Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  “It’s her child, too,” I reminded them both, kissing the back of Valeria’s hand and straightening back. While I sat up, a lad with short chestnut hair passed us by. I lowered my voice, at once keenly aware of the other passengers around. “And she’s mad…but I don’t know that she’s mad enough to hurt her own child. Either way, when next we find her she’ll be ready to fight us again. I want to make sure I’m ready for that…and, if that could wait until after she’s given birth, moreso the better. I don’t like the thought of things turning ugly.”

  The women exchanged a glance before Valeria, that gentle ambassador of love, asked me in her rich and wonderful voice, “Have you given much thought to fatherhood, Rorke?”

  “Only insofar as I find myself frightened by it,” I admitted, laughing, “and the question of how I can be what I have never experienced.”

  “We durrow have no fathers,” boasted Valeria with a patient smile, “and we manage all the same to be perfectly fine parents to our daughters.”

  “Yes, but you at least had mothers. I have no parents except the Church—and now I wonder if I have been regarded as warmly in turn. I don’t think so, sadly. But…it doesn’t matter.”

  Again, I lapsed into silence, more given to brooding when I was exhausted. Certainly I was in need of time to fully digest the events of the day, from my acquisition of Exigence on.

  Valeria, however, went on. “And if things do come to their worst, Rorke—if you must slay Gundrygia and raise the child without its mother—who will help you?”

  I was reluctantly to voice my hopes out loud and hoped the answer showed in my face, but they waited to hear it aloud. I gave it after slight delay, confessing, “Well—if you two find yourselves with me then, I would hope, perhaps—that is—I don’t—”

  Both women threw back their heads in spates of laughter, sharing a look and rolling their eyes in good humor.

  “So bold in matters of sex,” teased Valeria softly, her cheeks attractively flushed by her mirth, “yet so shy in love.”

  “I would not be so shy,” I told her in return, staring into her pale eyes in some lovestruck wonder, “if I did not feel it impetuous for me to assume you were willing to leave your duties for me, Materna.”

  “Haven’t I already?”

  I opened my mouth, unable to come up with anything resembling a real response, and soon enough shut up again. Smiling, Valeria patted me. She then rose from her seat and announced, “I’m off to find Indra and Odile…aren’t you two just famished! Come meet me in that commissary they pointed out to us while we were boarding.”

  Valeria slipped past Branwen and sauntered up the aisle. The high elf filled her empty seat at my side. Hand sliding into mine, Branwen asked, “What are you going to do with that sword?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Keep it safe. Gundrygia seemed to think it has some power—what, exactly, I’ve no idea.” While Branwen lapsed into thought, my hand tightened around hers. She looked up at me questioningly until I observed warmly, “You came with us.”

  “I came with you,” she corrected, pressing against me. Branwen’s soft body always able to cause a stir in me, I slid my arm around the small of her back and filled my senses with her marvelous flesh. My head bent over hers as she said, “I’m very fond of Valeria and Indra and Odile after all this, but it’s you…you’re the one I’m here with.”

  My mouth sought out hers and she moaned against me, her tongue trailing out to invite the caress of my own. Breaths mingling humidly between us, Branwen’s body slid against mine and her hand explored my chest.

  “Maybe we’d ought to wait,” I breathed into her sensitive ear, kissing it to its high-swept peak. “At least until it’s dark…until we won’t get caught.”

  With a chuckle and a randy, crooked grin, Branwen extricated herself from my clutches. “Then I’m going to get something to eat…Valeria’s right. I’m starving!”

  I laughed slightly, watching her go with what I’m sure was a certain twinkle in my eye. Ah, Branwen!

  What a relief to be on good terms with her again—to have finally, fully forgiven her in my heart. Receiving the Scepter—receiving Exigence—had cured me of any remaining ill will I bore her. Now I understood that her betrayal, like all the misfortunes that had befallen me in my life, was part of a very concrete plan that Weltyr had for me. It was not uncommon for even largely secular folk to talk of Weltyr’s plan in a general sense, a notion that was expressed often to comfort someone amid grief or another setback.

  But now I understood that it was, so far as I could tell, a tangible reality. Weltyr’s plan was not some far-flung abstract. The plan was reality: I was living Weltyr’s plan, an expression of his will, and my reclamation of the Scepter had been part of that.

  Surely, then, the child conceived by myself and Gundrygia was also part of that.

  What was this Wotsung line of which I was a part? What was it that the witch treasured in my seed, and why was it that Weltyr had blessed her, of all the women I had come to love in the past weeks, with the implantation of my first progeny?

  Then again…had she received the first? While on my way to the commissary, I passed a pair of parents who smiled as their young daughter nicely entertained her upset brother. The mother, it appeared, was already with child again, and rested a light hand upon her stomach. Children could come quickly enough in concert when it was one woman, but when a man distributed his passion between multiple receptive females, well…suddenly a certain notion presented itself to me, making tangible what was once a distant abstract. It seemed somehow impossible that I should be a father; therefore, the very likely possibility that I had succeeded in inseminating a few of Valeria’s durrow friends had not meant anything much to me in the Nightlands. It had just not seemed real.

  Now, not just aboveground but flying over it, I knew I had engendered life. My own body had succeeded in passing on some parcel of myself that now grew elsewhere—and, perhaps, not just in Gundrygia.

  Not just, either, in Valeria’s friends.

  Valeria, Branwen, Indra and Odile all sat talking softly in the commissary when I found them crowded around a small table directly near the entrance.

  “And here’s the lucky man,” said Odile, drawing an empty seat from the table adjacent to them and scooting her own over to give me room. “We were just talking about you.”

  I laughed, sliding into the offered seat. “Good things, I hope.”

  “Only that you don’t know how lucky you have it…some kid was staring at us just now, but he went on through to another compartment.”

  “If I were a stranger to this table, I have to admit I’d be inclined to stare, too.”

  The women giggled brightly around me, a choir of angels. Beneath the table, Branwen’s boot slid against mine. Clouds and blue sky rolled merrily past the window behind us. Soon enough, a porter came by with the order the women had made.

  After, bellies full, we returned to our seats and promptly fell asleep sitting up. Valeria leaned against me, mouth slack, and Branwen against her; in the row ahead of us, Indra and Odile drooled against each other between snores.

  I was the last to fall comfortably asleep.

  IF IT’S NOT ONE THING

  VALERIA SHOOK ME awake gently, though when the task proved difficult her motion grew more vigorous. I was amazed to open my eyes only to find the cabin dark and the world outside much the same. Five hours must have passed; maybe more. Blinking through my heady stupor, I asked her to repeat herself and this time had better success at understanding what she’d just said into my ear.

  “Branwen’s just gone to wait for you in the cargo hold,” she whispered, her voice a sultry tone that fired my loins and made me yearn for her greater closeness. “I told her I’d wake you up for her.”

  “You should come, too.”

  Laughing softly, Valeria slapped me on the arm. Her velvet lips nuzzling against the ridge of my ear, she told me, “Maybe if you think there’s enough room, I’l
l come next time…for now, I’ll let you two take the risk of getting thrown off the airship.”

  “They’ll wait until our next landing,” I assured her with a doggish smile, leaning in to exchange a lingering kiss before sliding up from my seat. “Which way is it, now?”

  Soon I moved stealthily down the aisles of the Swan, past the other, more soundly sleeping passengers. Valeria had directed me to go to the back of the economy compartment and several hallways beyond. Avoiding the porters by hiding momentarily in a latrine, I just barely managed to sneak through to the baggage area where Branwen awaited me.

  There, in the dark, my voice a whisper, I called, “Hello?”

  “Here,” sang Branwen, her pale body reflecting the moonlight pouring through the porthole of a door in the compartment. My desire for her flamed in an instant, though I was still barely awake after such deep and necessary sleep. I would, however, defy any man to look at Branwen’s nude body on the offering beneath the moonlight and remain the least bit tired. Her stiff pink nipples and small tuft of gold pubic curls were the only interruptions in the milky flesh that stretched upon a bed she’d made of her clothes and cloak. With these beneath her, outstretched upon a few of the crates the Swan was due to transport, she was a veritable Anroa of the Airship. I would have done anything to see her rendered in fresco just then: a portrait to forever seal into the wall of my heart.

  Seeing me, her thighs spread slowly open. The display of her body thrilling me, I stripped off my tunic and made quick work of my breeches before enfolding her in my arms. Out mouths connected in the dark, breaths melding while our tongues resumed the interrupted caresses of before. Her hands trailed over my chest and down my stomach once again, this time gripping the staff of passion that ran through me like an all-encompassing fire. I filled my palms with the soft flesh of her breasts, my kisses trailing to her ear and then down over her nipples while she writhed beneath my caresses.

  “Oh, Rorke”—her tone of lust was already so desirous that I could only imagine how she had spent the time awaiting me—“yes, oh, please, take me as a reward for your task well-done…oh, Rorke, you saved that girl, and saved us, too, Rorke—oh!”

  My head found its way between thighs that tightened amid the rapid lashes of my tongue. Shuddering, moaning, Branwen ground herself against my lips and cupped her breasts in her hands, teasing her nipples while watching me between her legs.

  “Yes! Yes, please, Rorke, please—oh, sweet Anroa, I need your cock, Rorke! Fill me with your seed…oh, Rorke!”

  Biting her plentiful lower lip with the tips of her white teeth, Branwen wriggled about beneath me and begged, “Give me a baby, Rorke, oh, please, please? I’ll carry your child, Rorke, I’ll gladly bear your heirs!”

  Unwilling or unable to tell her that I suspected she might already be in for just such a task, I stood upright and drew her to the edge of her makeshift bed. Arranging myself between her splayed legs, I bent to press my mouth to hers.

  Something fell in the darkness of the baggage compartment.

  “What’s that,” she cried, throwing her hands over herself while I straightened up.

  That same something moved quickly, scrambling from one end of the cargo hold to the other. However quick it was, I was far quicker. Branwen scrambled upright while, stark naked, I held no compunctions about dashing after the spy and catching hold of them. The interloper of our lovemaking cried out, their head lowering while Branwen said a magic word. The car filled with her faerie light, the golden high elf equivalent of the durrow’s blue wisp flames. While this magical fire flickered in the center of the car, my vision cleared to find I grasped the spying young man from before in my hands—his head was low, but it was undeniably the same head of hair I’d seen receding down the aisle.

  Relieved it was not a porter or someone worse, I nonetheless scoffed as I asked, “Like sneaking about, do you?”

  “Let me go,” protested the lad, his voice high and somehow familiar while he struggled to yank his arm from my grip. “Let me—”

  An explosion whistled through the air. The airship rocked violently and the intruder tumbled against me. Our eyes locked.

  Just as I recognized Elishta-bet, her hair cut short and her soft Temple garments exchanged for a boyish wardrobe to hide her identity, someone a few compartments back from us screamed, “Pirates!”

  Branwen sighed and bent for her clothes.

  “Guess we’d better get dressed,” she said. “See that sword of yours anywhere around here, Rorke?”

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  Thank you so much for reading, my friend! Do you want to see more Burningsoul? Be sure to leave a review! When Book I hits 50 reviews, I’ll be able to release Book III in confidence readers will love it! And don’t forget to join my mailing list so you can know when it’s on the way.

  IN THE NEXT VOLUME OF

  THE BURNINGSOUL SAGA

  Since Rorke Burningsoul has escaped the Nightlands, his life has been adventure without rest. Why should he be surprised, therefore, when the airship set to whisk him and his four lovely companions to Rhineland is boarded by the all-female pirate crew of the legendary ship, The Flying Rhinemaid? There’s no such thing as a cruise in the world of Urde—there’s only peril, and the will to overcome it. As the chaos in the air takes turns no one could expect and certain shattering truths come to light, Rorke must struggle to stay focused on the task of reclaiming the Ring of Roserpine…especially when he’s instead confronted by the constant temptation to seek out Gundrygia, the wild witch who is pregnant with his child.

  Who can tell the best way to move forward? There is so much that the last of the Wotsungs does not know: about himself, about his heritage, about the world where he lives. Even about the women that he loves. Only one person seems willing to enlighten Wanderer Rorke Burningsoul without playing coy games.

  And it just so happens that this person looks identical to him.

  JOIN REGINA’S MAILING LIST TO LEARN WHEN BOOK III IS ON THE WAY!

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  (Coming April 30th, 2021!)

  This modern mash-up of LOLITA and DANGEROUS LIAISONS is for any reader looking for a fresh take on the Marquis de Sade. Libertine abortionist Dr. Hammond Harteveldt bears a charmed life, though most might not feel that way. After all, his former brother-in-law was recently found dead in his prison cell while awaiting charges related to some very sordid sex crimes, and the retired widower has subsequently come into custody of his deeply troubled goddaughter… CLICK HERE! >>

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Regina Watts loves writing torrid smut, transgressive fiction, horror, fantasy, and w
hatever else comes to mind. Check her out on twitter @WritesWatts, at her own website, or follow Painted Blind Publishing’s website for more information about her work. If you’re enjoying the series, don’t be shy about leaving a 5-star Amazon review. A special thanks to the Harem Lit Facebook Group for letting her advertise!

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Painted Blue Publishing is an imprint of Painted Blind Publishing, a publishing house devoted to bringing you the finest in psychedelic literature. We here at PBP firmly believe there are many routes to consciousness expansion, and sex is one of them. It is our pleasure to produce works that challenge the American preconception equating literary erotica with pornography by default, but if you would like to see more from Regina Watts with a less erotic emphasis, we would encourage you to check out the works of M. F. Sullivan, Painted Blind Publishing’s flagship author and devoted editor of Ms. Watts.