4. The Wrong Orc
THE WRONG ORC
Iheld my tongue for the first hour, kept silent when he pulled me behind a tree and listened to nothing, when he snaked our path through bracken instead of the soft earth, and when he pressed me, again, down beside an embankment, fear turning my senses too alert till he listened, listened, and sprang away, leaving me to stumble after him.
And it should have relieved me that it was for a different reason that he pulled me against trees and pressed me to the ground, but instead, dread rose in my gut, the knowing that something was wrong, that we were doing this wrong. We moved south.
“I’m sorry, please, may I ask a question?” My voice croaked, and I winced at it. I had been quiet too long, with no walks alone to forage and hum, too trapped in the silence of that house.
He cocked his head to the wind before he nodded.
“Why are we going this way? Aren’t the orcs…”
He raised an eyebrow.
I pointed north. “...aren’t the orcs over there?”
“There are orcs over there. Yes. You will find there are orcs in quite a few directions.” He stepped over a fallen tree.
I scrambled over it. “But we were supposed to go back to your people.”
“You mean to the orcs attacking your town.”
“Yes.”
“To make a magic pronouncement that none of them can toy with the humans anymore.” He was looking up at the trees, searching for something.
“Yes.”
“Annora…can I call you Annora?”
“I am your wife.”
“Thank you. Annora.” He approached a pine.
“There’s no easy way to say this. Your people are idiots.
” He dismissed that tree, kept walking as he talked.
“The Gol Droth don’t care if you marry me.
I’ve spent three weeks among their horde, and I was ready to leave at the three hour mark.
I’m even more ready to leave now, yes?” He glanced at me, returned his eyes to the trees.
“News of my violent nuptials is not going to bring anyone peace. You don’t need to meet them. ” He turned and kept walking.
I was frozen, sick. He leapt over a dip.
“Wait!”
He didn’t stop. I slid down the bank, started scrambling up again. “You’re saying…this alliance doesn’t protect the town?”
He scanned the trees. “From the Gol Droth? No. But congratulations, now they can be entirely safe from the Drashik. Who live in…” he jabbed a thumb South. “...this direction.”
“You’re not of the horde that was hurting us.”
“That’s an exaggeration. Half.”
My mind was slipping on the loose soil along with my shoes. “Your blood is half theirs, but they don’t care about you at all?”
“I don’t know. Did your town care about you?” He jumped to a branch, started climbing a pine tree. “The Droth like me well enough.”
“Then we should go back.”
“It’s me they like, little witch. We’re hiding for you.
” He wrenched something from a snarl up in the tree, and twigs and branches showered down.
A pack. He’d retrieved a pack, stashed in the nest of rubbish.
He leapt down, landing in front of me. “Because I’m not sure they like me enough to be nice to you, do you ken?
” He reached out, and I stiffened, as he reached for my head—
—and pulled back a twig.
“Come on. We need to keep moving.”
I caught my breath. My face was hot. My stomach was roiling, from the womb-poison I’d chugged yesterday or from the ridiculousness of this situation. And it was foolish perhaps to be this angry, but, “What will happen to the town?”
“Hmm?”
“My people!”
He lashed my dowry bundle to the top of the pack frame as he walked, worked with the straps. “The Gol Droth are leaving on their own accord soon after this. They have meatier prey to the east, and there are rumblings that the magisters hire for war.”
I stumbled. “So they’ll be safe?”
“They’ll be no less safe than if they’d successfully sold you to the locals. Is that what you want to hear?”
My whole chest hurt. “Yes,” I said to his back. “Yes, because I actually care about the people I leave behind. Because I’m not a monster.”
He turned.
His eyes were calm, but I still stepped backwards.
“Alright,” he said, something honeyed and deadly in the roll of his words.
“You’re right. I never lied, but your people are so stupid that I didn’t have to, because they don’t think orcs move around, yes?
” He was smiling, and it didn’t reach his eyes, and my gut was screaming at me to run.
“This marriage agreement was coerced on my side, and on your side was on false pretenses, yes? Because I would marry you again to save my own hide, and I won’t apologize for that.
” His tone was velvet, and I shivered, fear and dread.
“But you know about the truth now. You can back out of this, and I should, having shared your bed, be honor-bound to help you with that. Do you want me to take you back to the Gol Droth? They’d receive you in some manner, I’m sure, a pretty peace offering.
Maybe you’d end up a wife. Who am I to say?
Some of them might honor the codes.” He stepped closer, his gaze a fire.
“I can’t promise whichever one won their challenge would be as handsome as I am, but this is your choice, isn’t it?
Your wedding. Your funeral.” His lip curled, cruel. “How much do you care about that town?”
My insides were water. I couldn’t scream, couldn’t cry.
He stood there, waiting, just watching me shake.
And he was right. He’d owed us nothing, no truth that could have endangered him, no explanation of the hordes he treated with.
It was our foolishness that wasted my sacrifice.
And to go as tainted loot to our enemies, to be sold and traded again…
I could kill this orc, to save myself. I couldn’t kill a horde.
“Fine,” I croaked out. “It’s fine. Let’s…let’s go.”
He bowed, elaborate, utterly un-Orcish, and returned to his trail I couldn’t see.
South. Bogdana had told me the name of the road in the South.
She’d traced in the fine dust of that table where the road met the river, where her aunt’s village of Mereborough would be.
Orcs were wanderers without hearth and home, so we’d keep moving.
She’d made sure, wherever I’d go, that I could find the way.
I lunged into the rhythm of his steps, the cadence of this path away from everything I knew.
“I did wrong you in one thing,” the orc said, as he swung along the uneven turf as easily as breathing. “It’s our tradition that on accepting marriage, a bride makes a request.”
I ducked under branches. “What is that?”
“No, that’s what I ask you.” He faced me. “You say what you ask for.” The smile from before had gone, his expression cold and smooth, and it struck me that he might have been pretty, if he wasn’t terrifying. “Can’t think of anything?”
My mind was a cold blank.
He turned back. “Let me know when you do.” He walked.
We were still walking when night fell. We didn’t talk, and he still checked, constantly, for some sound, some clue, something I couldn’t see or hear.
My legs were lead. My whole focus was on not tripping in the darkness.
I considered using my one request to ask him to stop this interminable trek, but I sealed it back.
If that tradition mattered to him, I should save it to survive.
Once he stopped to pull a flat of speckled travel bread from the pack, and told me to eat my small piece as we moved.
That was the last word spoken. We drank at a brook. We kept walking.
And while walking, I had time to think, time for the thoughts that had been at bay for days to rush in like wolves.
I thought of my father bleeding out on the floor of our cabin.
I thought of the choice Bogdana had given my mother, and the horror that I lived because she’d chosen wrong.
I thought of the ache I could still feel, of the orc’s body over mine.
We were only supposed to be able to bind them with marriage because they were slaves to sex, because they were controllable, the worst stories about men exaggerated into form. He hadn’t seemed controlled or bewitched. He didn’t feel like I’d made him mine.
The moon rose, and the woods stopped feeling real. I stopped feeling real. A whippoorwill sang, and I wanted to sing back, but I had to follow the orc, this figure whose broad back flickered through the trees.
A cloud passed the moon, and I fell.
The world was cartwheeling past, shadow and pain, and then I was lying, dazed, at the bottom of some shallow ravine, the wind knocked out of me, and everything confused.
A moment’s whisper, and he was looming over me, muttering Orcish that sounded like a curse. “Can you hear me? Annora. Tell me you’re awake,” he hissed.
I pulled my voice back. “I am…awake.”
“Can you move? How badly are you injured? You just walked into a ravine.”
“I can’t see,” I mumbled.
He cursed again. “You hit your head? You can’t see because you hit it?”
“No, it’s dark.”
He cursed again. “We can’t stay here. There will be a patrol.”
I tried to get up. I had my arms, and my legs. From a healer’s standpoint, this wasn’t worse than bruising. I caught his shoulder, and leaned on him. My arm gave out, and I fell.
He cursed a blue streak in the common tongue this time. “I forget how weak you keep your women.”
I didn’t have time to think how his displeasure could affect or shorten my life. His arms were under me, and he hauled me up into his chest.
I think when I’d been younger, when I’d still dreamed girlish dreams, I’d imagined being rescued and carried. But not like this, not by a monster I intended to kill, careless because he owned me, fleeing other monsters under the darkened sky. If I’d imagined this, I would have been so afraid.
Now I was so tired that I didn’t even fight.
I was dimly aware when his lunging and rapid lope through the trees had stopped, when the moon was back and there were no trees overhead. I heard him mutter Orcish again, and felt him clench me tighter. Once I opened my eyes, and thought I saw grand protrusions of stone.