Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

Valeria, eyes full of tears, stood with one hand over her mouth and her face turned toward the stars.

“I can’t see them,” she whispered, laughing, blinking, the soft white plumes of her hair blowing wild in the night breeze of that cold mountainside.

“What’s that, Valeria?”

I placed my hand on her shoulder and she laughed all the harder. She shut her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks, and flung her trembling body into my arms. While I pressed her to my heart, she gasped out, “The stars, Rorke—I’ve waited so long to see them, and now after all this time I can’t see them because I’m crying too much.”

I laughed very gently, my hand keeping her fragrant head against the throbbing rhythm of my heart. “There we are, my queen, good Materna of Roserpine—there are your stars, Valeria. They’ll be there still when your tears have dried, I promise.”

“Not if I cry all dark.” Laughing, Valeria wiped a finger beneath her eye. Then, clasping my hands, she gazed up at the sky and smiled to herself in awe.

Indra managed the same feat without weeping—though, to my great surprise, the same was not true of Odile. The seasoned rogue glanced up at the stars, stared for a handful of seconds, then turned her face away, to the base of the mountain, with a guarded sweep of her hand over the curve of her cheek.

I pitied her immensely just then. She had told me once of the terror of her colony’s extermination at the hands of the Order of Weltyr…the very same protectors of the Temple who raised me, and the establishment of knights I was on this journey to join. Just to think of them, the odious dream-vision from our stay in the den returned to me again.

You are being lied to, Eradicator.

The voice pulsed in my brain, once more taking the same paths intuition took within my consciousness. I gritted my teeth and let my heart fill with a prayer to Weltyr—an expression of my gratitude to be led out of the dark terrors of the Nightlands. To show my thanks to the watchful god, I looked around the world he made and took in everything I could.

Adjusted as my eyes were by then to the darkness of the subterranean Nightlands, I had little difficulty making out the state of the terrain around us. Not beneath that densely starry sky. If I had to hazard a guess, this entrance was one utilized by travelers and merchants from the town Adonisius had called Soot. This village’s soft lamps glowed through the night in the distance to the north, natural gold rather than the blue wisps that hovered about the durrow to keep them warm.

Valeria’s own floating faerie light had dropped near her feet so she might see the sky without its interference. The tips of her fingers resting upon the edge of her lower lip, her eyes trailed wildly over the sky. She marveled, “There are so many more colors than I was told…bursts of purple and blue and red…and so many stars!”

“They have names…some of them make pictures or even stories. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any of them. Oh! Well—wait, that fellow there, do you see those three? That’s Urio, the hunter. He’s supposed to be fighting a bull somewhere around here…who knows where that is.”

While Valeria laughed along with my poor description, I smiled over at Branwen. The high elf, looking quite relieved, herself, looked away from the stars that had been helping her get her bearings.

Her attention caught, I asked, “Could you show our friends a few basic constellations, Branwen? Help them orient themselves?”

“Oh,” she said, pleasantly surprised and somehow pleased to have been called upon to teach the durrow anything at all. “Well, sure—first, you find the North Star…”

As she pointed up and the dark elves gathered around her to follow her explanation, I looked around the area. Trees were not abundant at this altitude, but they were around, and a small cluster of pines marked the curve of a workable path down the edge of the mountain. How long it would take that path trod by merchants and wanderers to develop into more harrowing terrain, I was not sure. I thought it good to explore the issue somewhat.

Though I was concerned the fallen branch I collected from the base of that micro-grove was perhaps too damp to serve as a torch, the magical light of Valeria’s fire took to it generously. While the torch burned in my hand, I told the companions who paused mid-lecture, “I’m going to go down a ways and see if the path holds up. If it looks bad, I’ll come back—if it’s fine, I’ll call up.”

“You should let someone come with you,” Branwen told me, looking ready to volunteer. I shook my head, gesturing with the torch toward the tunnel.

“Even with the wisp lights, it’s too cold for us to be standing around unprotected unless we’re going to be on the way from one place to another. Stay by the mouth of the cave and let me determine whether it’s safe.”

Valeria touched my hand. “Be careful, Rorke.”

After a returned squeeze of her soft knuckles, I made my way down the side of the mountain with my blue torch lifted high.

My first note was that the path from the mountainside cave was well-trod, indeed. In fact, the more I thought on it, the more I found it odd that an entrance so treacherous and so far from the city of El’ryh would be a popular means of merchants bringing wares into the Nightlands. With all the cliffs we had been forced to scale, or all the claustrophobic passages through which Adonisius navigated us, how could a merchant burdened by goods possibly make their way to the city by such a route?

I tried to imagine doing it with just that burden Odile and Indra had forced me to haul from the spirit-thieves’ so-called