Chapter 2 Blorjorn
TWO
BLORJORN
The human woman stumbles again.
I slow my pace without looking back, giving her time to find her footing. The chain between us clinks with every step—a sound that grates against my skull, a constant reminder of what I’ve done.
Claimed a human. Like a weapon. Like spoils.
The thought sits wrong in my chest, heavy and sharp-edged. I’ve claimed many things in my hundred forty years. Territory. Trophies. The axes at my belt still warm from fresh blood. Never a person.
But Grothak breathes because of her. His heart beats because she knelt in the dirt and stitched him back together while her own people hunted her. Among my kind, debts are promises. I cannot simply release her and pretend otherwise.
It would shame me. It would shame the Blackbone. And shame among orcs cuts deeper than any blade.
The war camp rises from the grassland ahead—canvas tents snapping in the hot wind, smoke curling from cook fires, the low growl of orcish voices carrying across the plain.
Home, such as it is. Fifty-three warriors and a handful of support who keep us fed and armed.
We’ve been moving for three days, staying ahead of the human patrols, and everyone is tired and hungry and on edge.
Bringing a human woman into this camp is going to make everything worse.
I do it anyway.
The sentries see us first.
Karth and Dunna, posted on the southern approach, both of them going still as stone when they spot the human stumbling behind me. Karth’s hand drops to his axe. Dunna’s nostrils flare, scenting.
“Captain.” Karth’s voice is carefully neutral. “You’ve brought... something back.”
“A healer.” I don’t slow down. “She saved Grothak’s life.”
That stops whatever protest was forming on Karth’s tongue.
Grothak is popular—loud and warm and quick to share his rations, the kind of orc who makes a war band feel like family instead of just a fighting unit.
Word of his injuries spread through camp before I left to track down his attacker.
Word of a human healer saving him will spread even faster.
Whether that works in her favor or against it remains to be seen.
The camp swallows us.
Tents of cured leather stretched over bone-pole frames, decorated with clan markers and trophy skulls.
Weapons racks bristling with axes and spears.
The hulking shapes of war-wolves chained at the perimeter, yellow eyes tracking our movement, lips curling back from fangs longer than my fingers.
The central fire pit blazes hot enough to forge metal, warriors gathered around it, gnawing on roasted meat and speaking in the guttural cadence of old orcish.
Every single one of them stops talking when they see the human.
She hesitates behind me, the chain going taut between us.
Her fear hits my nose—sharp and acrid, cutting through the camp smells of smoke, sweat, and cooking meat.
I don’t blame her. Fifty orcs staring at her with various expressions of hunger and hostility would make anyone’s survival instincts scream.
“Captain!” Fenrik’s voice, too loud and too eager, cuts through the silence. The young warrior bounds toward us, all gangly limbs and barely-grown tusks, his bright green skin practically glowing with excitement. “You found the raiders? Is that—is that a human?”
“Your powers of observation are truly remarkable.” I keep walking. Fenrik falls into step beside me, practically vibrating with questions I have no intention of answering.
“But why is she chained? Did you capture her? Is she a prisoner? Can I—”
“Fenrik.” One word. I don’t raise my voice. I never raise my voice.
He goes quiet instantly, though his mouth keeps working like he’s physically struggling to hold back the flood of words. I make a mental note to assign him extra patrol duty. Burn off some of that energy before he annoys the human to death.
The healer’s tent sits near the center of camp—close to the fire, close to my own shelter, where the wounded can be tended efficiently.
Grothak lies inside on a pile of furs where my soldiers laid him already, his chest wrapped in bloody bandages, his breathing shallow but steady.
The work the human woman did was good. Better than good.
Our own healers couldn’t have matched it.
She notices him immediately. Her body shifts, posture changing from hunched and defensive to something sharper. Focused. She catalogs his condition in a glance—the rise and fall of his chest, the color of his skin, the way his fingers twitch against the furs.
“He needs water.” Her voice comes out hoarse. She clears her throat, tries again. “And someone should check those bandages. If the bleeding started again during transport—”
“You’ll check them.” I reach for the key at my belt. The manacle around her wrist clicks open. “That’s why you’re here.”
She freezes, staring at her freed wrist like she doesn’t quite believe it. The skin beneath the iron is red and raw—I kept the manacle loose, but iron against flesh still chafes. Another mark I’ve left on her.
Add it to the list.
“I could run.” Her chin comes up. Those hazel eyes find mine, shifting between green and amber in the firelight. Defiant. “You just unchained me. What’s stopping me from—”
“The fifty orcs between you and the edge of camp. The war-wolves who’ll track your scent for miles. The human patrols hunting you.” I hold her gaze.
Something flickers in her expression. Not quite fear. Calculation, maybe. She’s smart, this human healer. Smart enough to know I’m not bluffing.
“Fine.” She turns away, dropping to her knees beside Grothak. Her hands move with practiced efficiency, peeling back the bandages, examining the wound beneath. “Get me clean water. Boiled, if you have it. And whatever herbs your healers use for infection.”
She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t say please. Just issues commands like she has any right to give them, like she isn’t a prisoner in an enemy camp surrounded by creatures who’d happily gut her for sport.
I should be offended.
Instead, I find myself almost amused.
The war band gathers while the human works.
Not all at once—that would be too obvious, too aggressive. But they drift toward the healer’s tent in ones and twos, finding excuses to pass by, to peer inside, to get a look at the strange creature their captain dragged back from the corpse road.
I stand at the tent’s entrance, arms crossed, watching them watch her.
Vekra is the first to approach directly—the oldest fighter in the Blackbone besides myself, her gray-green skin faded with age, her white-streaked hair hanging in a single braid down her back.
She carries her two-handed sword like it weighs nothing.
“A human.” Her voice is flat. No judgment. No accusation. Just observation.
“A healer.” I match her tone. “She saved Grothak.”
“So I heard.” Vekra’s gaze tracks the human woman’s movements—the quick, competent hands, the way she murmurs to herself while she works. “She’s the one they’re hunting. The one who treats our kind.”
“You know of her?”
“Stories. The human medic who doesn’t care whose blood she’s stopping.” Vekra’s expression doesn’t change. She lost her entire clan to human soldiers sixty years ago. Whatever she feels about this woman, she keeps it buried deep. “Some call her a saint. Others call her a traitor.”
“Which do you call her?”
A long pause. Vekra watches the human check Grothak’s pulse, adjust his blankets, pour water between his cracked lips with careful precision.
“Useful,” she says finally. “For now.”
She walks away without another word. I don’t stop her. Vekra’s acceptance isn’t something that can be demanded or forced. It has to be earned, slowly, through actions rather than words. If the human healer wants to survive in this camp, she’ll learn that lesson quickly.
Or she won’t. And then she’ll be dead, and the debt will die with her, and I can stop feeling this uncomfortable pressure in my chest every time I look at her.
Simple.
Except nothing about this situation is simple.
Night falls over the Bloodscar Plains.
The sun dies in shades of orange and red, painting the pale grass the color of rust. War drums begin their rhythm in the distance—other camps, other war bands, marking territory and warning rivals. The stars emerge thick and cold overhead, indifferent to the violence below.
I make my rounds through camp, checking the perimeter guards, the weapon stores, the horse lines.
Normal captain’s duties. Nothing that requires thought.
My feet know the paths. My hands know the work.
My mind keeps drifting back to the healer’s tent, to the human woman with blood under her fingernails and defiance in her eyes.
Kielyne. That’s her name. I overheard Fenrik asking her; the boy’s curiosity is too strong to contain despite my warnings. Kielyne Aelwyn.
It sounds strange in my head. Too soft for a battlefield. Too human.
I return to the central fire as the moon rises.
A few warriors still linger, sharing a skin of fermented mare’s milk and speaking in low voices.
They fall silent when I approach. Not from fear—I’ve never led through fear, never believed in it—but from respect.
The kind earned over decades of shared blood and battle.
“How is he?” I jerk my chin toward the healer’s tent. Grothak’s silhouette is visible through the canvas, the human woman’s smaller shadow moving beside him.
“Better.” Fenrik, of course. The boy can’t help himself. “She says his fever’s breaking. She’s been talking to him, even though he’s asleep. Telling him to keep breathing, keep fighting.”
I claim a seat by the fire, stretching my legs toward the warmth.
The flames cast dancing shadows across my arms, catching on the old scars, the kill-marks and honor-marks and shame-marks that tell the story of my life in raised tissue.
The oldest ones glow faint red in the darkness—shadow-stain, the curse that all orcs carry.