Valmar laughed in return, beginning to enjoy this, and ran even faster. His blood grew hot from the pursuit and the sight of her sweetly-rounded form running before him. “Sprite or faey,” he called, “you cannot escape me forever!”
“Do you think you are man enough to catch me?” she called back. “And man enough to make me yours when you do?”
He still did not gain on her, as her own strides came faster and faster. But when she had run over two miles she suddenly stopped and whirled around, her sword drawn and shield up. She laughed at him, her back to a tree, and when he hesitated sprang at him.
She held no practice sword but the real thing, a boy’s sword such as he had had when he was twelve, sharpened to a razor point. He dodged quickly behind a tree, still rational enough in spite of his excitement to want to avoid being skewered. He drew his sword quietly, counted to three, and leaped out the other side of the tree. She was waiting for him coolly, but she did not stand a chance against a young man who had done little but exercise his muscles and practice his sword play for many weeks.
In two strokes he had his sword wedged solidly against hers and pushed it up and back. She tried to kick him, but he stayed just out of range. His left hand snaked in and grabbed her wrist. She dropped the sword with a cry, and he kicked it away at the same time as he threw his own sword from him.
With one arm he crushed her mailed body to his chest while he pried the shield from her grip, then loosed her helmet. She was laughing again, showing a row of sharp little white teeth. Her hair, dense and curling, cascaded out from under her helmet and down her back, and he buried his fingers in it.
Her black eyes danced at him, tiny points of light at the center, and her mouth smiled widely just before her hot lips closed on his.
They lay afterwards in the long grass, their heads pillowed on Valmar’s rolled-up tunic, the sunset sky tinting her skin pink. Her armor and shield glistened a short distance away.
He felt comfortable, relaxed, and joyous, but he also felt vaguely ashamed now of the overpowering force of his passion, even though he told himself it had all been her idea. That she had surreptitiously called him away from the Wanderers’ courtyard suggested that this would not be something of which they approved. But he put these thoughts aside as she kissed him on the ear.
“Are you then a sprite or faey,” he inquired with a smile, “come to test if a mortal man can match the immortals?” He traced the smooth line of her cheek with his forefinger and kissed her red lips.
“No sprite or faey,” she answered, “as you would know perfectly well if you had ever met the faeys.” She chuckled. “But I am indeed interested in mortal men, Valmar Hadros’s son-or at least one mortal man. And so far I like very much what I have found!”
“You know who I am,” he said, caressing her perfectly formed shoulders and breasts. This was nothing like the furtive interludes with the maids of his father’s castle-some almost twice his age, and with breath tasting of onions. He had been thinking he would give up the maids soon anyway. This was more as he had imagined it would be to lie in Karin’s arms. He pushed thoughts of Karin resolutely from him. “Tell me at least your name.”
But she laughed instead of answering and turned around, propped up on her elbows, to look at his face.
“You came here to find heroic deeds and glorious battles,” she said briskly, in a tone which for a moment reminded him, quite incongruously, of a merchant in a booth trying to persuade him of the rational advantages of buying his products rather than anyone else’s. “I am offering them to you.”
“Are you a Wanderer?” Valmar asked in amazement and almost horror. He had never imagined that he might lie with a lord of voima-or, apparently, a lady.
Her eyes glinted at him. “What do you think?” she asked teasingly, then shook her head. “No, I am certainly not one of those beings you mortals call Wanderers. As you may have noticed, they are all men! That is why I had to get you away from them.”
She referred, he noticed, to “you” mortals, suggesting that whoever she was, she was not an ordinary person who had somehow, like him, reached this realm. He ran a hand down her back to reassure himself that she did, indeed, have one.
“I shall have to get home soon,” he said, beginning again to feel guilty. Whoever she was, it was difficult to see her as connected with the high deeds and heroism to which he had promised his life and manhood. But it would be hard to explain that to those dark eyes. “The housecarls will be heating the bath house and preparing dinner for me,” he added lamely.
“And that is reason enough to return?” she asked with another laugh.
“Well, I serve them, the lords of voima, you see. And if you are not a Wanderer yourself, I need to return to them. Would you perhaps like to come back to the manor with me?” he added hopefully. “I am sure they would be pleased to meet a friend of mine.” The thought shot through his mind that it would be difficult to introduce her as his friend when he did not even know her name.
For answer she rolled on top of him, her elbows by his ears, and began to kiss him. After only a moment’s hesitation he wrapped his arms around her warm body and held her tight to him again.
It was hard to tell time by a motionless sun. Again they lay stretched out in the long grass, the woman’s head on Valmar’s shoulder, her black curls spread across his chest. How long, he asked himself, had it been since he left the courtyard? An hour, two hours, six hours? And did the Wanderers even keep time themselves, or were their cycles of meals and activity only for his benefit?
“They will wonder where I am, back at the manor,” he said.
She turned her head to nibble delicately on his shoulder. It tickled and made him laugh; he tickled her waist until she laughed too. “If they wanted you back,” she said then, “they would have come for you long since. Clearly they do not care if you stay or go.”
“But I haven’t gone!” he protested. “That is, I haven’t actually left their service.” There were implications to what she said that he did not like.
“What lord would allow the man under his command to desert without even following him?”
Had he deserted the lords of voima? he asked himself in panic. “I am not under their command, as such,” he desperately tried to explain. “They asked for my help, but they do not compel it. I am being trained to help them against their enemies here in this realm, before I descend into Hel for them, to find the lords of death so that they and their sun may be reborn.”
It sounded foolish in his own ears as soon as he said it. She laughed, predictably. “And are you so eager for death yourself,” she said in a teasing tone, “that you yearn for steel to bite your flesh in preference to my embraces? Because if so I could get my sword and help you out!”
“No, no, of course not,” he said, pulling her to him and stroking her hair. The Wanderers had warned him that he was not indestructible here in spite of the powers he was supposed to have, powers he had yet to see. And her sword had been very sharp. “But, but- Are you one of the Wanderers’ enemies?”
Her eyes glittered at him from two inches away. “Of course I have no use for those beings-those men — who claim to be lords of earth and sky. And you will have little use for them either when I explain to you the honor and glory that will come in overthrowing them.”
He tried to draw back, but she was lying across his chest and her arms were much stronger than they seemed.
“Do you not think there is voima in me?” she asked, giving his lip a playful bite. “Have you not considered them and their quiet hall a little more, well, boring than you expected?”
It was as though she had read his mind. “But who then are you?” he said with dry lips.
“Their fated end is coming,” she said, stroking his beard. “In asking you to help them against us- we whom fate has chosen to succeed them! — they are doing nothing but making a last, pathetic effort to change their end. Is it not better to accept one’s fate with dignity?”
“It’s better to fight to the last man in a courageous, desperate battle for what you believe,” said Valmar.
“When you find courage among them,” she said with a laugh, “let me know. The best they can manage is to ask for a mortal’s assistance. If you want adventure, high courage, and glorious battles with the trumpets ringing, you will have to fight against them. And besides,” moving her chest against his and smiling with the corners of her mouth, “if you go back to them you will have to leave me. And you do not wish to do that, do you?”
He most certainly did not. He embraced her and kissed her almost desperately. For him to have found love like this, so unexpectedly, almost better than anything he could have imagined, and then to risk losing her again just
