She ran up to me, a broad grin brightening her beautiful face, and threw her arms around me, planting a long, deep, and passionate kiss on my lips, with delight sparkling in her big blue eyes.
Energy surged through me as our tongues danced, and an urgent heat stirred in my loins. But as much as I would have enjoyed a romp right now, there were many other matters to attend to.
I disengaged from the kiss and gently took her arms off my shoulders.
“I’ve got some news,” I said.
“And what might that be, Vance?”
“As comfy as this castle is, and as great as it’s been sleeping in a real bed after all that time on the road, we have to leave. Tomorrow at first light.”
She sighed with disappointment but gave me a nod of understanding. As someone with responsibilities of her own—being the Bishop of Erst—she knew that this little sojourn in Brakith couldn’t have lasted forever. She understood as well as I did that the threat of the Blood God wasn’t just going to go away and that every day we delayed our quest against him and his evil followers was a day we allowed them to grow in strength. She was as committed as I was to blowing that blood-drenched piece of troll dung off the surface of this planet forever.
“I knew this day would come,” she said wistfully. “I had just hoped that it wouldn’t arrive quite so soon. And I was so enjoying these nights with you. I knew that it was an impossible fantasy, of course, but I was hoping they wouldn’t have to end.”
I knew that the passionate lovemaking sessions we’d been engaging in weren’t the only reason Elyse was saying this; she’d enjoyed having me all to herself for a while, without having to share me with Rami, or Isu, who’d been quite the recluse in recent weeks beneath the crypts of the Keep. Then there was Anna, whose advances had been quite persistent. And it hadn’t been that I didn’t want to get to know the gorgeous raven-haired beauty a lot more intimately, but she and I just hadn’t had the time to fit in the kind of activities that we both wanted to engage in.
Neither of us said it directly, but we both knew that this period of exclusivity to Elyse was coming to an end. I knew that she’d be upset about it, even though I’d always been clear from the start that I wasn’t ever going to be a one-woman guy. Rami-Xayon would soon be back, and Isu would be around me all the time too, now that we were about to head back out onto the road and she couldn’t spend her time lurking in the shadows of the crypts anymore.
“I’ll start packing my things,” Elyse said with a sigh, trying (but failing) to disguise the sadness in both her eyes and her voice.
“Dust off that mace of yours,” I said. “Stories have been coming in from all sorts of traders and merchant caravans about new dangers popping up on the roads. I have a feeling that our journey won’t be an easy one, and you’re probably going to have to bust some heads open before we reach our destination.”
“You’re still set on traveling to the Wastes, to see this so-called ‘Wise Woman’ of that reeking barbarian oaf’s tribe?”
Elyse had a special sort of contempt for Drok. There were three things about him that really annoyed her. First, there was the fact that, in her eyes, he was a heathen, a pagan who outright rejected and loathed the Church of Light. Then again, so was I, and she’d managed to look past that inconvenient fact about me.
Second, she was simply disgusted with his personal hygiene, or, rather, his complete lack thereof. As a berserker, he believed that to wash himself would be to quite literally wash away his strength as a warrior. Hence the stink. Elyse was a stickler when it came to cleanliness; she wasn’t quite a neat freak or petrified of filth, but she was close enough. Drok’s stench turned her stomach in a particularly intense way.
Third and lastly, there was the fact that he’d been so insistent about me going to see the Wise Woman of his tribe. Elyse regarded this whole thing as a waste of time, a wild goose chase based on nothing but primitive superstition. It had taken quite some convincing to get her on board with traveling to the Wastes, but part of her still saw it as a fool’s quest that would end up being a gigantic waste of time.
“That’s where we’re going, yes,” I answered firmly. I considered telling her about the most recent dream Drok had, but I decided against it; she’d already concluded that Drok’s dreams meant nothing and were merely inconsequential by-products of the cheap, nasty grog he was so fond of quaffing.
“Vance, are you really, really sure about this? I mean, wouldn’t we be better off going straight after your uncle Rodrick? Making a beeline for him and hitting him hard and fast?”
I shook my head. “We haven’t even pinpointed where he is just yet. And, I can’t explain it, Elyse, but I have a hunch—a very, very strong hunch, an unshakable intuition—that I need to see this Wise Woman. The old crone has some part to play in this story. I can’t tell you how, but I just know it. And when have my instincts about these kinds of things proved to be wrong?”
Elyse let out a long sigh that told me that she wasn’t particularly happy about what I was saying but that she understood my reasons for saying it nonetheless.
“All right,” she said, not sounding particularly convinced, “if that’s your decision, I’ll go along with it. I only hope and pray that your instincts are right.”
“I’m pretty sure
