Page 43 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“I can take a dim view of you and still not want you to die,” she said.

“I suppose,” he said.

“Perhaps I disagree with your opinions on love.”

“Oh?” he said. “So, you’re going to tell me all about your sainted grandparents, who were devoted to each other until the very end, I’m certain?”

“No, my grandparents died before I could ever meet them,” she said. “But I suppose I was going to say that I don’t think love is temporary, and that it can certainly last longer than nine months.”

“Can it, though? Really?” he said. “Because, certainly, people stay together for longer than nine months, for decades upon decades. But I can assure you that they aren’t experiencing that same ecstatic attachment to each other as they experienced at the beginning. Everyone knows this. Feelings like that fade.”

She supposed she’d heard that sort of thing, too. “But they strengthen in other ways.”

“They turn into something else,” he said. “People can be friends, I think, or they can care about each other and want to be good to each other. They can learn to tolerate each other. They can learn to co-exist. But all of that is work, unpleasant work. It’s not like being in love, it’s not like that.”

“You know, I’m beginning to think that someone hurt you, my lord, that someone hurt you very badly.”

“Oh, no, I don’t say this out of bitterness,” he said. “Though you’re one to talk, you with your men who have used you and never cared about you. You’re the one who’s been hurt.”

“I am not like other women, and if I could be that way, men would want me differently.”

“I doubt it,” he said.

She glared at him.

“I’m only saying, which of us is a man, warrioress, you or me?”

“You are hardly like normal men, my lord, so I don’t think you can speak for your sex!”

“I know how men think of women, and it’s always the same way. Which is why I pay them, because then everyone knows the score.”

“What is the way?”

“It’s that women are to be won, to be conquered, to be acquired, to be had, to be enjoyed, and then eventually, once there has been a great deal of that, a man tires of a woman. Sometimes, he is stuck with her afterwards because he has made promises or gotten her with child or bought her a country estate or married her or what-have-you, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t tired of her and that he doesn’t wish to go pursue someone else.”

She made a noise in the back of her throat. “No, that is not true.”

“You said something about your being an oddity?” he said. “It isn’t really like that. I mean, it is, you’re not wrong, but it’s more that all women are unique and exciting experiences and a man wants to have as many of them as possible. Now, to the point earlier, about choice, when it’s a woman a man wants, it may take him a very long time to tire of her, hence the nine months or a year of love, but eventually, he does.”

She was a bit struck by some of this. She chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip. “You think so? That men treat all women this way? Even wives? Even wives they choose?”

“Yes,” he said. “I have seen it. And I know myself, what it is like when I fall into some kind of fixation with a new whore. There is nothing like it. I am obsessed. I would do anything to please her. I think of little else but her. It’s all very much like love, yet it is easier.”

“No, it isn’t like love, because those women are just pretending with you.”

“Well, maybe all women are pretending,” he muttered.

“They are not! Let us go to the point that I am a woman and you are not, so perhaps I know better than you about this.”

He glanced at her, tilted his head, considering, nodded, and went back to looking at the back of his horse’s head.

She continued. “But why are there couples who seem so happy? Some men must not tire of women. For instance, when I was with the orc army, there was an ashreg—”

“A what?”

“A high-ranking commander in the army. It means hawk. All of our ranks are animal names.”

“All right,” he said.