Chapter 2 To Chase One’s Dreams #3
The woman laughed a bright, bell-like laugh, and Kraghtol realized he had stood frozen in place for a few solid seconds now. He let out his breath before answering. Well, trying to answer.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to… I just noticed the music and I…”
The woman laughed again and cut him off.
“Let’s try that again. I am Liva. Nice to meet you. Perhaps you want to share your name as well?”
She winked, which confused Kraghtol even more. That was decidedly not how people usually reacted to him.
“Kragh,” he rumbled, his coarse voice a stark contrast to Liva’s clear and light one.
“Kragh. Sounds unusual. I like it. Now, Kragh, judging by your backpack and the fact that I don’t know your face, you’re not from Caemdir. It would be terribly inhospitable not to invite you to our feast on the night of the equinox.”
Without asking for further permission, she took his hand and led him to an empty part of the food-laden tables, away from the main festivities.
Her hand felt so small and delicate that, for a moment, he was worried he might break her bones just by holding it.
The light was brighter here, which enabled Kraghtol to make out more than just Liva’s silhouette.
She was objectively beautiful, he decided.
Her dark hair was straight and long, framing a petite face with a perpetual cheeky expression.
Her fingers were slender and well-manicured, and her light clothing highlighted the curvy body underneath more than concealing it.
He quickly looked up at her face again, not wanting to get accused of stealing inappropriate glances. Luckily, Liva didn’t seem to mind.
“Interesting. Seems like there is a whole unusual man behind the unusual name. I can’t say I’ve ever met someone like you before. Come on. Don’t just stand there. Sit down and grab a bite to eat. You certainly seem hungry. Tell me, where are you from?”
Her words surrounded Kraghtol like a whirlwind, mimicking the thousands of doubts in his own head.
Still, he decided to go with it. She wasn’t necessarily wrong, too: He was hungry, even after his dinner, and the food on the table looked just delicious.
Before long, he found himself chewing on sweetened bread and apple pie while trying to answer all of Liva’s seemingly endless questions.
It was easy to avoid the embarrassing parts of his past, since Liva mainly concentrated on shallow topics, asking more about the daily life in Mistpine than Kraghtol’s struggles.
She did, however, know how to comment on his accomplishments or features in a positive way that Kraghtol was entirely unaccustomed to.
Aside from Merrick, he had rarely received compliments, but Liva didn’t seem to run out of opportunities to flatter him for his strength or cunning.
It was a novel experience for Kraghtol, but he didn’t question it until after some time, he felt her hand on his thigh suddenly and flinched.
“So… do you already have a place to stay tonight?” Liva asked him in her innocent and sweet voice, making no effort to remove her hand. Suddenly, it all made sense to him, and he felt blood rushing to his head. She wasn’t just making conversation; she was flirting.
“Oh. Oh. Yes, I… I’m sleeping outside. Sorry.”
He tried to push her hand away gently, but she just laughed.
“Oh, come on, big guy. It’s the night of the equinox. Surely you don’t want to sleep on moss and stone when you could wrap those powerful arms around me tonight?”
She lowered her voice and almost whispered now as she added: “Nobody needs to know. You’re far away from home and it’s a celebration night.”
While speaking, she had taken his hand that he had just used to free his thigh and guided it to her hip, no doubt in an inviting and intimate gesture, but Kraghtol pulled it back quickly.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Liva, but I can’t. Sorry.”
This whole thing was becoming more and more embarrassing for Kraghtol, and he just hoped she would take the rejection well. But apparently, Liva was not yet ready to give up.
“But why? It could be the perfect night. Just the two of us, under the moonlight… Am I not pretty enough?”
“I appreciate the offer, really.”
Kraghtol basically squirmed in his seat now.
“And it’s not that you are not pretty, I guess, but I just don’t see women that way and…”
There was a moment of surprised silence before Liva let go of his hand and burst out laughing suddenly.
“Just my luck of the hollow, really! A mysterious traveler appears on the night of the equinox, the perfect customer, and he turns out to be a man’s man.”
She didn’t really seem to be saddened by this revelation, though. If anything, she came across even more authentic than before, which left Kraghtol in utter confusion. Then, one word bubbled up in the cauldron of his head.
“Wait, customer? You mean you’re a…”
His voice trailed off, mainly because he didn’t know the proper non-offensive word to continue. Thankfully, Liva had no such shame.
“A whore? Well, what if I am?”
She still seemed amused to no end, but all the innocence was gone.
“Well, I… As far as I know, we don’t have anyone like you in Mistpine.”
Kraghtol tried to navigate the potentially treacherous waters carefully.
“But it’s an honorable profession, I think. I mean, in a way we are colleagues even.”
Before Liva could answer, he quickly added,
“In the guild. You guys are also in the Guild of Healing and Bodycraft, right?”
It was true: not only healers and apothecaries were organized in this particular guild.
It was one of the biggest guilds in Wardenreach since it included every profession that dealt with the bodily needs, including barbers, bathers and, yes, even whores.
Say what you want about the guilds, but they really were well-organized.
Liva wiped her eyes from laughter and grinned cheekily now.
“That would certainly be true. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Kragh. Come closer.”
Even more confused, Kraghtol leaned closer, just to hear Liva whisper, almost mouth,
“I’m not with the guild.”
“What? But that’s…”
Liva’s finger on her lips reminded him to lower his voice just in time.
“…Illegal. What if they find out?”
To his surprise, Liva just shrugged.
“So far, nobody has been able to catch me. I wasn’t born here in Caemdir, and I’m not planning to die here. And even if they catch me, what are they supposed to do? Fine me? I’m trembling!”
“They could imprison you. Or worse.”
The young woman’s courage impressed Kraghtol, but at the same time, he could hardly believe what he had heard.
That was just reckless without reason. Granted, this was probably a backwater village the guilds didn’t care too much about, too, but after everything he had heard about them, it seemed unlikely that she could escape the vigilant eye of the guilds and the orderkeepers forever. And that could only end one way: badly.
“Kragh, you’re thinking too much. You know what? Let’s dance. It’s far too late to find another client for tonight anyway, so we might as well have some fun. Some innocent and entirely free fun.”
She winked at him again but quickly jumped to her feet and half-dragged him towards the music.
Kraghtol had never danced in his life and felt incredibly out-of-place again, but to Liva, this didn’t seem to matter.
Her way of dancing was just like herself: chaotic, without rules but somehow miraculously fitting in with the music just fine.
And for once, Kraghtol found it possible not to let himself be stopped by all the staring eyes watching the half-orc dance the night away with the whore.
Even though he believed Liva’s offer to spend the night at her place — and nothing else — to be sincere, he opted to return to his outdoor campsite late in the night so he could continue his way early in the morning without causing any commotion.
If he didn’t still have to travel for many more kilometers, he probably would have liked to stay even longer here.
Liva had turned out to be a really captivating person once they got past the flirting attempts.
She was refreshingly open about just about everything and unconventional to the core.
Not only was she the first person besides Merrick to speak to Kraghtol like he was a normal human being, but she also showed genuine interest in him, which was also a first. Over the course of the night, he told her the whole short story of his life — from the circumstances of his birth that he only knew the full extend of for a few days now to the mysterious patient and the alchemical concoction in his backpack.
Liva was a good listener and asked many questions, showing genuine interest. She did not, however, judge anything.
Still, when he walked through the chilly night out of the village, Kraghtol felt strangely warm inside.
This adventure was starting better than he had hoped for.
In just a week’s time, he had already accomplished something he had failed to do for nineteen years now: to make a friend, even though he had done most of the talking.
The rest of the journey went by largely uneventful. Now and then he encountered signs that told him how far it was to the city, and it pleased him to see he was making good progress and might even arrive shortly before the end of the tenth month.
The guilds strictly standardized every unit of measurement, which must have been no small feat. At least his foster father had told him stories about earlier times, when everything was in utter disarray and people used units named after body parts.
Now, it was much more logical. They had grams and kilograms for weight, meters and kilometers for distances, and an easy to remember monetary system that only required you to count to ten. The only thing the guilds could not simplify to a ten-based system was time.
Not that they didn’t try, but it had proven just too convenient to slice the day into 24 hours, and those into 60 minutes, as it was easily divisible by a lot of numbers.
7 days were a week, going from Firstday to Masonday.
And four of these formed a month, since that was about the time the moon needed for a full cycle — although Elven astronomers had calculated that to be one or two hours longer than 28 days — and a full year were 365 days, which was split into 13 months and one day of celebration.
That day marked the winter solstice, while the summer solstice was in the middle of the seventh month.
If he arrived in Winterstone before the eleventh month, he would still have two months before the long night, which was good. The lack of daylight in the last months made people even more on edge than they already were in his presence, and he wanted to make a good first impression.
With that in mind, he spent the night in a proper inn when he was just one more day of travel from the city. Besides enjoying a hearty meal and sleeping in a proper bed, he wanted to take a bath, and it was better to pay four copper pieces than look like a sweaty, unshaven savage.
His finances were looking good too, or at least not terrible.
He had had to buy food for four copper coins, and his shoes had needed repair after two weeks on the road for eight, but that was all.
Combined with the four coins from today, that left him with just under 17 and a half silver pieces, not counting the gold coin from his mother.
Kraghtol could hardly believe it, he realized as he relaxed in the warm water.
It was not only the fact that he would set foot in a city the size of Winterstone for the very first time in his life.
No, if everything worked out, he would soon be a student of the alchemical craft, which was nothing short of a miracle.
It had taken nineteen years, but finally, his life would take a turn for the better.