Champion's Heart - Chapter 1

Flight. Pain. Fear.

Char’s aching muscles drove him onward, stumbling over root and rock. The dense air of the forest furthered his disorientation, the night calls of bird and beast causing his frantic blue eyes to dart this way and that.

Have to get back. His company would be lost without him there in the thick of combat to rally them.

Shame drove the prolonged panic within Char to even greater heights. Never had the thinnest stripe of cowardice been shown in him, yet now he was an unwitting deserter.

He’d rankled even at the tactical order for his company to retreat and shape the Sahrin advance to his warband’s advantage. Still he had done his duty, luring the well-armored Sahrin flank toward the forest’s edge.

Only, in the dark, the trees had seemed to come upon Char and his company without warning. In some trick of the moonlight, the trees had seemed to swell to envelop the humans before it, almost as if...but no, the forest had not drawn breath as a greater entity in a thousand years. And it would not have stirred without the return of the gods and their ancient children.

So Char cursed his own incompetence, calling once again for his company, who’d seemed to vanish from view in an instant when Char had been enclosed by trees. The croaking of frogs was his only answer.

Then the sound of water. The stream! Char thought amid his desperation and fatigue. One had been running near to the tree line, serving as a freshwater source for the warband before the Sahrin attack.

Only as he burst into the tranquil glade and beheld moonlit spring of water spilling into the forest pond from a smooth, elevated rock in a brief waterfall did Char consider that the sound had been far too loud for a stream.

His bare, brawny shoulders sagged, and he glanced about in despair, heaving deep breaths into his ragged lungs and pushing sweaty strands of hair back along the braids they’d escaped in his long run. The sword he’d clutched so fiercely since the battle fell from fingers numb with the night chill, and he clutched his hairy chest from heartache as much as fatigue.

“Ancestors,” Char whispered, “if, by chance, I near a vertex, please hear this lost soul and guide his way home.”

No comforting reply came to him on the gentle breeze, and no guiding light greeted him from the ancestral realm.

Blistered feet trembling beneath his fur-lined boots, Char sank to his knees and closed his eyes, wondering if he’d ever return to the warband, and, if so, whether he’d do so in anything but deepest disgrace.

A rustling of nearby leaves caused his eyes to snap open once more, and he braced to battle any predator that might approach to the bitter end.

He halted in reaching for his sword, however, as he identified the source of the sound. A figure of indecipherable grace and elegance had entered the glade...or perhaps she’d always been there. Standing but a few paces from the kneeling Char, a woman of considerable height and shapely form, draped in flowing garments of green-banded white, regarded the human before her with eyes like starlight. Slight and markedly feminine, the woman nonetheless possessed a nearly overwhelming strength Char could only feel, and never begin to express.

Full, dark lips parted on a face of far paler green, framed in long, wavy locks the color of naked walnut wood, and the woman stepped fluidly toward Char on slender feet bound in branchlike tendrils. Compassion and sympathy formed ever subtle tug of her expression as she lowered herself to Char’s level, brushing his sweaty, bearded cheek with fingertips softer than heather.

At that simple touch, Char felt safer than he ever had in over three decades of life, and his find his thoughts slipping into darkness as he fell forward into the woman’s arms.

He awoke some time later to a cool touch against his lips. Char’s eyes fluttered open, and he beheld the kind, easy smile of the woman. One of her hands stroked his hair—which had been loosed, washed, and dried—as it lay in her lap, and the other lifted a metal chalice to his mouth.

Char drank, long and deeply, and he felt as though the deepest, most unquenchable thirst he’d ever dared to acknowledge within him had been sated. After a few moments of guzzling, he realized that the cup should have been long empty.

Blinking, he drew back from his lips, peering within to see it just as full of the sweet, crystal clear water as ever. A joyous smile spread over his face. “This is a mighty relic, indeed!” He gave a laugh of simple pleasure, delighted to hear the power of a well-rested man in his own voice.

A gasp and a wince then gripped his body.

He peered down his own body, now stripped to the waist of its minimal, leather-strapped armor, and saw that a myriad of wounds he’d barely noticed in his hasty blundering through the forest had been cleaned and dressed, though not entirely salved of pain.

“Ah,” Char groaned. “That will make the return journey more bearable.” Past his legs, he saw that his cloth breeches and had been pulled up and his boots removed for washing his feet, as well. He tried to convey his deepest gratitude up to the woman with his eyes. “Thank you.”

As he tried to heave himself upward, the woman swept around to his side in a swirl of spotless white fabric, placing a delicate hand against his heart. There was no challenge or threat in her vibrant silver gaze, only sincerity and concern.

Pausing, Char studied her, and it was hardly a trial to do so. “What is it?”

Her fingers slid down toward the site of his greatest pain, in his upper left abdomen. A pleading intensity pulled at her mouth.

Three things Char understood at once. First, he and this mysterious woman didn’t speak the same tongue. Second, somehow she was able to convey utter clarity of meaning, despite this barrier. Third, it was inconceivable to read deception in her as she withdrew her hand.

Char moved his own rough, callused hand to the bandage she’d indicated, nodding slowly up to her. “I understand. Internal bleeding?”

Fear and pity saddened her supple features, and Char regretted ever having caused her distress.

He issued a slow, deep sigh as he eased back down to his mossy bed. “I see. I’d best move as little as possible, then.” Frustration boiled within Char’s chest, but he knew better than to push onward or object. There was no honor in dying so far from his warband, and he wished to enter the ancestral realm with a far greater tale to tell than bleeding out in a forest.

The woman rose, pulling a thick blue blanket over his feet and up to his neck. It was warm, but not oppressively so, and the weight of it soothed Char’s agitation without irritating his wounds. She then moved back to sit by his head, cradling it in her lap once more as she brought morsels of fruit and bread from a nearby basket to Char’s mouth.

Comfort seemed to spill through his body, and he drifted off to thoughts of home.

He dreamed of his own hearth, blazing full and cheery. He heard the laughter of friends and comrades. He saw his wife, Ylsa, pushing through the front door, shoulders laden with fresh venison. He felt her lean, well-muscled form sheened with sweat in his arms, locked against him in the heat of passion numerous times and long into the night…

Char stirred awake, feeling a smile on his face and a profound rigidity in his loins. He looked about, unsure what had roused him, and his eyes found the pond’s babbling waterfall.

A soft humming wafted across the glade, and Char easily identified the source. Backlit by the enormity of the full moon atop the rock that fed clear water into the pond as if from a magic spring, the woman was now clothed only in the gentle lunar glow, barely more than a willowy silhouette as she lifted a metal pitcher overhead to spill water down her shapely form.

Gulping at the heat of passion both the sight and the echoes of his dream elicited, Char felt he should avert his gaze. Surely the woman was unaware of his wakefulness, and he wouldn’t wish to sully all the kindness she’d shown him with uninvited lust.

Then, still as bright as the stars in the shadows that played over the rest of body and barely obscured full detail of the view, the woman’s eyes found Char’s over her shoulder. She stooped and lowered the pitcher with one hand and gathered her sodden hair with the other, never once breaking her gaze.

She wished for him to look upon her, Char realized. To savor the spectacle of her bathing in the moonlight. To imagine the thrill of joining her, pressing his scarred, battle-hardened flesh against her verdant, voluptuous curves.

Char felt the heat in his groin threaten to erupt, and just the faintest brush of his hand to readjust the risen tension was enough to finish the task.

It has been some time, Char supposed, recalling that his last visit home to Ylsa had been over a month prior. As a fresh heat, this one of shame, threatened to rise within him, however, Char found himself meeting the star-like glow of the woman’s eyes once more.

There was joy in them; gratification that she’d helped Char find sexual release.

Already drowsy from the brief but potent rush of pleasure, Char lay his head back down and drifted off once more.