At any rate, enough of the women were like Larha that everything about it was confusing. She was eager for them all, and they liked her eagerness. She would be shared amongst five of them, but two of them would be pleasuring her, attached to suckle her nipples or toy with her engorged clitoris. She would be crammed full of them, moaning around the orc cock stretching her lips, both of her holes penetrated, and she was not pretending to like it, she did like it, and it was this, these sorts of women, these sorts of displays that meant that he and Aerhril were rabid for each other every night.
Well.
He didn’t want to admit it, maybe, that he took some kind of perverse pleasure in watching the women in pain. He didn’t want to look at that part of himself. He didn’t knowhowto look at it.
He was beginning to feel an emotion that he had not felt very much of in his life, truly.
Guilt.
All the guilt he’d felt thus far in his life had mostly had to do with her, with Aerhril. He had not wished ever to hurt her. He had felt regret when he did. He had striven not to do so, though sometimes he had perhaps hurt her on purpose, because of…
Well, things had been different then.
He had not been free in this way, not as he was now. It changed things within him.
One afternoon, as he was leaving the council room, he noticed that one of the orc warrior women was watching him.
He met her gaze.
He did not remember her name. There were no elf warrior women, so far as he knew, but there used to be, if the elves’s folklore stories were any indication. Somehow, as time had marched on, the elf men had pushed all the women out of the fighting.
There were not a number of orc women in the armies, but there were some. If an orc woman wished to pursue fighting, she had to be unmarried and to refuse to share the bed of any man. She was supposed to be a perpetual virgin, he understood, because if she was ever to lose her purity, she would lose her fighting prowess.
But this tended to be the way it wassupposedto be, not the way it actuallywas. Those sorts of orc women had their pick of men, even if the army traveled with some orc women—sometimes wives of the officers, sometimes strumpets or whores, that sort of thing—because there were still less women than there were men. The warrioresses were sought after. They were capable of defending themselves, and if a man attempted to defile a warrioress, the punishment was swift death, so if an orc tried to force himself on one, either she’d kill him or he’d be executed on the spot by someone else.
Those women were safe enough.
Even so, there weren’t many of them, and they were never included in the council meetings. This one, he had seen her on the periphery from time to time, and he had noted her precisely because it was odd to see a woman there.
She held his gaze as he looked at her now.
He took this as an invitation and made his way over to her. But when he got there, they simply looked at each other and neither spoke.
Finally, she said, “You are going to find your elf maiden, I suppose? Going to meet her for tea?”
The orcs had adopted the meal structure of the elves here, who had—in turn—adopted the meal structure of the southern elves. It was interesting the way that they did this, as if everyone agreed the Valaedor elves were to be envied and copied, even if everyone also wanted to gut them anddestroy them. In the north, there were three meals, breakfast, luncheon, and dinner, and dinner was served in the early evening.
In the south, there were four, and the first four were all meager. A lateish breakfast, a luncheon a few hours later, and then the third meal, tea, earlier than dinner might be served, but later in the afternoon.
Confusing this practice was the fact that visitors might be received between luncheon and tea, and these visitors would be served tea, but that was not the meal tea.
The final meal, dinner, was served late, usually after eight o’clock, and it was the only very substantial meal, with a number of courses.
He had not known all this himself. Aerhril had explained it to him, though she said it was something observed mostly by the highest echelon of the upper classes in the Vale, that her family had not been rich enough to indulge.
“Yes,” he said to the warrioress.
“I will walk with you, if you do not object.”
“Of course,” he said.
They fell into step together.
“I have forgotten your name,” he said finally.
“Gathren,” she said. “And you are Dathor.”
He nodded. Both of their names sounded as if they’d been influenced by the elvish language. “Were you born in Arzakh?”
