Chapter 7 Sage #2
Tonight, Araphi plays a salacious tavern song about a lowborn maiden whose father was a bard employed by the Copper Court.
She grew up attending him until she too was hired to play.
She could not believe her luck when, after her first performance for the court, the noblewoman who she had loved from afar since they were children invited her back to her quarters, and took her as a lover.
But although the lady would scream the bard’s name in bed, she still wouldn’t acknowledge her outside the bedchamber.
The noblewoman became engaged to a lord the next season, and the heartbroken bard was made to play at the wedding, hosted at court.
She sang their story, which she had composed into a ballad, and aside from the noblewoman, the guests were none the wiser.
The last lines of the bard’s ballad are the last words of Araphi’s:
Never share thy lips with a lady who shan’t speak your name
And good luck, m’lady, to thee I say!
As she finishes to applause, Araphi takes a sip from the flask. She licks wine from her lips as those large eyes meet Sage’s across the fire.
Sage’s belly clenches, but it’s all just a game.
It’s just a game.
It’s just a—
Sage grinds her fingertips into her thighs as she stands so quickly that her last fig falls to the dirt.
“We’d be wise to keep a quieter camp tonight,” she declares too loudly, so that her voice seems to ring around the clearing.
“We’re far enough from the cities to worry about attracting notice.
I’m going to bunk down early so I can take a late watch.
Bramble, you take the first watch, then wake me in a few hours? ”
“You got it, boss,” the healer says.
“Not ‘boss,’ ” Sage insists. Then she turns away before the others can speak, though she feels Remy’s questioning gaze follow her as she retreats beyond the firelight’s glow and toward the clearing’s edge, where her tent awaits.
An hour passes, and once again, sleep eludes her.
Once again, she can’t explain it.
Her restlessness is usually soothed by moving, by leaving.
By adventuring. This is her purpose in the world.
And this is what she’s always wanted: the chance to prove herself as a party leader.
It’s going well, isn’t it? So why is she lying here with the distant crackling of the campfire, the chatter of her party, and the sound of her own breath for company?
She listens as Remy begs off, claiming that he needs a long walk alone with his thoughts each night before turning in, and Nura heads out to chop more wood for their morning fire.
Sage rolls to her back to stare up at the canvas above her, barely visible in the dark.
She’ll never be able to relax if she can’t quiet her thoughts, furious as bees in a swarm.
Without so much as a door between her and the party—only the folded canvas above and the sounds of the campfire and the nighttime for cover—she slips a hand beneath her mammoth-wool blanket.
She thinks of Rosaria in her room at the Bear’s Embrace.
Of the taste of red wine clinging to her lips, and the shimmer of spectral butterflies dancing across her flushed and sweat-damp skin, and of her soft fingers skating down Sage’s body, digging into her hip bones as she knelt.
Sage slides her own fingertips down her body, sighing as she thinks of nothing but the taste of wine, the shine of butterflies, the scent of lemon…
But wait.
Rosaria always smells of honey musk and magnolia—a signature perfume.
Yet the heat building in her sex flares brighter as her imagination works its will unbidden: Rosaria’s soft hands replaced with long, competent fingers calloused from hours upon hours of practice on stringed instruments, and a drop of wine clinging to a different pair of blush-colored lips.
Sage pauses, but only for a moment.
Perhaps this is the thought she needs to quiet in order to sleep. And no one need ever know whose face Sage pictures hovering above hers in the dark.
Slowly, she begins again, her fingers stoking the embers glowing at the crux between her thighs into a campfire of her own.
Closing her eyes, she pretends it’s the bard’s hands cupping her, then working harder and faster and deeper as her body responds, dampening.
She drags her free hand through her hair, tightening her fist to feel the tug, and that too belongs to the bard.
The Araphi of her imagination beams down at her, wearing the same look of sly triumph as she had at the audition, once Sage finally relented to her charms. As Sage snakes her hips against the ground, she can practically feel the tickle of air in her ear as Araphi leans down to sing quietly, just for her.
Never share thy lips with a lady who shan’t speak your name.
“Araphi,” Sage murmurs beneath her quickening breath, and the heat spreads through her stomach, her rib cage, her chest. A sound she’ll soon have to clamp her teeth around builds in her throat…
That’s the moment when a scream she’s never heard but can place in an instant rends the night air.
Sage sits up, and the tent seems to spin for a moment as the fog of pretend dissipates around her.
She reaches twice for her belt before managing to lay a hand on it.
But once she does, Sage moves on instinct.
With her dagger belt buckled and her shortbow in hand—she never sleeps without it during an adventure—she slings her quiver over her shoulder and tears out of the tent.
She surveys the scene with sharp eyes. Tea and Araphi are still by the campfire alongside Bramble, not yet having begun their watch.
The three stand to face the pack of barbed wolves materializing out of the dark between the trees.
Creatures that have no business being this far south, only a day or two’s trot from the capital and Kingfisher alike.
She counts six, as tall as Sage on four clawed legs.
Their black lips are curled back to reveal canines sharp as the barbs of bone running down their spines, each the length of her daggers.
The wolf at the head of the pack slinks forward into the edge of the clearing.
Within a heartbeat, Sage has nocked her arrow, drawn the string back to her cheek, and released.
She has a second arrow nocked by the time the first thuds into the shoulder of the apparent pack leader, seeking vulnerable flesh.
The wolf stops in its tracks, shying back with a guttural whine to bite at the shaft, and Sage thinks for a moment that they might get lucky.
That the pack might melt back into the deep woods to seek easier, unarmed prey.
But that hope fades as the creature abandons the shaft and locks yellow eyes burning with reflected firelight on the nearest human to it: Araphi, who finds herself on the wrong side of the campfire, closest to the pack.
Again it slinks forward, the bulk of it blocked from Sage’s line of sight by the bard.
She holds, knowing better than to drop her bow.
She’s more lethal from a distance, out of range of the barbs and the claws herself, and her arrows are still deadly accurate despite partial cover.
Sage restrains herself until Araphi whimpers in panic, the faint sound carried across the campground by a chill breeze to reach Sage’s sharp ears.
She lets loose her second arrow.
Then she drops her bow, grabs for her daggers, and charges into the fray.