Page 16 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

She’d heard of such things. She had spent her time in orc war camps, after all. She knew what men spoke of. But she was under the impression that it was quite a feat to convince a woman—any woman, even a whore—to do such a thing.

Maybe elves were different. Maybe elf cocks were so fine and alabaster and beautiful that no one minded taking them into their mouths. Something surged in her at the thought, something that echoed as her fingers moved on her most sensitive of places, and she wondered what such a thing might feel like in her mouth, because the skin on a cock was silken, and she imagined dragging that against her tongue.

She shuddered, involuntary, and a tremor went through her pelvis.

Kneel down, warrioress, he would say. Do you know how to work my trousers?

Her finger squirmed against herself.

That’s right, just take me out. See what you do to me, then? See how much I like the look of you? I’m quite, quite stiff for you warrioress, stiff and ready for your mouth, for you to suck all of me right down, just like that.

When she saw him the next morning, she could not look him in the eye because she felt so very, very embarrassed. She knew from past experience that taking sexual liberties with a real man in her fantasies was a recipe for only bad things, and now she must pay the consequences.

It hardly helped that she’d had such an explosive release, pretending to suck his cock, which was the worst, most degrading, most disgusting, most horrid thing in all of the upperworld and in Nilhaem, the underworld, as well.

It had crested like a flock of white-winged birds taking flight over a gleaming lake reflecting the moonlight. It had beaten its way against her thighs, against her pelvis, against her inner walls, making her clench and spasm again and again, and it had been pure bliss.

Fuck Iahir nae Cirlahir.

That was all.

5

HE DIDN’T KISS her again, not before the orc army invaded.

He touched her a lot, and Gathren found herself enjoying his touches more than she strictly ought to have, but there was no kissing. They sparred daily, and sometimes she sparred with Kinsahad and sometimes with other guards. Only a few of them were really worthy partners, in her opinion. They were all spoiled and showy with their sword fighting, thinking that, somehow, the point of it was to clang the blades together, when the point was to put the sword into another person’s flesh, and the clanging only happened because the attempt was blocked.

Of course, maybe they didn’t actually want to stab her—not that they could because they were all using blunt practice blades. Still, perhaps they went easy on her, she never knew. It was what men always claimed when she beat them. She was used to it.

They had dinner in the main dining room every night. King Findas presided over the table, eating a lot, crying across the table to urge people to have more food or to try some raspberry wine or to be sure to eat their fill. He seemed, Gathren noted, nervous, as if he knew that things were about to go badly, as if he could see that he had gotten himself onto the wrong side of a number of people, and now he was simply trying to placate them all.

She did not like Findas. How could she, when she had seen the tracts he had printed up, tracts featuring drawings that depicted the orcs as akin to rodents or insects?

However, she had not expected him to be the way he was, she supposed. She thought he would be formidable or frightening. He was… small.

Not because of the way he looked, she supposed, though he did have a certain round-shouldered way about him that made him seem as if he was always curling in on himself.

No, the smallness was something else, a perception within the man, a self-fulfilling prophecy. That smallness infected him and he wanted to be big.

Perhaps he targeted her people because he thought them easy to cow and frighten. Perhaps he thought that being bigger than an orc was a simple thing?

She could see that Findas desperately wished to be big, but that he was not.

She did not feel sorry for him, and she was still quite convinced he needed to die, but as the days wore on and the date of his death approached, she began to feel only a grim feeling about it, akin to a knowing that one must muck out the stalls in a stable—it was necessary, it had to be done, but she was not going to enjoy it.

Well, it wasn’t as if she was killing him herself, anyway. Iahir would do it. She found herself grateful that she did not have to kill this pitiful small man herself. It seemed distasteful now, somehow.

The days had gone slowly at the beginning, but they seemed to go quicker and quicker as the day of the planned assassination approached. She had no one to speak to except for Iahir. Well, the guards during the sparring sessions, sometimes, but that was just jokes and one-upping each other, taunts and boasts.

She supposed she also spoke to the servants. At one point, her bleeding came. As a warrioress, she was quite adept at handling the inconvenience of it, for if it came on the battlefield, she could not stop to change her bloody rags.

But the truth was that she had not brought anything with her, not the very absorbent rags she used or the harness that kept everything in place or anything of that nature.

If it had not been for the servants, she would have had to go to Iahir about it, and she could just imagine what sort of conversation that would have been. Luckily, she was spared from such things. The servants had brought her fabric and pins, like an infant’s diaper, really. Was this what the elvish women did?

But her bleeding came and went, then, and time continued to pass, and soon enough, it was the night before they were set to kill Findas.

At dinner, Gathren was surprised when the woman seated next to her struck up a conversation with her.