Shared Between Them (5 page)

He grabbed her waist and yanked her to his chest. “Give us a kiss for luck, then.”

She swallowed and hesitated.

“Come on now,” he ushered, his expression stern. He waved his fingers impatiently in front of her nose. They had to hurry.

She finally got up on her tiptoes and kissed him. It seemed she was only interested in maybe giving him a peck on the cheek. Instead, he grabbed her tight and forced his mouth onto hers, kissing her deeply. Lords above, did she taste good! He could kiss her forever.

When he let go, she had trouble finding her footing and wavered in her steps. He held her steady, proud to have caused her to lose her balance, and then turned to go.

Taric quickly grabbed her hand, then kissed the side of her neck, eventually finding her lips. He acted as if he were much more tender and lover-like than Draevan was, causing Draevan's face to heat. He knew that Taric would never attempt to get any woman they shared to like him more, and normally he wouldn’t care. This time, however, he wanted even-footing.

After kissing her, Taric gave her a peck on the nose, saying, “Be good, now. We'll be back directly, and we'll expect you not to have wondered off.”

“Alright,” she said, nodding very anxiously, wide-eyed.

Draevan grumbled and then growled, “Be here,” before grabbing his war hammer, turning towards the woods, and putting his 'game face' on. He couldn't be distracted, not even by thoughts of her.

He only prayed that she'd keep her word.

* * *

Draevan’s mother had predicted that they’d be able to kill the giant, the same one that was presently pounding heavily through the woods, when Draevan was about five and when Taric was around two and a half, which was why they were sent to be raised by a curmudgeonly old general who trained them for this moment since they were old enough to hold a sword.

Actually, he was teaching them before they were really old enough to wield a sword. To this day, thirty years later, Taric always thought that if he was walking around without his sword and satchel, that the old man would pop out of nowhere and switch the lights out of him, even though he’d been dead for ten years.

That being said, when they watched the trees fall and rattle in front of them and realized that the giant was—well, a giant—Taric had the most awful feeling that all the training and beatings in the world couldn’t have truly prepared him to fight this fifty-foot monstrosity who was made out of stone and, for all he knew, would eat full-grown men as an appetizer.

“Maybe we should have just taken her,” was all he said to Taric about his doubt. They might not ever get another chance!

Draevan shook his head, pursing his lips, watching their enemy stomp closer. “Doesn’t matter. I’m going to go back there and marry that girl before morning, so help me.” Suddenly he winced. He had never been so set on not-just-fucking a girl before in his life, and he seemed to realize this as much as Taric did. “I mean, it doesn’t matter,” Draevan recovered, “because we’ll have her soon enough.” He looked up as the giant peered right at them with muddy-red eyes from the last layer of trees in front of them.

The giant sniffed loudly and grunted aggressively. Birds abandoned their perches and flew up into the sky. It was said that a giant was only as large as its treasure and that it grew as its treasure grew.

If that was true, this was one rich son-of-a-bitch.

Draevan sighed and shook his head. “This is gonna get messy,” he stated, pulling out his war-hammer and balancing the weight in his arm.

“It will certainly be an interesting morning,” Taric agreed, pulling the second sword out of a satchel strapped to his back.

The giant wasn’t the take-prisoners type. He was a smash-now-and-ask-questions-later type of creature. His hand whipped out, coming down like a falling bolder to Draevan and Taric’s position. They feinted without trouble, which was something the giant didn’t expect by the way it snorted, “Huh?” They then jumped on his wrist like a couple of angry fleas, leaping up his arm right towards his head with great speed.

The armies of the North had a name for them—
Storm Dealers.
It was said that they hit so hard that a crack of their blade actually sounded like a clap of lightening. They had been trained as children to cut through
rocks
if they had to.

Taric, feeling a surge of adrenaline wrack through his body, immediately went and sliced off the giant’s ear, causing a mighty roar to shake the forest, and then he slid down the giant’s back as a hand came up to smash him like a bug.

“Ho!” Draevan shouted, avoiding several hand-smacking furies. The giant probably looked from a distance like he was trying to get a hornet out of his jacket. “Taric! He’s a humpback!”

It shouldn’t have been that easy.

As Taric avoided an incredibly narrow escape in which he was nearly pinched up between two fingers, he realized it wasn’t easy, but a knot of spine was a target. That is, if the spine on a giant worked like it did on anything else…

Taric looked back just quick enough to see what Draevan was talking about. He was right—there was a hump. “You get the spine. I’ll distract him so you don’t get squashed!”

“For a big fucker, he sure does move fast!” Draevan hooted by way of agreement as he continued to avoid the giant’s hands. “By the way, if something happens to you, I will have no trouble fucking that little fox back there by myself. So if I were you, I wouldn’t do anything stupid!”

“Thanks for the warning!” Taric barked back, then leapt up onto the giant’s bare scalp, leapt down it, and jumped onto his long, out-hanging nose. Taric grabbed a piece of eyebrow to keep from falling off the edge—which would have been a sure death since he would have been smashed if he hadn’t fallen completely.

With his other hand, he swung down and launched the blade straight into the giant’s eye.

A piercing screech sounded through the air as the giant screamed in agony, moving his hands to his face. Taric only just missed the scraping hands, leaving his sword in the giant’s eye to jump onto his shoulder, then his elbow, and then onto a nearby tree.

The tree branch unfortunately snapped, and Taric found himself free-falling a good twenty feet into a bush.

CRUNCH
!
CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
Another groan sounded above Taric, and it sounded like a thousand trees were cracking and breaking around him. Sore, stunned, and quite prickled, he climbed out of the bush and looked up into the sky, realizing that to live he was going to have to run very quickly to the left, which he did, getting out of the way just before the giant fell flat on his face.

When that happened, the ground shook so violently that Taric still got tossed backwards another six feet. When he landed, he raised his head, checking to see where his cousin was.

He couldn’t see Draevan anywhere for a moment, and he whirled around. “Ah!” he shouted, stepping back, not realizing Draevan was right next to him.

Draevan looked like he had split an eyebrow, and he had blood dripping down his nose. But the injury didn’t keep him from grinning. He took his sword from his satchel, and Taric got out his spare. “And now,” Draevan said, grinding his teeth at the giant writhing weakly on the ground, with a broken back and a stabbed eye, “for the messy part.”

The massive undertaking it was to cut off a giant’s head was something that Draevan and Taric had planned to forget as soon as possible. But forgetting was easy once they realized where the giant’s treasure was.

In his bones were gold, gems, and jewels packed strongly together. They looked at the severed spine, wiped the blood dazedly off their faces, and then continued to gawk. No wonder giants got bigger when they took treasure—they were
made of it
.

“It like… It’s like one of those toys at children’s parties. Only full of gold rather than candy,” Draevan said, moving closer.

Taric pursed his lips at the description. “Yeah, Draevan,” Taric said sarcastically. “Just like that.” He rolled his eyes until something caught his eye. He kicked the thick giant’s blood away from the ground with the heel of his boot and saw a sharp, golden edge peer through the red. He reached down and, heaving, was able to pick it up.

It was a giant, round shield. Diamonds radiated from it, glittering through the red stain.

Draevan turned. “Is that what I think it is?”

“The elven king’s shield?” Taric replied, looking at it. “The giant was wearing it as a necklace.” He smirked. “We have our gold, Cousin, we have our shield, and we already have an elven wife with hair like mountain snow and tits like pillows.” He wiped his blood-stained face on his sleeve again. “Could this day get any better?”

“Yeah,” Draevan grumbled. “To actually have her there when we get back to camp.”

“Something tells me she’ll be there,” Taric said, unable to think about relinquishing this feeling of completeness he felt. “Come on, let’s head back. We can get some dwarves out here to get the gold and tell the elves this eve.”

“She’d better be,” Draevan grumbled. “Because I do not want this moment spoiled.”

Taric laughed and patted Draevan on the back. “Don’t be so full of doubt.”

* * *

“The lying
whore
!” Draevan snapped, wiping the blood out of his eyes as he came to the campsite and realized that not only was the elf gone, but so was his horse. He had never been so upset in his life.

He was going to marry her, for gods’ sakes! And she just left. No note, no message, no nothing. She hadn't even wanted to give them farewell kisses… Which he was far less than surprised by, but more horrifically impressive was how well she was able to look straight into their faces and lie.

He threw down his war hammer and turned to Taric to accuse him of being at fault.

Taric's mouth was pressed together so tightly that his lips were turning white. When Draevan opened his mouth to begin blaming him for this current trouble, Taric waved him away, snapping, “I don't want to hear it!”

Draevan clenched his jaw, crossed his massive arms across his chest, and glared at his cousin as darkly as possible. He was not only angry with Taric for losing their girl, but also at himself for letting Taric override him.

They had a lot to discuss before they shared a wife, apparently, or else they wouldn't have one at all! “I can feel your look,” Taric hissed, waving Draevan away.

“We could have been filling her with our child this very night, Draevan. She could have given birth nine months from today the future hero of the North, but
no
. No, you just had to run your little experiment!” Draevan yelled. “You can't have realistically thought that our prisoner would just sit on her hands and wait for us to come back!”

“We had to try to trust her,” Taric said, but didn't back up his statement with the reason why this level of trust was so important. In the past, when they'd heard that trust was so important in a relationship, Draevan remembered that the advice was normally directed at the wife rather than the husband.

“Damn little thing's invisible, Taric! She's as light on her feet as a dove! We couldn't find her yesterday, and we're not going to find her today! We won't be able to find her until she wants to be found! You damn fool! Next time I suggest we tie a girl up, we’re tying her up!”

Taric was always skilled at optimism, so it wasn't too surprising that he was trying to cover up his judgmental snafu now. “It's not like we don't have other options,” he said. “We killed the giant, now the elf king owes us a wife of our choosing. That's the decree. I'm sure in the kingdom there are elves that are even more fetching. You think that here—in the middle of a dangerous wood—we'd find the most beautiful girl in the world as a trickster thief out to mock us and steal our coin?”

Draevan ground his teeth but hoped he was right.

* * *

It didn't take very long for both men to find out that Taric was, very unfortunately and very thoroughly, wrong.

It didn’t take long to get an invitation to the elf kingdom; the dwarves they’d hired to bring their riches safely back to their village in the North—at a whopping seven percent of profits—somehow told the proper people.

They were the first humans in history invited into the elf kingdom of Alanar, where they presented the king the shield that the giant had worn around his neck until the two men had chopped it off, which had been lost to the elves for nine centuries. The extremely obnoxious king kept his word, but when he told them to choose a bride for themselves, they hesitated, despite the fact that the prophecy was so close to being at-hand.

The elf-women's hesitancy to even be in the same room with Draevan and Taric wasn't why they were having trouble choosing a bride. The problem was that, upon entering the elven kingdom, they realized that the elves were… strange-looking. The little elf woman they'd met in the woods had been the most human-looking of any they'd seen and therefore was the most attractive.

Everything they'd heard about elf women before had been proven to be irreparably true. Kyra had unfortunately been the exception. She must have been too low-born not to have dozens of piercings in her ears, nose, eyebrows, lips, or even her forehead like all the royals had. Everyone in the kingdom seemed rich enough to gorge themselves on Guju fruit, which had stained everyone's teeth—men and women alike—a terrifying blood red, but she was probably too poor to afford to eat them. Kyra apparently hadn't “achieved” anything either, because if she had, she would be nearly covered in tattoos from fingernail to eyelid, which they learned were gained in special ceremonies.

After all of this, the women didn't want to marry
them
. When Taric or Draevan came around the corner, they had the ability to clear a room quicker than if the giant himself had walked by. Still, the men were told to stay in the kingdom as the king's honored guests until a decision was made, and they weren't hurried to make the decision at all. In fact, the elves thought the idea of one of their women mating with either of the men disgusting, and not something to be happy about, let alone be rushed into. Taric and Draevan found themselves heartily agreeing with them.