Aleyda woke before dawn. We were both still tired and hungry so we spent a few minutes methodically consuming our preserved rations. After being on the island, I think I could better understand the party atmosphere that had developed in Shroud Hallow among the returnees from the island. Eating crappy food for months on end, risking your life day after day and then returning to home was certainly a reason to celebrate. I assume the larger companies actually served hot and somewhat more nutritious food to their people. Like many other things, though, Caider planned our diet to be the bare minimum required to keep us alive and functioning. It was not doing wonders for my regularity. I was not sorry he was dead.
We left just as first light was starting to filter across the sky. I am certain that we looked quite comical and if we ran into anyone on the trail they would let us know just how absurd our appearance was. We had taken the company’s loot out of Caider’s pack and put it into our own but we were loaded down with weapons, tools and food taken from the orcs. We looked like the idiots who thought carrying more of everything meant we were safer and better prepared. In other words, we looked like two people headed to war who had never been in a fight. Anyone we ran into would seriously question our competence. I guess it was better to be underestimated if someone tried to rob us on the trail.
I was toting five swords. Of course, there was the sword and rapier I had brought with me to the island, but I also had two from the orcs and Caider’s sword as well. Aleyda carried her own weapons but also two battle axes and a mace. We each had numerous bags of other provisions fastened to us anywhere we could secure them. All that metal was heavy. I didn’t think we would be making great time up the mountain today, but at least we had gotten an early start.
Within a few minutes, we had returned to the portion of the trail where we had fought the orcs. Just as I thought, there was no way to hide the fact that people had battled here. I half expected the ripe smell of decomposing flesh to cover the area but besides the coppery scent of spilled blood, I didn’t smell any rotting bodies. At least the strange fauna on the island was good for something. If I were a more generous soul, we would have buried the bodies to keep them from the tender mercies of the local scavengers. That sounded like a lot of work, though, and frankly, each one of the dead deserved whatever happened to them. The circle of life is great at recycling.
I half expected to run into the military force camped somewhere near the trail but we never saw them. They must have continued moving deep into the night in an effort to reach safety and meager comfort. I wonder what they though when they found the freshly spilled blood on the trail, provided any of them were fresh enough to notice it at the time.
We didn’t encounter anyone at all before we reached the place where we turned off the main trail to head up to the caverns and Segerick’s people. I assume it was because of our very early start. Either that, or companies were starting to evacuate the island now that the military forces were in conflict with one another. I hadn’t seen any towns or bases for the forces from the Gremmans Confederation. They must have been staging their raids from their ships. It would be difficult to occupy territory from the deck of a ship but if they managed to slay enough orcs I doubt that it would matter to them much.
We had to stop and rest much more often than we normally did. The day passed uneventfully, but what normally would have been a full day of hiking was shaping up to take two. That meant another day camping out in the wilderness. We were already tired from our exertions the previous day, so we decided to camp early to try to get as much rest as possible. The sun was barely setting when we found ourselves in a small clearing along the game path. We were in for a long night.
After we had stopped and unloaded our burdens, Aleyda and I sat down and once again started refueling our bodies on mystery meat and water that tasted strongly of the skins that contained it. We ate in silence, futilely trying to hear what was going around on the mountain around us over the smacking of intent mastication.
Finally, we were done eating. Aleyda stood up and walked over to me and then sat down beside me.
“James,” she said. “I have a question and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way. No matter how you answer it, I won’t think less of you.”
“Go ahead and ask,” I said with a little laugh. “Even though now you have gotten me a little nervous. Is this about my past? I am not proud of how I acted back then.”
“No, it’s not about that,” Aleyda replied. “That was before I knew you and if I see you falling back into those habits there will be hell to pay. No, it is something else that has been on my mind.”
“Ask away,” I said. “I don’t intend to keep secrets from you.”
“You talked briefly about a woman you were in love with and how driven you were to stay with her. Are you still attracted to women or did that one bad experience ruin you for everyone else?”
“That was a long time ago,” I replied. “I have seen much, done much and grown as a person since that happened. I don’t see me spending the rest of my life alone if that’s what you are asking. The circumstances just haven’t been right for me to pursue anyone.”
For some reason, she blushed at my admission. I could tell that my answer had made her nervous. Aleyda, so fierce an indomitable in battle, started fidgeting. We sat there in silence for several moments while she gathered her thoughts. Then, finally, she spoke again.
“Is there any chance that I could be that person?”
Her answer ran through me like an electric current. Now, she wasn’t the only one nervously sitting in the clearing.
“I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t attracted to you,” I admitted. “I have been for a long time. I haven’t pursued you because I felt like I have a degree of power over you and the rest of our people. Sometimes, that authority can make things feel coerced. I wouldn’t want to force you into anything, especially if you thought you would have to comply to stay a member of our community and to survive.”
“If you tried to force me into anything I didn’t want to do, I would thrash you,” she said.
“Without a doubt” I said. “I will never be your equal in battle.”
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“Did you know that Lapina was attracted to you?” she asked.
“I never had a clue,” I responded. “I was too busy trying to keep us all safe and alive. And yet, I still failed her.”
“She wasn’t the only one,” Aleyda said. “Lapina and I had a sort of rivalry vying for your attention. But yet you never seemed to notice me.”
“Oh, I notice you,” I said. “Frankly, you are everything I could ever hope for in a woman, in a partner. You possess a fierce beauty. You are capable and strong. You have saved my life more times than I can count. You are a vital part of what we are building. I’ve just been so afraid of ruining our relationship that I haven’t let myself pursue you.”
“You think I’m beautiful?” she asked.
“Of course you are,” I said. “After I told you about my previous baggage, after I spent the winter hiding things from you, I swore to myself that I would never lie to you again. At least not over anything important. Above everything else, you are my friend. I don’t have enough friends. You have earned my respect and you deserve my best.”
“If I have one complaint about you, it’s that you think too much,” she said, leaning against me. “For once, take a look at what’s right in front of you instead of always trying to plan three steps ahead. You have told me that you are interested in me. I have told you I am interested in you. What more is there to say?”
“But so much could go wrong,” I replied. “In the future, I might do something to make you hate me.”
“For everything that might go wrong, something else could go right,” she replied. “Would you please just shut up and kiss me?”
She’s right, I thought. Sometimes I spend so much time projecting things forward in time, trying to foresee inevitable doom, that I ignore the things right in front of me that matter. I worry about what will happen later and forget to live in the present. And that was sapping a lot of joy out of my life.
I wasn’t going to wait to be asked twice. I reached out and gently cupped the back of her head with my hand, pulling her towards me. As I drew her towards me, I noticed her breath smelled of the dried jerky that we had just consumed. I couldn’t bring myself to care. Our lips met softly at first, gently exploring each other. Soon, however, she let out a low moan and our mouths moved against each other more hungrily, more insistently. She started to run her hands up and down my body and it was driving me wild with desire. Finally, she broke off the kiss coming up for air.
“I have wanted that for so long,” she said.
“Me, too,” I replied.
“Take off your clothes,” she demanded.
“Wait,” I said. “You are incredibly special to me and I look forward to getting to explore all of you. Out in the forest surrounded by threats, this is not the place for it. I would feel like an idiot if we found something special only to have it ended shortly thereafter by something that crept up on us, killed us and ate us. I am not going anywhere and I am certain I want you more than you want me. If we are going to do this, though, we need to do it right. That means at a time when it is not dangerous to be distracted.”
“I understand,” she said. “But I have been waiting for you for so long and I want you now.”
“I want that, too. I want that more than I can express in words. But what I want more is to be with you for years to come. I think you are very special. You might be the most special person I have met in my life. Our time together will tell us that. I just don’t want that time to end tonight at the side of a game trail on this stupid island.”
“Alright,” she said. “I can wait. But don’t you dare make me wait too long.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
After the revelations of that evening, neither of us had a desire to immediately sleep. I sat behind her and enveloped her in my arms. Everything in the world felt right that night. My worries fell away as I reveled in the feeling of tightly holding someone whose life I valued higher than my own.
Soon enough, night had fallen and the world around us was once again dark and foreboding. The clearing that we camped in was so small that there would be little warning if something burst out of the trees around us intent on mayhem.
“I’ll take first watch,” I said, gently kissing her again. “Get some sleep.”
Sometimes fate can be a fickle bitch, but other times things just work out. That night was one of those times. Nothing attacked us that night on either my watch or Aleyda’s. We each got a few hours of sleep. It wasn’t nearly enough but it was better than nothing.
By the end of our next day of relatively peaceful travel, we had made it through the caverns and back to Segerick and his people. I was surprised at how free, how light I felt after we delivered the weapons, tools and provisions. Segerick and his people were extremely thankful for our contribution. I told him what had happened with Caider. I also let him know that our plan to raid for more weapons and provisions was probably not likely to happen and that they would have to make do with what they had already received and anything they could fashion themselves. If we were successful with mining the gold, I thought we might be able to make it back out to collect them in significantly less time than my initial estimate. They just needed to hunker down and survive until we could get back.
That night, surrounded by the security of others, I got to hold and be held by Aleyda as we slept. Even though we were around others and sleeping on the hard ground, it was glorious.
The next day, we made our way back towards the gold seam. Thankfully, unburdened by the junk we had carried up the mountain, the trip didn’t take very long and we were there by midday. The others had obviously been hard at work. The stream had been diverted making the gold more accessible and a crude sort of scaffold had been erected. The seam was far enough back in the rock that only one person could work on it at a time. Others pulled gold out of the stream below. Tikter had obviously decided that being alive and potentially rich was better than being poor and dead because he was busy trying to extract the ore from the rock that had been mined or panned.
After I arrived, I explained what had happened with Caider and showed the others that we had recovered our former profits. That buoyed everyone’s spirits. After giving that explanation, I went to talk to Bowen.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said. Then, I explained our detour to deliver supplies to our people under the mountain. For some reason, he seemed to be closely studying Aleyda and me. Finally, when I wound down he spoke.
“So, you finally decided to get together?” he asked.
“Yes, but how could you tell?” I responded.
“You have been mooning over each other for months,” he said. “Now, that tension is gone. I am happy for you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t think it was that obvious.”
“You have no idea how many times that topic came up in conversation back at the farm,” he said. “It was obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes. Even Mero could see what was going on.”
“Well, how embarrassing for me,” I said.