Chapter 5 #2
I crept from the room, my eyes seeking shapes in the shadows beyond the dim light of the fire and struggling to find any.
We’d blocked off the windows in the room we’d chosen to sleep in using the bigger pieces of furniture we could find.
We’d had nothing left over to do the same in the rest of the building, so we had to hope the door would be enough to keep us safe.
Silvery moonlight illuminated the old bar area up ahead of me, and I padded closer to it, the grunts getting louder, more frenzied.
My gaze caught on a portrait of a woman in a voluminous blue gown whose violet eyes seemed to track me as I passed it by.
I frowned at her, unable to see much of her face in the dim light aside from those eyes which were eerily similar to my own.
A grunt drew my attention from her, and I frowned at myself for allowing the distraction. This forest was full of tricks and I refused to fall prey to any of them.
I readied a stone in my slingshot, my pulse pounding to a crescendo as I closed in on my prey.
The Boar was rumoured to have a hide of that was near impossible to pierce, its cloven hooves sharp as knives and its tusks deadlier than any human-made spear.
It would take a direct strike between its eyes to down him.
Nothing less would suffice. I needed to get into position without it detecting me so that I could-
I fell still as I rounded the corner into the small bar at the rear of the building, my lips parting and fingers almost slipping on my drawn stone.
The grunting wasn’t coming from the Boar.
In the centre of the room, their eyes thankfully pointed towards the bar on my right, Gunther had Helga bent over a table and was ploughing his cock into her with rapid, jagged thrusts.
His shirt was crumpled on the floor, but his trousers were hanging loose beneath his ass, sweat rolling down his bare skin as he pounded away, grunting with effort and stealing all hope of the Boar from me at once.
“Harder, for fuck’s sake,” Helga hissed, gripping the table she was bent over and driving her ass back against him.
I swallowed a lump in my throat, standing there for far longer than I should have as I scrambled to recover from the shock of my discovery.
“You fucking love my cock,” Gunther panted, thrusting harder, grunting louder.
“I would if I could feel it,” Helga growled, and Gunther cursed her, slamming his dick into her more firmly and making the table legs scrape against the floor.
The shriek of wood on stone snapped me out of my shock and I whirled away from them, slipping back into the darkness of the corridor and colliding with a hard body before I even realised someone else was there
“See something you like, Ferris?” Colton asked me in a low, amused tone.
Gunther was grunting so loudly now that I doubted he or Helga could hear anything other than his piggish sounds of pleasure, but I still cringed at the thought of being discovered here.
“I thought he was the Boar,” I blurted, knowing Colton couldn’t see the heat of my cheeks in the darkness, my embarrassment shielded in bravado.
Colton breathed a laugh, his hand finding my waist as he leaned down to speak into my ear.
“I imagine Helga would gain greater pleasure from the encounter if he was.”
I snorted in amusement, and the grunts in the bar became a drawn-out wail of pleasure that belonged solely to Gunther.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Helga growled while Gunther panted, and Colton tugged me back towards the room with the fire.
“Best we don’t let them find out that you were watching. If I’d known you were into voyeurism though, Ferris, I’d have gladly put on a show for you myself.”
“I’m not,” I hissed, slipping through the door and finding the fire blazing again. Esther was still asleep against the wall, so I had to assume that Colton had built it back up.
I headed for my pathetic excuse for a bed, intending to sleep away my disappointment and embarrassment, but Colton hounded me.
“What?” I asked, stalling short of returning to my thin blanket. “Are you planning on following me into my bed?”
“Is that an offer?” he countered.
“No,” I replied firmly, though my skin prickled a little at the insinuation.
Colton was…well, Colton. He was the man every woman in town had claimed to want for a husband should he return from the forest and who had certainly done the rounds of testing their marital beds, even if he never lingered in any of them for long.
He was precisely what all the books described a Champion to be; tall, strong, handsome and irritatingly deserving of the admiration he drew for his battle prowess.
I may not have been one of the simpering fools who had followed him about town in hopes to gain his attention for a night or three, but I wasn’t blind.
“Pity.” Colton looked me up and down, the edge of his lips tugging towards a smirk, as if he’d known precisely where my thoughts had just wandered to, but I wasn’t going to be distracted by his obvious flirting.
I scowled.
“What is it?” I asked, knowing he wasn’t truly looking to bed me in a room full of people.
Colton considered me for a moment, then shrugged. “I want to see that book you were hoarding before we settled for sleep. I could take it by force, but I figured I’d be polite first and see where it got me.”
I stilled, my eyes falling to the pack which lay beside my bed, its contents containing the few most precious things I owned.
My instinct was to refuse his curiosity but one look at his powerful body told me he hadn’t been lying. He could take it by force, and then where would I be? Perhaps if I sated his curiosity over it he’d lose interest…
“Fine,” I grumbled, taking a seat on my blanket and drawing my pack into my lap.
Colton sat beside me. Close. Too close, his knee butting up against my thigh and his shadow fallowing over me as it danced in the flickering light of the flames.
He was filthy. I was filthy. Hell this whole fucking place was filthy, and yet something about it suited him, like he was built for the roughness of the forest rather than the bustle of the town we’d left behind.
I very much doubted the same could be said for me, but it didn’t matter if I was suited to this place or not – my destiny lay beneath these trees and I wouldn’t turn from it no matter how hard it proved to claim.
“It was no accident you ended up in here with us, was it?” Colton asked curiously, his gaze all too astute, his guess too close to the truth to bother denying.
I shook my head, poisonous memories slithering through my mind, a call unanswered, a fate which shifted so fucking unfairly-
“No,” I admitted, banishing those thoughts. “I came here intentionally. It was always my plan.”
“Then why not train as a Champion?” he questioned.
“My mother and father never would have allowed it,” I said dismissively.
“It would have broken their hearts for me to even suggest it. Besides, I’m not like you.
” I waved a hand at him and the rest of the Champions, indicating their brawn, bulk, preference for violence.
“The way you plan to do this thing isn’t the way I-”
The door thumped open, drawing our focus to Gunther as he sloped back into the room, adjusting his fly and grinning like he had something to be smug about. Helga didn’t follow him but her words did.
“I’ll be along in a bit – just need to finish what you couldn’t, small fry!”
The grin on Gunther’s face faded to rage and I quickly looked away from him, busying myself with drawing the larger of the two books I carried from my pack. It was the one I’d been studying when Colton had noticed it and the only one I was willing to share with him.
“Bitch,” Gunther muttered, stalking back to his bedroll while Colton made no attempt at all to hide his laughter.
Gunther glowered at him but with one assessing look, he clearly decided he didn’t favour his chances against the favourite of the Champions and truthfully, I didn’t either.
Colton Evast was a brute of a man and I was starting to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off distancing myself from him sooner rather than later.
Especially now that it transpired that he was actually paying attention to me.
Whatever decision I made in that regard would have to wait for daylight, however, so I gave in to the demand he’d made of me and placed the book in my lap.
“It’s a book of the spirits,” I said cautiously, my fingers skimming the embossed cover of the tome I cherished so dearly. There were metal coverings over the corners of the hard case to protect it, and each of the forest’s spirits were represented on its face, all surrounding a single tree.
Colton eyed it, but as he reached out to take it, I quickly opened it and positioned it so that he could view it clearly from my lap.
Colton glanced at me, obviously knowing what I’d just done, but thankfully he didn’t attempt to take the book from me again.
“There are chapters on each of the spirits,” I told him.
“Myths and legends recounted, descriptions, depictions.” I showed him the first chapter which was titled ‘The Stag’.
There were pages of beautiful artwork showing its pelt of woven leaves, its moss-covered horns so tall and wide it was a wonder the beast could traverse the forest at all.
“The Stag is the keeper of the forest’s histories and the guardian of moss, fungi and soil.
Where it steps, nutrients bleed into the ground, moss spreads across the trees and mushrooms sprout in honour of its passage,” I surmised, pointing out the various images and notations, the ethereal stag peering out at us from the page as if it were listening too.