1. The Captive #2
Jarreth relaxed back against the cot, his breathing more even.
If I was useless, maybe I’d still done something about the pain.
Bogdanna used to say that medicine helped, even if it was only oak leaves in water.
Being cared for soothed the body with the soul.
We hadn’t realized then that I'd have to leave her side, that the rest of my life oak leaves in water might be the best I could give.
I sat back, drained, and the orc was staring at me again, more intently than before, the smirk gone from his face.
Orcs hated the witching ways more than anyone, I’d heard.
They were crushed under the mages in the east, and then hated our folk gifts and blessings. I turned back to bid Tenithin goodbye.
“Aren’t you going to help him too?” The orc’s voice, low and acid, bade me pause.
Tenithin waved a hand at the bars. “Ach, who are you heckling? Do you know what this girl's been through today because of the likes of you? Shut your maw.”
The orc wasn’t silenced. “You didn’t go through the trouble to capture us because you needed us dead.” There was a second shape laid out at the back of the cell, past him, a hulking figure. It didn't move. “You let us die, this is worthless.”
Tenithin turned at that. “And maybe we only need one of you, eh? Shut your flapping maw.” He bristled, but I could hear it, in the snap of his voice, the crackle. Tenithin was bluffing. The orc had struck home. The overseer wanted them alive.
“I could look at them,” I said. I could exploit this fear, this need. If I could wedge myself into the places others would fear to tread, I could force them to need me.
And if I forced them to need me, they wouldn’t sell me away.
Tenithin’s hand twitched on the table. “Well, then, they’re certainly…if you think…” His tone was apologetic, but his eyes roved my face, sizing me up, weighing the risk.
I picked up my basket. “I’ll do it.” Best not to think. Maybe I’d never think again. “Do you have the key?”
Tenithin messed about with his key ring while he shouted to a man outside, who came to stand by the bars, for all the good it would do.
His short sword wouldn’t reach the back of the cell, but this was my foolishness; if the orcs decided to kill me I wasn’t going to expect help.
Tenithin was scolding “Now not one wrong move from you, do you understand? I’m doing you a kindness.
I expect that to be respected.” The orc murmured some assent and moved back, and the door to the cell creaked open.
The other orc was lying still on the earth floor by the back wall.
My heart lurched for a moment, remembering the last time I’d seen a corpse, but his side moved: breath.
The problem was glaring. Dark purple bruising, even through the olive green of their skin, stained across his ribs, blood spreading under the surface.
“Hello, Sir Orc,” I said, moving slowly. Surprising an injured man could be as dangerous as approaching a cornered beast, and I wasn’t sure which activity my current gambit was closer to. “I’m going to look at your injuries, if you’ll let me.”
I pressed my fingers, feather-light, over the bone, and he flinched, but didn’t attack, didn’t bite.
“I think you’ve broken a rib. Maybe two,” I said, pretending this was normal, touching an orc was normal.
“The good news is that all of them are still in their places instead of in your lungs or your guts, so you’ll recover, if nothing worse happens to you. ”
His face was turned away from me, black and purple staining along his cheek, his temple. He didn’t respond.
I looked up at the other orc. “Was he injured somewhere else? They didn’t stab him?”
The one with the forehead scar shrugged. “I haven’t gotten him to talk.”
I leaned in. “Are you otherwise hurt, sir?”
The scarred one sighed, and rumbled out something in their language, harsh and hissing with consonants we didn’t have.
The one on the ground was quiet, then answered, all shushing sounds punctuated with the hard sounds, “gawk” and “thrak.”
The scarred one's eyes hardened. “He’s not otherwise injured,” he said, and then muttered, “Rutting humans.”
“Hey!” the one guard squawked. His sword pommel clunked against the bars. “Keep your mouth clean before the maid.”
I fumbled through my basket, realizing I had nothing for bruising, no liniments and nothing for pain. He needed the kinds of tinctures Bogdana made, and here I was clinging to life by my fingernails, not even able to offer him thyme and chamomile.
“Does the Overseer want them whole?” I asked, willing my voice not to waver. I needed them to think of me as someone who solved problems, not someone who petted some ribs and told them Bogdana would fix it.
Tenithin cleared his throat. “Whatever the plans, I’m sure it wouldn’t do harm.”
Quit stalling, Annora.
“I’ll sing for him,” I said, bile in my mouth.
No one was going to care about the level of medicine given to an orc.
I nodded while Tenithin assured me the Overseer would pay me a few copper, and maybe it was better that Bogdana wouldn’t come in here; I’d spare her sitting in a cage with monsters. The town really couldn’t risk Bogdana.
“Sir Orc?” I murmured. “I don’t have any medicine for you. Is a song alright?”
He choked out a word, barking and short. I looked back at the scarred one.
“He says to go ahead.” His gaze was cold.
I spread my hands over the blackening bruise, breathing deep, opening that well inside to start my foolish song. I couldn’t mend bone, but I could lessen the heat in the area to relax the pain. I could prove I was more solution than problem.
The first syllables shook on the air, and a hand slammed over my mouth as the first orc dragged me against the wall.
His other arm pinned me close. Tenithin and the guard were yelling, looking for the key, but it was the orc’s voice I heard, so close to my ear.
“You sing a different song, pale-haired witch.”
He could break my neck. He could end everything, my hopes and my troubles, before the two men even found the key. His hand loosened on my mouth, fingers still on my lips, as if muffling the magic would stop it. “Explain yourself.”
I croaked, “It’s always a different song.”
“You lie.”
“He’s differently injured. Why…would a broken rib be the same as a blade cut?”
His grip tightened. “You want me to believe that? You sing one thing for your friend and another for mine, and you want to play the innocent?”
Did he just want someone to punish? Did it matter? “Think what you want,” I got out, bracing for the next pain. “You can kill me and see if they still want you alive. But I won't help him if I’m dead.”
The mottled side of the orc on the ground rose and fell, shallow, pained breaths.
The orc released me, and I fell back to the ground, to my stinging knees. “If you hurt him, you will die before your body hits the floor.”
Tenithin was stammering. “Miss Annora, you can come back toward the bars—"
I crouched again by the orc against the wall, addressed my attacker. “I don’t hurt my patients.” I sang.
The problem with song-magic, the danger I'd skirted all my life, was that I reached for what was inside of me, for hope, for pleas, for goodness, what was actually there tried to come out. I was in a prison cell, leaning over the shape of one of their raiders, a violent murderer turned docile by pain the way so many are, a creature who’d been battered by the same anger that threatened to spill out of me so many times, the same helpless, seething rage.
I wanted to stay controlled, because of Tenithin, because of the guard who’d be watching now, ready to murmur to others and increase the gauntlet I would run, but the song pitched and came low, rose and crashed like the mourning I couldn’t afford.
Like the tears I barely managed to cry. Like wishing I had someone worth mourning.
The anger that had been roiling, unable to be spilled, came through in my keening. Fix it. Damn everything, and fix it.
I stopped. The swelling had receded a little, under my fingers. His side moved as he breathed, slower, more relaxed, and he turned, a wide face with a break across his nose, and sat up.
The scarred orc spoke at my back, not to me, more of their tongue, and the one I’d treated answered.
I should get up, should get out, but I was drained, by the singing, by something else.
Everything about me felt heavy, and I just wanted to pause there, kneeling on the packed earth like all of me would fall apart when I stood.
“You healed him,” the scarred one said.
I shrugged. “I can do a little. Not much.”
“I was wrong. Apologies.”
Tenithin was giving instructions, and I should try to listen, but the orc spoke, and his voice pushed everything back.
“I’m sorry for this, too.” He wrenched me up by my arm.
Should I be getting used to this, his hand on my throat, arms pinned as he pressed me back against him? One day an orphan, and this was my normal now?
“Open the door or she dies.”
Tenithin was squawking.
The orc barked, “If anyone was coming for your screams, they’d have come the first time. Do it.”
A key jangled in the lock.
“Shove it open. All the way.”
A creak. The one guard had his sword held up over his head, his eyes the kind of wide with fear mine should have had, if I’d had anything other than the most basic desire not to die. Tenithin was between his table and the door.
My captor spoke again in their tongue, instructions to the other, who was pushing himself up to stand, saying something anxious in return.
“Alright,” he returned to the common tongue.
“We do this safely.” He stepped to the doorway, and before anyone could move, he hurled me into the guard’s stomach.