The Princess Read online

  Aria rolled down the window and let her hair get mussed. She felt extraordinarily free and happy. She had a day of no duties, she was alone in a car with a handsome, sexy man, and she had left her heavy corset at home.

  J.T. kept glancing at her until he could stand it no more. In a practiced American gesture, he put out his right hand, caught her by the back of the head, and pulled her over to kiss him while keeping his eyes on the road. “Good to see you again, baby,” he said, releasing her.

  She settled back in her seat, smiling. “Where are you taking me?”

  “First we’re going to your Royal Guard’s training grounds. Ever been there?”

  Aria laughed. “When I was fifteen I sneaked away one afternoon and hid in the bushes and watched the men train. They are all quite beautiful.”

  J.T. laughed. “They’ll take away your princess badge if they find out.”

  She laughed again, feeling very unprincesslike.

  The guards’ training ground was nearly a mile from the palace on a broad plain that had always been free of trees and was traditionally used as the site of tournaments and trials by combat. Around the edge of the two-acre plain was a long, low open-front stone building.

  When they were within sight of the men, J.T. stopped the car and looked. There were about a hundred and fifty men, all rather eerily the same size, all of them wearing nothing but a white garment that could only be described as a loincloth. Their nearly nude bodies rippled with muscles under sun-bronzed skin covered with sweat. They were involved in a great variety of sports: wrestling, archery, fighting with long thick sticks, sword fights with broadswords, hand-to-hand combat. Here and there was a gray-haired man wearing a red armband who now and then shouted at the combatants. Their gray hair did not lessen the magnificence of their bodies.

  J.T. felt as if he had stepped into a time warp. This scene, these men with their old-fashioned weapons, their primitive garments, the stone shed in back, was something from long ago. “Straight out of your thirteenth-century Rowan, isn’t it?” J.T. said softly, his voice filled with awe. Suddenly he realized he would like to train with these men. If there had to be fighting between men, it should be like this, not the dropping of bombs on anonymous thousands.

  “Uh-oh, they’ve seen us,” Aria said.

  A moment later, one of the gray-haired men blew a whistle and the guardsmen disappeared from the field, returning in seconds wearing long gray robes and standing at attention in a perfect line. They were an impressive sight.

  J.T. eased the car forward.

  “They won’t like that I’m here,” Aria said.

  “You’re their princess, don’t forget that.”

  “But they are very private people. Grans says—”

  “Stick by me, honey, I’ll protect you.”

  “Ha! They are my guard, my men, my…” She trailed off and smiled as the gray-haired man, now wearing a long, black robe, came forward to open her door.

  “Your Highness,” he said formally, “welcome.”

  J.T. and the captain of the guard looked one another over and judged each other quickly. “I need your help,” J.T. said.

  “You have it,” the captain answered without question.

  Medieval-looking wooden chairs were brought and J.T. and the captain were seated under one end of the stone building while Aria was given a chair several feet away. Contrary to Aria’s belief that she would not be welcomed by the men, they made her a little too welcome for J.T.’s taste. One man brought out a fat-bellied guitar that J.T. supposed was a lute and began to strum it, another man offered her cakes from a plate, two other men held out silver goblets of drink. And whatever they were saying was putting an enormous smile on Aria’s face. She looked like a princess of old surrounded by her handsome courtiers whose heavy, muscular legs stuck out bare beneath their scanty clothes.

  The captain looked from Aria to J.T.’s frowning face and smiled. “We do not get many visitors to our training ground and our princess has never been here.” He chuckled. “Except once when we were not supposed to know she was here.”

  J.T. smiled. “How much do you know about what is going on?”

  “Someone shot at Her Royal Highness,” the captain said, his mouth set in a grim line.

  “It has been more than that.” J.T. knew that he could trust this man. Perhaps because they were descended from the same warrior stock, but J.T. knew he could trust this man with his life. He told him that someone had tried to kill Aria in America. He told of the other attempts on her life and J.T. could feel the captain’s growing anger.

  “We have been told nothing of this,” the older man seethed. “In the past hundred years we have been relegated to doing nothing but opening and closing doors. Our king may have forgotten our true use, but we have not. We are ready to lay down our lives for our king and his two granddaughters.”

  “And the rest of them be hanged,” J.T. said. “I agree with you. I want her watched every minute of every day. I wish there were women who could stay with her in her bedroom. I don’t trust any of those women with her now.”

  “Perhaps there is someone. Come with me.”

  J.T. was reluctant to leave Aria alone with those half-naked men but he followed the captain.

  “There was a time,” the captain said as they walked, “when Lanconian warriors were the finest in the world. Over the centuries most of the people have turned to farming but a few of us have kept the tradition of training. We are not as much in favor now since Lanconia has been declared a neutral country.”

  They turned a curve in the path and rounded a grove of trees. Opening before them was a small clearing and here ten women wearing white, draped garments that reached only to the tops of their magnificent legs were participating in games like the men’s.

  “My God,” J.T. said with sharp intake of breath.

  The captain smiled. “Centuries ago, the women were trained beside the men. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  J.T. couldn’t close his mouth as he looked at the six-foot-tall, bronzed goddesses wrestling and fighting. A whistle blew and the women lined up, and a dark-haired woman wearing a longer red garment started walking toward them.

  The captain turned his back to her for a moment. “Jarnel trains the women. She is also my wife.”

  J.T.’s eyes were on the woman. “No wonder you stay so fit.”

  J.T. and the captain talked to Jarnel and it was agreed that, somehow, one of the guardswomen would be substituted for one of Aria’s ladies-in-waiting.

  Later, as he and the captain were walking back to the men’s training ground, J.T. said, “Tell me, do the guardswomen welcome men like your men welcome the princess?”

  “No,” the captain answered. “Lanconian women are pursued. They do nothing to win a man; he must go to them. Of course there have been exceptions. In Rowan’s day sometimes the women fought each other for a man. In fact, that was the case with Rowan himself.”

  “You mean this Rowan I keep hearing about was the prize in a contest? Some muscular broad won him?” J.T. laughed.

  “I imagine the warriors looked somewhat like our guardswomen,” the captain said mildly.

  J.T. remembered the ten tall, beautiful women in the field behind him, their skin gleaming with sweat, and he stopped laughing.

  It was nearly noon by the time Aria and J.T. drove off in the Cord, three carloads of guardsmen behind them in old but perfectly kept black Fords. J.T. wanted to see a vineyard. He followed the directions the captain had given him and arrived just as the workers were sitting down to their midday meal.

  Aria often saw the city dwellers but these country people had too much work to do to stand in line to gawk at a pretty princess. They were stunned into speechlessness at the sight of her looking a great deal like their own daughters and sweethearts.

  “Your…Your Highness,” one woman stuttered while the others stood quietly, their lunches forgotten at their feet.

  “May we join you?” J.T. asked. “We brought