Page 59 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

They would have arguments about who was going to bring water to the horses (or who would lead the horses down to the water) and who was going to heat food on the fire and who was going to brew the tea and who was going to pour the tea. He would offer and she would offer and neither would let the other do it.

Before, he supposed he had not cared, but now he did not want to be a burden on her. He did not want to do anything that would make her feel as if he was causing her any trouble at all.

He wondered at himself for not having cared about such things before. Surely, he should have.

And then he wondered at himself for all these years with women that he paid, and he wondered how many of them had found him utterly insufferable but had pretended otherwise because he was giving them money.

He had sometimes gotten a bit enamored of the women he paid, he had to admit. He had enjoyed giving them baubles and dresses and all manner of things of that nature. He had enjoyed giving them compliments, snuggling in against their bare skin and whispering soft things to them.

But even if a part of him had been serious about those things, he’d known that they only accepted such things from him because there was an arrangement.

He had never had a woman take him on without compensation.

He could not quite believe a woman would.

And she—Gathren—she obviously did not want him at all. He could not fathom why she had even said that ridiculous thing, that she was in love with him? She was not. She did not act at all as if she was in love with him. She was snappish and peevish with him at every turn. Certainly, if a woman was in love…

Ah, but there it was.

She resented him.

He was a burden on her, an annoyance, an inconvenience, and her feelings for him, whatever they might be, were the same, and he had no notion how to prove to her that he was worth anything.

Partly this was because he did not personally feel as if he was worth anything, and he thought this was backed up by evidence, because he had never mattered to anyone.

He felt clumsy around her now, afraid to speak, afraid to move, afraid to simply be.

Everything about being in love was appallingly bad.

He wanted nothing more to do with it.

They reached the mountains and then began to wind their way through the narrow paths that wound between the rise of the slopes. Sometimes the roads were little more than a narrow ribbon of rocks and dirt, grass growing on either side, tree roots jutting across them. They had to walk the horses more often than not.

They went a whole day like this, and he could see that the food was going to run low, that they had underestimated how long all this would take.

On the day after, however, they saw the blue dragon. It was circling overhead, further up in the mountains, and they watched and spoke to each other, quite animated, charting the path from here to there, talking of how they could get there, likely before nightfall if they started off now.

Then, the dragon careened down from its circling and spread its wings wide. It soared lower and lower, diving directly towards them, and they both realized it had seen them. It was coming straight for them.

Iahir wondered if this was it, if they were going to be burned to death right here as the dragon came for them, if these were his last moments in all of the land or sea.

But the dragon swooped right over their heads, and they were both stunned at the sheer size of it. It was huge, the wing span twice as wide as Iahir was tall. Its body was long, wormlike, but stretched out over them, it was breathtakingly large.

They cowered against a tree trunk, neither able to catch their breaths, for some time after it was gone.

“It went that way,” Gathren said eventually, pointing. “I wonder if that is the way we are to go.”

“I think not,” said Iahir. “I think it went that way entirely to throw us off.” He pointed. “You see that?”

She squinted. “No, what are you speaking of?”

He jammed his finger at the black spot in the mountain near where the dragon had been circling. “I think that’s a cavern entrance. I think that’s its lair. I think it deliberately did not go there because it does not want to draw us there.”

“Oh,” said Gathren. “Well, that might make sense.” She swallowed. “But if we start towards it, the dragon will likely see us, will it not? And then it will be even more aggressive in its attempts to dissuade us from coming there.”

“Perhaps,” he had to admit.

They were quiet, resting there, unsure of what to do next.