9 #2
“So cavalier towards your own people, are you?” she said. “Well, I don’t know why I thought differently.”
“What will we do if we get her out?” he said. “Are you going to bear her on your horse? Are we going to leave her on the side of the road?”
Gathren rubbed her forehead, thinking this through. “I don’t know.”
“You can’t leave me here!” cried the woman from within the carriage.
“How are we even going to do it?” he said. “Is one of us going to climb in there and drag her out?”
“Perhaps,” said Gathren, “we could right the carriage and then get her out that way?”
“With her weight in it?”
“You don’t think so?”
They both surveyed the carriage, and Iahir wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of it all. But perhaps that was reprehensible. The woman was badly injured.
“All right,” he said, “perhaps I can lift the carriage and we can get her out through the other door. She is already down on that end anyway.”
“Worth a try,” said Gathren.
He was able to lift the carriage, though not enough to get at the door, possibly since the woman was resting against it.
However, the window on the door was shattered.
Gathren got down on her hands and knees and urged the woman to try to put her head and shoulders through the window.
“I can’t, oh, I can’t,” sobbed the woman.
“You have to,” said Gathren, “or we will simply leave you here. If you want out of this carriage, you must try to get free.”
The woman sobbed some more and did nothing.
Gathren crawled in closer and reached in through the shattered window.
Iahir’s arms were straining from holding the carriage up.
Gathren hauled the woman through, and the woman shrieked. “You’re an orc, don’t touch me, oh, don’t touch me!”
But Gathren pulled her free anyway, yanked out of there and dragged her over to the side of the road as the woman screamed and swore, saying that she’d been cut on the broken glass from the window, that this was the worst rescue attempt in all of time.
Gathren came back and helped him to lift the carriage. Together, they tried to rock it back up onto its wheels.
It was too heavy.
“Turn backwards?” Gathren wheezed. “Put our backs into it?”
Sweat was now streaming down his face. The place where he’d been stabbed in the shoulder was throbbing. “Worth a try,” he managed.
They did it.
The carriage rocked up.
Now, it was easy enough to push it off the road.
The woman they’d freed was wailing there, bleeding and maimed.
Panting, he and Gathren surveyed her.
“Well,” said Gathren, “we got her out. Perhaps it’s up to the next traveling group to do the rest.”
“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps so.”
“Of course, if the orcs find her, they’ll just slit her throat,” said Gathren, rubbing her face with one hand.
“Do you care, warrioress?”
“Don’t you, my lord?” she said pointedly.
They were quiet.
Gathren cast her gaze down. “There’s a chapel in Matlinrir.”
“Yes, I know it,” he said. “That’s nearly a half hour out of the way, which will mean a whole hour lost for us, not to mention whatever time we’ve lost here, doing this.”
“Well, she’d be safe there,” said Gathren.
He sighed.
“You don’t have to come,” said Gathren with a shrug. “I will take her. You go on to Cirlahir. It’s been lovely knowing you, my lord. Well, lovely is perhaps the wrong word, but it has been… something.”
He shook his heed. “No, I’ll come along.”
“Why are you intent on coming with me?” she said.
He didn’t know. “You’ll have trouble with the monks at the chapel, undoubtedly. They might not take well to an orc, especially considering everything that’s happened today.”
She sighed, nodding. “Well, that is true. I do appreciate it.” She surveyed him. “But I don’t understand it.”
He was simply stalling. He didn’t want to go home. He would do anything to put that off.
Perhaps not anything.
But going to Matlinrir? Why not?
GATHREN WAS HORRIFIED to find the chapel on fire.
They had seen the smoke as they were approaching, but she had not thought it would be the chapel burning. There should be some sort of consideration, she thought. Sacred spaces should not be destroyed.
But the chapel was in flames. The stone bell tower was intact, but inside, all of the monks had been killed.
She and Iahir discovered this as they ascended the steps in the tower. They had left the elf woman, who was still wailing and hurling insults at them both, outside.
At each floor, they walked through and found all of the bodies. The dead monks were slumped over writing desks, slumped over on the floors, streaks of blood on the walls showing the path they had slid down from where they’d been pinned and stabbed.
“Why?” she said softly. “Why the monks?”
“It was days ago, it seems,” said Iahir. “Judging from the smell.”
“No, that fire—”
“That may have been lit recently, but your army has been working its way toward the capital city,” said Iahir. “You seem surprised, when I heard that your strategy thus far was some kind of token rape.”
She swallowed. “Yes, I suppose.” At the keeps in the north, the army invaded, found the lady of the house, and then one orc raped her in front of her husband before slitting his throat.
She had never quite understood why such a thing was necessary, but those in charge claimed it broke the elves’ spirits.
“So, there has been no attempt, thus far, to shield the weak. Instead, the weak have been used against the strong to break us down,” said Iahir. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t realize that this is the same thing.”
“But they are monks!” she exclaimed. Of course, the orcs in the army had not grown up in Lothenhil, not as she had. This was her country, and the orcs and the elves worshiped the same pantheon, after all. It was not exactly the same religion, however, for they favored different gods.
The orcs worshiped Bracc, the god of warfare, and they believed Haem, goddess of the underworld, had a special affinity for them. In the south, the elves revered Ornhil, goddess of the dawn. In the north, the elves believed they were the favored ones of the goddess of the trees.
Certainly, in the stories, there was enmity between Bracc and Ornhil, who had jealousies that caused them to strike at each other and at the favored people of each of the gods. But even so, there should be a shared feeling of respect for the spaces of the religion, she thought.
In all truth, the orcs were likely more devout than the southern elves, many of whom thought the gods nothing more than a pretty set of stories for children, some embodiment of the natural world.
Perhaps this was why they had killed these monks, burned this chapel?
Was it to deride the elves’s lack of belief in the gods?
“You’re very distraught over this, warrioress,” said Iahir.
She turned to look at him. “Yes, and you’re not.”