33
DATHOR BUNDLED HER off to bed early that night, making the excuse of their long journey to say that they were exhausted and must get some rest.
She was yawning as he helped her out of her dress. Even if he’d wished to be at her again—though he knew he shouldn’t, not if she was still sore—he was prevented because she was asleep almost immediately.
He’d been sleeping next to her for weeks now, and he was already accustomed to the intimacy of it, the sweet soft casual closeness of their sharing a bed. He thought of giving her up, sleeping alone again, and it made him feel a cold kind of resistance to such a thing.
He was up early in the morning, leaving her to her own devices for the day, and he spent the entire day in a council meeting with the chieftain and his advisors, and it was like being back in Arzakh again, only the chieftain wasn’t listening to him anymore, and he wondered if it was because he’d brought her along.
He likely should not have brought her along, not if he was being rational about everything. He had never been rational about her, however.
The orcs were very resistant to the alliance with the Valaedor, and none of his arguments were landing very well with them.
He was talking about logic, about infrastructure, about the complicated nature of the entire system of government here, how there were treaties to be kept up with the dwarves, expeditions being funded to far-off lands, and this was not to mention everything that was being taken care of here in Lothnehil.
He made speeches about how toppling the elves’s systems would disrupt the entire economic system, that there would be no food and the trains would stop running and the schools would all close, and everything would be chaos, but they didn’t care, because this was not their home.
They didn’t have trains in Arzakh. They did not have imports of silks or spices or hothouse oranges or anything of that nature, only what could be smuggled over the pass, and the Rathog Pass was now increasingly a one-way journey.
The orc army had come a different way entirely for this invasion, in fact. They’d come over the mountains, using a route that was longer and more treacherous but had enabled them to arrive in the elves’s country in vast numbers with no one the wiser.
At any rate, he was realizing the orcs’ motivation in coming here was destruction. They wanted the elves to suffer. He understood that notion, because it had also been his motivation for wanting to come back. The desire to burn everyone down who had hurt him, to raze it all to the ground.
Except now he understood that if everything was rubble, it benefited no one.
However, nothing he was saying on that subject was getting through to them.
Days passed, and they silenced him more often than not, and he was running out of ways to try to convince them.
He also could not keep retiring early from dinner. He and Aerhril stayed to the periphery, though, but they could not help but watch. It wasn’t only Larha that was part of the orgiastic activities. There were a few other elf women, some orc women, too, and everyone was drunk.
The women were pulled out of their chairs and onto the laps of the orc soldiers, usually sometime during the last course of the meal.
The orcs would begin by exploring under the women’s clothing, but soon enough, articles of clothing would be pushed out of the way, removed, or even outright ripped, and there would be a round, rosy-tipped pale elf breast that appeared, squeezed and cupped and stroked by thick green-gray orc fingers.
There weren’t enough women to go around, so the orcs on either side of the one who had a woman in his lap would join in, removing the elf woman’s clothing, baring both of her breasts, baring her long, slender legs and her tidy quim tucked between them.
And soon enough there were orc cocks buried in every available orifice of each elf woman and in the orc women, too.
It happened every night, and Dathor and Aerhril watched it happen, and then, as the hour grew later and later, as the orc gazes began to roam over Aerhril, he would put her behind him, and begin to guide them both into the shadows, so that they could fade out of sight and make their escape without anyone noticing.
Afterward, Aerhril would climb him in their bedchamber. They would get back behind closed doors and she would already be wet from watching and he would be aroused too.
She asked him if it was just like that with the orcs, did they have some kind of culture where they did things on display like that.
“No,” he said. “No, everyone’s gone mad.”
Some of the elf women were clearly being abused, and he could see it, could tell that they were beaten somewhere, their eyes glazed over from too much pain, too many times being forced to take orc cock in their cunts and mouths and arses.
But it was more than the pain, as he well understood.
It was the way that one lost control over one’s own body.
He had lived that way for too long, his limbs and chest and legs and fingers and toes not his own. His self the property of others, who did with him as they chose.
This was not what he wanted, not for the orcs to simply visit this on the elves.
Oh, but isn’t it what you wanted? a voice would speak up in the recesses of his brain. Isn’t it what you gloried in when you slashed Celedin’s throat? Did you not simply want them to hurt the way you hurt?
It was different. Celedin deserved it. These elf women were not exactly innocent, because they had, and likely still did, think of themselves as superior to the orcs. But it was too brutal a punishment for the crime, in his opinion.
At any rate, enough of the women were like Larha that everything about it was confusing.
She was eager for them all, and they liked her eagerness.
She would be shared amongst five of them, but two of them would be pleasuring her, attached to suckle her nipples or toy with her engorged clitoris.
She would be crammed full of them, moaning around the orc cock stretching her lips, both of her holes penetrated, and she was not pretending to like it, she did like it, and it was this, these sorts of women, these sorts of displays that meant that he and Aerhril were rabid for each other every night.
Well.
He didn’t want to admit it, maybe, that he took some kind of perverse pleasure in watching the women in pain. He didn’t want to look at that part of himself. He didn’t know how to look at it.
He was beginning to feel an emotion that he had not felt very much of in his life, truly.
Guilt.
All the guilt he’d felt thus far in his life had mostly had to do with her, with Aerhril. He had not wished ever to hurt her. He had felt regret when he did. He had striven not to do so, though sometimes he had perhaps hurt her on purpose, because of…
Well, things had been different then.
He had not been free in this way, not as he was now. It changed things within him.
One afternoon, as he was leaving the council room, he noticed that one of the orc warrior women was watching him.
He met her gaze.
He did not remember her name. There were no elf warrior women, so far as he knew, but there used to be, if the elves’s folklore stories were any indication. Somehow, as time had marched on, the elf men had pushed all the women out of the fighting.
There were not a number of orc women in the armies, but there were some.
If an orc woman wished to pursue fighting, she had to be unmarried and to refuse to share the bed of any man.
She was supposed to be a perpetual virgin, he understood, because if she was ever to lose her purity, she would lose her fighting prowess.
But this tended to be the way it was supposed to be, not the way it actually was.
Those sorts of orc women had their pick of men, even if the army traveled with some orc women—sometimes wives of the officers, sometimes strumpets or whores, that sort of thing—because there were still less women than there were men.
The warrioresses were sought after. They were capable of defending themselves, and if a man attempted to defile a warrioress, the punishment was swift death, so if an orc tried to force himself on one, either she’d kill him or he’d be executed on the spot by someone else.
Those women were safe enough.
Even so, there weren’t many of them, and they were never included in the council meetings. This one, he had seen her on the periphery from time to time, and he had noted her precisely because it was odd to see a woman there.
She held his gaze as he looked at her now.
He took this as an invitation and made his way over to her. But when he got there, they simply looked at each other and neither spoke.
Finally, she said, “You are going to find your elf maiden, I suppose? Going to meet her for tea?”
The orcs had adopted the meal structure of the elves here, who had—in turn—adopted the meal structure of the southern elves.
It was interesting the way that they did this, as if everyone agreed the Valaedor elves were to be envied and copied, even if everyone also wanted to gut them and destroy them.
In the north, there were three meals, breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, and dinner was served in the early evening.
In the south, there were four, and the first four were all meager. A lateish breakfast, a luncheon a few hours later, and then the third meal, tea, earlier than dinner might be served, but later in the afternoon.
Confusing this practice was the fact that visitors might be received between luncheon and tea, and these visitors would be served tea, but that was not the meal tea.
The final meal, dinner, was served late, usually after eight o’clock, and it was the only very substantial meal, with a number of courses.
He had not known all this himself. Aerhril had explained it to him, though she said it was something observed mostly by the highest echelon of the upper classes in the Vale, that her family had not been rich enough to indulge.