Korvak stopped breathing.
His eyes went wide, and he made a strange, choking sound in the back of his throat. The color drained from his face, only to be replaced by a dark, mottled flush that climbed from his thick neck all the way to his hairline. He looked like he’d been simultaneously stabbed and told the funniest joke in the world.
I frowned. “What? Was it wrong?”
He stared at me, his mouth opening and closing once before he finally managed to speak. “You just said,” he rasped, his voice strained, “‘I will take you to my bed.’”
The world stopped. And then it caught fire.
A heat so intense it was painful flooded my face, my neck, my entire body. I was mortified. Utterly, completely, and irrevocably mortified. I wanted the stone floor to crack open and swallow me whole. Of all the possible mistakes, I had to make that one.
And then, he laughed.
It was not the cruel chuckle of a warrior mocking a foolish captive. It was a real laugh. A deep, honest, rumbling sound that started in his chest and shook his entire body. It was the sound of a landslide, of a thunderstorm, of pure, unrestrained mirth. It was the most surprising and wonderful sound I had ever heard. It stripped ten years of war and command from his face, leaving only the man behind.
I was still burning with humiliation, but seeing him like that, so completely unguarded, a small, traitorous smile tugged at my own lips.
It was in that moment, with him roaring with laughter and me wishing for death by embarrassment, that his mother, Grakka, entered the longhouse.
She stopped just inside the doorway, taking in the scene. Her son, the great general, clutching his stomach as he laughed, and me, the human prize, looking like a ripe tomato. Her expression was, as always, unreadable stone.
She walked toward us, her steps silent. The laughter died in Korvak’s throat as he noticed her.
Grakka stopped before me and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time. Then she spoke. And she spoke in the common tongue. Her accent was thick, the words heavy and awkward on her Orcish tongue.
“He is a general,” she said, her dark eyes sharp. “He knows how to break armies. He does not know how to teach a child to speak.” She gestured to the stool opposite me. “I will teach you.”
Korvak looked from his mother to me, a flicker of protest in his eyes, but he said nothing. He knew a command from his matriarch when he heard one.
Grakka sat. She ignored her son completely, her full, formidable attention settling on me. “We willbegin,” she said, her voice a gravelly monotone. “The word isAgnar. Fire. Say it until it does not sound like a dying goat.”
I stared at the old Orc female, the woman who had ignored my existence for days. She was taking me under her wing. It was not kindness. Grakka did not seem like a kind woman. It was… something else. A practical decision. An acceptance, of a sort.
And as I sat there, between the laughing general and his stern, new tutor, for the first time since my helmet had been knocked from my head, I felt the cold, hard knot of dread in my stomach loosen just a little.
Chapter 10
Korvak
The warrior in her was dying.
I watched it happen day by day. It was a slow, quiet death, unfolding in the cage of my longhouse. When I had first seen her, she was a creature of fire and motion, a whirlwind of desperate courage in the mud and blood of her city. Now, that fire was being banked, smothered under a blanket of silence and inactivity.
She had started pacing. Back and forth, from the hearth to the door, a restless, relentless rhythm that spoke of a body and spirit screaming for release. She was a wolf trapped in a pen, her muscles atrophying, her instincts dulling. The sight of it was a constant, low-grade torture. I had not claimed a pet to be kept by the fire. I had claimed a mate with the heart of a predator, and I was killing her with comfort.
My mother’s lessons were a partial solution. Kael—the name was a constant, soft weight in my mind—was a fiercely intelligent student. Her Orcishwas still halting, peppered with mistakes, but the wall of silence between us was beginning to crumble. But language could not exercise the body, could not satisfy the warrior’s need for strife.
I found her one afternoon by the weapon rack near the door, her hand hovering over the hilt of a practice sword. Not touching, just feeling its proximity. Her knuckles were white.
“You are wearing a path in my floor,” I said from across the hall.
She snatched her hand back as if burned, turning to face me. The defiance in her stormy eyes was sharper today, honed by a whetstone of pure frustration. “Your floor is made of stone. It will survive.”
“My sanity, however, is in greater peril,” I rumbled, walking toward her. “You need to bleed off that energy before you chew through the doorposts.”
A flicker of suspicion crossed her face. “And what do you suggest? A brisk walk around the stronghold so your people can stare at your human pet?”
The word ‘pet’ struck a nerve. It was exactly what I feared she was becoming. “No,” I said, my voicesharp. “I suggest a sword. In a training ring. Against me.”
