“I don’t, uh, want to be an insensitive jerk,” Twig said, sounding a bit nervous. He was glancing at the privy door, where Gavin had just gone.
Owen nodded, patting his shoulder. “Okay. What is it?”
“Um.” Twig was blushing, and took a deep breath. “What’s going to, like, happen? Like, Sir Gabrielle is going to be the queen now, right?”
“I wonder,” said Owen, thinking, “if we should have taken a more subtle approach to this.”
Aria looked at him, then at the hole in the ground where the blacksmith’s forge had used to be. Owen had bought and given him a new forge to work out of so that he wouldn’t be out of work. “You think this now after we’ve dug a massive hole in the ground?”
“Yeah, well…” Owen shrugged. “Maybe if we’d left everything the way it was, the evil sorcerer would have come back and tried to do evil sorcery, then we could have just caught them.”
“Well,” said Aria, crossing her arms. “Yeah, I guess. But too late now.”
“Yeah, too late now.”
When Owen left the fortress, Aria was standing in the cold, waiting for him. “Hey, why didn’t you come in?”
“I just got here. Come kill a monster with me.”
Owen blinked. “What kind of monster?”
“A golem, I think,” she said. “It’s not far, it’s just under an inn over there. Come on.”
“Oh,” said Twig, looking between Owen and Aria. “That’s so cool. Can we go, Owen? Only I’ve never seen a golem before and I think it would be a good learning experience.”
Fun, though I can’t say as I saw the point.
The grounds of the academy were well kept even in the winter, shovelled paths cutting between the buildings, the snow unbroken in several places, though it was also clear that people had walked through it and played in it. Ahead of them was a huge tower, with smaller towers growing out of the side. Behind that tower, Owen could see briefly as the path curved, was another tower, this one more twisted. Most of the buildings he could see had at least one small tower.
“Needs more towers,” Owen decided. “Our place has more towers.”
“Yeah,” Gavin agreed. “But if they got more, then we’d have to get more, and if we got more, then some dragons would probably come and knock them over, and it would be a whole thing.”
“I feel like at this point in our relationship with dragons they should know better than to knock our shit down,” Owen said. “Because either they’re smart enough that we can talk them out of knocking our shit over, or they’re smart enough to know that if we can’t talk them out of knocking our shit over, I’d just kill them and turn them into armour.”
HighQueue wanted to see Louis getting all bothered by Aria beating him up in the self defense class she teaches. Enjoy!
Gavin was writing a bunch of letters to people out east to bully them about what they were going to bring to Gabrielle’s wedding, and Owen was helping by eating his ass while he did it.
“Adrianna Yetnakker’s already said she can’t come, which is weird since she said it before she even knew when the wedding was,” Gavin muttered to himself. “Her husband is coming, though, so he can bring some furniture with him. Oh, and his cousin has all those spice merchants on his payroll, so…”
Owen caressed Gavin’s thighs as he worked, licking around Gavin’s asshole thoroughly. He wasn’t jerking Gavin off at his request, he wanted to cum just from this.
“I kind of wish we didn’t have to invite House Huntrose, but they are our cousins, I guess.” Gavin sighed. “Do cousins of this calibre even count as family? They’re like, not even my cousins, their parents are my dad’s cousins. I could fuck Ira Huntrose right now and it wouldn’t even be incest.”
Click for the full profile of our favourite mercenary!
“So just to be clear, you stormed a demon fortress, got your ass kicked by the smoking hot queen of demons, fought an immortal ocean wizard, killed a kraken, got married, got a boyfriend, adopted two kids, and got over your dragon racism, all on the trip that I wasn’t invited on?” Aria demanded, arms crossed, glaring at Owen.
Owen shrugged. “You said you were busy.”
“Well it turns out I wasn’t that busy, so let’s pretend it was your fault for being a little bitch. Bring me along on the next trip or I quit.”
“Deal,” Owen said, smiling. “It wasn’t the same without you. But Gavin’s mentioned wanting his bodyguard to be bigger now that we’ve got Darby and Greg to look out for too, so we won’t be leaving you behind next time or else it’d just be nothing but knights.”
“Which I hear Gavin wouldn’t object to,” Cleo said pointedly.
“How are you feeling?”
Looking down at Aria with a look in her eyes that answered the question for her, Cleo smiled. “Nervous. I haven’t seen any of my siblings since I left.”
Aria hadn’t seen any of her siblings in years either, but they at least weren’t all evil sorcerers hellbent on killing her and destroying the world. Unless their priorities had changed after she’d left. But if they had, she hadn’t had any indication of that in the letter her brother had sent back to her after she’d contacted him at the archmage’s behest.
“It’ll be okay,” Aria promised, patting Cleo’s back. “If he pulls anything, just toss him out the window. Or into Steve’s portal.”
Cleo gave a cursory, and false, chuckle at that. “I don’t expect he’ll try anything. He’s not stupid and even if he was, we’re in the middle of the academy.”
How Best to Use a Sword 