The Gladiator’s Bride by Nhys Glover
Crippled by shyness, shunned for being not-right-in-the-head, gifted artist and Roman noblewoman, Marcia Mica, has only two people in the world who truly love her – her teacher, Daedalus, and her childhood friend, Asterion, both slaves in her father’s household.
But when forbidden love blooms between the unlikely friends, only disaster can come of it. That disaster leaves Marcia horribly scarred and Asterion sold into the arena as a gladiator.
Years later, Daedalus brings a broken Marcia to Britannia, and Sabrina, the healer who saved his life when he was a boy, works miracles on the scarred girl. However, not all scars are physical and those Sabrina has no ability to heal.
When Sabrina and Marcia are kidnapped by a Celtic leader bent on revenge, Asterion must depend on the dreams of a Celtic Seer to find the love of his life and help foil a revolt that threatens the fragile peace in Roman Britannia. But even if he and his friends succeed, can scars that are more than just physical ever really be healed and can those whose lives are owned by others ever truly be free to follow their hearts?
Excerpt:
Dath edged across the room towards Marcie. He hadn’t noticed the wall behind her until the bastard pointed it out. Now he saw that it was a monochrome painting: a reddish-brown scene that would have suited the Christians and their belief in Hell and Damnation. It was, he realised instantly, a picture of the night of the fire. There was Asterion, tied to the large cartwheel, his back scourged with cruel welts. There was the Master, his face a mask of such ugliness he could have made Medusa a perfect mate. And around them both were flames; a fire raging out of control, eating everything in its path.
With a shudder, it suddenly dawned on him what she’d used as paint. The brownish-red colouring could only be one thing: Blood.
Had this animal not allowed her paints? Had she been forced to work using her own blood as the medium? Or had she intentionally chosen to work in blood because it captured her agony as nothing else could?
‘Blood?’ He hadn’t realised he’d spoken the word out loud until the merchant replied.
‘She did it in burned pieces of wood in my suite. So when I moved her in here I made sure she didn’t have access to anything she could disfigure my walls with. But she outsmarted me. Made brushes out of her own hair and cut her arm to get blood.’
After a lifetime of teaching others to appreciate the written word, Aussie author Nhys Glover finally decided to make the most of the Indie Book Revolution to get her own written word out to the world. Now, with almost 100,000 of her ebooks downloaded internationally and a winner of 2013 SFR Galaxy Award for ‘The Titan Drowns’, Nhys finds her words, too, are being appreciated.
At home in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales of England, Nhys these days spends most of her time “living the dream” by looking out over the moors as she writes the kind of novels she loves to read: The ones that are a little bit steamy, a little bit different and wholly romantic.
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