by Sarah Hawke
If Valuri heard me, she didn’t react. She just laid there twitching spastically, and I slowly traced my fingers along her tattoos. I sometimes wished they were visible more often—the ones on her stomach in particularly were incredibly sexy. I kissed her belly while I gradually slipped off her boots and trousers.
“Fuck,” she said eventually, lifting her fingers to the mess on her face. “I guess that fight this morning took more out of me than I thought…”
“Well, you did get kicked through a house,” I reminded her. “Then you walked twelve hours through the mountains on heels.”
Val grunted and shoveled several globs of seed into her mouth before it cooled. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive the gods for making you taste so good.”
“According to some people they’re not even real. Maybe I’m just naturally delicious.”
“That’s even worse.”
“Then maybe you just have bizarre tastes.”
“Just shut up and fuck me already, would you?”
Grinning, I pushed apart her knees and lowered my lips to her already sodden quim. I lashed her clit with my tongue while I eased my left ring finger inside her. Her soft moans and euphoric convulsions stirred my cock back to life in less than a minute. I didn’t scoot up and fuck her right away, though—I wanted to get her off at least once with my tongue just to remind her exactly what she was missing.
“Escar’s….fuck!” she cried out, grabbing my hair with her hand. Her slender thighs squeezed my head so hard it actually hurt, and I belatedly remembered how easily she could crush me with her Senosi strength. I was fortunate she had enough control to hold back.
When she finally came down and relaxed her grip, I licked my way up her taut belly and crawled between her legs. Thanks to her superhuman agility, I was able to grab her calves and push them all the way down to the bed until her feet were flanking her head. I took a moment to appreciate her glistening, gaping cunt before I slammed the head of my cock inside her.
Valuri screamed so loudly that half the fortress probably would have heard her if not for the chaos outside, and her nails clawed into my back hard enough to draw blood. I might have been annoyed if it wasn’t so damn hot. Instead I pounded her so relentlessly, so ruthlessly , that any normal woman—even Kaseya—would have begged me to stop.
Senosi durability had its advantages.
“Give it to me,” she begged, her eyes glowing like hot green coals. “Give me everything you have left!”
“It’s going inside you where it belongs,” I taunted.
“What?” she gasped. Her eyes widened in horror like a teenager who was afraid of getting pregnant. “You better not!”
“I’ve seen you feed from it before,” I said, slamming into her so hard the bedframe creaked. “I bet you’ve been lying to me this whole time, haven’t you? You’re just a slut who likes wearing my cum on her tits.”
I was just teasing her to try and get a rise out of her—the only thing better than fucking a hot, hungry Senosi was fucking a hot, hungry, angry Senosi—but then her expression abruptly shifted, and I realized I had unintentionally struck a nerve.
“Holy shit, I’m right, aren’t I?” I gasped. “You don’t actually need me to cum on you!”
Her lip twitched. “It makes it easier for me to feed.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, snickering so wide I stopped pumping her altogether. “It’s never made a damn bit of sense, but I just went along with it anyway.”
“Because you like it,” Valuri said, digging her nails into my again. “So what the hell are you complaining about?”
She made an excellent point. I slammed into her again, even harder than before. The bed squeaked and shuddered in rhythm with the slapping of our flesh. I almost couldn’t believe she had been lying to me for years just so I would pull out and cum all over her. And yet for some reason I couldn’t explain, I loved her even more because of it.
“Fuck!”
I barely had a chance to grab my cock before it started firing. This load might have been even bigger than the last one, as hard as that was to believe, and by the time I finished spurting Val looked like a whore who had just been gangbanged by three different men. My seed was everywhere—her lips, her chin, her tits, even her eyelids. And I’m not sure I had ever seen her happier.
“Shalassa’s sweet tits, you are a mess,” I breathed, falling over next to her. “And you fucking love it, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” Valuri said, licking a stray glob from her lip. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and tell the innkeeper to draw me a hot bath.”
“You just had one.”
She sighed. “Fine, I’ll do it.”
“As funny as that would be, it’s probably not a good idea.”
“Why? Worried I’ll give the old maid a heart attack?”
“Yeah, but not because of the mess,” I said. “You look like a bloody demon right now.”
“Oh, right,” Valluri muttered. “Well then get your ass down there and start the water. And make sure you heat it up.” She paused and shrugged. “You should probably find out what the hell is taking Red so long, too. I bet she’s gushing all over the floor.”
I stood and nodded. Now that I thought about it, Kaseya really had been gone a long time. A sudden surge of panic rippled through me, and I activated my ring and stretched out through the Aether. I felt her presence downstairs in the common room. She wasn’t hurt or scared…on the contrary, she was preternaturally calm.
“She’s still downstairs,” I said, standing and collecting my trousers. “I’ll be back.”
I found her sitting cross-legged and alone in front of the fire, her eyes closed and her body strangely rigid. The innkeeper gave me a strange look, probably because my hair was a mess and she’d heard Valuri screaming.
“Your other girl has been sitting like that for an hour,” the old woman said.
“She’s…pensive,” I muttered, trying to ignore the sudden rush of heat in my cheeks. Loud sex was amazing in the heat of the moment, but afterwards it was always embarrassing as hell. “Can you, uh…can you draw a bath?”
“Already started,” she said, gesturing down the hall before she disappeared back into the kitchen. If I hadn’t paid her double, I had a feeling she would have thrown us out.
Shaking away the thought, I swept up behind Kaseya and touched her shoulder. As far as I knew, she had shared in almost every climax I’d had ever since I’d fastened the tan’ratha collar around her neck. She should have been busy trying to catch her breath and put out the fire in her quim…
“Hey, you home?”
She didn’t move. Frowning in concern, I crouched down next to her and reached out to the Aether. I could feel a strange swirl of energy encircling her almost like she was sitting at the center of localized storm. I had never encountered anything like it.
“When you said you wanted to meditate, I didn’t realize you meant turning into a statue,” I said, pinching her skin. When she still didn’t move, I swallowed nervously and ran a hand through her hair. “If this is some kind of magic, maybe Val can disjoin it. I’ll go and—”
I never finished the sentence. In one moment I was touching Kaseya, and in the next I was standing inside a strange bluish cavern I had never seen before. I had to blink several times to make certain I wasn’t hallucinating, and it took me almost a minute to realize I was trapped in another dreamscape.
“What the hell?” I muttered, my head whipping back and forth. The cave surrounding me was enormous—a pair of fully-grown dragons could have rolled around in here without bumping into one another. The stone looked blue thanks to the ominous, glowing crystal formations lining the walls.
“We’re beneath Nol Krovos. This is the Fount of Velhari.”
My head whipped around so quickly I probably would have broken my neck if any of this were real. Kaseya was standing about twenty yards away from me across the cavern, her eyes locked onto something in an adjacent
cubby.
“What the…?” I swallowed and forced myself to breathe. “How the hell are you doing this?”
“I’m not,” she said. “I was pulled into this place when I tried to stretch my senses out across the White Ridge. I didn’t know why first, but then I realized it was because of Zalheer. He was reaching out to me…”
I paused and shuffled closer to her, struggling to let all of this sink in. “So he’s alive, then.”
“For the moment,” Kaseya said. “He is badly injured, and he doesn’t believe we can help him. He’s surrounded by a thousand Roskarim warriors.”
I swore under my breath. “Does he know what they’re planning?”
“Not precisely. I’m not even convinced that he’s conscious.” She sighed. “I suspect they are waiting for Ayrael to return before they try and move him.”
“So basically, it’s just as bad as we thought,” I grumbled. “Fantastic.”
“He wanted to make certain we saw this just in case,” Kaseya said.
Once I drew closer to her, I could finally peer into the adjacent cavern. It was filled with a huge, shimmering pool of liquid that may have been the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. At the center was another glowing crystalline structure that almost looked like a tree. I could sense the Aether pouring off of it; the emanations shuddered through the cavern like a tremor.
“It almost feels…alive ,” I rasped.
“I think it is,” Kaseya said. “When I reach out, I can hear it speaking to me.”
I braced myself against the stone and stretched out with my senses. I had heard stories of Aetheric “wells” before—in the distant past, some ancient empire or another had created nexuses of power where they could bolster their channeling abilities to unfathomable levels. I didn’t understand the why or the how, but this seemed like it confirmed their existence, at the very least.
“If the Inquisitrix performs her vatari ritual here, she will collapse the Three Corridors,” Kaseya said. “We cannot allow her to succeed.”
I nodded slowly. I had absolutely no bloody clue how the three of us were going to stop her, of course, but it wasn’t as if we had ever allowed a total lack of plan to stop us before.
“Do you know how to get out of here?” I asked.
“Yes. Take my hand.”
I did as she asked, and a moment later the two of us were lying in front of the fire at the Icewatch inn. I blinked and coughed, and when I leaned up I saw Valuri staring down at us, her black eyebrows cocked. Her hair was set from a bath, and she was wrapped up in a towel.
“What in the bloody abyss was that about?” she asked. “Did you smoke some lotus while I wasn’t looking?”
“I wish,” I muttered, helping Kaseya to her feet. “We had another adventure in a dreamscape.”
Val’s expression darkened. “Zalheer?”
“I don’t know how, but he showed us the Fount of Velhari. I think he wanted us to see that it was real before the Inquisitrix got her hands on him.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Exactly where we thought,” I said. “Right in the middle of a few thousand angry barbarian warriors.”
“There must be another way to free him,” Kaseya said. “Vorsalos is still a long way away. We could wait until they leave the barbarian camp then intercept them on the road somewhere.”
“Assuming we can keep tracking him. And there’s the little problem of running into your sister yet again.”
“We know her weakness. We can defeat her.”
“Maybe, but I’m more worried about the fact she could have a hundred Roskarim with her this time.” I sighed and shook my head. “We can’t storm into their camp, and we can’t really afford to wait around, either. We need to let your people know about the Inquisitrix’s intentions before it’s too late, and the Black Mistress is the only one we know of who’s capable of sending messages to the island. She might even be able to get us a ship, too, given enough time.”
“I know, but we cannot simply leave Zalheer behind,” Kaseya said, more firmly this time. “We have to find a way to free him.”
I sighed. I should have known that delaying this argument a few hours wouldn’t actually solve anything. “Kaseya…”
“If Zalheer is right about the Fount, we’re going to need his help,” she pressed. “And not just because there’s so much more he can still teach us about sorcery.”
“You feel guilty about what your people did to him.”
“No, I’m enraged about what my people did to him,” Kaseya said. “I feel guilty about how readily I believed their lies.”
I gently cupped her cheek. “It’s not your fault. How could you have possibly known any better?”
“I could have listened more closely to my sister. I could have asked more questions.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter now,” I told her. “We can’t be certain that Zalheer’s story is any more accurate than the one you were told.”
“It is, and you know it,” Kaseya said. “We can still use his help, Jorem.”
She wasn’t wrong, obviously. Whatever else the old sorcerer might have been, he was powerful. He could push himself far beyond what I’d ever thought possible without suffering an Aetheric backlash, and he had mastered channeling techniques from across the world. Leaving him to the wolves—literal and proverbial—would be wasting an opportunity that might never come again.
But none of that made the prospect of rescuing him from a horde of angry barbarians any more appealing. I glanced over to Valuri for help, expecting that she would leap to my defense. But apparently the amazon’s taunts had really gotten to her earlier—the Huntress glanced away and avoided eye contact altogether.
“We could head out tomorrow and try to scout his position,” she said. “The Roskarim are only about a day away according to the scouts here. Tomorrow night they’ll probably establish a final camp a few miles north of the wall.”
My jaw dropped open. “You want to try and sneak around an entire army and pray we don’t get caught?”
“Red and I have trained for this type of thing, and you have your magic. As long as we’re not stupid, we can probably stay out of sight.”
Kaseya smiled. She had probably been expecting to fight both of us over this. “If we are caught, we can retreat back to the fortress. They won’t be able to pursue without exposing themselves to the archers on the wall.”
“And what if he’s being held in a tent right smack in the middle of their camp?” I asked.
“Then my claws are going to get especially bloody,” Valuri said. “Either way, we need to know for certain. It seems wrong to go to all this trouble and then walk away.”
I sighed and smacked my hand into my forehead. “This is just revenge for leaving you behind in Vorsalos, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Great,” I grumbled under my breath. “Just great.”
2
We eventually stumbled back to our room and went to sleep, and the next day at the fortress passed mostly without incident. Just before dusk, we joined the soldiers on the wall to watch as the barbarian army finally marched into view around the edge of the mountain. The sound of their war drums echoing off the mountains was even more unsettling than I imagined.
“I hope your reinforcements get here soon,” Valuri whispered.
“They should arrive first thing tomorrow morning,” Derec said. “I doubt the Roskarim will attack in the dark after a full day’s march.”
“We’d better hope not.”
I sighed and leaned against the battered crenellations. As a boy, I had envisioned standing atop a castle and facing down a giant army just like this. Nothing was more glorious to a ten year-old than winning a battle against impossible odds, especially when his imagination conveniently made him invulnerable. The reality, I reminded myself yet again, wasn’t nearly as glamorous.
“If we’re really going to do this, now is the time,” I said. “Assuming you stil
l sense Zalheer.”
“He is alive but unconscious,” Kaseya confirmed. “I suspect they are wary of his magic. Without my sister to contain his power, they have resorted to beating him into submission.”
“I guess they’re called barbarians for a reason,” Valuri muttered. “Come on, let’s go. We’ll keep our distance until nightfall.”
Leaving Icewatch was easy with Derec’s help, though all the soldiers on the battlements stared down at us like we were insane for voluntarily leaving the protection of the walls. They weren’t wrong, of course, and I spent most of the trip imagining all the horrible ways this “plan” of ours would inevitably go wrong. The majority of them involved being swarmed by more barbarians than I could count, but I left room from the possibility that we’d get eaten by frost wolves or ice trolls or any of the other monsters native to the Ridge.
But thankfully the Roskarim were still far enough away that we could easily snake along the edge of the Shattered Peaks and avoid skirmishing with their forward scouts. The weather mostly cooperated, too—it was still cold as fuck, but at least we didn’t stumble into a blizzard.
I couldn’t sense Zalheer’s presence until we were almost on top of him, but Kaseya continuously assured us that she knew where she was going. We reached the fringes of the barbarian encampment about an hour after nightfall, at which point we tied up our mounts, tucked ourselves deeper into the hills for cover, and pulled out the spyglass.
“I really hope you don’t expect to spot him with that thing,” Valuri grumbled. “He could be inside any one of those tents.”
“He’s over there,” Kaseya said, pointing north even though her eyes were closed.
I swiveled the spyglass. The tent in question was a little larger than most of the others, but there was no obvious indication that the barbarians were using it as a makeshift prison. Not that I doubted Kaseya in the slightest—I could feel her certainty through our bond.
“Well, it’s not the worst place they could have picked,” I said.
“It’s bad enough,” Valuri said. “The wolves will sniff us out if we get anywhere close, and I guarantee they have a spotter somewhere up on that hill. One puff into his warhorn and we’ll have half the army swarming over us.”