The orcs’ High Chieftain listened to Dathor, and Dathorfound himself saying things like, “We need guns,” and “We can win against them if we surprise them. They’re all soft and easily frightened, elves are. We just roar in their faces with our gray skin, and they’ll all roll over and beg us to leave them be.”
And somehow, some way, this meant having conversations with the high commanders of the army, and this meant making trade deals with elf businessmen, buying up guns and gunpowder and all manner of things.
But he’d done it now.
I’m home,he thought, looking up at Foxglove Peak.I’m home, and I fucked her, and I killed him. It’s done.
Yes, there was nothing more to worry about. The war did not need to be his problem, not anymore.
He could forget all about that.
He could just be here, rule this place, sleep in his uncle’s bed and drink from his uncle’s goblets and lord himself over the elves who would cower from him and his faction of orc men.
This was enough.
8
HE WASN’T DEAD.
Celedin wasn’t.
Aerhril saw him, lying in a pile of bodies outside the chapel, all of them lined up in a row along the hallway there. There was an entrance to the chapel out of the main hall. Not every keep had an attached chapel, but Foxglove Peak did.
The bodies themselves were all bloodied and still, and she supposed that was why she noticed him.
Because he was moving.
He was breathing, that was. His chest was rising, barely rising, and then falling.
She did not know who it was at first, but she moved closer, thinking to herself that she did not know what she was going to do if someone was alive, because she had no means to help them, and that anyway, she was just meant to be looking for the children, that was what she was doing, because they had to find them, and certainly the children would have seen this grim and gory pile of dead elves and run the other way, horrified.
Then she realized it was him.
There was blood on his face, and his neck was open, cut open, a red glistening gash exposing all sorts of tendons and muscles and ever so much blood. She could hear his breath now, hear the wheeze of it, in and out.
She stood over him, shaking, and thinking to herself thatshe would simply run away, because he was Celedin, after all, and she hated him. She despised him. He was everything she hated on land and sea, and she did not care if he slowly choked to death on his own blood, if he suffocated there on his back, slowly dying in pain, she did notcare.
Then his eyes opened.
Oh, by the yellow-haired dawn, must he have seen her? She hated him, but she was not so made of stone that she could simply walk away now, not when he lifted a hand and reached up to her, wheezing her name, barely audible.
She shook.
“Aerhril,” he wheezed.
She peered down at him. Her voice shook, too. “Celedin, I cannot lift you. There is nowhere to take you, anyway. There is no one to help you. There are orcs on all the doors.”
He touched his neck. He lifted his hand and looked at the blood on his fingers. And then, clumsily, gasping noisily for air all the while, he sat up. He slapped his bloody hand against the wall, leaving a handprint there, and he got to his feet.
She backed away from him.
He stood over her, wheezing, his long dark hair falling around his fine, elvish features. She had often thought he was cruelly beautiful, his nose so sharp, his eyebrows dark slashes over his blue eyes. He did not look cruel now.
He pitched forward and she caught him, allowing him to lean against her. “Top of the steps,” he wheezed. “His room.”
The small room where Dathor had slept as a child, the one she used to run to when she was frightened, that room. Yes, it might be a good place to put Celedin for now. “There are orcs on the way there,” she said. “They will see us.”
He gasped in air noisily, leaning against her, hair in his face, thinking. “Tell them…” A wheeze. “Yell that they are being attacked.”
