“I said no,” I repeated, louder this time, taking a step forward. “You are not soldiers. You are butchers. You’re poisoning women. Children.” I thought of thelittle girl Korvak had knelt before, the one whose life he had valued more than the cowardly merchant’s. “They are not your enemy.”
Roric actually laughed, a short, ugly bark of disbelief. “They’re not human! They’re animals. And you seem to have developed a taste for them.” His eyes narrowed into hateful slits. “You’re a traitor to your race. You should be on your back for us, not for some monster.” He spat on the ground. “An Orc-fucker.”
That was the final, clarifying truth. To him, my choice could only be a sexual one. A betrayal of my body, not my conscience. He couldn't conceive that I might simply be choosing the side that wasn't trying to murder children, because he didn't see them as children at all.
“You’re the traitors,” I bit out, pulling the dagger from my belt. “You’re traitors to everything a soldier is supposed to be.”
Roric’s face went cold. The game was over. “Kill the bitch,” he ordered. “But don’t damage the merchandise too much. After we’re done here, we’ll see what we’ve been missing all these years. Make it hurt.”
The two scouts charged me. I met the first one, my dagger a flash of steel. I was faster, more agile. I ducked under a wild sword swing and drove my blade into the soft spot under his arm. He grunted and stumbled back.
But I was one against three.
The second scout’s sword came in low, and I had to leap back to avoid it. I felt a searing, white-hot pain in my thigh as the tip of his blade sliced through the leather of my borrowed breeches and into the flesh beneath. A cry of pain was torn from my throat. I staggered, my leg threatening to give out.
Roric advanced, his own sword drawn, a cruel, satisfied look on his face. “You should have stayed a good little pet, Kael.”
I set my jaw, pain radiating up my leg. I was wounded, and I was outnumbered. I was going to die here. But they had made one fatal mistake. They had told me exactly what they would do to me if they took me alive. And that meant I had absolutely nothing left to lose.
I met his advance, my dagger held low, ready to sell my life for a chance to take one of them with me.
Chapter 12
Korvak
The first sign that something was wrong was the silence.
My longhouse, which had for weeks been filled with the low, constant presence of her—the soft scuff of her boots, the rustle of a page as she studied the Orcish histories my mother had given her, the quiet clatter of a knife as she prepared food—was utterly, unnervingly still. An empty space had opened up in the air, a vacuum where her energy should have been.
I had grown accustomed to her presence in a way that had crept up on me, a slow, insidious vine wrapping itself around my core. My day was now bracketed by the sight of her in the morning and the quiet tension of her presence across the hearth at night. Her absence was not just a lack of noise; it was a physical hollowness in the home we now shared.
At first, I told myself it was nothing. I had given her the freedom of the valley. She was exploring,pacing off the demons of her confinement as she so often did. But a cold knot of unease began to twist in my gut. She had been gone too long. The sun was beginning its slow descent toward the jagged peaks of the western ridge.
I left the longhouse and scanned the stronghold. She was not by the training rings. Not at the forge, where she sometimes watched the blacksmiths with a strange, hungry look in her eyes. Not with my mother.
The unease curdled into a low, primal dread.
I did not call for a search party. I did not alert the guards. This was a male, consumed by a sudden, irrational certainty that something was deeply, horribly wrong. I strode from the gates, my hand resting on the hilt of my axe, and headed for the woods.
The higher I climbed into the hills, the more the feeling of wrongness solidified. And then I smelled it. Two scents, hitting the wind at the same time, a combination so vile it sent a jolt of pure, atavistic rage through my very soul.
The first was the scent of her blood. It was faint, but unmistakable to my senses, a thin, coppery thread of alarm on the clean mountain air.
The second was the smell of poison. A cold, bitter, tang.
The two scents,her bloodandpoison, intertwined in my mind and broke something inside me. The world narrowed to a tunnel of red-hazed fury. Every instinct screamed a single, coherent command:Find her. Kill what is hurting her.
I moved through the woods not as an Orc, but as an avalanche. I did not care for stealth. I snapped branches, my heavy boots churning the earth, my speed a blur of deadly purpose. The scent of her blood grew stronger, leading me uphill, toward the springhead.
Then I heard it. The clang of steel. A man’s cruel laugh. And her grunt of pain.
I burst through the tree line into the clearing by the spring. The scene that met my eyes seared itself into my brain. Three human males, dressed in the filth of the Magistrate’s kill squads. One lay on the ground, clutching a wound under his arm. The other two were advancing on Kael.
She was backed against a rock, a bloody gash high on her thigh staining her leather breeches a dark, sickening crimson. She was pale with pain and blood loss, but she held the dagger I had given her in a white-knuckled grip, her body a taut line of pure, defiant fury. She was a cornered wolf, wounded and outnumbered, ready to tear out the throat of the hunter who came for her.
The sight of them, leering at her, their swords raised against her wounded form, shattered the last vestiges of my control.
A roar was torn from the depths of my being. It was a pledge of absolute, annihilating violence.
