WARNING: This is a long story, but it is unfinished, and likely to remain in that state.
Also, it contains:
-Low levels of erotic content
-Slow Pacing
-Annoying characters
-Unsatisfying events
Consider yourself forewarned, dear reader!
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RELUCTANTLY ROGUE:
The Indecent Adventures of Atyr Bracken
PART THREE
All To Make a Poet
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CHAPTER ONE
Setting Out
It was a long time of lips and laughs and whispers before Atyr slipped out through Kella's window. His feet hit the ground, and a great swell of Experience wound itself in a knot around his heart. For what it had been granted, he could not have said, unless it were that to see the starlit hint of her teeth just peeking from behind her soft, poet's smile, and then to lean in and wrap that smile in a kiss, and to pull it into him to save forevermore in memory, was an experience.
It was a long, starry dream of a walk back to the lodging house. It might have been shorter, but his mind was the mind of a young man in ecstasy, and it was concerned only with the smooth drape of silken hair, the soft warmth of full lips, and with dark eyes; it only infrequently reminded his feet of their destination. And so it was that he found himself fully outside of Woodstead, heading east on the road before he noticed his error.
With a loud laugh for the ears of the night breeze, he spun on his toes and strode back into town. Atyr had never learned to whistle, but he tried now, a squeaking, breathy sketch of a melody half-remembered.
She had kissed him so many times.
He missed Gant's door again on the second attempt, and caught himself halfway to the North End, before he managed to still his joyous thoughts enough to remind himself that he was on less than a quarter-night's drunken sleep, with a long journey to begin in the morning. On the third attempt, he remembered to stop at the inn door.
It was all shadow on the main floor, the patrons all home or in rooms upstairs. At times, Atyr had wondered if Gant ever slept, but even the sunken-eyed innkeep himself had retired.
He almost missed Cei, a slumped form at a table with his head on his arms. His brother's head lolled over to look at him as he approached.
"Been with your lady?" Exhaustion weighted the words. "With Kella?"
Atyr could only give him a grin, a grin which broke into a laugh. Cei pushed himself off the table and slouched back in the chair. A little smile worked its way into his weary features.
"Well, let's hope you don't come back from your Oldwood journey to a tiny Bracken in the oven." Cei gave a little huff of a laugh. "Might kick your ankles enough to get you to finish that cabin though. Think your lady love would live in the Brookwood?"
Atyr swatted at him. "You're a dog, Cei. We just talked."
The younger man squinted in the dark, unconvinced.
"Really, that's all we did! Well, and some kissing." The dumb, sloppy grin split his face again, unbidden.
"Must have been a lot of kissing. Feels like I've been down here all night."
Atyr nodded. "About that. What are you doing up?"
"You left me alone in a bed with a strange woman, Atty. Call me a dog if you like, but a dog that's learned some respect."
"She didn't seem like she minded. She was old enough to have raised us, you know."
Cei shrugged. "I minded." He stood up and stretched his neck, wincing. "C'mon. You can burn my ears with all your talk of kissing on the road tomorrow, but I'm a man half-dead. Bed."
Atyr, still grinning like a drunk, followed him up the stairs. Sleep hit him in the face with the full weight of two days and three trolls and a bottle of woodsman's wine before he even had a chance to yank off his boots.
They rose late and felt no guilt about it. Cei remarked that if the length of a morning's sleep was all that separated success from disaster, Atyr's quest was probably ill-fated to begin with. Pesky had arrived in the night, and was impatiently tapping at the window panes when Atyr opened his eyes. He tried for a moment, but felt no real guilt about that either. Practicing patience would do the little fae some good.
They ate swiftly and packed swiftly and left the town walking swiftly. Brackens might have their faults and limitations, but laziness was not a vice they countenanced.
Pesky and Cei pestered Atyr with questions about his evening with Kella. Both of them seemed incredulous that, given the length of time he had spent in the bedroom with her, nothing beyond kissing had occurred. Atyr wondered idly if his brother might not have been a better fit for Pesky's fae-touch, had circumstances been switched.
It was a confusing conversation, with Cei unable to hear or see Pesky, and Atyr relaying her remarks whenever they were relevant, or responding to things his brother couldn't hear when they weren't. But, while it was at least a relief not to have to ignore the little sprite's remarks in Cei's presence, it didn't ease Atyr's sense of being somehow alone now, unable to truly share this world of the fae with anyone.
It was tiring for Cei as well, it seemed, to have to rely on Atyr to repeat everything for him. Even Pesky grew frustrated, eventually. By mid afternoon, the three companions had drifted mostly into silence.
They camped that night under the boulder in the hollow, the same where Atyr had woken with his leg gone sour. A cheerful little fire was crackling, and all three of them were munching on the last of the bread and fresh vegetables from the Bracken home. Pesky was engrossed with prying peas free from a pod and devouring the little green balls with verve.
