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

she looked away from me, toward the poorly covered row of bodies that would soon be covered in mushrooms and picked apart by insects.

“He has agreed to show us an expedient route to the surface, but warned me that it may take some effort. For the most part, he just asked we leave him be.”

“He’d ought to thank us,” said Odile.

Branwen, quick to relate to the most selfish member of our merry band, nodded vigorously. “That was what I said, more or less—Rorke is a hero, so far as I’m concerned.”

“Heroes can only be so heroic to certain types of people.” Sitting up slightly from the pile of flesh, Valeria reached for a nearby loose fur and said, “If we’re to take advantage of Adonisius’s offer without falling behind or otherwise earning his greater impatience on this journey, then we had ought to sleep soon, and well.”

“I know I will,” said stretching Odile, pinching Indra’s hindquarter while sitting up to set the magic lantern by the door. “And, from the sounds of it, so will our new friend.”

“Well—well”—Branwen was red to the tips of her ears, and I had to turn away to keep her from seeing my barely contained laughter as I undressed—“well, if you really must hear about it—”

“Lighten up, surface girl! I was only kidding.” Checking the bar of the front door and dragging over a set of shelves for an added precaution, Odile satisfied herself that the den was secure and pranced back to the furs to bundle up against Indra. “Who can keep a man like this one around and not put him to good use? Or be put to good use by him—eh, Indra?”

“Don’t tease me, Odile! You know I’m sensitive when I’m tired…”

While Indra and Odile settled in together as was their custom, Valeria sat up on the edge of our pile of furs. Undressed, I stretched out and invited her, with the extension of my arm, down into my embrace by the flickering blue flames of the hearth. The displaced queen of the dark elves took my offered caress, melting against my body, her white hair falling in waves across my face and neck.

“Is this what adventuring is always like?”

Her pale eyes searched mine. Fingers running through those silken tresses, I pushed aside the curtain before Valeria’s face and confessed to her, “It did not seem as such to me until I met you…I’m starting to think that, despite the rumors otherwise, Roserpine is far more gentle a goddess than Weltyr is a god.”

With a light scoff and a little laugh, Valeria’s nose brushed against mine and she patted my chest in a manner that was genuinely fond. So intimate it seemed as though we had known one another for years, yet so fresh it excited me to new thoughts of love in an instant.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said, her tone one of playful remonstration. “Good dark, Paladin of Weltyr.”

“Good dark, Materna of Roserpine,” I said against her ear while she turned away from me. She settled in with her round backside pressed against my hip and her face to the room, away from me, where I could not see if she was asleep or awake with restless thoughts of danger, of future, of what she had lost and perhaps would never regain.

Then, there was Branwen. Branwen, who understandably did not seem inclined to get out of her armor or clothes. The truth was, however, that this would be our last opportunity for some days to divest ourselves of such things and sleep behind the relative safety of a door. I pitied her for missing the chance to be comfortable for even a few moments. I glanced down at my free arm, then looked hopefully at her.

“I’ve two arms, Branwen.”

With a skittish, embarrassed glance at Indra and Odile curled together, then another at Valeria to my right, Branwen took off her boots and rested beside me.

How familiarly she settled in my arm! I thrilled. But what man wouldn’t to have a woman in each arm, plus two more sleeping near his feet! Weltyr’s kindness was unmatched, truly. Hot-and-cold as always, Branwen looked wryly at me even in my arm.

“I’ll bet you’re pretty pleased with yourself right now, aren’t you, Rorke?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

With a scoff and a roll of her eyes, (as Odile produced a short “Ha!” while drifting off to sleep), the high elf tried to hide her crooked smirk by laying her face against my heart. “Good night, Rorke.”

“Good dark, Branwen…sweet dreams.”

ABOVEGROUND

THERE ARE THINGS in accounts such as this that, as a reader, I tend to skip. Ahead of me lay two such narrative traps: the recounting of a dream, and a long journey from one place to another with little to no action. The first, I must share because Weltyr commands it, and because it will become important later. The second, I may compress in order to sooner discuss those things that happened on the surface—but, rest assured, it was an arduous task for myself and my companions to follow the misshapen along his shorter route out of the Nightlands.

And all the way there, I found myself bleakly revisiting the dream I had the dark after we rescued Branwen.

I was not sure it could rightly be called a dream. Dreams, after all, were perceived as gifts from gods—containers for divine information and inspiration that could not be received by the human mind in another fashion, whether direct or obscure.

As was taught in the Church of Weltyr and the Temple where I was raised, the information in dreams was concealed in their symbolism. Even a dream that seemed forthright tended to contain a second or even third meaning, and the challenge was to plumb the depths of those meanings for the concealed message. Dreams with prophetic content—of the sort Valeria experienced and attributed to her goddess, Roserpine—were the dubious pleasure of only a few, and by and large considered undesirable. It was