“We can use it,” he said. “You and me, I mean. In the new world we wish to create. Think of it, think if the keeps and castles were held by orc-elf couples like us. It would usher in a change faster than anything else we might be able to do, especially if the next generation of nobles were half-breeds like me.”
She smiled at him, thinking of how far he’d come, thinking of that self-hatred he used to have when he told her he would never put a babe in her that would grow to be like him. “It’s a future I want to see.” She thought of it, in fact, and she knew it would not be easy, that they would be fighting against prejudice and hatred and disgust and all manner of things, but…
She could see it, shiny and distant, but there. Real. Possible.
33
DATHOR BUNDLED HERoff to bed early that night, making the excuse of their long journey to say that they were exhausted and must get some rest.
She was yawning as he helped her out of her dress. Even if he’d wished to be at her again—though he knew he shouldn’t, not if she was still sore—he was prevented because she was asleep almost immediately.
He’d been sleeping next to her for weeks now, and he was already accustomed to the intimacy of it, the sweet soft casual closeness of their sharing a bed. He thought of giving her up, sleeping alone again, and it made him feel a cold kind of resistance to such a thing.
He was up early in the morning, leaving her to her own devices for the day, and he spent the entire day in a council meeting with the chieftain and his advisors, and it was like being back in Arzakh again, only the chieftain wasn’t listening to him anymore, and he wondered if it was because he’d brought her along.
He likely should not have brought her along, not if he was being rational about everything. He had never been rational about her, however.
The orcs were very resistant to the alliance with the Valaedor, and none of his arguments were landing very well with them. He was talking about logic, about infrastructure, about the complicated nature of the entire system ofgovernment here, how there were treaties to be kept up with the dwarves, expeditions being funded to far-off lands, and this was not to mention everything that was being taken care of here in Lothnehil.
He made speeches about how toppling the elves’s systems would disrupt the entire economic system, that there would be no food and the trains would stop running and the schools would all close, and everything would be chaos, but they didn’t care, because this was not their home.
They didn’t have trains in Arzakh. They did not have imports of silks or spices or hothouse oranges or anything of that nature, only what could be smuggled over the pass, and the Rathog Pass was now increasingly a one-way journey.
The orc army had come a different way entirely for this invasion, in fact. They’d come over the mountains, using a route that was longer and more treacherous but had enabled them to arrive in the elves’s country in vast numbers with no one the wiser.
At any rate, he was realizing the orcs’ motivation in coming herewasdestruction. They wanted the elves to suffer. He understood that notion, because it had also been his motivation for wanting to come back. The desire to burn everyone down who had hurt him, to raze it all to the ground.
Except now he understood that if everything was rubble, it benefited no one.
However, nothing he was saying on that subject was getting through to them.
Days passed, and they silenced him more often than not, and he was running out of ways to try to convince them.
He also could not keep retiring early from dinner. He and Aerhril stayed to the periphery, though, but they could not help but watch. It wasn’t only Larha that was part of the orgiastic activities. There were a few other elf women, some orc women, too, and everyone was drunk.
The women were pulled out of their chairs and onto the laps of the orc soldiers, usually sometime during the last course of the meal. The orcs would begin by exploring underthe women’s clothing, but soon enough, articles of clothing would be pushed out of the way, removed, or even outright ripped, and there would be a round, rosy-tipped pale elf breast that appeared, squeezed and cupped and stroked by thick green-gray orc fingers.
There weren’t enough women to go around, so the orcs on either side of the one who had a woman in his lap would join in, removing the elf woman’s clothing, baring both of her breasts, baring her long, slender legs and her tidy quim tucked between them.
And soon enough there were orc cocks buried in every available orifice of each elf woman and in the orc women, too.
It happened every night, and Dathor and Aerhril watched it happen, and then, as the hour grew later and later, as the orc gazes began to roam over Aerhril, he would put her behind him, and begin to guide them both into the shadows, so that they could fade out of sight and make their escape without anyone noticing.
Afterward, Aerhril would climb him in their bedchamber. They would get back behind closed doors and she would already be wet from watching and he would be aroused too.
She asked him if it was just like that with the orcs, did they have some kind of culture where they did things on display like that.
“No,” he said. “No, everyone’s gone mad.”
Some of the elf women were clearly being abused, and he could see it, could tell that they were beaten somewhere, their eyes glazed over from too much pain, too many times being forced to take orc cock in their cunts and mouths and arses. But it was more than the pain, as he well understood. It was the way that one lost control over one’s own body.
He had lived that way for too long, his limbs and chest and legs and fingers and toes not his own. Hisselfthe property of others, who did with him as they chose.
This was not what he wanted, not for the orcs to simply visit this on the elves.
Oh, butisn’tit what you wanted?a voice would speak up inthe recesses of his brain.Isn’t it what you gloried in when you slashed Celedin’s throat? Did you not simply want them to hurt the way you hurt?
It was different. Celedin deserved it. These elf women were not exactly innocent, because they had, and likely still did, think of themselves as superior to the orcs. But it was too brutal a punishment for the crime, in his opinion.
