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

“Strange dreams,” I confessed to her. “Tonight was the first night in some time that I have slept well and not been plagued by a disturbing vision of one sort or another. First upon waking once Al-listux escaped, then while we slept in the bandit’s den.”

“Perhaps that was the fault of the Nightlands…it must be disruptive to your mind to have the cycle of glorious sunlight taken from you. Oh! Burningsoul, even with the curtains filtering it, it’s so bright…how can you stand it?”

“Just made for it,” I told her, my hand trailing over her cheek. “I want to find a solution for your eyes…maybe when I go bother that smith again—ah!”

The dregs of sleep drifted away to leave, with sharp clarity, all the memories of yesterday. I sat up slightly, telling Valeria, “Hildolfr—he paid for a suit of armor for me.”

Her lips parted in confusion, Valeria had to actively parse my words before understanding them. “The old man? But why would he do that after leaving you for dead?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t understand it. It seems like some gesture…of what, I’m just not sure.”

Invoking Hildolfr so suddenly brought to mind the first strange dream—one I had nearly forgotten in all the hustle of our journey out of the Nightlands. Hildolfr fishing by a stream; the nightmarish eight-legged stallion rearing to reveal its writhing mess of legs.

Wait, a stream? No—no, it had been much wider and more dramatic than a stream. That much was clear in my memory. Not a stream, then. A river. What river, I wondered?

I glanced at Valeria, who was far more expert in these matters than I. “How do you tell a precognitive dream from a vision—for that matter, from a regular dream?”

“All dreams have the capacity for certain degrees of prescience,” she explained thoughtfully. “I do not know whether that is because they are derived from the gods or because, having seen the symbol in sleep, our minds seek it out in waking life. So far as prescient dreams heralding actual events are concerned, they are often very vivid, but ultimately the cruel joke is that it is impossible to tell a prescient dream from a more common one until the event in question.”

“Naturally…” Sighing, I shook my head and told her, “These matters are cryptic to me. The Church of Weltyr teaches that every dream sign contains messages from the All-Father, but I admit they are not always the clearest to me. The priests at the Temple do more interpretation than any other duty.”

“Few durrow are as in-touch with the contents of their dreams,” Valeria confessed. “Perhaps if they were the Nightlands would be at greater peace with aboveground societies.”

“Perhaps…but the same could be said of us up here. I can’t speak of elves, but most humans don’t think twice about the contents of their dreams. The only reason why the priests have a pool of so many people coming to request their interpretations is because there are so many people, worshipers of Weltyr especially, living in Skythorn. Ah…”

My hand slid over her arm and my gaze drifted toward the covered window, where the supple golden glow of evening light eased through the curtains to enchant the room. “I am not eager to return there empty-handed, Valeria…if we are to ask the priests to divine the location of the ring for us, they’re going to want to know why I am pursuing an artifact unrelated to Weltyr and the task for which they sent me from the city in the first place.”

“But with the ring we could surely reach the scepter with greater ease. It increases my perceptive abilities and grants me many magical powers I do not have otherwise. Without it, I’m precious more than a healer. With it, I can do far more.”

Yes, perhaps that was true—but I still could not shake the feeling that, whatever Roserpine’s ring bestowed upon Valeria, the last thing the Temple wanted to hear was that I was working with a heathen to retrieve one of her goddess’s artifacts. I kissed the top of her head and drew her ear to my chest, where there we lay until Lively knocked upon the door to deliver a meal. Valeria hurried to cover herself and I drew on a pair of breeches before answering with my finest smile.

“Hello, dear!” With a smile of her own, Lively pretended not to ogle my chest by instead looking down at the broad and surely hefty tray of sausage, grits, and other breakfast foodstuffs she had been kind enough to put together despite the evening hour. “Here’s breakfast for ya. Delivered it to your neighbors already. Shall I leave it in the hall?”

“No,” I told her, gesturing, standing aside from the door. “The table there is fine.”

“You’ll have to pardon the small oranges,” she told me, shining her smile upon Valeria while placing her tray down upon the corner table. “We get them from down south, of course, but lately it’s been hard to get a delivery of anything from that way. The gimlets have been intercepting just about one out of every three shipments, I’d wager…haven’t killed anyone yet, thank the Wanderer.”

“That certainly is a blessing,” I told her. “I didn’t realize the gimlets were a problem for you here…I had a run-in with one myself while we were coming down the mountainside.” I was almost tempted to ask her if she knew anything about Gundrygia, but she was already going on and I was not sure how to broach the subject without sounding insane.

“Yes, well, they’ve been a problem for Soot just as long as the town’s been around…at least since my grandmother’s time, and before. Since they’re very poor hunters, they make their living scavenging. Mind you lot stick to groups if and when you leave the town—they’re not liable to start a fight they’re not confident they can win.”

Then, wiping off her