by E M White
Only, the barbarian princess never wavered from her conviction of victory. She’d repel Magnus Sinn’s invading army. She’d send him cowering back into the Savage Reaches so depleted he could never return. Or she’d leave him dead at her feet. That’s what she’d said.
He blinked excessively in thought, standing sentry outside her bath.
She hauls me out of my shell.
A woman like that.
Her base so solid.
I’ve never leaned on anyone, of course.
But…
…if I were to…
Onäs listened to her in her bath, through the flap of the tent.
She and Akimi were discussing the bad news Zacharius had brought during his astonishing reconnaissance of Magnus Sinn and his army—a feat of endurance all her grizzled veterans were dumbstruck to learn about, even Onäs.
Onäs caught himself peeking through the space of the tent flap more and more. He’d see her bare skin emerging from the water. He’d see the tops of her breasts circled by a delicate film of bubbles. He’d hear the little splashes. Then, there was their feminine laughter—almost giggles between them—a princess and her tent maiden with whom she shared an intricate, intimate bond. Why was that so arousing? He’d peek again and see Akimi standing alongside the raised, wood-slated tub in her elven robes. Akimi was running a small white cloth down Sarina’s back. Akimi did so slowly, thoughtfully. Her long pink ears revealed how much she was enjoying it. Sarina, arms crossed over the rim of the wooden tub, went on nonstop about questionable tactics and the cunning of her leading men.
“Onäs, what are you looking at?”
Onäs averted his gaze from the luxurious curves of her bottom. They were now cresting higher from the bathwater. He looked to her face. She was grinning directly at him.
“Akimi, my handsome champion is spying on us. You want me to invite him in?”
Onäs growled and whipped back to overlook the extensive stretch of the camp outside. For a prestigious elf of deadly reputation, he suddenly felt like an adolescent. He must’ve made quite the ridiculous face.
“Onäs! Dammit, I see you looking. Get in here! It’s bath time for you.”
He inclined his head toward the gap in the tent, his stone-faced expression straight ahead now. “I’m bathed and clean, Highness. It’s your human barbarians that could handle some reminding, Highness.”
“Onäs, I’m going to count to three. Get in here.”
He pushed himself in the tent. A wave of trepidation made his knees feel a bit wobbly.
Her hair was pulled up, a gorgeous pile of curls that wouldn’t be contained. Thin wet spirals played about her wet shoulders, down her cleavage, sticking to her cheek. She rose up on her knees in the tub and placed her hands on the rim. Thin streams of water ran along the wide turns of her breasts, reddened by the heat of the bath. Water dripped off the tips of her large, pale nipples. She swayed her hips side to side. Her ample breasts followed.
Onäs noticed that Sarina also bore multiple purple bruises along her arm.
One bruise wrapped around her ribs and was already yellowing.
An especially red rash painted her elbow.
All of these injuries represented the grueling sparring sessions she subjected herself to daily.
Onäs had rarely witnessed her turn down any soldier’s challenge to brawl, no matter the rank, male or female, no matter the style of practice weapon. Almost half the time, because of determination more than skill, she won. When she lost, however, she was a bit of a mess about it. That was something she needed guidance on.
“I’m not pronouncing judgments about your hygiene, Onäs.” She took a moment to regard him entering the tent. He left one leg outside. “I’m offering you a chance to relax, to unwind, before the chores of the day.”
Now he struggled to direct his eyes up. “You might as well be ordering me to relax.”
“See? There you have it. Get undressed.”
Onäs’ heart began beating wildly, as if he were about to plunge into combat. The sight of her, her tone with him, it sent a flash of fire through his body. And there was no denying the warming, enlarging arousal going on behind his scabbard, which he was now carrying strategically in front of him.
“This is what makes you speechless.” She stood up in the tub. Her entire body was flushed pink from the heat. “I’m not trying to seduce you, Onäs.” She made a playful, sour face. “We’re probably going to see each other naked now and then. Maybe get used to it.”
Akimi, her long ears flushed red with pleasure, was no less distracted by Sarina’s body than Onäs. She missed Sarina’s hand with a long white cloth on the first two attempts. Finally, standing on tiptoes, she draped the cloth around Sarina’s lovely shoulders, first tenderly patting the dripping tendrils of golden hair at her neck.
“Who will stand guard if I’m in here?” He thought it was a good enough point.
Sarina laughed and stepped over the rim of the tub, those powerful thighs emerging with a big splash about the ground. “I’ll stand guard. How’s that suit you?” She turned away casually.
But in that instant, Onäs saw that patch of hair down below, from behind, dripping with water. Tender folds of pink peeking out. She was absolutely breathtaking. There was going to be no hiding his cock now.
If she wanted to look, either he’d seem ridiculous trying to hide it or she’d see it bulging through his garments. He nonchalantly tried shifting it upward, but he was sure she noticed.
“You should allow me to help train you.” Onäs pointed to the sparring bruises about her beautiful body. “As your champion…” He wanted the words to come out as deft as possible. “…it would be an honor to provide lessons in one-on-one combat.”
By now she was wrapped completely, white fabric adhering to her skin, those wide wet nipples behind the sheet about to make his heart burst. She was smiling, collecting her things with Akimi, examining him. “If I had a copper for every man who offered to provide some sort of lesson, tell you what.”
She was moving slowly, he noticed. Waiting perhaps to see if he would undress.
He gathered a deep breath. “Perhaps you should nevertheless consider it, Highness. We’re probably going to see each other fight a lot. Maybe get used to it.”
He looked to the inviting bath. He looked outside through the gap in the tent flap where he was duty-bound to be this particular moment.
The princess standing guard for her champion?
His mind couldn’t even process it.
“Why not go into town for a bath, Highness? A real bath?”
“Onäs Grimblade, I am the daughter of Athrid the barbarian king. Military amenities serve all my needs. As they do yours.”
Onäs grimaced at the obvious truth of her words. And the obvious mistake in his own.
“Should you have me under a hardened roof instead of the tent made for a warrior?”
His gaze remained dumbly fixed upon the water. But his fighter’s instinct was already triggered. He faced her head on and lowered his brow.
“I’m intrigued you should put it that way,” he said. “Should you have us all under the yoke of Imperial law instead of fighting free like the barbarians we are?”
Sarina stopped dressing. Her face abandoned all playfulness.
Onäs looked to Akimi, who had frozen too. She gave him a wide-eyed, admonishing stare in return.
Sarina straightened up. A frown swept across her brow. “What are you getting at, champion?”
Onäs gripped his scabbard tightly in one hand. “Only that you’re seeking to garner distinction from the consuls of the Empire. Am I…wrong about this?”
Sarina took a step toward Onäs. Her stare bore into him. “I’m ensuring relations between my father and the Empire, yes. Shall I go on?”
She stepped even closer, looking upward at him now. Her brow tightening even more.
“That is my role. I am my father’s daughter, and I will fight until the Empire recognizes
the steadfast faith of the tribes and enters into my father’s proposed treaty. What’s your issue with this?”
Onäs looked directly at her. He was not about to be lectured when he knew he was absolutely correct in his assessment of her hypocrisy. “Tell me you are a barbarian princess again, tell me you are a barbarian warrior, commander of the Fourth Army of your Allied Tribes.”
She looked very displeased with this. “That I am.”
“The Sacred Empire has sought nothing but to wipe the barbarians and their long-lived traditions clean from Auzurix. For hundreds of years. At least. Human, elf, all the other races, it hasn’t mattered. I’m merely asking, Highness, how are you trying to…seek both?”
“Seek what? Both what?”
“To serve the Empire, like this, what we’re doing here, and to serve your barbarian blood. You can’t serve both.”
He turned completely to her now, body to body. His cock was still hard under his clothing, but he no longer felt like the shuddering boy caught off guard by a young woman’s flirtations.
“Been wanting to say that for a while, haven’t you?”
He tried ordering his heart to calm, tried urging his cock to ease down. Neither were helping. “I don’t tolerate people who aren’t honest with themselves. That’s all.”
She was looking up into his gray eyes, her own eyes narrowing. Anger was bubbling around her soft features. Her lips were the ones quivering now. “How do you presume to comprehend anything about me?” The softness in her voice betrayed the danger.
He dared to place one hand on the side of her shoulder, still damp from the bath.
Both their eyes searched the other.
He wanted to kiss her. He couldn’t deny it. He tilted his face. If only to see if she would raise hers in reply.
Her lips parted. Ever so slightly. The fabric around her body was so thin, so transparent.
His cock was aching and throbbing. His hands craved to feel the softness of her body. All of it. He felt her warm breath rising to him.
To Akimi, had she not humbly looked away, they would have looked frozen in time. But to him, the space between began closing in euphorically small increments.
What would have happened had the space shrunk to nothing?
Then, a shout came from outside.
“The princess!”
Sarina gasped almost inaudibly and stepped back.
“Where’s the princess? Word from the road! Word from the road!” The messenger’s voice was young and in a devilish panic.
The princess and her champion allowed a last glance to each other. Behind Sarina, Akimi rushed out the tent first. Followed by Onäs.
He seized the messenger by the arm as he passed the tent. “What is it, boy?”
Sarina followed him out, her body still wrapped only in the pale sheet against the morning cold.
The boy was white-lipped from running. His head was shaved at the sides, but his blonde crest had fallen for his exertions. He was panting terribly as he managed the words, “From the hills, they’re on the march.”
Onäs and Sarina looked hastily at each other, the longing of lust and heart promptly gone from their faces.
The boy exclaimed, “Magnus Sinn and his whole murderous army. They’ve begun their approach to Tias!”
12
The Men Become Worried
Captain Vadric stood upon a crest of land, a large crag of soil and stone spewed forth like an eruption of earth. At his feet, it fell away, broken and falling straight down a hundred yards to an unforgiving spill of boulders and scree.
Vadric stood with Markus and Zacharius. Together they studied the long rolling line of the horizon, looming east and west, a separation from what they knew and understood from the mysteries coming. Still vague. Still monstrous.
Two hundred paces behind them, down the slope, lingered their company sergeants and Zacharius’ twins in a huddle of whispered hearsay, waiting for orders. Behind even them, sprawled, Sarina’s camp, meandering lines of gray tents and the morning gray haze of cookfire smoke. Farther beyond all that stood Tias and its sad, summer-beaten tracts of farmland they’d come to defend.
Upon the edge of the escarpment, Vadric watched Zacharius lift his staff, that gnarled length of prehistoric magic, and mumble his incomprehensible, alien sounds. If Vadric looked close enough, which he knew better than to do for the sake of his own sanity, he’d see the incantations eerily out of synch from the mage’s lips.
He and Markus, good friends that they were, gave magical Zacharius, as usual, all the space he wanted.
Next, the staff’s green stone, affixed by the skins of various extinct creatures, pulsed its greenish light, shed its pale mist, and searched the land beyond the horizon for the army of Magnus Sinn.
Together, Vadric and Markus watched Zacharius’ face for a sign, craving some kind of good news. But they knew better. No good news was to be had that day.
Vadric shifted uneasily in his big boots. How long did they have until Magnus Sinn’s wretched army arrived? He felt the terrible uneasiness, a raging brutality in his heart, an urge to protect. Something large was coming to hurt the soldiers in his company. It was coming to hurt his friends. It was coming to hurt Sarina.
Had the karnog’s army grown since Zacharius visited its camp two nights ago? How had it had already advanced so much distance?
He and Marcus we’re looking to the white mage, his staff extended toward the vast horizon, with the mysterious magic on his lips. Sarina needed answers. Right now.
Markus shattered the uneasy silence between them. “Can you see their marching order?”
Zacharius didn’t answer.
Markus glanced toward Vadric and moistened his lips.
“What order can these beasts possibly have?” Vadric said. He growled at the possibilities.
“If they’ve come so far so quickly,” Markus said, “something very powerful is driving them. This Magnus Sinn.”
Vadric squeezed the handle of his great battle-axe. “Even monsters can be whipped to march at a run.”
Markus asked, “Who is this Magnus?”
In Vadric’s mind, Sarina was already in direct opposition to this mysterious army commander, this massive beast with four arms and a growing reputation for sadism. More and more, it seemed like an unequal contest. From the looks in Markus and Zacharius’ eyes, he wasn’t the only one feeling that way.
The Savage Reaches was a vast, cruel region of land. Even the ocean on its western border failed to contain its boiling tribal wars, where the deep waters covered the bones of a hundred races, lost to the deep with their skulls smashed in and their souls spilled among the waves. Even the long horizons of land, like Vadric and his friends stood before now, concealed the multitudinous battlefields where the constant brutality of war tilled and fed the soil with the slain. Vadric burned to know what was coming over those horizons now. For he had a princess to serve…and a lover to protect.
He took a turn at the mage. “Zacharius!”
Still, the mage whispered his magic. Green wisps of light danced between his staff and his eyelids.
Finally, Vadric said in the mildest voice he could fake, “Tell us what’s coming for Sarina…” He gritted his teeth. “…or I’m pitching you off this cliff myself.”
Markus almost smiled. “Better answer the orc, my man.”
Zacharius stamped his staff on the edge of the outcropping. The mist retracted, swirled around the green stone, and vanished. The white mage sighed mournfully and turned around to his fellow royal consorts.
Vadric thought the man was struggling with something. Trying to find the right words. “Speak, man!”
“I’m afraid Magnus Sinn’s army has…grown. At least in its viciousness.”
Vadric’s heart sank into his gut. The rumors for once proved true. He clenched his fists and growled. Again.
“Grown. Is it big? How fucking big?”
Zacharius tucked his chin to his chest. He looked out across the la
nd before them.
The sound of hooves rumbled toward them, a single horse from camp.
All three of them turned. The horse was coming toward them up the grade. Onäs’ horse was coming out of a canter.
The elf looked as troubled as the rest of them. He swung down from his saddle and went right to the edge of the outcropping, staring out into the void of land and air.
Markus said, “Nice of you to join us.”
Onäs didn’t take his eyes from the horizon, as if he could, with his keen eyesight, see as far as Zacharius’ magic. “I was in the bath with the princess.” He glanced at each of the consorts. Quickly he added, “Talking. She was in the bath. I was not.”
The men all looked at him blankly.
“Talking?” Markus said, nodding. “I think we’ve all called it that before.”
Vadric looked the elf up and down, encouraged to see the newcomer was as concerned about the situation as he and Markus and Zacharius was. There was no denying that Onäs had been working as hard. He’d spent the last two days futilely teaching Tias’ garrison how to attack with a sword without skewering themselves—or the man next to them.
Now however, it seemed none of those preparations mattered. Sarina herself had predicted the futility of Tias’ defenses. And no one had argued.
Zacharius leaned onto his staff. His expression resumed its anxious glaze. He said to them, “I can’t see much. Not clearly. They’re still a day out.” He looked to his feet for a moment. “But they’re coming fast, that part’s true.”
“What else? Why the glum look, man?”
“Somehow he’s whipped them into a fury. Savage warriors and bloodthirsty beasts, it takes quite a commander to beat them into this kind of pace. I think he’s a lot more than the princess bargained for in this commission.”
Onäs asked, “Can we take him?”
