15
NOW, RACLAHAD WAS numbly shoveling the grain mush they were having for breakfast into her mouth. It was the same grain mush they’d had for dinner, but the toppings varied. In the morning, there was honey and molasses for it. In the evening, there was tomato catsup and vinegar and black pepper.
Aerhril watched her sister and tried to think of something to say. It’s all right. He made me sleep in his bed, but he did not touch me.
No, there was no point in getting into that with her younger sister.
You get used to the grain mush. Once we had no meat for the whole of the winter, and all we could eat was from the stores, and we all survived.
No, not that either.
She said nothing.
Eventually, her sister said something to her. “Have you found a way to get through to him?” she said.
Aerhril was surprised. “What are you speaking of?”
“You said that you knew him from when you were children together,” said Raclahad. “Have you found a way to get through to him? Can you get him to let us all go?”
Aerhril drew in a breath. “Oh, no, I do not think he’ll do that.”
Raclahad set her spoon down in the bowl with the mush. She sat back and stared into her abandoned breakfast. “Never? Not even if you work on him?”
Aerhril’s lips parted as she thought about it. “Well, he cannot keep us all here forever. He has some plan, as I understand it, well, the orcs have a plan. They are marching on Renegahan. They want to take over. Once they’ve done that…”
Now, the other women at the table were turning to her. Some looked shocked and horrified, others shrewdly interested, others angry.
“I don’t think there will be any reason to keep us here after they’ve accomplished their revolt is all,” she said. “I think they are keeping us here because they do not want us to spread the word.”
“What about the woman from Falls Keep, the one with the small babe,” spoke up Hafindel, who she saw was standing over the table, a bucket in one hand, a dry mop tucked over her shoulder. “They let her go.”
“So they did,” said Aerhril.
“Where did she go?” said Hafindel.
“She wanted an escort to take her to her mother’s home in Aleador,” said Aerhril. “Celedin granted it.”
“Yes,” said Hafindel. “Yes, I remember. He sent Gilfinhil, and he has never returned.”
“No?” said Aerhril.
Hafindel shook her head. “We were all saying that he had been spared, that we were happy for him.”
Aerhril was fairly certain she knew what had happened to Gilfinhil, but she sought out Dathor after breakfast anyway.
He was in the main sitting room on the first floor of Foxglove Peak, sitting at the writing desk where the steward used to sit.
Celedin had never used it. It gathered dust in between the times that the maids came in to go over the room.
“You remember I spoke of a woman from Falls Keep with a small babe? You said she should not have gotten away. Do you know what happened to her?”
“Not precisely, no,” said Dathor, unscrewing the cap on the inkwell.
“I know that at Falls Keep, she got away, and we didn’t shoot her because she had a baby in her arms. But we pursued her.
She was veering down towards Shadow Heights, but we steered her this way, knowing that it would not matter if she came here because we planned to take the Peak within days. ”
“But she left.”
“Yes, that was unfortunate,” he said.
“Did you kill that woman? Did you kill her baby?”
“Me, personally?” he said, dipping a quill into the inkwell. “No.”
“But she’s dead.”
“The man driving the carriage is dead,” he said. “I don’t think she is. But I don’t know. This wasn’t my concern. We would not have stopped her, but we can’t have someone running all over the Silvarenna spreading the word of the coming invasion. We rely on the element of surprise, you see.”
“If she isn’t dead, where would she be?”
“I don’t know. In some orc’s tent, perhaps.” He shrugged. “She may have been given the choice between that and death, and it would be likely to guess what she would choose.” He scratched the pen down a sheet of paper.
“You don’t even care,” she said.
He wrote, letters careful but a bit shaky. He had been tutored with them when they were children, but then he had left, and she did not think he’d received any more schooling after that. He could write. He could read.
She moved around over his shoulder, to see what he was writing, but she could not make out the letters. “What is that?”
“Orcish,” he said, amused. “Did you not think we could have a language, then?”
“Obviously, orcs have a language,” she said.
Everyone had a language. Across the channel, in the other countries, they might speak other languages, she granted.
The dwarf peoples had several different languages in their lands, and the dragons—both the solitary dragons here and the societies of dragons in the far east—had their own languages, too.
There were trolls in the isles to the north.
There used to be trolls here, in the Silvarenna, but long, long ago, the silvan elves had driven them out, chased them across the ocean. The trolls had a language, too.
She knew that the dwarves had things that were written, that they had books and operas and their own courts and kings and cities and all of that.
There were steam engines in the dwarf countries.
The elves and the dwarves were pushing into the new lands, the unsettled lands, together—well, as rivals, one pushing ahead and the other then catching up and surpassing and then on and on.
But the orcs, she had never thought they had a written language. She had never seen an orc who could read or write, she had to admit. She did not know why she had thought this meant that they couldn’t or didn’t.
“You did not learn it growing up,” she said.
“There’s not a lot of diverting activity in Arzakh,” he said. “Mostly, just betting on games of throwing rocks, dodging spurting flames out of cracks in the earth, and reading old scrolls.”
“Oh,” she said. “Scrolls.”
“No books in the orc language, though there are those who wish to make a printing press with the characters and start to produce it,” he said. “It’s one of the plans once the orcs take the capital.” He smirked. “I shouldn’t be sharing these things with you.”
“You write in that language to communicate,” she said. “And if ever it was intercepted by an elf, they would never know what it said. And I can look over your shoulder all I want, but I’ll never discern your plans.”
“Are you planning to betray me and get word out, Aerhril?” He looked up at her.
“No,” she said, smiling at him.
“But if you were, you wouldn’t tell me.” He went back to what he was writing.
“And if your army found me, they’d kill me like they did that woman and her babe.”
“We aren’t in the business of killing women and children,” he said.
“But if you have to, you will,” she said.
“If you think I would let anyone kill you, Aerhril, you’re positively insane.” He was matter-of-fact about this. “I would not let a hair on your head be hurt.”
She nodded. “So, if someone should try to go and get word, then, it should be me. Since I am your weakness.”
He set the pen down in its inkwell and regarded her.
“Keep on like this, and you’ll make me think that it would be foolish for me to allow you to leave my sight.
Perhaps I’ll parade around with you everywhere, pulling you onto my lap or with my arm around you and inside your clothes?
What do you think? Is that what you’d like?
Would you like to be publicly made into my whore? ”
“Have you not already done that?” she said.
He went back to his letter. “Do not test me, Aerhril. You cannot leave and the revolution cannot be halted. It’s time for the orcs to rise up. Too long have we been suppressed.”
She sighed. He sounded sort of insane now, all propaganda of the other side. She didn’t think he even believed in any of that. Dathor had never believed in anything, she didn’t think. He’d only ever cared about survival.
Well, and her.
SHE DID NOT stay with Dathor, deciding that he might make good on his threat to never let her out of his sight, and she did not want her freedom curtailed.
Carefully, she managed to sneak up to the top of the stairs and look in on Celedin.
His neck was wrapped in a bandage, but he’d bled through it.
There were clean rags sitting out, however, and she decided to give him a fresh dressing.
While she was carefully removing the blood fabric from around his neck, he woke up.
“Aerhril,” he rasped. “It’s you.” He blinked up at the light coming in through the window. “What day is it?”
“You’ve been sleeping since yesterday,” she said. “When I put you up here. At least, you’ve been asleep every time I’ve come to look at you.”
He grunted. “I need…” He was embarrassed. “I need a chamberpot.”
Oh, of course. Well, what further indignities could she sink to?
“Stay here,” she muttered and she went to seek something in one of the nearby rooms. She found an empty one and brought it for him.
He was able to get out of bed and go stand in the corner to empty his bladder. He apologized when she took it, but she just glared at him. She hurled it out a window in the hallway and brought it back to his room, hoping that no one would notice it was missing.
He was back in bed, his eyes open.
“I came to put clean dressings on your wounds,” she said.
He rasped, “It’s not going to heal.”
“You don’t seem to be dying,” she said. “You can move around. Your body seems intact. It got your vocal cords perhaps, but nothing vital. You’re not bleeding to death.”
He let out a wheeze.
She knelt and began to wrap his neck.
He let her. When she was done, he said, his voice paper thin, “They’re taking down the tents.”
He must have seen when he was up, pissing in the chamberpot. He must have looked through the narrow window there. There were two windows in the room, the larger one overhead, too high to see out of, and that small one there, in the corner.
“The orc army, you mean,” she said. “Yes, they’re on the move, I understand, going on to do this at some other castle in the Silvarenna.”
“There are so many of them,” he said in his hoarse whisper. “We never stood a chance. Perhaps bring me…”
She waited.
“Something to end it with?” he said finally. “A gun would be easiest.”
She got up, looking down on him.
“It’s hopeless,” he said.
“No,” she said, and she wondered at herself. Would it not be easier if he were dead, after all?
“He’ll kill me when he finds me,” he said. “This time he will not do it so quickly. He’ll want me to suffer.”
“He won’t find you,” she said. “No more talk of doing away with yourself.”