Chapter 8
KHALA
This place was Grat’s, and I felt his presence in every detail. His pine-soap scent lingered in the cabin. The firewood he’d chopped lay neatly stacked by the fire pit. The coals in the fire he’d made to cook us breakfast were still warm. But he was gone.
We’d loaded all the meat from the cellar into a giant wicker basket with shoulder straps. He heaved it onto his wide back, gave me one last hug and the sweetest forehead kiss, then marched off into the wetlands.
I did the dishes after breakfast, swept the cabin’s floor, then wondered what else to do.
With no traps to set or check, there wasn’t much work for me here.
I considered doing some laundry and inspected the barrel tub that Grat had positioned over the river-rock stove.
The tub was too big and a little too high to do laundry in.
But I could use it to heat enough water to wash the sheets for our bed.
I had never laundered sheets before. But I had helped with washing baby clothes in the village in our estate. Rolly and I used to visit the villages often when my husband was alive. I would use any excuse to get out of the palace and escape the High Lord’s company.
Grat normally carried the water for his baths straight from the creek, using two giant tin buckets. I’d have to make at least four times as many trips to fill it to the same level. But I could build something that wouldn’t require either of us to carry any buckets.
Stepping back a little, I estimated the distance between the creek and the tub, noted the speed and the direction of the current, then located the few trees I could possibly use to stabilize the joining points.
Pipes were necessary to build a proper water pump, especially one powered by steam. But since there weren’t any pipes at the cabin, I could use wooden grooves and a water wheel instead of a pump.
The prospect of a new project filled me with excitement. Since I was a kid, I’d always had something on the go, and I didn’t even realize how much I’d missed it lately.
As a child, I started out with simple mechanical things. But once I’d learned about the many uses of the steam engine, I started coming up with more complex but also far more practical things.
My parents kept my “tinkering” a secret from the public, afraid that such a lowly and unladylike occupation would deter potential suitors.
My husband mostly indulged me for the first year of our marriage.
He even allowed me to use a part of the horse stables to set up a workshop, “just to give her something to do,” he used to tell the visitors to our palace.
That was when I built a steam-powered wheelchair for Rolly so that he could easily join me on all my walks.
Eventually, my husband’s healers decided that my “tinkering with metals” and “too much thinking about things” might be detrimental to my ability to conceive an heir, so he promptly put an end to all my projects and ordered my workshop dismantled.
I cried myself to sleep that night after he’d left my chambers. But weeks after his funeral, I built an even bigger workshop, with a forge and a spacious courtyard for all my trials and experiments.
The years after my husband’s death had been the happiest years of my life. I’d made many improvements to the estate that even the king’s palace didn’t have. I’d brought in running water, built steam-powered mills, and even created a machine that helped the farmers plow their fields each spring.
The workshop was gone now, along with the estate. All I had left was the title of the High Lord’s widow and the royal blood in my veins, both of which Reizon wanted. But I certainly could make filling a bathtub easier for a certain orc who loved bathing.
I chopped down a few thick stalks of giant bluestem plants growing around the creek.
Mostly hollow inside, they made the perfect half-pipes after I’d split them in half lengthwise and scraped out the soft flesh inside.
Then I fitted the half pipes into a single track that ran from the creek to the tub.
Fully absorbed by my work, I didn’t stop for lunch.
After breakfast, I’d put a sandwich with blood sausage in the pocket of my tunic. Ever since my nearly starving in the woods alone, I felt less anxious when I had some food with me now, even if I wasn’t hungry. But I didn’t want to stop working on my project even to eat lunch.
If I had more time, I’d build a small turbine up the creek where the current was stronger rushing down the rocks.
The turbine would turn the wheel with the rope that I had attached several buckets to for scooping the water from the creek.
I’d also build in a gauge with a stopper to shut the water off when the tub was filled and a steam whistle that would go off once the water had heated to a preset temperature.
For now, however, I’d have to use a manual pulley system to turn the wheel.
I wondered what Grat would think about all those improvements. Would he be happy to have more time to spend in the tub instead of spending it to fill it? More time to do the things he did to me in that tub…
The hot memory of his thick fingers thrusting inside me made my inner muscles clench. I missed his touch, not just his hand between my legs and his tongue on my breasts, but also his bear hugs and his bed cuddles.
His rejection stung, and I pondered what I could’ve possibly done to make him push me away like he did on our last morning together.
“Our brains don’t work the same,” he’d said.
Maybe a month or two ago, I would’ve agreed that I had nothing in common with a bog orc from the distant Wetlands.
I grew up believing that bog orcs were uncivilized brutes who did little other than fighting and reproducing.
The nobles at King Belin’s court talked about bog orcs as far inferior to humans and closer to animals in their intelligence.
Like apemen or “wild things” that Grat called them.
Like me.
The thought lanced through my mind, nearly making me drop my tool in the water as I stood waist deep in the creek, fitting the rope with buckets to the spokes of the wheel.
Grat genuinely believed I was one of the apemen, the species with the intelligence level of a toddler. He said he’d be taking advantage of me if we had sex. To him, making love to me must feel something like…fucking a monkey?
Bile rose to my throat as my stomach hollowed with the realization. No wonder he was ashamed of his erection in my presence. He let me sleep in his bed, like I used to let my cats sleep in mine. But Grat didn’t want to see me as a woman.
It was my fault. I never corrected him when he assumed I was an apewoman. He didn’t know the truth, because I never told him. I even tried to play the part of a “wild thing” by speaking little and replying in short sentences at first. I had only myself to blame for all his assumptions.
I still couldn’t tell him the truth, but I could prove to him that I was no less intelligent than him.
Spurred by this new motivation, I tied the rope around the end of each spoke, tugging at it a little too aggressively as anger simmered inside me.
He thought I was just an ape?
He was kind to me like he would be to a pet?
“We’ll see what you’ll have to say about my brain now, dear Grat,” I argued under my breath with the orc who wasn’t there.
“Maybe I’ll build that turbine too, and the whistle, and a steam engine to rotate mini propellers inside the tub for a whole body water massage.
I’ll show you what this wild thing can do. ”
I yanked at the rope, turning the wheel. The first bucket plunged into the water with a splash, spooking a small school of fish. They scurried away in every direction, like silver shooting stars in the clear water.
A long, dark shape slinked through the current, chasing the fish. Gasping, I didn’t even pause to see what the shape was. If there was one thing the Wetlands had taught me, it was that many scary things lived here and it was best to run first and ask questions later.
Spurred by alarm, I screamed, dropped the bucket, and rushed out of the water.
With a splash behind me, something slammed against my back, shoving me into the wet dirt and tall grass. I fell forward, with my face down. I tried to gather my legs under me to get up, but the weight of the predator on top of me pushed me back into the ground.
I twisted around and froze, now facing a set of sharp red teeth bared at me.
Water dripped from the monster’s short black fur. Its pointy ears lay flat against its narrow head. Its yellow eyes stared down at me, and its huge front paws pressed on my chest.
A menacing growl reverberated through its large slick body. Saliva dripped from its teeth a hairbreadth away from my face.
Horror gripped me, freezing my insides. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t breathe with the monster standing on my chest. I waited in terror for those teeth to sink into my neck, but the monster didn’t move, just stared and growled at me.
I slowly moved my hand to my pocket and found the soggy sandwich that was supposed to be my lunch.
“Have it!” I tossed it as far away from me as I could.
The monster leaped after it.
I scrambled to my feet and ran to the cabin. I didn’t look back until I was inside, then I slammed the door closed and bolted it shut.
Leaning with my shoulder against the locked door, I pressed my ear to the wood. I expected to hear growls on the other side of the door. Some disappointed howling maybe? From the monster whose prey had gotten away? But all seemed quiet.
A moment later, I ventured a careful peek out of the window.
The monster had found my sandwich and gobbled it up in a few bites. Then it sniffed the area around the place where the sandwich had been, as if hoping to find more.