Elora returned to the entrance hall then with Ingrid, Astrid, and Ylva close behind her, and their arms were full of carefully packaged foodstuffs and several leather pouches of water.

  “My lord.” Ingrid nodded to me. “We’ve packed enough food for you to last at least four days. That should be enough for the journey to the village and your return home, with some to spare in case your plans do not go accordingly.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I also have…” Ingrid lowered her voice as she walked over to me. “Plenty of the special tea for Lady Shalanna. You’ll need to boil water over a fire to prepare the tea, so I packed a small kettle and a cup for her as well.”

  “Thank you.” I smiled as I took the small pack of tea from the old elf.

  “Two scoops,” Ingrid instructed me. “There should be enough of this for at least four days as well.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Safe travels, my lord,” Ingrid said, and then she waved for the young blonde girl and the sour-faced woman to return to the kitchen with her.

  “Good luck, Lord Levi!” Astrid called over her shoulder as she followed the housekeeper from the room.

  I smiled at the young girl and turned to help Elora secure all of our supplies in Frida’s saddle pack.

  A moment after we secured the last satchel, Hezzig walked in through the front doors with a look of triumph on his beardless face.

  “My lord!” Hezzig declared, and he held a lethal-looking blade high above his head. “I’ve just completed your dagger!”

  Chapter 12

  “Just in time.” I grinned. “We’re about to hike to the northern village.”

  “Yes, Sir Finnern told me about your journey, so I rushed to complete the dagger this morning,” Hezzig said. “It was nearly done, thankfully, and all it needed was a good sharp edge. I hope you are pleased with the blade, my lord.”

  “I’m sure I will be,” I said.

  I took the lengthy weapon from the dwarf blacksmith and tested its weight in my hands. Just like the sword Hezzig had crafted for me, the dagger was perfectly balanced right where the eight-inch blade met the guard. The last four inches on the back side of the blade was serrated with quarter-inch-long teeth, and there was a delicately engraved pattern of knotwork along the rest of the blade’s spine.

  I stepped back, gave the dagger a few practice swings to get a feel for the blade, and I smiled.

  Hezzig held his breath as he waited for my reaction to his work.

  “This is an incredible blade,” I assured the blacksmith.

  Hezzig heaved a sigh of relief and grinned at me with immense pride. “Thank you, my lord.”

  “No, thank you.” I clapped the dwarf on his broad shoulder, and I tucked the dagger into my belt. “I look forward to testing it out.”

  “I will be curious to know what attributes it has,” Hezzig said. “I quenched the blade in a mixture of the lava demon and the acid-spitting demon’s blood. I will be interested to see if this dagger has the blood splattering quality of the lava demons, or the rotting ability of the acid demons.”

  Hezzig had experimented with the different blood quenches over the last week, and he’d discovered the acid-spitting demons gave weapons a grotesque and useful quality. The dwarven blacksmith had used a few spare rabbits to experiment with, and with the first strike of the acid-blood blades, the poor creature’s entire body had started to rot from the center of the wound out to all its extremities. An animal as small as the rabbit had quickly succumbed to the internal festering of its flesh, and I’d been glad to see it didn’t suffer for long.

  I hoped the dagger had that quality, if not both, and I secretly longed to deliver that kind of pain to a demon or two.

  Or all of them.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Either way, I’m sure this blade will serve me well.”

  “Are we ready?” Ayen asked, and he smirked at me with excited impatience.

  “Yeah,” I chuckled at my big blond friend’s eagerness. “I think we are.”

  I looked around at my five companions for confirmation, and I was met with several nodding heads.

  “Alright, let’s head out,” I announced.

  Elora, Cedoric, Ayen, Finnern, and Shalanna, with Frida close by her side, fell into line behind me, and I led us all out of the castle.

  We marched quietly through the narrow mountain pass, headed into the forest, and began our journey north to the farming village.

  We hiked through the forest at a good pace for a while until we came closer to the edges of the danger zone, and then I led my companions further west so we could hike along the base of the mountains.

  My companions chatted casually among themselves, and I chuckled as Finnern and Ayen regaled the others with tales of their adventures. The two had started to form a competitive friendship, and each one of their stories somehow managed to one-up the previous one.

  Ayen shared about a demon attack on the camp several months before I’d arrived, and he claimed he’d made a perfect shot straight through the eye socket of one demon and into the skull of another demon right behind the first.

  “That is impressive,” Finnern allowed. “I once hurled Justice Bringer clear through the torso of a demon, and it slammed into a second hard enough to sail into a third. The force of my blow splattered the second demon and crushed the third to death against the mountain walls.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Ayen’s sour smirk at the former dwarf king’s tale, and I wondered how accurate either of their stories really were.

  We marched along the mountainside for a while, and I recognized the area where the dwarves had been trapped by the nest of albino demons.

  “Should we camp here?” I turned around to ask Finnern. “Or are there more caves further north? I don’t really want to stop yet, but I also don’t want to have to camp out in the open if that’s where we end up near nightfall.”

  “There are more caves further north that will suit us,” Finnern assured me. “We can go for quite a while longer before we will run out of safe places to camp for the night.”

  “What’s everybody think?” I asked the group, but my main concern was making sure Shalanna wasn’t overdoing it.

  “I believe we should keep going if we can,” Elora said, and she glanced at Shalanna. “What do you think?”

  “We should keep going,” Shalanna said. “I think it would benefit us to get as far north this evening as we can manage.”

  “I agree,” Ayen said. “That will shorten our journey for tomorrow.”

  “Good point,” I agreed. “Okay, let’s keep going. Finnern, please let me know when we get to the last caves if we haven’t already stopped.”

  “Certainly, my lord,” Finnern said.

  We continued hiking along the base of the mountains for a while, and we gradually trudged into totally unfamiliar terrain. I was glad to see the forest looked the same as it did further south, but I couldn’t help but notice the increase in sounds from deeper within the trees. There were definitely more than just rabbits and cockerels in this part of the forest, and I wondered if there were more moose. If there were, I hoped they were lucky enough to have avoided the tiny parasitic demons we’d encountered and had to slaughter shortly before we found Finnern and his people.

  Ayen silently wandered off into the treeline with his bow drawn up in front of him, and he returned a few moments later with a fresh kill in his hands. He gave Finnern a smug smirk, and the dwarf rolled his moss-green eyes at my friend with good humor.

  The sun grew low, and the shadows started to swallow up the forest around us, and I decided we needed to stop and make camp before we lost the light completely.

  “Let’s call it a night and set up camp,” I suggested.

  “That’s a wise choice,” Finnern agreed. “There are a few caves ahead of us, but we are nearing the end of the outer edges of my former city.”

  “Your city must have once been massive,” Cedoric commented in an awed voice.

  “Oh, yes.” Finnern nodded. “My kingdom once was a formidable underground fortress, and I ruled over tens of thousands of dwarven citizens. My palace was twice the size of Castle Levi, and there was an entire city surrounding it.”

  “That’s so fucking wild,” I breathed, and I tried to picture an underground cavern big enough to fit it all. “What does something like that even look like?”

  “No one but the dwarves know for sure,” Finnern chuckled with pride. “Everything was built into the mountain, so there was no way to really see it all from the outside. From the inside, my city looked like a continuous maze of caverns, tunnels, and homes.”

  “I wish I could have seen it for myself,” I said with a smile. “Is there a good spot to camp, then?”

  “Yes, in fact there is a nice cave just ahead of us that is closer to the ground than many of the others,” Finnern said. “It will be the easiest for us to access.”

  “Show us the way.” I gestured for the triple-braided dwarf to take the lead.

  Finnern led us another twenty yards forward, and then he stopped and looked up at the cliff face like he was studying a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  “Here it is,” he said a moment later with a sly grin, and then he slipped into a deceptively wide crevice hidden in the mountain side and completely disappeared from sight.

  “Woah,” I gasped.

  “Where did he go?” Cedoric asked with an unusual level of interest.

  “Come along,” Finnern’s voice echoed from within the cave.

  I shrugged at the others and followed the triple-braided man into the mountainside. I held my arms out to the sides and was glad to feel the tunnel was wide enough for Frida to squeeze through with us. Then I looked over my shoulder and waved for the others to follow.

  “Goodness,” Shalanna breathed as she stepped into the darkness behind me.

  My eyes adjusted quickly to the dark cave, and with the dull light still seeping in behind us, I spotted the burnt-red length of Finnern’s hair just ahead of me. The footsteps of my companions echoed behind me, and we walked in silence for a moment until darkness finally swallowed us up. Then the ground suddenly sloped up, and the dim light of the evening reappeared at the end of the tunnel.

  Finnern stepped out into a wide cave that was thirty feet in diameter with an opening that looked out over the forest from about eight feet above the ground. Across the other side of the cave from where we’d entered was a wall of collapsed boulders, and I assumed it used to lead deep into the dwarves’ underground city.

  Frida whined a bit as she squeezed through the end of the tunnel and into the larger cave, and then she circled around once as her shark tail wagged happily behind her.

  “This is a perfect place to camp for the night,” Elora mused as she looked around.

  “This cave seems very intentional,” Ayen said in a tone like he was fishing for more information while trying not to seem too interested.

  “This was once a guarded entrance to the city,” Finnern explained. “We will have a good view of the forest so we can keep watch.”

  “Brilliant.” I smirked. “We’ll take turns keeping watch throughout the night, but let’s set everything up first.”

  “I shall take the first watch, my lord,” Cedoric volunteered without hesitation.

  “Alright, thanks.” I nodded. “Finnern, do you think we can risk a small fire?”

  “That should be fine,” Finnern said as he fingered the end of his beard’s middle braid. “In fact…”

  The former dwarf king turned suddenly and walked over to a small alcove in the back of the cave. A moment later he walked back to the middle of the cave with an armful of incredibly dried-out firewood.

  “Here we are,” Finnern said with a slightly smug smirk.

  “Awesome,” I chuckled. “Let’s build a fire.”

  My companions spread out in the cave and began to settle their supplies for the night. Cedoric helped unburden Frida from her saddle pack without having to unload all of the supplies, and Elora and Shalanna began to roll out their sleeping mats on the floor.

  I was a bit worried Shalanna may have overdone it, but her color was good, and she seemed to be doing well enough. I knew Elora would get her something to eat and fix her a cup of the ginger tea if she needed it, so I focused on helping Finnern and Ayen set up a nice fire pit.

  We laid the super dry logs in a triangular formation toward the mouth of the cave, and Ayen pulled out a small bundle of tinder from his pack. Then Finnern handed me a bit of flint, and I pulled my new dagger from my belt. I’d been practicing starting fires with a blade and flint, but it was still a new skill for me, so it took four strikes before the sparks caught on Ayen’s tinder.

  The other men were respectfully silent and patient as I worked, and they both grinned proudly at me once the flames began to spread and crackle over the wood.

  “Well done,” Ayen murmured, and he walked over to where his dead rabbit waited to be stripped and cleaned. The big blond man sat down and started to prepare the kill to be cooked over my fire.

  Finnern just gave me a single nod of approval, and he laid his hand on my shoulder as he rose to his feet. “I will bring over more firewood.”

  I smiled at the fire I’d created by myself, and I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Castaway when Tom Hanks’ character triumphantly shouts, “I have made fire!”

  But I couldn’t stand here being smug about my small accomplishment, I wanted to check in on my ladies.

  I spotted Cedoric kneeling at the edge of the cave with his sword and his lumberjack-style axe resting across his thighs, and I knew he would take his watch duties as seriously as he did everything else.

  I walked over to where Shalanna and Elora were seated side by side on their mats with a small spread of Ingrid’s honey bread and dried strips of cockerel meat between them. Frida was sprawled out between them and the mouth of the cave, and she kept her beady black eyes on the forest outside. I sat down with my ladies and smiled as Elora handed me a fresh bodlin fruit.

  “Thanks,” I said, and I looked at Shalanna. “How are you feeling?”

  “I am very tired,” Shalanna sighed. “But otherwise well.”

  “Good,” I hummed. “If we’re going too fast, I need you to let me know, and we can slow down.”

  “No.” Shalanna shook her head. “Our speed was fine. I promise you, if something is too much for me, I will speak up.”

  “Good.” I nodded. “I want you two to make sure you get some sleep.”

  “I have already told Cedoric I will take the second watch,” Elora said with a playfully disobedient smile.

  “Of course, you did,” I chuckled. “I guess I should know by now I can’t tell either of you what to do.”

  “No, you cannot,” Elora giggled. “But I appreciate your concern. Would you like to take the next watch after me? That way you can be certain I will get some sleep.”

  “That sounds good.” I grinned. “Do you think you could get some sleep before then?”

  “Yes, I believe I shall lay down and rest until Cedoric is ready to turn the watch over to me,” Elora said.

  “I am already far ahead of you,” Shalanna murmured, and she yawned as she laid back to rest her head on the roll at the end of her sleeping mat.

  “Good.” I leaned down and kissed the sleek, black locks of Shalanna’s short hair. “We’ve still got several hours of hiking before we get to the village tomorrow.”

  “Make sure you get enough sleep as well, Levi,” Shalanna said through another yawn, and her silver-flecked blue eyes slid closed.

  “I will,” I whispered, and I caressed my thumb gently over the smooth plane of her cheek twice before I turned to Elora.

  My silver-haired lover scooted as far away from Shalanna as she could while remaining on her sleeping mat, and then she patted the spot next to her. I slid over and leaned back against the cave wall beside my elven warrior.

  “I’m so glad she’s feeling better,” I whispered.

  “As am I,” Elora sighed and leaned her head on my shoulder. “I know little of human pregnancy, but I know it can be very rough.”

  “Is it different from pregnancy for an elf?” I wondered.

  “Oh, yes,” Elora said in a soft voice so our conversation wouldn’t disturb Shalanna’s sleep. “I believe the period of pregnancy is nine moons for a human, is that right?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “How long is it for an elf?”

  “An elven pregnancy is a full sixteen moons,” Elora sighed.

  “Wow, that’s wild,” I breathed. “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “I would assume the longer length correlates with our longer life spans,” Elora said.

  “Huh.” I pondered that.

  I wondered what it was like if one of the parents were human and the other was an elf. I knew of two half-elf people now, and they were the two different combinations of elf and human. Goren had a human father and an elven mother, but Freesia had an elven father, and I assumed, a human mother. It was interesting to think about all the combinations this world had to offer.

  “Do you think pregnancy is different when an elf and a human have a child together?” I asked.

  “Hmmm,” Elora hummed. “I suppose it is. I remember Ingrid’s pregnancy, and it was not a full sixteen moons. At the time, I assumed Goren was born too early, but he was as healthy as any other babe.”

  “What about the morning sickness?” I asked, and I looked at Elora out of the corner of my eye as I nodded my head toward Shalanna. “Is it like this for elves, too?”

  “I suspect symptoms are different for every individual,” Elora said slowly, and she narrowed her eyes at me. “As far as I know, I am not with child, Levi.”

  “No.” I smirked. “Not yet, at least.”

  Elora gasped softly and looked at me with wide eyes, and then a happy smile spread across her beautiful face.

  “Is that something you desire?” Elora flushed furiously.

  “Of course,” I murmured. “I didn’t think about it before, but after Shalanna told me the good news, I realized I want to have a lot of kids. And it’s not like we’ve been abstaining from the exact thing that leads to babies. You might have my seed growing inside you right now and not realize it.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26