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

As if any man could.

“Rorke!”

Branwen’s call seemed only to reinforce the beauty of the All-Father’s gifts. How ignorant I had been to scorn her for even a moment! How ridiculous I was to hang the mistakes of anyone over their character and judge them by these flaws. Was I not the most flawed among all men I had known, even if only to myself? How dared I sourly close my heart against fully loving Branwen when her betrayal had been Weltyr’s will? How could I help but forgive her when she, hearing my footfall as I rose to call to her, burst into the quarry where I prayed?

“He’s here,” she called, cupping her hands around her mouth, “he’s here, Valeria!”

Branwen’s smile turned upon me again—but how her face fell when she saw Strife in my hand!

“Rorke! What’s happened?”

Sliding my empty arm around her taut waist, I drew her into my embrace and guided her mouth to mine. Though surprised, she yielded at once, her soft lips fluttering to permit the trailing of her tongue into my mouth. The sweet pitch of her moan fired my blood, a flame whose growth was accelerated by the energy that flooded my body when faced with the divine. When she pulled away for a gasp of air, her face was flushed and her eyes had grown glassy with desire.

“What a place for a kiss like that,” chided the elf, who nonetheless bit her lip and looked shyly away. Her eyes widened to cross the Scepter reclining against the stone. “Why—is that—”

“It is,” I told her.

“Where did you—how is it here?”

I did not have to be told that I could never speak in full to anyone of what had transpired there. No one but you, reader, into whose hands this chronicle will have been placed only once I have retired from the business of being an old man to become a young one again in Weltyr’s manor-house. At that time, though, with the event so fresh, I could not even think of it for how mad it made me feel. Able to produce neither lie nor truth, I looked at the Scepter and evasively said, “The raven brought me to it.”

“I see the lantern there. How is it possible? Was it some druid, or another witch in disguise?”

I shook my head, unable to speak further on the subject, and was awash with gratitude when Valeria hurried into the clearing amid the stones.

“Ah,” she cried with relief, “Rorke, oh, we were so worried she had taken you again—”

“She’ll have to pull a trick even craftier to lure me into her false world next time…I’ve no need of the pleasures she provides with the two of you here, and if she had genuine divine truths to impart she would share them in a way that permits me to recall them. I have no use for her. What of the gimlets in Soot?”

Branwen shook her head. “When you were following the raven, they scattered in all directions. Anroa knows where they’ve gone.”

I rubbed my jaw. “Hopefully not back in those houses…”

What would be the outcome of this harrowing week? The people of Soot would, at best, be furious. At worst, a few of them would be ill or even dead from their time spent living in the hills without supplies. There was also the cost of the ruined fields to consider—and the question of how the future would look long-term for the already troubled relationship between the gimlets and the villagers of Soot.

“I think I have an idea about how we might broker a peace,” I told the women, my eyes falling across the scepter while my arm loosened its hold on Branwen’s waist. “But I’m not sure how it will go—these things are delicate in the best of times, but…”

Valeria noticed it upon following my gaze. Her pale eyes widened in the sublime mask of her face.

“It can’t be—”

“It is,” said Branwen while I made a silent approach.

All thought dissolved into nothing but miscellaneous sensory experience as the Scepter of Weltyr drew me in to witness its majesty. Mesmerized, I knelt before it, my forearm draped over my knee and both my hands clasped. Its many gems gleamed with lustrous beauty in the lantern’s light. In each one was reflected my own awestruck face. Even the gold, immaculately polished in spite of its long sojourn away from home, bore traces of my phantom.

I had expected to look at it and feel some tremendous impulse to touch it, or to covet it greedily—this was what Grimalkin had implied. But, especially now knowing why Hildolfr had behaved as coldly as he apparently had upon killing me, (It was, after all, he whose weapon mortally wounded me before the durrow came to my aid!), I felt not the least spark of covetous inclination. No desire to sell or barter or trade.

I still did not understand what I was to do with this thing. All I knew at that moment was that it was a symbol of a new covenant between myself and Weltyr—a private one, set apart from the covenant I’d once had with the Church.

The covenant he destroyed with the flick of his lance.

“Pray, Valeria—do you have an extra petticoat under there that I might borrow to wrap this in?”

But the high priestess of the durrow shook her head and, drawing her hem to her knees, knelt upon the rocky ground. “That is not a just manner of transport for such a sacred object…Roserpine would not permit it.”

Valeria shut her eyes, her hands clasped before her face. Her lips moved to emit words that were soft and meaningless to me as her breaths, but, for their music, twice as wonderful to hear. The air around her took on the thunderstorm quality of magical weavings, and as the prayer grew on, it took the rhythm of a kind of song.

The prayer was not the only thing to be woven, however. While the song