8 #2
It took her about twenty minutes to find the outskirts of the fray, and what she saw gave her pause.
It wasn’t fighting, near as she could see.
It was orcs splintering their way through the doors of town houses and bursting inside, dragging out elves and bludgeoning them to death.
They weren’t only the heads of the houses, but servants too.
The street was littered with bodies, male bodies, female bodies… small bodies that could only be—
She looked away and decided she did not wish to see.
She hid, ducking into one of the houses with a splintered door, assuming that it was empty. She went into a sitting room that had the drapes all drawn against the street, and she sat down and put her head in her hands.
She needed to think.
Perhaps she’d been wrong to send Dathor, the commander, off.
He’d been very smart, sort of lethally smart, but also good at manipulating people.
He’d also been half elf, and he’d been too soft on the elves—well, that was what she’d thought at first, but then she’d had that conversation with him, and she’s seen how sneering he was about elves.
He truly seemed to think himself superior to absolutely everyone, orcs and elves alike.
But if he had been here, instead of all the way back in the north where she had sent him, perhaps the orc army would have been shamed into not slaughtering children.
Dathor had wanted to ally with the elves, and she had said there was no alliance with the elves, that the elves did not see the orcs as anything other than animals.
But Dathor would say, now, that there was a reason for that, that orcs were embodying the worst things that the elves said of them, and there was some truth to it all.
Orc society was also different than elf society.
There was no concept of war crimes amongst the orcs.
War was brutal and vicious, and it was a free-for-all.
The elves, on the other hand, had grafted gentlemanly agreements onto war, and this, whatever the orcs were doing, attacking civilians, killing children, it was something the elves would never have done.
Dathor had said this in his arguments. He’d said that if the orcs tore everything down, the country would be worse off than it was now.
And the assassination had been her idea, but she had not been quick enough. Maybe if word could have gotten to the orc army that Findas was dead, this would not have happened?
Well, it was pointless to waste time on could-have-beens. The fact was, this was what had happened. She had played a part in it. And now, the future might be quite murky.
It was odd, she thought. She rarely thought her own actions through, but she could see the future of the entire country rather clearly at this point, and it looked grim and dark. Or perhaps that was only the echo of Dathor’s voice in her ear, his prediction, not hers.
She lifted her head and drew in a breath through her nose.
She would not rejoin the army and kill civilians herself.
She had a code of honor, and she could not live with herself if she was killing someone who was unarmed, someone who was not actively trying to kill her.
She had not, in all truth, killed many people in her life, and all of them had been in the thick of battle, so she was not even sure how many of them had survived afterward.
Perhaps all of them.
Perhaps she had never killed anyone.
Iahir was right that there had been few battles for her. She was skilled as a fighter, but untried in war.
Anyway, she was not going to rejoin the orc army after all.
So, then, what was she going to do?
She stood up.
She had to go home. There was nothing else to be done, after all.
Her uncle would put her to work on the farm and she would toil away the rest of her days, but perhaps they could sell to elves again in the markets now that Findas was dead.
She had thought she might have some other life, but that was not to be.
Home.
Well, there were three gates out of the city, and the northernmost gate was the one she might wish to take, since it would put her out on the road she could follow to take her towards her home.
However, that was the gate the orcs had likely come in through, so she did not think she should go that way.
The southernmost gate was very close to the palace, and she might be recognized there.
She should not go that way. And, of course, it was the opposite direction she was going, not that there was much south below the southernmost gate, truly.
There was sand and rocks, and then everything gave way to the docks.
The ocean was right there. There was no east gate, because the ocean lapped against the walls of the city there.
The western gate, that one was the furthest from her current location.
She would have to go all through the city to reach that one, and she thought she might be conspicuous, an orc warrioress going the opposite direction of the orc army.
The elves here would not take well to seeing an orc, not since the orcs had been killing them all, and the orcs who saw her would know her for a deserter.
Oh, drag her to the depths of the Nilhaem, she was going to the southernmost gate after all.
Since she would be conspicuous, she decided to take a cloak that was hanging by the door, something with a hood that would hide her features.
And she went to the stables for a horse, more for the travel on the other side of the walls than through the city.
Still, she might not look like an orc with a horse and a cloak. She would have to take her chances.
The horses in the stables all seemed terrified, their eyes wide, their breath making their flanks expand and retract. She touched each of them, and she took the horse who seemed to calm at her touch, taking this as a sign.
She wasn’t much of a horsewoman, but she’d grown up on a farm, and she knew horses well enough.
Most of the horses she’d grown up with were work horses, not these sorts of horses—the kinds of horses that elves rode were half pets, half companions, half servants, she thought.
Elves went riding for sport, and the horses they took along were not being used for service but simply for pleasure.
It was a different relationship with a beast than she was used to.
However, of course, see how much the elves had cared for their horses. If they’d fled, they’d done it without their precious beasts.
Perhaps she was being uncharitable. Perhaps the owner of these horses was simply dead.
She grimaced.
She led the horse out and put a saddle and bridle on it. There were some already-stocked saddle bags hanging along with the rest of the tackle. She looked inside to see that they contained a canteen, a blanket, bandages, and other essentials. She brought one, attaching it to the saddle as well.
She did not mount the horse yet, but led it along and they took to the streets. The orc army was coming in from the north, going down the main street of Renegahan. She decided to get ahead of the carnage and cut across the main street closer to the palace.