Page 79 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“I never thought I could possibly have a woman like you, and now I’m realizing that I haven’t been preparing myself for it, and that I have squandered all the time before you in the worst ways possible, and I’ve done all manner of things that would make you not want me, and I could curse myself for not being a better man for you. I’m so sorry I’m the sort of man who has cock sheaths, who thinks about transmitting diseases, who—”

“It’s all right,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s all right. I don’t care about that.”

“Shouldn’t you?”

She reached up to touch his face. Right now, she had come on his fingers, felt him come against her tongue, and she was swimming in their intimacy. Right now, she did not care about much. “I don’t care at all, my lord.”

21

BUT THEN IT was morning, and she was awakening alone in her room.

She dressed and she went out into the hallway and she looked into his room. The door was open. He was not in there.

She went out to check on the horses. He wasn’t there either, but someone had been. Someone had given them water and oats.

Absently, she patted her horse’s neck, who nickered her affectionately. “You need a name,” she said to the horse.

And then she went back into the lair.

She found Tafnir frying some kind of bird eggs and fish on a metal sheet over tongues of flame. He had turning implements in his claws, and he looked sort of ridiculous that way, tending to food.

He greeted her warmly. “Thy mother is in the dining room with the strange elf. Breakfast will be ready soon.”

Well, he cooked. He was a dragon who cooked.

She didn’t know what to think about anything.

In the dining room, Iahir didn’t meet her gaze when she came in, and she wondered what had happened while he slept. Something had changed, obviously.

Her mother got up to give her a hug, saying it was so nice for her to be here, and she would love it if she would stay for a time, that she had missed her so desperately.

“Well,” said Gathren, “we have to go…” They had nowhere they had to go, actually.

Iahir cleared his throat. “I have to go home, of course. But you could quite stay here, warrioress.”

Gathren did not wish to stay here, not with her mother making eyes at the dragon. If she thought that her mother needed rescuing, then she would, if only to wait for her mother to change her mind so that they could leave this place and leave Tafnir. But she was wavering on that point, truly. She did not know what to think about any of it. She sat down at the dining room table. “You don’t wish me to come along?”

He looked up at her and then away.

“Certainly,” called Tafnir, entering the room with a platter of eggs and fish, “thy daughter mayst stay for some time, an extended visit of weeks, even. But she cannot live here.”

“I don’t want to live here,” said Gathren.

“Oh, Tafnir,” said Gathren’s mother, sighing.

“I am serious,” said Tafnir. “We dragons are called solitary for a reason. We cannot abide too many people, not for long stretches of time. I intend no offense, of course, Kadrai’s daughter.”

“It’s fine,” said Gathren. “I am definitely planning on leaving.”

She did not get a chance to speak to Iahir alone until an hour or two later, when he was in his room packing up the pipe that Tafnir had gifted him.

She hovered in the doorway, feeling nervous. “Did I do something?”

He looked up at her. “No?” He sounded confused.

“You did not wake up with me?”

“Oh,” he said, straightening. “Well, I woke just before dawn, and I thought of your mother coming down to wake you and discovering us together, and I thought you might not like that.”