The Orc’s Captive Bride (The Five Kingdoms #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The first thing Thea noticed was the cold.

Stone pressed against her cheek, rough and unforgiving, and her muscles screamed a protest as she pushed herself upright.

The second thing she noticed was that she was naked.

Well. That’s different.

Her glasses—miraculously intact—sat askew on her nose. She straightened them with trembling fingers, and the world sharpened into focus.

Stone monoliths rose around her in a perfect circle, each one three times her height. Beyond them, an endless expanse of pale grass rippled under an impossibly blue sky. Mountains hunched on the horizon like sleeping giants, their peaks white with snow.

There was no sound except the soft sloughing of the wind whispering through the grass. There were no trees, no buildings, no people.

No explanation.

Her breath came faster as the academic part of her brain—the part that had earned her three doctorates before she turned thirty—tried to categorize what she was seeing. Stone circle. Megalithic structure. Post-holes would indicate Bronze Age construction, but the stones themselves…

She looked up at the nearest monolith.

No weathering. The surface was unmarked by centuries of rain and wind, which meant these weren’t ancient stones. They were new… and she was naked on the altar stone in the middle of the circle.

A brief wave of panic washed over her as she scrambled off the stone, clinging to it as her legs wobbled.

Why was I laid out as a sacrifice in the middle of an empty stone circle?

The last thing she remembered was the burial site in Norway—the one that had the university department in an uproar because the runes didn’t match any known runic alphabet.

She’d been called in as the expert, the prodigy who could crack any linguistic puzzle.

She’d been tracing the engravings on the burial stone, carefully recording the odd symbols when the world exploded into light—blinding, all-consuming light that had tasted of copper and felt like falling.

And now she was here.

Wherever ‘here’ is.

Ignoring the panic still hovering at the back of her mind, she forced herself to take stock of the situation. The angle of the sun indicated late afternoon. She would need to find shelter. Clothing. Water. Food.

Instead, she turned back to the stones.

Just a quick look. Five minutes. Maybe they hold the answer.

The engravings covered every surface, flowing from base to apex in continuous lines that her eyes wanted to follow. They weren’t runes—at least, not any runes she’d ever studied. The symbols were fluid, almost organic, as if someone had taught water to write.

She approached the nearest stone, moving silently across the grass. Up close, the markings seemed to glow with a faint silver light that might have been a trick of the afternoon sun. Or might not.

She automatically reached out to trace one of the symbols, and the moment her fingertip touched the engraving, golden light exploded beneath her skin.

Her heart hammering against her ribs, she yelped and jerked back, stumbling over her own feet. But there was no pain, just a lingering warmth that spread through her body.

She stared at her hand. It looked normal. It felt normal, except for the faint tingling that made her think of static electricity and that one time she’d accidentally grabbed a live wire in the university’s basement storage.

What the hell?

She touched the stone again.

Nothing. Just cold granite beneath her finger.

She pressed harder, tracing the symbol she’d touched before.

Still nothing. But when she pulled her hand away and looked at the engraving, something shifted in her perception.

The symbol no longer looked entirely foreign.

It reminded her of… something. A word on the tip of her tongue.

A melody she’d heard in childhood and half-forgotten.

Fascinating.

The academic in her perked up despite the absurdity of her situation. This was a puzzle, and puzzles had solutions. Solutions simply required data.

She moved around the stone, her fingers hovering just above the engravings. Each symbol tugged at her memory in different ways, like a language she didn’t speak but somehow understood. Threshold one symbol seemed to whisper. The word felt right, logical even, but how did she know?

The line of symbols curved around the monolith’s base, and she followed it automatically, searching for more of those flashes of meaning.

The grass gave way to packed earth between the stones, and the wind grew stronger outside the circle.

She should have felt the cold, but she didn’t.

She should have been terrified, but the part of her brain that couldn’t let questions go unanswered was in control.

The engravings continued around the stone, and she squinted at a particularly complex knot of symbols that seemed to fold in on themselves. She turned to take a few steps back to get a different perspective… and walked straight into something solid.

Or rather, someone.

Her nose connected with what felt like a wall of sun-warmed leather. She bounced back with a squeak that would have mortified her under any other circumstances, landing hard on her backside in the dirt.

She looked up.

And up.

And up.

The man—creature? being?—towered over her, easily seven feet tall and built like he’d been carved from the same granite as the stones. But it wasn’t his size that made her breath catch. It was the wrongness of him. The impossible, undeniable otherness.

He had green skin. Not metaphorically green, not sickly pale green, but the deep emerald of spring leaves.

He was lean rather than broad, but his muscles looked as if they’d been sculpted with the specific purpose of intimidation, rippling beneath his skin as he shifted his weight.

Scars—pale against the green—crossed his bare arms in patterns that might have been decorative or might have been the record of a brutal life.

Tusks curved up from his lower jaw, each one as long as her thumb and filed to a sharp point.

His hair, black as ink and bound in a warrior’s knot, framed a face that was simultaneously human and absolutely not.

He had high cheekbones, a broad nose that looked like it had been broken and reset, and a deep scar that angled from his temple to the corner of his mouth.

His eyes were the color of old gold, sharp and intelligent, and when they met hers something passed between them—a flicker of recognition she didn’t understand.

Orc. The word surfaced in her mind from a lifetime of fantasy novels and D&D campaigns. Except this wasn’t a game. This was a living, breathing creature that couldn’t exist standing three feet away from her, wearing leather armor and carrying weapons that looked far too real.

He didn’t crouch down to her level or extend a hand. He simply stood there, looking at her the way she might look at an unexpected spider—with a mixture of irritation and resignation.

She should have been terrified. Some distant part of her was screaming that she should be running, hiding, doing literally anything except sitting naked in the dirt staring up at a creature that belonged in a fevered hallucination.

Instead, she heard herself say, “Well. This is awkward.”

Her voice came out surprisingly steady. Good. She’d take whatever victories she could get at this point.

The orc’s eyes narrowed. He said something in a language that sounded like gravel being crushed, harsh and guttural and utterly incomprehensible.

She blinked. “I… don’t understand.”

He tried again, slower and louder, as if volume and enunciation would somehow bridge the linguistic gap, but the sounds meant nothing to her. They didn’t even feel like language—more like the rumble of distant thunder given syllabic form.

He made a noise that might have been frustration or might have been a curse. It was hard to tell. Then he looked down at her, really looked at her, and his gaze swept over her in a way that made her suddenly, painfully aware of her nudity.

She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Enjoying the view?”

The words came out more sarcastically than she’d intended, but he couldn’t understand her anyway. Except his expression shifted slightly. His eyes—those unsettling gold eyes—flicked back up to her face, and she could have sworn she saw the corner of his mouth twitch in a faintly mocking smile.

He understood the tone, at least.

She leveraged herself to her feet, keeping her movements slow and non-threatening. She’d dealt with enough feral cats during her undergraduate days to know that sudden movements were a bad idea around creatures with teeth.

Standing didn’t help much—he still towered over her by more than a foot—but it felt better than cowering on the ground.

“Right,” she said, more to herself than to him.

“So. I’m somewhere that isn’t Norway. Somewhere that has impossible stone circles and even more impossible people.

You don’t speak English. I don’t speak…” She gestured vaguely at him.

“…whatever that was. And I’m naked. Great. Excellent. This is fine.”

This is not fine.

The orc watched her babble with an expression that might have been patience or might have been the calm that preceded violence.

It was impossible to tell. She’d built her career on reading context and subtext, but she had no framework for this encounter.

Every cultural reference point she possessed was useless here.

He said something else, this time with a different inflection. A question, maybe?

She shook her head. “Still not getting it. We’re going to need a Rosetta Stone. Or charades. I’m excellent at charades. Why don’t we start with names? I’m Thea.”

He hesitated, then repeated it, mangling the ‘th’ sound into something closer to ‘Tea’ but getting close enough that she nodded.

“Yes. Thea. That’s me. Dr. Thea Monroe, actually, but let’s start simple. And you are?”

He hesitated again, then said something that sounded like “Khor-rek” with a roll in the middle that her English-trained tongue could never replicate.

Relief flooded through her with surprising intensity. He had given her his name. They had established communication.

“Khorrek,” she repeated, doing her best to replicate the sound. From the look on his face, she wasn’t entirely successful but he didn’t correct her. Instead he reached down and grabbed the hem of his leather tunic.

Oh god, what is he—

He pulled the tunic over his head in one smooth motion, revealing a torso that looked like it had been designed to make anatomists weep with joy, each muscle defined to the point of absurdity.

But he also revealed more scars, some silver, some darker than his green skin, each one telling a story she couldn’t read but spoke of pain.

Then he stepped forward and dropped the tunic over her head.

She stood frozen as the leather settled around her shoulders, still warm from his body. It fell to her mid-thigh, far too large and smelling of leather and smoke and something else—something earthy and wild.

She looked up and found him watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite decipher.

Something flickered in those gold eyes—desire, perhaps, or satisfaction—but it vanished as quickly as it appeared, replaced by something almost business-like.

He was looking at her like a problem that needed to be managed.

She clutched the warm leather to her chest, a meager shield. “Thank you.”

He didn’t acknowledge her gratitude. Instead he pointed at her, then pointed off into the distance, towards the south, and made a walking motion with two of his fingers. Not exactly dragging her off, but…

“You want me to go with you?”

Absolutely not.

Not only was he a stranger with questionable motives, despite the fact that he’d given her clothing, but she’d arrived in this world at this place. Logic dictated that her best chance for leaving it again was to remain here.

The problem was communicating that minor detail to someone who spoke a language that sounded like rocks being ground together in a cement mixer.

“Look,” she said, spreading her hands in what she hoped was a placating gesture. “I appreciate the wardrobe donation. Really. Five stars for customer service. But I’m not going anywhere with you until I understand what the hell is happening.”

His expression didn’t change, but his gaze hardened. He didn’t raise a weapon. He didn’t even make a threatening gesture. He simply looked at her, and the cold certainty in his eyes was more terrifying than any sword. He was telling her, without words, that it was not a negotiation.

It was an order.

Her mind, that glorious, analytical instrument that had served her so well, tried to process this. It offered up a dozen scenarios, each one more bleak than the last. She was an asset. A prize. A package to be delivered. She was a valuable, and fragile, commodity.

He said something else in that grinding-stone language. The tone was… patient. Like he was explaining something obvious to a particularly slow child.

“I don’t understand you,” she said slowly, enunciating each word as if that would somehow bridge the language barrier. “I. Don’t. Understand.”

More grinding-stone syllables. His patience was clearly wearing thin.

He gestured again, more emphatically. Pointed at her. Pointed at himself. Pointed at the horizon.

Come with me.

The message was clear even without shared language. And just as clearly, he expected obedience.

“No,” she said, shaking her head to emphasize her refusal. Surely that had to be recognizable across linguistic boundaries.

His jaw tightened. She saw something flicker in his eyes—frustration, maybe, or impatience. His hand moved to the massive sword hanging at his hip, and her heart lurched into her throat.

This is it. This is where I die. Killed by an orc on an alien world because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.