved from constrained waltzes to free-for-all wildness, and the music became more and more frenzied.

Even the most staid matrons and gentlemen joined in the circle dances, where circles wove inside circles, and lines of people, linking hands, pulled each other in sinuous waves through the huge ballroom.

Those not dancing clapped, including Penelope and Damien standing on the dais together, the sound growing louder and faster as the dancers frantically tried to keep up with the time.

The laughter gave way to whoops and ululations as the ancient madness that lay buried inside every Nvengarian rose to the surface. Penelope’s heart beat faster, feeling the stirrings inside herself, dark needs that told her, more than Alexander’s pieces of paper, that she was truly one of them.

She felt Nvengaria’s magic and its wildness and its barely suppressed barbarism seeping from the bones of
the land itself. No matter how many elegant palaces and estates adorned the hills, they were at heart a very basic people, as primitive as the logosh. There was probably more link to the logosh in Nvengarians than they knew themselves.

As the ballroom grew darker, the red light of braziers taking over the light of candles burned to the nubs, Damien came to Penelope’s side. His fingers hard on her arm, he said, “Let us adjourn.”

“Should we?” she asked, glancing about. “We are the guests of honor.”

“We should.” His face was flushed, his eyes, like those of his people, deep blue and glittering. “Else I’ll drag you under the table and ravish you.”

“Then we should go,” she said quickly.

They made no formal good-byes. Damien simply led her to a small door in the back of the room, and out.

He hastened her through dark narrow servants’ halls and up winding staircases until they reached the bedchamber they were to share. Damien’s huge bed of state, nearly twice the size of the one they’d been given in Carleton House, dominated the room. A canopy of red and gold hung from the high ceiling above it.

“Goodness,” Penelope said. “Seven or eight people could sleep in that.”

Damien kicked the door closed. “Tonight, only two.” He stood near the door, looking more like one of the logosh of the mountains than an Imperial Prince. “Take off the dress if you want to save it from me.”

She touched the fine silk of her white gown. “It is rather splendid.”

“Take it off,” he repeated. “Else I’ll rip it from you.”

She remembered how he’d asked her to slowly undress for him the night at Carleton House, but she sensed that tonight, he had no such patience. Under his intense gaze,
she quickly stripped off the gown and laid it across a chair.

He came to her, strong fingers unhooking the stays and skirts she wore under it. “Everything off. I want you bare for me.”

He unlaced and yanked the chemise from her, then pulled her naked against his Imperial Prince’s uniform.

“Mine,” he said. “Beautiful, beautiful, and mine.”

His kiss was more like an assault, teeth and tongue probing her mouth, his civilized behavior completely gone. Prince Charming had vanished, the real Damien taking his place.

He scooped her up and carried her to the bed, throwing her to the middle. She raised herself on her elbows to watch him quickly get out of his clothes, leaving them all over the floor. “Petri will scold,” she said.

He growled. No, more of a snarl of some ancient beast. Naked, he got on the bed, moving with sinuous grace to the middle of it.

“I want you,” he said. “I want you hard and fast and I do not intend to be gentle about it.”

Her heart beat faster, a dark shiver trailing down her spine. “Do your worst, Prince of Nvengaria,” she said coyly.

That had been a mistake. His eyes grew dark with a kind of delirium, desire overtaking his senses.

He flipped her over, then pinned her outstretched arms with one hand holding both her wrists. He spread her thighs with his knee, then lifted her hips and entered her swiftly.

She screamed. She thought she’d experienced so much with him, but this went beyond it. His powerful thrusts touched places she’d never been touched, awoke feelings she’d never known existed. She screamed and screamed and he rode her until he peaked with his own climax,
then he rolled her over and, still aroused, entered her again.

He took her three times before he finally collapsed beside her. Exhausted, she kissed him, her lips swollen, scraped by his teeth and tongue. She had the feeling that he could have gone on a few more times; he was simply being kind and letting her rest.

“Damien,” she said sometime later, when her voice returned.

“Yes, love?” His voice, too, was broken.

“On Midsummer’s Day, when we were snowed in up in the mountains, the prophecy ended.”

“Yes.” He kissed her brow with gentle lips.

“Yet I still loved you. I felt the prophecy go, but I still loved you more than my own life.”

He smoothed her hair. In the shadows of the canopy, his eyes were dark, almost black. “And now?”

“Yes. Still.”

He looked at her a long time. “I felt the prophecy die, too. But I knew, I’ve always known, that it made no difference.” He kissed her. “I love you madly, Penelope.”

“When we arrived in Nvengaria, three days late, when it was all for nothing, they still wanted you,” she said. “You did not fulfill the prophecy in time, you failed, and they still wanted you.”

He smiled, his charm and arrogant assurance returning. “That is what Alexander did not understand. Some things are more powerful than prophecy or magic.”

“Love,” she said.

He nodded. “The most powerful of all.” He smiled. “I ought to write a ballad.”

She touched his cheek and smiled sleepily. “Tell me another Nvengarian fairy tale instead.”

He chuckled. She snuggled against him, liking the warm vibration of laughter on his chest.

“Once upon a time,” he said, drifting his hand through
her hair, “there was a beautiful princess. One day, a very handsome, very charming prince came along and carried her off to his kingdom, far, far away.”

“Mmm, I like that.” She traced the ridges of his abdomen. “Did they live happily ever after?”

He kissed her, his voice roughening. “They will, Penelope. They will. This I swear to you with all my heart.”