14
NO HOVELS FOR her, indeed.
Dathor remembered it. She’d been sixteen when they’d tried to run away together. They had not made it very far. She couldn’t pull herself up on the box car.
Dathor had been on the train, and she’d been struggling, and he’d been reaching down to help her, and she’d been falling behind, and it had been hopeless, and he had to jump out.
They went on foot for a time. He said they would try again, that they just needed practice.
They tried four or five times. She couldn’t do it. He tried once to sort of hurl her up, toss her into a box car, but that turned out to be impossible.
Night fell, and they sought shelter in some abandoned lean-to used for hunting or something. It didn’t even have four walls. He made a fire, and she was exhausted. She sobbed into him.
He’d had all these ideas of the two of them alone together on that box car, things he might do to her, with her.
He wasn’t going to… well, at that point he was still convinced he would never actually fuck her, because he was serious about never making a half-breed child.
But he remembered that one night they’d had together, her hand on his erection.
However brief it had been, he craved it.
He craved her. He wanted to see her breasts.
He wanted to uncover her and look at her between her thighs.
He wanted to pleasure her, to make her sigh and burst against him.
He didn’t know how that even worked for women, but he knew it did work, had heard enough talk from female servants to know there was a way to be good at it as a man and a way to be awful, and he wanted to be the former.
But none of that was happening, because she was exhausted and defeated and it was very cold.
She sniffled against him and said, “Neither of us know how to cook, do you realize this?”
He felt acutely stupid. He glared into the fire he’d made, which was already burning through its fuel. He needed to leave her to get more wood. They’d brought food along, of course, but he knew what she was saying. “We’ll figure it out. It can’t be so hard.”
“You mean I will,” she said. “Because cooking is for women to do, but can you imagine it, all of it? Bread and potatoes and roasting chickens and stringing beans and—”
“I can help you,” he said. “We must not think this way. We must think instead of our plan.”
“I am thinking of our plan and how it doesn’t work!” she cried. “We cannot volunteer to go across the channel to where they are giving land away to anyone who wants to farm it and make something of ourselves if no one can cook.”
“I have to go and get more wood,” he said.
“Well, no one is stopping you.”
“And I see you aren’t volunteering to help?”
“Me?” She was truly stunned. “Help how?”
“Gather some wood, perhaps?”
“Oh,” she said, as if he had just proposed that she go and take a bath in filth.
He sighed. “Never mind.” He went to get the wood himself.
When he got back, she was still sniffling, hugging her knees to her chest, the fire making changing patterns on her tearstained face.
“If you want to go back, you’ll have to go without me,” he said to her. “I can’t go back after I’ve stolen you away. You know what they would do to me.”
“I have not said anything about going back,” she said in a tiny voice.
He knelt down and began to feed the fire, not putting all of the wood he’d brought back in, but a few sticks here and there. When he had it blazing to his liking, he settled down next to her.
“The truth is,” he admitted to the flames, “I do not know if they are giving that land away. It was a rumor I had heard. Even if it is true, I’m not sure if they would give it to an orc.”
“Then I’ll go by myself to apply for it.”
“I do not know if they will give it to a woman,” he said.
She was silent for a moment, digesting this. “You did not think to explain this before?”
“No, because I wasn’t really admitting it to myself. I would think it, but then I would shove the thought away, because I didn’t want it to be true, and I wanted us to leave together.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
He put his arm around her. “We’ll figure something out. As long as we’re together, everything will be all right.”
She snuggled into him. “I feel that, too.”
But he had to admit that this had been an idea that had been more about his own ego than anything practical.
He had wanted to be able to do something for her, because he had felt inadequate for so long, as if he was barely worthy of touching the hem of her skirts, and now he was realizing that this plan was badly thought out and that they were like as not to have a number of difficulties.
But her sobs subsided and the fire was warm, and they slept.
When they woke in the morning, the fire was out and the bags they’d packed with their clothes and their food was gone.
“Where is it?” she demanded. “What have you done with our food? This is not funny, Dathor!”
He assured her that he hadn’t taken it only ten times, but she just kept getting louder and more shrill and more angry, and she would not accept that he had not taken it. She clenched her little elf hands into fists and she pounded them against his chest, and she’d never hit him before.
He grabbed her wrists, stopping her, gazing into her eyes.
“Tell me where you’ve hid them!” she said.
“You know I haven’t hid them,” he said. “You know they’ve been stolen in the night by someone who is long gone.”
She tried to pull her hands out of his grasp.
He should have let her but he tightened his grip. “I am not your servant, Aerhril,” he said. “You cannot abuse me when it pleases you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I would never hit you,” he said.
She laughed in his face. “As if it hurt, you weakling. All that talk about how I was the yellow pale thing, and it has always been you, it seems.”
He let her hands go. What had he been thinking, tying himself to this for his entire life?
She was a girl playing at being in love.
She did not understand true suffering, had never experienced it, and she was incapable of seeing him as an equal, as a man who should have respect.
Some part of her would always see him as an orc, and nothing she did to him would ever matter.
He fumed over this, but the more pressing problem was their empty bellies.
They quarreled as they made their way over the terrain.
“What are we going to do for food, then?” she said.
“Oh, I’m supposed to come up with an answer? Me? Why don’t you make a plan yourself? Why do I have to do everything?”
“I thought you wanted to prove yourself to me,” she sneered. “You were so convinced that I thought of you as lesser than me and all of that, and you wanted to be able to have done something for me to prove just how good you would be at taking care of me, I thought.”
“I never said I wanted to be your caretaker.”
“You wanted me to need you!” she cried. “And I do, and you are no good to me at all.”
As for food, their options were limited. What small amount of coin they’d been in possession of had been stolen along with everything else, and they could not buy anything.
All they could do was to steal food, but that would mean they would have to come across food, and they wandered through the craggy countryside next to the road for hours and didn’t see anything edible.
The longer they went without anything to eat, the more irritable the both of them got.
He said it, though. He said it out loud. “I don’t know why I thought you and I would ever be happy together. One sign of trouble and you go immediately to pieces. If we spent our lives together, I’d spend it constantly catering to your whims and desires, and you are spoiled.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know why I thought we’d be happy together either. I think I must have simply felt sorry for you. I think all I wanted to do was to help you get away from your horrible uncle and cousin. But now, I realize that no amount of pity could have made you less of a fiend.”
“If that’s how you feel, I don’t even know why we’re bothering to continue this,” he said.
“I don’t either,” she said.
And then she cried out in a sharp and agonized way, and even though she had been crying out and making all sorts of noises of dismay for the entirety of their journey together, this one was different and he knew it.
Something very bad had happened.
She went down onto the ground, her foot turning under her.
He went down too, and there was an ecstasy of words. Whathappened-myfoot-letmesee-doesthathurt—
She fainted into him, literally swooning, and his heart stopped beating.
He was terrified.
He hoisted her up, her body lulling, head falling back, limbs askew, and he carried her to a little spot under a rocky ledge where he could lie her down on the soft moss.
Her eyes fluttered and she regained consciousness, and she was stunned to see that she’d moved but then the pain cut into her again and she let out another of those agonized noises.
“I put down my foot and it was a hole,” she said. “And it turned, and all my weight was on it, and—”
“Hush,” he said, kneeling there to examine her foot, her ankle. It was already swelling. It was red. It was very bad. Could she have broken it, just from that?
No, it was probably just a sprain, but…
She was trying to sit up. “Give me a few moments, a quarter hour at the most, and I shall be able to continue on. I think it’s only twisted.”
“No,” he said. “You are not going to be walking on this,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”
She was sitting up now.
“Lie down,” he said to her.
“No, I’m all right,” she insisted, and then she caught sight of her ankle sitting next to its twin, and she could see how it was swollen compared to the other one. She let out a little noise of dismay. She lay back down.
“We need a horse,” he said. “And what I’ll do is lead it, gently, back to Foxglove Peak, and we will make up a story, we just need something plausible about why we’ve been away overnight.”
“We can’t go back!”