CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SIEGEBREAKERS

It is said that there are more forgotten tunnels in the ruins of the ancient world than there are proper halls in the hardscrabble cities above them. We cannot now conceive the grandeur known in those bygone days.
-Selem il Bushard, 'Historics'

They'd returned to their home village, only to find it badgered by scouts from, presumably, Nortsair with a larger army certainly not far behind. The scouts were content to loot the nearby farms and probe the defenses, but the greater army would soon settle in for a siege, if not an outright assault on the town - they'd have to prepare for both.

Two days wasn't a lot of time to prepare a town for a siege, and Larian had given the townspeople a lot to do. Even so, they'd managed to shore up the rest of the breach in the palisade with temporary fortifications and put up two timber towers armed with the siege bows that Larian had diagrammed for them. These were enough to push the scouts from Nortsair out beyond the 200 yard mark. One would-be invader who'd tempted fate lay dead about a hundred yards out from the palisade, an enormous arrow sprouting up from his torso and pinning him to the earth. Perhaps anticipating the coming feast, crows circled the sky above.

Out beyond the effective range of the bows were twenty or twenty-five tents housing, if Thea had to guess, a hundred or so men. Not that she was an expert on military encampments, but she knew how many people you could comfortably fit into a tent. Heath rode forward a bit, his sharp eyes observing the camp for a minute.

"They look to be mostly militia and auxiliaries from Nortsair," he said. "I only count seven horses, so they haven't got any cavalry to speak of."

"Can you be sure they're from Nortsair?" Matthias asked him, squinting at the camp. For anybody with remotely normal vision, though, it was too far to make out much beyond the tents, cooking fires, and the vague details of people moving about.

Heath shrugged. "A golden fist crushing a castle tower seems like a Bestel Myrdon sort of banner to me. But I suppose they could be from somewhere else. I can't see their tracks from here, but they probably came from the wood."

Whoever they were and wherever they were from wasn't particularly important. They were camped out by Rouentz and didn't have good things in mind, as evidenced by the three torched farms. The fields and orchards themselves were intact, but three families (assuming they hadn't been killed) were out of their homes. And, if Heath was right and they were from Nortsair, their 'uncle' Bestel Myrdon wasn't with them, because then the town would already be captured - or, quite possibly, wiped from the face of the map.

"We can probably take them," Cano said, his hand inching toward the pommel of his sword. "Heath and I can, I mean. The rest of you guys, I dunno, keep a low profile."

"Cano, no," Larian said, placing her hand over his. "There's got to be a hundred of them, armed with who-knows-what, and they're expecting more. Otherwise, they wouldn't just be camping out and torching farms."

"Plus," Thea said, "maybe we shouldn't slaughter a hundred men with the bad luck of serving under an evil scion? Our first impulse to violent glory isn't necessarily the best course of action."

"I agree," Matthias said. "If and when they start threatening to murder innocent people - then you can start murdering them back."

"No killing unless they try first."

Cano rolled his eyes. "Fine, 'Battle-Maiden', what brilliant course of action to you suggest?"

"Our best bet is to find a route for supplies to get in and for people to get out without being noticed... have we got any ways of doing that?"

Heath shrugged. "I can carry things in and out without being noticed. I can take a decent-sized pack, or maybe a small person..."

"Or the tunnels," Larian said.

Her wealth of knowledge told her that the great and ancient city had once boasted a substantial network of underground aqueducts, catacombs, and smuggler's tunnels. While she didn't know of any that were currently accessible inside of Rouentz, there was a sizable ruin about a mile south of town that had clearly once been a great aperture for a tunnel or aqueduct, for beneath its great collapsed arch and pile of rubble there was a little trickling rivulet of fresh water dribbling into Augur's Creek. If Larian's guess was right, the tunnel ran right under the town and probably had one or more entryways, even if they were currently hidden or impassable.

Leaving Heath to tend to the townspeople and their defenses, the four of them rode back south, out past the still-smoking ruins of the Stone farm and over to the acre of impassable rock and briar between the Stones and the Rhetts. There, they traversed to the big rocky outcropping that Thea had always assumed to be a natural formation - not that Theo had ever put much deep thought into it. But, hacking through the briar, the edifice was pretty clearly artificial, the stones to either side piled into half-toppled pillars and the ruins of an entryway completely collapsed into a pile of rubble and boulders. They slogged right up the little rivulet, where the briar was lightest, with Cano and Matthias hacking the way for them.

Despite Matthias's objections, the girls accompanied them, reasoning (persuasively) that they could fit into smaller spaces if the need arose. Indeed, they had no problem whatsoever with the briar - Maddie and Svilga slipped ahead, their odd ghosting ability leaving them unharmed by thorns and prickles, and they played along the old stoneworks while the men hacked and cracked their way to the place. It irked Thea a bit that Cano and Matthias assumed such brute labor wasn't suitable for the women... but she wasn't going to complain too much. She already had half a lifetime of unpleasant hard labor under her belt, so the men could spend a few years evening the ledger out for all she cared. As they approached the ruins of the tunnel, Thea heard voices behind them.

"I dunno… could be a farmer. I heard somebody crunching and chopping through something with an axe," one of the voices said.

"You sure?" came a second.

"Yes, I'm sure... There, look! Somebody's chopped a path right along the little stream here... I wonder what for?"

From their little path through the briar, Crouching and glancing back around the little turn in the stream, Thea saw the boots of militia men. Just that moment, one of them pushed the briar branches to the side and looked in, spotting Thea through twenty yards of partly cut-back nettles.

"Hey! You! What the hell do you think you're doing in there!"

"I've got this," Cano said, indicating that Matthias should continue.

"No killing!" Thea hissed and, against her better judgment, followed after him.

The militia man spotted Cano and swore. "He's fucking armed!"

Thea popped out of the briar right behind Cano, only then realizing that there were a few more men than she'd expected - a whole squad of eight militia with a cart full of sapper's oil - they intended to torch the Rhett farm. As 'young' Albard Rhett was Thea's friend (or had been Theo's friend, at least), she cared for that even less than she normally would.

"Put your weapons down!" Thea shouted.

The men looked to one another in confusion. "Are you serious?" the squad corporal asked, clearly not intimidated by her Battle-Maiden getup.

"Yes, I'm serious!"

The man scratched at his stubble and glanced to his men. "But... miss, there's two of you and eight of us and, no offense, but you're a girl."

"And I'm armed," Thea said, tapping the haft of her axe. "Why the hell shouldn't I count? The way I figure it, I count double and Cano counts... ten times?"

"A dozen," Cano stated.

"A dozen. So we've got you outnumbered, fourteen to eight."

The scouts were too confused to contest those odds. One of them nudged his corporal.

"Listen, miss..." the corporal went to grab Thea. She unsheathed her axe, spun away, and clobbered him with the flat of it, right on the side of the knee. There was an audible crunch and the man toppled down, clutching at his leg and howling in pain.

That was enough for the militia to return attack, most of them unsheathing their dirks, with two more dropping back and unstrapping their bows from their backs. Thea decided to let Cano do most of the heavy fighting and retreated back toward the briar. One of the archers set loose, his arrow flying right for Thea and knocking right between her breasts, sending her stumbling sideways and into a thorn bush, the prickles scratching at her cheek. But her breastplate was unscathed and the arrow dropped harmlessly down. When another hand reached in to grab her, she stabbed it with the arrow's barbed tip, sticking the man right through the palm, and when he screamed and bent down, she kneed him in the face with reinforced greaves. The man right after him crouched and tried to scramble over his unconscious comrade and got a boot to the face, followed by Thea's axe to his chest. It didn't quite make it through the man's gambolin, but he cried out and, as he tried to push the axe-head free, Thea punched him twice in rapid succession and his eyes rolled back. She stumbled back out of the briar in time to watch Cano finishing off the rest.

"You've got an arrow in your arm," she said.

"I know," he shrugged. "I had to prioritize. You're all right?"

Thea nodded and blotted the blood from her cheek. "Looks like you killed one," she said. Most of the men were incapacitated, either unconscious or groaning with one or more injuries of intermediate severity. But one of the archers was very clearly dead, his head crushed by a sizable stone.

"He was taking wild shots into the briar after you - I didn't want to risk him hitting anybody."

Thea nodded - one dead out of eight wasn't so bad. Better than the eight out of eight that Cano was likely to go for without a cooler head to guide him. She motioned back toward the ruins in the briar. "Why don't you get Larian to see to that arrow wound and then start lifting heavy rocks out of the way. Matthias can help me tie these men up, and then I can see to their wounds afterward if they keep me kindly disposed."

"You know how to do that?"

"Well enough," Thea nodded - given how she soaked in information, a day and a half of tutelage under Larian was enough for some basic medical skill. "Go on, killer. The Battle-Maiden will take it from here."

+++++

Thea and Matthias got the militia men tied up in short order, after which she saw to their bleeding and broken bones - simple bandages and splints, given that she didn't have any herbs on hand beyond what was in the nearby meadow. Some sprigs of gemini bloom to help with the pain, but that was about it. Then they took the squad's wagon of sapper's oil, unloaded it, and piled dried out briar branches around the barrels, setting the whole thing on fire - from a distance, she figured, that wouldn't look so different from torching a farm, though it wouldn't burn for nearly as long. Still, it'd buy them time. She'd thought about torching the cart the militia squad had brought, but figured that might be useful for moving people and supplies through the tunnel.

While the sapper's oil burned and while Cano worked at getting them access to the ancient tunnels, Thea and Matthias interrogated the militia men. More accurately, she did first aid on the men and, having never received proper medical treatment before, they assumed they were being tortured. Giving a man with a double arm fracture a splint and some bitter leaves to chew on was basic practice, but to men with little experience with any medicine, it might have seemed like she was aggravating the wound. The first man volunteered information, and the subsequent ones followed suit, assuming this was the acceptable thing to do.

"We were told to torch a farm every six hours until Lord Quill gets here," the man said. "We didn't mean anything by it - all of the homesteaders fled for the town or for the hills, so nobody even got hurt."

Thea didn't bother to point out that somebody's livelihood was very much hurt by having their home, coops, and assorted other farm buildings burnt to the ground. She pulled the bandage around the splint tighter and the man winced.

"Lord Quill?" Matthias asked. He thought he recognized the name.

Lysander Quill was, he explained to Thea, a mercenary-turned-merchant well known for his weapons, armor, and various other metal and leather goods. Matthias had seen Lysander Quill at the masquerade party, looking cocky and pleased with himself, and assumed he was just being the regular cocky and arrogant Quill that everybody in Nortsair learned to tolerate. In retrospect, though, he was exactly the sort of bastard that Bestel Myrdon would ally himself with.

"This Lord Quill... I assume that's Lysander Quill?"

"Yes, sir," the next militia man said, wincing as Thea bound the gash on his thigh. "They say he's coming with two hundred more men to take the town and seize the granary stores for the army."

"The army?"

"Lord Myrdon's army, sir."

"And this Lord Quill... has he changed of late? Does he look different, perhaps have any strange abilities?"

None of the men could say for sure - they hadn't known what he looked like before. But there were rumors. Rumors that he'd summoned an apparition and struck his competitors down, that he'd melted one man's armor down to slag, even as he wore it. Not particularly informative tales - normally not the kind to believe - but they painted an ugly picture and hinted that Quill might be playing scion to some horrible and powerful god. And he was coming with two hundred men.

"That can't be good," Thea said.

"What can't be good?" Larian asked, emerging from the bushes. "So… we've got a pretty passable tunnel now, though we're not sure how far it goes. We should move your prisoners out of sight.

"Our prisoners."

With a little finagling and with Cano carrying several of the more incapacitated men through the briar they moved everything back to the ancient tunnel and passed inside, lighting a torch to find their way. Cano stayed back to keep a watch on the militia men, reasoning that they were a lot more likely to have trouble with militia men looking for their friends at the tunnel's entrance than they were to encounter anything in a tunnel that had been abandoned for centuries.

"What about ghosts and monsters and stuff?" Svilga asked, crowding close to the torchlight.

"There's no such thing," Thea told her. "Well... not in that way." Ghosts, from what she could tell, were short-lived and pretty harmless. As for monsters? Three days ago, she'd have speculated that most of the monsters of folk legend were greatly exaggerated, but the Jenny O' Wisps she'd encountered the night before had been right on the money.

The air was stale and smelled faintly of mold, stuffy in the way of a room with no air circulation whatsoever. Their footsteps echoed across dry stone, kicking up little clouds of dust from desiccated slime. The channel had once been the cloaca of an ancient sewage aqueduct, but now all that remained was the tiny rivulet wending down the middle of the slanted channel, a little crust of fungal growth feeding off the flow and forming a channel. The rest of the tunnel, perhaps three yards wide and tall enough that Matthias could barely stand upright, was bone dry. The first twenty yards were littered with ancient graffiti, but after that there was nothing but old stone walls striated with centuries worth of water lines.

Ten minutes in, they came to another cave-in site and, rather than retrieving Cano, they decided to try themselves - the boulders and debris here didn't seem quite so insurmountable. So they lifted what stones they could and tossed them to the side, trying to make enough headway to crawl over the barrier. They managed to make a tiny hole near the ceiling, and now damp, pungent air was blowing out with an unsettling, low hum.

"Stay out of the way of our rocks," Matthias said to the girls, tossing one down and watching it roll to a stop.

"We will... we'll wait on the other side for you," Maddie said. Her whole body went blurry and shadowy and she slipped up the debris field and through a hole not much bigger than Thea's head.

"Madeline! That's very dangerous!" Matthias snapped.

Her face poked through the little hole, her golden eyes glittering in the torchlight. "There's glowing mushrooms in here!" she said happily.

Svilga ghosted up the slope and disappeared from view. A moment later, her voice echoed out from behind the rockpile. "Wow!"

"Stay near the hole, okay!" Matthias said.

"The hole going down?" Maddie called back, a bit more distant.

"What hole going... damnit!" Matthias said. "Stay near us!" He started hauling rocks double-time.

Matthias wasn't as strong as Cano, but he was plenty strong. Maybe stronger than he ought to have been, even with his large frame and solid musculature, though it wasn't nearly as obvious - what he could do was at the edge of credibility for a regular human. Thea realized that the same was true of her, too. It hadn't always been that way, to be sure - on the way to Purgistok, she'd felt the extra weight in her war axe and struggled to swing it. But now she was tossing stones that were twice the size of Larian's, and Larian wasn't a wilting lily. Maddeningly, Thea had no idea if this was part of her goddess-given powers or something entirely different. She didn't think she was imagining it - it was hard to miss doubling in strength in the course of less than a week.

"Larian," Matthias said diplomatically. "I think you can probably fit through the hole. Would you mind checking on the girls?" Translation: you aren't doing much good here - would you mind being useful?

Larian wasn't too proud to admit she was the lease effective rock-tosser. She shrugged, climbed up the pile, and squeezed through with a little grunt, leaving Thea and Mathias to toss down stones in the torchlight. He dislodged an especially large stone and pushed it down the slope of the scree pile before stepping back and wiping his brow. He observed Thea for a moment, watching her toss two more rocks to the wayside before she thought to meet his gaze, his skin like oil and his eyes like gold in the flickering light. Perhaps he was implying that she should climb through - she could definitely fit now.

"That outfit becomes you," he said eventually. "The militia men were terrified of you, you know."

"Terrified of me?" Thea laughed, her voice echoing down the tunnel. "Why? Because I have armor?"

He shook his head. "Because you look like serious business in it. Last night, when the jennies supplicated themselves before you and gave you a crown... why do you suppose they did that?"

"I haven't any idea."

"Me either," Matthias said with a shrug. He pulled out one last rock and appeared to think the opening good enough for now. "I don't have any idea, but I don't think it was an accident. They didn't bow before me. They didn't give me a crown."

"Ask your daughters if you can have a turn."

Matthias frowned and peered through the hole they'd made. "I don't want her... them getting big heads..."

"Maddie was a slave for three years and Svilga longer. Let them play at being princesses."

"Yes, Battle-Maiden," Matthias said with a smirk and a bow - it appeared that this was going to be Thea's nickname for the time being. "My point is that… you made me a scion, and apparently the girls, too. I think you might be special, even among us, so keep yourself safe."

Matthias climbed through the hole, leaving Thea alone in the guttering torchlight. Why would she be special? No, Matthias was probably just sweet on her. She sighed and followed after him.

The cavern beyond was substantially larger than the tunnel, and it was immediately obvious where the cave-in had come from. Glowing mushrooms had gnawed away at the stone over the centuries, forming gaping holes in the stonework and piling rubble around the edges of the cavern. The whole middle of the area was a marshy mess with patches of mushrooms speckling the every surface in little glowing mats. The whole place was bathed in an eerie blue-green light about as bright as double full moons. And, at the very center of the room there was a great vertical path leading down and absolutely coated with fluorescent fungus. After being in the dark for fifteen minutes, it hurt to look at, and Thea couldn't possibly guess how far down the bottom was. Larian was wandering happily about the room, picking samples of the several different species present.

"Moonshine creamcap," she said, waving a slim bluish mushroom around. "Very nutritious, good for healing organ damage, capable of neutralizing many poisons, at least partially. Too many cause intoxication and, if taken habitually, fatty liver. Nobody's seen one in hundreds of years!"

"Are we going down there?" Maddie asked hopefully, peering down the shaft. "I could, you know, slip down and check it out. I'd bet my axe there are all kinds of mushrooms down there."

"You haven't got an axe and, on that note, we have no idea what's lurking down there. Nobody's going down there," Matthias said. "Our job is to follow this tunnel straight back to find where it leads to the town."

They did so, the girls using clusters of picked mushrooms to help light their way, as their torch was just about out. Here, the water flow was more significant, occupying almost half of the tunnel's base and relegating them to skirting along the sides. It was another two hundred yards or so before they reached the end of the passable tunnel, a massive metal grate preventing entry into the dark expanse of tunnel beyond. Thea could hear flowing water and the low hum of air in the distance.

"We're going to need Cano if we're to have any hope of getting through this thing," Matthias said, and he started to turn around.

"What about the ladder?" Maddie asked.

Sure enough, hand grips had been hewn into the tunnel wall on their side of the grate, leading up to a shadowy chute in the ceiling. Larian climbed up the thing and then thumped at the stone of the ceiling with the butt of her little hatchet. A moment later, Thea heard stone grinding against stone, and then Larian squealed happily, her feet disappearing above ceiling-level. A moment later, Heath's grinning head popped down from above.

"It's about time," he said. "I thought I was going to have to find the place, myself."

+++++

Thea climbed up next, emerging into the church crypt. The chute into the tunnels had been built into an old marble sarcophagus, one of about a dozen arrayed around the outside of the crypt. The center of the crypt, of course, contained the several remaining casks of the late Fra Hollen's last batch of ale. The Soenmen had gone through an entire cask of the stuff in their brief time occupying Rouentz, but that still left three casks.

"Lucky thing the passage didn't come up under one of the casks," Heath said.

Thea nodded. "Then you would've had to work your way through the thing to get us poor saps out, eh?"

Heath nodded solemnly. "I figure we could have done it, though." He gestured to the several other men in the crypt - Bull the blacksmith and several other stout men wielding iron crows and other prying implements. "I should tell the others we've found the tunnel," Heath added. "I had people waiting in the basements of every old looking building - though, obviously, I thought it was likely to be somewhere in the church because Larian thought it was probably here and she's almost never wrong."

"Almost never wrong?" Larian said. She pecked his cheek. "Oh... and you three," she gestured to Bull and the others, "please follow the tunnel down and help Cano with our prisoners. We ran into a little company before we made it to the tunnel, and I'd rather we bring them here for better safekeeping. As for me, I'm going to check on the progress of our defenses... and let my mother know I'm safe."

It was easy to forget that Larian was only fifteen - she looked three or four years older and often acted older than that, given that she had access to a virtually limitless wealth of information. It was easy for Thea to forget that she was forty and had spent the majority of that as a large man with a vocabulary that barely breached the triple digits. There was no singular event that had precipitated in Theo's absorption into Thea Battle-maiden - in some ways, it was more like Thea had been built on top of Theo one layer at a time, but her wealth of experience and diversity of thought comprised so many layers that they absolutely overwhelmed whatever little core of Theo weathered the onslaught of transformation. For all of his limitations, Theo had been good at heart, and Thea liked to think she'd kept that bit, at least... though it wasn't always so clear. There was a lot more gray in the world than simple Theo had understood. Thea wondered whether Theo was effectively dead and, if so, whether she should mourn him…

"Thinking deep thoughts?" Matthias asked her.

Thea realized with a start that she was still in the dim church basement, staring into nothing... or, rather, staring into the big symbol of the split circle, the One God that most of the townsfolk believed in. She'd be surprised if one in five of them could quote a single passage of scripture.

"Thinking shallow thoughts, actually," Thea said. "I'm trying to imagine what I'd have thought about all of this before I changed, and I think it would have all gone completely over my head. I'm a whole new person. In some ways, I'm as more of a child than the other three..."

"Nonsense," Matthias said with a smirk. "I'm not about to spend the evening drinking with a child."

It was late afternoon, and you'd have never guessed the town was under 'seige' if it hadn't been for everybody staying within the town's defenses. The hundred or so men from Nortsair kept their focus on the two defensive towers and the weak spot in the palisade, currently being shored up as they looked on. Bored men and women took turns in the timber towers with their war bows and their great big arrows. They'd probably be able to hit the encampment from where they were, but not with any accuracy. They could probably force the encampment another fifty yards out, but it'd be a waste of arrows. Matthias sent Maddie and Svilga to play in the commons - he was starting to trust them on their own, which was a good sign.

"Remember - at the first sign of trouble... screaming, fires, horses, a loud bang... whatever it is, come and get me in Swill Bill's tavern, okay?"

Maddie rolled her eyes. "Anything?" She wasn't used to having a father who cared about her.

"Anything."

Thea and Matthias wandered into the tavern and found it pretty crowded - there wasn't a whole lot to do when you were stuck in town and unable to return to your farm. As they walked in, all eyes were on them - a tall and handsome north-man with golden eyes and a heavy money pouch and a disarmingly beautiful woman with sparkling hair and exquisite armor? That would garner attention just about anywhere. Plus, the two of them weren't exactly unknown... already, a few of the patrons were getting down from their stools to supplicate themselves - a gesture that Thea didn't care for. She looked to Matthias, looked to his pouch, and could tell that he was thinking the same thing.

He cleared his throat. "I'll hire anybody who wants to help with the defenses or with our escape plan..."

Almost immediately, a voice called back, "How much?"

On the few occasions when Thea had been paid in cash for her labor, it was usually about half a cupra per hour. That worked out to around an argento per week if you worked steady hours and took a day and a half off. Right now, she wanted as many people working as possible and maybe a nice and private table to enjoy her drink.

"An argento per day!" she said. "For half a day today and all day tomorrow! You've got until I finish my beer to decide."

Bill plopped a foamy beer on the counter and Thea lifted it high before going to work on the thing. Even with her smaller body and smaller mouth, she could put down beer at a pretty respectable clip, and she made no effort to slow herself until the last little bit, which she sloshed around to emphasize how little there was. Most of the bar gathered around them, drinking more out of boredom than need, and Thea remembered each person and their assignment as Matthias assigned them - the defensive towers, the earthworks and palisades, and finally the church basement. They'd need to expand that tight little tunnel if they were going to get people out or supplies in to any significant extent. As Matthias took each name, he'd glance to Thea, who'd give him the nod if that person was trustworthy. Only trustworthy people got basement duty, as they didn't want anybody from Nortsair finding out about the tunnels yet.

"Come back to pick up your money tomorrow morning!"

Once the townsfolk filtered out, Thea and Matthias settled by the bar and got Swill Bill to stop giving him the stinkeye for an argento - sure, Bill was missing out on a few cupras after his clients wandered off to bolster the defenses, but he'd be much better-off not having the town invaded on a regular basis. Matthias offered another argento for a bottle of his finest wine.

"I haven't got any fine wine," Bill said. "They call me 'Swill Bill' for a reason... I've got ale and spirits, and that's it."

"We'll take some of whatever Fra put on reserve," Thea said.

"How do you know about... right... right, you were Theo, yeah?" Bill said.

"Yeah."

"Sweet stars." Bill's eyes ran up and down Thea, as if this revelation had just given his eyes license to roam. "Thea... What's that like? Being a... well, a woman. That has to be all kinds of different, hasn't it?"

Thea shrugged. "Honestly, the biggest difference is how I think..."

"You mean you fancy men now?"

He said it quickly enough that Thea snorted. "I might have before, too. I'm not sure. But I don't mean that, Bill - I mean I'm conversing with you in complete sentences and wondering how long I'm going to have to wait before you give me some of Fra's good dark."

Bill obliged eventually, relinquishing a growler of Fra Hollen's dark ale from the back room. Thea and Matthias offered up an argento for it and then retreated to a secluded corner of the now-mostly-empty tavern. Thea sat in the dim light of the tavern, enjoying Matthias's company and sipping at the beer, its alcoholic spirits wafting up into her nose like licorice, its lees soaking across her tongue. She smiled at Matthias, glad for the moment.

"This is nice," she said. "It seems like, ever since I came across that stash… since I became myself… it's been one thing after another... I'm glad to get a moment with good beer and good company."

"I'm good company?" Matthias said with a smirk.

"I'd settle for less," Thea said. "I like my men like I like my beers - strong and dark."

"Are you flirting with me?"

"Maybe. Why not?" Thea looked deep into his eyes, gold and chrome and reflecting all of the world in them.

"Why not?" Matthias chuckled. He reached across the table and took her hand into his, running his thumb along the back of her hand. "Because it's not kind to tease."

Thea took a long draught from her mug and stood from the table. "Teasing implies I don't intend to indulge you... how long do you figure your daughters will be out?"

Long enough, Matthias figured. He followed her up the stairs and back to his small room, cornering Thea before they even got to the room and kissing her, his hot lips against hers, and she pressed her body into his, every fiber of her body telling her that this was right. She could taste Fra's beer on his lips and the slight musk of his scent. Eventually, Matthias pulled back, looking to Thea with inquisitive eyes and perhaps expecting she'd reverse her decision. But she didn't, slipping into his room and...

"Hey!" the room's occupant snapped.

"Sorry," Thea giggled. "Wrong room."

Then she slipped into the correct room, Matthias filling the door frame and watching as she disrobed, the armor taking a bit longer to extract herself from than regular clothes. Beneath it, her skin was smooth and pale, with a hint of peachy tint to add vigor and hardly a hair in sight. It was a body that master sculptors might dream of but never quite get right, taut and perfectly proportioned... except, perhaps, a slight overemphasis on her hips and buttocks and a definite overemphasis in the bust region. Matthias just watched in awe, needing a moment to compose himself before disrobing, as well. Thea lay back on his bed and watched, his ebon-dark body barely less perfect tan hers, taut with muscles sliding beneath the sheen of smooth skin.

She stretched, feeling the sheets sliding beneath her nude body, closing her eyes as Matthias bent down to kiss her and run his hand down her side - down her breasts and belly, down her flank, and returning up between the junction of her legs. And when he rubbed there, she groaned and pushed his hand firmer against her sex.

"Mmmm... again," Thea said.

"You've..." Matthias said. "You've got a... does your womanhood, you know, work?"

"It sure feels like it," Thea said with a sigh, and then propped herself up... somehow, she hadn't gotten around to telling him she was complete. Would he be mad? "I... that's how I killed Igna," she said. "He went to enter me, and then he did enter me. My body opened up and he slid in, and I somehow sucked all of the life right out of him..."

"Sweet Avalon," Matthias muttered. "I... I wish you'd told me, but I understand why you didn't... I..."

"I don't know what'll happen if you go inside me... I was worried and still am. But we can do other things... I think it's worth it to explore a little bit, at least."

That's exactly what they did: made little forays into sexual discovery. They kissed for a bit, with Thea realizing she didn't really know what she was doing - Theo hadn't done much kissing, and now her mouth was substantially different, with plump lips, a smaller mouth, and a little pink tongue. Matthias assured her that her kissing was perfectly adequate.

"I don't want to be perfectly adequate," she huffed. "I want to be really good."

He shrugged. "Then pay attention to how I react and let your perfectly perfect memory teach you what to do."

As they kissed, Matthias started stroking along her body and down between her legs. And, when she felt warm and wet down there, he smiled knowingly and pulled back, sliding his face between her thighs. And, though she was worried he might do something to trigger her life-draining powers again, she was a lot less worried when he got to work with his lips and his tongue, tracing out patterns and probing her with a warm, insistent wetness that left her shaking and screaming… and left the man next door thumping on the wall and shouting for her to keep it down.

It took Thea a moment to recover from her orgasmic stupor and, when she finally propped herself up and moved her hair out of her eyes, giggling giddily, Matthias was watching her intently - and it was very clear that he hadn't yet had his needs attended to. She returned the favor to Matthias, as she'd heard that there were things that women would sometimes do for men with their mouths, even if many of them found it degrading. She didn't find it that way - Matthias had a musk about him and a generally pleasant smell, as if the faint aroma of resins and balms was what exuded from his flesh rather than the stinking sweat of mere men. Quite possibly, this was literally the case. She coaxed him and teased him with her mouth - harder than it looked because his manhood was so large, but Thea found that she was perfectly adequate at pleasuring him and improving. She registered his little gasps, looking up to gauge his facial expression, locking eyes with him as she took his reactions in, and running her own fingers between her legs and marveling at the slick and pleasant wetness she found down there. Eventually, Matthias ran his fingers through her hair, gently coaxing her deeper onto him and then pulsing inside her mouth, releasing his seed. And, unsure what to do, Thea swallowed it down and found it, if not pleasant, less unpleasant than she'd been lead to believe.

"That was..." Matthias said. He sighed, his voice rumbling deep in his chest, and rolled onto the bed next to her. "If that's all we get to do, I think I'm fine with it."

"You'd want to do that more?"

Matthias nodded and kissed the top of her head. "As long as you want to, then yes. Much, much more."