“And if your army found me, they’d kill me like they did that woman and her babe.”
“We aren’t in the business of killing women and children,” he said.
“But if you have to, you will,” she said.
“If you think I would let anyone kill you, Aerhril, you’re positively insane.” He was matter-of-fact about this. “I would not let a hair on your head be hurt.”
She nodded. “So, if someone should try to go and get word, then, it should be me. Since I am your weakness.”
He set the pen down in its inkwell and regarded her. “Keep on like this, and you’ll make me think that it would be foolish for me to allow you to leave my sight. Perhaps I’ll parade around with you everywhere, pulling you onto my lap or with my arm around you and inside your clothes? What do you think? Is that what you’d like? Would you like to be publicly made into my whore?”
“Have you not already done that?” she said.
He went back to his letter. “Do not test me, Aerhril. You cannot leave and the revolution cannot be halted. It’s time for the orcs to rise up. Too long have we been suppressed.”
She sighed. He sounded sort of insane now, all propaganda of the other side. She didn’t think he even believed in any of that. Dathor had never believed in anything, she didn’t think. He’d only ever cared about survival.
Well, and her.
SHE DID NOTstay with Dathor, deciding that he might make good on his threat to never let her out of his sight, and she did not want her freedom curtailed.
Carefully, she managed to sneak up to the top of the stairs and look in on Celedin. His neck was wrapped in a bandage, but he’d bled through it. There were clean rags sitting out, however, and she decided to give him a fresh dressing. While she was carefully removing the blood fabric from around his neck, he woke up.
“Aerhril,” he rasped. “It’s you.” He blinked up at the light coming in through the window. “What day is it?”
“You’ve been sleeping since yesterday,” she said. “When I put you up here. At least, you’ve been asleep every time I’ve come to look at you.”
He grunted. “I need…” He was embarrassed. “I need a chamberpot.”
Oh, of course. Well, what further indignities could she sink to?
“Stay here,” she muttered and she went to seek something in one of the nearby rooms. She found an empty one and brought it for him.
He was able to get out of bed and go stand in the corner to empty his bladder. He apologized when she took it, but she just glared at him. She hurled it out a window in the hallway and brought it back to his room, hoping that no one would notice it was missing.
He was back in bed, his eyes open.
“I came to put clean dressings on your wounds,” she said.
He rasped, “It’s not going to heal.”
“You don’t seem to be dying,” she said. “You can move around. Your body seems intact. It got your vocal cords perhaps, but nothing vital. You’re not bleeding to death.”
He let out a wheeze.
She knelt and began to wrap his neck.
He let her. When she was done, he said, his voice paper thin, “They’re taking down the tents.”
He must have seen when he was up, pissing in the chamberpot. He must have looked through the narrow window there. There were two windows in the room, the larger one overhead, too high to see out of, and that small one there, in the corner.
“The orc army, you mean,” she said. “Yes, they’re on the move, I understand, going on to do this at some other castle in the Silvarenna.”
“There are so many of them,” he said in his hoarse whisper. “We never stood a chance. Perhaps bring me…”
She waited.
“Something to end it with?” he said finally. “A gun would be easiest.”
