by E M White
More than twice, he’d fall behind as she trotted up a rise, not entirely by choice given her enthusiasm. He’d see up into her white tunic, bunched at her waist.
From below he could partake the round, bold curves of her bottom, naked and tanned and surprisingly bouncy under there.
Female elves didn’t have that kind of shape.
Then again, Onäs realized, most human females didn’t have that kind of shape either.
Even more than the sight, to his keen elven senses, especially from down below, her scent was…something of a distraction.
Akimi trotted along behind them, graphite and multiple sheets of papyrus in hand, jotting down the constant stream of commentary Sarina would dictate as they went—notes to her subordinates about order and discipline, notes to the tiresome tribal nobles back home, notes to herself about tactics and strategy.
Onäs recognized the delicious thrill of command glimmering in Sarina’s eyes, poised in her shoulders. She thrilled to observe her orders followed well. She represented not only a stunning example of the human female body—but also of an inexhaustible, ravenous mind.
Onäs had never felt a desire to be so close to a human before, never felt his blood rise to overhear one speak. He’d known many during his travels. Kings and queens and their blood-soaked generals. He respected very few. But none of them ever sparked such curiosity—even arousal—within.
Her smell alone…
The sky stretched over them with an immense brilliance, all the most vivid hues of blue above them, sweeping vistas of the golden Korinth Mountains, and the dark ground at their feet. Not a cloud to be seen after the night’s tempest. Not a bird. Only the two white moons up there, halfway through their phases, the only constants among all the races of Auzurix now rising over the mountain range. They were not always auspicious in these grim days, those two moons. But they were a familiar sight, the same patterns of transit across the sky as Onäs had seen during his childhood in the distant court of King Ryther Bloodseer. Such a sky, the vastness of destiny it represented, could make Onäs feel uneasy.
But today, Sarina’s pace as she dragged him about, kept his mind plenty occupied.
When she would descend a gully in front of him, she’d turn to finish a thought aloud. Onäs began wondering if the show of ample breasts, nipples barely hidden behind her plunging tunic, were part of Sarina’s intentional plan to keep jerking him off guard.
After all, he wasn’t entirely sure where he stood in the princess’ mind. He hadn’t been able to discern his place with her at all. Especially among all the ranks of trained soldiers, phalanxes lining up now, spears to the sky, light cavalry skirmishers clustering as cohesive units, even the tribal berserkers hanging together and forming up in patterns, filling the long stretch of muddy, trodden grass.
But the army commander’s champion?
Where did he belong among all this?
This role, this place, this ambiguity—it was wholly new to him. It made him huff impatiently and sway on his feet if he thought about it too much. And thinking about things too much was something Onäs tended to do. To a fault, and he knew it.
“Onäs! Get down here with me!”
When Onäs had tromped his way down a small incline to reach her, his boots slopped with mud and clay, Sarina said, “You’re quiet today.”
“Merely observing, Highness.”
“Coincidence. I’ve been observing you.”
It seemed that couldn’t have been the case, considering the constant study and remarks she’d been calling out to Akimi during the last forty minutes.
She added, examining him up and down just to prove her point, “You’re stuck with me, Onäs. What’s on your mind?”
Onäs looked away, toward the flat line of the horizon. Then he looked down the mess his boots had become.
“Onäs? You’re my champion. I’m literally putting my life in your hands. My father went to war alongside your father. If you can’t look me in the eye, this’ll be a long road to Tias.”
The truth was, all morning he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. With a deep breath, he said, “If you’re displeased about my performance in the arena, Highness, you have only to say it. I’ll excuse myself from your service and be—”
“Don’t do it again.” She looked directly at his eyes. “You’re my retainer. I don’t make a habit of cutting lose retainers simply because they make people feel uncomfortable. But that…didn’t go so well. Because you had something to prove. Am I right?”
That hit harder than Onäs had expected.
“In other words, we didn’t choose each other, but you’re stuck with me. If you need to know what I think of you, if that’ll help you sleep at night, then save my life. Not that hard. Just a matter of time before you get the chance.”
Onäs bristled. “I don’t need anyone else, Princess or not, to know my own value.” He didn’t worry if Akimi overheard.
“That right?”
“I mean it.”
Sarina set off again. “Fine.”
Even tiny Akimi passed Onäs, looking up and making eye contact and smiling knowingly as she whisked by on her small legs.
They reached Captain Markus’ unit first.
“Your company needs to be in column, one hour, Captain.” She placed her hand on his and smiled. “We’re going to save Tias or die trying, hear me?”
He nodded firmly. Then he pointed to the caravan of Bolzheim’s merchant carts circling at the tail of the marching column. “Everyone’s favorite mayor is enduring a terrible day, sorry to say.”
They were well beyond earshot, but they could all see the weaselly burgomaster directing the transfer of provisions himself, pink-faced from cursing and unsuccessfully wrangling goats.
Sarina looked back to Markus, grinning with him. She held up a finger. “One hour?”
Markus put a fist to his bear pelt, over his heart. And nodded formally. “Princess.”
But his lingering gaze at her swinging behind as she walked away was far from formal.
Half his company, almost fifteen hundred men—and even some of the women—crawled over each other to watch her bottom bounce under that white tunic, little jiggles at the back of her thighs that set their loins on fire.
When they reached Captain Vadric’s company, a louder, slightly more undisciplined horde—fitting, Onäs supposed, given the partial orcan blood that coursed through Vadric’s towering frame—Sarina was positively bounding with gusto.
She flung her bare arms up around the brute’s neck, which he lowered for her to do so.
His voice was deep and full of affection. “We go, proving ourselves once again to the Empire, Princess.”
She hopped with a swordsman’s artfulness upon a cart and spun to gaze over Vadric’s troops. Many of them were falling out of line to circle around her.
“I have no doubts today,” she began, surprisingly in the softest voice Onäs had heard her use all day, causing the entire mass of brawn and armor, over a thousand souls deep, to hush in that instant. “If all of you follow your captain and sergeants into battle, obey their every command, even in the face of bloodthirsty foes, you will all be heroes to this little town called Tias.”
The soldiers all murmured their consent.
“More importantly, you will all be heroes to me.” Her voice lifted into lively bursts. “We march for three days, then show me! You ignorant, savage, blood-thirsty animals!”
An abrupt cheer broke across the field, even from those who could not have possibly heard.
Upon the cart, she turned to Vadric, shirtless as usual in the biting sun, his head and thick tusks at her waist. She curled a hand around his temple. “We march in half an hour, captain.”
He grunted and began shouting at his soldiers. He cursed them for getting out of line.
“Call on me tonight, in my tent, Vadric. After we make camp.” She pursed her lips and flared her eyes. “It’s been days.”
Vadric lowered his brow and grunted
again, quieter this time. He then scolded and barked at his troops with whole new ferocity.
Again, they were off, princess and champion, now tromping toward the front of the column, taking their place at the front of this simmering congregation of brutality.
She was flaunting Onäs a little, he supposed. Giving him the tour. For everyone’s sake. For his. For her army’s.
She has strength and charisma, he thought.
Even more, she has vitality and passion.
Everything she did had a reason.
It was no wonder that men clambered to serve her.
But who was the genuine woman?
The real princess?
Leaders tended to do things for layered purposes.
Which was fine.
Onäs liked people to have layers.
He had layers.
Sarina hadn’t said anything to Onäs for ten minutes, but now she’d stopped and was staring at him. She was waiting once again for him catch up. “You wonder where you’ll stand when the fighting starts?”
It wasn’t exactly what he was thinking. But the meaning was the same. “I don’t do well, getting lost in a crowd.”
“You’re in the Fourth Army, Onäs Grimblade. My army, if I may be so precise.” She twisted up her expression in a way that wasn’t exactly flattering for a face like hers. “Individualists tend to die out quickly.”
“I hope that, as your champion, I can stand out. Serving you and protecting you. In doing so, I shall remain true to myself. Which is all I desire.”
Sarina didn’t seem so convinced. “Onäs, do I need to worry about how you feel all the time? I’m unused to that in the men I surround myself with.”
He threw it back at her, “Is it better to make men feel however you wish?”
They studied each other a moment, the immensity of blue sky framing her mass of blonde hair, highlighting her deep blue eyes.
She motioned to her army beneath the rise they’d climbed. “I need only point a finger. Three thousand charge into battle. How am I going to control you?”
“The same. But give me a command, Highness.”
She frowned at him. She wasn’t buying it. She looked up to the two moons, white lobes in the blue sky, hands on her hips, a cheek pinched in thought. Without looking away from the sky, she said, “You fall into a rage often, Onäs?”
He frowned. “It happens.”
“You’re prone to doldrums? Bouts of melancholy and the like?”
He looked plainly at her, not denying it, not sure where she was headed.
She seemed to be trying to keep him off balance.
High, low.
High, low.
That made him smile.
She went on, “Vengeance? Crimes of passion?”
“Your point, Highness?”
“Seems to me, Onäs Grimblade, we have a lot in common.” She smiled and took a big step toward him. She lifted his hand and looked down upon the elven tattoos that converged to a point behind his knuckles. “I too fan the fires of resentment far beyond sensibility. I’ll admit it. To you. I too like cutting down my enemies when others tell me not to. Or like you in the arena, I refuse to cut them down when everyone tells me I should. Most people…can’t keep up with me.”
“I believe it.” He almost smiled again, still waiting for her to deal the final blow, waiting to see what direction it would come from.
“You and I are going to be spending an incredible amount of time together. That’s the way this champion-princess thing works. Or so I’m told. You’re going to learn my secrets, and I’m going to, blood and tears, wrestle a few from you.”
“Could very well be, Highness. If I may say, this shouldn’t be about me.”
They moved closer.
She was looking up to him. Sultry eyes bigger than most humans. Perhaps to see into the hearts of those she led. She did have that way about her.
She touched his chin with the pad of her forefinger.
He became still as stone.
“Haven’t you seen yet, Onäs Grimblade? I like possessing things. Protecting them.”
His downward gaze began to blur. Below him, her eyes, her breasts, her mouth—and the wet, soft, fullness of her lips. Swimming and pulsing. Suddenly he was a child, experiencing his first duel to the death, his senses obscured and his wits scrambled.
“What kind of champion would you…be to me…if I didn’t possess you.” She smiled. Honestly and without guile. “Completely.”
She left him with that.
A mighty, death-dealing elf with a reputation of savagery and cunning, retained by the king of the Allied Tribes to protect his daughter…
…and his knees had wobbled at her touch.
He cleared his throat and tried to focus his vision on something distant, something along the horizon, something harmless. His eyes fell on the tiny forms of white-haired Zacharius in his black robes and his two acolytes, the red-haired twins, already riding the road far out ahead.
But his thoughts were stuck on the princess. How did she do that?
“Akimi! We’re off to war again!” Then Sarina said to herself, “Thank Uthril.” She slid on her chain mail and topped it with her mother’s plated gorget and spaulders.
Akimi was already mounted, her shade cloak spread about her horse’s rump. “Aye, m’lady.”
Sarina quickly inspected her mount’s headstall and reins. “Onäs? You hear me back there?”
“Highness?”
“Know anything about karnogs? Big brutes, lots of arms?”
“Four of them, I hear.” He too had begun a final survey of his stallion before the long march began. Given his financial state when he was hired by Sarina’s father, he was happy to be issued one. “Never seen one.”
“Pray you never have to fight one.”
Onäs made eyes at the horse, rubbing the beast’s soft nose. “It would seem, Highness, that you’ve guaranteed we will.”
“Oh.” She paused. Thought about it. Then her teeth flashed grandly in the sun. “Suppose I did. Here comes Mayor Ratface!”
“Your Highness!” The little man came charging along the muddied ground. “I say, Your Highness!” His head was barely visible bobbing between the backs of the horses. “Everything’s accounted for. It’s all in your wagons. Everything.”
“I’ve no doubts, your honor.”
The little man made unintelligible gestures with his hands. “And Quintus Petrus?”
“Will hear all about your enthusiastic service to the Empire.”
The burgomaster was a bit of a disaster at the moment. He wrung his hands nervously and backed away, laughing one moment, almost shedding violently angry tears the next.
Sarina and Onäs and Akimi all glanced playfully at each other. Akimi was hiding a smile behind her glove.
Onäs said, “How’s your pet spider?”
The little man continued his bumbling retreat, only eyeing the elf with disgust and saying no more.
That done, Sarina swung up onto her horse, no stirrups for these barbarians. Then, the raven wing headdress went atop her cascading mane of hair. With the click of her tongue, her horse trotted to the point position of the column that had begun clanging and plodding alongside them.
The Imperial standard rose in the sun, square and simple. Then Sarina’s personal standard-bearer hoisted his own pole, and the long woven black flag took to the sky, higher than anything out there. The eyes of the blackbird, embroidered with gold thread, cast its menacing stare toward the road.
Now Onäs climbed into his saddle, elven-made, absolutely with stirrups, and took his place at Sarina’s rear flank.
Her top half was armored and shining and glinting in the sun—there was royalty there, no doubt. Her bottom half, mostly bare tanned legs that sunk into her knee-high boots, rocked in the seductive rhythm of her steed.
Off to war…
…once again.
It wasn’t a situation so alien to him. But still.
He felt completely misplaced.
And he wasn’t sure why.
8
Sarina Gets Some Royal Relief
When Sarina began to move in the circles of her father’s supporters, there was no shortage of men wanting to nab her, to teach the young heir about the grab and tug of tribal power, to keep her in their bed as a show of affinity.
Had they wanted to build relations with her father? Or had they been consumed with the fantasy of her body. A body so full at so young an age—with her untamable spirit, with her fiery teenaged pep, with her sovereign power she’d undoubtedly develop?
Sarina knew the caprices of men long before she should have, their whims, their humors, their conceits…their kinks.
The bright star in the court of the highest tribal king made the tents and log castles of noblemen pulse with lurid, longing breath and the fantasies of her curves. So many men spent their nights imagining what they would do with such a young woman—politically and physically—if only she’d succumb to their gifts and charms.
She’d not resisted all of them. But she’d weathered her time with them. Some she regretted. Some she relished. Eventually, she turned them all away. She’d learned what she could learn, about men and their bodies, about her own body, and about the ways of tribal leadership—all the impetuses of tribal power and leverage.
She thought about such things when she knew one of her lovers was on the way—sex and power—and how inseparable they were. She always did.
The flap of her sleeping tent opened, revealing the broad frame of Captain Vadric.
He ducked in without a sound, turning slowly, attentively, to make sure the flap closed completely behind him.
From her bed, Sarina watched the half-orc, dressed only in his fur trousers, his wide muscled chest practically filling the tent, looking about, taking in the candles, the drifting incense smoke, the brazier that had already been moved safely away from the bed.
His eyes seemed to ignite when they adjusted to the dim candlelight, when he found her in her bed, sable furs and cloth pulled up under an arm. He took a knee on the rug next to her. “Sarina.”
