The Orc’s Rage

Chapter 1

1

Cedar

“ C edar!”

The shrill voice grated on her, like metal scraping over metal. Cedar glanced down at the piglet in her hands, which was still sleeping. She’d been sitting with the mother, a pig she called Bread Pudding, since the sow gave birth.

Nobody else knew the names she gave the animals; it was a private thing she shared with just herself and the creatures she cared for.

“I’m in here,” Cedar called back, returning the piglet to the pile all huddled around their mother’s engorged nipples.

Lissa appeared in the barn doorway, a shadowy figure blotting out the light. Cedar didn’t have to see her face to know that she was scowling mightily. The woman was always scowling, ready to unleash her festering anger.

“Where have you been?” Lissa snarled as she stalked into the barn. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Why?” Cedar asked, dusting the straw off her knees as she stood up.

“There’s no bread, no vegetables, and no meat, either. What are we going to eat for supper?” The gnarled woman pointed at the piglets. “Maybe we should butcher one of those for tonight.”

Cedar put herself between Lissa and the pigs. “They’re much too young,” she told the old woman in her coolest, calmest tone. If she raised her voice, Lissa would read it as insubordination, and then she’d bring out the switch. “Just let them grow up some and we can have a nice suckling pig. Right now there’s barely any meat on them.”

Lissa scoffed. “We need something to eat.”

“I’ll figure it out.” Cedar didn’t know what she could possibly scrounge together, but she’d come up with something. They had plenty of eggs, and she’d found some wild onions and tubers in the woods yesterday. Maybe the bread was stale, but she could dunk it in egg batter and probably save it.

Lissa shook her head and let out a hmph . “We’re going to have to butcher one of your precious little piggies soon. Unless you want to starve like your parents almost did.”

As a younger girl, Cedar was traded for a single cow. That was all. A daughter for a cow—that’s how hungry their family had been. When Lissa had bought her, Cedar knew she would most certainly be a slave for the rest of her life, or until Lissa finally died.

That thought brought her comfort from time to time.

Cedar’s hands clenched at her sides as she remembered how her mother had simply turned her back on her daughter when the deal was done, but she stuffed them in the pockets of her skirt so Lissa couldn’t see. The old lady didn’t miss it, and her eyebrow arched.

“Having a thought?” she asked sweetly, the tone she used whenever she was itching to pull out the switch. It wasn’t so much about punishing Cedar as it was about Lissa’s deep-seated need to inflict pain on others, whether human or animal. Everything was Cedar’s fault, from now into eternity. When Lissa needed someone to hurt, her servant was there.

“Not at all,” Cedar said. “I’ll come and get started on dinner.”

Off in the distance, she heard a metallic ring. It must be Rodan, their neighbor, working on horseshoes.

Lissa took one last look at Bread Pudding and her new litter. “Don’t get attached, Cedar,” she said in an imperious tone. “You know better.”

Of course Cedar knew. The animals never lasted. When Lissa needed extra copper for whatever new thing she fancied that week, they would be down one more pig, as the cows were long gone. Then another pig, until they had nothing left to eat and no more money with which to buy more.

Then it was on Cedar to figure out how to feed them until Lissa came up with another scheme. She cheated merchants whenever she could, making bad deals and selling snake oil—her supposed “herbal remedies.” No one in town liked or trusted her, which meant she had to seize on travelers or peddle her wares in other villages.

Cedar sometimes thought about marrying, perhaps one of the guards who stood on the edge of town to keep watch for orcs. But then he would have to buy her from Lissa, and who would want to take on that cost for a wife of ignoble birth?

It was a hopeless endeavor to think about such things. Sometimes Cedar fantasized about catastrophes that might befall Lissa and bring an end to her reign: an animal attack, perhaps, or an orc raid. Cedar hadn’t known the way life was before the ice melted, but when she overheard some older children role-playing as big monsters and battling each other with sticks and stones, her mother sat her down and told her what she knew.

It had begun far north—that’s where the first sightings were. A great warm spell came over the land, and crops were dying everywhere. The orcs came out of the melted ice, or so the first reports said. Monsters, each like a man that had swallowed another one, with hulking brows and great tusks protruding from their jaws.

An orc was a beast with clawed hands and a hideous face that tore down everything in its path, spreading like a plague. The orcs rode upon saber-toothed cats that had emerged from the prehistoric ice with them. But they were so relatively few in number—only those that had emerged from their frozen tombs—that humanity was able to hold them back. The orcs kept their locations secret and crept out to seize and take before vanishing again.

They had been spotted in the highlands recently, but never came this far south.

As Cedar stepped out of the barn into the fading afternoon, a man shouted far off down the road. Perhaps an escaped horse had broken through a metal gate, and that was the noise she’d heard.

Thinking she might help catch the horse, Cedar jogged to the path that led away from Lissa’s rundown patch of land. Their neighbors were a good way down the lane, with their much bigger plot. And yet, even from here, Cedar could hear old Rodan yelling.

She peered over the bridge that crossed the creek. Another clang rang out, and Cedar paused, torn between going to see what was amiss, in case she could help, and fearing what she might find.

“What’s going on out here?” It was Lissa’s voice again.

“I don’t know.” Cedar heard Rodan cry out, and it was an agonized sound.

Footsteps. She thought the ground was moving underneath her as dozens of pounding feet got closer, and prickles covered her skin. From around the side of Rodan’s house streamed huge, green bodies covered in pelts and bones.

Orcs.

Beside her, Lissa shrieked, and it startled Cedar enough for her to realize she had to move, or she would die. Because when her mother had called orcs monsters , she had understated it.

These were abominations.

With a speed born of pure terror, Cedar ran as fast as she could, away from the sound of Lissa’s screams.

Kargorr

His heart was beating fast, so fast, thundering in his ears in that soothing, feverish drum. He relished how it swelled his muscles larger, filling them with his hot blood, until fat veins trailed down his shoulders and hands.

The hands that now held his steel axe aloft. The grrosek hadn’t forsaken all their old ways, but many of them. It was a good trade though, a stone axe for a steel one. Blood flowed much faster, much thicker, and the humans they came across bent under steel like so many stalks of wheat.

Lord Kargorr loved the sound it made, the blade burying itself into flesh, and he had to admit those puny creatures had invented one good thing in the time the grrosek were away.

His horde approached the village from the south, as Kargorr preferred to do. The north was their home, the place they had come from and would always return to, so the humans were never prepared for an attack from the south. The guards had been easy to take down, caught unawares by predators that streamed at them from both sides. But the cries had carried, and other humans came out armed.

Lord Kargorr’s number wasn’t great, but because this was no fortified outpost—merely a village—it would be enough. He and his warriors cut down every man and woman they came across. Survivors didn’t tell stories, didn’t spread the word.

He had torn through the farmer himself because his rage had demanded sacrifice. The rage, that heady, delirious thing that drove all orcs at the core of their beings, urged him to stick his sword through the man’s belly. A shriek followed, and one of Kargorr’s warriors speared a woman like a piece of meat.

It was time to finish this. Kargorr tossed the body down and gestured for his horde to follow. They had left some of their number behind to collect what they could from the villagers’ homes and storage sheds. What they took from this village would feed the parog well for many moons.

He turned a corner around the farmhouse, and a terrible screech greeted him. It was a bony old human woman with a face like a badger, standing at the end of the road.

He would silence her.

But then something caught his eye. A fleeing shape—a woman in a tunic and dirty green skirt—was sprinting away from the house, off into the woods. The pale skin of her calf flashed, and Kargorr lowered the axe he was preparing to throw at her backside. She was sturdy, and clearly in possession of her senses if she was running for her life. In addition to the sound of their screams and the taste of their blood, humans also made good prizes. Others from his own parog had taken humans as slaves, as concubines, or whatever other service a grrosek could imagine for themselves, and those humans performed well once they were broken and cowed.

“Chase her,” he snarled to Orgha, his closest warrior. “Bring her back to me alive.”

While his right hand raced off after the disappearing waif, Kargorr seized the old woman by the throat. It stopped the sound in her lungs, and she thrashed against him.

“Are you her mother?” he ground out, trying to wrap his mouth around the human language. It was so ugly. He opened his grip enough that she could let out a squeak.

“Who?” she croaked.

He shook her like a rat. “The girl.”

“She’s—she’s a servant!”

He cocked his head. From the direction of the woods came a scream, and when he glanced over his shoulder, he found Orgha dragging the woman in the green skirt out of the trees.

“A servant,” he repeated, tasting the unfamiliar word. “You mean a slave?”

“W-w-well, no?—”

He’d heard enough. He tightened his hand again, closing in on her windpipe, and she let out a harsh gasp. Orgha returned, dragging the green-skirted woman behind him. When she saw his hands around the old lady’s throat, she stopped cold. Her hardened brown eyes traveled from his chest to his throat, and then to his face. Her dark hair was thick and fierce, and his gut clenched as she scowled at him. Her face was filled with hatred, and the ferocity of it licked his insides.

Kargorr leaned toward her, still holding the woman gasping for breath and clawing at his huge hand where it was wrapped around her neck. He brought some of the girl’s hair to his nose and sniffed her. She jerked back, trying to put space between them, but Orgha held her fast.

There. That smell. The moment it filled his nostrils, Kargorr’s groin ached. It was a bolt of lightning through him, and he knew then that she was his.

He straightened and lifted the frail old woman into the air between them. Then he snapped her neck.