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."
