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

her head in another mighty laugh, her lips peeling back from teeth that seemed somehow fanglike. “What a thing to say to me, hero! What god sent you? “Weltyr,” you called him?” She thought for but a second, then looked at me with fiendish eyes that glowed in the darkness. I wanted to make love to her then and there, her petulant sneer somehow leaving me all the more eager to feel her body in my arms.

“Yes,” said the barbarous witch, shimmying off her slab and twirling away from me, “I know that god…he was called something different in my time, and something else long before that. Praise be to you, wanderer! It feels so good to move about and stretch…and awful, too.”

Gundrygia doubled over to touch her toes and shake out her hair, her body dancing through her furs: bright white shimmers of light glowing through the ink of night to reveal strange dreams like the shapes of the dwarvish toy sometimes called “a magic lantern.” A funny thing, with moving pictures that often told a story. What a story, Gundrygia’s body!

I tried not to be too distracted…or not to sound as such, at any rate. “What was my Father called before his name was Weltyr?”

“It’s secret, wanderer. Secret as the place to which his other eye flew when he tore it from his own skull in sacrifice.”

“So you do know my god. A sorceress, you called yourself?”

“The very chieftess of all who would call themselves magicians, rest assured.” Her movements, at first stretching, slowly became literal dancing. That body of hers swayed within her primitive garb in what I assumed to be some celebration…or, perhaps, invitation. “But I am not interested in myself just this moment…who are you that awoke me? Rorke Burningsoul, this is your name, but whence hail you?”

“The city of Skythorn is my home,” I answered her, allowing myself to openly appreciate the roving of her hands over her splendid breasts. “And I go now to pursue the Scepter of Weltyr—a precious relic stolen by my old companions, Grimalkin and Hildolfr. My being here is but by the grace of my Lord.”

A smile crossed her face. When I asked her the matter, the sensual woman shook her head and turned her swaying, arching back to me, her hips rolling within the artfully split confines of her furs to show sometimes this leg, sometimes that one, now a bright and beautiful flash of lunar skin that vanished as quickly as it extended. “You are a man of few words, and yet in those words you say very much. Rorke Burningsoul, Rorke, Rorke…”

The words rolled from her in the growl of a big cat, each iteration another ten degrees of temperature in my blood. I almost had to clutch the slab to keep myself seated upon its edge. Around this time, it occurred to me that her dance might not be meaningless after all—neither meant to celebrate, nor seduce, but instead to cast a literal spell. I also realized in that moment that I did not care. I basked in the slide of a hand down the long white column of an arm.

“You are a man of god, Burningsoul. That much is clear.”

“Before anything, I am Weltyr’s son. All other things in the world that are sweet to me—for instance, being private audience to a dancing enchantress—are gifts from my god for performing his will.”

“Enchantress! What a flirt you are…”

While she uttered that high, wild laugh, I my heart raced with delight and dread. Struck with the immense craving to know more about her, I begged, “Whence do you hail, Gundrygia, and how came you to find yourself here?”

“You really did find your way here by accident, eh? I suppose most have forgotten me by now. I’ll find my father—he’ll tell me the time.”

“And where is your father?”

“Across the sea from here,” she told me. “Far away, north of Rhineland.”

Ah! Now that was a country I knew. “That’s where Grimalkin hails! Rhineland—but how is it that you’re here, Gundrygia?”

“I won’t tell you that easily. I’d just as soon not think about it at all.”

The music of her presence was overwhelming to me, and I could not discern what enchantment she had put upon my person. Perhaps it was simply an assurance that my love for her would burn wildly, savagely, from those first moments of our meeting—even once everything was said and done.

“What will it take to get you to tell me?” I asked, still poised upon the edge of the slab and barely containing myself. “A woman like you is the sort that a man has to know everything about.”

As her bright teeth flashed with her laughter, Gundrygia lowered her furs from her shoulders and let them gather at her bare feet. “Then fight me for it, warrior…let’s wrestle awhile and see who pins whom.”

Exhaling, I considered her nude state and the shining glory of her exposed body, the high globes of her swollen breasts round like the wonderful flesh of her backside. The dark thicket upon the delta of her womanhood drew my eye as I said, “To wrestle a woman is a different matter entirely. I might upset you if I prove too rough.”

The arrowhead tattooed upon her chin and lower lip produced the effect of a constant pout that was, in that moment, accentuated by a real one. Her hands ran back up her waist and over her breasts again, the lovely pink peaks of her nipples stiff with my attention. “You think you’d need to take it easy on me, do you? I assure you, Paladin, I’m a worthier foe than all that.”

“If you are to prove a worthier foe than I would suppose without the assistance of your magic, then I would demand worthier prizes. What is the name of your father?”

“That fee is simpler, because his name will mean so little to you…I’ll give it for another kiss, Paladin.”

Somehow, I still found myself frozen beneath the fixating power of her