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

expression as hard as I could for a woman so beautiful and, even if by her own nature, imperiled, “will we be trapped in this nether-space of yours forever?”

“How could you ask that?”

“Answer my question.”

Nostrils flaring, Gundrygia stared defiantly into my face.

“No,” she admitted, “you’ll be free from here if you kill me. If it’s so important that you continue living as a deluded slave, then fine.”

Moving quickly, Gundrygia rolled forward upon her knees and once more grasped the blade. My companions gasped while, lifting her chin, the witch guided the tip of the sword to her throat and stared me hard in the eyes.

“Kill the mother of your child, Rorke Burningsoul.”

My mind struggled to parse the words once spoken aloud. Lips parting in shock, then tensing, I prodded the blade against her neck and said above her softly hitched breath, “You’re lying.”

“Not about this,” she assured me, maintaining that steady stare into me.

Full of all number of strange emotions, I struggled to find some hint of deception in her face. Indeed, I prayed to find it.

There was defiance there, and feral hostility. But there was no trace of a lie.

I lowered Exigence.

“Rorke!”

Valeria’s cry drew my attention away from the witch kneeling before me. Whirling about, blade already raising, I prepared to defend myself against a pair of rat-beasts that thundered along the rails through the tunnels for me—

And, with a rapid chant, Branwen hurled a bolt of lightning as though launching a javelin through the air. Roserpine may have struggled to reach the mockery of space that was Gundrygia’s pocket dimension, but the witch herself had claimed Nature to be her very god. I should not have been surprised that it was our druid who counted most just then.

With a bright explosion more rapidly blinding to the durrow than the fireball had been, the druid’s lightning danced down the line of the rail and ran through the charging rat-beasts. By the time they tumbled within ten feet of me, both were dead and smoking with the abhorrent stench of roasted meat and burning hair.

I turned back to Gundrygia, but the witch was already some yards away from me.

“How lucky you are to have your little entourage. Where would you be without them, slave?” Glowering at me through the pale moon of her sullen face, Gundrygia gestured to Exigence. “You will throw away ultimate power—destroy yourself—in following the commands of your master. If you don’t come with me now, Burningsoul, you’ll be exactly as free as Exigence there.”

Plagued by the conflicting desires to hold the mother of my child and destroy a threat to my life, I felt only deep sorrow for Gundrygia. I wanted to save her from her own grim fate—or the grim fate to which she bound herself by the decisions she made. By holding in her heart such a fearful loathing for Weltyr.

“So,” I suggested to her, sliding Exigence back into its place at my hip, “come with us, instead.”

Scoffing, looking totally taken aback by such an idea, Gundrygia demanded, “What do you mean?”

“I mean just that. I mean, come with us. Help us find Valeria’s ring.”

“Yes,” said Valera hurriedly, stepping forward despite the protests of Indra and Odile. “Yes—oh, a child of Rorke’s! How pleased I’d be to meet such an angel. What love I feel already to think you the vessel of such life!”

Now looking more sincerely confused—and, perhaps, just a bit angry about the confusion, or a suggestion she possibly perceived as a joke—Gundrygia shook her head. “How can you be his lover yet say such a thing? You dark elves truly are quite bizarre, aren’t you!”

“It’s not just them,” said Branwen, her hand to her heart, a new urgency in her earnest eyes. “I understand why she would say that. I love Rorke—I’d love any child of his, whether mine or someone else’s. Maybe especially someone else’s,” she added with a wry laugh that Odile dryly echoed.

Smile fading, serious again, Branwen went on to Gundrygia that, “You haven’t hurt any of us, and if you had, knowing you’re with Rorke’s child would change things. Anyway…Rorke obviously cares about you, or he would have already killed you and freed us from this place. Since he cares about you, we do, too. There must be something he sees that’s worth loving in you, and I want to know what it is.”

“Me, too,” said Indra, nodding. “Rorke’s such a good-hearted person.”

“If he thinks you can be saved from a death at the other end of his sword,” Odile agreed, “then I’m willing to give you a chance.”

“Please.” Valeria stepped just to the edge of the light, her hands clasped before her heart. “Please, Gundrygia—come with us.”

I had not expected to receive such commendable help from my companions, but I ought to have believed they would stand by me. Each one of them was a good woman from the first day we met; and though some of them made questionable decisions from time to time, they all had pure hearts and wills unquestionably aligned with my god.

For just a few moments, Gundrygia looked nearly swayed by these good hearts. The warmth that was offered to her would have been alluring to anyone—and to someone like Gundrygia, who had for so long been alone and abandoned in the world, I could not begin to imagine just how deeply she desired to take us up on the offer to join our party of travelers.

Alas, we were not yet a family…and family called to her then, a baleful black voice echoing through the bleak space that mimicked the tunnels beneath Skythorn.

Come home, Gundrygia, commanded the familiar voice, everywhere and nowhere around us. Come home, daughter. Bring the new Wotsung with you.

Gundrygia’s hopeful face fell, the open expression of marvelous possibilities clamming into a tense, cold mask.

“Yes, Father,” she answered it, raising a hand.

Bright light filled the tunnel fast enough to blind even me.

ALL ABOARD THE BATTLE SWAN

WHEN THE WITCH’S light faded from our eyes, we