24 #2
“You’re being ridiculous,” she said. “You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. You will be happier there. Perhaps it isn’t going to be perfect, but nothing is perfect, Dathor. We cannot have anything else.”
“I am not coming along,” he said.
“So you’re going to stay here,” she said.
“Well, not forever, I suppose, but just until I can find a way to get free. Perhaps I’ll go to the seas and make my fortune as a pirate.
Perhaps I’ll go across the channel to the unclaimed lands and find gold and jewels.
Who knows. I’ll come back, and I’ll be rich and I’ll have everything, and you’ll be heavy with his child and so disappointed that you didn’t wait for me and—”
“If you were capable of this,” she said. “The time to have done it was months ago, you fool. You have these fantasies, but you just stay here, content to have me suckle you, to spill your seed down my throat and never change anything—”
“You are betraying me.”
“I am doing this for both of us,” she said. “Yes, it requires some sacrifices—”
“No sacrifices on your part,” he said. “You get to be his wife. You get to have us both.”
She glared at him. “You’ll change your mind. You’re angry, of course you are, but you’ll think it through and you’ll come along and we’ll make the best of it somehow.”
“If I asked you to choose me, you would not,” he said.
“Choose what?” she said. “Choose nowhere to live, no money at all, everyone despising us, no children of our own, living in hiding? There’s nothing about us together we can choose, Dathor. You know it. I know it. This is impossible with us.”
He sucked in a noisy breath through his nose and clenched and opened his fists. He did not disagree with her.
DATHOR WATCHED ELRION go in to speak to Celedin and he watched him come back out, red faced, frustrated, walking very quickly.
The offer for Aerhril had been refused, it seemed.
This pleased him. He went about his chores with a skip in his step, though he wondered why, because it was only prolonging the inevitable. She was going to marry some elf, and if it wasn’t Elrion, it was going to be Celedin.
He thought about Celedin, his childhood tormentor, the man who sometimes threw himself at him in a rage and slashed him to bits with knives, the man who paid others to hold Dathor down while he pummeled him.
That man sticking his prick into his Aerhril.
She was correct. He was cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Elrion was obviously the better choice of two evils. But admitting it, it was like admitting defeat. He realized, of course, he was living in some fantasy world, some pretend place where he got to have things that he was never going to get to have.
You do not get an elf wife. You do not get to be with her in front of others. She will never claim you. You will always be her filthy, shameful secret.
Elrion was back the next day. He summoned Aerhril to the sitting room and kissed her in front of Celedin, that was what Dathor heard.
He didn’t see it. Celedin was angry, but Elrion said that she was already marked as his now, tainted by his claim, and that Celedin should simply take the money and go along with it.
Celedin raged and the steward insisted on driving the bride price up to something astronomical, especially when he found out that Elrion wanted Dathor, too, and Dathor owed him money for when he had kept him as a child.
But Elrion agreed to all of it.
And that night, Dathor slumped in the corner of the stables in the darkness and sobbed.
After he was able to stop crying, he crept into her room and awakened her in her bed.
She reached for him, but he didn’t touch her.
“I will come along,” he said. “I would be a fool else.”
She sat up. “Good. I knew you would—”
“But we must…” He touched her hair, fingering a lock of her golden tresses. “We must be realistic about this, I suppose.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
He let her hair trail through his fingers until he was no longer touching it, no longer touching her. “I relinquish whatever claim I thought I had on you.”
She only blinked at him.
“Now,” he said, “you relinquish your claim on me.”
“What does that even mean?” she said.
“It means that we no longer expect the other to… be with us and only us, I suppose.”
“Are you done with me? Are you punishing me because I—”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be done with you,” he said in a choked voice. “I don’t think I could be even if I tried. But I must stop thinking this means that we have some future together. We don’t. You must have your future with him, and I must… have whatever future I have.”
“Maybe you can make something of yourself if you are away from this place,” she said. “You could study things, like Igbar with his herbs, or you could—”
“Yes, maybe,” he cut her off. Though he thought he was never going to be much good at anything besides horses and lifting heavy things and, well, fighting.
She smiled, beckoning. “Come, then. Let me see to you.”
He wanted nothing more than to let her pleasure him. His cock even stirred at the thought of it, but he shook his head and backed away. “No, no, I cannot just now.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Tell me about kissing him. What was it like?”
She huffed. “It wasn’t like anything. It wasn’t a real kiss. It was pointed, for Celedin’s benefit. He didn’t even use his tongue. He just smashed his lips into mine and moved his head around for several moments. It was nothing. I do hope he doesn’t think that was a real kiss.” She made a face.
He didn’t say anything.
“Oh, don’t be jealous, Dathor. Between you and him, there is no comparison. I could never feel for him the way I feel for you.”
No, but what she felt for him she could never feel for Dathor. Because Elrion was capable of rescuing her. He had money. He had so many things that Dathor did not have and would never have.
“All right,” he said. “I will endeavor not to be jealous.”
He left and he staggered into town and tried to drink in a tavern.
Well, he successfully drank in the tavern for a time, but then the owner came to him and said that the others were getting restless, not liking the sight of an orc sitting there, drinking ale, and would he mind going?
If he would leave quietly, he could have a bottle of mead on the house.
So, he took the free mead and went staggering on his way, drinking the entire bottle on his way to Thelandel Chapel. He was not certain when it was he’d decided to go there, but it had definitely been a drunken decision.