Chapter 12
Korvak
The first sign that something was wrong was the silence.
My longhouse, which had for weeks been filled with the low, constant presence of her—the soft scuff of her boots, the rustle of a page as she studied the Orcish histories my mother had given her, the quiet clatter of a knife as she prepared food—was utterly, unnervingly still.
An empty space had opened up in the air, a vacuum where her energy should have been.
I had grown accustomed to her presence in a way that had crept up on me, a slow, insidious vine wrapping itself around my core.
My day was now bracketed by the sight of her in the morning and the quiet tension of her presence across the hearth at night.
Her absence was not just a lack of noise; it was a physical hollowness in the home we now shared.
At first, I told myself it was nothing. I had given her the freedom of the valley.
She was exploring, pacing off the demons of her confinement as she so often did.
But a cold knot of unease began to twist in my gut.
She had been gone too long. The sun was beginning its slow descent toward the jagged peaks of the western ridge.
I left the longhouse and scanned the stronghold. She was not by the training rings. Not at the forge, where she sometimes watched the blacksmiths with a strange, hungry look in her eyes. Not with my mother.
The unease curdled into a low, primal dread.
I did not call for a search party. I did not alert the guards. This was a male, consumed by a sudden, irrational certainty that something was deeply, horribly wrong. I strode from the gates, my hand resting on the hilt of my axe, and headed for the woods.
The higher I climbed into the hills, the more the feeling of wrongness solidified. And then I smelled it. Two scents, hitting the wind at the same time, a combination so vile it sent a jolt of pure, atavistic rage through my very soul.
The first was the scent of her blood. It was faint, but unmistakable to my senses, a thin, coppery thread of alarm on the clean mountain air.
The second was the smell of poison. A cold, bitter, tang.
The two scents, her blood and poison, intertwined in my mind and broke something inside me. The world narrowed to a tunnel of red-hazed fury. Every instinct screamed a single, coherent command: Find her. Kill what is hurting her.
I moved through the woods not as an Orc, but as an avalanche. I did not care for stealth. I snapped branches, my heavy boots churning the earth, my speed a blur of deadly purpose. The scent of her blood grew stronger, leading me uphill, toward the springhead.
Then I heard it. The clang of steel. A man’s cruel laugh. And her grunt of pain.
I burst through the tree line into the clearing by the spring. The scene that met my eyes seared itself into my brain. Three human males, dressed in the filth of the Magistrate’s kill squads. One lay on the ground, clutching a wound under his arm. The other two were advancing on Kael.
She was backed against a rock, a bloody gash high on her thigh staining her leather breeches a dark, sickening crimson.
She was pale with pain and blood loss, but she held the dagger I had given her in a white-knuckled grip, her body a taut line of pure, defiant fury.
She was a cornered wolf, wounded and outnumbered, ready to tear out the throat of the hunter who came for her.
The sight of them, leering at her, their swords raised against her wounded form, shattered the last vestiges of my control.
A roar was torn from the depths of my being. It was a pledge of absolute, annihilating violence.
The three humans spun around, their faces—a moment ago so full of smug cruelty—contorting into masks of pure, abject terror. They had been so focused on their small, wounded prey they had not sensed the apex predator stalking up behind them.
I did not give them time to think, to regroup, to beg.
The one closest to me was my first target.
He tried to bring his sword up, a pathetic, panicked gesture.
I was already on him. My axe was a blur of dark iron.
It took him high in the chest, the heavy blade shearing through leather, ribcage, and spine with a sound like a great tree splitting in a storm.
I tore the axe free in a spray of gore and turned on the second.
He was smarter. He screamed and threw his sword at me, a desperate, useless act, and tried to run. I let my axe go, spinning it end over end. It caught him between the shoulder blades, burying itself to the haft in his back. He fell without another sound.
The third, the one she had already wounded, was scrabbling backward on the ground, his eyes wide with horror, crab-walking away from the carnage. I stalked toward him, my bare hands clenched into fists that ached to crush and break. He whimpered, a high, thin sound.
“Please… mercy…”
I looked from his pathetic, terrified face to Kael. She was still leaning against the rock, her leg now trembling violently, but her eyes—her beautiful, stormy eyes—were fixed on me, wide with a mixture of shock, pain, and something I couldn't decipher.
I had no mercy left for the creature that had made her bleed. My boot slammed down on his sword hand, shattering the bones with a wet crunch. He shrieked. I reached down, grabbed him by the throat, and lifted him from the ground. His feet kicked uselessly in the air.
“You… hurt… her,” I snarled, the words in the common tongue a guttural, broken thing, forced from a throat raw with rage.
I squeezed. There was a sharp crack of bone, and then he went limp, a dead weight in my grasp. I tossed the corpse aside like a piece of refuse.
The red haze of my rage receded, the fire banked by the sudden, chilling silence. It was replaced by a cold, sharp terror that was a thousand times worse.
Kael.
I turned to her. She was sliding down the face of the rock, her wounded leg giving way, a fresh wave of blood staining the ground beneath her.
“Kael!” Her name was a raw sound, torn from my lungs.
I was at her side in two great strides, my boots skidding in the slick, poisoned mud. I went to my knees before her, my hands hovering, terrified to touch her, terrified not to. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow and fast.
“The water…” she rasped, her eyes fluttering. “Poison… they…”
“Hush,” I commanded, my voice rough with a frantic tenderness I did not know I possessed. “Do not speak.”
My gaze fell on the gash in her thigh. It was deep, bleeding freely. Too much blood. She was losing too much blood. My own blood ran cold.
I ripped a length of cloth from the tunic of a dead man and pressed it hard against the wound. She cried out, a sharp, choked sound of pain that felt like a dagger twisting in my own gut.
“I have you,” I murmured, the words a raw, desperate prayer. “I have you.”
There was no time. The Healer. I needed to get her to Zogga.
I gathered her into my arms, my movements as gentle as I could manage with a body built for war. She was impossibly light, a fragile bird in my grasp. She whimpered as I lifted her, her head falling against my shoulder. Her blood soaked into my tunic, a warm, wet stain over my heart.
The journey back to the stronghold was a blur of focused terror. I ran. I did not feel the branches that whipped at my face or the stones that turned under my boots. My entire world had narrowed to the precious, wounded weight in my arms and the desperate need to keep her breathing.
I burst through the gates of the stronghold like a storm, roaring for the Healer. Orcs scattered before me, their faces shocked as they saw their General, covered in fresh blood, carrying the limp form of the human female.
I did not stop until I was inside Zogga’s lodge. It was a longhouse filled with the smells of drying herbs, moss, and clean smoke. Zogga, the clan’s Healer, was an old, stoic female with hands as gnarled as ancient roots. She took one look at Kael and her expression hardened.
“On the furs. Now,” she commanded, and I obeyed instantly, laying Kael down on a clean bed of furs with a reverence I would not have shown a king.
Just as Zogga began to cut away the blood-soaked leather of Kael’s breeches, my brother, Kazgar, entered, his face a grim mask.
“What has happened, brother?” he demanded.
Before I could answer, Kael stirred. Her eyes fluttered open, hazy with pain but sharp with purpose. She looked at Kazgar. “The springhead,” she whispered, her voice a thread. “They poisoned it. The humans… a kill squad…”
Kazgar’s face went rigid. He looked at me, his eyes wide with horror and understanding. He didn’t need any more explanation. He spun on his heel and bellowed an order to the guard at the door. “Sound the alarm! No one is to drink from the river! No one! Secure the springhead! Now!”
The alarm horn began to blow, its urgent, deep notes echoing through the valley. The clan, which moments before had been peaceful, was now a flurry of disciplined action. Kael had saved them. This small, wounded human had saved my people from a cowardly, agonizing death. The debt was incalculable.
My attention was solely on her. Zogga was cleaning the wound, stitching it closed with a practiced, steady hand. I hovered nearby, a useless, hulking mountain of anxiety.
“She is strong,” Zogga said, not looking up from her work. “The blade missed the artery. She has lost much blood, but she will live.”
The relief that washed over me was so profound it almost brought me to my knees.
“You should be pleased, General,” Zogga continued, her voice dry as she packed the wound with a poultice of healing herbs.
“To have found one with such a spirit.” She finally looked up, and her ancient, wise eyes seemed to see straight through my armor, into the frantic, terrified heart of the beast within.
“The wound on her leg will heal. It is the one in your chest that I cannot tend to.”
Once she was bandaged, I gathered Kael into my arms once more and carried her home.
My mother met us at the door, her face a mask of stone that did not quite hide the fear in her eyes.
Together, we settled Kael into my bed, piling the furs high around her.
Grakka brewed a bitter, steaming tea to ward off fever, and held the cup to Kael’s pale lips herself.
Throughout the evening, a strange thing began to happen.
A silent procession. One by one, warriors and artisans and even other females would appear at the door of my longhouse.
They would not speak. They would simply place a gift on the threshold and retreat.
A perfectly cured wolf pelt. A small, intricately carved bone charm.
A string of smoked fish. A waterskin of the oldest, strongest mead.
It was tribute. It was thanks. It was an acknowledgment.
She had earned her place.
I sat on the rug by the hearth all night, watching her sleep in the flickering firelight, the pile of tributes growing by the door. I listened to the soft, steady sound of her breathing.