It very well could be someone else, he told himself. And even if itwasNaydi, it was not so unusual that she might want to distance herself from him, or even be afraid to speak to him. If a guard overheard them, they very well might think they were planning an escape and monitor them more closely, or something far worse. He thought maybe she did not recognize him, but that seemed unlikely—what other elf would be personally captured and held captive by the orcish warlord himself?
But either way, she did not want to speak with him, he told himself, and he shouldn’t push his luck. When he was done with the meager meal—bread and a few strips of dried meat again—he curled up on top of his pile of straw, and tried to remember the last book he had read, telling himself the story as closely as he could recall. He was quite sure his retelling was missing some plot points, but it passed the time.
It had been about an hour when sound finally broke through the silence.
“Hello?” a faint voice came from the opposite cell in heavily-accented elvish, and Taegan jumped in surprise—if his bed were not already on the floor, he certainly would have fallen out of it. “Hello?”
“Hello,” he hissed, barely able to keep his voice at a whisper as he clambered up from his makeshift bed to press his face between the bars. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” the voice came back, hesitant this time. “Don’t speak much elvish. You speak orc?”
Taegan bit his lip in frustration. “No,” he replied in orcish, wracking his brain for any stray bits of the language Zorvut had shown him or that he might have heard in passing. “Um, hello, my name is Taegan.”
An amused snort answered him. “No orc then,” the voice came quietly, speaking elvish again. “Just elvish. I know you. My name is Naydi.”
“I knew it!” he hissed, resisting the urge to smack the metal bars in front of him in vindication. “I knew it was you. Why didn’t you answer me before?”
“Dangerous,” she replied, and in the darkness Taegan could just make out the shape of her shifting to sit against the bars of her cell as well. “If they hear elvish, well…” She made a noise from the back of her throat like a bone being snapped. He could certainly understand that.
“Okay,” he said, nodding in agreement. “Okay. That’s alright. I can be quiet. Gods, you have no idea how badly I’ve wanted to have someone to talk to.”
“Listen,” Naydi interrupted before he could start babbling. “Listen. I know why you here. Hrul took you… Because me. I did bad thing. My fault.” She paused, but even in the silence Taegan could tell there was more she wanted to say and could not put into words he would understand. “I’m sorry, you, Zorvut. My fault.”
Taegan pursed his lips before letting out a long sigh. That alone seemed like reason enough for her to hesitate to speak to him. And part of him did bristle at the thought of her place in all this—though she couldn’t possibly have known how her actions would snowball then. Mostly, though, he yearned to have someone to talk to, to commiserate with, to just prove to himself he was not so maddeningly alone in the darkness. It was not his place to forgive her, but as far as he was concerned, her actions were far more pardonable than what Hrul had done to them.
“Well, thank you,” he replied slowly. “I think Zorvut would value hearing that more than me, but… For what it’s worth, I appreciate it.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated softly. They sat in silence for a long moment; now that he finally knew it was Naydi, Taegan was unsure of what else to say to her.
“Zorvut will come,” he said quietly. “He’ll come for both of us.”
“No,” Naydi answered sharply, and Taegan looked up in surprise though he could not quite see her. “No, if he comes here, Hrul kill him. He can’t.”
Taegan frowned. Zorvut was certainly on his way, and he, at least, was sure that he would win whatever fight lay ahead. But she seemed far less sure, though she had no idea about the magical ability he’d spent the last month honing.
“He’ll be alright,” Taegan replied. “He’ll win.”
Naydi said something in orcish that he could not understand, but the worry in her tone came through clearly. She obviously did not believe him.
“It’ll be alright,” he insisted, and she fell silent. “He’ll fight, and he’ll win.”
She made a faint grunt of acknowledgment, but did not respond. He could not think of anything else to say, and so they fell into silence for a long moment.
He was ready to crawl back to his makeshift bed, their conversation seemingly over, when her voice finally came again from the darkness.
“You have elf magic?” she asked, her broken elvish tinged with hope. Taegan winced at the question.
“No, I don’t,” he replied quickly, looking away even though it was too dark to see her at all. “I don’t know any magic. I’m sorry.” If he could do even basic magic that could possibly change things, but he was certain even the warlord knew he had no magical ability to speak of—if he hadn’t, or even suspected Taegan of hiding some latent magic, his hands surely would have been bound to his sides from the beginning.
“No magic,” she repeated slowly, and sighed. The disappointment in her voice was palpable even from Taegan’s cell. For a moment he wanted to blurt out that even though he did not, Zorvut did—but he thought better of it. If he were Zorvut, he would be relying on the element of surprise that his newfound power would bring, so the fewer that knew of it the better. Could he trust her with that information? He wanted to, but he wasn’t certain, so he held his tongue.
Taegan waited to see if she would say more, but now she seemed truly done, a heavy silence settling over them.
Dejectedly, he settled down into his pile of straw, pulling the blanket over him. Though the two blankets were thin, luckily they were orc-sized, so he could place one over the straw and then fold it up to mostly cover his legs and torso while wrapped up tightly in the second. If he laid on his side and curled his legs up a bit he could pull the second blanket all the way up to his chin. A small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.
He mulled over their conversation for a while, absorbing everything Naydi had said. It was the first conversation he’d had in what felt like years. He thought he would have been more eager for a long conversation, but there was a hopelessness to the orc woman’s tone that had permeated her words and left him unsettled.
But he couldn’t let that cause his own hope to waver, he told himself. He knew what Zorvut was capable of, far better than she could have known. Zorvut was coming for him, and would fight for him, and would win.
