“I suppose not,” she said.
“So, they wish to crush him,” he said.
“Also, he has not been good for them. His attacks on the orcs have wreaked havoc with the economy and his moratorium on trade with other countries, that has been disastrous.”
“Yes, we must not discount that,” he said. “Hit a Valaedor elf in his pocketbook if you wish to make him vicious.”
“So, you really think you could do it?” she said. “An alliance?”
“Well, I have some contacts who are waiting for word from me, men who have led protests in the past, who may even be sympathetic to orcs.”
“But that is not an army,” she said. “The army of Valaedor is controlled by Findas.”
“No, true,” he said. “I had hoped to have some splinter group, or to—”
“If we are going to topple Findas, it isn’t going to be with an army, because any attack on his palace will be turned away, by his armies.”
He furrowed his brow. Could he have been this stupid about it? Was this truly doomed? If so, what was he going to do? He rubbed his forehead, trying to pull the elements of his plan together, to find some way that they made sense.
Gathren was still speaking. “We’d need to infiltrate Findas’s safe spaces to get to him that way.”
He turned to her in understanding. “An assassination, not an attack.”
“And we cannot get there, not on our own,” she said. “This is what we would offer your contacts. We tell them that they help us get in to kill Findas and then they have the protection of the orc army.”
He let out a little laugh. “That’s brilliant.”
She lifted a shoulder. “Do you think you could make it work?
He started to walk again. “Perhaps, yes. Perhaps it’s better than an alliance with an army.”
She fell into step with him. “I think it is better. After all, any alliance must have boundaries. It must only be something small. We cannot ally with the elves indefinitely.”
“Little chance of an alliance happening at all, I suppose,” he said glumly. “But out of curiosity, why do you say so?”
“Because, of course, elves hate orcs,” she said.
He glanced at her, because that was a very obvious thing to say. Did she mean something more by it?
She continued, “You say all this business about their pitying us and giving us charity and how we can use this to manipulate them, but you are forgetting the fact that once they oust Findas, they will treat us the way they have always treated us, and that way is to treat us likeanimals.”
He swallowed slowly.
“You think they have some superior civilization to us,” she said. “You said something in one of your speeches about how their government is more complicated than ours, how they have a better grasp onfairness?”
He cringed. “I did not mean that, not quite in that way. I believe, afterwards, I said that it made them shortsighted and weak, did I not?”
“They will never be fair tous,” she said.
He felt this settle into him, and he realized she was correct. Whatever advantages the elves had, their superiority blinded them to reality. His own superiority had blinded him here as well. He had thought that this alliance was a good idea.
He could see now that it was not.
He had told himself that after they killed Findas, that the elves could be convinced to change their laws to make things fairer for orcs. Out of charity.
What a thought.
The elves were not truly charitable to orcs, only to theirown kind. He could not have it both ways, that the elves saw themselves as superior and that they would give orcs rights. They would not do so. He was fooling himself.
