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

pupil roughly the same hue as her sclera. The effect was so subtle I wondered if it always appeared as such to the sensitive subterranean elves. I worried, too, that its appearance was the sign of some damage, and remembered Odile’s story of the blind durrow bard with grim concern. Valeria reassured me.

“My pupils? Of course they’re always there, Paladin. Your eyes are too poor! Just like your ears. Who knows what else you’re missing in the world?”

“That may be so…but what are we going to do if you go blind?”

“Once, in light like this, won’t hurt me…and Roserpine will heal anything she desires to be healed. To see a thing like this is my reward for following her will…you understand that, I’m sure.”

I did, indeed, understand that. Valeria was part of my own reward for following the divine commands that ordained my path. I could not help but feel, therefore, a certain impulse to protect her from her own decisions. Of course I knew that she was not some object to be carefully withheld from the world…

But, given what we were coming up against, I could hardly help my concern for her wellbeing.

There was no telling what would happen once we reached Soot, nor what state it would be in. Lively had precious little information on the subject since she was tossed out at the height of the gimlet invasion. With nothing to go on, we had to keep our eyes open some miles from the town. We were not far from Dardrie Ranch when the signs of devastation began to take hold.

Tucked as it was amid the mountains, Soot was frequently foggy for long hours. However, as the horses dutifully carried us into the mountains cloaked in night, the cool and fresh mountain air was soon stained by the hard-edged scent of fire. When Valeria commented on the lack of stars, it occurred to me that the problem was not fog, but smoke; and, as we rounded the turn of a pass and saw Soot as a small scatter of lights off in the distance, Valeria gasped in horror to see what Branwen and I could not.

“The fields! Oh, Rorke—I think they’ve been scorched—”

With her own sharp intake of breath to hear such a horror, Branwen listed forward on her exhausted mare. “Is that what we’ve been smelling all this time? I thought I was dreaming it.”

I shook my head. “I’ve smelled it, too. I guess we’d better hope Dardrie Ranch is still standing.”

Praise Weltyr, it was. We left our horses tied in a thicket of trees about two miles south of the ranch and let them take a well-earned rest in relative safety. With them obscured in the trees and further protected by a fence of brambles that sprang from the ground on our druid’s command, we turned Odile’s lantern down to the bare minimum required for Branwen and I to see. Then, together, we three made our slow way to Dardrie Ranch.

Until we were near enough to see lights glowing in the windows of the ranch house, the value of Valeria’s sensitive eyes had not fully occurred to me. Her arm extended out across my chest and stopped me in place. With a sharp hush, she peered into the darkness and whispered in a tone so quiet I strained to hear it, “Those must be your gimlets.”

Amazed that she could see them, I shut the lantern off entirely and asked, “Where are they?”

“Running about, doing something—wood,” she discerned at last. “A few are scurrying back and forth with logs of wood. Carrying them into the house.”

“Trying to burn it down? The fiends!” I drew Strife at once, outraged and horrified to think of the poor Dardries. Like most of the citizens of Soot, they were simple folk who made an honest living and, so far as I could tell, bore ill will to none. They had been very lenient to us, we strangers, when renting horses, even given Erdwud’s good word; and they had asked no questions, nor shown any negative inclination toward the rumors of the durrow ladies allegedly in my company.

I made my way to the property with my sword drawn. A kneejerk reaction—based, I see in retrospect, on emotion. At the time, bedraggled by our long travel, a seemingly endless chain of conflicts, and the fears Lively related to us about her husband and the people of Soot, I was not in any mood to patiently wait and see how things developed. Valeria whispered in a sharp tone after me, “There’s surely more than just the two I’ve seen rushing in and out!”

“Then let me lead,” I told her, moving at a semi-crouch through the darkness and around the perimeter of the ranch’s burned property.

Though Weltyr did not bless humanity with the sensitive dark vision of the durrow, he did see fit to allow gradual adaptation to the night. Therefore, in the absence of the enchanted lantern, I (and, I would imagine, Branwen) saw more of the property by the second. Shapes distinguished themselves from the darkness, aided by illumination in windows and something that I discerned quickly to be the stable’s stalls outlined in the structure of an outbuilding.

Behind it all, the town still a mile off glowed as it never did so late at night. While I feared a fire yet burned there, my priority was preventing a new one.

Luckily, we would be able to get from one place to another fairly quickly. We made it to the stable building undetected and crouched behind it on the side opposite the house. The horses had not been slaughtered yet, it seemed, and could be heard softly snorting and occasionally pawing the earth as they settled in for the night. While I wondered how it was that the terrain could be so scorched while the buildings remained untouched along with their animal inhabitants, another noise from within the stable made us all tense up.

The yelp of a gimlet, chittering away as though laughing.

With