Page 92 of The Orc Warrioress and the Elf Lord

“You needn’t worry about him,” said Iahir. “We will not see him. He is always in his laboratory, doing all manner of ghastly experiments. He thinks of nothing else, and he is entirely occupied in that way. He would not be pleased to see you, but it will likely be days before he even knows I’m home. He pays me no mind.”

She swallowed, thinking of all the things that people said at court, about how Iahir was trying to get his father’s attention. “The experiments, are they… for her?”

“You have put that together remarkably quickly,” said Iahir, turning down the corners of his lips. “Yes, quite. When my brother began to have breaks with reality, my father seized on that, saying he would cure my brother and then cure my mother, but what he did was entirely destroy my brother’s mind. And me… well, I refuse to go down there now, into the laboratory. When I was young, I didn’t have a choice, but now…”

Gathren let out a breath, shaking her head, understanding so much of what he had said to her about his family now.

There was only one thing that really didn’t make sense.

Why had he concealed it?

25

HIS TOWN HOUSE was on the shore. It stood up on stilts like the houses here at the water’s edge, in order to let the water come in during storms, he said. The house faced the ocean. Steps went down to the smooth rocks on the shore which gave way to sand, and then the waves that lapped up against the sand and the rocks. It was beautiful, the water stretching off into the horizon, nothing in sight but water, though there were lands across this water, lands that could be reached after not too long on a ship, lands where goblins lived.

The house was locked up tight, but it had another of those dials on the front door, and Iahir worked it to allow them entry. Inside, everything was dark and gloomy.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said to her. “There should be servants here, servants who live here all the time, year round.”

“I don’t need to be seen to by servants,” she said, but she supposed she did, unless she was going to go into the kitchens herself and try to cook things. She could cook, but she wasn’t exactly skilled at it.

“Well, of course you don’t need it, but we’d be much more comfortable that way,” he said. “I’ll find out what’s happened.” He took her up to a room that adjoined his room, and there were still clothes in the wardrobe that had obviously belonged to some elvish courtesan. After he left, she spent too much time going through them and imagining this woman, how tall and thin and graceful she must have been, how small and delicate, how much the opposite of Gathren.

Because he did leave, and he said it was to bring back servants, but he was gone for a long time.

She found a small library—really just some shelves that lined the corner of the upstairs sitting room—and sorted through them until she found a book that seemed interesting—a great deal of them were about dragons, she noted, and she had to find one that wasn’t, a story about some repentant crime lord, purportedly a true story though she had her doubts, having never heard of this man.

She took it out to the shore, bringing along a chair. She read and let the water wash over her toes. It was quite private here, on the beach of the envivtain-to-be. No one saw her. She was aware, of course, that an orc lounging on the shore might not be a welcome sight here, not these days.

There were other town houses close by, but there were large blue walls built to section off one part of the shore from another. Iahir’s portion was vast.

She read until it grew dark, and then she went inside. Iahir still had not returned. She lit a candle and went searching until she indeed found the kitchen, and she was quite hungry. There was not much there. Bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of potatoes. There was some salted meat, though, and she decided to boil some rice and eat it with the salted meat. She made enough for Iahir, but hours passed, and he did not appear.

He was back quite late, hours after she had eaten his portion—out of boredom or hunger, she could not say. She was not angry with him, not exactly. She was the one who’d wanted to come here, after all, and he had tried to discourage her from it. But she did feel rather abandoned, rather an inconvenient footnote to his life here, and she had not realized how much she had grown used to him making her the center of his attention. Why, he had followed her secretly. He had volunteered to be killed by a dragon for her. He had endured all of her criticisms of the way he licked her cunt and kept making new attempts to please her.

She could not be blamed for expecting a higher level of attention from him, she supposed.

However, she could not rightly blame him for not paying her that level of attention, not really.

He had brought her food. “You must be furious with me.”

“No,” she said. She was not.

“You must be ravenous,” he said, unwrapping the plate of food, which was green beans and roast poultry and herbed potatoes. “It’s cold.”

“I did eat rice and salted pork,” she said. She was rather full, but the food he’d brought smelled divine, and she sat down to eat a few mouthfuls.

“Well, I’ve found out a number of things,” said Iahir. “Renegahan has been entirely seized by the orcs. They are in the castle. They are in the halls of Parliament. They have blocked the gates, and no one is allowed in or out, and they are stringing up elves over the walls of the city daily.”

She set down her fork, no longer interested in eating. “So, it is their intention to kill everyone?”

“I don’t know what their intention is,” said Iahir. “Perhaps you know, Gathren. You were there. You were part of the planning, at least that is how you represented yourself to us. But if you were not really known to the High Chieftain as his daughter—”

“He did not send me away when I came to the council room,” she said. “He knew me enough to allow me access.”

“So, you do know.”

“Well, no, it was all very vague, what we hoped to achieve when we got to the capital,” she said. “My father did not have concrete plans, so this was why he summoned Dathor.”