The Valkyrie (Raxillene's Rogues Book 2)

by Max Keith

  “Of course,” he obliged pleasantly. “I had a bet with Lord Gurgen once about what would feel better than a virgin pussy. He said nothing would. So, see, I got an idea.” He reached a massive, languid paw up to her ass and smacked it, none too tenderly. “I took a slave girl, ran a dirk up into her gut, and fucked the wound.” He laughed again, nastily. “I don’t think she came, though she screamed like it. But I certainly did, somewhere into her lung.” He considered, then nodded against her thigh. “Yeah, must have been her lung by that time. At least, air came out when I pulled my cock out. As I recall, she barely stayed conscious enough to lick off the blood.”

  “Riveting.”

  “I know, right?” He gripped the silk over her butt, tearing it like paper as he walked, and pushed an experienced finger straight into her anus. She refused to hiss with pain, though it hurt. A lot. “You’ll need some breaking in back here, Lyria. But we’ve got all night. You see? So, cooperate and at least you won’t find my cum in your lung.”

  “You say such sweet things.” She kept her voice as dry as she could, her asshole on fire.

  “My mother raised me well.” The tents were gone now, the smell of manure strong on the night air; she heard the grunting of the horses beside them, glanced up to see the passing snouts. She’d need to be fast, and desperate. “You’ve a sweet body though, it has to be said. Perhaps after you’re dead I’ll have you stuffed.” He reflected, rolling the thought in his brain. “I’ve never done that before. I wonder whether I could fuck you that way… y’know, stuffed…”

  Her whistle, three curiously discordant notes, shocked him enough to jerk the finger out of her ass, and she heard Pixie’s quizzical answering neigh very close by. She held his hips tightly; he’d go down hard, and she didn’t need to get thrown clear. She had to stay close to him, the night dark and moonless. There was a moment of hesitation as the evening air waited; man and horse looked, then reacted, and the horse was faster.

  Even as Sir Hobb had the first third of his dagger out of its sheath, his other arm instinctively releasing Alorin’s legs, Pixie’s blunt heavy teeth snapped hard and loud as they ripped off half his nose, plus a fair chunk of his face. The other horses, not their masters’ war horses but rather the plain, reliable beasts they used for things like shopping, looked on in frank shock tinged with, perhaps, more than a hint of revulsion; they were well-bred horses, and well-bred horses did not tear off men’s faces.

  Pixie was not a well-bred horse. Alorin had bought her because nobody else wanted her; she’d always been cranky, but Alorin had shown her love and respect and the horse had figured out that she owed a great deal to the valkyrie. So, when the alarm whistle came and Pixie saw her rider’s rump being fingered by a foul-smelling brute of an unfamiliar man, the solution must have seemed obvious.

  Hobb’s yowl was an ugly thing, a foaming mass of nearly palpable sound as the blood and spit flew and his body hit the sandy ground. Instinct had made him fall back, but he’d had good training over the years, and he recovered with remarkable speed; his hand went for his dagger, his mind racing to decide whether to go first for the woman or for the horse. But then his decision ceased to matter very, very quickly. For, needing speed and desperation, Alorin found both.

  She had experienced a queer weightless sensation as Sir Hobb had stumbled and gone down, moving with him, her legs already in motion as soon as he let them go; his butt smacked into the dust with the woman already twisting, rolling clear but not too clear; she needed to be close for this. Her hand went to the ankle sheath, the horses whickering all around them, and she already had her antler-knife buried in Sir Hobb’s liver as the shrieking man got his knife clear, his eyes wide and darting in the faint starlight.

  “Guhh,” he said, or something like it; Alorin had stabbed many, many men. Some screamed, others grunted, but they all died. His howl of pain and rage stopped as if his throat had been ripped out, the sudden cold shock of her blade cleaving its way into his vitals leaving him utterly speechless. She ripped the knife out twice and jabbed it back in twice, once in the gut and then again behind, into his kidney, and Sir Hobb-of-the-Wood crumpled like a torn squeezebox, bleeding in silence.

  Now his eyes, still wide, showed rage and confusion at such a sudden attack as he gurgled toward the earth, and Alorin slipped gracefully to her feet beside his head. His hand still gripped his dagger, but he seemed to have forgotten it; Alorin had not, though, and she gave that wrist a stomp vicious enough to break the bones there.

  The night was silent again, horses and man and woman all staring at each other, the wheezing gasp of the wounded knight intruding only slighty. In Alorin’s brain rang the harsh buzz of battle, the clanging adrenaline clogging her mind even as it lent power to her body. She took a full, deep breath, and then she was kneeling in the sand beside her tormentor. Lord Gurgen’s stallion, at the end of the line, began jerking nervously at his picket when he smelled the blood.

  “Sir Hobb,” Alorin nodded, grateful that her voice seemed steady. Her bloody knife filled her hand, already sticky. “Apologies; my horse forgets herself sometimes.”

  Hate-filled eyes glared back at her, the pain growing intense now. She felt his body start to tremble. His wounds would eventually kill him, she knew, but she didn’t care to wait for that. She listened closely, but heard nothing coming from the camp; screams in the night, suddenly cut off, were not always caused by violence in this particular camp. Indeed, she still could hear the faint shrieks of that foul bitch Nisette. Sir Hobb’s mouth fell open as he tried to say something, but a faint spotty cough was all he could muster. Alorin flinched back slightly to keep the blood off her silk.

  “I’ll go now. Know that you’ve succeeded, after a fashion; I cannot kill your lord, not now.” She bent closer then, whispering softly in his ear. “But I can kill you.”

  It went swiftly after that; the Kayes did not generally believe in making their victims suffer, even the raping kind. A quick slash laid his trousers open at just the right part of his groin, precisely as Auntie Hirr had taught her, and his scrotum was right where it was supposed to be, his balls smaller than she’d expected. No matter; her blade was sharp and her hand skilled, and a single vicious stroke gelded him.

  Even through the symphony of pain Hobb was already living through, or rather dying through, he felt that. A thin, strangled cry came wheezing from his throat, of pain and despair and the loss of more than his life, but it did not last long; the knife was up at the top of his throat now, slipping through and back to grate against his vertebrae. “Oh, hells,” she sighed; it was hard to cut a spine from the front, and she always seemed to miss low. So she let the point slip inside the neck, and then it was into the tough fibers where his spine entered his brain. The knight’s right arm flopped helplessly in rhythm with her sawing knife, but although he certainly was alive for a few moments more, the blood bubbling sudden and dark from his neck, he felt nothing. Once she was done cutting, only his eyes remained, jerking spasmodically back and forth before they, too, went still.

  Alorin did not linger; she was far from the sort to go sentimental over her kills. She ground his balls beneath her heel almost as an afterthought, and then she was naked before Sir Hobb’s eyes clouded over, the torn silks proving their worth by wiping the blood from her knife. Then she threw the gaudy rags to the dirt and gave them no further attention. She’d hidden her bundle, complete with far more suitable clothing, underneath the stolen saddle.

  The other horses, still wary of Pixie and her mistress, whickered nervously at each other as the saddle went on. Her horse was frisky anyway; she preferred traveling over standing before a picket rope with all the humans doing odd-smelling things all night, and Sir Hobb’s nose had given her a keen edge of excitement. The saddle felt good on her back, the bit comfortable between her teeth, and then Alorin was hugging her neck and feeding her a moldy apple and she was ready for anything.

  Alorin doubled back as far as the path cutting south to the village with Si
r Hobb’s baby, and urged Pixie through the hovels with as much speed as she could manage while staying quiet. Her mind clipped along even faster: Sir Hobb would very likely be discovered before daybreak. She assumed the grooms would come to check on the horses at some point, and when they tripped on one hulking, cold noble, minus his balls and his life, the pursuit would not wait. Count Clerent would know right away what had happened, and no matter how he felt about his cousin’s death he’d be enraged enough at Alorin to leave his wagons and most of the followers and set out at once, by night.

  With his hounds.

  She had to get into some water at once, to lose the scent. At worst, she reckoned on an hour’s head start, meaning she’d need to be out of the forest and headed for the Allwhite by then, hell for leather. She knew Pixie would need to arrive with strength enough to swim the river, but time pressed on the valkyrie like a hand on her back; even before the trees began to thin just south of the village, she’d turned east and begun crashing through the brush with reckless haste.

  She had no map, but she’d studied the one Poildrin Franx had at the Tower, and anyway she had a good head for terrain; she hoped to strike the Mudwater near its junction with the Allwhite, perhaps five leagues off. Over this ground, on a dark night, that meant nearly two hours; she could reach the river in three, then, from the time she’d left Sir Hobb.

  She hoped it would be enough.

  The Priests’ Wood melted away from her on her left with surprising abruptness, its shadowy bulk retreating fast as she angled south. The night was still and cool, perfect for this kind of work; Pixie had her ears thrown well forward, alert and self-confident. She knew what she was doing, so Alorin could concentrate on any sounds of pursuit.

  She slowed the horse gratefully just as she began to hear the Mudwater, but then both of them froze as a horn-call went flying through the night; it was either very loud and very distant, or fairly normal but rather close. Either way, Pixie took off down the broad, grassy slope before her as though Gurgen’s stallion was nipping at her tail, headed for the Mudwater.

  Alorin mastered her fear and forced herself to think. Lord Whitemar had already linked her to the Princess, and if he knew where the Tower was he’d be expecting her to head that way. So she did. She urged the horse into the sluggish, shallow water; first came two pools, then the river itself, and Pixie was battering her way through it not east, but west, against the current. The water remained blessedly below Alorin’s knees, and she pushed the horse nearly a mile upstream before she let Pixie surge dripping onto the south bank. She trotted that way for a few paces, leaving a shred of her cloak on a bush as she passed, and then it was back into the river; the horse was surprised, but Alorin clamped her knees and held hard.

  The valkyrie drove Pixie back into the main channel, then jerked suddenly to turn her back eastward; now thoroughly perplexed, the annoyed horse fought the move for a moment until Alorin smacked her ass and put back her heels. Pixie got the message once she realized the current was now with her, and they picked up speed. Alorin was careful to keep their course as close to the middle of the river as possible, discomfort be damned; the riverbed would still be swirling when the Count arrived, but the water was muddy enough for that not to matter.

  And all the while, Alorin kept her ears well skinned for the horns. She was passing now back across the head of the pursuit, losing ground until she got back to the point where she’d entered the river in the first place. Her westward sojourn had been risky, a delicate gamble; she was hoping the Count would arrive at the river and, stymied, wait until daylight to continue the hunt. With luck, he’d look most carefully to the west, assuming she’d fled that way, toward the distant mountains and their closer forests, and when he spotted the wayward hoofprints of a tired horse, given her head by a scared and exhausted rider, his assumption would be confirmed.

  Maybe.

  If all went fantastically well, he’d head toward the mountains for hours while Alorin and Pixie cooled their heels on the other side of the Allwhite. In any case, there was nothing for it now; she was committed, her boots soaked and heavy as she plowed through the brown water. There’d be miles of this, as she understood with a grim and sinking heart; she hoped Pixie would be up to it, but again there was nothing she could do about it now. Except keep plunging on down the river, praying for the sight of the broad, glittering Allwhite in the dawn sun, as Whitemar fretted and raged back at the Mudwater.

  Before her the moon sailed on, looking down unwinking.

  * * *

  Alorin had heard of folk swimming the Allwhite; she herself had crossed it, many times, at King’s Ford or at the Fool’s Bridge just a dozen miles or so from where she and Pixie now stood. But until tonight, she’d never have thought she could do it.

  Never a very good swimmer, she’d clung hard to Pixie’s mane as the two of them had dragged themselves through the water. It always looked so calm and serene from the banks; the force of the current, as they’d at last panted their way into the middle of the channel, moved them swiftly down toward where the River Broon swung in from the east. Alorin understood that being caught in that kind of confused current would be lethal, so as the sun split the far horizon ahead of them, she and her horse urged themselves out of the cloying water and into the safety of the Southlands.

  For an hour they lay exhausted on the bank, with Alorin quite unable to care about the chill of the morning on her wet body. She thought dully of changing her clothes, but the rest of her meager possessions were soaked as well. She knew she should rouse herself to get her things laid out in the young sun, but she also knew she must do so out of sight of the River.

  However, because all of this required effort, she could not make herself manage any of it.

  Instead she stared up at the lightening sky, shivering, with Pixie sleeping beside her. At some length she was able to prop herself onto her elbows and stare back over what looked to be a calm, slowly-oozing stream.

  She was not sure what she was looking for, all the way over there; the likelihood that Count Clerent would have figured out her ruse, then pushed his men to get to the river, was not terribly high; indeed, with the sun only now coming all the way up, they’d probably be rousing themselves at the Mudwater, still well to the north; the Allwhite had carried her far.

  So she saw nothing at all but the fields and grasses farmed by the folk of Fool’s Bridge town, just barely out of sight on her left. Lord Whitemar would, of course, know it was there; once he discovered how she’d given him the slip, he would probably come there to cross the River. His only other course, really, was to abandon the entire search and accept that she’d murdered one of his vassals and then shown him a clean pair of heels.

  “Not bloody likely,” she mused aloud, and her horse pricked her ears at once. The valkyrie frowned. “Come on, girl,” she sighed, brushing the grass from her soggy leathers. “We’ve got to make some distance before we hide.”

  She brooded as the two of them squelched doggedly east, toward the Broon. She’d be able to cross without difficulty; there were many fords, and one of the King’s Roads ran down toward the coast beyond. She needed a barn, she decided, where the two of them could pass one dreamlessly peaceful night, and then they should be safely on their way toward the towns and cities on the Sea. She’d get a letter to the Princess, and then… well, that was a problem for another morning.

  Six

  It was many weeks before Alorin found herself back in the Borderlands, once more skirting the Priest’s Wood. She rode in considerable style this time, her clothes new and clean and well-made, her shorter hair its natural silver and swept back into a tight braid. With the autumn getting colder, she’d opted for a cloak done in weasel fur, and even Pixie’s saddle was brand new.

  All of this, naturally enough, had been paid for by the bank between her thighs; left with a failed assignment and a crying need for money, she’d opened her legs, in Drinn’s dry and memorable phrase, and pulled gold from her cunt. Alorin did
not enjoy whoring, but it was not without its occasional pleasures. Plus, for women who looked like her, the pay was quite good.

  Especially down on the Cape, among the richer seaside towns and in the Palace itself. She’d been there since early October, listening hard for news of Count Clerent of Whitemar. He’d come to the Palace once, predictably, to deliver the ritual petition due from great lords when their principal vassals needed to pass their lands to their heirs; Sir Hobb-of-the-Wood, it seemed, had a legitimate son someplace, and so the King’s Regent gave his bored assent and now there was a new Sir Hobb. Alorin had grumbled when she learned of this visit; it would have been nice to purchase a crossbow and take her chance while he was there, but at that time she’d still been in parlous financial condition, lying down twice or even three times per night.

  It had been a paid lover in Caxter, well up the Cape from the Palace, who’d told her the story late one night when all she’d wanted to do was curl up and sleep. “Seems he arrived fresh from a hunt, all draggled and filthy. Imagine! Petitioning the King in such a state!”

  “I shudder to think of it,” had been Alorin’s dry reply, and then apparently Lord Whitemar had disappeared back to his castle, and to hear the locals tell it nobody had seen him since.

  But that didn’t mean there weren’t rumors, and they’d begun while Alorin was still fucking her way through the Royal Hunt Wood, north of the Palace, working the taverns there. By the time she’d gotten herself to the Palace, the rumors had grown louder and more impressive, and they amounted to a dying Lord Whitemar.