Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  “There,” announced Odile, hands on her hips. Indra, grimacing, shoved a misshapen corpse into the same nook as the rest of the bodies, then looked down at the ichor on her palms with disgust. Odile, meanwhile, had gone on, “Seems to us that this is good a place as any to wait out the dark…will the elf be staying with us?”

  “What do you think, Branwen?” I looked hopefully at her, Valeria’s body in my arm pressing all the closer to mine as I addressed my former lover. “Would you care to stay with us, at least until we reach the surface? I would appreciate any information you could give that might ease our pursuit of the traitors.”

  Her rigid posture relaxing at the invitation, Branwen folded both dainty hands upon her heart and swore, “I’ll tell you everything I know, Rorke. Thank you—thank you for saving me.”

  “Saving you was nothing,” I told her, turning to help the ladies bar the den’s main door. “Forgiveness, now that’s the hard part…and the most important.”

  JOYOUS REUNIONS

  BLUE WISP FIRE burned in the hearth near the back of the den, the smokeless flames dancing together while we huddled around its magic warmth.

  We had plundered the chambers of the bandits to great reward. In addition to a vast sum of gold and silver that had surely been raided from the coffers of waylaid merchants, we uncovered many wares. Thick furs from aboveground animals I recognized—dogs of Weltyr, to my sorrow, among the pelts of plains-kings and unmentionable ones—had served as the beddings of the various bandits. Now they made up our own. A larder turned up bread, salted fish (a hideous, blind breed known only to the Nightlands, with hateful fangs and a thirst for blood), and, most importantly, ale. All this alongside other stores of staples and ingredients that would have required more processing than any of us had interest or experience for. We ate together in happy relief, glad to have a place to wait out the dark in relative safety.

  Maybe even in comfort. When the meal had been eaten it occurred to me that Branwen had been really very quiet throughout most of the conversation. I nudged her, drawing her attention from the bottom of her ale mug, and said merrily, “Now, Branwen, there’s no need to look sour—I’m working on forgiving you, remember?”

  “And I’m glad. It’s only—I suppose I’m just a bit confused about a few things.”

  While I lifted my eyebrows, Branwen looked between all four of us. Her face soon glowed with blushing contemplation and she said then after a few seconds, “Perhaps I’d ought not to ask.”

  “Ask away,” enthused Odile, swinging her mug in the direction of the high elf. “There’d ought to be no secrets between those who travel together! Especially after what happened between you two before.” While Indra softly admonished her friend, Odile laughed and went on, “Well? It’s true—she betrayed him. And now, if she betrays him, she’s betraying us, too…so it’s in everyone’s interest that we’re all transparent with each other.”

  Scoffing lightly, Branwen muttered, “As if durrow have any place to talk of morals,” before going on. “It’s nothing, really, I was just wondering—well, it’s very odd, what you said before. Perhaps you didn’t understand what I was asking, Rorke, but I think it was settled for me when I saw you kiss Valeria. You two are—companions, yes?”

  I glanced between the three dark faces to my right, then Branwen’s bright one on my left. “Well,” I told her, “I have a great, specific fondness for Valeria, but all three are my companions.”

  While the durrow made noises of agreement, Branwen rolled her eyes. “You’re not understanding what I’m saying,” the high elf said—a fine one to talk about patronizing! “When I say ‘companions,’ I don’t mean companions in adventure or travel. I mean—”

  “Like this, right?”

  With a cheeky grin, Odile set her mug down, leaned across Valeria’s lap, and pressed her lips to mine in an eager kiss. I gasped slightly, surprised but far from displeased, and leaned into her affection while the closest servant of Roserpine smiled at shocked Branwen.

  “We have what some from the surface would think of as a different way of life, and Rorke here was quite shocked at first…but no man interested in experiencing all that life may hand him minds a bit of well-mannered sharing now and again.” While Odile leaned back from me with a wicked grin—then, seeing sweet Indra’s lustful look, turned to passionately kiss her friend—Valeria smiled and slid her hand into my lap. “At any rate, he’s no more a slave of mine…who could dare call so valiant and bold a paladin as Rorke Burningsoul a slave?”

  “None but a god,” I assured her, praising Weltyr for the gift of the soft mouth that tipped toward mine. While I embraced Valeria, the scent of her richly floral even after the long bloom and dark of our journey, Branwen observed the proceedings with an amazed expression. Her face was bright red, those eyes of hers wild. Her lips parted softly: pink petals that revealed a glimmer of tongue just beyond.

  At last, drawing away from my mouth but staying close against my chest, Valeria turned her head to gaze through lightly tousled hair at my former lover. “Were we to share him with one more, I don’t think any of us would be adverse.”

  Branwen tended to keep a perfectly crafted visage, but just then she was difficult to read for other reasons. It seemed she cycled through several emotions, all of them variations on shock. Desire settled there, but all the same, as Odile and Indra moaned softly beneath one another’s caresses, she stood up and cleared her throat.

  “Well! Well, since he and I have such a history, I just don’t want to make anyone jealous. Maybe I’ll go take the first watch.”

  Looking around, then claiming a scimitar fallen from the hand of one of the exterminated bandits, Branwen smiled uneasily, looked nowhere near us, and said, “I’ll be back when I need a bit of rest…I’m certainly wide-awake now!”

  She took up the magical lantern that was said to repel monsters, then, and was gone. While the high elf unbarred the door and hurried out to take her chances with the darkness rather than give into her desire to join us in celebration of our freedom—Branwen from her captors, me from slavery, Valeria from a life of tiring solitude as Roserpine’s mouthpiece—the durrow watched her go and tried not to laugh.

  “All surface elves are alike,” commented Odile, resuming the process of getting Indra out of her tight-fitting leather breeches. “You see in their eyes how eager they are to submit to a free way of living, but they all resist…it’s the fault of your kind, Burningsoul.”

  Laughing Valeria gazed into my face while letting her hand rove back and forth in my lap. “Aye,” she agreed, “well-said. And, since it’s the fault of your kind, Rorke”—my lady shoved me away, giggling cruelly, pushing herself back toward her friends and drawing up her short dress as she did—“you’d ought to go and rid her of these notions that our ways are in any sense profane. As much as she speaks of Anroa, you would think she would prefer to enjoy so much love at once.”

  While Indra and Odile drew Valeria into their arms to kiss her sensually and rid her of her dress, I stuck around until the scrap of fabric was thrown over my head. While the ladies laughed, I chuckled in good humor, tossed it back at them, and rose with a chivalrous ache. “Very well…you ladies celebrate here, and I’ll go see if I can convince Branwen to stay inside with us.”

  It was not many strides before I found her, in truth. In point of fact, the t-juncture where Branwen was poised stood near enough to the door that, as she was being startled by my approach, the edge of Valeria’s husky moan drifted through the door and around the corner of the tunnel. The high elf, who had been lost in thought and pacing about the circumference of the light, whipped around while brandishing her plundered scimitar with dangerous unfamiliarity. The weapon was huge in her delicate hand, and I laughed despite myself. She recognized it was me and grew more at ease, lowering her blade with a scowl.

  “What’s so funny?”

  I stepped forward, catching her trembling hand in mine. “You are,” I told her. “Even after what happened bef
ore, you make me laugh, Branwen…you’re a very brave woman.”

  Rolling her eyes and staring out into the darkness, Branwen permitted to me to extricate the clumsy blade from her hand. “This is a little too big for you, don’t you think? I saw a dagger or two in there….make sure you know which one is suited to you before we move on.”

  While I leaned the scimitar against the wall, the elf regarded me with a somber sort of longing.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be in there with them?”

  “Now, don’t be jealous…I’d rather we were both in there with them, Branwen.” While her arms crossed and her gaze darted away again, I assured her, “I know how it might seem to you—”

  “Really rather odd,” she said tersely, her tone high and mighty. “I know you were a bit of a cad, Burningsoul, but—”

  The picture of innocence, I asked her, “A cad! Me? Whatever have I done to earn such a lowly status in your eyes?”

  At the same time, a fistful of scattered memories blazed through my head. Branwen watching me flirt with the barmaids at alehouses early in our journey, when we were still traveling from location to location trying to find these well-hidden entrances to the Nightlands; that time with the gorgon; defending that working girl in the city of Klexus, which earned particular ire from the high elf because the specimen was another of her species, albeit lowborn. All mankinds have their caste systems, I suppose. I have heard it said that the human race was divided against itself before the existence of all our many brethren in Weltyr’s will. Why that is, I do not know, for all men look to be the same shape and color to me—God-like.

  Can I help that I find this to be especially so with women?

  “You’ve a roving eye,” admonished Branwen, flicking me in the chest while I laughed and caught her small waist in my hands. As she shivered to realize her body was in my grasp—as in so many, still quite recent times—I shifted my embrace and drew her all the more closely against me. She did not pull away, though she still, through heavily lidded eyes, lightly chastised me. “You think you’re Anroa’s gift to all womankinds.”

  “Of course not Branwen…I’m Weltyr’s gift to to himself.”

  While she laughed and rolled her eyes, I was pained by the beauty of the gesture and the strange relief it caused me to follow the rolling of her pupil. I had missed her—her eyes, her pretty face. The elegant arch of her brow trembled with the shutting of her eyes. I bent my head over hers to kiss her, exhaling against the instant renewal of passion made all the hotter by her treachery. In fact, while thinking of her firing that bolt at me—betraying me, admitting she had become a victim to the hateful designs of the god of void and money, Oppenhir—I had to have her more urgently than ever before.

  And, after my time with the durrow, I had learned a thing or two about what some women seemed to enjoy. When Branwen moaned to be pushed back against the wall, I ran my hand down her waist and beneath the pert curve of a backside that was finely accented by the tight hug of her dark green breeches.

  “It’s my duty to mete out justice,” I assured her when at last she drew back from our kiss to catch her breath, her blue eyes locked on mine with tigerish desire. “Most would not let such treachery go unpunished.”

  “One week is too long a period of slavery for you,” she whispered, gasping while I undid the tie of her breeches and pushed them down her slim hips. She made no protest, only going on to say, “I suppose you expect me to bend to your will now that you’ve saved me? That I owe you something?”

  “Of course not, Branwen…it’s all in good fun. But contrition a balm to the soul, don’t you think? Why, the Church of Weltyr is very concerned with mortification of the flesh. The All-Father himself is said to have—”

  Branwen pressed her fingertip to my lips with a hushing noise. “Save it for later, Rorke…I think between this and a spanking, I’d rather have a spanking.”

  Laughing, I fell down upon the protected grounds illuminated by the magic lantern light and dragged Branwen with me. After haphazardly arranging her over my knee, I gripped her by her svelte waist and liberally applied the flat of my hand to her round rear. She squealed right away, squirming and attempting to keep her cries muffled.

  “Rorke—oh, Rorke! You’ve never been so—forceful…”

  “Yes, and I regret that now. Perhaps, had I not been so patient with your petulant behavior, you would have known it was very unwise to betray me…especially in a matter concerning my god, and my relationship with him.”

  “I’m sorry, Rorke! Oh—oh, I really am sorry—ah—!”

  Despite her playful protests, her back arched more with each swat of that wonderful rump. “Perhaps, if we show you a good enough time, you’ll be incentivized not to do it again.”

  “Oh! Oh! Ah—you expect me to—become one of ‘your’ women, do you?”

  “I don’t expect it,” I told her, drawing her upright in my arms to run my free hand down her cool thighs, then back up to the heat between, “but I can’t deny I’d enjoy it. And, at any rate, I belong to my women just as they belong to me…those durrow would take great offense to the thought of it only going one way.”

  She moaned, her thighs splaying, her bosom heaving within the confines of her brown leather bodice. “I can’t believe you and those durrow—oh! Burningsoul…”

  Through the wild curls of her golden hair, Branwen gazed up into me and yielded the honey of her body at the lightest trailing of my fingertips. “I have missed you…”

  “You’ve missed my body,” I corrected her, sighing while she reached between us and half-twisted in my lap to free me from my breeches. “And I’ve missed yours…but I’ve also missed you, Branwen. I hope you’ll realize soon enough that you really did miss me.”

  Though she glanced up at me upon hearing such a thing, the high elf continued the task of freeing my manhood and straddling my lap.

  “I did miss you, Rorke,” Branwen crooned, her face arranged with those heavy eyelids and lustful lips that revealed her secret wanton streak. “Truly, I swear it by Anroa…but I will admit, I missed this big thing, too…”

  While her hand trailed up and down my length, I drew her mouth down to mine and nearly consumed her. She moaned into me, squirming beneath the pressure of my kiss, then proved unable to resist me even to tease us both. She glanced down and carefully fit herself to the tip of my member, her gasp widening her mouth while she eased down the shaft and lit both our bodies with sparks of pleasure.

  “Oh,” she cried softly, “Burningsoul!”

  A sudden spate of moaning from the durrow orgy in the emptied den made me all the harder within Branwen’s familiar core. She gasped, glancing at our point of connection, her hips rippling to the beat of an ecstasy that filled me topfull of desire—and frustration. How had I let her do such a thing to me before? I had to keep her in line this time. Still kissing her, I gripped Branwen’s legs to my body and rose easily with her still mounted upon me.

  The elf gasped, crying out in sheer delight to be pushed against the wall and held there while I buried myself in her. Her soft hands trailed over the muscles of my arms, hardened with the support of her slight frame. She received every hard stroke with greater joy, the pounding that rattled her dainty body causing her face and throat to redden exquisitely in the light of the lantern. Each thrust rippled through the cleavage of the sumptuous globes bursting from their leather confines: I bent my head to kiss her flesh and breathe the sweet aroma of her sweat. While her golden eyebrows knit dynamically above her fluttering eyes, Branwen gazed into my face, moaning to watch the man who took her.

  “I’m so glad you came back,” I told her, my forehead pressing to hers, fire no doubt burning in my eyes for as hot as the embrace of her body made my mind. “Yes, and gladder still that it was the misshapen who found you…had the durrow captured you, you would have been in the heart of El’ryh and made into a slave. You had ought to be grateful, Branwen…by any standard—certainly by the durrow standard—you owe us your life. Y
ou were right before…you’re a slave to all of us, in a way.”

  Her body fluttered around me at the notion, wetter at once. She even moaned, her gaze darting toward the shut door and its den of impromptu pleasure. I bent to kiss the ridge of her pointed ear, my tongue darting out against the sensitive flesh to send goosebumps racing down her neck.

  “Come along with us, Branwen,” I bade her softly, “not just until we reach the surface. Help us win back the Scepter of Weltyr and free your soul of guilt, and in the meantime taste the delights I’ve come to know in just a short span of time. Weltyr has had concubines beyond counting,” I added, lifting my eyebrows while she laughed merrily. The sound was often broken up with little moans of pleasure as I filled her, her thoughts barely able to form.

  “That explains why you’re such an eager goat of a man…oh! No, no, a bull—oh, Rorke, yes, by Anroa, take me, Rorke, harder, harder, please!”

  I braced her back against the stones, the new angle of her pelvis deepening the potential of my thrusts and leaving her speechless. As I worked her rapidly, the delicate elf’s features trembled as though she might cry. Her brow furrowed with a kind of consternation and her eyes rolled up. While her pupils angled toward her brow, nearly crossed, her trembling eyelids and quivering mouth foretold the sudden quake around the dagger I buried in this traitorous wench I nonetheless loved. Branwen moaned my name, her legs tightening about my waist as she climaxed, her brow unfurrowing with the bliss of her body’s crescendo. Yet still she seemed unsatisfied, begging me even as she came, “Rorke! Oh, sweet Anroa, yes, by the goddess, let me be your love-slave! Use me as it pleases you, give me to your other women…I will obey you, if it will earn forgiveness. If it will earn your love back, Rorke.”