Page 34 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“I can’t believe I have to explain this!” She was disgusted with him.

“I have never represented myself as being extraordinarily skilled or intelligent, have I? My best qualities are always the connections I have due to my birth and the amount of fun I have, despite everything. So, you have to explain it. Have pity on a stupid elf lord, would you?”

“And you are simply making jokes,” she said. “We are not equals, that is what.”

“Equals,” he said softly.

“You elves treat us orcs differently than you treat each other.”

“Well, we are different,” he said.

“Worse,” she said. “You treat us worse. We are given the worst jobs, and we must enter last and sit in the shabbiest train cars, and we certainly are not able enter into trade agreements like the elves. Why, no one would give us a loan if we wanted one. How could we possibly invest? All of the ruling class of this country is rich and elvish and from the Vale. An orc certainly cannot get into that echelon of people.”

He was silent, trying to digest that. Orcs wanted loans? They wanted to be part of the nobility? But, yes, he supposed all people would have ambition of some sort, that it wouldn’t make sense to think that orcs were easily content with what they had. He knew very few people who were content with what they had. He was not content, for instance. He had that urge, that itch, to reach for something else.

It wasn’t ambition in his case, just a desire to rile people up, to make them react. He was not sure why, because he knew it did not make it so, but it made him feel as if he mattered to be able to do that.

“Nothing to say, my lord?”

“Apologies, warrioress,” he said. “I am an entirely obtuse person who never much thought of anything from an orc’s perspective, I’m afraid.”

She barked out a laugh. “Oh, no, of course you haven’t. Why am I even angry?”

“It is galling to be so utterly ignored, I wager,” he said. “I would warrant that most elves are the same way. They are simply unaware.”

“That isn’t true,” said Gathren. “That can’t be true. How could they be unaware of what is right in front of them?”

“People don’t tend to look at things unless it affects them, I’m afraid,” he said.

“I suppose that’s true,” she said.

He thought about moving one of his hands up to cup one of her ample breasts. He wouldn’t, of course. That would get him thrown off the horse at the least, and stabbed at the worst. She’d be quite displeased with him.

Speaking of stabbings, he should perhaps look at the wound in his shoulder. It should be all right now, he thought. It would have started to scab over. He was certain it couldn’t be bleeding as freely as it had been when they left the city. But he had not looked at it, and he had distracted himself entirely from the pain.

“Can’t say I mind riding one horse with you,” he said.

“Oh, you can’t be comfortable back there.”

“I am, however, quite comfortable.” He had imagined her breasts on a number of occasions. He wondered if the gray-green of her skin would fade in places the sun never touched. He wondered about the color of her nipples, the size of them, how sensitive they were.

When he had been fucking a dwarf, she had been so much smaller than him that it had made certain intimate acts very difficult. And she had been as fair-skinned as he, so while there was an intriguing element to having a miniature and rounded figure to undercover and explore and tease, it hadn’t been that different from being with an elf, in the end.

He suspected orcs would be much the same, once one got past the green skin and the buxomness. Not that different, not in the end.

But he wanted the chance to experience those differences. He would love to unwind whatever she used to bind down her breasts, free them and bury his face in their softness. He could tell they were soft because of the small little brushes he was getting holding onto her waist.

Perhaps she might be amenable. It had been a nightmarish day, and perhaps she would want to end it in under the sheets with some warm body. Perhaps if he tried, she would surrender to him. Perhaps when they got to the place where he could get a horse, he should say that her horse needed to rest, after having borne both of them for so long, and then he should press her to stay the night, for it was an inn, and they could take a room.

One room, with one bed, just as they only had one horse now, and he could simply say that she would need assistance, for surely she didn’t wish to sleep with her breasts so tightly bound away, and then she would become shy in that way of hers that he sometimes saw in her, and she would quietly agree and she would be shyer and shyer as he uncovered her, and then he would—

“My lord!”

“Hmm?” he said.

“How are you—the saddle is in the way—is it quite that long, then?” She turned around to look at him.

“What are you talking about?”