She let out a breath.
“Why is that?” said Celedin. “Why forgive him, and not me?”
“I told you, I have forgiven you,” she said. And at this point, she even meant it. “We were all hurt here,” she said, gesturing around the walls. “This place is our home but also a means to torture us. It is safety and a nightmare all at once. None of us…” She shook her head. “No one was kind to you, Celedin. But at least Dathor and I had each other.”
Celedin scratched the back of his head. His eyes were shining, as if what she had said had moved him.
She moved forward and took one of his hands in both of her own. “I may be with him now, but I will not allow him to kill you, no matter what he wishes. You can trust that.”
He nodded slowly. “All right.” A pause. “You aren’t telling me why you’re going to Elrion.”
“I really don’t know,” she said. “There was some plan before, that we were going to try to get Elrion to contact his old revolutionary friends from when he was at university. Back when he marched for the rights of orcs, you know? Those people might ally with the orcs, and they might help us to topple Findas and then—”
“That’s the plan?” he said. “You both want some world where you can be together, I suppose.”
She nodded. “You see through me.”
He eyed her. “And there is no chance of us, is there?”
She drew back. “Us? Like that? After everything?”
“What have I done to you that he hasn’t?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” she said. “He has never hit me, for one thing.” But she found herself touching her neck where he had taken her by the throat that time, and she thought about all the timesshehad hithim.
“Why? What is it about him? He’s a fiend.”
“He’s my fiend,” she said. “And you’re… you and I…” She was quiet. “Oh, no one knows these things, Celedin. No one knows why love blooms between two people and not between two others.”
“Or blooms on one side sometimes and isn’t reciprocated,” he said, sighing.
She nodded. “Right. I am sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “But this is my home. And if you have some notion that you and he can preside over this place, you’re sorely mistaken. I will never give up the Peak.”
She winced.All right, all right. Celedin is a problem for another time.“That’s so far in the future as to hardly be important now. Try to stay alive, I suppose, to avoid beingkilled by the orcs in this keep or starving to death, and we’ll come to that later.”
He smirked at her. “Good luck.”
“To you, too, Celedin.” She meant it.
THEY WENT HORSEBACKon one horse to Thelandel Chapel, and Dathor had to explain the plan to her as they trotted along the dirt road that wound to the other keep. He tried to concentrate on the plan, anyway, but it was difficult with her so close.
“We must convince him to write to his revolutionary friends and get them to meet with the High Chieftain in Bilkwood,” he said. “That is how we begin to craft the alliance. And we must be well assured that he will not betray us.”
“Well,” she said, looking back at him, her small and round little bottom nudged up against his crotch in a way that was starting to make his cock stir again. Admittedly, he had not had a chance to relieve the pressure from this morning. He’d been moving from one thing to another to prepare for their departure. “I cannot think of how we are going to manage that.”
“No?” he said. “You don’t think he can be swayed by appealing to his ideals?”
“What ideals?” she said. “You’re the one who pointed out that he never treated the orcs as equals. He always thought of them as lesser than him. You’re the one who said that he rescued people to gratify himself, to make himself feel important.”
“Did I say that?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so. Maybe I just had the thought myself.”
“Right, no, I know this,” he said, sighing, tightening his grip on her, pulling her firmly against his body. “All men are more motivated by whatever gratifies them personallythan by anything else. Figure that out, figure out what they fear, and then you can control them.” It was what Lashrud had said to him this morning, but oddly, he had never quite thought of it like that. Hearing it, however, he knew it was right. He had simply always sort of done it without thinking about it, subconsciously. He supposed that spending his whole life seeing people show him their worst selves with the way they treated him, it had meant that he could understand how a person could seem upright and also conceal a well of ugliness.
People wanted to let out that ugliness, that was the thing. They derived pleasure from it. Many people didn’t think they did, but they all did. Knowing this about others was an advantage.
