By the time Odile finished pulling open the webbing around Branwen, the misshapen had thrown down his blow gun and made a dash to the door. Valeria moved to block his exit. While he skidded to a stop to figure out how to get around her, his spider legs scrambling and skidding across the stones, Indra launched one more projectile of her own and managed to nail the bandit right between his eyes. These now unseeing orbs rolled up into the back of his head and his eight legs collapsed beneath him. The last of the misshapen bandits died upon the floor, leaving myself and the durrow all the more convinced of our ability to work as a team.
Branwen, however, still looked with fear between my companions—as if they were, in any sense, equivalent to those captors who had just held her for ransom or worse.
While Valeria’s phantom armor unwound from my shoulders, innocent Indra to the freed captive. “Are you hurt?”
Her delay clearly indicating she belatedly realized the durrow addressed her, Branwen stuttered out, “I—well, yes, a little.”
The Materna of the durrow passed me by, saying, “Permit me lay hands on you…you’ll feel a bit of heat.”
While the other durrow stood aside, Valeria’s fine lips moved in a soft healing prayer to her goddess, Roserpine. The dark elf set her glowing hands upon Branwen’s unready ones. The high elf gasped softly, her pale face flushing with a sweet pink tinge of astonishment to be healed by a durrow—by a member of the notoriously cruel race of slave-traders. By then, I was less surprised. I may not have worshiped Roserpine or respected her particular teachings, but even I was forced to admit that prayers in the durrow goddess’s name had as much tangible effect as any prayer to Weltyr. Before my very eyes, the scratches and bruises across the high elf’s pale arms faded to reveal perfect, unbroken flesh.
My hands itched to touch her. Instead, I busied them by wiping clean Strife’s enchanted blade and sliding it back home to its sheath.
“How marvelous,” commented Branwen, her eyes now tearless but still quite wide while she observed her own healing. “Durrow magic can mend wounds just as well as one of Anroa’s healers!”
“Because I’m one of Roserpine’s healers,” answered the Materna simply, lifting her hands away from Branwen’s. As the high elf turned her arms this way and that to investigate how complete the healing process had been, my former mistress stared on. “And you are Branwen. One of the party members who betrayed Rorke in the den of the spirit-thieves.”
With no other injury to nurse but a pair of rope-burns, Branwen rubbed her wrists and affected a sullen pout. “I suppose he went about telling the whole city of El’ryh,” commented the high elf, her downcast eyes flickering twice toward me. Picking webbing from her hair as she soon was, the high elf was unprepared for Valeria’s next comment.
“No,” said the woman who was mistress of my heart only, now that my body and mind were once more fully free for Weltyr’s command. “He related the story of your betrayal to me once we had made love and his mood grew more gently inclined. Burningsoul is somewhat stoic, otherwise.”
Thunder sweeping across her face, Branwen looked between the two of us and said to me in shock, “You and this—durrow, Rorke?”
“These durrow,” I amended, glancing between the other ladies with a mild clearing of my throat. While, grinning, Indra and Odile waved, I gestured between them. “Branwen, ah—this is Odile Darkstar and Indra of the Nocturna Clan.”
“Ho there,” said bold Odile, offering her hand for a shake. “No wonder you were so broken-hearted over this wench’s betrayal…if only we were permitted to return to El’ryh! She’d make a fine attendant for your baths, Madame.”
With a wry chuckle, Valeria explained to the high elf, “I’m afraid you will have to excuse them…Odile is quite forward, and Indra lets herself be pushed around. My name is Valeria of El’ryh, Materna of the City and the representative of Roserpine before the people—and the people before Roserpine.”
“When you left me for dead,” I said, trying to keep my tone as level as possible, “Odile and Indra here found me. They made me swear that, in exchange for healing, I would come peaceably with them to the city of El’ryh and serve as a slave. Only by virtue Weltyr’s grace and Valeria’s ill fortune was I able to escape, and now she has freed me…and I should think to find you here as I do now, Branwen, that this has all been timed to the ticking of the All-Father’s cosmic clock. I never thought I would see you again, let alone rescue you from brigands like this. How is it you find yourself back down here?”
As if reminded of the increasingly late hour and the need for shelter by the mention of our dispatched foes, Indra and Odile exchanged murmurs. Experienced adventurers that they were, they then set about dragging the vanquished mishappen from the places where they had fallen, patting down the bodies for loot, and organizing them into a semi-tidy row that was easily avoidable. While watching this from the corner of her eye, Branwen found she was out of webbing to pick from her golden hair. Now she simply began worrying a few locks that hung free over her shoulder.
“Anroa haunted me fiercely on our way out of the Nightlands, and once we emerged again at the surface…I don’t know how I let Grimalkin talk me into anything like this!”
“So, it was Grimalkin behind the scheme?” The dwarf and I had endured more than one argument between the two of us in our time journeying together. It somehow struck me as wholly unsurprising that he would be responsible, in greater or smaller part, for the treachery that could have easily ended with my death. Unsurprising, and
