Wed to the Barbarian (Barbarian Duet #1)

Chapter One

H ow did one man possess that many muscles?

As the cleric expounded from the stone temple’s center dais under a cloudless sky, Jem’s gaze returned time and again to the wild strangers across the square courtyard.

He’d never attended a spring summit, though he’d heard breathless tales two years before of the Northern barbarians who’d suddenly reappeared at the annual gathering.

As a boy, Jem had never quite believed the far-flung kingdom of Ergh actually existed. It was the stuff of legend, a cautionary tale—anger the gods at your peril.

The gods of wind, water, fire, and earth had conspired to sever Ergh from the mainland and banish it north for…something or other. Jem couldn’t recall the exact nature of the offense offhand, but it was to do with one of the wars that had once plagued Onan.

Yes, the clerics had sailed across the forbidding Askorn Sea on occasion in attempts to lure Ergh back into the fold and restore balance to the world and whatnot, but that was all rather theoretical.

Ergh had remained a fiction to Jem, even once his brothers returned from the spring summit with sneering reports of the barbarians who’d attended for the first time in centuries.

Yet here they sat! Almost two dozen people of Ergh in the very impressive flesh, right before Jem’s eyes. They spoke the common language of Onan, although their accent was harsher. The language was proof they’d once indeed been part of the realm in ages past.

They were led not by a queen or king or royal as they had been before Ergh was banished north, but by a chieftain—a title that Jem assumed applied to people of all genders. The current chieftain, Kenver, had apparently been in power for some time. He seemed to be a humorless man.

The delegates came in various descriptions, much like the people of Jem’s home, Neuvella, and Gwels to the east and Ebrenn to the west. Skin from pale to dark, hair from silver to black, bodies lean to wide.

Yet they were unlike anyone Jem had ever seen.

Although their number was fewer than the other delegations by half, the Northerners somehow seemed to fill their side of the temple to the breaking point.

Instead of wearing silks, they were clad in animal skins all over, some with fur still attached despite the afternoon’s heat.

Their legs were spread wide where they sat, their boots thick and heavy rather than smooth and sculpted.

They had no weapons Jem could spot, but he imagined even the smallest person from Ergh could break his neck with a brutal snap.

Let alone the larger delegates who very strongly resembled the murderous mountain warriors who kidnapped the heroine in Jem’s favorite book.

Lowering his head as if deep in contemplation, he stared through his eyelashes at the chieftain’s second son.

Fur accents on coarse material sat atop wide shoulders, his muscled arms bare and a black leather vest covering his chest—barely—the same leather straining over thighs that were like tree trunks.

This son looked around thirty years and had the same straw-colored hair and pale skin as his father and older brother.

The chieftain’s daughter had dark skin and hair, cropped short like her brothers.

Some delegates had longer hair that hung wild, not twisted and neatly sculpted like Jem was used to seeing.

The chieftain’s hair met his broad shoulders.

Instead of a crown of jewels, he wore a headpiece of two curving white tusks.

From a distance, it appeared the second son’s square jaw hadn’t seen a razor for days.

Did he smell as fierce and wild as he looked?

Jem imagined musky sweat and dirt and ice.

Did ice have a smell? If it did, the second son surely reeked of it.

If Jem were pinned helpless beneath him, it would fill his senses…

He repressed a shudder of desire, fiddling with the silk collar of his green shirt.

Where he sat, almost at the end of the front row on the southern side of the temple, he could examine the man while appearing to pay heed to the chief cleric’s sermon, her hoarse voice echoing as she spoke passionately on something he was surely supposed to find profound.

At least Jem was in no danger of falling asleep in boredom—not with all those leather-clad muscles to ogle.

Still, he shouldn’t be eyeing the son of the Ergh chieftain at all. Hadn’t he learned his lesson? If his brothers noticed, humiliation would undoubtedly follow. Jem shifted his gaze to the eastern side of the temple and the ruling family in the front row led by two queens, one his cousin.

There. They had a son who wasn’t too tall or broad and apparently enjoyed sums and formulas, if Jem recalled correctly. He was much more appropriate for a mate. Much less likely to break out into roars of laughter if Jem approached with a bold invitation for later.

Not that he would. He almost snorted aloud at the notion, coughing to cover the aborted sound. Since becoming a man, he’d issued precisely one invitation to bed him and there would not be another.

On cue, the remembered humiliation of a feast a few years ago bloomed to life, sticky and cloying even as it cut deeply. Would Jem be ancient like the stooped and wrinkled cleric and still experience the shame and horror of that rejection as though it was yesterday?

It was his own doing. He should have known it was a trick. His two older brothers had always enjoyed tormenting him, but when they confided that a visiting soldier had expressed desire for him, Jem had been all too pathetically eager to believe it.

He’d been mad to consider even for a fleeting moment that a man of the soldier’s bravery and strength would want him.

No. Jem was too small, too weak, too quiet, too odd.

He’d be lucky if any man would agree to take him for a spouse.

He was a prince, so someone eventually would for political gain if nothing else, but Jem wouldn’t be the one to make a proposal.

He squirmed on the stone chair. Even once the soldier had realized Jem wasn’t jesting with his invitation, he hadn’t been able to curtail his laughter at the absurdity of it all.

At the absurdity of Jem himself, apparently.

The man had then schooled himself and attempted a kinder refusal, but Jem had run into the night, wishing more than ever he could unfurl wings and fly into the endless sky.

The soldier had been one of the royal guard regiment from Gwels.

One soldier each from the royal guards of Neuvella, Ebrenn, and Gwels now stood sentinel at the sole entrance and exit to the temple under a white marble arch.

They wore shiny bronze helmets, and the soldier from Gwels this time was mercifully a woman.

Since arriving at the Holy Place the previous day, Jem had held his breath each time he spotted a royal guard from Gwels.

He might curl up and die with humiliation if he actually encountered the man who’d rejected him.

The sooner he could safely escape home to his peaceful days with his birds by the lake and cozy nights with fanciful tales in the pages of his books, the better.

He wondered again if the tiny dillywig hatchlings had survived.

They had only been beige, bald, sightless little lumps, their yellow beaks open in soundless protest at leaving the safety of the eggs that had been cracked too early.

One of the groundskeepers had sworn to look after them in Jem’s absence, and Jem hated not knowing the tiny creatures’ fate.

He turned his head enough to peer at the tense Western delegates from Ebrenn.

King Perran was a nasty piece of work. His back was straight and he kept his expression neutral during the sermon, but Jem imagined the cruel thoughts slithering through the king’s head.

His pale face was wrinkled and hair gray, but he was strong yet.

His jeweled crown was so enormous Jem wondered how he could sit up with it atop his head.

His wife had died some years before after falling suddenly ill. There were still whispers that she’d been miserable married to the old man and her death had been murder. Others said it was by her own hand in her grief for her daughter, who’d been ill herself and had only lived a decade.

At the king’s right hand sat his remaining child. Prince Treeve of Ebrenn had certainly grown up in the years since Jem had seen him. His shoulders were broad—though not as wide as the barbarian’s—his skin and hair tawny, legs long in tight breeches and tall boots.

His glittering crown was less ornate than his father’s, but the emeralds seemed to make his brown eyes sparkle with hidden depths.

It was only Ebrenn’s tradition that the children of royal leaders wore crowns as well, and Jem was relieved he didn’t have to parade around in one.

The emeralds suited Treeve, though. His teeth were white and straight, lips full—

And lifting into a smile as he noticed Jem’s surreptitious stare!

Jem barely resisted squeaking as he whipped his head too far to the right, garnering attention from the Eastern delegates.

Cursing himself, he stared at the cleric on the pedestal, breathing shallowly.

The last thing he needed was Prince Treeve mocking him.

Jem got enough of that from his brothers.

Besides, for as long as Jem could remember, he’d been told Ebrenn was not to be trusted, and that the king in particular was treasonous and greedy.

While much nicer to look at, his son was likely just as horrible.

The king had boldly encroached on the border with Neuvella for far too long, one stretch of it through a disputed valley.

The anger of Jem’s mother toward Ebrenn had deepened so much recently it worried him. Jem typically ignored all things royal and political, but he felt that if not for the presence of the clerics, Mother and Ebrenn’s king might come to blows.