My stillness was a command in itself. The combat around us sputtered out as my warriors saw their leader frozen, staring down an unmasked, unarmed human. They lowered their weapons, their brutish faces masks of confusion.
I finally found my voice. I filled my lungs and roared a single word in Orcish, a command that boomed off the stone buildings and shattered the last vestiges of the fight.
“ENOUGH!”
The final screams of the dying were the only answer.
My second-in-command, Ghorza, strode to my side, his iron-shod boots crunching on rubble. His gaze flickered from me to the girl, and his scarred brow furrowed in deep confusion.
“General?”he rumbled, his voice a low avalanche.“The city is taken. Your orders?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She hadn't moved. She still stood there, a cornered wolf, ready to fight to the last, even with no claws and no hope. The sheer,impossible strength of her spirit was a tangible thing in the air between us.
“The killing is done,”I said, my voice tight, clipped.“We have won. This is our land now. There is no honor in butchering the routed.”
“As you command,”Ghorza said, though I could hear the question in his tone. He turned and began bellowing orders to the warriors.“Disarm them! No more killing! Round them up! The General has spoken!”
The Orcs moved to obey, their battle rage cooling with practiced discipline. They began dragging the surviving human guardsmen from their hiding places, stripping them of their weapons and herding them into the center of the square. A cheer went up from a squad near the gate.
“So easy!”one of them shouted to his comrade in Orcish.“Their leaders fled like jackals! Left their own to die a coward’s death!”
“It is the human way,”another replied, spitting on the ground.“They have no honor. They fight for coin, not for clan.”
I watched them work, my mind still reeling. I saw my warriors begin the solemn task of separating thedead, gently lifting our fallen brothers to be carried home for the rites, while leaving the human corpses in piles for the pyres. It was the way of things.
Then Ghorza’s orders continued, wrenching my attention back to the present.“Separate them! Men to the west side of the square, women and children to the east, by the fountain. Move!”
My eyes snapped back to the girl.
She was still watching me, but her expression had changed. The rage was banked, replaced by a wary, intelligent intensity. She saw my warriors moving among the terrified civilian survivors. She saw them grabbing weeping women and screaming children, shoving them into a separate group from the men. And I saw the flicker of understanding—and a new, sharper terror—dawn in her eyes.
She knew what was coming. She was about to be sorted.
Her small, desperate life of deception was about to be undone not by my axe, but by the simple, brutal logistics of conquest. She would be forced into the pen with the other women, her armor stripped away, her secret laid bare for all to see. The very fate she had clearly courted death to avoid was now seconds away.
And for some reason I could not fathom, I could not allow it.
The primal, possessive instinct that had stirred when I first caught her scent, an instinct I had violently suppressed, roared to the surface. It was an irrational, undeniable command from the oldest part of my brain.Mine.Protect.
It made no sense. She was the enemy. A human.
But the image of her, so small yet so ferocious, was burned into my mind. The thought of her being thrown in with the shrieking, hysterical civilians felt… wrong. It felt like a profound insult to the warrior who had charged me, the soldier who had fought with more courage than any of her male counterparts.
Ghorza approached me again.“General, the prisoners are secured. What are your orders for… this one?”He gestured with his chin toward the girl.
I looked at her one last time. She stood alone in her circle of silence, an island of defiance in a sea of her people’s defeat. Her chin was up. Her shoulders were back. She was not begging. She was not pleading. She was waiting for her sentence.
I would not give her one. Not the one she, or anyone else, expected.
“Take her,”I commanded, my voice coming out harsher than I intended, a general’s bark to cover the strange quake in my own gut.“To my quarters. The command tower. Post a guard. She is not to be touched. She is not to be harmed.”
Ghorza’s scarred eyebrow shot up in surprise, but he was too disciplined to question a direct order. He just nodded once, a sharp, accepting gesture.“It will be done.”
He stomped over to two of my largest warriors.“You heard the General. Take the little cur to the tower. Unharmed. Or he will have your hides for his boots.”
The two Orcs approached her cautiously, as if she were a viper who might still strike. She didn’t fight them. When they laid their massive hands on her arms, she simply went rigid, her face a pale mask of stone. As they led her away, her head was held high. For a single, fleeting moment, her eyes met mine across the bloody square.
I expected to see hatred. I expected fear.
