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

She knows things, Gundrygia.

She frightened me. In my fright, like a captive animal, I sought to annihilate her body with mine. And all the while she moaned and laughed, and whispered to me things that made my heart race. She told me some strange and horrific truth. With my body inside hers, Gundrygia told me things I had never known. All the secrets of the world. All the answers to all the things I could possibly ask.

And why, friend, do I not repeat them here, now, at this very moment?

Because I did not remember them once she released me from her embrace.

That was the most terrifying revelation of all. On later inspection, I remembered plunging into the forest after her, and finding her in that clearing. I remembered the early snippets of our conversation as I have related them to you. But as I try to picture the hours when our clothes were off and we rutted like animals in the wild of that strange magical artifice, Gundrygia screaming with ecstasy in my embrace, the memory becomes fragmented somehow.

That was why it was like a dream, I suppose. In dreams, we are given so much information that we forget all of it, or nearly all of it, unless we are trained or interested in such matters as the recollection of dreams. In the space Gundrygia created for us to be together, I sank into a pool of hedonistic bliss and was given a crystal clear look into the absolute nature of reality: and because I was so unready for the experience of that absolute nature, because I took to trembling in her arms as her secret-whispering went on and on, my mind did not, could not, would not retain it.

To describe the time as entirely missing, or my state as a black-out one, would be to refuse responsibility for my poor decision early on in the experience as much as it would be an inaccurate picture of how I continue to perceive the event in my memory. When Weltyr’s most sentimental servant comes to sit upon my heart, I recall that first time with Gundrygia not as a gap in my consciousness, but as a chill.

I, Rorke Burningsoul, Paladin of Weltyr, am chilled.

And that is why I will end this event’s account here.

WELCOME TO SKYTHORN

GUNDRYGIA HAD HER way with me and took my seed, and when the trauma of her secret-telling passed over me, she said, “Don’t worry, Rorke, don’t worry—you’ll leave this place and you won’t recall a thing.”

As I have already told you, that is not quite true. After all! I remembered her telling me that. But it was true in a wildly important sense, and when I suddenly found myself with the horse’s reins in my hand and dawn creeping across the valley, I remembered two things only: the immense, feral pleasure of the witch’s embrace, and the shame I felt at having struck her.

I resolved to be a better man. After looking around to find I stood as though having just stepped from a small grove of trees—one into which I could not possibly have chased Indra, might I add—I knelt to pray.

There are many prayers to Weltyr, some involving the use of his runes. I prayed only for his forgiveness, along with the strength to be a better man in my dealings with my fellow creatures in the world.

It was not just having struck Gundrygia that distressed me about myself. It was what I had done to the bandits—the bandits, whom all throughout these pages I ought to have been calling “the kin of Adonisius.” I was not an executioner or inquisitor. It was not my place to slay for just any reason. For all I knew, one of the misshapen in that den was not a worshiper of not Roserpine, but Weltyr. Unlikely, I know, but who was to say?

Above my head, a croaking caught my attention. Drawn from prayer, I looked up. A great raven sat high in the cedar above me, its black feathers bristled widely and its black eye fixed on me.

Very strangely, I wept a little. Perhaps it was my introspection, or an aftereffect of whatever Gundrygia had done to me. I finished up my prayers and, once the raven flew off in the direction of Soot, mounted the horse to follow. Through the hills and dales of the valley, we traveled together from the edge of the mountain and into the heart of the town.

People gasped in delight and waved at me while in the middle of setting up their market stalls or walking their children to Soot’s small village temple. I waved back, thinking only that they were being quite pleasant. Then, feeling similarly pleasant after whatever had transpired between myself and Gundrygia—no matter how eerie I sensed it all had been—I put the horse back in the stables among his comrades, strolled merrily into the front door of the inn’s tavern, and was almost startled into drawing Strife by Lively’s delighted cry across the room.

“Oh! Burningsoul, welcome back!” Wiping her hands and hurrying to me, Lively enthused, “I just fetched your ladies their breakfasts and it seems like they’re all awake. Oh, they’ll be glad to see you! Been a lot of long faces up in those rooms.”

“Is that so?”

In a hushed, conspiratorial tone, Lively covered the side of her mouth with one hand and leaned into me. “Oh aye, well, can’t rightly say I blame ‘em. Six days is an awful long time to wait for word for any friend, let alone one’s as close as you lot seem to be.”

Six days!

The words passed over me in a great shock that had only just begun to settle when Lively asked, “So, d’ja find it?”

“What’s that, Lively?”

“Whatever that thingie is you’re lookin’ for…oh, what was it”—on the other side of the tavern, in the hallway poised above the bar, Branwen stepped out of the room at the end of the hall;