2. A Wedding Night #2
The Overseer fumbled with the keys. “Are you going to let me wash?” The orc drawled, and he almost dropped them. The orc raised his eyebrows. “That seems the minimum courtesy for your sacrificial bride.”
Silence hung.
Bogdana snapped, “For godsakes the door has to open anyway! And he’s tied! Are you going to let the beast be more considerate to our girl than you?”
Someone rolled in the rain barrel from outside, with the dipper. Bogdana scolded them through dragging the dingy guard cot inside. When they opened the cell, I focused on helping move the cot into the cage, and not the door locking behind me.
“You will be released in the morning.” Overseer Marsen sounded so uncertain. He shuffled in place.
The orc’s gaze was flat. “I assume you’re not staying to watch?”
The overseer flinched. Some command was announced.
I didn’t watch any of them as they filtered out, just stood by the pallet bed, feeling the heat and cold flooding over me.
I’d never fainted before. I wasn’t going to tonight.
I would prove myself useful to the orc, and I would endure, and I would survive.
I stepped towards my groom. “Let’s get you out of those ropes.” I sounded calm. He sat at the edge of the narrow bed and didn’t protest as I moved around him, to the knots at his wrists, his lower back.
“I don’t suppose you brought a knife,” he rumbled.
The myriad ways a blade could make this night worse flashed before my eyes. “I did not.”
“Well. We didn’t have a pleasant interaction the last time you were here.”
I got slack on one of the knots, tugged the rope through. “Well,” I muttered, “this is not a pleasant circumstance.”
He let out a chuckle. I got one knot undone. One unbinding closer to my undoing.
“I didn’t expect the border towns to adhere to the old ways.”
“The old ways?” The rope cut into his forearm here, and I tried to still my pulse, be careful. I didn’t need to make my husband more my enemy.
“Thrak ishi and Tar ivan. Alliances by force. Our people have moved away from such things, though there are always backward enclaves.” He winced and the cord slid across the cuts. “Like yours, I suppose.”
My stomach twisted, pride and shame like a knot. “People do desperate things when they need to survive.”
He glanced back at me. “I meant no offense. My grandmother was a war bride. There is no shame in navigating this world as best we can.”
The last rope came loose under my fingers, sliding off, and my husband stood.
He was so much taller than me. Broader than me.
Aside from the marks my kinfolk had put on him, this was a body peppered and nicked with scars, white against green in the pale lavender of the twilight.
He rubbed the feeling back into his wrists, his hands, towering over the cot and me, over this whole cell, a lithe body and powerful.
He passed me and walked to the barrel.
“First things first.” He ladled water over his face, raked fingers through his hair.
He kept speaking, even as he didn’t look at me.
“I wasn’t about to ask you in front of them.
No one’s forcing you to do this?” Another splash, water over the smooth expanse of his shoulders. “I’m not interested in forcing anyone.”
I wondered what happened if I said yes, what would even happen then. I held Todderick in my mind. “No,” I said. “This is the best choice for me.”
He continued his ablutions, water running down his back.
“Well, congratulations, you are currently my best choice for survival as well.” He paused his task.
“...that sounded flippant. Don’t worry. The Drashik keep their oaths.
” He set the ladle down, started at the ties of his trousers, and I turned away, and he spoke behind me.
“I can’t speak for the other hordes, but we do. ”
That meant the town would be safe, I supposed. I should take that as some kind of comfort. I wished it relieved some of the cold dread in my chest.
“Are your family going to be angry about this?” His voice sounded light. “Do I have to fight someone when we're done?”
“No,” I whispered. “They're all dead.” I remembered in my haze that this troth had to bind him to the community. “—but I have many people here I care for.”
He snorted. “Most orcs don't believe being an orphan robs you of sentiment. I'm not going to call you heartless.” Water splashed. “I'm low on kin as well, but my kith will tell you I'm not a total asshole.” Kith. The orc had kith. I don’t know why that felt wrong.
“The orc you helped escape,” I got out. Keep him talking. “Was he your family?”
The splashing stilled, started again. “No. No, I met him a week ago.”
I remembered his threat, the feeling of his grip on my throat. “You seemed to care about him.”
“He had someone waiting for him.” And for the first time tonight his voice was cold. “If he'd been offered this ‘merciful chance,’ he'd have been choosing between death and oath-breaking.”
And now he was angry. Now I’d done it. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be. I highly, highly doubt you were the mastermind of this.”
The splashing had stopped, a sound like cloth. And suddenly, in the dying light, I wanted very badly to delay what was coming any way there was.
I shouldn't be learning about him. The more human he was the harder he would be to kill. But no, that couldn't be true. I wasn't going to be a weakling trapped by sentiment. I could ask a question to delay the inevitable and still finish this. “You speak a lot of Common,” I rushed out.
He grunted. “My brother’s father spoke it.”
“You have a brother?” I whispered. I don’t know what I’d expected. They didn’t pop out of the ground.
“Shield-brother,” he said. “We worked together as mercenaries.” A gulp. He was drinking. How long had he not had water? “I picked it up for the cursing, and then…it was useful.”
I was nodding, in the darkness, my back still to the orc. “Useful for me,” I said.
He sounded wry. “Yes. You’d have had a much harder time manipulating one of the locals.” A deep breath. “Now then. To business.”
The cot moved behind me, and I felt myself turn to water and stone, the strips of dried seaweed heavy on my thigh.
A touch brushed my back, as he started at the ties. His voice in the cell sounded careless, bored. “Have you done this before?”
“No,” I whispered. A little kernel of rebellion twisted in my gut. “Have you?”
“I've had people use me for pleasure. I've never sealed an oath.” He didn’t sound annoyed.
The stiffened bodice fell off my shoulders.
He was talking. “‘A good time, not a lifetime,’ I think they say.” I crossed my arms, and he added, archly, “Not that I'm questioning your judgment in randomly choosing a husband based on looks.
I'm sure you could have done worse.” He tugged at the shift. “I think you have to stand, wife.”
Right, standing. I was helping him. My legs were leaden, wobbly. I stepped out of the dress, stopped to hang it over the bars. “Do we have to take the shift off?” My voice didn’t sound like my own.
“Hmm?”
“The door. It isn’t locked, and…” I squeezed my eyes shut. The idea of Toddrick coming in here was somehow worse than the certainty of being punctured by this stranger.
“You don’t trust your people.”
I didn’t answer.
“Fair enough. Do you want to stand or lie down?”
I could hang onto these bars, probably, to keep my knees from buckling, and then I wouldn’t have to look at him. But maybe that was worse. Maybe it was better to see, to know at least this was my choice. “Lying down is fine.”
“Alright, then.”
The sun disappeared, and the room was in darkness. I moved back towards the deeper shadow, towards the warrior waiting on the cot, my hands out reaching for the wall. My fingertips brushed hot skin, and I gasped.
He laughed. “You can’t see in the dark,” he said. It was the closest I’d heard to a real laugh from him.
“No.” My heart was hammering in my chest. I clenched the thin skirt of my shift. “Do you?”