Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  Instead all I heard was the moan that followed it, so sensual it were as though I had caressed her. Her wild eyes all the more ablaze, the witch threw her arms around my neck and pressed her lips to mine in a savage kiss.

  She smelled like lavender and honey. Like the hands of the pretty and kind older girls who worked in the kitchens at the Temple; who told beautiful fairy tales and sang funny songs when the priests weren’t around to chide them for it. But she also smelled like a woman—rich and acrid, somehow chalky. Cruel. I can’t explain it.

  She was wise, and she whispered to me profane magical secrets.

  She knows things, Gundrygia.

  She frightened me. In my fright, like a captive animal, I sought to annihilate her body with mine. And all the while she moaned and laughed, and whispered to me things that made my heart race. She told me some strange and horrific truth. With my body inside hers, Gundrygia told me things I had never known. All the secrets of the world. All the answers to all the things I could possibly ask.

  And why, friend, do I not repeat them here, now, at this very moment?

  Because I did not remember them once she released me from her embrace.

  That was the most terrifying revelation of all. On later inspection, I remembered plunging into the forest after her, and finding her in that clearing. I remembered the early snippets of our conversation as I have related them to you. But as I try to picture the hours when our clothes were off and we rutted like animals in the wild of that strange magical artifice, Gundrygia screaming with ecstasy in my embrace, the memory becomes fragmented somehow.

  That was why it was like a dream, I suppose. In dreams, we are given so much information that we forget all of it, or nearly all of it, unless we are trained or interested in such matters as the recollection of dreams. In the space Gundrygia created for us to be together, I sank into a pool of hedonistic bliss and was given a crystal clear look into the absolute nature of reality: and because I was so unready for the experience of that absolute nature, because I took to trembling in her arms as her secret-whispering went on and on, my mind did not, could not, would not retain it.

  To describe the time as entirely missing, or my state as a black-out one, would be to refuse responsibility for my poor decision early on in the experience as much as it would be an inaccurate picture of how I continue to perceive the event in my memory. When Weltyr’s most sentimental servant comes to sit upon my heart, I recall that first time with Gundrygia not as a gap in my consciousness, but as a chill.

  I, Rorke Burningsoul, Paladin of Weltyr, am chilled.

  And that is why I will end this event’s account here.

  WELCOME TO SKYTHORN

  GUNDRYGIA HAD HER way with me and took my seed, and when the trauma of her secret-telling passed over me, she said, “Don’t worry, Rorke, don’t worry—you’ll leave this place and you won’t recall a thing.”

  As I have already told you, that is not quite true. After all! I remembered her telling me that. But it was true in a wildly important sense, and when I suddenly found myself with the horse’s reins in my hand and dawn creeping across the valley, I remembered two things only: the immense, feral pleasure of the witch’s embrace, and the shame I felt at having struck her.

  I resolved to be a better man. After looking around to find I stood as though having just stepped from a small grove of trees—one into which I could not possibly have chased Indra, might I add—I knelt to pray.

  There are many prayers to Weltyr, some involving the use of his runes. I prayed only for his forgiveness, along with the strength to be a better man in my dealings with my fellow creatures in the world.

  It was not just having struck Gundrygia that distressed me about myself. It was what I had done to the bandits—the bandits, whom all throughout these pages I ought to have been calling “the kin of Adonisius.” I was not an executioner or inquisitor. It was not my place to slay for just any reason. For all I knew, one of the misshapen in that den was not a worshiper of not Roserpine, but Weltyr. Unlikely, I know, but who was to say?

  Above my head, a croaking caught my attention. Drawn from prayer, I looked up. A great raven sat high in the cedar above me, its black feathers bristled widely and its black eye fixed on me.

  Very strangely, I wept a little. Perhaps it was my introspection, or an aftereffect of whatever Gundrygia had done to me. I finished up my prayers and, once the raven flew off in the direction of Soot, mounted the horse to follow. Through the hills and dales of the valley, we traveled together from the edge of the mountain and into the heart of the town.

  People gasped in delight and waved at me while in the middle of setting up their market stalls or walking their children to Soot’s small village temple. I waved back, thinking only that they were being quite pleasant. Then, feeling similarly pleasant after whatever had transpired between myself and Gundrygia—no matter how eerie I sensed it all had been—I put the horse back in the stables among his comrades, strolled merrily into the front door of the inn’s tavern, and was almost startled into drawing Strife by Lively’s delighted cry across the room.

  “Oh! Burningsoul, welcome back!” Wiping her hands and hurrying to me, Lively enthused, “I just fetched your ladies their breakfasts and it seems like they’re all awake. Oh, they’ll be glad to see you! Been a lot of long faces up in those rooms.”

  “Is that so?”

  In a hushed, conspiratorial tone, Lively covered the side of her mouth with one hand and leaned into me. “Oh aye, well, can’t rightly say I blame ‘em. Six days is an awful long time to wait for word for any friend, let alone one’s as close as you lot seem to be.”

  Six days!

  The words passed over me in a great shock that had only just begun to settle when Lively asked, “So, d’ja find it?”

  “What’s that, Lively?”

  “Whatever that thingie is you’re lookin’ for…oh, what was it”—on the other side of the tavern, in the hallway poised above the bar, Branwen stepped out of the room at the end of the hall; her face widened in shock and relief and a strong hint of anger before she dashed toward the stairs—“some kind of, um, oh, a staff, or a—”

  “Scepter,” I told Lively absently, my gaze following Branwen and my body turning toward her as she charged down the stairs.

  Without saying a word, the high elf threw herself into my arms. Her face pressed against my shoulder and, with a shaky inhalation, she tried not to cry while I held her close to me.

  Moved and a little flustered at the sight, Lively looked between the two of us with a motherly smile and said to me, “Just let us know if you need anything while you’re settling back in.”

  “I will, of course. Thank you so much.”

  While Lively walked off, Branwen looked up at me through red-rimmed eyes and hissed, “We thought you were dead.”

  “At moments it felt like I might have been…I think I need to talk to you four.”

  “Yes, you certainly do. Oh! You’re so lucky Valeria is—Valeria.” I realized with an odd jolt that Branwen had now spent about as much time with the durrow as I had—more, strictly speaking, with Indra and Odile. “We were talking about going to try to find the scepter without you, but Valeria convinced us to wait. Well—she convinced us to put it to a vote, at least.”

  “And which way did you vote?”

  With a pouty look and a roll of her eyes, Branwen didn’t answer. She just grabbed my hand and said, “Come on, Rorke—oh! Rorke. I’m glad you’re here. I’m really—so glad you’re here.”

  To my astonishment, Branwen said such a thing and I actually believed it. After all…she was still there. With me thought dead by my companions and the town at large under the impression that I was simply out on an errand to another location—either to save a murder investigation or protect their rights to the other horses—Branwen had absolutely nothing binding her to the durrow. If she really wanted to slip free and go her own way, she would have done it while I was gone.

  Yet, she did not
. She remained, and I felt happy relief to know that her heart was a great deal more stalwart than her business sense tempted it to be. Regardless of whether her staying on was due to latent guilt, (I had, after all, disappeared when she and I had just had something of a row and she had refused to come horseback riding with us), she had stayed on, and the durrow had, too.

  Pushing open the door to the room on the end of the hall, Branwen called inside with a grin she couldn’t banish, “Okay—I have great news. But don’t scream.”

  From within the room, Odile brusquely asked, “What,” while a chair screeched across the floor. Branwen pushed open the door and I found Valeria had already risen to her feet, her face expectant, her garb—surprising.

  The embroidered square neckline of her white blouse crisp against her dark skin, Valeria stood before me in a loose bodice and a skirt that was, for her, something close to chaste. She had modified the long blue garment so that it was no longer quite so long and now was cut closer to the cloth of her priestess’s garb, but modest enough that she could fit in a little better among the denizens of the surface world.

  “I knew it,” she whispered. The Materna dashed across the floor to touch my face, then my hands, a literal sigh of relief heaving from her bosom on contact. “Rorke, Rorke—I knew you would be back.”

  “Well,” said Odile, tossing down the cards in her hand and leaning forward. “This sure is a surprise! All right, I know when to admit I was wrong—”

  Indra, too, bore features wide with delight while slapping her friend on the arm. “I told you,” she bragged in spite of her friend’s attempt to respectfully eat crow, as the saying goes. “Yes! I told you, Odile! There was no way anything could have happened to Rorke. He’s much too great a warrior.”

  I hardly had time to be flattered before Valeria drew me down into an intense kiss, her tongue lashing mine. Groaning at the taste of her love, I chuckled as I lifted my head for a breath.

  “I’ll have to be abducted by strange witches more often,” I said, earning a laugh from Odile and surprised looks from the others.

  The rogues and druid, I noticed, were also dressed in fresh clothes—and, notably, a pair of goggles were poised atop Odile’s head. She adjusted them slightly while leaning forward, asking, “What’s this about witches? Do tell.”

  Indra’s eyes had widened with shock. Sitting up all the straighter, she asked, “Is this like that woman you found? The one in the mountainside?”

  “The very same,” I told them, removing Strife’s scabbard from my belt and sitting upon the edge of the bed. “Let me tell you some things that happened…”

  Starting with the gimlet who stole my torch, I related to all my companions as fully as I could the neglected story of Gundrygia and her awakening. The women listened with intense interest and varying degrees of concern. Odile, for instance, took the story like a man listening to his friend relate a conquest. Indra looked concerned, then vaguely guilty when I mentioned her disappearance into the trees—though I impressed upon them all that this had been caused by Gundrygia, and not by some mistake of Indra’s.

  Of them all, Valeria and Branwen appeared the most concerned. In her usual fashion, Valeria did not mind my extracurricular excursions but, seated beside me upon the edge of the bed, focused on that element that also troubled me: “You remember nothing after making love to her?”

  “It would be wrong to say I don’t remember anything…but I don’t remember all or even most of what was done and discussed. I remember asking her many questions, and—I do remember her answering me, but…ah!” Irritated, I rubbed my forehead and assured them, “I’ve been rolling it around in my mind all the way back to The Weeping Willow. I can remember the questions I would have asked—questions I’m sure I did ask—but for the life of me I have no concrete memory of asking them, nor of the witch’s responses.”

  “Not even this information she claimed to have about your birthright?” Branwen asked this from the window where she stood, her arms folded and her countenance grave.

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe she was some kind of hidden person.”

  My brow arched. “Some kind of what?”

  “You really are a city boy, aren’t you…you know. The good neighbors. “Faeries,” they call them sometimes in the common tongue around here. Watch this—if we ask Lively about local faerie legends, we’ll probably hear something interesting.”

  While Branwen stuck her head from the room to call for the manager, Odile said, “Sounds like you didn’t have it so bad, Paladin. You got us worried…we thought we were going to have to cut and run to avoid paying for a dead horse.”

  “Glad you were worried about me as well as money, Odile…what are those goggles, though?”

  “Oh, these? Indra and I just can’t keep sleeping during the bloom—er, the day, so I asked Erdwud to go down to the forgemaster here and sell a couple of old welding goggles. He only had two to part with, though, so Madame here keeps one and Indra and I trade off with the other.”

  Indra nodded, having listened to all this quite guiltily and saying with a look down at her hands, “Not that I’ve been able to sleep anyway. I’m so sorry, Rorke! I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right, Indra. Whatever happened, it’s true that I feel I had…mostly a good time. I think.”

  Still looking grim as Indra was, I crossed to her side and knelt to take her hand. Holding it between both of mine, I looked into her somewhat surprised, certainly flushed face and told her warmly, “Did you work on your riding while I was gone?”

  Snapped a bit from her malaise, Indra earnestly told me, “Well—yes, of course we did.”

  “One of the other reasons for the goggles,” said Odile. The high elf re-entered the room just in time for the elder rogue to continue, “Branwen taught us.”

  “Did she!” Pleased, I smiled at the moody druid and got a roll of her eyes along with a spate of deep blushing.

  “Well! Someone was going to have to do it if we ever had a prayer of leaving Soot…looking around for you was good practice.”

  While I stood, Lively knocked upon the door and let herself in. Her eyes bright, her hair up in a blonde ponytail that bobbed as she looked around, the inn’s manager said, “Don’t we all seem in better spirits already! You needed something, dearies?”

  “Actually, yes.” Glancing at me, Branwen gestured and said, “While traveling, Rorke heard something about some kind of faerie legends around Soot. We were just wondering if you knew anything about them.”

  “Oh, aye! You lot certainly are adventurers, aren’t you…well”—waving her hand, looking pleased for a few seconds away from her work, Lively looked almost conspiratorially at Branwen—“people say it’s bad fortune to be talkin’ about the hillfolk without their explicit permission, but I don’t go in for all that, so I’ll run me mouth a bit. It’s all about them gimlets, see, up in the mountains.”

  Everyone in the room was now fully interested, with even Odile turning eyes toward Lively and her story.

  “I’ve told you all about the little buggers, always causin’ us problems. Well, I think it’s said they used to have a queen? I don’t know, there are different versions to these things all the time…she was either the creator of the race, or a human woman who eventually became their queen after she was spirited away to serve the gimlet colony. At any rate, all kinds of different people have seen them with her over the years. They say she sleeps long hours—whole seasons, depending on who you ask—and that people who go missing in the hills are taken by her.”

  Thumb worrying against the edge of her lip, Branwen asked, “Why does she take people in these stories?”

  “Oh, who knows! All kinds of reasons. Fools that go lookin’ at her, I think. That’s the most popular one, anyway, but I’ve heard causes range from simple trespassing to accidentally waking her up.” While I mulled this over, Lively said with a light laugh, “I don’t know if it’s worth you lot taking your valuable time to look for her,
but if you were to relieve our gimlet problem a bit, I’m sure no one would complain.”

  “We’ll keep it in mind,” said Valeria with a polite smile. “Thank you, Lively.”

  “You’re all welcome. Let me go finish that breakfast for you…I’m sure you’re famished after your long trip home.”

  With the door again between us and Lively, I told my companions, “It’s true I woke her up when I found her on the mountainside, but that was also when she told me one or two things I do remember. She told me she came from north of Rhineland, and that her father is named—Clinschor, I think.”

  “Interesting.” Folding her arms, Branwen asked, “Could she have been making it up? Faeries do that sort of thing all the time.”

  “I don’t know…aren’t faeries supposed to be small and winged?”

  “No,” Branwen answered, “those are pixies—crude little pests, tiny goblins with wings. Faeries could pass as human, or something close to it…they don’t care for human cities, but they mingle freely with elves and otherwise live in their own pocket dimensions parallel to Urde. Just like the place where Gundrygia lured you.”

  Given how similar the two experiences were, I found myself wondering if perhaps there wasn’t some truth in this suggestion—yet I thought back to Gundrygia’s answers to my questions and decided after a moment of contemplation, “Whatever she be, faefolk or human witch, I believe what she said about not being from around here. As to what all this means, and how she should know anything of me, I can’t say. Do faeries tend to possess powers of telepathy, Branwen?”

  The elf shook her head. “Not specifically that I know of, though they keep many secrets. And it’s hard to say, too, what a faerie would be doing consorting with gimlets.”

  “Maybe they found her there and thought she was some kind of goddess,” I suggested, still feeling this, too, was wrong. Nevertheless, I persisted. “Whatever the case may be, Gundrygia certainly seemed to have confident control over them. Never once did they buck a command or show anything but eagerness in pleasing her, and of course there were all those offerings they had arranged upon her burial mound.”