10
IAHIR WAS LIKELY a horrible person, in the wake of everything, to be enjoying the fact that he had to use his arms to encircle her waist or else he would fall from the horse. He supposed that he should feel guilty about that fact, but he didn’t.
Perhaps the guilt over everything else had too far eclipsed his ability to feel guilt about anything else.
He would rather have only concentrated on all the places he was touching her, or on the way that the bottoms of her breasts sometimes brushed his hands where they were clasped around her waist, but she wanted to talk more about King Findas.
“I don’t think Findas is the only reason,” she was saying. “I think perhaps he only exacerbated a problem that already existed. Because you must see that orcs have been badly treated in Lothnehil for some time.”
He did not know what to say to that. “I suppose that there have been accidents in the mines that are primarily worked by orcs?” he said. “Missing limbs, cave-ins, whole teams of miners suffocating before help could get to them? You will say that if it were elf workers, others would care more?”
“Accidents in the mines,” she repeated blandly, no emotion in her voice.
“Sorry,” he said. “That clearly is not what you meant. I have not paid strict attention to things outside of my own sphere, I suppose. But I do remember a protest in the streets once about maimed orc mine workers, and I did think it was likely true that elves more readily sacrifice other species than their own to dangerous work. I thought that was reprehensible.”
She only sighed.
He tightened his grip on her. There, perhaps he would simply let it all go, then, and concentrate on holding onto her. He wondered if it would be the very worst thing in the world if he made an attempt to bed her now.
He concluded it would.
This was not the time.
So, he said, “All right, warrioress, you might as well explain yourself. How is it that your people are badly treated?”
“I can’t believe I have to explain this!” She was disgusted with him.
“I have never represented myself as being extraordinarily skilled or intelligent, have I? My best qualities are always the connections I have due to my birth and the amount of fun I have, despite everything. So, you have to explain it. Have pity on a stupid elf lord, would you?”
“And you are simply making jokes,” she said. “We are not equals, that is what.”
“Equals,” he said softly.
“You elves treat us orcs differently than you treat each other.”
“Well, we are different,” he said.
“Worse,” she said. “You treat us worse. We are given the worst jobs, and we must enter last and sit in the shabbiest train cars, and we certainly are not able enter into trade agreements like the elves. Why, no one would give us a loan if we wanted one. How could we possibly invest? All of the ruling class of this country is rich and elvish and from the Vale. An orc certainly cannot get into that echelon of people.”
He was silent, trying to digest that. Orcs wanted loans?
They wanted to be part of the nobility? But, yes, he supposed all people would have ambition of some sort, that it wouldn’t make sense to think that orcs were easily content with what they had.
He knew very few people who were content with what they had.
He was not content, for instance. He had that urge, that itch, to reach for something else.
It wasn’t ambition in his case, just a desire to rile people up, to make them react. He was not sure why, because he knew it did not make it so, but it made him feel as if he mattered to be able to do that.
“Nothing to say, my lord?”
“Apologies, warrioress,” he said. “I am an entirely obtuse person who never much thought of anything from an orc’s perspective, I’m afraid.”
She barked out a laugh. “Oh, no, of course you haven’t. Why am I even angry?”
“It is galling to be so utterly ignored, I wager,” he said. “I would warrant that most elves are the same way. They are simply unaware.”
“That isn’t true,” said Gathren. “That can’t be true. How could they be unaware of what is right in front of them?”
“People don’t tend to look at things unless it affects them, I’m afraid,” he said.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said.
He thought about moving one of his hands up to cup one of her ample breasts. He wouldn’t, of course. That would get him thrown off the horse at the least, and stabbed at the worst. She’d be quite displeased with him.
Speaking of stabbings, he should perhaps look at the wound in his shoulder.
It should be all right now, he thought. It would have started to scab over.
He was certain it couldn’t be bleeding as freely as it had been when they left the city.
But he had not looked at it, and he had distracted himself entirely from the pain.
“Can’t say I mind riding one horse with you,” he said.
“Oh, you can’t be comfortable back there.”
“I am, however, quite comfortable.” He had imagined her breasts on a number of occasions. He wondered if the gray-green of her skin would fade in places the sun never touched. He wondered about the color of her nipples, the size of them, how sensitive they were.
When he had been fucking a dwarf, she had been so much smaller than him that it had made certain intimate acts very difficult.
And she had been as fair-skinned as he, so while there was an intriguing element to having a miniature and rounded figure to undercover and explore and tease, it hadn’t been that different from being with an elf, in the end.
He suspected orcs would be much the same, once one got past the green skin and the buxomness. Not that different, not in the end.
But he wanted the chance to experience those differences. He would love to unwind whatever she used to bind down her breasts, free them and bury his face in their softness. He could tell they were soft because of the small little brushes he was getting holding onto her waist.
Perhaps she might be amenable. It had been a nightmarish day, and perhaps she would want to end it in under the sheets with some warm body.
Perhaps if he tried, she would surrender to him.
Perhaps when they got to the place where he could get a horse, he should say that her horse needed to rest, after having borne both of them for so long, and then he should press her to stay the night, for it was an inn, and they could take a room.
One room, with one bed, just as they only had one horse now, and he could simply say that she would need assistance, for surely she didn’t wish to sleep with her breasts so tightly bound away, and then she would become shy in that way of hers that he sometimes saw in her, and she would quietly agree and she would be shyer and shyer as he uncovered her, and then he would—
“My lord!”
“Hmm?” he said.
“How are you—the saddle is in the way—is it quite that long, then?” She turned around to look at him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You are poking me,” she said vehemently.
“Poking…?”
“With your prick,” she practically growled.
He laughed, angling his pelvis backward.
He had indeed gotten himself quite bothered there, and his erection had been pressing into her, over the top of the saddle.
He likely had scooted himself in closer without thinking about it, liking the feel of her warmth there.
He had been lost in his fantasy about her.
“Apologies, warrioress. That is not entirely within my control. I cannot help that that part of my body likes you. I don’t think I’ve made any secret of that. ”
“We have just come from a tower of dead men,” she said. “We have just left a city with dead children. How can you possibly be aroused at a time like this?”
“Well, you’re very… pleasantly shaped, as you know, and I am holding onto you, and—”
“Think of something else and make it go away,” she ordered him. “Think of dead children, think of your guilt, think of that woman’s twisted leg who stole your horse, I know not, but make it go away.”
“It’s not exactly the way it works, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I will keep my distance from now on.”
She scoffed.
He laughed. It felt good to laugh.
GATHREN HAD NOT had a man’s member hard and eager and pressed into her in some time, and she had rather forgotten the thrill of it.
It was strange in a way. She was not sure that she much cared for the act at all, and she felt that once she started on it, it was always disappointing, but the feeling of a man being aroused by her, it was a pleasing feeling.
It was like power in a way, knowing that she could do that to a man, make him react in that way.
But it wasn’t truly power, she knew, because she did not control the man’s arousal, and he did not control it either.
That was what made it so thrilling, perhaps, the lack of control, the wildness of it all, the way that she could sense that it could grip them both and send them off into some kind of spiraling inevitability, the rush and crush and the undeniableness of it.
Also, it made her feel desirable.
Sometimes, she hated feeling desirable, it was true. It was like a burden, like something that she could not get away from, and it was so prurient and base, the way men slathered over her breasts and hips, especially when elf men did it.
But not always.
There was a part of her that sometimes simply felt it as the brush of a feather of pleasantness. She would feel a little shivery and pleased.
She probably was so harsh with him because this was one of those times.
She had no reason to feel such a surge when she realized what was pressing into her, that Iahir was hard for her, that he had wrapped his hands around her and plastered himself into her from behind, that the rhythm of the horse was likely gently rocking her body against his arousal.
She should be appalled, so she pretended to be appalled.
He, of course, found her anger amusing, which only made her more angry.
The seething feeling eventually swallowed up any thrills or surges she was feeling about it.
They rode on.