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

It may have been a plurality of bats, actually. I still to this day am not sure. All I knew then was at one moment, when Indra was taking her turn practicing a canter, something swooped down upon her from the dark. Crying out, Indra ducked her head while looking up, her whole body cringing and her heels digging into the flank of her mare. The horse whinnied and, at this familiar command, tore off at a gallop while Indra cried in surprise.

Odile cried out after her friend, frightened by the sight of the mare’s charge into the brushes and through the high boulders. Trees grew plentifully throughout much of the mountain’s lower quadrant. If I did not move fast, Indra could easily have found herself lost—at the mercy of the horse and its familiarity with the region.

“Stay here,” I commanded Odile and Valeria, urging the second stallion into motion in pursuit of the unpracticed rider. The beast, obedient to my command, galloped off into those same brushes, around the same boulder, and far off from Valeria and Odile in a matter of seconds. I was confident that catching up with Indra was a matter of choosing the right path through the trees.

What a fool I was to still dream that anything could be so simple!

The light reached my eyes a second before the forms did—regular torchlight, not the blueish tinted kind produced by my comrades’ inborn magic. I attempted to slow the horse, but too late. A pair of gimlets leapt from the darkness and, with a surprisingly practiced arm, lassoed the beast about the neck to provoke its fearful rearing. I was only barely able to hang on and keep myself from being thrown to the ground. By the time its hooves were again upon the dirt, a few more baleful little imps had leapt from the darkness to jab at me with the tips of primitive flint spears.

“Enough,” called a woman’s voice. “Enough! Leave him alone.”

Much to my surprise, the yipping lizard-men around me glanced in the direction of the sound and hastened to obey. I looked around myself, seeking Indra and her horse anywhere within in the torchlight.

Instead, I only found Gundrygia.

The wild sorceress slunk from the dark when her worshipers had settled down and my mount had followed suit. My fury with my captors and fear for Indra leveled into shock to see Gundrygia’s approach. Her furs had been abandoned and exchanged for gauzy garments, semi-transparent things that had been perhaps crafted by magic and were, in the end, no more substantial than those textures we feel in dreams. Still, so far as my eyes were concerned, the fabric was as real as the curves to which it clung. As real as the decolletage whose cut it emphasized, or the leg that peered through its pale pink drapery.

Gone was the eye make-up from before, and the tattoos along with it—but for all the civilizing effect these things had, Gundrygia’s hair still seemed an indisputable tell of her wild nature. A crown of bright red poppy flowers adorned hair that, though pulled up and back, was still as unkempt as a feral creature’s pelt. Her crooked smile, too, reminded me of beasts, and the stare of her eyes was that of a madwoman, albeit one who had been driven to such dire straits by the insurmountable task of spending her life so painfully beautiful. In her hands were all number of flowers, one of which she dropped at her feet before selecting another.

“Let him down,” she said, drawing the white petals of a lily across her lips and down the curve of her neck. “Don’t let his stallion wander off.”

“What have you done with Indra?”

Gundrygia’s chin tipped up and back. She laughed, shaking her head, then disappeared beyond the torchlight at the slow pace of her swaying, slithering gait.

Gritting my teeth, I dismounted the horse and offered it but brief comfort. “Don’t harm a hair on this animal’s head,” I told them tersely, looking between the lizard faces and finding perhaps more understanding than I had expected to. With another reluctant glance around, glad I was in the custom of bringing Strife wherever I went, I rested a hand upon the pommel of the blade and walked into the darkness after Gundrygia.

The trail of flowers dropped one by one marked her path through the darkness. I followed the lilies and the lilacs and the daffodils, each comfortable upon the bed of moss over which I trod with no hesitation. The farther I grew from the torches, the thicker that darkness became. Where had she gone, damn it? What had she done with Indra? It didn’t seem possible that I should have been able to make it this far into the trees without meeting the dark elf or her startled horse. Where, then, were the both of them?

A soft light gradually edged into my awareness, revealed by the increasing color of the flowers at my feet. In total darkness, they had appeared variations of the same blacks or grays. Now, flower by flower, each was more colorful. So was the mossy eart upon which these flowers lay. I looked up and found the trees through which I’d been walking opened up ahead of me, their space permitting me to step into a clearing that reminded me somehow of the sepulcher into which I’d fallen.

Yet this space was the polar opposite of that ancient chamber of stone and death. The exquisite clearing, where Gundrygia had arranged her body back upon a bed of moss, teemed with the sweet sounds and aromas of life. Crickets chirped and fireflies glowed softly in the air, calling their lovers to them while similarly hopeful frogs croaked in the pond beside Gundrygia. Seeing me, the hand that had been resting against her cheek trailed over her breast. Her dark gaze slid over my body, my face, and then rested with anticipatory pleasure upon my