All A Hero Needs Is A Quest 6 (Patreon)

“There are raiders in the mountains east of our village, Cramhold,” Vicca broke in. “Deserters from the Imperial Legion. They steal our harvests, rape and pillage to their sadism’s content, and our King—“

“He won’t help us!” Karne added, stumbling over his effrontery. “He thinks the raiders aren’t a pressing issue… that dealing with them can wait until they’re preying on some place more important, then they’ll be worth dispatching the Royal Guard!”

“No glory in it now!” Vicca groused. “Wouldn’t be a worthy battle.” She spoke as though quoting an audience that hadn’t gone to her liking.

Sonja could’ve asked what they’d expected from a royal, but sarcasm seemed likely only to spur more outrage and further delay the conclusion of negotiations. “So you’d like me to do the Royal Guard’s work for them?”

“Well… yes,” Karne said, his eyes now going to Sonja’s drink with a thirst brought on from his outburst of nervous talk.

Sonja handed the mug to him. “Sounds simple enough. These ruffians… not much more than a dozen?”

“At least that.”

“Their armor, does it look… rusty? Old? Scavenged?”

“Yes!” Vicca cried, happy to agree with Sonja. “None of it matches and none of it gleams—”

Sonja held up a hand to stop her. She’d see for herself better than the girl could ever describe it. “And their weapons,” she asked Karne. “In the same state?”

Karne nodded. “They’re crude, but they know how to use them.”

Sonja gestured for him to drink and he did, gratefully. “Alright, say I deal with these vandals. Slay them all or send them scattered too far to ever return. What’s my return?”

“Return?”

“Pay. What do I get out of it?”

Karne and Vicca glanced at each other. Karne swallowed the thick helping of mead he’d mouthed. “We have little in the way of possessions. What we do have, the raiders have already mostly taken or destroyed…”

“You can have all the grain you want!” Vicca suggested brightly.

“Although… we need enough to last the winter, and to plant next season,” Karne noted.

Sonja sighed. “Look, you understand I can’t do this sort of thing for free? If I do, no one’s going to want to pay me—they’ll all just come up with some sob story and expect me to risk my life because I feel sorry for them.”

“But Lady Sonja, we have nothing. If we had, there were other mercenaries we might hire: but you, you’re champion of the downtrodden, foeman of the oppressor…”

“Seven Hells!” Sonja swore. “If word got out I gave you my services for free, the next lout I turn down would most likely take it out on your village, just to spite me and the thought of me! Find yourself a shrine—pray for deliverance from whatever god’s in attendance. They’re the ones running a charity, not me. Or take up dancing. You’d make up some coinage in no time…”

Vicca’s hands made tight little balls of fury. “You… you…”

Karne took her by the arm. “We knew she might say no.” He handed the mead back to Sonja. “Thank you for hearing us out, Lady Sonja. Would that you had a better answer—but the farmer must resign himself that the earth sometimes takes seed and water without any return.”

Sonja sighed. Their unfailing politeness—Vicca even curtsied, in a ‘no hard feelings’ manner—spiked her sympathy far harder than if they’d harangued her. They were good people, unjustly cursed with the failings of the world. She wished she could help them, but they asked for what no self-respecting sellsword could give: philanthropy.

“Besides,” she said, rubbing the cat’s head. “Can’t very well get up with you down there.”

Chapter 2

As they retreated, Karne’s disappointment was thick and bitter, while Vicca shook with anger. It included Sonja, but the cloud of it hung over their negligent king and rapacious foemen, only bordering Red Sonja in its expansion.

“We knew she might say no,” Karne repeated, escorting his beloved through the darkened roads to the stables. There, they’d been permitted to sleep among the horses, and could beg something in the way of food and water before setting off again in the morning.

“We knew the king might say no,” Vicca fumed. “We knew the raiders would come again and again. But is it too much to ask that that she-devil, who lives to unsheathe her blade, could do it on our behalf?”

“She has her reasons,” Karne reminded her gently.

“And you’re not even mad at her!” Vicca hissed. “Is she so comely?”

“You saw her yourself,” Karne offered.

“She dresses immodestly, I’ll give her that… gets a reaction… but I’ll bet that’s all she knows how to do. Preen and pose. Tempt. I’d wager she doesn’t even know how to use that sword at her side! She’d turn us down no matter how much money we had to offer! It’s all stagecraft, stagecraft and costuming…”

“She looked like she knew how to handle herself.”

“So either she knows how to handle herself or she knows how to look like she can handle herself. Which do you think is more likely—a woman who looks like that? I don’t think she even had any scars.”

“She did,” Karne corrected her, remembering the ghostly white lines hidden among Sonja’s burnished tan. From what the tales told of her many injuries, her recuperative abilities must be supernatural.

“Examined her closely, did you?”

They had reached the stables. The horses were bedded down for the night and the building was quiet, dark. Quieter and darker still when they shut the door behind them, leaving only the moonlight that came through open windows and wide spaces between the planks of the walls.

Suddenly, Vicca saw a use for all the impotent rage she felt—and one good thing to come out of their dealings with Sonja.

Wheeling on Karne, she grasped him by the crotch. As expected, his manhood was thick and ready… the dumb animal breeding instinct in him acting like Sonja’s near-nakedness was much as a license to throw her to the floor and mate with her.

“Yes, you got quite a good look at her,” Vicca nodded. “But I’ll be the one to benefit from that.”

“I really didn’t get that good a look at her,” Karne protested, even with Vicca working away the laces of his codpiece. “It was dark and there was so much smoke…”

“Enough about her!” Vicca hissed. “We don’t need her for this!”

Back in Cramhold, after that first foreboding entry into sexuality, they had fucked regularly, almost daily. The years of dealing with the raiders and attempting to negotiate the bureaucracy that would bring them help had put a damper on their chemistry. Even now, alone on their quest to find help in the outside world, there was little chance to feed Vicca’s hungry young sex the sustenance to which it had become accustomed.

Now she didn’t care where Karne’s hardness had come from. It was hers. His marvelous cock was too big and too stiff for it to matter what had made it that way. All that mattered was how it jerked like a horse waiting to leap into motion. Karne let himself be pulled into an empty stall where their bodies pressed together. They kissed hotly, Vicca writhing her groin against Karne’s hardness.

“Let me have it,” she rasped. “Yes, yesss… Let at least one good thing come from dealing with that harridan.”

She lifted her dress and shift, showing her lover there was nothing underneath but her furry little snatch. Then, with Karne still unsure, she took his hand in hers and pulled it to her gathering wetness.

“See?” she cooed. “Let that old bat drink herself into a stupor. I have access to a much finer vintage.”

“Belin,” Karne groaned blasphemously, unable to resist the buxom woman’s sexual demands.

Vicca giggled, seeing that she had him in the state which she liked best. She undressed, eager to turn his desire for her into raging lust.