Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Uram promised me a long day of walking that first morning, but it turns out his home is more than a week away, since we’re on foot and trudging through the first snow of the winter.
It’s a good thing that he bought me new boots and a cloak in the village because the weather has turned harsh, and I would have frozen my toes off in my old footwear.
But despite the grueling pace Uram sets as we walk, I’ve come to enjoy the rhythm of our days.
My mate leads us unerringly north, sometimes on footpaths used by woodsmen and travelers, other times cutting through thick forest. Every night, he finds us a shelter to stay at—a woodcutters’ hut, a small, dry cave, or just a nice divot in the ground where we can string up my blanket as a tent, light a fire to keep us warm, and spend the night tangled up in each other.
Uram shows me how well we work together by taking care of my sore, tired body every night. He rubs my aching feet and kneads the muscles of my back, then makes me come until I’m a panting, shaking mess. He allows me to explore him as well—above the waistline of his pants.
“If you take out my cock,” he growls at me, his features tight with passion, “I’ll be inside you in seconds. I won’t be able to hold back, and I don’t want to knot you where we might freeze our toes off.”
His logic makes sense, but that doesn’t mean I’m not increasingly hungry for what he promised me. I steal kisses from him whenever I can and make sure to give him back as much affection as he’ll let me.
On our fifth day of travel, Uram suddenly stops on the path, holding up his hand. I halt beside him, following his gaze to a clump of bushes.
“What is it?” I ask quietly.
He frowns, his head cocked to the side. “I’m not—”
An arrow whistles through the air, hitting him in the arm. Uram dives at me, knocking me to the wet ground, then pushes me behind a tall fir tree with a thick trunk.
“Oh, gods.” I raise shaking hands to where the shaft of the arrow sticks from Uram’s cloak. “You’ve been hit!”
He grits his teeth, snaps the shaft off with one quick yank, then undoes his cloak and lets it fall to the ground. From his weapons belt, he takes the big hunting knife and shoves it into my hands. “Run.”
I gape at him. “What?”
“There’s more than one attacker,” he forces out through gritted teeth. “They probably want to kill me and steal you, but I could be wrong, and that’s not a chance I’m prepared to take. So run, Rose. Don’t look back.”
He shoves me in the direction of a thicket of dead brambles, deeper into the dark forest.
“I can’t leave you,” I protest, even as I take a step back.
“You will,” he growls. “I need to protect my mate, and I can’t do that while worrying you might get caught in the crossfire. Run and hide, now!”
With that order, he turns on his heels and melts into the undergrowth. For a moment, I think of following, but he’s a warrior and he knows best in this case. So, I duck between the trees and keep running until all I can hear is my own panting breath. I stop, looking for a good place to hide.
There’s an old maple tree with branches not too far off the ground, so I tuck Uram’s knife in my sleeve and scramble up, scraping my skin on the rough bark.
Then I climb higher, trying to get a sense of what’s happening with Uram and the attackers, but the trees are too thick, the firs with their bushy branches obscuring my view.
My stomach roils at the thought of Uram getting hurt. If it’s thieves or brigands who attacked us, I hope he just gives them what they want so no one gets hurt. But I have a sinking feeling that I know the attackers all too well.
A movement in the corner of my eye catches my attention. It’s a man shambling through the forest, right on my trail. I’d forgotten to obscure my footsteps—not that it would have been easy to do with the ground wet and snowy. I might as well have written a signpost pointing directly at my location.
Still, I wrap my gray cloak more tightly around me and press my back to the trunk, hoping to stay invisible.
But my disguise doesn’t last long.
“Hello, Miss Rose,” Mr. Genner drawls from under the tree. “Why don’t you come down here and we can have ourselves a little chat?”
I grit my teeth and remain silent. This man doesn’t deserve my reply. His arm is in a sling, and I feel a vicious sense of satisfaction knowing that it was Uram who broke it. He clutches a long knife in his good hand and stares balefully at me.
He and his friends must have followed us on horseback, or they wouldn’t have been able to catch us so quickly. A man with a stung pride is always dangerous, but here, in the middle of the forest, our situation is even more dire.
“You can come down now,” he says, his voice losing the false sugared tone, “or we can wait for one of my boys to follow, and they’ll shoot you off this tree.”
Fear spreads through my veins at the thought of the archer who shot Uram. My mate has an ax, and I’m sure he’s a skilled warrior, but he can only fight the attackers at close range. If the archer stays well back, he could shoot him full of arrows and never suffer a scratch himself.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I mutter, the words meant for me, not the bastard on the forest floor. “I’d rather die than give myself over to you.”
I snap a dead branch off the nearest tree limb and chuck it down at Mr. Genner. It misses, but the man cusses anyway and steps out of range. There’s not much he can do but wait—either for one of his companions to join him or for me to lose my balance on the icy branches and tumble to the ground.
Then I sense more movement in the forest. I scan the trees, squinting. It takes me a moment to notice Uram slinking from tree to tree, his ax at the ready. Whatever happened with the other attackers, he’s here, stalking Mr. Genner.
But he’s moving too slowly, his left arm, the one with the arrow wound, tucked awkwardly against his side.
And now that he’s close, I can see blood covering his skin, a lot of it.
Maybe not all of it is his, but Uram has been hurt, and Mr. Genner is still fresh, despite his injury.
His knife may not be a match for Uram’s ax in a normal fight but if Uram is too injured to swing his ax well…
I snap off another branch and throw it at Mr. Genner. “You asshole! I’m never coming with you. I’d rather die!”
The man turns purple in the face and starts spewing obscenities at me while I pelt him with branches. If I keep his attention on me, Uram might get close enough to incapacitate him without injuring himself even more.
“You disgust me,” I scream. “I’ve had to put up with your filthy hands for months.”
He spits on the floor, livid with anger. “You think you’re better than me? You’re nothing but a—”
A twig snaps behind him as Uram leaps forward.
Mr. Genner turns around, his eyes blown wide with shock, and I think for a moment that Uram will simply smack him to the ground and shut him up.
But the big battle ax cuts through the air on a powerful swing, and Mr. Genner’s head rolls to the side, severed completely.
Uram collides with the headless body, knocking it to the ground as he sprawls on top of it. The head lands several feet away, a crimson stain spreading over the trampled snow.
There’s so much blood.
Bile rises in my throat, and I swallow convulsively, my grip on the tree trunk turning painful. I can’t seem to let it go—I’m frozen by the horror.
But Uram isn’t moving. I wait for him to get up, to look up at me and grin, blood-smeared but victorious. Only he doesn’t—his back moves with shallow breaths, yes, but his grip slackens on his ax handle, and he doesn’t move away from the corpse underneath him.
“No,” I whisper, forcing myself to unpeel my fingers from the bark. “No, no, no.”
I clamber from the tree, ignoring my scrapes and bruises, and land awkwardly on my left leg. I rush to Uram’s side and press my shaking fingers to his neck.
When I sense the pulse of his heartbeat, I sob in relief. But no matter how much I shake his shoulders or pat his cheeks, my big warrior doesn’t wake.
“All right,” I mutter, wiping away my tears with my sleeve. “What would Uram do?”
He’s proven himself to be capable and practical, so I try to put myself in his shoes.
I push and heave with all my might and manage to roll him to his back, assessing his injuries.
He’s been shot with four arrows—in his back, hip, and shoulder in addition to the one in his arm.
He must have snapped the shafts on his own and pulled out the one in his back, but the other three arrowheads are still lodged in his flesh.
I debate cutting them out, but I have nothing here to stitch his wounds, so removing the arrowheads would only make him bleed out faster.
None of the wounds are fatal, though, and neither are they bleeding so freely as to incapacitate a warrior of his size. I can’t figure out what has him knocked out—until I notice the widening bloodstain underneath his left thigh.
Finding the narrow gash in the leg of his dark leather pants, I cut it wider with Uram’s knife. My stomach turns at the sight. A deep stab wound oozes blood, trickling over Uram’s green skin. How he ran with the injury, I have no idea, but this is bad.
I shiver violently, both from the cold and the fear.
We’re still so far from the Hill, and I have no idea where exactly we’re going.
There’s also no way I could make my way back to the human village to get help, even if I followed our tracks.
It took us five days to get here, and besides, the villagers would hardly help the orc who killed a whole group of their own people.
The thought of the other villagers has me straightening my back.
I peer into the trees, wondering if we’re about to get attacked by Mr. Genner’s friends.
But the forest is quiet, with only an occasional bird crying out in the distance.
I have to believe that Uram incapacitated the rest of this ambush before he came running after Mr. Genner and me.
The thought of so much killing should repulse me, but I am only proud. Uram saved me again, but this time, he might pay with his life.