Ogre Squire #4: An Inn at the Crossroads

Ukura and Althea find a comfortable place with a secret

I had torn off a strip of my pants and wrapped them around my axe, careful not to catch the edge of my blade. Within them, they fastened the warg’s tooth to the tip of the weapon. I grasped it with my hand and stared hard at the pointy molar. “Warg, speak to me!”

Althea looked across the fire with mild bemusement. “You know, it doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work then? Show me!”

Althea shook her head, sending her red braid wagging. “Not until I trust that you have the experience and mental strength to handle an extra voice in your head. You are not merely acquiring the beast’s powers like a weapon. It becomes a part of you.”

“Then the dragon and angel, and everything else you have… all of that is in your head?”

“After a fashion,” said Althea. She gazed off into the distance. “The angel, Metaton, is constantly trying to guide me to the virtuous path. He is an asset in my knighthood, even if often an idealistic one. But the dragon, Au’Gor… he is a vicious creature. One thinks I should guide you to schooling, to leave you in the city and let you mature as I would any human girl. The other thinks I should kill you right now before you betray me.”

I was startled. My hand was resting on my axe, even if I had never intentionally put it there. “Which is which?”

Althea chuckled. “It does not matter. Being a knight means having the strength not to let them overtake me. But you have not struck me as a paragon of self-control.”

I tried not to be hurt. After all, I had killed the warg, hadn’t I? I had saved the farmer and his family. Wasn’t I good enough to have a sixth of Althea’s power?

“Your time will come,” said Althea. “But the most frequent task of any warrior is waiting. You must learn to master that before anything else.”

I hated waiting. Since defeating the warg, it had been nothing but days of walking, making camp, and sleeping rough in roadside meadows. As I lay on my improvised bedding, I felt as if my axe, and especially the warg’s tooth was staring at me. I wished that some beast might attack just so that I would have something to do.

I decided to start drawing with a pen, as opposed to the other thing I was doing before.