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

“Hail, Rorke Burningsoul, Paladin of Weltyr…the hero who woke me from my slumber.”

“Yet here you seem to have thrust me into one of my own.”

“This is no dream,” she assured me, one knee bending to permit the slide of a silken hem along her thigh. I struggled to maintain eye contact while the exquisite witch told me, “Though I suppose it’s true enough to say this space does not exist. Not in the conventional sense of existing.”

“I don’t care about that. Where’s Indra?”

“Back in the real world,” she said, laughing at me, her impudence incensing my desire. “Yes, by now she should be out of the trees…maybe even with a better grasp of riding. You’re welcome.”

My hand tightened around Strife’s grip. “So you lured me here. Why?”

Another mocking laugh peeled past her lips, though more softly. The hand that had trailed over her bosom continued its journey and, at her hip, steadily gathered the fabric of her gown. Higher, higher still, the hem of that garment rose along her thigh.

“Why do you think?”

Her question was a whisper, a smirk quirking her lips just barely up past her teeth. I inhaled over my shoulder at the exit of the evidently enchanted grove. Seeing my hesitance, Gundrygia clambered upright upon her knees and threw herself forward. Before I could move she clung to my waist, her earnest yet mad eyes plastered upon mine between fronds of her wild hair.

“Would you deny me, Paladin? Would you look around this space I’ve made just for us and refuse me the satisfaction of my lust?”

“Why me?”

Her smile widened. Kissing my stomach through the fabric of my tunic, she told me, “Because it was you who woke me, of course.”

“No,” I told her, catching her by the hair and yielding a gasp, “that’s not why. Tell me the truth, Gundrygia.”

But I had already made a mistake more fatal than following her into that grove in the first place. No matter what touch was lain upon her, Gundrygia perceived only pleasure. Soon I would learn there was nothing with which I could dissuade her from my seduction.

“Oh, yes”—she gasped as I tugged her by the hair away from me, heavy lids revealing eyes amorously aglow—“yes, Rorke, pull my hair…oh, treat me roughly, discipline me for my wicked ways. Turn me toward your god, Burningsoul! Win me for Weltyr with the raging flame of your passion.”

“Who are you?”

She produced another infuriating cackle at the question. I shoved her away from me entirely, ignoring her drama-laden cry as she caught herself upright upon the flower bed where I’d tossed her.

“So cross with me, Rorke! Whatever have I done to earn such rage?”

“Using my friends as tools in whatever game of yours this is supposed to be,” I told her, my hands forming fists when I found that the path into the clearing had disappeared. “And mocking me with this secret knowledge you have of my heritage.”

“Mocking you!”

Springing upright, the wild woman threw her arms around my neck and caressed my face. I stared coldly as she shook her head, her devious expression a pantomime of cajoling tenderness.

“No, no, Paladin,” she insisted, her body fitting so perfectly to mine that I had to repress a groan of agonized desire. “No, I would not dare to mock one so mighty. One meant for such great things.”

“How can a man think on the great tasks of his future when the past is a stranger to him? Speak, Gundrygia, or let me go free—but do not continue in this taunting, this lording of your knowledge over me.”

“What knowledge lies in me that does not already fill your heart? What mother could beget such a great hero as thou, Burningsoul? What father’s seed could engender a savior of Urde?”

“Damn your riddles!” Frustrated, I caught her by the arms and shook her. She laughed, moaned, showed her teeth in a terrible grin while those eyes clapped upon mine. “Tell me what I want to know. How is it that you know all this? Where was I born, whose son am I?”

Her eyebrows lifted toward her hairline, knitting her smooth brow with cruel humor. “Art thou not the son of Weltyr, Paladin?”

What was it about Gundrygia that so erased my sense? I struggled to contain the emotions she inspired through her arrogant manner and the cruel retention of knowledge I had pondered for a lifetime. All the childhood nights spent in the dark, wondering why I wasn’t good enough for my parents—wondering if they were nobles or serfs, kind or cruel. Imagine young boy wondering all of that for years on end, before he finally gave up and decided the issue was better uncontemplated. The inferiority. The isolation. The helpless decades of frustration.

It was that young boy, still so much a part of me at that age, that guided my hand in the impulsive slap I will forever regret.

I had never hit a woman before—outside of an actual battle, of course. Weltyr willing, I never again will lift a hand to any creature of his making outside of the proscribed circumstances. But in that grove, so soon after the argument with Branwen and now infuriated to find Gundrygia had endangered my friend, lured me here, and told me nothing, I could not withstand the impulse. My hand cracked across Gundrygia’s face, the sound blotting out her gasp.

Instead all I heard was the moan that followed it, so sensual it were as though I had caressed her. Her wild eyes all the more ablaze, the witch threw her arms around my neck and pressed her lips to mine in a savage kiss.

She smelled like lavender and honey. Like the hands of the pretty and kind older girls who worked in the kitchens at the Temple; who told beautiful fairy tales and sang funny songs when the priests weren’t around to chide them for it. But she also smelled like a woman—rich and acrid, somehow chalky. Cruel. I can’t explain it.

She was wise, and she whispered to me