Looking around, then claiming a scimitar fallen from the hand of one of the exterminated bandits, Branwen smiled uneasily, looked nowhere near us, and said, “I’ll be back when I need a bit of rest…I’m certainly wide-awake now!”
She took up the magical lantern that was said to repel monsters, then, and was gone. While the high elf unbarred the door and hurried out to take her chances with the darkness rather than give into her desire to join us in celebration of our freedom—Branwen from her captors, me from slavery, Valeria from a life of tiring solitude as Roserpine’s mouthpiece—the durrow watched her go and tried not to laugh.
“All surface elves are alike,” commented Odile, resuming the process of getting Indra out of her tight-fitting leather breeches. “You see in their eyes how eager they are to submit to a free way of living, but they all resist…it’s the fault of your kind, Burningsoul.”
Laughing Valeria gazed into my face while letting her hand rove back and forth in my lap. “Aye,” she agreed, “well-said. And, since it’s the fault of your kind, Rorke”—my lady shoved me away, giggling cruelly, pushing herself back toward her friends and drawing up her short dress as she did—“you’d ought to go and rid her of these notions that our ways are in any sense profane. As much as she speaks of Anroa, you would think she would prefer to enjoy so much love at once.”
While Indra and Odile drew Valeria into their arms to kiss her sensually and rid her of her dress, I stuck around until the scrap of fabric was thrown over my head. While the ladies laughed, I chuckled in good humor, tossed it back at them, and rose with a chivalrous ache. “Very well…you ladies celebrate here, and I’ll go see if I can convince Branwen to stay inside with us.”
It was not many strides before I found her, in truth. In point of fact, the t-juncture where Branwen was poised stood near enough to the door that, as she was being startled by my approach, the edge of Valeria’s husky moan drifted through the door and around the corner of the tunnel. The high elf, who had been lost in thought and pacing about the circumference of the light, whipped around while brandishing her plundered scimitar with dangerous unfamiliarity. The weapon was huge in her delicate hand, and I laughed despite myself. She recognized it was me and grew more at ease, lowering her blade with a scowl.
“What’s so funny?”
I stepped forward, catching her trembling hand in mine. “You are,” I told her. “Even after what happened before, you make me laugh, Branwen…you’re a very brave woman.”
Rolling her eyes and staring out into the darkness, Branwen permitted to me to extricate the clumsy blade from her hand. “This is a little too big for you, don’t you think? I saw a dagger or two in there….make sure you know which one is suited to you before we move on.”
While I leaned the scimitar against the wall, the elf regarded me with a somber sort of longing.
“Wouldn’t you rather be in there with them?”
“Now, don’t be jealous…I’d rather we were both in there with them, Branwen.” While her arms crossed and her gaze darted away again, I assured her, “I know how it might seem to you—”
“Really rather odd,” she said tersely, her tone high and mighty. “I know you were a bit of a cad, Burningsoul, but—”
The picture of innocence, I asked her, “A cad! Me? Whatever have I done to earn such a lowly status in your eyes?”
At the same time, a fistful of scattered memories blazed through my head. Branwen watching me flirt with the barmaids at alehouses early in our journey, when we were still traveling from location to location trying to find these well-hidden entrances to the Nightlands; that time with the gorgon; defending that working girl in the city of Klexus, which earned particular ire from the high elf because the specimen was another of her species, albeit lowborn. All mankinds have their caste systems, I suppose. I have heard it said that the human race was divided against itself before the existence of all our many brethren in Weltyr’s will. Why that is, I do not know, for all men look to be the same shape and color to me—God-like.
Can I help that I find this to be especially so with women?
“You’ve a roving eye,” admonished Branwen, flicking me in the chest while I laughed and caught her small waist in my hands. As she shivered to realize her body was in my grasp—as in so many, still quite recent times—I shifted my embrace and drew her all the more closely against me. She did not pull away, though she still, through heavily lidded eyes, lightly chastised me. “You think you’re Anroa’s gift to all womankinds.”
“Of course not Branwen…I’m Weltyr’s gift to to himself.”
While she laughed and rolled her eyes, I was pained by the beauty of the gesture and the strange relief it caused me to follow the rolling of her pupil. I had missed her—her eyes, her pretty face. The elegant arch of her brow trembled with the shutting of her eyes. I bent my head over hers to kiss her, exhaling against the instant renewal of passion made all the hotter by her treachery. In fact, while thinking of her firing that bolt at me—betraying me, admitting she had become a victim to the hateful designs of the god of void and money, Oppenhir—I had to have her more urgently than ever before.
And, after my time with the durrow, I had learned a thing or two about what some women seemed to enjoy. When Branwen moaned to be pushed back against the wall, I ran my hand down her waist and beneath the pert curve of a backside that was finely accented
