Chapter 104: Sir Rickard came to the rescue (4)

“So here it is.” He said, pulling over a chair and sitting opposite me. I tried to sit up, “No no,” he said, “Take your time. Give the drugs a bit of time to work and for you to adjust to them. You would probably get dizzy which would mean that I would have to fix you again.”

I subsided but he did help me sit up and propped a pillow underneath my back so that drinking would be easier.

“So you've met Sally?” he asked as he sat and put his slippered feet up on the bed. The slippers were pink and were at odds with his otherwise rugged exterior.

I nodded and took another sip.

“Godlings are fascinating creatures,” Pula started. He sounded rather like a lecturer at the university. “They are, at the same time as being child-like and innocent, extremely clever and sometimes they can be uncommonly wise. They see beauty in places that the rest of us don't. In Sally's case, she sees beauty in the written word. She finds the shapes and the patterns of it absolutely fascinating. So she was the first of the three of us to come here really.”

I listened carefully to the story, sipping from my drink slowly.

“This cabin is built on the top of an old mine. It isn't human in construction as the mining techniques are far too advanced for humans, so I suspect it was dwarven or maybe gnomish in basis. I struggle to believe it was Elven though, but anyway.” He peered at me. “You must stop me if I go off on a tangent.”

“Not in the least.” I told him, hiding my smile behind my cup.

“So anyway, Sally had chosen this as her home and was collecting written works since long before I came here. Books, pieces of paper, scrolls, maps, tapestries. So long as it contained written language then she collected it and stored it here in the mines.”

“How long's she been doing this?”

“I have no idea. I was the next to arrive and the collection was....considerable by the time that I got here. Utterly without order though. She stacked them and kept them according to where it seemed appropriate to her rather than to any other kind of order. She couldn't read at the time you see so, all she had to go on were the shapes of the letters and odd pictures and engravings.

“All things being equal she actually did quite well. When I came here I would often find selections of books by the same author had been kept together because she recognised the pattern of the authors name and decided to keep them together.”

“Storing all of that underground though....”

“Oh yes I see. That's why I know the construction isn't human. There is no damp in the mine. There's some kind of air filtration system that keeps out harmful gasses such as fire-damp and the like but it also means that the parchment or skins or cloth that the things are written on, are perfectly preserved. They degrade over time but that's where I come in. Copying the old and degrading works onto the new. I can do that because of the lack of other harmful effects on the paper. Otherwise it would be the work of thousands of people working around the hours of the day to keep things properly preserved.

“I arrived next you see. I was wandering around the countryside having thought it prudent to leave my most recent village as they had begun to notice that I wasn't entirely....human. I was a monk in that place and I preserved the abbey while working with the books. The vast majority of the other monks had been taken off by the wars of the time which left me in my skin of an elderly monk and some of the other older monks who died off one by one until only I was left. The Abbot left to follow his ambitions and I begged for leave to die there which he granted.

“I lasted ten years before the villagers noticed that all was not quite right with me.

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“I packed a wagon full of books, carefully disguising them with sack-cloth and hay, changed my shape to that of a poor farmer and left.

“Through a variety of misadventures, I found myself near here. I was camping one night when I woke up one day to fine Sally going through my personal diary. She had lifted it off my person in the middle of the night and was leafing through it carefully, admiring my penmanship.

“She fled of course when I woke up but I waited, took a couple of my other books from the wagon and she gradually overcame her nervousness. I am blessed with being the kind of scholar that likes to share knowledge with like-minded folks, rather than that kind of arrogant idiot who prefers to horde all the knowledge to themselves, so I started to show her that the funny patterns that she so admired were actually words and language that could be read.

“She was delighted and picked up the trick of reading and writing with remarkable speed. Like many, I suppose I mistook her for a child and as such I had underestimated her hunger for the meaning behind the words. She led me to this place and showed me her collection.”

He grinned at the memory.

“At first I was quite intimidated by it all. But between us we set about working through the treasure trove that she had put together. A lot of it was meaningless of course, sales receipts, love letters or diaries. But together they gave pictures of that time and place. I saw the value of it all and offered to help Sally with her collection to which she agreed. I taught her to read. The various human languages as well as elven and Dwarven and we set about organising her collection.

Sally would regularly go off and return with new bits of paper, sometimes papers, scrolls or another book. It was clear that she had probably stolen them but she was clever enough to never get caught. We spent our time organising her collection and reading from the vast treasure trove of information that we had access to.”

He sighed at a memory.

“Then my wife came. She was running as, she tells me, her people often are. She had made the mistake of bestowing her charms and graces on a nobleman of some power and when she decided to move on to other lovers, as her nature dictates, the man flew into a jealous rage, slew her other lovers and pursued her in an effort to bring her back to him. In chains if necessary.

“Sally found her, unconscious and exhausted in the fields, maybe a mile away and was trying to drag her here by the ankle which was not going well. Instead she came and got me and we managed to heal the poor thing of her injuries, but in taking her away, her pursuers completely missed her. As I was using a shape that moved quickly and easily through the undergrowth, the noble's trackers couldn't see where I had been when I carried her off and rode straight past us. Thanks for reading on ManaNovel!

“As we nursed her to health, Sally and I, I fell in love with her and....thankfully.... she fell in love with me. We got a visiting priest to marry us and here we stayed.”

“Hold on,” I interrupted before he carried on. “With all due respect to the lady and to you. How does that work. Succubi are Succubi after all and....” My words petered out in the face of the man grinning at me.

“You're asking me how I managed to keep her. Why hasn't she got bored of me and moved on?”

“Yes. I suppose I am.” I subsided gratefully.

“I'm not a jealous man. I knew what I was dealing with and I knew what I was getting into. Yes she goes off. For days, weeks or even months at a time as she falls in love with a new man. She is....incapable of being faithful in the human sense of the word and I needed to make peace with that.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Not as hard as you might think. Remember that I am not human either. She is not faithful but she is incredibly loyal. I don't mind her going off and having her adventures so long as she comes back to me and tells me before she goes so that Sally and I don't end up worrying about her. More recently though it has been less of an issue.”

“Why?”

“People come to us.”

“I see.”

“I don't think you do. Not yet anyway. But there's another factor that helps me keep her interest. I can change shape which means that my appearance, manner and almost personality changes with it. So if she wants something different then I can provide that for her. She still, occasionally wants something new and fresh so she does occasionally still go off but...” he shrugged. “I am alright with that. As I say, she comes back. There may come a day where she doesn't.... But until then....”

He shrugged again. “I am happy and content and I hope I make her happy and content. She certainly hasn't left yet and we have been together for a long time.”

I nodded, considering this for a while

“So people come to you.” I prompted.

“Yes. My wife has a talent for organising things and she saw a way that we could turn things to our advantage. Rather than accruing paper without pattern and purpose, she argued that we should charge for our services. If you want knowledge out of our collection then you must give us something in return. Whether that is new knowledge, food, supplies or some time spent with my wife then that is what we ask. We have had enough of a response over the years that we have had to expand the mine twice, with the aid of some people who came here looking for some piece of information or other. We expanded our preservation spells with the aid of a wizard and now here we are.”

“How come I've never heard of you?”

He considered me for a while. “Oxenfurt trained yes?”

“Yes.”

“Oxenfurt is a nice place. I've been many times but it's still a little elitist. You think that knowledge is a privilege that must be paid for. You can't walk in to the university without sufficient money for it and demand to be taught. You require scholarships and patrons and money. Always more money. What this means is that otherwise perfectly intelligent students are kept from the knowledge that they need. How many clever men and women who might change the world with what they could do or discover in that university, have been turned away because they couldn't meet the price?”

“You are not wrong. But forgive me, you charge for the use of your knowledge.”

“But there is a difference. Here we only ever ask for whatever the knowledge seeker can afford. An exchange of knowledge, time, maybe some food or similar. We believe that knowledge should be freely exchanged. How much better would the world be if everyone knew about things like crop rotations and the proper uses of personal hygiene. Also the benefits of having a cat in every house alongside the uses of regular bathing.”

“But you still keep it here, hidden and locked away.”

“There are two factors. The first is, if we advertised ourselves. How long before a unit of church knights turns up and destroys the three of us for the monsters that we are, before burning the books because they contain things that are considered heretical and dangerous. Or a noble comes to destroy those parts of history that he dislikes. Or the Elves, in an effort to Prove that they were here before humanity and so humanity is stealing what is rightfully theirs without realising that the elves themselves stole the land from the dwarves and the gnomes.

“In our warrens we have the information with which Alfred Nable constructed his blasting powder. What happens if another person recreates that formula and uses it in a manner that Nable specifically killed himself to prevent. In our warrens we have information on the biology of elves that would mean that the humans could wipe the elven race out permanently. Or the dryads out of the Brokilon, or the mer-people out of the sea, or the vodyanoi for that matter.”

He leaned forward.

“Or someone comes and discovers an air-born toxin that would wipe humanity from the face of the planet.”

He sighed and relaxed after leaning forward with his passion.

“We consider ourselves custodians rather than teachers. Yes, my wife too which is another reason that I think she stayed. Knowledge is power and with the contents of our warrens and mines we could make or break the world. There is stuff in here that could benefit the world but there is also stuff in here that could destroy it.”

“I know the answer,” I responded, “but indulge another scholar. Why don't you do your own editing of the place?”

He smiled. “Who am I to say what is important and what isn't. What is vital to another might be dangerous to me.” he shrugged. “We collect, we learn we aid while we can. My wife has some empathic abilities and as such she can normally tell when a person is dangerous or wants the knowledge for evil purpose. They are led away or prevented from coming.”

I rubbed my ribs. “She's not that empathic.”

He smiled. “You took us by surprise, almost coming straight through the village. Normally visitors spend a bit of time down there before coming up. She's also a little on edge.”

“Why?”

He laughed again. “You'd have to ask her. You well enough to stand? and I'll introduce you properly.”

I picked myself up.

“How are the ribs?” He asked me.

“Pretty good actually. Actually I don't....”

He took the bandages off me. The redness and the bruising that I had been expecting had vanished. I looked up at him in astonishment.

“All kinds of knowledge in our warrens. I read a book on rib injuries once and this is what they recommend.”

“This could save lives.” I pointed out.

“Yes. But the means to heal people is often a derivative from the means to harm people. The stuff that I used to heal you with catches fire in presence of water. Notice how I dried your skin before applying the salve? Now imagine a rainy battlefield, or even a misty one. Catapults with clay balls full of the stuff thrown into a city. Once it catches fire, it does not stop burning.”

I shivered at the thought.

-

I shook myself out of the memory with some difficulty. I was stood in the corner of the bedroom where I had once sat and had my ribs taped up. A little patch of colour caught my eye under some ash and I carefully picked my way over and pulled out a little doll made of straw. It had dried out, presumably in the heat but you could still see the overall shape as well as the small red shirt that had been stitched over the thing. I carefully carried it with me as I went back outside.

I didn't recognise the doll. If I didn't know better then I would have assumed that it was Sally's. But at the same time I struggled to mesh the two things together. The extremely intelligent scholar that I had met who could discuss higher mathematics, ethics and engineering while at the same time taking childish delight from Kerrass tickling her, swinging her around and running through the grass with her on his back.

But somehow I didn't think she would mind the assumption.

I put the doll remains on the bundle of blanket that contained the child and stood there looking at it for a while.

I had known these three people for a matter of days. Not even a week as I stayed with them while Kerrass had gone off to hunt the beast. I had laughed with them, shared their food and talked with them long into the night. Not one of them would have been out of place in the university of Oxenfurt. Indeed, I thought that Pula was possibly the most intelligent man I had ever known.

He knew more than I knew on every subject that I had ever studied. His arguments were so vast and far reaching. Compassionate and cautious while at the same time having a cynicism about people. I remembered one of the things that he had said to me.

“People are stupid.” He told me at one point when I was tackling him about the fact that his little family unit were keeping this wealth of knowledge from the world.

“Individual people are clever, they think about things, consider consequences, take people as they find them. The reach past prejudice and learned behaviours. They think things through from beginning to end. But as a whole....people....and I don't just mean humans but also elves and dwarves and all of the intelligent creatures that walk on the continent....people are filled with fear. Anger and hate. They are reactionary and ignorant and so...very....scared.

“Did you know that when the Vampiric race first came her through the conjunction of fears that they were so terrified by humanity that they studied them, almost to extinction in some places?”

I shook my head.

(Frederick's note: Reminding the reader that Pula had told me this before I met Ariadne)

“Fear.” Pula said. “Reaction. They didn't think. They saw something that they did not understand and studied it until they broke it without consideration for the thing that they broke.

“I was once told that the intelligence of a mob is the lowest individual intelligence in the room divided by the number of people in the mob. And yet the most powerful Kings and Queens are always the monarchs that harness the powers of the mob for their own end.

“Individuals are clever,” he told me. “People are stupid.”

I remembered that I had nothing to say. I had thought of the mob rule in Novigrad during the height of the Witch-hunters reign of terror where good people burned the old women and the magic users who only days before had lanced boils and healed the sick. It hough of the way that the people cheered.

I shook my head again to try and free myself from the image and turned to look for Kerrass. He was halfway up a ladder, that he had found somewhere, and was trying to free Pula's body from the tree that he had been nailed to.

“I'm sorry,” I called. “I should have been helping.”

He shook his head.

“See to Saffron.” He said. “I've got this.”

Another thought got through the fog of anger and fury that had covered my brain. “I'm going to call Ariadne,” I told him. “Maybe she can salvage some of the papers. It seems a shame that their life's work go up in smoke without at least trying to do something to preserve it.”

Kerrass thought about this for a while.

“No,” he said after a moment. “No, that's a good idea. You should do that.”

“Are you sure?” I checked. He was arguing with himself again and I wanted to make sure I got the answer out that he wanted to give.

“Call her,” he said after another pause. “Call her, you're right. Better Ariadne than....” He shook his head again before nodding to me. “Call her,” he said again before turning back to trying to work the nails free from Pula's ankles and wrists.

I moved a little way off towards the horses to fetch another blanket as well.

I took my pendant out and grasped it tightly, picturing Ariadne in my mind.

She was a little while in coming, her touch feather gentle on my mind.

“Freddie? What's up?” She sounded surprised. We had only spoken through the pendant a week earlier. We were trying to space out our conversations as I was afraid that we would run out of things to say to each other.

“I...” a sob choked me. “I need your help.”

“Is it Kerrass?” I had a sensation of movement and the feeling of air in her lab out in Angral. She gathered up a satchel and started putting things in the bag.

“No,” I managed, forcing some words out past the lump in my throat “Kerrass is fine. I just....We need your help and I....I kind of need to see you.” I sobbed again.

“I'll be there as soon as I can. I just need to sort a couple of things out.”

I nodded as she broke contact. I got another blanket from a horse and went back to where Saffron's body lay and knelt next to her, spreading the blanket out on the ground.

The day was getting darker and I thought that I could hear the rumble of thunder.

-

“So you've met my wife Saffron?” Pula asked me.

“Briefly.” I said managing to get a smile on my face in front of the horribly beautiful woman in front of me. “At least I believe I met her hooves.” I tried for a joke.

She laughed, turning to Kerrass who was playing checkers with Sally. “You're right. He is funny.”

Ok, so what to say about meeting a Succubus for the first time. It seems ludicrous to describe her as beautiful. Of course she was beautiful. This is literally a creature that survives by seducing men and feeding off their essence. Of course she was beautiful but that is just words written on a page.

Ariadne is beautiful. So beautiful that I wake up and think I must be dreaming when I realise that I'm going to be marrying her and she surprises me with it every time I see her. So beautiful that she frightens me but she has a very particular kind of beauty. It is the beauty of the evil queen in stories but as if she has had someone turn around and tell her that being one of the good guys is a nice thing as well.

She gets taken aback by happy thoughts, covers her mouth when she smiles and this... endearing nervousness is what makes me look at her beyond the superficial way of saying. “She is a beautiful woman.” I love her for the intelligence in her and the sense of humour that she uses to look out at the world.

The Empress is very beautiful. She has the classical face, high cheekbones, clean jaw line and piercing eyes that would not look out of place on portraits of the most beautiful women in the world. She also has the scar on her cheek which somehow accentuates her beauty but more than that... To me, the Empresses beauty comes from her passion and intelligence, her energy and her ability to relate to everyone from the highest lord in the land all the way down to the muckiest commoner. That air of having seen things and done things.

That knowledge and worldly experience. That's what makes her beautiful.

Madame Yennefer has the beauty of a storm cloud.

Madame Eilhart has the beauty of a cold, flawless and remote statue.

Dr Shani has the beauty of the girl you've known for ever whose beauty always takes you by surprise when you return home.

Beautiful women all.

But there is a difference here. The sight of a Succubus just makes a male mind think of sex. And that's when she's not working at it with her skills and magic.

For physical characteristics, Saffron was around five ft and four inches but her height varied depending on how she used her legs. Her hair was a deep burnished red. Not the ginger frizz that Marion has but a deep and dark crimson that just doesn't occur in human hair without the use of dye. Her hair was long and she had it tumbling down her back. At various points in our acquaintanceship she wore it in a braid over one shoulder or another, piled high on her head but most commonly she wore it down and when she just let it go it went down as far as the bottom of her back.

Yes she had horns that swept down from her temples, round the back of her ears and then along the jaw line until the points extended to just back from her chin.

Her skin tone seemed a little darker than most women on the northern continent and to look at her you would think that she was wearing deep eye shadow so that her eyes looked deep and dark and smoky. I would later find that that was either how her eyes were coloured or was a measure of the effect that she was having on me. Her limbs seemed long, supple and smooth but also with toned muscle underneath the skin. There were tattoos on the backs of her hands that reached up and around her wrists and traced up her forearms. All in the same darker shade that lined her eyes. They were the tattoos of leaves and natural shapes. As though she wore the meadowland on her arms.

At the time she was wearing a long dark blue....dress doesn't really describe it well. It came round her neck and down across her front to cover her chest before it went down and became a skirt. It was not small and skimpy, it was a practical piece of clothing that left her arms and legs free to move. But I would be lying if it wasn't also painfully obvious to me that she wasn't wearing anything underneath it.

She also wore a choker of blue leather, similar in shade to her other garment and a silver pendant that depicted a winged fairy that held a blue jewel.

It seemed that blue was her favourite colour

Somewhere around her mid thigh her human legs started to turn into goats legs which she propped onto a foot stool.

“Saffron?” I asked her, reaching for a topic of conversation, any topic of conversation to take my mind off how unbelievably sexy she was.

“Yes.” She smiled as she accepted a glass of some wine from her husband that was cooking us all dinner at the same time. “Because I'm spicy.”

She grinned at me and I couldn't help but feel as though she was laughing at me despite the fact that the line about spice was obviously an old joke.

“Be nice Saff.” her husband told her. “You did give him a concussion and three bruised ribs.”

“He was sneaking up on us,” she protested without much force.

“Yes.” Her husband responded with a deadpan sense of humour. “If by sneaking up on us you mean, riding up the middle of the track without care for stealth. Upwind of us so that we could smell him coming while also chatting to his companion openly. Yes. Sneaking I thought I recognised it.”

She pouted at him but it was clearly an old joking argument. Pula was preparing some chicken. He had taken some chicken, stuffed it with some kind of spiced meet mix while adding some, I think it was garlic butter, and then tying it all together with some thin slices of ham, before pan frying it.

“Yes,” I thought to myself. “Focus on the food.” It'll take your mind of the unspeakably sexual creature that was sat next to you drinking wine.

“Am I making you uncomfortable Master Scholar?” She asked me.

I took a deep breath and turned to face her, feeling the colour rising in my cheeks. “Would you care for honesty madam?” I asked carefully.

“Ooh madam is it.” She lifted her hooves of the foot stool and leant forward. “Go on then.”

There's a moment that comes occasionally when an attractive woman does this. Whether intentionally or unintentionally she accidentally shows you a little more flesh than you had entirely been prepared for. The overwhelming part of your instincts is that you should sneak a look at the forbidden area. This is a mistake.

Even though I was now absolutely convinced that Saffron was teasing me mercilessly for her own amusement I forced myself to carefully maintain eye contact.

“Despite your teasing,” I told her, being careful with my words so as not to give away the fact that I was all but drooling, “Which is not a game that I enjoy by the way.” I added. “You are perfectly aware of the fact that you are a beautiful woman. And yes,” I had to swallow, “I find you intimidatingly beautiful.”

“Ooohh,” she pouted. “I like him.”

Kerrass chuckled.

“Stop playing with your food Saff.” Pula told her.

“Not much to look at though.” She commented.

“Looks can be deceiving Saffron,” Kerrass told her from where he was being thrashed by Sally across the game board. “That one satisfied the most jaded courtesans that I know of, in both Vengerberg and Vergen.”

He said it with a disgusted tone of voice.

“Did he now?” Saffron's gaze became assessing and contemplative.

“Saffron,” warned Pula, gently.

She laughed suddenly and she was a different woman. The hard, mocking edge left her. Suddenly she came across as a laughing young woman. “I'm so sorry,” she said putting her hand on my fore-arm and leaning over conspiratorially. “I jest, more to wind him up than anything.” she gestured at her husband.

“But you never manage it though.” He said, spooning a creamy looking sauce over the chicken

“Can you forgive me?” She leant forward so that she was looking up into my face while making her eyes absolutely huge.

Her eyes were blue, so light in shade that they were almost white.

I was so shocked at the seeming change in her character that I didn't know what to say.

She did confirm for me though that the previous movement of clothing that accidentally exposed some shadowed skin to me was no accident as this time there was no such shadowed opening.

“Of course he forgives you. He's a sucker for a pretty face.” Kerrass commented from the other side of the room.

I took a deep breath to push Kerrass' comment from my mind.

“I cannot madame,” I told her. “For I have already forgiven you.”

She laughed in delight and kissed me on the cheek, quick as lightening before gathering up her cup of wine and sitting back down. She was still distressingly attractive but there was less of an....uncomfortable, aggressive air about it.

“Come on Kerrass.” Sally complained. “I've beaten you six times now and you promised me a present last time you were here.”

“Did I?” wondered the Witcher with comic exaggeration. “A present? I remember making no such promise.”

“You did,” Sally protested. “You said you'd bring me a book with more than three hundred pages in it.”

Kerrass considered the matter for a while “Really,” he wondered. “That doesn't sound like the sort of thing that I would do.”

“You did. You promised.” She muttered darkly. I shivered, remembering some of the things I had heard about what Godlings could do to people when they got irate.

“Remember Sally, I'm not a very nice man. I break promises all the time.”

“No you don't.” She protested but I detected a little bit of fear coming into the girls voice as Pula came round and topped my cup up, poured for his wife while giving her a kiss. It was not lost on me that the kiss seemed genuine and warm with love and affection.

“Well, lets see what fell into my saddlebags shall we?”

Kerrass reached into the bag that was next to him and brought out a large leather book which I recognised as being a book of Skelligan ballads as copied down by the bard Collarion. I remembered the scandal of that book. Collarion had got a Skald drunk and had got him to tell him all of the ballads and epic poems before fleeing the islands before the Druidic protectors of the aural traditions could catch him. Rumour had it that the bard had made a fortune before managing to drown in a bath tub under mysterious circumstances.

Sally counted the pages suspiciously.

“Four hundred and twenty three,” she cheered triumphantly. She picked the book up, tucked it under one arm and strode off to sit, cross legged in a corner of the room where she placed the book on the floor in front of her, cupped her chin under her hands and started reading.

“That's her occupied for a while,” Pula commented as he handed our food round.

It was delicious.

“Where did you learn to cook this?” I asked him.

“Where else?” he asked me, settling into his own chair. “I read a book on the subject. It strikes me as odd that we go through life with the basic need of eating and that we often go out of our way to only eat disgusting food.”

“Or drink shite beer.” Kerrass added.

“Or have bad sex.” Of course it was the Succubus that said it. “Honestly, is it too much to ask to learn how to do these things properly.”

I blushed. Although not innocent I was, and am, unused to discussing such things openly and with children present. Or rather, child-like people present.

We ate in silence and I noticed that I wasn't the only one who watched the portion of the food that had been left out for Sally go cold, untouched, next to her knees as she read through her “present”, ignoring her food.

Pula laughed as he collected the plates. “I'll take that as sign that people liked my cooking then.” He told us. I smiled my agreement and leant back. He stacked the plates in a corner of the cooking area before pouring everyone, other than Sally, a cup of wine and sat down with his own sigh of contentment.

“So then Kerrass.” He took a drink from his cup and grimaced at the taste. I don't know what he was complaining about, I had already taken a sip and I thought that the wine was beautiful. “What can we do for you?”

Kerrass set his cup aside.

“There's a monster I need some help identifying.”

“Oh?”

“I think it's a mutation from a siren, Lamia or Ekhidna.” He told the story about what we'd been hunting. “I want to be sure before I go and make a fool of myself.”

“And get yourself killed,” Pula smiled as he said it.

“That too.” Kerrass admitted, “but right now, I'm more concerned about the embarrassment.”

The three of us laughed at him.

Sally didn't, she was too busy being engrossed in her book.

Pula exchanged some glances with Saffron who nodded.

“We can help you.” Pula told him.

“How much will it cost?”

“Come on Kerrass,” Saffron grinned, “you're not that naïve.”

“I'm not. Let's just say that I want to see his face.”

Saffron nodded, and shared a smirk with Kerrass. “I want him.” She pointed at me.

I spluttered some of my wine through my nose and started choking until Pula clapped me on the back.

“You can't have him permanently,” Kerrass told her. “For how long?”

“A night and a day, or the length of your hunt. Whichever is longest.”

“It's going to take me a few days at least.”

“Then that's how long I can have him.”

“He must agree to it.” Kerrass responded quickly, after pointedly ignoring my discomfort.

“Very well,” she agreed meeting his gaze. I was reeling a little and felt dizzy. The events were spiralling out of my control far too quickly. “But you, Kerrass, must convince him.”

“I don't think he will need much convincing,” Pula commented with a grin in my direction.

“He might.” Saffron glanced in my direction before turning back to Kerrass. What little I saw of her gaze was...appraising. “But my price stands.”

Kerrass considered this for a moment before shrugging.

“Done.” He said.

“Wait,” I tried. “Hang on.”

“Excellent.” She exclaimed happily, “Then I shall go and prepare.” Then she was gone, moving faster than I had thought possible.

Pula moved through the other door in the cabin, there was a thunk and the sounds of a hinge.

“Kerrass.” I couldn't decide whether I was angry, scared or excited.

“Freddie,” he mimicked. “Be a man Freddie. Man up.”

(I would remind people that might judge Kerrass harshly that this was still relatively early in our relationship)

“But...”

“What is it Freddie? Afraid?”

“A little.

“Or is it that you don't like being haggled over.”

“That too.”

“Think about it. You have visited several whore-houses since we met where the price was agreed with the bordello madams. Are you saying that you are better than the women we slept with on those nights?”

When confronted like that I didn't know what to say. Again, I would remind you that this was early in my journeys and I was still working hard to overcome my societal bias. I wanted to yell at him and scream and tell him that I was not some commodity to be haggled over or used.

But he was right. That was what we did in the whore houses and bordellos. I felt myself falling down the rabbit hole.

That's a term that we use for describing what happens when you have a philosophical question that you don't know the answer to and all it does is that it leads you to more questions. If you're lucky, you learn something new about yourself when you go down the rabbit hole. If you are unlucky it can take you a while to pull yourself out of that hole.

I wanted to tell Kerrass that I was better than those women but I already knew how he would respond. He would say “But what makes you better than them? Your social standing? An accident of birth. That answer will be the same if I argued that I was better because I was wealthy as I certainly hadn't earned the money that I had, that I was better educated or because I was a man.

All of these things were down to a simple accident of birth. Modern nobility has long since moved past the state where a man can become powerful by dint of his own effort alone. Sooner or later he would need allies, money a patron or other kind of backing. It is rarer and rarer for a man to change his class in the modern day. We know those people that manage it but make no mistake, they are the exceptions to the rule.

My Grandfather managed it and as a result, our family was almost universally hated by the noble class that we had joined. Sir Rickard (although I had not met him by this point) often complains about the fact that he is rarely accepted by the knights and nobles that he got lifted up to when he was knighted but he is also no longer a common soldier. This makes him hated by a lot of both sides.

This is one of the reasons Sir Robart hates my family and Sir Rickard both. The other being that he's a massive dick-head.

This is still true today. You can think of odd examples of people that have lifted themselves up from the dirt to cause the mighty lords of the land to tremble, but there aren't many that have survived the attempt. As mostly, to do that, the only to do so is on the battlefield and not many people survive that effort.

I came out of my thoughts to discover that Kerrass was reading a book that Pulla had handed him and Pulla was watching me with a slight smile on his face.

Yes I was angry that Kerrass had traded me away for a book. Not even that, I was traded for access to a book.

He realised that I was looking at him.

“Well?” He asked.

“I'm not happy about this Kerrass.”

He smirked a little. “Scared?” he asked again.

“A little.”

“Of what?”

“Don't Succubi kill their prey.”

Kerrass and Pula looked at each other before laughing. I think that that was the first time I heard Kerrass laugh properly and uncontrollably. I had heard laughter and chuckling but not this kind of side-holding laughter.

“Your religious prejudices coming through again Freddie,” Kerrass told me.

“That's not how it works.” Pula added. “She feeds of your life essence yes but where would be the sense in killing you. Then she couldn't feed off you again. The process is not unpleasant...”

“Besides,” Kerrass interrupted, waving Pula into silence. “We both know that you're going to do it.”

“Why's that?”

“Because you're a scholar Freddie. You're curious.”

I didn't have a response to that.

(A/N: I know, I know. I promise that there'll be more cheerful stories coming.....eventually)