Page 50 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I’m not doing it because I need to.”

“I don’t even understand why you’re here.”

He gestured with both of his hands. “I, erm, I thought if I followed you, that I could convince you that we should go to bed together.”

She let out a cry of disgust and started back for the barn.

“Wait, can I bring my horse to the barn, too?” he called after her.

“Make Haem herself smite you, Iahir nae Cirlahir,” she called back.

“I’m going to take that as a yes?”

She could strangle that man, really.

On the other hand, in a way, she was glad he was here.

No, it was only that she was glad not to be alone, really. It was only that.

But when he got back from putting his horse into the stall, and she had gotten hers settled as well—though she had not yet thought of a good name for her horse—she approached him and bent her head down and pressed the top of it directly into his chest.

And he let out all the air in his lungs and put one hand on the back of her neck and the other her back.

They stood like that, and he gently ran his fingers up and down her spine, sometimes brushing against her braid, and it went on. She silently begged him to stay silent, because she was sure that if he said anything at all, it would ruin everything.

And he was, for quite some time.

Until eventually, he said, “I don’t think that dragon has eaten your mother.”

And she pulled her head back and looked up at him. “What?”

13

IAHIR HAD ONCE been rather interested in dragons, back when he was small. He didn’t like to think much about that time of his life. He knew that a number of people were very sentimental about childhood, but to him, it had only been a period of time in his life in which no one had much taken him seriously and everyone had treated him as if there were some series of jokes that they were not keen on sharing with children and where he—crucially—had no control over his day-to-day existence, simply shuffled here and there and forced to do all manner of things that he despised, like tutoring and working figures and learning grammar and geography.

Admittedly, being an adult was not so much better in most respects, but there was at least the illusion of choice.

Perhaps he had simply gotten old enough that he no longer much cared if people disapproved of his choices, and when he had been a child, all of that disapproval had felt like a thousand knives to his chest.

At any rate, dragons were a thing he used to like.

He liked both sorts of dragons—the dragons in the east and the dragons here, in Lothnehil, the solitary dragons, the kinds with wings, the kinds that breathed fire. The dragons in the east did not have wings and they did not breathe fire. They weren’t even called dragons in the dragon’s language, after all, they were called loang, but when the explorers had made contact with the countries in the east, they had seen the dragons there and thought they looked like dragons back home, so they had called them dragons.

He was perhaps more interested in the solitary, fire-breathing kind of dragon than the other kind, though he found all things eastern rather intriguing, he had to say.

When he was a child, the idea of being some huge and imposing winged thing, something that could come and go as he pleased, something that wasn’t bothered by the daily annoyances of obligation as the son of an envivtain, it all had been rather appealing.

Of course, it turned out that dragons weren’t actually as solitary as it was believed. They liked to take captives, it turned out, and they did not eat these captives. As a general rule, dragons didn’t eat things as big as elves or orcs. They were more likely to eat smaller prey, nothing larger than a wild boar, and even that was rare. They ate birds, mostly. Sometimes deer and rabbits, too. Occasionally, perhaps even a wolf. Sheep, they might take, but most of that had ended after they’d been forced into the treaties that kept them from taking farmers’ livestock.

The treaties were ancient, over two hundred years old, but many of the dragons would remember having signed them because dragons lived a very long time, much longer than elves or orcs or dwarves—and of course there were dragons in the dwarf countries as well, and they had their own treaties with the dwarves.

“Look,” Iahir said now, to Gathren, “the truth is that I know a bit about dragons.”

“You were talking about stories,” said Gathren. “Stories about dragons?”

“Well, didn’t you hear tales about dragons when you were a child?”