by Noah Layton
I was lying on the floor of the western lookout tower. Talia was nowhere to be seen, but one of the fox-people was sat on the chair nearby on duty.
‘Good morning, Jack,’ he said as I sat up, rubbing my head. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Not great… Wasn’t Talia on duty here?’
‘Who?’
‘The lady with the cat-ears.’
‘Oh, she was, but our shifts swapped over several hours ago. Said you’d fallen asleep up here. She went back to her house.’
‘Right… Jesus, it’s cold.’
‘The coldest day we have had for some time. I am not sure how long this hot weather will hold.’
I bid the fox-man goodbye and headed back to my treehouse, practically taking a walk of shame. It was morning, but it was early, so early that nobody was out on their work duties yet apart from those at the lookout towers.
Talia’s house was quiet and her front door closed as I passed it. No doubt she was asleep to.
I headed quietly up the steps and opened the front door, wincing as it creaked. My four wives were inside, naked in the bed, their clothes strewn about the floor along with their canteens, from which remains of bronze ale had leaked.
No doubt this had been one hell of a party.
But my girls weren’t sleeping. They were all awake, albeit half, and they all looked over at me with raised eyebrows.
‘Late night?’ Ariadne said, grinning widely.
‘You could say that…’ I said, getting into bed with them and feeling their warm bodies curl up around me.
‘So you were with our new friend,’ Lara said with interest. ‘Tell me everything. I’ve never been with one like her before…’
‘Incredible,’ I remarked. ‘I hope you girls don’t mind.’
‘It is not the job of a tribe master’s wife to state whether we approve, Jack,’ Ariadne said. ‘We are your wives. We all get along.’
‘Right, I always forget that part. See if I had just pulled this kind of shit back in my world and come wandering in at 4 in the morning and admitted to having sex with another woman, I would have had my ass kicked and my entire life ripped apart. Out here… Well let’s just say it’s a slightly better deal for a guy.’
‘Well,’ Elera replied, looking around at my other wives, ‘even if our opinions were important, we think that she would be a wonderful addition to our family. We are a close-knit group, and it is important that we all love each other.’
‘You think that I should marry her?’
‘Why not?’ Elera remarked. ‘I love how full this bed is.’
‘We just need to make a her a better hunter or something,’ Lara said with a sarcastically self-important shrug. ‘Like me…’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s incredibly beautiful, and you know that’s something I always approve of in men and women, but can she fight?’
‘She says that she can, but I’m not so sure. I mean, she was a princess back at her old tribe. She’s maybe become a little more down-to-earth after having to spend so much time in the wilds and working to look after herself, but I don’t know how convinced I am that she has those skills.’
‘She did scratch up your clothes something fierce back at the Ichabod’s Cove. But I know what you mean… I’ll be keeping my eyes on her until she proves herself.’
‘She wanted join us on the mission the other day,’ I replied, ‘that could just her pride. You’re right, Lara. Even if she would be a great addition, let’s keep an eye on her for the time bei-’
Suddenly the leaves and shrubbery on the branches overhead began to slap and hit against each other.
‘Please tell me that’s not her watching us have sex again,’ Santana moaned, ‘I was just beginning to like her…’
‘I think it’s a bird,’ Ariadne said, standing from the bed. ‘It’s stuck.’
My foxgirl slid out of bed, taking one of the many blankets with her, one that just so happened to be covering Elera, leaving her tight blue body naked at the edge of the bed.
‘What are you playing at, foxgirl? It is freezing…’
‘Yes, but you did just say that we all love each other,’ Ariadne smiled cheekily, wrapping the sheet around her tightly. ‘So I am sure that you will find it in your heart to forgive me. Besides, I am just modelling your usual look.’
Ariadne scampered across the room and headed outside briefly. The pattering of the bird’s wings started up once again, then ceased as it crossed to the branches above the front door.
My foxgirl appeared at the door once again, but this time carrying a blue-feathered bird in her hands, around the size of a pigeon.
‘Did we agree you were going to bring it back inside?’ I asked, looking over at her in confusion.
‘It’s a homing bird,’ Ariadne said. ‘They deliver messages.’ She pulled a small piece of parchment out from a pocket on its leg and tilted her head to the side to read the name. ‘It’s for you, husband.’
I got out of bed and crossed to her side where she held the bird securely under her arm and the parchment in the other. Taking the parchment and glancing around at the girls, I unrolled it and read it aloud.
‘Dear Master Jack,
I hope this letter finds you well, and that your tribe are secure and safe. You will always have our support, and I hope that we would receive yours in return. As such, I now call for your assistance, not for a time of war but for a time of mourning; Master Artrix, my father and the master of the sun-elves of Morelia, took ill last night and passed away from the wound he suffered some time ago.
I would ask that you join us at our home this evening to celebrate his life, and to honour him in his death.
Kind regards,
Master Mariana Moonthorn’
‘Holy shit…’ I muttered. ‘I knew he was sick but I didn’t think it would come around this quickly.’
‘She speaks very formally about her own father considering he has just died,’ Santana said. ‘If it were my father I would be distraught.’
‘That’s just how they are. She told me. They love each other, but their relationships are different to ours. It’s all part of being a sun-elf.’
‘I’m assuming we are going,’ Lara said. ‘Sure, we need to honour Artrix’s life, but this is also important for our relations with their tribe.’
‘Yeah we are.’
‘Oh, joy,’ Elera said. ‘Does this mean another painful wagon ride along these things you land-walking beings call roads?’
‘Only for a little while,’ I said, ‘but screw that wagon journey past Grayholde. We’re taking the ship this time.’
Chapter Thirteen
While the girls packed up our things for the journey, I spent some time in the Storage Building gathering up the ores that we had mined from the new land where Tobias and the warriors had resided.
The route we were heading along on-water would inevitably take us to another riverside trading post, giving us the opportunity to stop off to unload our mined and smelted goods before attending the land of the sun-elves.
Santana remained behind to take care of the land; she was open to heading out but had begun to establish herself as the home bird who preferred to keep the land running in my absence.
It also didn’t help that the last time we had travelled to the land of the sun-elves she had been kidnapped by an army of feral wood-elves who had almost sacrificed her to a demi-god.
Still, she elected to join us on the trek to the ship so that she could return with Myranthia and the cart after we had finished unloading the ores, with several of the satyrs joining.
I assembled my team – myself, Ariadne, Lara, Elera, Alorion, Captain Archie who we would meet at the ship, and-
‘Jack?’
Talia had appeared as if from nowhere in the clearing. She was no longer wearing the dress that she had slipped out of so quickly last night, instead wearing her tiny pants and shirt.
I had no idea what she was going to say.
‘Good morning.’
‘Are you heading out?’
‘A little… Diplomatic mission, I guess. Do you want to come with us?’
‘Of course I can,’ she repeated, smiling warmly back at me. She still moved sharply between an attitude and a shyness. Before last night I couldn’t put my finger on it, but now I realised; it was a mix between privilege and being ignored.
I was happy to find the Bastion still in good shape, and that Captain Archie was only slightly drunk after the previous night’s festivities; if anything it had stopped him from getting wasted in the morning, and he had now slept it off enough to set the ship on course for the first of our two destinations.
With the shipment loaded into the hold, Santana and the satyrs returned to the land while we set sail for the next riverside trading post.
We had already moved downriver to the hiding spot where my ship had been docked, but with the captain’s knowledge of Agraria’s rivers in the surrounding area we arrived at a trading post after several hours of tight squeezes and back-channels.
The girls helped me cart the two crates into the mining ore office where we offloaded them with the merchant for a price of 3800GP – not bad for a day’s work, especially considering that we were holding onto many of the iron bars and that the mine was nowhere near to being exhausted yet.
Bronze, silver and gold all went a long way.
From there it was another meandering trail of estuaries and sections of the river until we reached a passage that was familiar to me.
The forest rose either side of the river, before the land did too. Up ahead it became a narrow valley, where the bridge of Keltamir had resided before I had cut it.
It was where Ralos, Artrix’s son, had fallen to his death.
I could still see the whites of the sun-elf’s eyes as the spear slammed into his back. His whole body had jolted involuntarily, going rigid like he was already dead. It was the shock of it severing his spinal cord, his brain sending a final desperate call to his hand to hold onto me.
‘Go… They need you.’
I still shivered at the thought sometimes, but like any warrior, I knew deep down that Ralos wouldn’t have wanted us to think ill of his death.
He would just want us to live well and to remember him for who he really was; one of the bravest men I had ever met, in this world or in my old one.
We docked the ship on a sandy embankment just before the land began to rise. This wasn’t a common shipping channel because of the previous presence of the wood-elves.
I had little doubt that many in the area were still unaware of the demise of their tribe with the rise of Zagor from beneath it, so this section would be largely deserted.
At least for now.
Captain Archie remained with the ship while I and my wives journeyed through the forest towards the sun-elves’ tribal land.
I had spent only a limited amount of time speaking with Artrix, but the guy had made an impression on me the way not a lot of people in Agraria had done. He was a stoic, a fearless leader who had dealt with the death of his son with unbelievably calm acceptance, and if that didn’t make him formidable enough, he practically had the power to read the minds of his opponents just by looking into their eyes.
His daughter, Princess Mariana, a tall and beautiful sun-elf in her mid-twenties who was now taking over as tribe master, also had the same ability, one that I had been thinking about ever since we set foot off the ship.
‘Nobody mention a word about attacking the slave caravan,’ I said from the front of our group. ‘The sun elves aren’t slavers, but I don’t want Mariana to think that we’re using the protection of their allegiance as a hedge against any outsiders that try to retaliate. If she thinks we’re abusing the alliance we have she might revoke it, especially at a time like this.’
‘I thought she could read minds,’ Elera said. ‘Does that not harm us?’
‘She can read faces, maybe not as well as her father could but still pretty well. Hopefully she will just see it as sadness in response to the funeral… Which it is, obviously, but…’
‘But sometimes things show on our faces that we do not attend,’ Alorion said. ‘Even in times of an ally’s death, a tribe master must be cunning if he wishes to survive.’
It was an insult to the dead that this kind of thing had to be brought up during Artrix’s funeral, but it wasn’t meant that way. At the top levels of power no action was off the cards, and while I trusted Mariana and her people, I didn’t want our relationship to turn sour.
We arrived at the southern gates of the land a short while later. The guards stationed on the lookout towers either side of the closed entrance had their spears drawn and pointed at us, but as our faces became clearer through the trees they lowered their weapons to their passive positions, and the gate clunked open, pulled by a further pair of sun-elf guards.
One of the guards led us across the quiet land beneath the overcast sky, bringing us to the cemetery tucked away in a small section in the south-western corner, tucked away beneath trees whose branches overhung the cemetery.
Some of the graves here were ancient; it was where all of Artrix’s ancestors had been buried for the centuries
The focus now was only upon one, though.
Hundreds of sun-elves stood around the grove, and as I, Alorion and my wives took our place among them, we looked through to the grove to see Mariana and Artrix’s two widows stood around the open grave of Artrix in silence.
Despite the masses of citizens, it was quiet enough to hear the greenery of the branches overhead knocking against each other in the steadily rising breeze.
Nobody made a sound.
One of Artrix’s widows caught sight of me and moved gracefully to Mariana’s side, whispering into her ear.
She turned and looked to me. She was wearing a gown of brilliantly glimmering greys and golden browns, something eccentric and well-made but holding much less color than what I had previously seen her in. Her golden hair was tied up behind her yellow, sun-kissed face, and while her eyes looked analytical, it was an unfortunate mask; she wasn’t reading my mind, only acknowledging me.
‘Go,’ Ariadne whispered in my ear. ‘You’re the tribe master. It’s your job to represent us.’
I crossed the grove with all eyes on me, heading through the cemetery to Mariana’s side. She had turned back to the grave now, and fortunately my back was turned too. We could talk without prying ears listening our way.
‘My, uhh… Condolences,’ I said quietly. ‘I knew that he was sick but I thought that he had longer.’
‘He took a turn two nights ago, and no amount of medicine or rare potions from our doctors could have saved him. They could fend off the pain, though, and he died peacefully with us all at his side.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘Mm… So, how are you?’
I raised my head a little and glanced up at her.
‘How… How am I?’
‘Yes,’ she replied casually. ‘You saved my life and we haven’t seen each other as of late. The least I could do is ask you how you are.’
Suddenly I realized that a little of this was for show. The sun-elves reacted to death differently than other beings did, especially the masters and their kin, and Mariana was no different.
‘I’m fine. And how are you, tribe master?’
Mariana smiled. Fortunately she still had her back turned to the rest of her tribe.
‘As well as I can be. I miss him, of course, but it is the duty of a tribe master to be strong for their people in times of uncertainty.’
‘Much like any leader.’
‘Mm. I do not deny that I am stricken with sadness, but it is not my job to be sad at this moment in time.’
Despite being beautiful, Mariana was tough, and our positions as leaders meant that we would probably never be together. Tribe masters really only had three options when dealing with each other; kill them and take everything they had, submit t
o the other, or form an alliance.
We had been through too much together to kill each other, and submitting to each other was out of the question; either of us doing so would mean handing over control to the other, and there was no way that was going to happen.
Which left only option three; form an alliance and have each other’s backs.
Once we had finished paying our respects, every single member of the tribe congregated to do the same by Artrix’s grave. It was a long procession which eventually led to myself, Alorion and my wives to be seated in the treehouse, Mariana’s new home, in what was essentially congress with her.
‘I don’t believe we’ve met,’ Mariana said, turning to Talia and shaking hands with her.
‘Talia, Master Mariana.’
‘Please, it’s just Mariana behind closed doors. Jack saved my life once, we can dispense with the pleasantries.’
We seated ourselves on cushions and relaxed over a short, wide table with cups of sweet tea.
‘I suppose I should thank you first for that gift that you gave me.’
‘The ship?’ She smiled. ‘No need. It was my father’s idea.’
‘Well, I would like to have said thank you to him if I had had the chance.’
‘He was a closed book much of the time, but believe me when I say that he still felt extremely indebted to you, even after giving you the deed to the ship.’
‘Do you feel indebted?’
‘I feel that we are partners,’ she winked. ‘I shall leave it at that.’
‘I see. Well, even if we are partners, I’m guessing you didn’t bring us up here for a friendly chat.’
‘That suggests that I don’t like talking to you, which I do. You’re one of the only outsiders that I am acquainted with… No, wait, you are the only outsider that I am acquainted with, and the only one that I trust.’
‘There are a lot of stories from my world about leaders who go crazy because they don’t trust anybody,’ I smiled. ‘Thinking about going that way?’
‘Hardly,’ she laughed, drinking from her tea. ‘In fact, it is something that I wish to amend. I told you before that we intend to move our influence beyond our borders, and as my first act as tribe master I would like to propose such a conquest.’