Return of the Prince_Medieval Romance Read online

  Return of the Prince

  A Medieval Romance

  The Three Kingdoms: Book 1

  Elise de Sallier

  Published by Elise de Sallier, 2018

  Copyright © Elise de Sallier, 2018

  The right of Elise de Sallier to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters and events in this Book – even those sharing the same name as (or based on) real people – are entirely fictional. No person, brand, or corporation mentioned in this Book should be taken to have endorsed this Book nor should the events surrounding them be considered in any way factual.

  This Book is a work of fiction and should be read as such.

  Ms de Sallier can be contacted at [email protected]

  Cover Images: © DLR Designs

  Cover Artist – Diane Lynne of DLR Designs

  Contact: dlr-designs.deviantart.com

  Accreditation for images used throughout the story is at the end of book.

  Dedication

  To Kathie Spitz and Nan Kubicek for their wonderful friendship and support, and for the countless hours they have spent pre-reading and editing my fan-fiction stories. I wouldn’t be a writer without them.

  Dear Readers,

  Return of the Prince began life as a fan fiction story called Restoration. One of the fun things that fan fiction authors like to do is provide illustrations for each chapter of the story as we post them, usually weekly. I felt quite saddened when I realised I would not be able to share the lovely images I had found to illustrate this story. But then I discovered it is possible to include colour images in eBooks published through Amazon. These images are converted to black and white if you read on a Kindle, but for tablets, phones, or reading on your computer, you can enjoy the full colour effect. Naturally, I could not include images taken from movies or of famous actors, but I was able to find many suitable pictures on various free and paid stock image sites. The few images of people I have included are not meant to be viewed as exact interpretations of the various characters’ appearance but just to give a little added inspiration for the story and, hopefully, for your enjoyment.

  Unfortunately, I am not able to make the images any larger due to limitations with the Kindle Publishing program, but if you double click on them, they should temporarily enlarge for you to view them more clearly. Alternatively, you can read the story on your computer using the Kindle Cloud.

  Kind regards,

  Elise

  Chapter 1

  The sounds of galloping hooves jolted Eloise from her daydreaming. Wasting no time, she took cover in the dense shrubbery. She didn’t normally venture into the forest this late in the season, but her step-sisters were in need of new gowns for the Coronation Ball . . . or so they insisted. Their tastes were far from common, so Eloise, or Ella as her mother-in-law and sisters called her, had been ordered to make another trip to forage for black truffles while the valuable fungus was still fruiting. She didn’t mind. The chance to escape her step-mother’s ire for a few days was worth having to dig in the half-frozen mud and spending lonely nights in the derelict trapper’s cabin she had made her own. But she had no intention of falling prey to bandits or enemy soldiers.

  From her hiding place on a ridge, she saw a lone rider racing at breakneck speed along the path below, a half-dozen soldiers on his tail. The leader of the pack raised his bow, and Eloise’s hand rose to her mouth. Stifling a cry, she watched his arrow fly through the air, striking the fleeing man in the back and sending him tumbling to the ground. The man’s horse galloped on without him, his pursuers reining their mounts to a halt in time to see their prey go tumbling down the steep, brush-covered bank that led to the river.

  “Do we go after him, Captain?” one of the soldiers shouted, the blue insignia on their cloaks confirming their identities . . . Prince Carac’s men.

  “No, he was probably just a decoy. We’ll return to make sure he is dead once the prince has been captured.”

  Riding back the way they had come, the soldiers sprayed mud in their wake, oblivious to Eloise huddled in the undergrowth. While collecting the truffles she had already unearthed and placing them in one of the pockets of her skirt, she contemplated her options. Being in the vicinity when the soldiers returned was not one of them, but leaving without checking on the man did not sit well with her conscience.

  He was as good as dead. If being shot by an arrow and the fall hadn’t killed him, he had probably drowned and been swept away in the fast-flowing current. The odds of him surviving were negligible . . . but not non-existent, she conceded with a slump of her shoulders.

  In the ten minutes it took her to clamber down the steep embankment, Eloise second-guessed her decision to see if he had survived several times. The village was abuzz with talk that Prince Destrian was returning to the Kingdom for his father’s coronation now that his uncle, the much-hated King Althelos, was dead. If the man was one of the prince’s guards or companions, he might be trustworthy, but she would do well to be cautious.

  A clap of thunder sounded almost directly overhead, and Eloise increased her pace down the slippery embankment. A storm was coming. She’d been about to head back to her tiny cabin hidden deep in the forest when the attack had occurred. She should leave . . . now. The man wasn’t her responsibility, and a rescue party would surely come searching for him. Then again, if he had been used as a decoy, his life might not be considered valuable enough to waste precious resources searching the dense forest, not with Carac’s men on the warpath.

  Life was cheap in the Kingdom of Varianda, at least, it had been under Althelos’ brutal reign. There was talk that the new king would usher in a more humane era, along with an end to the border wars that had cost so many lives. Her father had admired Prince Cedric before his banishment, and Eloise hoped, for the sake of her fellow Variandans, that his reign would be different to his brother’s. With her life and future held in the hands of the heartless woman her father had so unwisely wed not long before his death, she doubted a change in monarch would have much impact on her own situation.

  Slipping the last few yards down the muddy bank, she spotted the man’s red trimmed cloak caught on some bushes near the river’s edge. It seemed the prickly shrubs, normally to be avoided at all costs, were all that had stood between the rider and certain death in the icy river . . . that’s if he wasn’t dead already.

  Wary of slipping and meeting the fate the man had avoided, and of the man himself, Eloise inched closer. A maiden alone in the forest was vulnerable to all sorts of predators, and she hadn’t survived the six years since her father’s death by taking foolish risks.

  Pulling back the branch that blocked the fallen man’s body from view, she startled at the sight of his green eyes peering out of the shadows and the knife he held poised to throw.

  “A girl?” He blinked twice. “You’re not one of Carac’s men come to finish me off. Are you?”

  Eloise was tempted to let go of the branch and make a run for it, but she could hardly blame him for being cautious.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, and he lowered the knife. “I saw you get shot and came to see if you had survived.”

  “Came to see if there was anything valuable on my person you could pinch, you mean.”

  It was Eloise’s turn to blink. “Are you calling me a thief?”

&nb
sp; “Well, aren’t you?” He reached over his shoulder to tug at the arrow she assumed must still be embedded in his flesh. To her surprise, he didn’t even wince, seeming more annoyed than anything.

  “No, I’m not a thief.” Tempted to release the branch and let it smack him in the face, she hesitated for a moment before snapping it back, so it would stay out of the way. “I just happened to witness the attack and came to see if you needed my help, but if you would rather I left you to it . . .”

  She turned away, and he lunged forward, grabbing hold of the hem of her skirt.

  “Don’t go!”

  Eloise cursed her stupidity. She shouldn’t have come close enough to be caught, but he had moved with far greater agility than she would have expected for a man with an arrow in his back.

  “There’s a storm coming.” She raised her chin in a show of defiance, but there was nothing she could do about the tremor in her voice. “If you hurt me, I won’t help you climb out of here, and you shall die . . . from exposure or when Carac’s men return to finish you off.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, sounding affronted. “I am a gentleman.”

  Eloise would have laughed if she hadn’t been so frightened. The title didn’t mean much in these parts, not like it had when her father was a knight in the King’s Court before Althelos had become corrupted by power and greed.

  If appearance was a measure of character, she might have been reassured, as the young man certainly looked presentable. Even hidden in the shadows, she could tell his clothes were of the finest quality, and his features were both handsome and regal. With his high, wide brow, chiselled jaw, and reddish hair—a common trait amongst royalty—she wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was the prince. Of course, that would make him a fool for leaving his escorts and riding off alone.

  “You have my word of honour that no harm will come to you for assisting me.” He let go of her skirt, and Eloise released the breath she was holding. “But if what you say about a storm is true, we need to get moving.”

  “It’s true, all right.” She shrugged. It wasn’t hard to read the signs, and she wondered if his senses had been addled in the fall. Quite aside from the occasional clap of thunder, the wind had picked up, and heavy black clouds darkened the sky. Once the floodgates opened, which could happen any moment, they would both be soaked to the skin. Well, Eloise would be. Her thin, woollen cloak had long since lost any water repelling effects of the lanolin in its fibres. The gentleman’s cloak, on the other hand, would offer far more protection from the elements . . . if they could get it free from the briars holding him fast.

  “How badly are you hurt?” she asked, kneeling down beside him. “You are a little pale, but don’t appear weak from blood loss. Did the arrow not go deep? I am assuming the shaft snapped off when you rolled down the hill.”

  “It did.” Sitting up as far as he could without getting further caught in the prickly branches, he reached behind him to tug a leather satchel over his head. “The arrow lodged itself in my bag, not me. I don’t think it even pierced the skin, though the force knocked me from my horse.”

  “Fortunate.” Eloise studied the arrowhead where it had penetrated several layers of leather and two thirds of a thick journal. “Were you winded in the fall? Is that why you haven’t tried to crawl out?”

  “No, it’s these accursed thorns . . . and I have hurt my ankle.” He tried to move his left leg before wincing and falling back. “I don’t think the bone is broken, at least, I hope not.”

  “So do I.” Eloise glanced back the way she had come—the way they had both come—down the steep bank. This was going to be harder than she had thought, her hopes plummeting further when the first fat drops of rain began to fall. Stuck, as he was, and with time running out, she had no choice but to untie the man’s cloak, leaving it behind when she dragged him out of the thicket.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered when he was finally free of the spiky thorns snagging his clothing and scratching at his skin. “You damned near skewered me, woman.”

  “Watch your language, and I am a lady,” she said automatically before checking his reaction to the mild rebuke. He seemed surprised, not overly offended, but she silently cautioned herself to try and avoid provocation. Holding her tongue wasn’t Eloise’s strong suit, her somewhat acerbic wit earning her many a slap from her step-mother and sisters.

  Helping the gentleman to stand, she slung his arm over her shoulders, steadying him when he swayed on his one good foot. Out of the shadows, he was even more handsome than she had first thought, paler too. A gash in his hairline that she hadn’t spotted was sending blood trickling down the side of his face. The sooner she got him back to the cabin and tended to his wounds the better, a feat easier described than accomplished.

  “What do you mean you’re a lady?” he asked when they paused halfway up the bank to catch their breaths. “Where are your chaperones, your protectors? You shouldn’t be wandering in the forest alone. It is far too dangerous.”

  “You won’t hear any argument from me.” Eloise wrapped her calloused, nail-torn fingers Around a tree root and resumed the difficult task of dragging them both up the muddy incline. “Let’s just say I used to be a lady,” she added between panted breaths. “And despite my rather drastic change in circumstances, I have not yet developed a fondness for crude speech.”

  To her surprise, a flush of colour appeared in his cheeks, making him appear younger than he first seemed, almost harmless. Then they reached a section where they could stand, and he let his weight rest on Eloise’s shoulders while he steadied himself, reminding her of his far greater height and strength.

  The prince’s man might be pretty to look at, but she was taking a risk helping him, one she hoped she did not come to regret.

  Chapter 2

  “Sit here while I secure the place and stir up the fire.” Eloise directed her sodden companion to take the only seat in the one room cabin. The chair was a flimsy affair she had found thrown on a rubbish heap and mended with twine. After waiting a second to make sure it would hold his weight, she ventured back out into the rain and pulled the brush screens she had made across the trail to the cabin’s door, effectively hiding it from view. There was nothing she could to do to disguise the smoke that would soon be billowing from the chimney, but they were a long way off the track, and she hoped it would be lost amongst the misty crags of the mountain against which the cabin was nestled. Foregoing a fire was not an option, for if they didn’t dry out their clothes and warm their near-frozen bodies, an intruder would be the least of their worries.

  The journey from the river to the cabin had been brutal, the man’s injured ankle slowing them to a crawl in places. Mud-covered and soaked to the skin, Eloise shivered as she coaxed the fire to life. Once she had a modest but respectable blaze, the flue, thankfully, drawing as it should, she turned back to her guest.

  “We need to get you out of those wet clothes,” she said, undoing the buttons on his coat with stiff fingers. “Your lips are blue, and I don’t like the look of that gash on your head. If you pass out, I won’t be able to get you up off the floor.”

  He nodded jerkily, offering no resistance when she tugged his dripping coat off his shoulders and down his arms. It was only when his shirt was removed, leaving his muscular chest bared, that she questioned her actions.

  “You have nothing to fear,” he said when her eyes widened. “Even if I had the strength, I would never hurt a lady . . . or any woman for that matter.”

  Eloise’s gaze shot to his face. It wasn’t fear that had motivated her reaction, and she was embarrassed to feel a flush of warmth in her cheeks. Turning away from his half-naked body, she hung the man’s coat on the rope line she kept strung across one corner of the room. Taking one of the thin quilts off the end of the cabin’s only cot, she passed it to him, keeping her gaze averted while he wrapped it around his shoulders.

  “Once I have tended to your injuries, you can remove the rest of y
our wet clothing, and I’ll hang them up to dry. The bed will be a little short for you, but it will have to do, as you will need to raise your ankle.”

  “What about you?” He took the towel she passed him and, avoiding the cut on his forehead, began drying his hair, sending it sticking out in every direction.

  “What about me?” Eloise asked, struggling to hide a smile.

  “You must be exhausted after practically hauling me all this way. I don’t feel right about taking your bed.”

  “I shall be fine.” She shrugged. It wouldn’t be the first time she had slept on the floor, though at least she would have a fire and could make a pallet with the thin blankets she had managed to scavenge over the years.

  After pressing a clean rag against the cut on his forehead, indicating he should hold it in place, she began the difficult task of removing the knee-length boot from his uninjured leg. Tugging hard enough to yank him partway off the chair, she huffed in frustration when it didn’t budge.

  “I apologize in advance.” He raised a hand to call a halt when she went to try again. “But you are going to have to straddle my leg. It is the only way you’ll get the boot off now it’s wet.”

  “Wonderful.” Eloise huffed a second breath. It was an intimate task, one she had seen her mother perform for her father when his valet wasn’t available, and certainly not one she felt comfortable performing for a virtual stranger. Deciding it was past time she introduced herself, she reached out her hand.