Chapter 4
ENG
The weekend crawled by. My hovel/den felt like a cage.
I paced, counting the minutes until I could go out and prowl the streets for an establishment where I would eat a meal and pass an hour or two evaluating any human female for her potential as a bride.
None appealed to me and I berated myself for my disinterest. It didn’t matter if I was interested or not.
She needed to be well-mannered, meek, obedient, and with sturdy hips to bear my offspring.
Moderately attractive would be a plus, although I didn’t need beauty in a partner to get the job done. I knew my duty.
I’d always known my duty. Every second of my life.
Here, among the humans who laughed as they spoke, their hands waving with animation, their cheeks flushed from the breezy fall weather, their hair wind-tossed, I found my thoughts straying from duty to a raven-haired female with tight muscles, dark-brown eyes, and soft skin the color of that milk-drenched coffee Ozar insisted on drinking.
She reminded me of the orc females back home. Not the ones who worked in the castle, or the ones in the town who swayed their hips in an effort to catch my eye. She reminded me of the warrior females from those stories I’d listened to with rapt attention as a young orc.
Bold. Powerful. Confident.
Not a princess.
No, not a princess, but she’d been one amazing ride—a ride I’d like to experience again.
A small voice in the back of my mind reminded me that even if I didn’t know her name, I could have Ozar ask the human woman he was convinced was his mate. But that would involve me asking Ozar for a favor. And for his strange human-mate-bond courting to last more than twenty-four hours.
And then there was the big question of why.
I’d been brought up knowing that sexual self-care was as important as eating a balanced meal, but any female could satisfy that need.
I could satisfy that need with my own hand.
Seeking out a specific human female was a waste of the time I needed to spend finding a bride and getting out of this place.
No females approached me, or even gave me a glance that would indicate they would be open to a conversation let alone a proposal of marriage, so I left the dining establishment and went for a walk, reluctant to return to the boring tiny box that the disrespectful hockey team owner insisted I live in.
The sun shone bright. The grass was still green even though the air announced the area was into their autumn.
A chill breeze tunneled through the tall buildings from the river, causing the humans to hunch down in their jackets.
Our autumn was much colder. We’d already have icy slush in the streets and snow on the nearby mountains.
Our grass would be dry and brown—what little grass there was inside the gates of the capital’s city, that is.
I had to admit that this human city was nicely organized with large community spaces, many smaller neighborhood nature areas, and even homes with enough land to support small gardens.
It gave me ideas. Our kingdom had come about as an alliance between five clans to protect against the fae during the War of Midnight.
The castle my family lived in, the city inside the gates…
all that had been planned as a place the clans could retreat to for protection if the marauding fae overcame our army and tore across our lands.
But that was a thousand years ago. And seeing the open spaces and wildlife in this human city made me think the time for change was now. Our people deserved something like this.
But my father would never agree to it. He still lived in fear of a fae attack, and that fear drove all his policy and planning.
Blinking, I looked around and realized that I’d walked to the harbor and followed the twisting line of the river around to the port.
Catching my breath, I let the impressive logistics of trade by water sweep over me.
Our navy was minuscule, serving only to protect our ports and safeguard the independent traders who paid for our protection.
The ships that delivered goods and services to our kingdom were powered by wind, sun, and magical enchantment.
They were impressive, but not nearly as impressive as these giant islands slowly being guided into large docks that were clearly constructed from steel and concrete rather than the hand of nature.
I’d seen villages smaller than these ships, and the colorful boxes stacked on the deck reached as high as some of our castle’s towers.
A mechanical claw maneuvered over one ship, picked a giant yellow box from the top of the stack, then slid it away.
The area was full of those giant, colored boxes, some on trucks lined up to leave the yard, and others sitting on the ground as humans inspected and tagged them with electronic devices.
I was fascinated. Not that we needed this level of logistics since our trade was clearly minimal in comparison, but I was still interested. What criteria allowed certain boxes to leave while others were inspected and held?
No. I wasn’t here to explore human city planning and trade logistics. I was here to find a bride. Then I would return home and get busy producing heirs. That was my duty. That was my responsibility.
With another long look at the ships and the claw and the giant boxes, I turned and walked back to my boring hovel.
The next day blurred into boredom, until I’d discovered the joy of human periodicals.
The magazine I’d snatched from Ugwyll had been interesting with pictures of beautiful, lithe human females accompanying articles that discussed their marital difficulties and interpersonal conflicts.
As attractive as the females were, I’d been alarmed at how drama-fraught their lives were.
Would it be impossible for me to find the meek and obedient female I’d been sent to wed?
Had humans changed so much over the centuries?
Once more I thought of the shrew.
I needed to stop thinking of the shrew.
Ditching Ugwyll’s magazines, I explored the stadium, digging through every unlocked office and closet.
Wasn’t like I had anything else to do.
Most of what I found was junk. Old brochures from when this had been a concert venue.
Boxes with papers covered in faded text.
Games—which I took to the locker room for the guys to occupy their time with.
It was the coach’s office where I found a stack of magazines buried in the corner of a closet behind a box labeled “coffee filters.”
By the mountain gods, these magazines had pictures of naked human females in very erotic poses. A few of them even included human males having sex with the females.
I lugged the entire stash to the locker room and selected one at random.
The other orcs had left, so I sprawled out on the scratchy carpet and paged through the magazine.
If this had been my first exposure to human women, I would have thought them all sex-obsessed with huge breasts, sunshine-colored hair, and rounded bottoms.
Again my mind drifted to a midnight-haired female with the tightest ass imaginable, powerful thighs, muscled stomach, and breasts that handily fit in my mouth.
Pushing those enticing memories away I focused on the pictures.
They reminded me of the eager women I’d bedded back home, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Flipping through the pages, I came to a section of text, a story.
It was a true retelling from a man who had delivered a pizza to a human den and had been greeted at the door by a female without clothing.
She’d brought him inside and initiated sex.
It had all ended with them naked, eating the pizza—which sounded like an ideal situation all around.
Did the shrew like pizza? I’d never had the food, but would be willing to purchase one and deliver it to her if that initiated sex.
My hand axe hardened painfully. I’d been semi-erect looking at the pictures and reading the story, but it was the thought of the dark-haired female that had me hard as steel and ready to go.
Throwing the magazine into my locker with the rest, I walked home where I tried to sleep and make it through another day in this mountain-gods forsaken place.
“What’s ‘Tinder,’” I asked Bwat one morning. “Is it a city? Because males in these magazines seem to meet a lot of females there.”
He squirmed, averting his gaze. “Look it up on your phone.”
I could have done that, but I refused to “Google” anything unless absolutely necessary. “No. Just tell me.”
“It’s an application where available females and available males meet each other,” he said.
I dug my phone out of my pocket and eyed it. An alert on the screen told me that the battery was low, whatever that meant.
“Here.” Bwat took the device. “You need to charge it every night. I’ve got a cable and plug with me.”
I rarely used the thing. It had taken me only a few weeks to learn this basic human language, and I had found the device confusing. While it would have been embarrassing and beneath me to ask Bwat for assistance, his offering it without my request made the whole thing acceptable.
“There.” The device beeped as he pugged it into a cord and the other end into the wall socket. “I’ll download Tinder for you and help you set up a profile.”
“Do you have a profile?” I asked, not knowing what a profile was but not about to admit that.
Bwat flushed, his green cheeks turning a darker, more olive-colored shade. “Yes, but none of the matches I’ve made have resulted in a date yet. I do know there are several princesses there looking for marriage though.”
I sat up straight, eyeing the phone. Human princesses? My father would be ecstatic if I were to bring home human royalty as a bride. I mean, human was human and no female would ever be considered quite the equal of an orc, but a female of status here would absolutely impress our populace.
While we were waiting for my phone to “charge,” Bwat took a picture of me with his device, then began grilling me about my kingdom and my prospects. Minutes later I had a “profile” on Tinder announcing that I was searching for a bride.
Mountain Gods above, if only I had known it was this easy. All these weeks prowling the streets, getting wide-eyed alarm from the human females I’d approached… This stupid human device that I’d scorned since we’d arrived might be the key to my finding a bride and getting out of here.
Bwat showed me how to “swipe right” on matches and how to reply to messages. By the time I’d arrived home I had two hundred matches and a dozen messages from females willing to be my princess.
Which bothered me. There had been plenty of eager females back home, but father had insisted I needed to set an example and be the first from our kingdom to bring home a human bride.
Fine. Pick one of these and leave. It should be easy, but every time I clicked on a profile, I got an uncomfortable feeling that these females were too willing and too eager.
Meek. Obedient.
I stared dead-eyed at the images, reading the messages that felt so flat and canned. In the end I finally picked the least nausea-inducing of the matches and swiped right, composing a short and to-the-point message.
Then I tossed the phone on my sofa and went to bed, enduring yet another night in this hell hole.