Broken Shield Ch. 03-04

Chapter 3

The sliver of muted autumn dawn sliced through sleep's thin veneer. Even the smallest mote of sunlight triggered the lesson of formative years on her papa's farm: "Up with the sun, Bluebelle, else the foxes eat all the eggs and the faefolk will away with the milk."

Larch had once gotten her to sleep until nearly noon, but she'd three broken ribs and he'd still had to tack his heaviest winter cloak over the inn's tiny window.

This morning, she'd no grievous injury, no wolf-fur curtain, only a glaze of mead and sweat and sex. Blue woke all at once, springing from unconsciousness to wakefulness without any blissful, hazy in-between moments. She was just suddenly and acutely aware of her throbbing hangover and the soft body sharing her bed. Sheet and blankets tangled around their feet. The dark hand on her breast. One thigh thrown across both of hers so that Mirri's hot sex pressed against her hip.

The room felt close and hot, and Blue desperately needed a piss. Hot kaffe, fresh bread, cured sausage. A poached egg. Oh, Sunshine, melted butter.

Blue slipped from the bed. Mirri smiled and turned to her other side. She made efficient use of the chamber pot and the water left in the basin. Her chest ached, the sort of deep, dull pain that meant rain and colder weather. Blue stretched against the pull of it. Fingertips nearly brushing the ceiling as she rose to tiptoes.

"Com'ere." Mirri's voice had gone hoarse with sleep. She could have been the queen Blue proposed to make of her last night. Lush raven curls tumbled across her forehead and smooth shoulders. Her legs curled under her with such elegance that the straw mattress seemed a throne.

Helpless to disobey in the face of Mirri's newborn confidence, Blue returned, leaning over so that her unbound hair curtained across one shoulder and her bare breast. A rumpled sheet of yellow silk. She cupped Mirri's nape and kissed her. Kissed her like she could consume her from the lips down. Kissed her with tongue and teeth and fury that would have scared her last night.

Hands butterflied at Blue's wrists. Grazed her shoulders before settling at her waist. Delicate fingertips chafed red from washing like points of lit tinder on Blue's flesh. They swept down, over deeply curved hips and thickly muscled thighs. Mirri hesitated at the junction of leg and body, where the velvet of Blue's skin met the crispness of blonde curls.

Blue heard the door open just before a please born of equal parts frustration and encouragement tumbled loose. Mirri squeaked and rolled backward in a mostly successful attempt to bury her nudity in the rumbled bedclothes.

"Larch?" Blue sighed, equally sure that her bare ass was on display to the whole hallway and that her partner had been the one to display it so. She could feel his canny green eyes cataloging her dishabille to tease her with at a later date. "Is the inn aflame?"

"Nay," the scrape of Larch's ruined voice almost covered his amusement. Almost.

"Then," Blue straightened and turned so that she blocked his view of the bed with her body. He filled the doorway, hair neatly combed, face shaved. Fully dressed except for his armor and cloak. "Kindly, fuck off, cock-brain."

This was hardly the first time Larch had seen her naked, and sure to be far from the last, but he managed to put just enough suggestion into the cock of his eyebrows that the cord of lust still tangled in her pelvis yanked tight again.

"Can't," he held up a sealed scroll between two fingers, "Orders from the Guild. Came with a caravan. Get dressed. I'll order breakfast." Larch started down the dark, and thankfully, empty hall.

When Blue called after him "Bacon, if ye value your life," he raised two fingers in acknowledgement without looking back.

The door clicked closed again, and Mirri popped her tousled head from the blankets. The smooth, dark apples of her cheeks gone burgundy with embarrassment.

"Sorry, luv," Blue offered both hands to pull the maid from the mattress, "That horse's ass only got an eyeful of me, if that eases your mind."

The lengthening dawn cast orange shadows on the floorboards as Mirri washed and dressed, taming her curls with a bit of ribbon and shoving stockinged feet into her shoes before speaking. "That letter means yer movin' on, yeah?"

"Likely." Blue paused in lacing short, cotton stays over her chemise. Breasts as large as hers needed more support than plain linen offered. "I'll see you, next time we come this way."

Mirri shook her head. "Don't bother. I'll likely be married 'fore then. Butcher's boy's been after me half-a-year." She paused, one small hand on the doorknob, and whispered, "Thank you," before slipping away into the early morning shadows.

Marriage, Blue suppressed a shudder as she pulled on her shirt and tucked it into canvas trousers. Marriage had worked out well enough for her middle sister, Clover, who was now pregnant with her third child in five years, despite the rather tawdry fact that Clara's husband had been betrothed to Blue first. An arrangement prompted by familial and pastoral closeness rather than any sort of affection, but one that had end when Seth had laid down with the wrong sister and gotten up with a babe in belly.

She'd sold her dowry cow and never gone back to Broken Shield. Even in the musty, low-ceilinged tavern, even with old injuries aching with the no-doubt damp weather, even as she found a seat at the unbalanced table Larch had spread with enough food to save his rotten life, Blue didn't regret it.

"So, raven-hair was not a maid." Larch spoke around a bite of bread and jam. He had the most irritating ability to speak and eat with equal rapidity and never lose a crumb.

"She was not." Blue hid a grin behind her kaffe cup. With caffeine perking quickly through her system, she tucked into breakfast. The common room was abandoned apart from them, the innkeeper's wife, and an old man crumpled o'er a table in such a way that he was either still drunk or dead. Blue waited until Larch had washed down a huge bite of black pudding with an even larger gulp of hot tea. "Your evenin' must've been much less satisfactory than mine."

Larch's indignation, and food, choked him, tanned cheeks turning red with the effort to swallow quickly enough to rebut.

Blue ignored his sputtered protest. "Up so early, neatly coiffed. Nary a sign of dissolution 'bout your morals. A poor evening indeed if you felt the need to catch a glimpse of my wide ass."

"Yer lily white arse is ever a treat to behold." Larch whacked the scroll across the table at her. "Stop fishing for compliments and read the orders of our lords and masters."

The seal of the Adventure's Guild showed an unbroken laurel wreath split with a spear. It matched the brass token she wore on her belt. The wax was black. Red meant a bounty. Gilt, bodyguarding. White was for return orders. "You e'er got a black one?"

"Nay, open it." Larch had flipped back into stoicism in that unnerving way of his. One moment laughing, the next deadly serious.

Blue cracked the seal and read for several long, tense moments, fork half-forgotten in her other hand.

A burnt end of bacon bounced off her forehead to land in her plate. "Well?"

Usually, Larch showed a little patience, if not gratitude for her literacy. If she hadn't badgered the priest in Broken Shield into teaching her, they'd be hunting down River Bend's temple to have the orders read to them. But not with a black seal and not when Blue's face blanched and then rushed with color.

"The Guild is calling an army to Cull Field. For Lord Ermil. Within a sennight." Blue read the parchment a second time and then a third. "Black is war."

Chapter 4

From River Bend to Cull Field was two days by fast horse, four on foot, and at least six with a heavy wagon. But fast horses cost money that they did not have and on foot, they could not carry enough provisions for the journey.

"Bad to be a-battle with light rations and holey boots," Larch reasoned.

So, they hired onto the caravan that brought the black wax orders. It was a merchant caravan headed to the front to partake in the grim economy of war. Better to make some coin and eat on the fat merchant's purse. Their boots might still be worn, but they'd have enough money to pay a cobbler and a blacksmith.

Vlad was fat, but more jolly than gluttonous and generous with his pay. When Larch had offered their services, flashing the Guild badge as assurance, Vlad had looked them up and down with little eyes set deep into laugh lines and nodded, wide grin showing a gold tooth. "Alright, one gold now, three we make it to Cull Field cargo intact. An addition jyll for any bandit killed 'long the way."

"A jyll to the one fells the bandit, right? Not to split five ways." Blue shifted the weight of her pack from one shoulder to the other. In the party, he'd already two Valonese sellswords, greybeards with slim pikes and padded doublets, and a novitiate priest, tall and slim in his black robes.

Silence spread as thick and wet as the cold front blowing down from the mountains. Vlad allowed one caterpillar eyebrow to creep toward his hairline and then laughed. A great booming laugh that sent a flock of chickens scattering with offended clucks. "Yes, yes, a bounty to be paid if we don't all die. Let's go before noon burns away."

A Saltlander, Blue realized, but as they walked away the many miles, trudging alongside the cart's deep ruts, she found she liked him. He carried a tune in that deep, loud, joyous voice and told stories of his time on the open sea. Though he reiterated, "Honest tradesman, me, not a pirate," whenever the tales grew too tall or too bloody.

The sellswords spoke too little of the common tongue for Blue to know any more than they were brothers, old enough to be her grandfather, and that she would not want to fight them. Larch seemed to like "Arno" and "Creo" well-enough if only because he could practice what conversation he remembered from his Valonese mother.

Which left Blue traveling the Queen's Walk with the priest for company. Well, priest in training, he'd not yet earned his red robes. Blue'd spent enough time with Old Samo back home to be comfortable with holy men though she herself was not particularly faithful to the Supplicant Sun nor its dark counterpart, the King of Night.

Still, Blue startled when, after lunch and near two hours of comfortable silence, the priestling, Reece, asked, "You can read?"

"I can." Blue made a quick study of his long, slender frame from the corner of her eye. His white blonde hair was shorn too close to his scalp, and he'd scraped his cheeks red when he'd shaved that morning. Sensible canvas trousers and well-worn boots stuck out the hem of his knee-length robes. An unblemished short sword was belted at his narrow waist. "You can use that sword?"

"Probably not half so well as you can read." Reece laughed, "I offered to read the orders when I gave them to your man." He hooked an elegant thumb towards Larch on the other side of the wagon. "He declined."

"And not politely." Blue slowed so that they walked abreast and found that she had to glance slightly up to make eye contact.

"No, snatched the parchment with 'Mah lass has 'er letters' and a rude gesture." Reece seemed to punctuate every sentence with a smile. His dimples deepening further as he mimicked Larch's Highlander brogue.

"Larch saves his charm to rise your skirts."

"Lucky you've got better manners." His pale eyelashes were thick and spikey. Irises the luminous dark blue of twilight just before the stars come out.

"Do I?" Blue winked.

"So far." A mottled flush worked up his throat, but Reece held out his robes in a mocking curtsey. "I brought some books. Do you like poetry?"

"Never read any." Unless Old Samo's Holy Scrolls counted.

"I can also offer you a treatise on edible pants?" Reece rummaged through his hip bag and pulled out two palm-sized, leatherbound books.

"Poetry." The book was warm from his body when she took it. "If you keep me from walking into a ditch or being trampled by the horses, I can read aloud."

The Walk was flat and hard packed in this part of the country, but it wouldn't stay so for long. Tomorrow, mayhap the day after, they'd pass from Flatlands through Midlands and into the gentle hills that fed Grandfather's Mountains. Cull Field was a moor where Midlands gave way to Highlands. And if it rained overnight, as the gray sky threatened to do, they'd be ankle deep in mud before noon.

"Safe as houses." Reece stepped behind her and placed a hand atop her shoulder. She couldn't really feel it through her coat of plate, and padded tunic, and shirt, but shuddered nonetheless when his thumb grazed the side of her neck.

Loving hands had, over the course of years, discolored the little book's leather cover. Inside, painstakingly penned verse crowded the parchment. Blue flicked through a few pages, tempted to start where the spine had been cracked, but in the end, she cleared her throat and began at the beginning. "A cold hearth is my heart / My moon-cheeked love / My black-winged dove / Without your tender art."

She read it as she would sing, from the diaphragm, trailing off when Larch started laughing. "Tender arts all the same in the dark, huh?"

Face hot, Blue shouted back, "Stuff it, cockbrain. Your own hand is no artist." In a near whisper, she asked Reece, "Love poems?"

The motion put her face very close to the edge of his jaw. He smelled like warm soap and sandalwood. The sharp edge of his sweat like an invitation. Would his pretty mouth taste as lush as it looked?

"A few, yeah." That dimpled smile was back in his voice. His hand moved more to the side of her neck on the delicate skin just below her ear, jocular and sexless except for the light press of fingertips against the front of her throat. "You read much, much better than I fight. I'd like to hear more."

Blue agreed, "But less lung this time."

Poetry, Blue found as she read through the waning afternoon, pleased her. It was like singing, the catch of cadence and rhythm, but somehow more private. The verses felt much more natural as she lowered her voice to an intimate volume. As the sun slipped towards the horizon, Blue fell more and more in love with the power of words.

"Whoa, wagon!"

Blue jumped at Vlad's shouted command. She'd leaned almost her whole weight against Reece in the ensuing hours so that her nape pressed against his shoulder. A flush scalded up her face as she handed him back the book. "Thanks."

"Borrow it again sometime. I like your voice." Reece dimpled. Reddish stumble already showed on his cheeks and jaw. He stepped away and tucked the poetry back into his pack.

Wanton whore, Blue scrubbed palms against her face. She didn't really know if priests were celibate or not. Old Samo had fucked every willing widow in the village, but he only followed what doctrine suited him. She drank deeply from her waterskin to soothe her raw throat and embarrassment.

When she joined Vlad and the others at the horses, they were debating the best place to camp for the evening. The tradesman thought they should just pull to the easement of the road to "Start early amorn."

"Might as well drop trou for every highwayman from Big River to Moon Top." Larch's crude objection was more accurate than not. A campfire on the Walk would be easypickings even if they set a watch. Wide-open to the road on one side and hemmed in by the Wizard's Wood on the other. Blue studied the slope of ground and found a familiar gap in the dense pine trees.

"There's a clearing, not far," she pointed north-east. "Should be wide enough trail for the wagon to pass if we're careful. Fast running stream, too."

Vlad cut shrewd eyes at her. "Know the area?"

Blue shrugged, "Grew-up another two hours east. Used to meet a boy in the forest."

"Alright, then, lead the way," Vlad clicked the horses back to attention and headed toward the trail she'd indicated.

Reece nudged her shoulder. "Snuck out to meet your beau. Romance in a moonlit wood?"

"Something like that." Blue returned his grin despite the odd melancholy of nostalgia choked in her throat. Galen. She'd almost forgotten him. He felt like a memory from another life. When she was still a farmgirl. He wouldn't know her now.