21
ONLY DAYS AFTER the dance that Aerhril had attended, Dathor was summoned to the sitting room. There were guests at the Peak.
Dathor had seen the carriage arrive, but he’d been too busy to see anyone alight out of it, and then he’d been busy with making sure the horses were all right, the carriage tucked away.
So, he had not seen the three orcs come out of the carriage, but there they were in the sitting room, all dressed up in jackets and ties—the men, anyway—and the one woman was in a tidy blouse and a skirt, a brooch at her neck.
He had never seen an orc woman up close, and he looked at her with interest. She was young, he thought.
She could not be too much older than him.
Indeed, he would find out that Nathre was only nineteen, but a year older than him.
She was slighter than the men but so much larger than an elf woman.
She was… he could not help but note the swell of her bosom, the generous curve of her hips. Were all orc women buxom?
He liked the look of her.
“Dathor, you have guests,” said the steward from where he sat, holding his tea cup in one hand and his saucer in the other.
He sneered a little, as if he did not approve of such things.
“Perhaps you can take them to the servants’ dining room to receive them.
Be sure to wash your hands before you… touch anything. ”
Dathor glanced at his hands, which may have been dirty. He tucked them behind his back, feeling embarrassed.
And then he caught sight of Aerhril’s expression. She was gazing at him with one of her mixtures of rapture and pity, and he felt a wave come over him. He despised her.
Why must she lord it over him, truly? Why must she take such delight in anything that he had been hitherto denied? Why must she act as if she was the one giving him such things?
She had not caused the orcs to come.
He refused to look at her again.
It was unsettling, hating her like that. She was everything to him, and he could not hate her. He would have to think it through and talk himself out of it, he supposed.
Later, though.
He led the orcs to the kitchen of Foxglove Peak, and the servants down there were not at all pleased to see them all sitting there at their dining room table.
“We could walk,” Dathor said to them. “The flowers are pretty this time of year.”
So, they left the kitchen and walked together along a path outside of the Peak.
Igbar had been with Elrion the longest, since he was but six years old. The others had only been with him since they were young adolescents. Dathor told them that he had never known his father and that he was half elf.
But they all talked at each other sort of constantly, a kind of giddiness to the interaction, all of them seemingly excited by it.
He could not quite say what it was they talked about, however.
They seemed to skip from subject to subject, some things serious—they knew some of the orc language, for instance, and promised to teach it to him, even taught him a few words—and some of it ridiculous—like Taktre’s fondness for hot chocolate.
The two male orcs were Igbar and Taktre. The woman was Nathre.
When they finally left, he had talked away the afternoon with them and he was behind on all his duties.
He felt strange, the way he’d never felt in the company of others, like he had been instantly accepted by them.
He had never experienced such a thing, he realized.
He was accepted, now, amongst the servants, because they were used to him, but whenever he met anyone, there was always the way that they interacted with him because he was an orc, the otherness that they projected onto him.
He must be warmed up to, always, and his disposition, he supposed, did not help matters, for he was often gruff.
But how could he not be gruff, truly, when everyone treated him as if he were part monster, a creature, a beast?
He wondered if this was the way everyone else felt when they met other people, an immediate sense of trust and openness, an easiness and a comaraderie?
It hurt him to think that might be true.
He told himself it wasn’t.
No, he and the other orcs were so quick to bond with each other precisely because of the way they were treated by others.
They were all treated with distrust and seeing others like them felt like a respite from it all.
In a way, perhaps, it was some compensation against the world, the knowledge of their shared oppression, he thought.
He was up late finishing everything and then she was tapping at his window when he was exhausted and ready to fall into bed.
He opened the window to her and she tumbled into his room above the stable as pretty as ever, and he did not despise her anymore, he supposed, but he thought he should despise her.
“What was it like?” she said. “What were they like? I wanted to come, but the steward would not hear of it. But Elrion says we must call upon him, you and me. I am to bring you specifically, and the steward heard and he cannot say no.”
He wanted to hide it from her, but he wondered at himself. If he really wished to be with her, could he hide things like this from her? He was only frightened, he supposed, because she wouldn’t understand.
“It was wonderful,” he said, rubbing his neck, feeling shy. “It was like meeting someone and not having all the normal elements of distrust and fear. Just feeling as if I was… normal to them, I suppose, straightaway.”
“Oh,” she said in a voice that was full of pity.
He continued to rub his neck. “You needn’t feel sorry for me, you know. I don’t need you to do that.”
“I didn’t say anything,” she protested.
“It’s another way we can never be equals,” he muttered.
“Yes, perhaps I had never thought about what it must be like for you,” she breathed.
“Maybe I hadn’t either.” He lifted a shoulder. “I had never experienced anything else.”
She went to him and wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed close and kissed his cheek.
He fought the desire to push her away and the desire to sag into her and accept this show of affection from her. He did not wish to do either, so he just stayed where he was and let her hold him.
“You will come with me to visit Elrion, though,” she said.
Of course he would go. How could he resist?
“MY NATHRE IS enamored of your orc,” said Elrion as he offered Aerhril a plate of biscuits.
She was so startled she nearly dropped her tea, but then she recovered. “Oh? Really? Dathor?”
“He is handsome, I think,” said Flaihir. “In a sort of rugged way, I suppose. He’s got such large hands, does he not?”
Aerhril took a biscuit. “I suppose. I have grown up with him, you know. He is rather like a brother to me.”
“Brother to an orc?” said Elrion. “How extraordinary. You are such a radiant soul, I think, Lady Aerhril. You must share your radiance with others. It would do such good for the world.”
“I agree,” said Flaihir. “I have been quite blessed to work with her here. She is a gleaming jewel hidden away in the rough countryside.”
“That she is,” said Elrion.
There was a plan. She and Flaihir had ruminated on it for some time. She was going to feign reinjuring her ankle, saying that it bothered her from time to time, and that she had been told that if she twisted it again, it could easily be quite serious.
In truth, she’d been told no such thing, but Elrion would believe it and insist that she stay at Thelandel Chapel, where she would be bedridden and he would come to look in on her and read to her and say sweet things to her, and her business was to throw herself upon his kindness and flirt with him mercilessly and hopefully get him to agree to buy her bride price.
Getting him to take Dathor should also be no problem whatsoever.
It was all very close, and she could practically taste it.
She must not be distracted by thinking of Dathor and that female orc, or of Dathor’s large hands, or anything like that.
“But she’s so disappointed he isn’t here today,” said Elrion.
“He could not be spared from his duties, sadly,” said Aerhril, though the truth was that Dathor had been purposefully excluded because he would probably volunteer to carry her all the way back to Foxglove Peak, even though she and Flaihir had come on horseback.
He had come a number of other times, though.
He liked the orcs and they liked him. When he came back from being with them, he would often have this sort of boyish smile on his face, this innocent smile of a being with no cares in the world, the sort of expression that had never been on his face when he actually was a boy, and it would make her insides squeeze so tightly that she would hardly be able to breathe.
She would feel a sensation, then, and she could not account for it, for the sensation felt a great deal like guilt, and she did not know what she had to be guilty for. She had not hurt him. She was the only person helping him. She was the only person who truly loved him.
But she supposed she could see that there was an entire world, a whole system that worked on the idea of denying him, and that she benefited from the system and that she was not doing anything about it.
She was enforcing it. She certainly wasn’t making a stand or trying to change things or make things better for him, for orcs.
Elrion talked of protests when he had been a student at university. He had gone straight there after his wardship had ended, straight to school. He talked of carrying signs and marching arm-in-arm with orcs through the streets of Cairnil, the city where he had gone to school.
“We have to do something about Findas,” said Elrion. “You know, it’s odd that we have had kings and emperors for so long when there used to only be the parliaments, the senates in the ancient world, you know? We should have something like that again. And there should be term limits.”
“Limits?” she said.
“Yes, you only serve on the parliament for a time, maybe fifteen years, and then someone else must.”
“But it is the envivtains who serve in the parliament,” she said. “Who else would do it?”
“We’d have elections,” he said. “Just as the ancients did.”
She had not heard of such things.
“Whatever it is we do, we must get rid of him. Even if someone simply managed to hide somewhere and shoot off his head—”
“You are speaking of assassinating the High King?”
“He is destroying this country,” said Elrion.
“Now, I’m not saying I entirely hold with this, but what he doesn’t understand is that the orcs are willing to do jobs that elves won’t do.
And that orcs are bigger and stronger than us, well suited to dangerous tasks.
If we drive them all back across that pass, will our country really be better off? ”
“Obviously not,” she said. “Obviously, I have never liked it.”
“Yes,” said Flaihir, “but there are many who do think that orcs should be driven away. Especially here in the Silvarenna. It is quite the popular opinion. Orcs should not have opportunities better offered to elves, that is what they say.”
“I have heard it, of course,” said Elrion.
She had some idea of him at that point, some romantic idea of him as a fearless revolutionary, ready to fight and topple Findas and his followers. She was a bit starry-eyed, she supposed.
“It’s such a lovely afternoon,” said Flaihir, right on cue. “We should go on a walk together, perhaps.”
“How about a ride?” said Elrion. “You’ve brought your horses, have you not?”
“A marvelous idea,” said Flaihir.
But it was not a marvelous idea, because how was she to hurt her ankle on a horse. She attempted it on the way out to the stables, but she did a terrible job of it.
Elrion knelt down and examined her ankle. “You’re fine, I think. Let me help you to your feet,” he said.
She and Flaihir exchanged a glance.
Flaihir shook her head, indicating they must give up on the entire scheme.
Aerhril was disappointed, but she did not think she could hurt her ankle again, after all, so she nodded.
They stepped inside the stable.
There was a frantic neigh, a dark shadow rising in front of her, a flash of pain, and then—
Nothing.