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

mind all the way back to The Weeping Willow. I can remember the questions I would have asked—questions I’m sure I did ask—but for the life of me I have no concrete memory of asking them, nor of the witch’s responses.”

“Not even this information she claimed to have about your birthright?” Branwen asked this from the window where she stood, her arms folded and her countenance grave.

I shook my head.

“Maybe she was some kind of hidden person.”

My brow arched. “Some kind of what?”

“You really are a city boy, aren’t you…you know. The good neighbors. “Faeries,” they call them sometimes in the common tongue around here. Watch this—if we ask Lively about local faerie legends, we’ll probably hear something interesting.”

While Branwen stuck her head from the room to call for the manager, Odile said, “Sounds like you didn’t have it so bad, Paladin. You got us worried…we thought we were going to have to cut and run to avoid paying for a dead horse.”

“Glad you were worried about me as well as money, Odile…what are those goggles, though?”

“Oh, these? Indra and I just can’t keep sleeping during the bloom—er, the day, so I asked Erdwud to go down to the forgemaster here and sell a couple of old welding goggles. He only had two to part with, though, so Madame here keeps one and Indra and I trade off with the other.”

Indra nodded, having listened to all this quite guiltily and saying with a look down at her hands, “Not that I’ve been able to sleep anyway. I’m so sorry, Rorke! I didn’t mean—”

“It’s all right, Indra. Whatever happened, it’s true that I feel I had…mostly a good time. I think.”

Still looking grim as Indra was, I crossed to her side and knelt to take her hand. Holding it between both of mine, I looked into her somewhat surprised, certainly flushed face and told her warmly, “Did you work on your riding while I was gone?”

Snapped a bit from her malaise, Indra earnestly told me, “Well—yes, of course we did.”

“One of the other reasons for the goggles,” said Odile. The high elf re-entered the room just in time for the elder rogue to continue, “Branwen taught us.”

“Did she!” Pleased, I smiled at the moody druid and got a roll of her eyes along with a spate of deep blushing.

“Well! Someone was going to have to do it if we ever had a prayer of leaving Soot…looking around for you was good practice.”

While I stood, Lively knocked upon the door and let herself in. Her eyes bright, her hair up in a blonde ponytail that bobbed as she looked around, the inn’s manager said, “Don’t we all seem in better spirits already! You needed something, dearies?”

“Actually, yes.” Glancing at me, Branwen gestured and said, “While traveling, Rorke heard something about some kind of faerie legends around Soot. We were just wondering if you knew anything about them.”

“Oh, aye! You lot certainly are adventurers, aren’t you…well”—waving her hand, looking pleased for a few seconds away from her work, Lively looked almost conspiratorially at Branwen—“people say it’s bad fortune to be talkin’ about the hillfolk without their explicit permission, but I don’t go in for all that, so I’ll run me mouth a bit. It’s all about them gimlets, see, up in the mountains.”

Everyone in the room was now fully interested, with even Odile turning eyes toward Lively and her story.

“I’ve told you all about the little buggers, always causin’ us problems. Well, I think it’s said they used to have a queen? I don’t know, there are different versions to these things all the time…she was either the creator of the race, or a human woman who eventually became their queen after she was spirited away to serve the gimlet colony. At any rate, all kinds of different people have seen them with her over the years. They say she sleeps long hours—whole seasons, depending on who you ask—and that people who go missing in the hills are taken by her.”

Thumb worrying against the edge of her lip, Branwen asked, “Why does she take people in these stories?”

“Oh, who knows! All kinds of reasons. Fools that go lookin’ at her, I think. That’s the most popular one, anyway, but I’ve heard causes range from simple trespassing to accidentally waking her up.” While I mulled this over, Lively said with a light laugh, “I don’t know if it’s worth you lot taking your valuable time to look for her, but if you were to relieve our gimlet problem a bit, I’m sure no one would complain.”

“We’ll keep it in mind,” said Valeria with a polite smile. “Thank you, Lively.”

“You’re all welcome. Let me go finish that breakfast for you…I’m sure you’re famished after your long trip home.”

With the door again between us and Lively, I told my companions, “It’s true I woke her up when I found her on the mountainside, but that was also when she told me one or two things I do remember. She told me she came from north of Rhineland, and that her father is named—Clinschor, I think.”

“Interesting.” Folding her arms, Branwen asked, “Could she have been making it up? Faeries do that sort of thing all the time.”

“I don’t know…aren’t faeries supposed to be small and winged?”

“No,” Branwen answered, “those are pixies—crude little pests, tiny goblins with wings. Faeries could pass as human, or something close to it…they don’t care for human cities, but they mingle freely with elves and otherwise live in their own pocket dimensions parallel to Urde. Just like the place where Gundrygia lured you.”

Given how similar the two experiences were, I found myself wondering if perhaps there wasn’t some truth in this suggestion—yet I thought back to Gundrygia’s answers to my questions and decided after a moment of contemplation, “Whatever she be, faefolk or human witch, I believe what she said about not being from around here. As to what all this means, and how she should know anything of me, I can’t