Chapter 11
Kael
The chains I wore in the Orc stronghold were invisible, but they were no less real.
They were forged of silence, of staring eyes, of a language that was a locked door.
Korvak had granted me what he likely considered a great deal of freedom.
I was no longer confined to the longhouse.
I could walk the stronghold, could even venture into the surrounding woods, as long as I didn’t go past the ancient, carved marker stones that delineated the borders of the main valley.
He called it freedom. I called it a larger cage.
Everywhere I went, I was a spectacle. The human.
The General’s prize. The other Orcs watched me.
The warriors’ gazes were heavy with a mixture of suspicion and a crude, assessing curiosity.
The females… their stares were the worst. They were sharp, analytical, their eyes lingering on the way I walked, the way I wore my borrowed tunic, the way my hair was the color of fire.
I was an alien creature, a strange mare brought in to sire a new line of foals, and they were judging the quality of the stock.
I felt their judgment like a physical weight, and it drove me to seek the solitude of the forest.
The woods were the only place I could breathe. The sharp scent of pine and cold stone was a clean slate, a place where I wasn't the General's mate-to-be, but just… me.
It was on one of these walks, following a rushing stream up into the higher hills, that my mind kept betraying me, dragging me back to the training ring. Back to the sand, the steel, and the heat.
Back to the moment I was pinned beneath him.
My body remembered it with a clarity that was infuriating.
The sheer, immovable weight of him. The solid cage of his arms and legs.
I was a soldier, trained to fight, to control a situation, to never give up an inch of ground.
And he had taken all of it in a single, fluid motion.
He had stripped me of my weapon, my footing, my control, and left me utterly, completely helpless.
It should have been terrifying. And it was. The part of me that was a soldier, the part of me that had fought for every scrap of autonomy, had screamed in silent, primal terror.
But there was another part of me, a deeper, more traitorous part, that had…
responded. It was the feeling of absolute surrender.
Of being so completely overpowered that the fight simply…
ceased to be an option. There was a strange, dark freedom in that moment of helplessness.
For one heartbeat, under the crushing weight of his body, the burden of fighting, of pretending, of being Kael the grunt, had been lifted.
There was only him, a mountain of undeniable power, and me, the one who had finally been stopped.
The jolt that had gone through me hadn't just been fear.
It had been something else. Something hot and liquid and deeply, deeply shameful.
I kicked a loose stone, sending it skittering into the stream. I hated him for making me feel it. I hated myself more for not being able to forget it.
Lost in the tangled mess of my own thoughts, it took me a moment to notice that something was wrong.
It wasn't a sound or a sight, but a smell.
Faint, but sharp and unnatural. A bitter, chemical tang on the clean mountain air that didn't belong.
It reminded me of the tanneries back in Grayfang Pass.
My old instincts, dormant for weeks, snapped to life. I was no longer Kael the confused captive. I was Kael the grunt, and something was out of place on my patrol route.
I crouched by the stream, my eyes scanning the bank.
My gaze fell on a patch of moss near the water’s edge.
It was slick, iridescent with an oily, colorless sheen that clung to the green.
I dipped my finger into the water downstream from it and brought it to my nose.
The bitter scent was stronger. Poison. Not a natural toxin from some plant, but something man-made. Something brewed.
My blood went cold. This stream fed the larger river in the valley. The one the stronghold drew its water from.
Someone was trying to poison the entire clan.
I rose slowly, my hand resting on the hilt of the dagger Korvak had given me.
I scanned the woods around me. The signs were small, but to a soldier’s eye, they were as loud as a shouting man.
A branch bent the wrong way. A footprint in the soft earth, too narrow for an Orcish boot.
A piece of dark, homespun thread snagged on a thorny bush—human make.
They were close. Professionals, but not careful enough. They didn’t expect anyone to be looking this far out.
I moved into the trees, a shadow, my steps silent on the carpet of pine needles.
I followed the signs uphill, toward the spring that was the source of the stream.
My heart was a cold, hard knot in my chest. What was I doing?
My gut reaction was to find the threat, to neutralize it.
But this was a human threat. This was my people, fighting back against the Orcs who had taken our city.
I should be helping them. I should be leading them to the weakest point in the stronghold’s defenses.
But the image of the hybrid children playing in the village outpost flashed in my mind.
The memory of Grakka, her stern face breaking into a flicker of pride when I finally pronounced a difficult Orcish phrase correctly.
The sound of Korvak’s genuine, booming laughter.
Not to mention what Korvak had shared with me on my first morning here.
They weren’t just a horde of monsters. They were a people. And someone was trying to murder them in their homes.
I crept to the edge of a rocky outcrop that overlooked the spring. And I saw them.
Three men, dressed in the dark, practical leather of scout-assassins.
They knelt by the pool of crystal-clear water where it bubbled up from the earth, carefully pouring the contents of several large glass vials into the springhead.
And standing over them, his arms crossed, was a man I recognized with a sickening jolt.
Lieutenant Roric, one of Captain Valerius’s most trusted sycophants.
A cruel, ambitious man who enjoyed tormenting new recruits.
“Make sure you get all of it in there,” Roric snapped, his voice a low, unpleasant hiss. “The captain wants every last one of those green-skinned freaks pissing blood by moonrise. The females and the spawn first.”
My stomach turned to ice.
One of the scouts looked up. “And what about the humans, sir? The poison won’t know the difference.”
Roric’s smile was a thin, cruel slash in his face. “Casualties of war. They chose to live with animals, they can die with them. Consider it a cleansing.”
He was going to murder them all. The Orcs, and the humans who had surrendered. Men, women, children. It wasn’t a military strike. It was an extermination. The same quiet, cowardly genocide Korvak had told me about, come again for a new generation.
These were not soldiers. They were the true monsters.
Roric turned, and his eyes met mine.
He froze. For a moment, there was just confusion. He saw a figure in an Orcish tunic, with short red hair. He squinted, and then his eyes widened in grotesque, dawning recognition.
One of the scouts turned. “Sir, is that… Kael?”
Roric’s face twisted, a slow, ugly smile spreading across his lips.
“So it is. Kael. Or whatever your real name is.” His gaze roamed over me in a way that made my skin crawl, lingering on the curve of my hip, the line of my throat.
It was the look I had spent five years avoiding, the look that had driven me to bind my chest and lie about who I was.
“We heard rumors a little grunt bitch was hiding in the ranks and was chosen to breed the orc general. I can’t believe we never noticed. ”
One of the other scouts let out a low whistle. “Damn, sir. All that time in the barracks… all those nights. If we’d known there was a cunt hiding under that armor, things would have been a lot more fun for us.”
The casual, brutish statement landed like a punch to the gut. This was it. This was the cage I had run from, standing right in front of me with swords in their hands. This was the fate I had chosen a life of mud and misery to escape.
They began to advance on me, fanning out, their smiles predatory. They didn't see a fellow soldier. They saw a woman they had been cheated out of using.
“Don’t you worry, little girl,” Roric drawled, his voice dripping with a proprietary slime.
“You’re just in time for your rescue. You can lead us back in, show us where the big one sleeps.
We’ll cut his throat… then we’ll take you back where you belong.
You’ll have a much better time with some real men. ”
The implication hung in the air, thick and suffocating. I belonged to them. I was their property, and they were here to collect. The last piece of my old life crumbled to dust. I was done.
“No,” I said, my voice low and shaking with a rage so profound it made me feel dizzy.
Roric’s smile faltered. “What did you say?”
“I said no,” I repeated, louder this time, taking a step forward. “You are not soldiers. You are butchers. You’re poisoning women. Children.” I thought of the little girl Korvak had knelt before, the one whose life he had valued more than the cowardly merchant’s. “They are not your enemy.”
Roric actually laughed, a short, ugly bark of disbelief.
“They’re not human! They’re animals. And you seem to have developed a taste for them.
” His eyes narrowed into hateful slits. “You’re a traitor to your race.
You should be on your back for us, not for some monster.
” He spat on the ground. “An Orc-fucker.”
That was the final, clarifying truth. To him, my choice could only be a sexual one. A betrayal of my body, not my conscience. He couldn't conceive that I might simply be choosing the side that wasn't trying to murder children, because he didn't see them as children at all.
“You’re the traitors,” I bit out, pulling the dagger from my belt. “You’re traitors to everything a soldier is supposed to be.”
Roric’s face went cold. The game was over. “Kill the bitch,” he ordered. “But don’t damage the merchandise too much. After we’re done here, we’ll see what we’ve been missing all these years. Make it hurt.”
The two scouts charged me. I met the first one, my dagger a flash of steel. I was faster, more agile. I ducked under a wild sword swing and drove my blade into the soft spot under his arm. He grunted and stumbled back.
But I was one against three.
The second scout’s sword came in low, and I had to leap back to avoid it.
I felt a searing, white-hot pain in my thigh as the tip of his blade sliced through the leather of my borrowed breeches and into the flesh beneath.
A cry of pain was torn from my throat. I staggered, my leg threatening to give out.
Roric advanced, his own sword drawn, a cruel, satisfied look on his face. “You should have stayed a good little pet, Kael.”
I set my jaw, pain radiating up my leg. I was wounded, and I was outnumbered. I was going to die here. But they had made one fatal mistake. They had told me exactly what they would do to me if they took me alive. And that meant I had absolutely nothing left to lose.
I met his advance, my dagger held low, ready to sell my life for a chance to take one of them with me.