3
“HOW FAR CAN YOU ACTUALLY THROW A STONE,”
Bianca griped, because they had been hiking around the mountain deer paths over a half hour, tripping over roots and rocks in the dark, trudging through slick snow and ice. It was hard to keep up with him, seeing as every step he took spanned about the distance that three of her’s would take. She’d gotten tired of calling out to him to slow down or wait up, and had resorted to holding onto the end of his cloak.
“I’m starting to think you’re as lost as I am,”
she grumbled, readjusting her grip.
“Am not.”
“Really?”
“I’ll get back to my camp before you find yours.”
“If you can find your camp you should be able to find this mushroom deposit in at least a much closer amount of time, unless you can throw a stone that will stay in the air for hours at a time,”
Bianca lamented, not helping the fact that even clutching onto his clothes she was out of breath from keeping up.
“Is that a riddle?”
Bianca stopped, letting out an irritated huff. She put her hand on her hip as the orc turned around to look at her. Her sense of self preservation, if she ever had one, evaporated when she saw his displeased frown in the light of his torch. “What, was that too many words in a row for you?”
“I don’t like riddles.”
“Tough.”
“Tough?”
“Too bad. Riddles should be answered. It’s rude to leave a girl hanging,”
she said as coolly as if she were scolding someone she had at least a chance of successfully tackling.
Tanis scoffed again as he turned around to continue leading the way. “It’s not, because I’m not rude.”
Such sound logic.
“Then answer my riddle.”
Bianca caught a glimpse of Tanis rolling his eyes. “My kind are not the tricky, sly ones. Yours are.”
“My kind,”
she repeated, narrowing her gaze at him. Orcs didn’t exactly have a reputation for being charming either, but she chewed her tongue on the retort. There was some benefit to survival in not antagonizing him, surely.
Then again, Bianca didn’t have much in the way of survival skills, as today had already proven.
“You’re so sure of that? Maybe you’re tricky. Maybe this is all a ruse to lure me into a false sense of complacency before you snap me in half and use my bones to pick your teeth.”
That got a laugh out of him.
She opened her mouth again to fashion yet another retort, but it died on her inhale, as she stepped around a large tree and a clearing came into view.
Unlike the rest of the forest, blanketed in a heavy snow, this was like a patch of spring had been forgotten. It was lush and green, lit up by luminescent flowers and fungi that curled up trees and carpeted the ground.
“How is this possible?”
“There’s an underground river that vents to the surface every few miles. My party’s camped by the springs a half mile or so north. We call these Fey Wells.”
Bianca wasn’t really listening. She had never seen so many chanterelle blooms out of season. This part of the Whispering Woods was oddly and unseasonably warm. Her heavy winter cloak felt hot against her shoulders.
She hurried into the clearing, going up to the biggest yellow floret. It was twice as big as her hand. Her basket wouldn’t be big enough to take as many as she was seeing, but she would stuff it to capacity. She took out her little pocket knife and began harvesting immediately.
There were other mushroom species in bloom as well, some she recognized, others that were strange to her.
After a few minutes of cutting the blooms and stuffing them in her basket, she felt Tanis’ shadow fall over her again, and when she turned to look he was crouched beside her.
The corners of his mouth were downturned, but there was something about his eyes and the way he lifted his brows that made her think he was trying really hard not to smile. Then his eyes returned back to the ground, and a true grimace took place.
He was frowning at the mushrooms, like they were personally offensive, though there weren’t any of the stinkhorn variety present. “How do you know they’re not poisonous?”
“Well, you’re not supposed to do it like this. I have gotten sick from this method, but it hasn’t killed me yet,”
Bianca shrugged, ripping a mushroom in half. She held its newly exposed flesh against her tongue, and grimaced. “This one is bad. The taste is like it’s stabbing my tongue.”
She offered the other half to him, expecting him to take it. But he took her wrist in his hand, putting the back of her hand against his tongue. “Tastes like a halfling.”
Bianca stared, wide eyed, frozen. The devilish smile faded from his face. He dropped her wrist and stepped back.
“I’m not actually going to eat you,”
he rolled his eyes.
Somehow that wasn’t actually what she was concerned about, at the moment.
Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of instinct to flee or throw a punch? All Bianca was feeling was a wave of warmth and flutters low in her stomach.
What a strange orc. She’d really only heard about how they were viscous in battles and not to fight one if she could avoid it. And she’d never really questioned that, because it made some sense not to go toe-to-toe with someone literally twice her size.
“Thank you for bringing me here. I don’t think I would have found this place at all on my own,”
Bianca started to say, before she shook her head. She had already spent too much time chatting about pointless things with him, when she should have been more concerned with getting back to her troupe. “Can you help me find my friends? They have a camp somewhere in the woods, probably closer to where you found me.”
He nodded slowly. “It’ll be easier to get back there in the daylight. I’ll take you to them in the morning.”
That was something, and it felt good to have that settled. Even if he did make her heart beat wildly in all sorts of places it shouldn’t, she did feel safer with him than she would have on her own.
Bianca returned to piling up different mushrooms in her basket, more than half full now with everything from morels to boletes and king trumpets. Every time she turned to toss a couple more in, she felt him watching her. The silence stretched between them, and Bianca had never been great at silence. Even during her troupe’s plays, she often found herself whispering and giggling backstage. “Hey. Um. Tell me more about the whole betrothal ritual thing.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because you mentioned it earlier, and I don’t know what else to ask about?”
She watched him cross his arms and lean against a tree. At first she didn’t think he would answer her, but then he sighed and shrugged.
“I don’t know how halflings do it. It’s a… courtship by combat thing. Drawing first blood. If it starts the Blood Fever, you’ve found your mate. But that rarely actually happens.”
Bianca couldn’t conceal her surprise. Not exactly how she pictured betrothal normally. But at the same time, there was something nice about the idea of having a mate. Knowing where you were meant to be, a real answer instead of hoping this path was the right one.
He shrugged and continued on. “At this point it’s mostly custom. But someone who may want to join their lineage to yours might start picking fights.”
“They really want in on the whole Son of Bloodthirsty, Kin to Bonecrusher line?”
“Some find it valuable.”
“Yeah, but, people randomly fighting you? That sounds exhausting. I’m sorry you’re going through that,”
she said, sitting back on her heels. She watched his posture soften, the tension leaving his crossed arms.
Bianca sighed and hefted her much heavier basket to the next patch of morels. “Being wanted for the wrong reasons sucks. It’s almost like not being wanted at all, because they don’t really see you.”
She stopped picking mushrooms for a moment. She had that same problem with a few members of her acting troupe, usually the leads of their productions. They probably didn’t even realize she was gone.
“The actors who invited me to travel with them said that I had talent for the stage– but I haven’t been on it once in a whole year. I’m just another pair of hands around the camp, now.”
She glanced at Tanis again. Even if he was a bit rude for her taste in company, she wanted him to know she was grateful. “I know you were probably just trying to make sure I didn’t scare off that huldira you were tracking, but I’m glad you didn’t just let it… trample me, eat me, or whatever.”
She wasn’t sure how to word her question without actually asking if orcs ate halflings. Why did you save me, why are you putting up with me, why aren’t you like the orcs I’ve been warned about?
“I’d never seen a Halfling before,”
Tanis offered, as if he gleaned her question from her face. “Only heard stories.”
She dared a coy glance back at him as she advanced into the grove. “Oh. Do I live up to them?”
“No. You’re not nearly as...ugly as we’re told.”
“What! That’s rude. We’re not that different from orcs, just proportioned a little differently,”
she stammered on. Well, no halfling she had ever met had tusks, or been green.
“You are short,”
Tanis allowed with an eye roll.
“Maybe you’re just oversized. Everyone insists on calling us ‘Halflings’, but maybe you should just call yourselves ‘Doublings’, and us by our proper name.”
She leveled a look at Tanis then, and she saw him try to do the math in his head. Perhaps the art of sums was not valued among orcs, since he seemed to struggle with her logic.
“Because we are twice the… proportion?”
he ventured after a moment, tilting his head.
Bianca opened her mouth to answer, but stopped short. Her eyes dipped below his belt.
She might have been a little too obvious because Tanis followed her gaze, brushing off his pants as if he thought she might have seen another bug.
“Anyway, don’t you know saying ‘you’re not as ugly as you might be’ to a girl is rude? I mean, I’m not saying you should compliment me but this alliance won’t go very far if you’re going to insult me,”
she prattled on, cheeks heating, turning her face away so her fluster wouldn’t be so obvious.
“Our alliance,”
he repeated, like it was still news.
Bianca huffed, “Yes, that. Because we’re allies. Keep up.”
She turned away, reaching for a pinkish cluster of fungal shelves rooted in the bark of a nearby tree. It was just a little too high for her, but she could see a sturdy branch just under her prize.
Before she could even begin to plan how she would scale the tree, she felt that shadow fall over her again, and Tanis was reaching for the cluster of chicken-in-the-wood mushrooms before she could even ask for help.
He cut the mushroom from the tree with his own knife, leaving as little as possible of the base behind, in a manner that suggested he had been carefully watching how she had done it. Then he turned back to her, coming down to kneel on one knee before her, level with her for the first time.
Bianca pretended to eye the mushroom he offered her, though she was much more interested in the hand that held it. “If we’re not allies, aren’t you being a little too nice? This morning’s fright was nearly spot on, but I think now you’ve exhausted your helpfulness quota for the month.”
“I can be unhelpful and tip your basket over,”
he offered with a tusked grin. The flashes of teeth had been giving her little pricks of panic ever since she’d first seen him, but they were starting to feel a little differently. Less in the middle of her chest and a little bit lower.
“Not what I meant.”
Bianca stepped forward to take the chicken-of-the-woods bloom from him, but her foot skidded out to the side, sliding in the mud beneath her. She leaned back quickly, overbalancing, finally catching a handful of his shirt to steady herself.
It was barely a second, but now she was standing so much closer to him, nearly fallen bodily into him. His large hand was against her hip, arm nearly curled around her as if he would have pulled her into his chest, if she’d been any less sure of her footing.
There he was again, likely to win most helpful orc of the month.
He let out a breath, nearly a laugh, perhaps at how much trouble she was just to be around. “Sometimes curiosity gets the better of me.”
Bianca blinked a few times. She almost forgot she’d asked him a question in that heartbeat. “What were you curious about?”
One corner of his mouth ticked up. “Halflings. I told you, never seen one before.”
“And now you’ve seen me.”
And tasted. She tilted her head up just enough to look him fully in the face, to see the deep, earthy brown of his eyes. “Still curious?”
He was quiet for a moment, eyes unfocused before his gaze dipped just to her mouth. He met her stare again. “Still.”
Goosebumps.