A set of hands grabbed her uninjured arm before she could pick out the glass. Celeste would have torn herself away if not for the fierceness of Kori’s scowl thrust into her face. “That’s too deep. Don’t touch it.”
She was guided inside the tavern, lively that evening and filled with music and voices. Glad for Kori’s tight hold as she was beginning to feel wobbly, she was dragged behind the bar, through the kitchen, and into a storeroom where she was dumped atop a crate.
Her vision tunneled, an awful lot of blood running down her arm, speckling her dress, dripping on the floor. She’d been covered in blood like this once before, spitting up crimson all down her front. She was sure she would die then, she’d even wished for death, but it had unmercifully not come.
There were voices, and others had packed into the cramped storeroom. Halfrida with her big, red curls and a basin of hot water, Kori still scowling but in a concerned way, and a third woman, a beautiful woman, the most gorgeous woman she’d ever seen—a goddess? Maybe death finally was coming for her after all.
But then she saw the point to her ears and realized it was only an elf, and that elf was tending to her wound along with Halfrida’s help. Kori’s harsh voice explained to the others that Celeste had been unlucky to be caught under the lamppost when it blew. If she had actually seen, there was no way she would have thought Celeste innocent, but the short woman’s tone was confident, and no one questioned Celeste’s motive, they just bustled around her and worried and…and what was this? What was happening?
Well, glass was being extracted from her arm—that Celeste could focus on because it hurt. She was no stranger to pain, and it was much easier to understand the way her skin felt rather than other people’s intentions. Another feeling followed, warm and wet as a linen was pressed to the gash, and yet another as deft, elven fingers cast arcana along her limb.
The sounds in the storeroom went fuzzy, but there were bandages being applied to her arm, hands touching her gently, and then a voice. It asked her once, then twice, and finally a third time, in patient and soothing tones, how she was feeling.
“I…I don’t…” She spied the droplets of blood on the floor again. “I’m sorry I made such a mess. Please, I’ll clean it up.” She reached a weak hand for one of the linens, but Kori stopped her.
“Quit that,” the short woman snapped. “Just sit still and let Ima’riel help you.”
“Taters!” called another much higher-pitched voice. The littlest girl from the tavern came sprinting into the room carrying a massive bowl in both hands. She crashed into Celeste’s knees and shoved a spoon into Celeste’s mouth. “Eat!”
Potato mash was apparently just the thing Celeste needed to drag her out of the panic and confusion. “Thank you,” she mumbled around the mouthful, taking in the worried faces that stared down at her, relief painting them.
The elven woman gave her a nod, standing to her full, towering height, and beside her, Halfrida dropped her hands onto her hips and snorted. “West Road was the last of the arcane lights—we’ll need to start using torches again. At least it wasn’t the old blacksmith’s forge that went, but gods know that’ll probably be next at this rate!”
The elf responded in her dulcet tone, “Let’s hope not. I’ll go to see Geezer again. Fire arcana is far from my specialty, but I would like to avoid any more injuries.”
“More taters,” said the little ginger girl, and she shoved another spoonful into Celeste’s mouth.
CHAPTER 8
MAKING A DEAL WITH THE DIVINE
Icannot read this part out loud,” mumbled Reeve as he turned the page.
Sid continued to pester him, though he was fairly certain the sword didn’t care about what was actually written in the book, he was just bored. It wasn’t that the man had no sympathy for the sword: not having hands or feet or eyes was probably difficult, but the Obsidian Widow Maker was almost always shoved away in a scabbard—couldn’t he just be content laying out on the floor for a little while?
Reeve cleared his throat and simply said, “Because.” He wasn’t going to tell the sword that the writing was growing indecent, and really, Sid probably wouldn’t enjoy this part anyway since he didn’t have any of the bits that were being described in increasingly vivid detail to do any of the acts that were hopefully going to be explained with more direction on the following pages.
Another day had passed, and the holy knight had made many gallant attempts to escape his noxscura prison. He executed an all-out assault on the shadows, slashing into the barrier that kept him in place with all the brute force of a man who knew no other way. Arcane metal crashed into arcane wall, especially frustrating as that wall was essentially transparent, but the sword was thrown back with each swing, and subsequently so was the knight. Reeve landed painfully on the floor more times than he could count as he’d knocked his head rather hard after the seventeenth attempt. That would have stopped a different man, and whether that man be weaker or smarter or more-prone-to-concussion-er, it is difficult to say, but it did not stop Sir Reeve.
What Sir Reeve gained from his questionable relentlessness was the ability to actually slicethroughthe barrier instead of be thrown violently away from it. Yes, it did seal itself right back up before anything else could pass beyond, including himself, but it was progress. The truth was not quite so favorable, it was just that the noxscura was beginning to feel a little bad about all the hurt it was causing him even if he was sort of causing it to himself, so the shadows made themselves malleable instead of delivering him forcefully to the hardness of the floor.
Reeve simply thought, of course, that he was weakening the enchantments, and perhaps he was, in a way, but he was also weakening himself. The knight was nothing if not resilient, but even divine arcana has its limits, and once he was doing little more than casting glittery light to be swallowed up by the shadowy wall, he had no choice but to wait for his magic to catch up to his will.
Frustrated, he resorted to wielding a different blade and turned to whittling the brittle fish bone he’d brought from Bendcrest, but once he snapped off one of the griffin wings of his carving, he gave up on that too. Then there were the books. Two of the tomes the witch left him were typical Valcordian prayer missals that Reeve already knew front to back. He moved on to the field guide of the surrounding forest, quite old and filled with illustrations of plants and beasts, but it was a quick read, and then there was only the tome that had fallen apart.
The pages were no longer scattered across the floor. He might have been occupying a witch’s chambers against his will, but there was no reason to leave it messy, so he had gathered them right away and set them aside. But with nothing left to fill up his time, he began to piece the story back together, and once he caught a glimpse of a salacious phrase, he’d been enthralled since.
It had begun innocently enough, the tales of a man and a woman on separate paths, but then their destinies converged followed by their bodies. He’d just come to a very interesting part involving tongues and their potential application in places Reeve hadn’t yet imagined when Sid really started in.
“Come on, bud, I’ll help you pronounce the big words.”
Reeve grunted. He couldn’t be a holy knight without being able to read, but Sid liked to poke fun at the time he’d misinterpreted the Ouranic carvings on a haunted crypt and temporarily lost his soul to a lich. Luckily, Flint had been there to call it back. But it was true that Reeve had never really cared for books. He hadn’t had the opportunity to realize it was likely because the temple only allowed him to read morality tales, and while they had taught him to be chivalrous and polite, the stories also gave him secondhand guilt for vices he never even considered doing.
There was certainly never anything likethisat the temple, discussions of racing hearts and sweaty palms and the eager sound a woman might make when expecting something of a man.
“Ahem?”
Right. Like that.
