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  DYE’S KINGDOM: WANTING IT FOREVER

  An Ellora’s Cave Publication, May 2005

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.

  1337 Commerce Drive, #13

  Stow, OH 44224

  ISBN MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-4199-0228-8

  Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned):

  Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), Mobipocket (PRC) & HTML

  DYE’S KINGDOM: WANTING IT FOREVER Copyright © 2005 MADISON HAYES

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. They are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Edited by Pamela Campbell.

  Cover art by Syneca.

  Warning:

  The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers. Dye’s Kingdom: Wanting It Forever has been rated E–rotic by a minimum of three independent reviewers.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of Romantica™ reading entertainment: S (S-ensuous), E (E-rotic), and X (X-treme).

  S-ensuous love scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.

  E-rotic love scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall word count. In addition, some E-rated titles might contain fantasy material that some readers find objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same sex encounters, forced seductions, and so forth. E-rated titles are the most graphic titles we carry; it is common, for instance, for an author to use words such as “fucking”, “cock”, “pussy”, and such within their work of literature.

  X-treme titles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storyline execution. Unlike E-rated titles, stories designated with the letter X tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

  Dye’s Kingdom: Wanting It Forever

  Madison Hayes

  Dedication

  To Theseus…

  Chapter One

  “Who died and made you king?” With her upper lip curled into a sneer, Martigay snorted at the big man’s back—then watched that back freeze in defensive disbelief. Slowly the man turned to face her, stunned incredulity stamped into his expression. The long, curving line of his lips parted as he stared, and Martigay was suddenly taken with the idea that…the large, intimidating man was…exceptionally…attractive.

  Attractive in an undeniably hard, male sense, impossible to ignore and unlikely to be overlooked. His broad, square shoulders spanned the chest of a mountaineer, wide and deep, and a heavy wool cloak was pushed back over the wide line of those shoulders. The long sleeves of his linen jerkin were pushed up to his elbows, exposing tanned forearms touched with a burnish of fair hair and patterned with a strong network of veins. The frayed edge of his doeskins were cinched tight around a tapered waist and his plain, soft leggings bunched at his groin, then hugged his legs in loose folds to tuck into the top of scuffed leather boots. Her eyes lingered a moment at his groin before they made a reluctant departure and followed his long legs all the way to the ground.

  In a cool appraisal, Martigay let her eyes slowly rise to his face. And that was where her dispassionate veneer failed her. The man was unmistakably first-class, grade-A, level one, hunk-quality material—nudged right up there next to godhood.

  The man was…dangerously handsome. He looked like the sort of man who would kill for what he wanted and would kill again before giving it up. The hard planes of his face spoke of violent hours on the battlefield and threatened danger as well as promised protection. The lines that bracketed his hard mouth had probably never seen a smile. Imagining how it might feel to be possessed by such a man, a shiver went up Martigay’s spine. As he glared at her, Martigay’s eyes drifted to the dark tattoo slashing his left eyebrow.

  Tattoos were uncommon in the men of her generation, though older men, especially Khals, sported intricate patterns that covered half their foreheads and extended downward across one eyelid. But this tattoo was a departure from the dark, scrolling artwork seen on older Khals. It was a simple, violent, arcing slash that cut from his hairline down through his eyebrow, ending just above his eye.

  Tucked inside the shadowed hood of his cloak, loose strands of his hair shone as bright as the sun on oranges. With an irritated twitch of his head, the demigod flicked the straight hair out of his eyes as he narrowed his angry gaze on her. Those eyes blazed a virulent, volcanic blue from beneath the cold edge of a frown. “What’s your rank, soldier?” His voice was a hard, dangerous scrape.

  Abruptly, Martigay realized she may have blundered, and seriously. At her side, she heard Pall snuff out a gasp of startled amusement. She pushed her shoulders back. “What’s it to you?”

  Someone coughed in the still tavern and there was a scrape of wooden chair against stone floor along with the warning sizzle of meat blackening on the spit in the fireplace.

  The man’s hood slid from his head, revealing the three gold ribbons of rank braided into his hair and Martigay clamped her teeth in hard regret. Damn. When she’d entered the busy tavern and found the man upbraiding one of her comrades, she’d taken him for an arrogant, threadbare aristocrat of little consequence. With his hood covering his head, she couldn’t have known he outranked her…and then some. Unwilling to acknowledge defeat, her jaw jutted forward.

  “What’s your rank?” he repeated, his words a cold command.

  That command put a shiver down her backbone like ice shards driven into her spine. With a blink, she straightened, irritated that the officer would ask what he could clearly see braided into her hair.

  “Field Captain, Commander,” she announced with all the professional snap she could muster. There was a moment’s silence, and though she didn’t watch those burning eyes, she felt them bore right through her, all the way to her spine.

  “Not anymore.” His voice was a harsh, contained rasp, like steel against steel. “Pawyn.”

  Martigay winced. She knew she’d winced and it had shown, though she’d preferred to have hidden it. “As you say, Commander.”

  His hand was extended toward her, palm up.

  Quickly, she reached for the blue ribbon in her hair and tugged at the knot with two fingers. Her hand hovered above his a defiant moment before she loosed the ribbon and watched it fall into his hand.

  Slouching back against the counter—the casual act meant to punctuate her façade of indifference—she boldly settled her eyes on his, as the two of them exchanged their mutual disdain. At some point, the man’s eyes fired in response to her impertinence—the soldier’s complete absence of deference or concern apparently moving the officer to further action.

  “Report to my tent tomorrow, after firstmeal,” he delivered curtly. With that, the commander motioned to his two attendants as he pushed through the tables and out of the tavern.

  And it wasn’t until then that she even realized the entire clientele and every soldier within the tavern, with the possible exception of Pall, was holding his or her collective breath. Every set of eyes was fixed on her.

  With a careless smirk, she shrugged, lifting her shoulders. “What?” she complained to Pall as she turned back to the counter signaling for a jack of ale. “The man was an arrogant son of a marmot—picking on poor Wags like that!”

  She grinned up at the man behind the counter, expecting him to confirm this opinion with nothing less than a nod. Instead, the barkeep stared at her as if she were mad.

  “Wags is hard on his mount,” Pall reminded her lightly. “His army mount. You, yourself, have complained abo
ut it.”

  Martigay lifted a shoulder. “Still, the commander needn’t have to come down on me! I was only sticking up for a man in my unit. I didn’t know he was an officer.” The barkeep slid a jack of ale before her and she took a long swallow. “He might have considered that! The man has no sense of humor,” she finished dismissively.

  Elbows on the counter, Pall nodded agreeably and turned his face to hers. His green gaze was filled with barely suppressed amusement as he looked out at her through a curtain of straw-colored hair. “You might be short on humor, too, if your grandmother—The Queen—had died last month.”

  Martigay stared at him with dawning horror.

  “I understand our new king was very close to the old lady.”

  * * * * *

  Several ales afterward, Martigay staggered against Pall as they reeled their way through camp, coming to an unsteady halt just outside his tiny camp tent. Catching her arm, Pall only just stopped her teetering descent to the ground. “Come on, then,” he grinned down at her, eyes laughing out of a tanned face. “Give us a shag?”

  She nodded several times. “Sounds good to me.”

  Pall laughed. “And in the morning—will you still respect me?”

  “Don’t respect you now,” she pointed out. “Don’t see any reason to change my opinion.”

  Pall considered this statement for a few moments before formulating his reply. “Promise you’ll not kill me and we’ll call it a deal.”

  Scrunching her face up in concentration, she gave this idea some thought. “Can’t guarantee that,” she admitted.

  With a grin and an arm around her, Pall pushed her along to her tent that had been pitched just beyond his. Hers was slightly larger, with room enough for two people to sleep and high enough to sit in without mussing your hair on the tent’s roof. Tucking her inside, Pall crawled in behind her and helped her struggle with her uncooperative bedding. When she was covered and settled, he scuttled backward to leave.

  “I deserved that field promotion,” she slurred.

  “Is that a rhetorical statement?”

  “Mmph?”

  “Do you expect a response?”

  “Bastard.”

  “Who? The new king or me?”

  “The king. Effing, royal bastard. Bet he’s never done anything more taxing in his life than lift a golden goblet to his mouth. Bet he needs help getting undressed. Bet he’s white as a slug under those doeskins,” she grumbled disingenuously, flashing on the image of the king’s lean, tawny forearms, “and as soft as a—

  “I’m sorry,” she announced loudly to the tent’s roof, and Pall heard her teeth grate in the next quiet instant. “I didn’t know who he was, didn’t know he’d lost his grandmother!

  “When did he get here?” she complained. “Why didn’t you tell me the king would be commanding the army?” Martigay sighed. “I deserved that promotion, Palleden.”

  Pall nodded. She had. Deserved it, and earned it.

  The river crossing shouldn’t have been a problem, earlier that day, even though the water was high. But one of the oxen had floundered on the slippery pavers and had gone down. The tall, bulky wagon had started downstream, dragging the tangled harness and both oxen with it. Men had hurried toward the wagon, sloshing clumsily through the water as the wagon began to roll and tip.

  Helplessly, they’d watched as the large mass moved away faster than they could catch it up.

  Then they’d watched Martigay slash across the river several paces downstream.

  She’d knotted her rope low on a tree at the bank’s edge and charged her pony into the rush of water. Urging her mount up the cobbled bank on the opposite side of the river, she jumped from her horse and wrapped the rope’s end around a second tree. The rope stretched taut as the wagon glided to meet it.

  The rope had halted the wagon long enough for many strong hands to get behind it. The oxen were cut free to flounder their way to the bank while others from her unit heaved the wagon to shore. Pall nodded. There was no question that Martigay had earned the blue ribbon the king had demanded she return.

  Pall shook his head regretfully. That promotion had meant a lot to her. She was ambitious. It had taken months of hard, perspiring application for her to work her way from pawyn to sergeant. Then in a day she was captain.

  And that had lasted exactly one day.

  The king needn’t have busted her all the way down to pawyn. He could have stopped at sergeant.

  Still, Pall thought, his mouth lifting at one corner, the girl’s spirit didn’t appear to be broken.

  “Arrogant, overbearing, pompous, royal little prick. Born with a silver…place setting…in his mouth.” She halted on these last words, stumbling over the visual image of the king’s hard, sensuous lips, his hair slicked away from his face and hanging down in a straight sheet to touch the wide line of his shoulders. Sweeping this idea aside with a brush of impatience, she looked to Pall to confirm her opinion. “Where’d he come from anyway?”

  Pall shrugged. “Don’t know much about him. From what I’ve heard, he wasn’t exactly next in line for the crown. The Queen bypassed quite a lot of family to put him on the throne.”

  “Wonder who he bullied, intimidated, bribed and murdered to assure his ascension,” she mumbled morosely.

  Pall smiled down into her smoke-blue eyes and let his gaze drift from there. Most men didn’t even get as far as her eyes, he knew. Most men never got past her beautifully rounded breasts—when she was facing them. And when she wasn’t facing them, it was her luscious, curving hips and trim little bottom.

  “He’ll be sorry he ever crossed steel with me.” She swaggered with bravado. “I’ll make him pay for this…in gold. I’ll be a lieutenant before I’m finished with the King of Thrall. And I’ll be wearing a gold ribbon in my hair.”

  “I’ve no doubt you will,” Pall told her consolingly as his eyes were drawn to the dark waves that haloed her head. “Why do you rub henweed into your hair?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful color.” It was. A rich, vibrant red so dark it had purple undertones.

  “That’s why I rub henweed into it, silly.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before. What would it be otherwise—without the color?”

  “Not so red,” she muttered up at the ceiling.

  He put a pat on her knee. “Check on you in the dawning, then.”

  Her fist made its wavering way to her forehead. “G’nite, Sergeant,” she slurred with gloomy resignation.

  Pall hesitated at the tent’s opening. “Be careful, Martigay. You made a powerful enemy today.”

  Martigay rolled her eyes upward. “You must be mistaken, Pall,” she drawled. “I’m too lazy to make enemies.” Pall smiled as he left. There were a lot of words to describe Martigay—but lazy wasn’t one of them.

  * * * * *

  Not a hundred paces distant, Dye stretched back in his camp chair, his eyes on the roof of his pavilion tent. The table before him was littered with stacks of ledgers, sheaves of correspondence and piles of curled-up maps. He shook his head.

  He couldn’t let a soldier get away with that sort of disrespect. The girl had to be disciplined. As the new king taking over command of the Army, he couldn’t afford to start off on weak footing. He should have dismissed the woman. Normally, he would have. If it had been a man, he probably would have. But at the time, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to the act. There was something about the girl that couldn’t be easily dismissed. Impertinent little—but the soldier probably hadn’t realized whom she was addressing when she’d made the awkward statement…and it might turn out better this way, he decided. It would give him an opportunity to make an example of the soldier.

  He shook his head again, but it wasn’t in regret or disagreement. It was a physical effort to shake his mind free of the cocky, arrogant little face that had been following him around all evening. That was with him now, as he stared at the tent’s ceiling.

  His hand raked back through his red
hair before it dropped into his lap. Unconsciously, his thick wrist scraped over the ties that laced his doeskin leggings together at the groin.

  It had been a crap fucking month, starting with the unexpected call to Gluthra—royal seat of Greater Thrall—where his grandmother had lived and ruled for almost eighty years. Dye was only one of the Old Queen’s many grandchildren who’d gathered after the old lady’s death.

  He’d gone to attend the firing of her funeral pyre and to see his sister step up to lead the country. But Petra had unexpectedly declined the throne, and instead of a new queen, Thrall had gotten a new king. No one had been more surprised than he to learn that his name was listed as second in line for the throne. It’s not as if he, or Petra for that matter, was the oldest of Tien’s grandchildren or even born to her oldest offspring.

  Within days, his leadership had been challenged, not by any of his cousins—they were smarter than that—but by a distant challenge in the tiny, prosperous country of Amdahl and part of his Kingdom. The desert clans of the Saharat had pulled together and invaded their tiny eastern neighbor. As the smallest country in the considerable collection known as Greater Thrall or Thrall & Etc., the small city-state had been overrun in a matter of days. No doubt the Saharat had felt the timing was right to invest in the attractive oceanside property while leadership was changing hands in far-off Gluthra, located north across the middle sea—with several days of ocean and the whole length of Agryppa to cross before help could reach Amdahl.

  And that, thought Dye, was the reason he was presently camped a day’s ride south of Tharran, the Agryppan capitol, on his way to Amdahl with an army of twelve thousand.

  To take back Amdahl. With ten thousand from Thrall—including the two thousand small, pale men indigenous to the country, and after whom the country was named—as well as two thousand from Agryppa. Not because Greater Thrall needed the income generated by the bustling port city, but because the people of Amdahl were used to the freedom that came with being part of Thrall & Etc. And because they expected the protection and assistance they’d requested.