“She wanted an escort to take her to her mother’s home in Aleador,” said Aerhril. “Celedin granted it.”
“Yes,” said Hafindel. “Yes, I remember. He sent Gilfinhil, and he has never returned.”
“No?” said Aerhril.
Hafindel shook her head. “We were all saying that he had been spared, that we were happy for him.”
Aerhril was fairly certain she knew what had happened to Gilfinhil, but she sought out Dathor after breakfast anyway. He was in the main sitting room on the first floor of Foxglove Peak, sitting at the writing desk where the steward used to sit. Celedin had never used it. It gathered dust in between the times that the maids came in to go over the room.
“You remember I spoke of a woman from Falls Keep with a small babe? You said she should not have gotten away. Do you know what happened to her?”
“Not precisely, no,” said Dathor, unscrewing the cap onthe inkwell. “I know that at Falls Keep, she got away, and we didn’t shoot her because she had a baby in her arms. But we pursued her. She was veering down towards Shadow Heights, but we steered her this way, knowing that it would not matter if she came here because we planned to take the Peak within days.”
“But she left.”
“Yes, that was unfortunate,” he said.
“Did you kill that woman? Did you kill her baby?”
“Me, personally?” he said, dipping a quill into the inkwell. “No.”
“But she’s dead.”
“The man driving the carriage is dead,” he said. “I don’t think she is. But I don’t know. This wasn’t my concern. We would not have stopped her, but we can’t have someone running all over the Silvarenna spreading the word of the coming invasion. We rely on the element of surprise, you see.”
“If she isn’t dead, where would she be?”
“I don’t know. In some orc’s tent, perhaps.” He shrugged. “She may have been given the choice between that and death, and it would be likely to guess what she would choose.” He scratched the pen down a sheet of paper.
“You don’t even care,” she said.
He wrote, letters careful but a bit shaky. He had been tutored with them when they were children, but then he had left, and she did not think he’d received any more schooling after that. He could write. He could read.
She moved around over his shoulder, to see what he was writing, but she could not make out the letters. “What is that?”
“Orcish,” he said, amused. “Did you not think we could have a language, then?”
“Obviously, orcs have a language,” she said. Everyone had a language. Across the channel, in the other countries, they might speak other languages, she granted. The dwarf peoples had several different languages in their lands, and the dragons—both the solitary dragons here and thesocieties of dragons in the far east—had their own languages, too. There were trolls in the isles to the north. There used to be trolls here, in the Silvarenna, but long, long ago, the silvan elves had driven them out, chased them across the ocean. The trolls had a language, too.
She knew that the dwarves had things that were written, that they had books and operas and their own courts and kings and cities and all of that. There were steam engines in the dwarf countries. The elves and the dwarves were pushing into the new lands, the unsettled lands, together—well, as rivals, one pushing ahead and the other then catching up and surpassing and then on and on.
But the orcs, she had never thought they had a written language. She had never seen an orc who could read or write, she had to admit. She did not know why she had thought this meant that they couldn’t or didn’t.
“You did not learn it growing up,” she said.
“There’s not a lot of diverting activity in Arzakh,” he said. “Mostly, just betting on games of throwing rocks, dodging spurting flames out of cracks in the earth, and reading old scrolls.”
“Oh,” she said. “Scrolls.”
“No books in the orc language, though there are those who wish to make a printing press with the characters and start to produce it,” he said. “It’s one of the plans once the orcs take the capital.” He smirked. “I shouldn’t be sharing these things with you.”
“You write in that language to communicate,” she said. “And if ever it was intercepted by an elf, they would never know what it said. And I can look over your shoulder all I want, but I’ll never discern your plans.”
“Are you planning to betray me and get word out, Aerhril?” He looked up at her.
“No,” she said, smiling at him.
“But if you were, you wouldn’t tell me.” He went back to what he was writing.
