Kestrel stewed momentarily, then shrugged the comment off. “So can you send a boat over to give me a ride across?” he asked.
“What? The mighty elf can’t cross the river?” one of the imps hooted, making the whole crowd laugh.
Provoked by the frivolous attitude of the imps, Kestrel turned and disappeared back into the forest that bordered the river bank, making the imps smirk with delight, until Kestrel reappeared ten seconds later, running at his fullest elven speed. He stepped out onto the surface of the river and proceeded to kick up a small rooster tail of foamy water in his wake as he ran across the river and leapt up onto the river bank. He turned and looked at the stunned crowd of imps. “Oh, do you still have to unload the cargo? I’ll go ahead and tell the king you’ll be along…eventually,” he smirked, as he turned again and started walking along the road that led from the river to the city.
He felt good, energized by having won the petty battle at the docks, so good that he whistled as he walked along. He saw imps floating high overhead, and then he followed the turn in the path and suddenly faced the sight of the high towers of Blackfriars, the city of the imps.
“Odare!” he shouted. “Killcen! Mulberry! Where are you all?” he shouted. He repeated the names, cupping his hands around his mouth to project his voice high up into the sky.
Imps started streaming out of the doors and windows of the towers.
Kestrel watched with satisfaction, pleased to see the stir he had raised, but he grew concerned when he saw a small cadre of imps come plummeting down from the sky, heading directly towards him. Just before the numerous imps reached him his concern turned again to joy, as he recognized that the approaching imps were the friends he knew, the very imps who had been stranded apart from him when the Rishiare Estelle had disrupted the plans they all had made to travel together to fight the Viathins and free the captive gods.
The first two imps struck him simultaneously, Odare from the right and Mulberry from the left, driving him to the ground with the impact of their reckless regard. He felt numerous things going on all together in a welter of impressions. He felt imp after imp seem to strike and add to the pile of small blue bodies that rested upon him in a squirming mass of affectionate friends, as kisses and pinches and shouts of glee rained upon him for a string of minutes that stretched out.
He felt his own eyes fill with moisture, and then spill tears of joy at the happiness of the reunion. There may be no place in the world where I could be more exuberantly welcomed than here with the imps, he found himself thinking, and he knew he took great pleasure in the thought.
“What ruckus is this that disturbs the royal nap?” a shrill voice called.
The imps that were piled upon Kestrel began to immediately untangle themselves and float up away from him, so that within a minute he could see the sky above once again. The sun was setting he realized, and then, against the backdrop of the reddening sky, he saw Dewberry hovering directly overhead. The queen of the imps was large with child, and her face glowed with a radiance born of both her physical state as well as the joy of seeing Kestrel alive and at her home.
“I might have expected to see you upon your knees to greet me, Kestrel-always-traveling, but laying on your back is a novel way to greet your favorite untouchable beloved. Is this some new custom you’ve learned in some exotic locale?” she asked, and then she plummeted down to kiss him and be engulfed in his gentle embrace.
“My queen, I could not imagine living another day without seeing the great, very great, make that very, very, very greatness, that you have become!” he replied.
She bit him laughingly on the shoulder, then floated up away from him.
“Because I hold you in such high esteem, I will ask the guards to place you in the nicest prison cell we have for making such mean comments!” she scolded him. “Come up, come up! We will have a dinner with you, and hear your news. We are so sadly cut off from the world because of the Rishiare Estelle conditions; we want to hear everything you have to say.”
And so a half dozen imps gathered around him, and physically lifted him to a balcony in the royal tower.
“You are very light, Kestrel friend,” Mulberry told him as they set him down.
“he looks very thin,” Killcen agreed.
“He has pined away from a broken heart, without an appetite, because he could not see me during all these past weeks,” Odare declared. “It is touching that he is here to see me now.”
With such ongoing joking and laughter, Kestrel was escorted to a large banquet hall, where Jonson sat at a table set upon a dais, with many other tables set on the floor just below.
“Come sit with me, friend Kestrel, hero of the imps, and tell us what you have been doing. We need to give the cooks time to prepare the unexpected banquet they now must provide, and I trust that your story will be exciting – we don’t ever expect to have boredom when you are around!” the king said.
Kestrel stepped up to the table, and after a hearty welcome from Jonson, he was made to stand and tell his tale, speaking to a room that started with a crowd, and grew more crowded as he spun the extraordinary tale of much that had happened since the fateful day when the Rishiare Estelle had disrupted the plans of all involved. He judiciously pruned parts of the story, including references to his own temporary divinity, aware of how raucously the story would be received and treated.
“And so, my friend, I am here to ask for your help, again,” Kestrel told the king as he ended his story with his return to the land of the Inner Seas, while Jonson sat upon his throne.
“You have great powers, while we are still suffering from the Rishiare Estelle,” Jonson replied. “I would never say ‘no’ to you, for we owe you all the help we owe to our brothers. But I wonder what we can do for you.”
“The Eastern Forest has fallen into a civil war, and my friends are in trouble. I need a squad or more of imps with pikes to help me help my companions,” he replied.
“You are asking us to go to war with the elves?” Jonson asked in astonishment.
An Unexpected Deity (Book 7) Page 31