(Continued from Chapter 1, Penance)

The Chronicles of Rapina, 
Chapter 2, River of Tears 


Rapina walked quickly by the light of the moon for half an hour until she was well out of town. Then she took Evangeline's holy symbol out of her pocket. Rapina took the symbol off it's gold chain and replaced it with the tear-drop shaped crystal mage-light. She put the light's wire hook and the reverend's holy symbol back in her pocket. The creek was cold but Rapina refused to step out of it for over an hour. When she did step out, she stuck to the shore and tried to make better time, nearly running. She jumped over the creek from time to time, sometimes walking in the creek for a number of yards to confuse her trail. 

After about three hours Rapina saw the first signs of dawn and sat down on a mossy log to rest. The creek flowed Southwest and Rapina knew that it flowed into a river that ran South. She could follow that river to whatever even larger river it flowed into. Rapina got back up and began to walk, she was surprised at how well she was holding up. She took off a shoe and examined her foot. There were calluses where there had previously been none. She looked down her robe at her slightly flushed and definitely swollen breasts. She still held a great deal of the reverend's energy stored in her body, and as long as she did, it would keep her whole. 

Rapina left the creek and went directly West. She could get to the river faster that way. While she walked through the woods Rapina found a walking stick. It was over long, but she did not have time to be fussy. Scarcely two hours after dawn, Rapina froze. She heard the baying of hounds. They were still quite distant, but they filled her with fear nevertheless. Had the constable realized she'd taken the creek and set dogs on either side of it in hopes of picking up her trail? She hoped not, but she feared so. Rapina picked up her pace. 

At last Rapina made it to the river, but the hounds were gaining. Rapina realized she might have to swim for it if the dogs got too close. She stopped and took off her robes. Digging in her bag, she took out the panties and bustier and put them on. She tied the money pouch on to the bustier by one of the garter straps and put the money down her panties. She put the holy symbol in the mage-light's pouch and did the same with it, then she put the reverend's robe in the bag and put the acolyte's robe over her lingerie. She could take the robe off quickly if she needed to swim. 

Rapina stepped into the water and jogged down stream. The constable, no doubt, was on horseback. Tears rolled over Rapina's high cheek-bones as she strained to go faster. She did not want to hang, it was not fair. She had not meant to kill reverend Evangeline, but he had killed and raped many times over and deserved what fate had dealt him. No matter how fast Rapina ran, it seemed the hounds gained, then they stopped baying. They were already at the river. Rapina's mood darkened as she ran through the shallows along the river. She scoured her mind for some way to outwit her pursuer. She hoped the constable would not know which way to go. She hoped he would go upstream instead of down, but when next she heard a barking dog, her heart sank, but as she rounded a bend in the river, her face brightened with a smile. 

A part of a tree three feet in diameter was precariously trapped in the middle of the river floating against some rocks. Rapina raced towards it, trying to reach it before it escaped the trap. When she jumped onto the log, she was nearly exhausted. It only took a few good hard pushes against the rocks with her walking stick to win her freedom. The log gradually gained momentum as the river's current moved it along. 

Behind her on the log she road were the stubs of a few branches sticking into the water. One stuck stright up into the air behind her. Rapina tightly tied the cloth sack to this branch and then concentrated on steering the log using her walking stick as a pole. The intermittent barking of the dogs grew gradually more faint, as the river's rapid current carried her away. Rapina's battle against the constable was behind her. Evangeline's family would hunt her, but they would not catch her easily just outside her hometown as the reverend and constable had no doubt caught other young women who had sought to elude them. 

The day was long and exhausting. The river ran fast and Rapina was often called on to steer the log through rapids. Fortunately, it did not matter so much if the log scraped the bottom or hit things, as long as Rapina kept her legs up out of the way. Mile after exhausting mile slipped by before Rapina beached the log on the shore of a pool formed in one side of the river and tied it securely to the bank with a vine. Scrounging in the half-light of evening, Rapina found a few edible plants. She was grateful for her Aunt's training. Without it, she would not have known what she could eat. At last, Rapina laid Evangeline's robe down on some boughs and fell into an exhausted sleep. 

When Rapina awoke, it was not quite morning. She expected to be sore and stiff from exertion and to have to deal with several abrasions she'd suffered from the bark of the tree she'd ridden on and various rocks she had scraped on her way down the river. Instead, when she woke she felt stronger, restored, vigorous. Her muscles felt strong, as though she had prudently exercised them by traveling the river for a few hours over several days instead of exhausting herself on the wild river for more hours than a girl of her strength and stamina could handle. Rapina smiled, reverend Evangeline was saving her life with his own life's energy. Rapina opened the acolyte's robe and looked down at her at her chest. Evangeline had been a powerful man. Though her breasts were not quite as swollen as they had been the day before, they were still engorged with energy and overflowed the cups of the bustier. Her nipples still tingled and stood erect at the slightest provocation. 

After a breakfast of wild herbs, Rapina mounted the log and released it back onto the river. She knew the constable might have ridden all night for fear that Evangeline's family, would fault him for shirking, but the river had carried her with tireless speed. She saw no sense trying to steer the log by mage-light for it was too risky, but she saw the sense in using every bit of daylight there was. Rapina left with the dawn and rode the roaring river for another day. 

After nearly a week of riding the river, Rapina had gotten it down to a routine. She stopped by the riverside whenever she saw a particularly good stand of edible plants from the water and even used the wire hook from the mage light, some of her hair and a worm to catch a fish she'd spotted in a river pool. She was not eating enough, but she was surviving. The energy she held from the reverend was slowly draining away as she faced each days cuts and bruises, though she had greatly reduced the number she sustained as she became more proficient at river riding. 

The river itself had grown considerably since she started her journey on the overgrown stream near her hometown. Her pole had become useless in the deeper water, forcing her to fashion a paddle from the dry husk of an otherwise rotted log. Rapids were a less frequent occurrence, but when she did run into them, the shear volume of water gave them greater power than they had ever had before. Thus when she heard the now familiar roar, Rapina brought up her paddle and braced herself for action. She looked around her. A number of other logs were floating in her vicinity, not something she really liked since the water might toss one her way if it got too wild. Rapina screamed and fought and laughed as she ran the rapids until suddenly she realized the roar was so much louder than before, and then it was too late. Rapina was airborne, the waterfall looked from her point of view to be a hundred feet high, maybe more. She screamed and then remembered she had better breath before she hit the water. 

When the log hit the water in sounded like an explosion. The water stung and nearly knocked the wind out of her. She was pulled under and nearly drowned before she fought her way to the surface. She shed the acolyte's robe beneath the falls and by luck found a log shortly after she surfaced. A pity it was not the log she had been riding before. The cloth bag and its contents were lost, though Rapina had begun to store the razor in the pouch with Evangeline's holy symbol after fashioning the paddle. It was all she could to pull herself over it. The last thing she remembered was coughing and coughing, she could not stop coughing. 
-----

This ends River of Tears, Chapter 2 of The Chronicles of Rapina.
The story continues in Chapter 3, Pillage.

Copyright 2001 by Rapina