Claimed by the Barbarian Read online

  Claimed by the Barbarian

  Samantha Madisen

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Afterword

  More Stormy Night Books by Samantha Madisen

  Copyright © 2021 by Stormy Night Publications and Samantha Madisen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

  www.StormyNightPublications.com

  Madisen, Samantha

  Claimed by the Barbarian

  Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

  Images by VJ Dunraven Productions and iStock/Filograph

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

  Chapter 1

  She woke to sniffling. Not hers. Someone else’s. Someone else was in the chamber. A panic gripped her as she bolted up and peered over the covers. The hearth extinguished, the only light came from the crack between closed shutters at the window. “Who goes there?” she whispered, her body trembling.

  “It is I, Lady Leola. Datharia,” came the quiet reply.

  Her pulse slowed as she breathed deep. Datharia was good. Datharia was safe. Strange that she would choose this time of night to visit. But hardly dangerous. “What brings you at this time of night?” Leola asked.

  Datharia clutched at her dress and shuffled toward the bed.

  Leola braved the cold air in the chamber to look at her more closely. She was crying. Or had been. “What troubles you?” Leola asked, her concern genuine.

  Datharia pressed a finger to her trembling lips and shook her head. “My lady,” she whispered.

  “Speak, Datharia. Tell me. Have you been hurt?”

  “No, m’lady,” she replied. She turned and stared at the closed shutters. “The men are marching up the valley.”

  Leola’s eyes went wide, the cloud of sleep lifting from her mind. “They are back?”

  Datharia gave a single nod in reply.

  “But that is good news, isn’t it?” She couldn’t imagine why the army’s return would make the chambermaid weep.

  Datharia pursed her lips and swallowed back more tears. “They are… routed, m’lady,” she said.

  An unfamiliar discomfort formed in the pit of Leola’s stomach at the admission. “Routed?” she echoed, her voice soft and full of disbelief.

  “Routed and…” Datharia’s voice caught in her throat. She pressed a fist against her mouth, speaking from behind her flesh as though she wished to keep the words inside. “They come to us in chains. Barbarian hordes drive them forward with whips like cattle.”

  Leola sat staring at the cold stone wall ahead of her. Routed? Routed? Surely it was impossible. But why would Datharia make up such a thing? “How… how can you be sure of this?” she asked.

  Datharia walked to the window and pressed a shutter open. The frigid night air rolled in. “See for yourself, m’lady,” she said, voice shaking.

  Leola poked a toe out from the pile of furs. Drawing the heaviest one around herself she stepped gingerly to the window, narrowed her eyes, and peered through the black night into the distance.

  There, lit by a line of unfamiliar torches, marched a string of men. Heads bowed, stripped of armor and weapons, they trudged toward the castle walls. Every so often a whip would crack above them, urging them to keep a steady pace.

  Leola’s jaw fell at the sight. This was… impossible. Or so it had seemed until she saw it. Ryken, for all his failings, did not lead his army to defeat. Ryken the Conqueror knew only victory in battle. Seeing him at the front of the line marching, instead of seated proudly on his horse, made her stomach turn with sickness. She turned to Datharia, forming a question she already knew the answer to. “They are marching them here?” she asked.

  Datharia’s shoulders rose, and then slumped with a shrug of resignation. “It is as much a mystery to me as it is to you, m’lady.” She stepped closer to the window and peered out next to Leola. “It is a miracle they are alive at all.”

  “Who is this horde you speak of?”

  Datharia shook her head. “The messenger only brought news of their approach. He conveyed nothing about who they were, nor where they were from.”

  As the line of prisoners moved closer, Leola gasped. Her eyes fixed on the sight of the man who seemed to be their leader. Sitting astride a lumbering, furry four-legged creature as tall as two horses, his menacing gaze sent a shiver racing down her back.

  The two women watched in silence as the convoy weaved its way through the defensive boulders on the other side of the moat. A glance at the sentries standing on the walls revealed they seemed as panicked as Leola felt.

  She turned to Datharia. “What do we do?” she whispered.

  Datharia’s eyes darted to the floor. She shook her head. “You remember Lord Ryken’s words before his departure?” she asked softly.

  Leola’s stomach hollowed even more. She did her best to stay out of Ryken’s way when he was there. His departure had been one of the few occasions she had been forced to listen to his droning speech about the glory of battle and the spoils of victory that lay waiting for his men.

  It was the end of that speech that caused her blood to run cold just then.

  And in my absence the Lady Leola will be the castle’s keeper.

  He had spoken it in jest; knowing there would be no situation which his second, Trydar, couldn’t handle, the comment had been a tease. A way to underline her inadequacy in all matters related to the kingdom.

  The memory of her own humiliation at hearing the soldiers’ laughter when he said it was still fresh.

  “Send for Trydar,” she said, courage rising in her at the comfort of knowing he would know what to do.

  “I have, m’lady,” Datharia whispered.

  “And?”

  “He is nowhere to be seen. We have searched the courtyards and his chambers and the stables. It’s as if he… disappeared.”

  Leola could think of only one reason that would be the case. Trydar had fled, perhaps because he possessed knowledge she did not: the provenance of and danger posed by the approaching horde. “The coward,” Leola muttered, in spite of her own fear.

  “Perhaps,” Datharia agreed. “And yet with him gone that leaves…”

  She didn’t have to say it. It was at once clear that this would be Leola’s duty. To greet whoever these tormentors were and discover why they hadn’t slaughtered Ryken or his men. Why had they marched them back to the keep?

  She froze as the procession halted in front of the drawbridge. The brutish fur-clad warrior sitting atop his beast opened his mouth and bellowed up the wall at the sentries. “Bring the keeper!”

  Two sentries huddled together and whispered. They shook their heads. One of them shouted a reply. “He is gone! Missing!”

  The warrior furrowed his brow.

  Leola, fear coursing through her veins, couldn’t bring herself to look away from the leader. He stood at least two heads taller than the largest man she’d ever seen; this was plain even though h
e rode atop the enormous beast that was larger than any horse. Beneath his bearskin pelt his chest and stomach were bare. Her eyes wandered along the ridges of muscle the tunic covered. He is a beast, not a man, she thought, and fear snaked through her, cold and liquid.

  “Then who commands these walls in his absence?” the warrior shouted.

  Leola sought out Ryken. Even in the flickering torchlight, she was able to see his face clearly, and his posture. He looked broken. His face was pale and his eyes glassy, focused on some point far away. While he was standing, and clearly alive, he radiated a lifelessness akin to a dying man.

  Datharia gripped Leola’s hand.

  When Leola looked to her, she was staring out at the sentries on the wall. Leola turned her head slowly. A new fear, like a cold iron fist, gripped her. The sentries were staring at the window. At her and Datharia standing there.

  “Sedrak doesn’t wait!” the warrior shouted. Swinging a tree trunk of a leg over the neck of his beastly animal, he dismounted and unsheathed his blade. Two steps backward brought him standing next to Ryken’s sunken figure.

  Leola sucked in a sharp breath as she watched the blade’s edge touch her uncle’s neck.

  “One hundred times I say my name,” the brutish Sedrak growled. “Then the earth will taste his blood.”

  The scream left Leola’s lips before she could think. Her hands shot up to cover her mouth.

  There had never been any love lost between her and Ryken. But he had raised and kept her these nineteen years, as he’d promised his brother he would. She did not love him, or claim to even like him, but watching him die would haunt her for the rest of her days.

  The warrior Sedrak turned to look at the window. “You scream for him?” he shouted.

  “Please, don’t!” Leola said, holding out a trembling hand helplessly, palm forward, as if she could stop the warrior with such a futile gesture.

  Sedrak turned to face Ryken. “On your knees,” he ordered.

  Blood drained from Leola’s face as she watched her uncle sink to his knees without so much as a moment of hesitation. Not an ounce of resistance seemed to remain within him. Or so it seemed from his expression, his eyes so still they lent him the appearance of a corpse.

  Sedrak took the sword by the hilt and drove it into the earth in front of him with both hands. It entered the nearly frozen ground as though he had sliced into a vat of butter “One hundred times I say my name,” he repeated, his eyes, intense and burning, staring up at Leola.

  Her skin crawled from his menacing stare.

  “One hundred times I say my name and if you are not standing here before me his head shall sail through that window there.” He lifted a thick, muscled arm to point at her with hands that seemed to be cut of granite.

  The threat cracked through the icy fear that froze her in place. Ryken’s life was in her hands, the way hers had been in his, so many moons ago. She owed him… something. Without knowing what she would do, without thinking through her actions, she spun on her heel and broke into a run, toward the chamber door and the stairs beyond.

  “My lady, no!” Datharia called out but Leola was already halfway down the round staircase. Only at the bottom did she remember that beneath the fur she’d wrapped around herself she wore only her sleeping shirt. The impropriety of it fluttered through her thoughts, but disappeared quickly with each rapid pulse of her heart. Getting dressed would have to wait.

  Or maybe soon there’d be no need? Maybe she, Ryken, and all the others within the castle walls would come to their end at the foot of the drawbridge.

  This thought flew from her mind before it was even completed. Running out into the courtyard she screamed at the sentries in the tower. “Lower the bridge! Lower the bridge!”

  The sentries exchanged worried glances, and Leola stopped, the cool air swirling around her bare, freezing feet. Her face must have conveyed her resolution, or perhaps the sentries had resigned themselves to their fate. A moment passed as Leola’s thin sleeping gown snaked about her calves in the stinging cold air that she could not even feel. The sentries, as if of a single mind, turned without looking at each other and began spinning the massive wheels. Chains clanked as they walked around the center of the wheel. and the massive oak planks of the drawbridge tipped toward the water in the moat.

  “My lady!” Datharia called out, running after her. “What if this is just a trap? If they are Northern raiders they will kill everyone in these walls! Please! I beg you to reconsider!”

  Leola stared at the yawning gap between the drawbridge and the great timber that formed the gate of the castle without answering. Her breath was a rapid staccato, her heart an animal in her chest. A trap it might very well be. But everyone within these walls owed Ryken a debt. For his protection. For his leadership. For their lives he’d saved.

  If death had come for them that night, Ryken would not walk into that great darkness alone.

  “Arm whatever archers we have and station them along the walls,” she hissed at the sentries as she passed them. She strode out onto the bridge, her bare feet slipping on the nearly frozen dampness of the once protective bridge. With each step, she slowed.

  Sedrak, the immense warrior beast, stood with his arms folded across his massive chest. Eyes closed, he muttered the same thing over and over and over, “Sedrak. Sedrak. Sedrak.” Like some perverse chant that would end in a fountain of blood if she wasn’t in front of him before he finished.

  She came to a stop ten paces from him. He seemed twice as large, now that he towered above her, as what she had ascertained from the window. A great mane of black hair framed his bearded face, and his muscled arms seemed coiled with an unfathomable strength. Fear gripped her again, and her feet would move her no further.

  Summoning as much courage as remained within her, she forced herself to speak. “I am here,” she said. Her voice shook as she spoke and she realized how weak it had sounded. The warrior continued to repeat his name, evidently unable to hear her raspy squeak above his deep, bestial chanting. Clearing her throat, she tried again. “I am here!”

  The warrior opened his eyes. His hands fell to his sides. His gaze locked with her eyes for a moment, and she forced herself to meet the dark orbs that flickered with the torchlight and a feral, predatory glint. They eyes wandered down her small frame with leisure, pausing at parts that caused her to blush. They stopped at her feet, and she thought the man’s lips moved beneath his rough beard to form an amused smile.

  She shuddered as his eyes flicked up with a reptilian quickness to meet hers again. She had to tamp down hard on the urge to divert her gaze, anywhere, to anything, as if she could wish the monster away by refusing to look at him. “I am here,” she repeated, and the words left her mouth as barely a whisper, frozen to brittle rasps by the chill the beastly man sent through her.

  She glanced at Ryken. He was slumped, lifeless, and she found an emptiness far more profound than she had imagined in the pale blue of his eyes. He did not return her gaze, or appear to even know that she was there.

  The great man rumbled, “And who are you?”

  Leola, who had been unconsciously sinking beneath the weight of the man’s stare, straightened. With the coward Trydar missing, she was the castle’s keeper. The fate of everyone within was in her hands, and she would not crumple like Ryken. Not yet. Summoning all of the nerve that remained within her, she managed to speak clearly, if not loudly. “Leola Grace.” When the man looked at her silently, she added, “A lady of these walls and of this realm.”

  “Your father?” Sedrak grunted, pointing a thumb toward Ryken. His tongue was thick with an accent. Leola was hearing it now for the first time. She could not place it.

  “My uncle,” Leola said, her eyes falling briefly to Ryken’s slumped form.

  She swallowed and resisted the urge to stumble back as Sedrak closed the distance between them in three steps. As he loomed over her she was forced to look nearly straight up to meet his gaze, but not before she took in a long
look at his forearms, nearly the size of her own thighs.

  “Your uncle tried to steal from me,” the warrior growled.

  She had to tip her head slightly to look at Ryken.

  The warrior bowed his head lower still, so that his breath could be felt on her forehead, and her view of Ryken was blocked by his fur-clad mass. He smelled of animal fur, leather, musk, and the smoke of wood fires. For a moment the scent intoxicated her, surprising her with its pleasantness.

  She forced herself to look back up at Sedrak, cursed herself as she felt her eyes grow wet. “I… I don’t…” she stammered. She cursed herself again for not paying attention at court, when Ryken made her sit and listen to his endless meetings. The formalities and speeches had been so boring. But how she wished that she had listened, learned the words used in diplomacy and negotiation.

  For a terrible moment she felt as if all the words of the language had flown from her mind, leaving her mute. Her mouth made attempts at forming some, but then opened, a bit like a fish flung to the shore and gasping for water. “I’m… I’m sorry,” she heard herself whisper.

  Sedrak raised an eyebrow. A wicked smile formed on his lips. He turned back toward his men, arms outstretched. “The girl is sorry!” he roared.

  The crowd, which Leola had all but forgotten, burst into uproarious laughter. The sound stabbed knives of fear into her chest.

  Heat crept across her cheeks, the sting of humiliation mixing with fear. In her chest a hard lump of anger was born of this combination: her temper, so beyond her control, had been awakened. Her cheeks were burned red with rage when Sedrak turned to stare at her again.