The Orc’s Rage

Chapter 33

33

Cedar

T he days were long and dreary, cold and dark. Bitter winds swept through the camp, and though Cedar could tell that her cat hungered to be outdoors more and more often, she kept him close by. It was selfish, she knew, but she needed his companionship. When the nights were coldest, she curled up with the bear pelt that still smelled somewhat of Kargorr, and stroked Kiya’s soft fur. She always kept her dagger under her pillow.

Cedar hoped that spring would come soon, at least, and peel back the frigid air and endless nights that were suffocating her slowly.

Rathka was her usual ornery self, though she grew even more surly the faster the days that Orgha was gone became weeks. Cedar and Rathka snipped at one another from time to time, but had learned to co-exist in their loneliness. It was no secret now that Cedar cared for Lord Kargorr, that his absence affected her poorly, but Rathka was not cruel about it. If anything, she was sympathetic as they both waited for the caravans’ return.

The other human concubines were known around the camp for their whimpering and whining, especially with so many of their orc keepers gone. Cedar had the opportunity to speak with them at the cook’s tent, as they huddled in a group with a guard, but decided after listening to them gripe about their masters that she didn’t have anything in common with them anymore.

One morning, Rathka remarked that Cedar’s belly had grown, and Cedar reflexively covered it. Did she wish Kargorr was there to notice this, instead? So much was happening without him. Though she kept her memories of their last two nights together close, it was still stained with bitterness. He would never admit who she was to him as long as his mission remained at the forefront of his mind.

Would he still keep up this wall when her baby was born? Would she forever be seen by the rest of the orcs as a thing?

Sometimes Cedar touched herself at night, thinking of Kargorr, willing his body to return to hers. After three weeks had passed since the caravans’ departure, Rathka insisted that it was time to visit the shosek .

Smoke filled the tent as they entered. Many pots full of odd ingredients covered the shelves, spilling over with leaves and herbs and dried bird legs.

The orc woman sitting on the other side of the fire was old, very old, with grooves on her dark green face that deepened when she frowned at them. She spoke none of the human tongue, only the Orcish one, and so Rathka translated. Little did she know that Cedar had been listening carefully, learning what she could just for moments like these. Cedar understood the ancient woman’s discontent, that she resented the human who had taken their lord’s affection so.

“The shosek is not pleased that Lord Kargorr chose you,” Rathka said, in a matter-of-fact way. “But she will take stock of your orcling anyway. Be grateful.”

Cedar pressed her lips into a thin line and turned back to face the healer, who was watching her intently. She ought to say something in Orcish, to put the old woman in her place as Lord Kargorr would, but Cedar didn’t know what position this woman held in the camp if she was willing to speak so boldly, and she wasn’t willing to give away yet that she could understand them. The less they thought she knew, the more unguardedly others would speak around her.

The shosek gestured for Cedar to come closer, so she obediently walked around the fire and sat. The old orc began to murmur something, words Cedar could barely hear, not to mention understand, as the smoke from the fire curled around them. While she spoke, the shosek reached for some pots off the nearby shelves and began tossing small objects into the flames. As they burned, the smoke reeked, and Cedar hastily covered her nose.

The old woman angrily objected.

“No,” Rathka chided her. “The shosek says you must breathe it in.”

Surely this couldn’t be good for her baby, but Cedar was surrounded by orcs, and it would be another mark on her standing if she refused. So she inhaled the smoke and gagged, and the shosek watched her carefully. Then the old woman rose from her seat and went into the back, to return with a pot that smelled as bad as the fire. She scooped out some of the ointment and indicated for Cedar to raise her tunic.

With some hesitation, Cedar obeyed, revealing her rounded belly, and the shosek smeared the ointment all over her. Then the old orc woman bent her head and murmured again, keeping both of her hands on Cedar’s stomach.

Cedar wished she could get up and run, because it all felt too strange, too intimate. Once again, Kargorr should be here with her, experiencing this with her, telling her what it all meant.

After some moments of silence, the shosek raised her head. She had a curious look in her eye that Cedar couldn’t quite parse, but it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Then the old woman spoke fast, too fast for Cedar to understand, but she picked up her disapproval. Rathka hesitated before translating.

“What did she say?” Cedar demanded.

Rathka’s mouth pressed into a line, like she knew this would hurt and she wasn’t eager to do it.

“This orcling grows outside the bonds of yapira and agsan ,” Rathka began. “So it will not be as strong as if it were cared for by a mated pair.”

The shosek squinted at Cedar, the sheen of white cataracts over her black eyes giving her an eerie look. It was as if the ancient orc could see the truth underneath the lie—that Kargorr considered Cedar his yapira but refused to claim her.

Surely such a thing couldn’t affect her baby. It was all superstition. But to fit in, Cedar would just have to bear it and pretend that the witch was right.

“Lord Kargorr should know this,” Rathka said as the shosek bowed her head, then shifted back to her original seat. Cedar did not need to be told that they were finished, and she gave the old woman a cursory “thank you” in her tongue. The orc seemed surprised that she knew even that.

Then Cedar and Rathka departed the tent, Cedar’s belly still slick.

“He’ll know it when he returns,” Cedar said firmly. “I want to visit the baths now, and not speak of it more.”

Rathka did not argue.

As they settled into the hot water, though, Cedar hoped the old woman was wrong. This child would be strong, she knew. If just to spite the hag, Cedar would raise it to be so, with or without Lord Kargorr as her agsan .

She didn’t need him in order to be a good mother.

Kargorr

After securing Lord Gannag’s agreement to bind their forces together into one singular army, with a singular purpose, Lord Kargorr could at last return home.

It had been more than a month now, as Gannag’s parog began packing up and Kargorr’s own band of warriors loaded their sledges. It would be two more weeks before they reached their own parog down in the lowlands, and for a moment, Kargorr’s head swam with the possibilities of what might have transpired while he was gone. If the humans had learned of the parog ’s location...

He imagined his Cedar, at the center of a pile of bodies, and his stomach churned.

And so he pushed his warriors hard, probably harder than he should, asking much of their cats and their mammoths both. After many days of this, when the band was worn ragged, Samrak took the risk of advising him to let them rest or the animals would make their objections known.

Reluctantly, Kargorr allowed them to stop early for the night. But he was still full of his blood’s need to be home , to see his hard woman and bury himself in her soft cunt, and to ensure his orcling was growing well. To fend it off and divert his mind, he snatched up a bow and left for a hunt with Liga, though she could have likely used the rest, too.

As they prowled through the woods, Kargorr tried to lose himself in the art of tracking, following footprints through the snow silently, while Liga sniffed the air to catch the scent of their prey. Spring was around the corner, and the animals would be careless as they began to mate and rut. Kargorr could use this to his advantage.

They moved silently through the snow toward the sound of males calling out to females. Then Liga leapt, and she was upon the stag before Lord Kargorr had even caught sight of him. Kargorr watched as his cat tore out the creature’s throat, spewing blood across the white snow, wondering how far his mind had wandered that he hadn’t seen it first.

Cedar. Thoughts of her were making him careless. His sarga had taken her, so why were they not now quiet?

Perhaps they would never be silent while she remained unclaimed.

But he had to wait. He would wait, until Orgha returned from his mission, hopefully bringing news that the eastern lord was open to Kargorr’s plan. And then they would leave once more, to recruit another lord, and another lord still, until he had the force underneath him that he needed.

Only then, once he had secured the loyalty of all the grrosek , would he allow himself the weakness of fully taking his yapira in front of the entire parog .

He would learn to control himself until then. He would learn to keep his thoughts on the task at hand and break off the part of himself that craved her, all of her.

When Liga was finished feasting, Lord Kargorr tied the carcass to his saddle, and they dragged it back to camp.

Cedar

More than six weeks had passed when the call rang out across the camp: Lord Kargorr had returned.

For long moments, Cedar thought she was imagining it. How many times had she hoped to hear that call? The drums beginning to beat, the cheers and whoops as other orcs left their tents and ran out to greet their returned friends and family?

Rathka surged to her feet and sprinted from the tent quicker than Cedar could track. But instead of running to Kargorr, Cedar felt frozen, remembering the last time he had returned.

How she had run. How he had chased her. How...

She took many deep breaths before steeling herself. She would not run this time. She had no reason to run, did she? He wouldn’t replace her. He hadn’t brought home the next iteration of her, a warm body to take her spot in their bed. He promised he wouldn’t.

And though he was many other things, she did not know him to be an orc who lied.

Cedar squared her shoulders, intent on meeting Lord Kargorr at the gates. But before she could leave, the tent flap flew open—and in the entryway stood the biggest orc that had ever lived.

He had a great scar traveling from his temple, across his eyebrow, over his nose to his opposite tusk and then down, vanishing into his traveling clothes. His dark eyes were red around the edges, his lips peeled back in a vicious-looking snarl.

Lord Kargorr saw her, and that red in his black irises spread, nearly consuming them. He advanced toward her, and Kiya hissed from his place in the corner of the tent.

“Send him away,” Kargorr commanded, his eyes never leaving hers.

“Kiya,” Cedar said in a whisper, and gestured outside. “Go find your friends.”

The cat understood this new word, friends , which meant his siblings and the other cats in the snowfield, and he was happy to leave and join them to play.

Then Lord Kargorr took another step closer, and another, his sheer, feral intensity pouring off his skin in waves.

“Cedar,” he rumbled, low in his throat, as if it were choking him. He seized her waist in one hand, while the other reached along her cheek to bury his fingers in her hair. Cedar gasped as he jerked her toward him, crushing her much smaller body against his huge, unyielding one.

He did not kiss her. He did not tear off her clothes. No, Lord Kargorr held her, enveloped her, clutching her as close as he could while he inhaled deeply at the base of her throat. She realized then that the arms he held her with were shivering, shaking, and so she wrapped her own arms as far around him as she could and squeezed him.

This was a different Kargorr than the one who had left her. This one was so desperate that he couldn’t tuck it away inside, couldn’t hide it behind hardness or cruelty.

Then, abruptly, Cedar was lying on her back on the furs, and he was on top of her, those red-rimmed eyes burrowing into deep into hers, as if he could read her needs off the fabric of her soul. He crawled down her body and snatched the hem of her tunic in his teeth, using them to peel it back and reveal her belly.

“There,” he murmured, sitting back so he could admire her. That’s what he was doing, as a smile crawled across his unpracticed mouth. “My woman and my orcling.”

He nodded, like he was agreeing with himself, like he was pleased at this outcome. Then he tugged on the laces of her pants, and Cedar helped him to kick them off.

She would not play coy. She would not hold herself back from taking what she wanted, what she’d been hungering for since he left. Perhaps she had not forgiven him, but she had allowed the flame to sprout anew in a different place. Here the tinder was even more ripe, more full of life-giving air, and when Kargorr braced himself between her thighs and spread them apart, she allowed the fire to consume her.

He reached down, dragging his finger from her protruding belly button to her mound, where he hovered for a moment before cursing to himself. He sat up and bit off the tip of his sharp claw, hastily filing it down on his tusk. He was muttering to himself in Orcish, something almost like a prayer as he got the tip dulled and returned to that warm, clenching place between her legs.

That finger skated over her lower lips, pausing to spread them, and Kargorr leaned down and breathed in deeply. Then came a low, throaty groan, as he dipped his finger into her, wetting it, before dragging it back up to her sensitive bead. He rubbed it in a way he never had before, just teasing it, circling it and flicking over the tip with small, precise movements.

Cedar had never felt anything like it. Her hips jerked involuntarily, and her cunt seized. With a hearty chuckle, Kargorr slid downward again, and tested the slit between her legs.

Then he dove down and devoured her.

Cedar cried out as that thick, black tongue of his lanced out, dragging up and over her clit, then across and down and every which way, while his finger worked its way inside her. She had touched herself while he was gone but had not taken an object, and now she felt small and tight around him.

As if he had just realized the same thing, Lord Kargorr snarled with barely contained desire. He began to pump his hand, fucking her hard with it while he ravaged her with his tongue, pausing occasionally to scrape his teeth over her swollen lower lips.

Soon, Cedar was high in the sky, above the tent, swaying and whirling with each lap he made, until she suddenly reached the sun and burst open. Her cry was high pitched as something unleashed inside her, and a rush of hot, wet liquid ran down onto the furs. She gasped and tried to wriggle away, but Lord Kargorr gripped her hips hard, pushing her back down to the bed as he thoroughly cleaned her.

She didn’t realize her eyes had rolled back in her head as she shivered and shook with the force of whatever witchcraft he had visited upon her, until a shadow rose high above her, and something even warmer, even broader and softer than a finger swept through all that wetness. A moan escaped her as it pushed in, and she found Kargorr kneeling between her thighs, his great shape blotting out the dim lamplight. His eyes were intent on the place their bodies joined, his mouth open to reveal gritted teeth.

“Cedar,” he ground out in a threatening voice. “I cannot promise I will not be rough with you.” Even more of him slid into her, and though it shocked her body at first, it seemed to remember him and parted for him. More of that slick crown fit into her, and then came the shaft, all in one long stroke. Lord Kargorr groaned, toppling forward onto one arm so now his face was only inches from hers.

As he snapped his hips back, and then surged into her again, he attacked her mouth in a bruising kiss. He swallowed up her cry as he sunk deep, burying that thick, pulsing cock as far as he could, until those lumps at the base of him hinted at what would come. But she was still so tight, unpracticed at taking him after so much time apart.

But she could see in his eyes, could feel in the way his teeth ran over her lip, that would not last for long.