Chapter 1
Randal
I don’t remember the exact year I realized I was a bastard, or what that meant.
One thing I knew at thirty-four years old…
I didn’t give a shit.
It barely crossed my mind anymore. I knew it crossed the mind of the queen—my father’s wife, which I guess made her my stepmother. Even the thought of that word would make bile rise into my throat, as I knew my presence did for her every time she looked at me, but I’d come to enjoy making her suffer in some passive way.
It seemed a bit of divine justice.
Cloaked but unmasked, I pounded back my cider outside the village tavern before heading for the market square. It was the first decent day of spring. People were everywhere. It had been a long, shitty winter—the worst of my father’s reign, without a doubt.
As I moved among the townspeople, nobody paid me any attention. As far as they knew, I was a journeyman carpenter who made a habit of passing through Aramoor and its surrounding lands. True, I stood three heads taller than all of them, and my shoulders were at least twice as wide, but nobody gave me more than a glance anymore. The feeling of being nobody important was fucking priceless.
Inside the castle, my life was an endless goddamned battle. Out here, it was easy. Nobody expected a thing from me; nobody knew me well enough to love me or hate me. They’d just seen me around so much that my appearance didn’t shock them anymore. And they were smart enough to get the fuck out of my way when they saw me coming.
Even my scars were of no interest. Though I always covered myself with my cloak, nobody commented on my face. My appearance was as familiar as the leather smith’s limp or the apothecary’s lazy eye. Nobody looked at me like a monster, which is what I fucking knew I was. The people of Aramoor were like the inhabitants of any castle city—they were all damaged, all fucked up in one way or another. I fit right in.
Way above the village loomed the massive stone walls of Ironhaven Castle. From each window, the washer women hung new royal standards, showing my father’s crest, a crescent moon with three stars, representing the three children born to the stolen princess a few generations ago, who went on to found kingdoms of their own.
I’d been forced by my tutor to learn the story as a child, though I believed little of the old tale. As I watched one of the standards flap in the breeze, I reminded myself yet again that it was also my crest. But no matter how many fucking times I saw the image, it never felt like mine.
Through the streets I went, past the grain seller with his barrels of wheat, past the butcher with his rows of hogs’ heads. The closer I got to the dairy stall, the faster I walked. If I was lucky, there was a chance I might catch one glimpse, one fucking glimpse of…
A man’s scream busted up my fantasy. I was the kind of guy that went toward trouble, so I took off running. Down a nearby alley, a pair of muggers had pinned an old man up against a wall. One of them held a small knife at his throat, drawing a trickle of blood that darkened his collar. The other patted him down, and a jingle of coins echoed around the alleyway.
Not a fucking chance was I going to let that happen.
With a few long strides I was on them, moving fast but quietly up behind the muggers’ backs. I might be big, but I knew how to be stealthy. I grabbed the one with the knife by the back of his neck, the way wolves grab their pups. The mugger let out a pathetically girly squeal as I seized him.
“What the fuck!?” He howled.
“Exactly,” I said, gripping him hard. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Let go of me. You’re going to snap my neck!”
Unlikely, but possible.
“Let’s give it a fucking try,” I said, lifting him up higher so that his feet dangled off the cobblestones. As soon as I raised him as high as I could, his partner hit me with a punch to the sternum. It was a horseshit dirty move, and it pissed me the fuck off. Worse still, it made me lose my grip on the girly squealer’s neck. The two muggers set off running, with coins jangling as they ran. Though I wanted to go after them to beat the living shit out of them, I checked on the old man first. Priorities. “You good?”
He nodded. He was rattled, but seemed alright. But I realized that in the scuffle, I’d lost my hood. Before I could yank it back up again, the man got a good look at my face. To his credit, he didn’t gasp when he saw me.
“Aren’t you the carpenter that helped out old Flannery when his cart got stuck in the muck?” He asked me.
Here we go with this bullshit again. The roads around Aramoor were calf-high with mud most of the year. One stuck cart was exactly like the next.
“Probably.”
“And the man who helped divert the ditches during the floods? Carried those big stones down from the forest for the job?”
“Nobody else was going to move them.”
“And the man who single-handedly raised the barn out at the freehold near the rye fields? And the same man who…”
Come on. This list of “good deeds” wasn’t going to catch the motherfuckers that assaulted him, now was it?
“Listen, man. You’re sure you’re good?”
“Indeed, I am, lad!” Said the old man, with a friendly slap of my shoulder. Reminded me of a child patting a bear.
“Good. Watch yourself in the future. Market day brings out all the assholes,” I said, and then booked it down the alley toward where the muggers had gone, pulling my hood up as I ran.
I rounded the corner and tore off down a towpath that ran parallel to one of the canals. The spring grass was still damp from the morning showers, and it was easy enough to track them. As muggers, they were pretty shitty. As escape artists, though, they had my respect. I chased them for miles, all the way out of town and into the sprawling countryside that surrounded Aramoor. In my rage, I’d not been paying attention to how far I’d run until I saw the old mill up ahead and realized where I was—out by the old dairy and stables.
Holy fuck. I was at her farm.
Like a vision, she appeared in the field up ahead of me. She stood in the farmyard, wearing heavy boots, with her skirt drawn up away from the ground, allowing me a tantalizing glimpse of her bare calf. The wind caught the hem of her skirt and smoothed the fabric around the curves and valleys of her hips. I pressed my clenched fist to my mouth and growled.
I wanted that body, I wanted that pussy, I wanted her to be mine forever and fucking ever.
As soon as I saw her, I forgot all about the damned muggers. She was all that mattered. I’d been fucking obsessed with her for over a year. But she had no idea I even existed.
Iris.
The first time I laid eyes on her was at the harvest festival two winters prior. She seemed hardly more than a girl, just on that cusp of change, but I knew she was too young for a brute like me. Legitimately forbidden fruit. But, even then, she took hold of something deep inside me and never let go. Over the year between, as she turned from a girl into a young woman, things changed.
An obsession turned rabid. I fought it, but lost at every turn. I wanted to love her, fuck her, take her and keep her. She was the single most beautiful thing in the entire goddamned world.
She wore a dark green dress that first day I saw her, and the same at the next year’s harvest festival. Green suited her, it brought out the dark of her eyes. I remember the way she blossomed as womanhood took hold. The way the fabric pulled taut against her hips, her breasts, her ass… Incredible the changes a year could bring.