3 #2
“Right,” she whispered. “He cut off the trade.” This had ruined her father, after all.
The High King—his name was Findas nae Ortholin—believed in elvish superiority and he thought elves could do everything themselves, and he had made trade increasingly difficult.
Her father had made his money on imports.
Since the High King had taken the throne, many businessmen in the Vale had been ruined. High King Findas was not entirely popular, well, not popular in the south, anyway.
Here, in the north, they tended to love him. He would speak of simpler times, the old ways, which were the ways of the north, the ways of the silvan elves, the ways of magic and communion with the gods.
Sometimes, hearing a train whistle far off on the breeze, the noise cutting through the cold air the way it did, Aerhril felt frightened, too.
She missed the comfort of the way things used to be.
Things had changed so much in her lifetime, an explosion of new things—gas lamps, revolvers, trains, all manner of things powered by steam engines.
She found it exciting, but it was sometimes frightening, too.
The High King hated orcs. And he had made it his mission to exile them all. Since he had taken the throne, he had begun having orcs rounded up and sent back over the mountains to the northwest, over the Rathog Pass and back to the neighboring country of Arzakh, where the orcs had come from.
All we want is for them to go back where they came from, was the rallying cry of the High King and his followers. All we want is for them to stop encroaching on our culture.
It was funny, because that was something she’d heard here for the first time, the anger that the Cirdan elves had against the Valaedor for encroaching on their culture, for the way the fair ones sneered at the old ways, calling them backward, calling them superstition.
In a way, though, perhaps she understood.
She had gone to the bonfires, heard the chants to the old gods, seen the dances and listened to the drums and the music.
She did not know if she believed that it made the harvest good or kept the winter winds away.
But it was beauty, and it was togetherness and it was nice.
There was nothing like that in the city, amongst her own people, who would not deign to participate in such things.
It was true what they said, that an invading force could come in and strip away all of the things that made another group of people special and unique. She had seen that it happened.
But the orcs were certainly not doing that.
They were entirely separate from the elves, treated as lesser, and there had always been strife between elves and orcs.
She wriggled out of her corset. It could likely have been looser before she had done it. It was not easy to get it off. “Do we trade with orcs in Arzakh?”
“Yes, Aerhril,” he said as if she were particularly stupid.
“Or, well,” she said, “we used to trade with them.”
“Precisely,” he said.
She pulled her shift over her head, balling it up and throwing it into a corner.
She shook out another one, a clean one, and it felt very good to have clean fabric against her skin.
She let out a whimper. “So, the orcs think, ‘If the elves will not buy things from us, we will just go and take their riches from them.’”
“Yes,” said Dathor.
“And I suppose they’ve seen those awful tracts that the High King publishes.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” she murmured. “Well, they must be very angry.” She picked up the corset and tried to pull it down over her body but it got stuck. She tried to take it off, and she couldn’t do that either.
She struggled with it for some time.
“What are you doing in there?” came his voice.
“I cannot wait for you forever, you know. If you are not put in the room with the other women soon, it will look bad for me.” A pause.
“Of course, everything I’m doing looks bad at this point.
Why I bother doing anything for you, when you do not even deserve it, is beyond me, truly, and—”
She pushed open the door. “Help me.”
He regarded her, in the bunched up corset that would not go over her breasts. “You are trying to get this on or off?”
“On,” she said.
“Why did you take it off at all?” He seized the bottom of the thing, which meant his fingers brushed parts of her breasts.
She hissed.
He yanked hard, and the corset settled properly over her body.
She jerked back from him. “I needed clean fabric against my skin.”
He flinched. He started to say something, then stopped. He rubbed a hand over his neck and studied the floor.
She backed away, back into her closet and banged the door closed on him.
“Are you all right?” he said, his voice unsteady.
She didn’t answer. She was going to start crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said in that same unsteady voice. “I did not think it all through.”
“You are not sorry,” she said tightly. “You did enjoy it. You enjoyed doing that to Celedin, humiliating him, beating him, using me to do it, and then making me watch you kill him. You enjoyed every single second of it. You have been dreaming of it for years, for your whole life, I imagine.”
There was nothing from him, not from the other side of the door.
Her hands were shaking. She had difficulty taking a dress off a hanger, but she managed to step into it and to get her arms through the thing. Then she opened the door to him again, turning her back to him.
He began to button her. “Celedin deserved it, yes, and I will never repent of doing it to him. But you did not. It was not punishment for what happened with Nathre. It was not even lust, Aerhril. It simply had to be done.”
“Stop speaking,” she said.
“I need you to cooperate with me, not to make things even harder, because if you are a problem, it will be difficult for me, and it is already difficult for me, and—”
“You are asking me for favors? Really?”
He sighed behind her. He buttoned the rest of her dress in silence.
Then he took her by the arm and jerked her out of her room. He escorted her all the way down to the south tower, where he threw her into a room with all the other women.