Page 83 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

She gazed into the fire. “What are you saying?”

“I don’t know, it seems to me that women get all the real things, and men get stuck with the shallow, violent things. I can never carry a child in my body, you know.”

“You wouldn’t want to,” she said to the fire. “Furthermore, I don’t want to.”

“You don’t know what I want,” he muttered.

“You want to be pregnant, my lord?” Perhaps she was mocking him.

“I want to be needed,” he said tightly. “I want to be necessary. I want to matter. No one questions the importance of mothers, you know.”

She glanced at him for a moment, understanding him, she thought. “Men matter. Men are important. No one questions the importance of men.”

He didn’t say anything.

“There’s a reason I wanted to be a warrioress, after all,” she said. “I wanted that, too. I wanted to matter.”

“Is that what you wanted, or did you want glory?”

She started to protest.

“I don’t mean it as an insult, warrioress, because I want glory, too. We all want it. I suppose I used to think women didn’t, or that orcs didn’t, or that it was some exclusive desire of the wealthy Valeador man, but I see now, that was narrow-minded. It’s easier for us to get it, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Why do you think I killed the High King, you know?”

“Glory?”

He nodded.

“It wasn’t a particularly glorious way you did it.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

And then they were quiet.

22

IAHIR DID NOT expect her to wake him with her mouth on his prick that night again, and—indeed—she didn’t. He wasn’t disappointed, but he was even more uncertain of all of this.

It seemed to him that none of it made any sense at all.

She had no reason to want him. She didn’t seem to want him, in fact. She seemed to resent him. Perhaps she was attracted to him, but she seemed to resent that as well. She seemed to resent her very self in some way, to resent her femaleness.

The problem was that, were he in her position—were he a woman, that is—he thought he might resent it, too. And he felt for her in that way, he really did, but…

Well, everyone resented things about themselves they could not change, did they not? He resented being born into the family he had been born into, all the wretched responsibility, no choice in anything, his whole future laid out in front of him, done, decided, before he had even been born. What was the point in living a life when all the living had been taken out of it already?

He resented that, but he made the best of it. It was just the way of things. You had to take life on the terms it presented itself to you. It wasn’t as if things could change, after all.

He found his freedom in the places he could, he supposed, but he knew, when anyone looked at his little rebellions, they looked exactly like the tantrums of a child, one who was angry and resentful.

Was that what he was to her? A tantrum she was throwing? A rebellion of some sort?

If so, what was it she was getting out of it, because he seemed to do nothing but displease her. He didn’t understand why she’d gone to bed with him at all.

He should have said no.

Why did she want to come with him to Cirlahir? That made even less sense. She should not wish to be around him at all.

Certainly, she’d said that she had nowhere else to go, but she didn’t seem like the sort of person who needed anything at all. She was so strong and self-possessed, his warrioress was.