Chapter 3 Blorjorn
THREE
BLORJORN
The first marauder dies on Grief’s edge before he finishes his war cry.
I tear the axe free, spin, and Reckoning catches the next attacker across the throat. Blood arcs black against the firelight. Bodies hit the ground. More keep coming—screaming, howling, a wave of skull-painted savages pouring into camp from every direction.
The Corpse Riders don’t fight like soldiers.
They fight like animals, all fury and no discipline, throwing themselves at our shield wall with complete disregard for their own lives.
It makes them unpredictable. Dangerous. The kind of enemy that takes three of yours for every one of theirs, and considers it a victory.
I carve through their ranks, axes singing, the old battle-rage humming in my blood. Every strike is controlled. Precise. I’ve been killing for over a century. I don’t need fury to do it well.
But fury finds me anyway.
Because every marauder who slips past our line is another blade that might find her throat.
Should have kept her closer. Should have—
A renegade orc charges me, enormous and scarred, wearing human finger-bones braided into his beard. I duck his wild swing, plant Reckoning in his gut, and use his falling body as a shield against the arrow that would have taken me in the shoulder.
No time to think. Only fight.
Fenrik appears at my left flank, the young warrior pale-green and wide-eyed but holding his ground. His blade work is sloppy—too much energy, not enough control—but he’s alive, and he’s keeping marauders off my blind side. Good enough.
“The healer’s tent!” I roar over the chaos. “Grothak—”
“Vekra’s there!” Fenrik gasps between sword strokes. “She’s holding the entrance!”
Good. Vekra won’t let anyone touch our wounded. Not while she still breathes.
I press forward, cutting a path toward the center of the fighting. The marauders hit us hard in the first wave, but they’re losing momentum now, breaking against the discipline of orcs who’ve fought together for years. Our archers find their marks. Our shield wall holds. We’re winning.
Then I hear the scream.
Not a battle cry. Not a death rattle. A name shouted in orcish: “Durnak!”
I spin. Durnak—one of my veterans, a hundred years in the Blackbone—lies crumpled near the supply wagons, a spear through his chest. Still breathing, but barely. And standing over him, axe raised for the killing blow, is a marauder with ritual scars covering half his face.
Too far. I’m too far to reach him in time.
But the human woman isn’t.
She moves before I can shout a warning.
The chain snaps taut between her wrist and the wagon wheel—she’s worked it loose somehow, or pulled the wheel pin, because suddenly she’s running across the blood-slicked ground toward Durnak with nothing but a medical satchel and the knife she must have hidden in her boot.
Foolish. Brave. Completely insane.
The marauder sees her coming. His axe changes trajectory—swinging toward her instead of Durnak. She ducks, barely, the blade whistling over her head close enough to shear black curls from her scalp.
I’m already running.
She drops into a roll, comes up slashing with her knife. The blade catches the marauder across the thigh—not deep enough to kill, but enough to make him stumble. It buys her a second. Two seconds. Long enough to throw herself over Durnak’s body, shielding him with her own.
The marauder raises his axe again.
Grief takes his arm off at the elbow.
He screams—a high, thin sound—and I silence it with Reckoning through his skull. The body drops. I stand over it, chest heaving, the rage still howling in my blood.
The human woman looks up at me. Her face is pale, splattered with blood that isn’t hers, but her hands are already moving—checking Durnak’s pulse, pressing against the spear wound, doing whatever healers do to keep hearts beating.
“He needs—” she starts.
“Later.” I grab her arm, haul her to her feet. “Stay behind me. Don’t move unless I tell you to.”
She opens her mouth—to argue, I’m sure—and I silence her with a look.
“Stay.”
For once, she listens.
The battle surges around us. I fight with one eye on the enemy and one on her—tracking her position, her movement, adjusting my stance to keep her in my shadow.
She crouches low, knife in one hand, Durnak’s head cradled in her lap.
Keeping him alive while I keep her alive while my war band fights for all our lives.
It shouldn’t work. Too many moving pieces, too many variables.
But it does.
The marauders break. They scatter into the darkness, those few who survive, leaving their dead piled around our camp like offerings.
The war drums fade. The screaming stops.
Silence settles over the Bloodscar Plains, broken only by the moans of the wounded and the crackle of fires that weren’t there before the attack.
I count heads. Durnak, still breathing. Fenrik, blood-spattered but upright. Vekra, emerging from the healer’s tent with her two-handed sword dripping red. Grothak’s silhouette visible through the canvas, safe.
We lost six. Could have been worse. Would have been worse if the shield wall had broken.
Would have been worse if the human woman hadn’t thrown herself at an armed marauder to save one of my orcs.
I turn to find her.
She’s working on Durnak, hands buried in his wound, blood up to her elbows. Her lips move—counting, maybe, or praying to whatever gods humans believe in. She doesn’t look up when I approach. Doesn’t acknowledge me at all.
Just keeps working.
Saving another life. Another orc life. Like it costs her nothing. Like it’s the only thing that matters.
Something clenches in my chest. I ignore it.
“Captain!”
The shout comes from behind me. I spin, axes rising—but it’s only Fenrik, pointing at something on the ground. A body. One of the marauders, still breathing, a gut wound that’ll kill him slowly.
His eyes find the human woman. And he starts to laugh.