Though Elani's face was flushed and her eyes squeezed tight in the vigorous, unslaked passion of her shuddering clasp, Leitara was spent, overshadowed, and more sickened than satisfied. While the half-human greatly outmassed her, and in crushing her to the table, leveraged her lust, Leitara had her unyielding Tree-Woman strength, and by bringing her feet to bear, toppled the witch.
When Elani picked herself up, her impassioned cheeks burned brighter with shame and she accused Leitara with hungry, sunken eyes. "You are stronger than you look."
Leitara dropped from the table's edge. "While dryad muscles are not much stronger, they work differently. If animal flesh applied itself not in bursts, but continuously, you might know a dryad's strength."
"I was tempted to an animal burst when you pushed me to the floor. If I was the age I look, I might have done so. But you must see past this discomfiture to my gratitude, for all I am I owe to you."
"Trust not in me, but your good luck," said Leitara, "which brought me here that you might not only outlive your expectations but your world."
When Leitara headed for the door, a desperate spasm flickered on Elani's face. "Do not go."
"Is our business not concluded?"
Elani's redness of cheek spread to her brow and neck. "Having ostracized myself for the mortifying ugliness of my great age, I braced myself for the solitude of my final years. Now that youth has washed over me, and this surge of lust ebbs, my loneliness will consume me. If you leave, I might die."
While Leitara could not deny her attraction, as her passsions chilled, the desire was no longer thrilling, but repellent, as if it stemmed not from her soul but an upwelling shadow. She could not so easily dam her wellspring of pity, for being estranged from her home world, she also knew loneliness.
"If you keep your hands to yourself, you may join me. While you will find no love in me, there is only death for you here."
"Am I so ugly, even now?"
"If you are unnatural, Elani, that eerie beauty only accentuates my desire."
"Do you not like women?"
"On Ielnarona, we are all women one time or another."
"I did not know it was in me."
"Is it, Elani? You only followed a desire. It means what you want it to mean."
"Why will you not follow your desire?"
"When your people came to Wywynanoir, I could not overcome my natural loathing for your animal skin, sweat, and stink. Animal hair was coarse and gross, not luxuriant and soft like dryad tresses. If we had met in Ielnarona, I would have spared your feelings, but there is now no reason to hold back. If I am enamored by your beauteous form, your substance is...not so enthralling."
"You wrap insults in compliments."
"I do not speak obliquely; I only say what I feel. Though I extend my hand in friendship, you will never hold it in love."
"I am still unfulfilled, frustrated...full of pent-up lust..."
"And sentence fragments."
Elani cracked a smile. "While I have not grown old by being unable to restrain myself, if I take your hand in friendship, do not expect that I will not hope for more."
"As the centuries have hardened my feelings in impregnable memories, do not expect this of me. That said, yesterday my closed eyes waited on my birth, and opened on smoke, fire, and desolation, a nightmare that only now ebbs in the face of my first friend." While this was a willful lie—for her first spark of camraderie was for the Baugn, and she had liked Kuruk better—she offered the conceit to sweeten Elani's bitter pride, for the Tree-Woman feared wandering friendless in the Human World. If her past selves whispered that she gloated in the witch's helpless attraction, she neither mentioned it, nor burned with the horror of shame or the relish of ego, for she was too newborn to grapple with such contradictions. Right now she only saw the starkest lines, those between animal and vegetal, old and new, magic and memory, and Human World and dryad exile.
Elani managed an irritated smile. "Then wait here while I pack a satchel of food and water."
Leitara's thirst roared. "I will help you." As Leitara shouldered a sack, Elani fastened backpack straps, then both slung skins of water and spirits.
"This one is neither water nor wine," said Elani.
"What is it?"
"A surprise, though I hope not to use it. It is not for drinking."
After ransacking Elani's home for provender and useful items, they ate the food they could not carry, drank their fill from the well, closed the door, then trudged through the woods. When they reached the road, and Elani turned towards the way they came, Leitara said, "I am sorry for your house, Elani."
"My house? That was only a bed and a dining table. It is my workshop I mourn."
"You will find admirers on Alfyria or Nahure."
"What of Ielnarona? You said they would covet my talents."
"We cannot go there, as I am an exile."
"Is this the right direction, Elani? Mount Juntawni is this way."
"Do we not head to Drydana?"
"Why?"
"Are you not curious?"
"If we do not leave the Drydanans to their mystery, the mystery of death will fall upon us."
Elani sighed, but voiced no argument, and when they moseyed towards Cuvaernei, and Juntawni's cragy peaks tapping the Abyss above, they paused at a hill, where they dropped to their bellies to gawk unobserved at the vast army camped outside Cuvaernei.
"Your other friend fell harder than I did."
Leitara snorted. "What do you mean by that?"
"They are Inamu."
The besieging warriors were clad in burnished steel hoops from head to toe, and grasped every conceivable weapon—swords, axes, spears, maces, and bows—and a few cruel designs which Leitara did not recognize, though she guessed their functions to be lethal from the dull bludgeons, blades, and spikes on their business ends.
"Why are they here?"
"Believe me, Leitara. I haven't heard anything, but such a fast summons could only be from honor or love."
Leitara shook her head. "Why so coy, Elani? Did you stir this up?"
"Not that I'm involved, but something tells me you don't want answers."
"You think I'm the cause?"
"No, that would be your Inamu friend. You're just the pretext."
"If I am the accident behind this, what does it matter? Soon they will be dead."
"We'll all be dead in time."
"Not if we have anything to do with it. I'm a dryad ringed by centuries, you just witched away your years, and we shall continue our long lives and forget the dead."
"Nothing lives longer than memory, Leitara. While today we have free will, tomorrow that today will be as still as the dead, as unyielding as stone. Will this day mark regrets or our finest hour?"
"Curse your Alfyrian side."
"My Alfyrian side? Elves are cold. And you can't mean my cow-eyed human mother, who was as good as you'd expect a simpleton to be."
"That's extremely reductive. Though I've only known a few people, there were a heap of wicked simpletons in Cuvaernei. Virtue and intelligence go hand in hand with the Inamu. And besides--your own mother!" Although Leitara had no memories of mothering or being mothered, but only of being expected to cut loose at the instant of sprouting and find a place to take root in dryad society, it suddenly hit home that in the languages of other peoples, she was an orphan, and would forever be a motherless cipher not only on Ielnarona, but to any in the Five Worlds that knew her story. "While offspring are only assets on the Dryad World, and our Tree-Mothers are uncaring, how can I think of the being that made me as less than myself? You should be in awe of your mother, Elani."
"You didn't know her," sighed Elani. "Her constant errors caused my father no end of grief, and in his visits, he would spend more time adjusting her than teaching me."
"While you had an Alfyrian wizard for a tutor, your mother was not so lucky. You think of her as a slow learner when her apprenticeship was delayed compared to yours."
"She gained some wisdom in her short life," breathed Elani with an exapserated groan. "She would advise you to esteem your friend. Meet honor with honor, she often said."
Leitara stood. "I came to that conclusion myself." When she walked downhill, Elani clung to the promontory for nearly a minute before tearing down the slope.
"What are you doing?"
"Isn't this what you wanted?"
"How did you get that from what I said?"
"Tomorrow, today will be as still as the dead. No regrets."
"What do you have to regret?"
"And you?"
"You had left me high and dry!"
"Friends don't take the high ground to lord it over their friends."
"But it's okay to hide our true feelings up there."
"You've been that age not even two hours. You don't know your true feelings."
"What's your plan?"
"While you might want one, I'm on good terms with the Inamu."
"Not the Inamu, an Inamu."
"Who used to be king."
"Did he? For his sake, I hope he didn't summon this army."
"Why for his sake?"
"Inamu kings do not abdicate, they are ousted when their councilors deem them too weak to rule, or when the heir becomes a stronger asset to the realm. While the king is exiled with a fortune, servants, and an annual stipend by messenger, they must not return, on pain of death. Moreover, the resentment of the predecessor's influence is so vehement that any dispatch he sends to the throne is an invitation to assassination."
"What a wonderfully arbitrary custom. It's almost dryadic."
"They claim to be the oldest nation on Hravak."
"Nations," Leitara snorted, "as if a war here affects only two peoples. You would think that after the first human war impacted their whole world, they would unify, if only to preserve their united self-interest."
"There are no historians on Hravak, and few scholars. Learning took root slowly here, where even now it is a syncretic hodgepodge which each sage cobbles from what he plagiarizes from elves and goblins."
"Like giants, but more successful. You should have borrowed from dryads. Unlike elves or goblins, we would expect only that you become wise."
Elani snickered. "You think I'm provincial."
"You believe me high-handed."
Breaking away from the besieging army, six horses galloped near so fast that their hooves churned invisibly and their sleek forequarters seemed to float under their Inamu riders, whose spears pointed skywards and trailed banners. After lagging to a moseying walk, the envoy split into two groups of three to circle left and right, and Leitara and Elani paced inside the wall of nickering horses until a command from a grey-bearded Inamu stopped all the horses at once, as if he commanded not only his horsemen, but their horses, who only suffered their reins as a cruel fashion.
"You are Leitara." It was a statement of fact, not a question. "And you are the wood witch."
"Your king knows me. Not the one who summoned you, but his son."
"You know Lord Kuruk, wood witch?"
"As I am on first name basis with King Kaltu, I would appreciate it if you called me Elani."
"I mean no disrespect, Elani. But we are not here for you. We are here for the Tree-Woman."
"All I see are horses. And snakes." A spout of gibberish ebbed into a sybillant hiss as Elani's arms undulated like serpents, the surrounding rocks rattled, and green snakes dripped from the saddles, leaving their steeds confused and bucking from the sudden lightening of their load and the absence of hands from their reins.
"Why would you do such a thing?" Leitara stepped over a rippling serpent that squirmed back to front, then back again, in its unfamiliarity with slithering; another no sooner lost his human skin than he paradoxically began shedding his snake skin. The horror washed over the Tree-Woman; what would he look like when his human form was restored? Would shedding that false skin leave him with a flawless baby skin, or only sticky muscles, sinew, and a few blemishes of protruding bone and cartilege?
"I did you a favor. Whereas Kuruk thought to lead you by the nose, now you can meet him on your terms."
"Are they poisonous?"
"While men are poisonous by nature, my love," said Elani, "as snakes, their teeth are pulled."
Elani lifted her chin, sniffed in a look of perfect condescension, and swaggered towards the Inamu. Leitara reminded herself to act impressed later, as not only did she not care who took the lead, but her young, raw ego was happy to be mothered by this sorceress, who was her indisputable elder in days, if her inferior in experience, knowledge, skill, and memory.
Having tramped the dry grass toward the camp, they strode between two regiments of spearmen so tightened by their formation and discipline that they looked neither left or right at the passing women, but stared straight at Cuvaernei.
Heading the front ranks were Lord Kuruk and one who greatly resembled him, aside for the emeralds and diamonds inlaid in the gold filigree of his breastplate; this jeweled relief of a bear's head had one cyclops eye as jagged as its gemstone teeth.
"There she is." When Kuruk grabbed this man's arm, and pointed with his other hand,
the younger lord's face chilled, his lips thinned, and his eyes withdrew into their icy blue. "Tree-Woman, this is my eldest son, Kaltu. King Kaltu."
Kaltu extricated his arm from his father's grasp, forced a smile, and bowed his head. "Though he tells me you are Leitara, my eyes tell me you are Inglefras."
Leitara's face tightened glaring back. "I am no friend of that pretender."
"You pretend too. I know royalty when I see it." Kaltu flicked his wrist to point, as if moving his arm would be an overture too taxing for the monarch.
Leitara looked down--the royal raiment had flowered again, this time orange and scarlet.
Kaltu continued. "Where is your escort?"
"They wend their way here and soon will be underfoot," smirked Elani.
Kaltu scoffed. "You mean that you have done them ill, wood witch. Very droll."
While both father and king were armored in interlocking steel diamonds, when arrows flew from the upper windows of Cuvaernian residences, Kuruk, having the uncertain footing and lightness of frame that came of age, was spun widdershins by a hurtling bolt and landed in a heap at Leitara's feet, whereas Kaltu shrugged off the arrow that glanced off his helm. When an arrow pierced Leitara's orange and red efflorescence, the fibers tore without feeling, as meaningless as Elani's caresses.
When Elani took an arrow in her midriff, she seized it with a white-knuckled grip, and with wide eyes flecked by madness, yanked it free, trailing not only blood but a few gory links--which then retracted, like thread spun on a spool, into the wound's red lips, which tightened in a thin-lipped smile, then vanished.
When the next volley darkened the sky, Elani lifted an upturned hand, and the missiles dissolved in a hail of garter snakes. Leitara pulled a writhing, hissing serpent from her hair with a disgruntled look, and Elani grinned. "I'm sorry, it was the freshest spell in my memory."
"This enchantment turns anything into snakes? How about cities? Or one measly house, with its houseful of archers swallowed into its stomach."
"Don't be ridiculous, my love." The third flight sparkled into fizzing fireworks which exploded over the Inamu. "While I might do this all day, if a stray arrow falls out of rhythm, or an archer shoots out of step, my heart might swallow an arrow."
Kuruk staggered to his feet. When King Kaltu barked an order, the first four ranks marched forward, the back half raising their shields,while the front lowered them to the charging horde, who waved axes, spears, and clubs in their screeching advance.
Leitara said, "couldn't you heal it?"
"That was the last gasp of my youth spell. If your friend has no pressing business, we should take our leave."
Kuruk said, "We have the Tree-Woman, Kaltu. Let us withdraw."
"They taunt us, father. When they live in ruins, they will respect the Inamu, and you will call me king."
"Perhaps the last. At the last, my son."
King Kaltu turned back to the battle, but not before his face hardened into a scowl, which then curled into a cruel smile. "Wouldn't you rather die in honorable battle, my lord?"
"No, Kaltu. Let me die in the presence of an honorable son."
"I will show you honor!" Kaltu lowered his visor, drew his sword, and roared, "spare no one! Kill them all!"
After a hushed war cry barely flitted across their grimly set faces, and like brass statues come to life, the gilttering warriors broke into a trot, then a sprint, then hurtled--each column of Inamu like a gleaming spear piling through the milling Cuvaernians, who broke under the momentum, either as corpses slashed to the dry grass, or by turning in fearful, gibbering flight, until Inamu horsemen unfurled two flanking lines to converge on, rope, and drag the shrieking deserters through the streets of their own city.
Leitara turned to Kuruk, who raised a shaking hand to his furrowed, sweating brow, shielding his eyes from view, and twisting his mouth into a look of dismay, which she might have assumed regret of the needless slaughter or envy at being unable to keep pace with the younger warriors, had not the wetness of tears collected in his beard.
"Is this not what you wanted, Kuruk?"
"Show some gratitude, Tree-Woman. I brought them for you."
"Have you not enough grief, my lord?"
"I am not here for grief, but honor."
"Honor is a fine line cut by swords, and you are on this side of it." Elani snickered.
"I might have known the Tree-Woman would find the wood-witch."
"Come with us, Lord Kuruk," said Leitara.
"Flee? I would rather die."
"You will," sighed Elani. "Whether at the hands of the Cuvaernians or those of your own people."
"You know our customs, wood-witch?"
"I met your son when his first wife was struck with a wasting fever. He is a good man. You do him grave dishonor, Kuruk."
"You know nothing, wood-witch. When I preferred my second son, Hauca, for my heir, Kaltu conspired with my council to oust me, though I was yet hale and strong."
"Were you? Are you?"
"Exile is fatal to me, wood-witch. I wither away from my people."
When a horseman galloped back, he reined in his steed to paced back and forth while they finished their conversation. While both rider and steed were unscathed, they were flecked with sweat and panting. "The King summons you, Lord Kuruk."
"He need not worry. Though my sword-arm is not what it was, and my legs are not as steady, my spirit is still brave, and I will await his boon with pride and honor."
"King Kaltu wants you to see this, Lord Kuruk. While the slaughter continues apace, and the Cuvaernians flee in droves, one man holds us at bay in a bar."
"One Cuvaernian?"
"One man, Lord Kuruk, but not a Cuvaernian."
"Perhaps you mean that he is not a man? Is he from another world?"
"It is not for me to say, Lord Kuruk."
"I was your king long before Kaltu, Dremon."
"I have never allowed evil to be spoken of you in my presence, Lord Kuruk." Dremon removed his helm, revealing that his left ear was pared away, leaving a puckered pink flap as dainty as a baby's toe. "Even to the face of King Kaltu."
"That was not wise, Dremon," Lord Kuruk's benign expression clarified into righteous anger. "Tell your king I have no wish to see his face, but when he want me, he knows where to find me."
"Lord Kuruk," said Dremon. "If you do not come, Kaltu will order him killed."
"What is that to me?"
"My king, he is Inamu! And possibly more."
"Dremon, you make no sense. If more than Inamu, he is a god, or so say our sages. And if he is Inamu, why would Kaltu want him dead?"
"When the tavern was dark, he was so like you in stature and breadth that I thought you beat us to the battlefield, until he stood and glared drunkenly through eyes that are the image of Lady Omora's."
"If another said that, Dremon, I might think they were your master's creature. "
"I know this man," said Leitara. "Though Khyte resembles your people, he is Drydanan."
"Drydanan," spat Lord Kuruk.
"You do not like them?"
"When I became king, those vagrant killers stole every needful thing and slaughtered those in their way. Though they now pretend to be civilized, they are hogs in human skin."
"While this Drydanan answers to that description, he looks like your people...
and, come to think of it, much like you."
"While Drydanan hair is blacker than Inamu, their skin is whiter than hot coals, and savage passions contort their intemperate faces, so that they resemble jackals more than humans."
"Though Khyte is a monstrous animal, the passions that blew him to the Dryad World have cooled. That said, he does not resemble your description, and is darker even than us dryads."
Dremon spoke. "My king, if he is Omora's, there is hope for justice in your line."
"Though I am no longer your king, Dremon, serve me once more, and take me to this Drydanan who looks Inamu."
Dremon lowered an arm, and Kuruk clasped it to mount behind the horseman.
"You are determined to die, Lord Kuruk," said Leitara.
"We are all determined to die, though it is not we who determine it; as hope is rarer than death, forgive this old man for following his heart. Will you follow, Tree-Woman?"
Elani said, "we leave for greener worlds, old man."
Leitara spoke coolly as if the wood-witch had not spoken. "I will follow you, Lord Kuruk."
Kuruk nodded and smiled gratefully. When Dremon flicked the reins, his horse cantered, then galloped back to Cuvaernei.
"You're not going?" Elani said with a flabbergasted look.
"Go on ahead, Elani."
"You're not coming?"
"When I leave this doomed world, you may accompany me, but if you don't want to see the fruit borne by this message, meet me on the falling oasis."
"You are quick to suffer those wicked streets a second time, Leitara. What kind of friend would I be if I let you walk to your death?"
"What will you do? Turn me into a serpent and cup me to your breasts? While dryads drink no mother's milk, and I have no taste for the poison of false friendship, I might drink the health of a good friend. As you are only becoming reacquainted with youthful vision, I'll be your eyes: Lord Kuruk is a good man and deserves our alliance."
"You might not say this if you saw the Inamu nation. They treat their horses better than their wives."
"Still better than the Cuvaernians. And regardless of how worthy they are as a people, Kuruk treated a lonely Tree-Woman with honor."
"Cursed Tree-Woman," sniffed Elani. "I'll lead the way." If Elani would have liked Leitara to believe she shrugged it off, she should not have squared her shoulders, and stepped briskly, almost mechanically, toward the overrun city.
Picking through the trampled and riven bodies, Leitara seized a spear from a dead hand, then dropped it for being split down the shaft; it took three tries before she found a suitable weapon, a heavy Cuvaernian backsword. Her best find, an Inamu round shield, was perhaps dropped during their charge, for its green paint and Kaltu's gold boar head were not even chipped. Elani picked it up, unlaced the still-buckled gauntlet, and strapped it to her wrist.
As the smoke streaming from hovels at first obscured the street, the gore seemed to spring up under their feet, as they stepped over headless corpses, feeble moaners bleeding from hacked stumps, and bodies darkened by trampling hooves into inhuman grotesques.
Elani coughed in the searing smoke. "Can you see anything?"
"Those larger shapes pacing are horses, and unless that larger house is a lord's townhouse, it's likely the bar."
On approaching the building, Leitara's assumption proved correct, and Dremon, still mounted, had in his hands the reins of two riderless horses.
"King Kaltu and Lord Kuruk are on the roof, talking to the stranger," said Dremon. "Don't go in!" When Leitara and Elani looked back questioningly, he continued, "your Drydanan friend set the stairwell on fire."
"Of course he did," said Leitara. "He's not my friend. Only Lord Kuruk may claim that honor." When Elani directed a hurt glance her way, Leitara rolled her eyes. "I meant of those inside, Elani."
"It's good we're friends, Leitara, or as a Tree-Woman, you'd never get through..."
Leitara slid the backsword in a fold of her self-grown garment, then cut off Elani's arrogant but well-meaning condescension by climbing the wall. The unyielding strength of dryads is so well-suited for climbing that even the most dignified Tree-Women use it as a means of locomotion, and since her hands and feet found easy purchase in the grooved Cuvaernian brick, in a few breaths she grasped the eaves and pulled herself atop the blazing bar.
The fire blasting from the open stairwell vomited not only smoke but a stern heat that softened the tar sealing the roof, which squished, uncomfortably warm, under Leitara's bare feet and between her toes. The liquifying pitch hardened almost instantly, inuring her next steps to the rising heat.
"Your name is not Khyte," Kuruk was saying, his voice buoyantly impassioned, "but Artonin, after my father. Though I chose Lady Aquelin for my queen, when Lady Omora bore you in good faith, I raised you as my own."
Khyte's expression was indefinable, as it flickered from Kuruk to Kaltu, then the half-dozen Inamu gripping spears, then to Leitara. "It wasn't nice to leave me in Cuvaernei."
"Leave you, my son?"
"Not you--her," said Khyte.
When Kuruk turned his head, Kaltu sneered, raised his shining sword, and slashed Kuruk through the back. When the elderly Inamu patriarch slid away from the blade, his eyes had already stiffened.
As Khyte was still stunned from what he heard, no matter that he had deflected his bewilderment by bantering with Leitara, it took a moment for his rattled eyes to shift to what was before him, and he stepped back in horror from what might be his father's corpse sticking to the melting roof.
"Kirtati!" hissed Leitara, naming Kuruk's son a bad seed, the worst of all dryad curses,
meaning one who thrived obstinately and perversely in an evil direction, not only its fruits but its roots wicked, and growing from a heartless core. She lunged at King Kaltu, darting between two guards over the bubbling rooftop that sagged and simmered under her scalding feet, but when she thrust the backsword toward his neck, he clashed it aside with his long, bright blade, and her weapon sank into the softened tar.
"You coward," she screamed.
"My father knew his life was forfeit, Tree-Woman," sneered King Kaltu, "and I deemed it merciful that he be spared terror and despair in his final moments."
Leitara's next scream, hot on the tail of the first one, shivered it in half and deafened her to other than the hot sap throbbing in her ears, and she dragged the dripping sword free, so that when he parried her next slash, hot pitch spattered from the edge of the blade, searing his face and the backs of his palms. While the heavier, stronger swordsman easily brushed her back, his hand flinched under the beads of hot tar, and his sword point drove a foot into the roof.
Though the one-edged backsword faced away from Kaltu at the full extension of her swing, when Leitara saw this opportunity, she heaved the wide flat back, knocking his helm loose to totter to the seething roof, and raising a welt on his forehead.
Having recovered their wits, the flanking guards brought their shields to bear and rushed Leitara, when the roof's bubbling reached a sinking point, stretching, then plunging like hot syrup, dripping shrieking Inamu guards in a humongous dollop of tar. Kaltu roared like a bear caught in a trap until he was swallowed by the sparking rubble. As Khyte toppled, his sword fell from nerveless fingers in time with Lord Kuruk's blade, which slipped from the dead man's scabbard.
Though Leitara landed on her feet, her smoldering soles caught fire in the blazing rubble,
and she watched numbly as the flame licked up her leg to combust her efflorescence, flaming the orange and red fibers to a golden torch before shredding, then shriveling to a fizzle in the airy torrents gusting through the collapsed bar, pounding the four walls flat, and blowing the rubble explosively away from Leitara, braining the guards, socking King Kaltu in the gut, and nearly smacking Khyte's knees, had not the impeccable warrior regained his poise and leaped over the shrapnel.
"Are you hurt, my love?" Elani stepped into the wreckage with one hand raised, and the other dragging the shield.
Leitara looked down, then clasped herself, running her hands over her arms, face and sides, feeling for sores and wounds. While her garment was singed to the last filament, and her feet were crusted with pitch, she was unharmed. Not even her hair was scorched, though it felt sere and coarse from the heat, which now washed over the burning husk of Cuvaernei, inundating them in rank waves of warmth.
"I am whole, Elani." Though she should feel grateful for the witch's blast of wind,
she felt like a seed withdrawing itself into its hull. The witch's good deed earned neither love nor possession that she should feel entitled to call her 'my love,' and the more inoffensive part of the endearment, 'my,' offended her even more than the assumed 'love.' She was not the witch's bauble. "Khyte, the king stirs."
"I will see to that," said Khyte, lunging for his sword in the rubble--
"No, you idiot," barked Elani, but not before Khyte had clenched the white hot hilt.
Khyte was not only young and strong, but inured to pain from serving his thane as warrior and headsman, not to mention from many arduous adventures through The Abyss. While he had borne wounds, bruises, and sprains in his travels and travails, he had minimized the full brunt of injury by dodging, rolling, sidestepping, and parrying, and was only once hurt worse than now, when he willfully clenched the oven-hot sword hilt, screamed, swooned in a backwards step, then leaned on Leitara.
"That was stupid, Khyte. Now you're no better than the bacon." Leitara's nose wrinkled in the torrid, porcine stench of burning humanity. When the Tree-Woman stooped, rolled Khyte across her shoulders, and lurched down the scorched thoroughfare, Elani blasted a path through the smoky debris with surging wind.