“I am half elf,” he said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I never felt that way, for the elves never thought of me as one of them. You have always thought I was nothing but a monster.”
“I have never thought of you as a monster, and the fact that you can’t see that—”
“You have. You have used me your whole life, Aerhril. You have enjoyed looking upon me, feasting your gaze on me. You especially like to eagerly let your gaze crawl over my form when I am sweating and working hard, and you linger ever so long on all my scars. I think you like the scars the most. You fancy that you and I are both very oppressed, that we have something in common in that way. But your suffering is nothing compared to mine, and you cannot handle that fact.”
“Nothing compared to yours?” She shook her head. “Nothing?”
“Yes,” he said fiercely.
“Well, I suppose that’s why it was justified to rape me in front of everyone in the chapel, then. Because I never suffer.” She spat the words at him.
He turned to her, his handsome features full of fury. “I didn’t say you didn’t suffer at all, Aerhril, I said that I suffer worse than you.”
She scoffed. “Oh, yes, you suffer, how you suffer. Look at you, commander, with all these orcs at your beck and call. How long were you even in that country and you somehow have worked your way up in the ranks? Oh, you suffer, all right.”
He squared his shoulders, nodding. “I shall give you that. It’s a fair point.”
“Meanwhile, I, here, have watched my father be put in prison, my mother disappear, and all I have been able to do is put off that wedding with Celedin, put it off and put it off,until I couldn’t put it off anymore, because he was frothing at the mouth for me.”
“Oh, poor Aerhril,” he said sarcastically, “wanted by a rich elf.”
“You know what he’s like!”
“Was he striking you?”
“Sometimes!” she snapped.
He hadn’t been expecting that. “Truly?”
“Oh, by the golden fingers of the dawn, how can you doubt it? He used to hurt me when we were children, and all that was holding him back was your uncle. He likes hurting things, and you know this as well as I!”
He hung his head. “Well, I’m sorry.”
She drew in a breath. “Oh, perhaps you are right that it has always been worse for you. I have never been whipped.”
“And you never will be,” he said. “If I could kill him again—”
She let out a laugh, a helpless laugh, because she supposed he could, at that. Should she tell him that Celedin was alive, wheezing his breath out in that old room of his? Should she let him have his revenge again?
And anyway, did it matter? Didn’t everyone like hurting things, everyone she had ever met? Had she not seen the sheer joy all over Dathor as he slit Celedin’s throat? Could she not remember the sick sweetness of sentencing poor pregnant Nathre to what fate Aerhril had condemned her to?
She had enjoyed it.
Momentarily, she had.
Then, later, she had hated herself.
None of that mattered, of course, because no matter how much one hated oneself or regretted one’s actions, they were already done and could not be taken back.
There was a meanness in everyone, absolutely everyone, herself included.
He looked away, out over the orc encampment, a lock of his black hair falling into his eyes. “I suppose you don’t welcome those sorts of sentiments from me, seeing as how Iraped you, or whatever you claim.”
She set her teeth, too angry to respond to that.
He tossed his head, shaking his hair of his eyes, making his long waves glisten. “It’s only that you would have allowed me to have you, and we both know that. Had I arrived on horseback and thrust open the outer doors to the chapel, come inside and beckoned for you, you would have run to me, and we would have galloped off on my horse, and I would have built a fire later and lay you down on the ground and kissed you senseless and you’d have opened those legs of yours to me, and so I don’t really think it counts.”
“Don’t you?” she said through clenched teeth. It was awful that she’d had that split-second thought that he was rescuing her, and now he was saying this.
