Bound to the Orc General (Brides of Grayfang Pass #1)

Chapter 1

Kael

The day began, as it always did, with a lie.

It started in my ribs, a dull, familiar ache from the bindings I’d cinched tight in the pre-dawn dark.

I’d wound the coarse linen around my chest until my lungs burned and the soft, damning proof of my womanhood was crushed into a flat, unremarkable plane.

The pain was a shield. The pain meant the lie was holding.

I swung my legs over the side of my cot, the splintered wood cold against my calves.

Our barracks were a long, drafty stone building, smelling of wet wool, stale sweat, and the damp chill that seeped through the mortar no matter how high the fires in the central hearth were stoked.

Outside, two days of relentless rain had turned the city’s dirt streets into a quagmire of thick, greedy mud.

Grayfang Pass wasn't a temporary camp; it was a scar, a fortress city carved into the foot of the mountains—humanity’s last, ugly outpost before the Orc territories. And today, it was drowning.

“Rise and shine, you miserable bastards!” Sergeant Marius bellowed, his voice a rusty saw blade against the relative peace of the morning.

A chorus of groans and curses answered him.

Around me, men stirred, shadows detaching themselves from lumpy straw mattresses.

I kept my head down, my movements economical as I pulled on my worn leather brigandine.

Keep quiet, keep small, don’t draw the eye.

It was the mantra I’d lived by for five years.

Five years since I’d last heard my own name. Five years since I’d become Kael.

It was my brother’s name. A good, strong name.

He’d died, alongside our parents, when the weeping fever swept through our village.

He was all of seventeen. I was fifteen. The fever had left me an orphan in the care of an aunt and uncle who saw me not as grieving family, but as a commodity.

A warm body to be married off to a pig-faced man of their choice to consolidate a miserable patch of farmland.

They saw a future for me filled with a swollen belly and a man’s heavy hand. A life inside four walls, my only value measured by the sons I could produce.

I saw a cage.

So I ran. I cut my hair with a stolen sheep shear, bound my chest with strips of our mother’s wedding dress, and took the only thing my brother had left to give me: his name.

I walked into a recruitment office and became Kael, a grunt in the Magistrate’s army.

A disposable boy with nothing to his name but the dirt on his boots.

It was a miserable life. But it was mine.

“Move it, Kael! Or are you planning on growing roots?”

The voice belonged to Torvin, a brute of a man with fists like ham hocks.

I grunted in response, my voice intentionally low and gravelly, a sound I’d practiced in secret until it became second nature.

I grabbed my helmet and headed for the door, but wasn't fast enough.

Torvin fell into step beside me, casually draping a heavy arm over my shoulders and leaning his full weight down on me. The top of my helmet dug into my scalp.

“Damn, you’re a short little shit,” he chuckled, using my head as a convenient armrest.

I grit my teeth, my neck muscles straining.

I was a full head shorter than most of the men here, a fact that provided them with endless amusement.

They called me "Runt" or "Pebble." They used me as a leaning post, a living joke.

Every time, raw fury coiled in my gut. The urge to drive my elbow into his ribs and my boot into his knee was a physical thing, a dragon I had to wrestle into submission a dozen times a day.

But I couldn't. A reaction like that would be noted. Scrappy was one thing; I’d earned a reputation for being a vicious little bastard in a brawl.

But there was a line. Too much pride, too much fire, and men like Torvin would decide it was their duty to beat it out of you.

And in that kind of beating, a secret like mine could easily be laid bare.

So I just shrugged his arm off with a grunt. “Piss off, Torvin.”

He just laughed, a booming sound that made my teeth ache. “Touchy this morning, Runt? Don’t worry, a little mud and misery will set you right.”

The mud was even worse than I’d imagined, a slick, brown sea of filth.

The path to the mess tent was a battle of its own.

I kept my head down, avoiding the assessing gazes of the officers.

They were the real danger. Men like Captain Valerius, who found sport in the suffering of others.

To him, we weren't soldiers; we were pieces on a game board, to be sacrificed without a second thought.

He was the kind of man who would take one look at a discovered woman, smile a slow, cruel smile, and claim her as a prize of war.

The mess hall was a cacophony of clattering metal trays and shouted conversations.

The morning stew was the consistency of dirty dishwater with a few sad, floating lumps of what might have once been a vegetable.

I ate it standing up, my back against a post, my senses on high alert.

A careless jostle, a hand landing in the wrong place…

my armor of leather and linen was all that stood between Kael the soldier and the girl he was hiding.

Joric, a grizzled lifer with more scars than teeth, sidled up to me, his bowl of stew steaming in the cold air. “Heard anything?” he asked, his voice low.

“Heard what?”

“Scout patrol came in just before dawn. Rode their horses half to death. They went straight to the Captain’s office.” His eyes, pale and washed out from years of staring at the horizon, darted around nervously. “They looked like they’d seen the devil himself.”

A cold knot formed in my stomach. “Orcs?” The word was a dry whisper.

Joric just nodded grimly. “It’s been quiet for too long, kid. The Red Tide was due.”

The Red Tide. That’s what they called the Orcish horde.

A force of nature that swept down from the mountains and washed away everything in its path.

The priests told us they were mindless savages, beasts who lived for slaughter.

But the veterans, the ones with haunted eyes like Joric, they told different stories.

Stories of terrifying discipline, of tactics that outmaneuvered our best commanders, and of their leader, a monster of a general named Korvak who had never lost a battle.

My fear of the Orcs was a deep and primal thing, fed by campfire stories of tusk and claw and the screams of dying men.

But my fear of being discovered, of being handed over to Captain Valerius, was sharper.

More immediate. I knew exactly what kind of monster he was.

The Orcs were, at least, an unknown quantity.

The sharp, shrill blast of a horn cut through the morning chatter. It wasn’t the call to muster. It was the alarm.

Every man froze. A collective silence fell over the hall, so profound you could hear the drip of water from the leaking roof. Then the great bronze bell in the central watchtower began to peal, a frantic, clanging death knell that spoke of pure panic.

Chaos erupted.

Bowls clattered to the ground. Men swore, shouting questions no one could answer.

Sergeants started roaring orders, trying to impose some semblance of order on the sudden pandemonium.

I saw Captain Valerius stride out of his tent, his face pale and tight beneath his perfectly coiffed hair.

The fear on his face was real. That, more than anything, sent a shard of ice through my veins.

“To the walls! To the walls!” Sergeant Marius screamed, his face purple with the effort. “Form ranks! Now!”

I was already moving, my body reacting on pure instinct.

I shoved through the sudden press of panicked bodies, my small size an advantage for once as I slipped through gaps in the crowd.

My spear and shield were leaning against the barracks wall where I’d left them.

My hands closed around the worn leather of the shield strap, the familiar weight a small comfort in the swirling madness.

The city had descended into pandemonium. Civilians poured from their homes, screaming. Merchants frantically tried to load carts, their panicked shouts adding to the din. The city’s disciplined military facade had cracked, revealing the terrified heart beneath.

“Kael! Joric! Torvin! North wall! You’re with me!” Sergeant Marius bellowed, grabbing men and shoving them in the right direction.

We scrambled up the stone steps to the parapet, the stone slick with mud and old rain.

From the top, the true scope of the disaster was laid bare.

It wasn't a defense being mounted; it was an evacuation. The city’s wealthy were already streaming towards the southern gate, their carts piled high with belongings, guarded by a cordon of the Captain's personal guard.

They were clogging the main thoroughfare, abandoning the city. Abandoning us.

They were running. The people we were supposed to be protecting were abandoning the city.

“What in the seven hells is going on?” Torvin breathed, his earlier bravado gone, replaced by a wide-eyed terror that made him look like a scared child.

Captain Valerius was down there, not rallying the troops, but overseeing a detachment of his personal guard at the southern gate. They weren't stopping the civilians. They were clearing a path. For themselves.

The blood in my veins turned to ice. They’re going to leave us.

The grunts, the fodder, the disposable boys like me—we were being left to hold the wall. To die on the wall. We were a speed bump. A human sacrifice to buy the officers and the wealthy a head start.

My hatred for them was so pure and hot it momentarily burned away my fear. These men, my supposed leaders, were cowards of the highest order. They would watch us get slaughtered from a safe distance and call it a strategic retreat.

“Sergeant!” a young sentry from the main watchtower yelled, his voice cracking with terror. “A rider comes! One of our own!”

We all turned, straining our eyes to look out over the plains that stretched towards the mountains. A single rider was galloping towards us, a frantic, desperate speck against the green landscape. He wasn't just riding hard; he was riding for his life.

Behind him, the earth itself seemed to darken.

At first, I thought it was a cloud shadow, a trick of the light. But it wasn't. It was a mass. A moving mass of black and green, pouring out of the foothills like a river of death. An army. So many of them that they looked like a biblical plague of locusts sent to devour the world.

My breath hitched. The stories hadn’t done it justice. The sheer scale of it was impossible. My mind couldn't comprehend the numbers.

The lone rider reached the gate, which was hauled open just long enough for him to stumble through before being slammed shut and barred. He fell from his horse, gasping for air, his face a mask of blood and terror.

“War party…” he choked out, his words carrying on the wind. “It’s not a raiding party… It’s the whole damned horde! And he’s with them! Korvak is with them!”

The name hit the wall like a physical blow. A collective gasp went through the men around me. The Bonecrusher. He was here.

Panic, which had been a frantic energy, solidified into pure, paralyzing dread. I saw one of the younger recruits, a boy no older than sixteen, drop his spear and vomit over the side of the wall.

My hands were numb on my own spear shaft. This couldn't be happening. My plan had been to serve my time, to earn my discharge, and then disappear. Find a quiet corner of the world where I could just be. Not a woman in a cage, not a boy in a barracks. Just… me.

But there was no quiet corner. There was only this flimsy wooden wall, and a tide of monsters coming to tear it, and us, to pieces. My fear was a living thing in my throat, choking me. Fear of the Orcs. Fear of the agonizing death they would bring.