She knew.
It was ugly.
“I know that orcs in Lothnehil hate it, but what do the orcs in Arzakh care? Are they simply angry that more of their own people are coming across the pass? Is the orc country becoming overpopulated? Why invade?”
The buttons were undone. She moved out of his reach, holding the bodice of her dress against her corset.
“Oh, are you serious?” he said. “Not going to let me see your underthings? I wouldn’t think that matters now.”
“It’s my dignity, you fiend,” she said, and she hurled herself away from him into her closet and shut the door on him.
“Arzakh is not a very nice place to live,” said Dathor. “Lots of eruptions of fire out of the ground, earthquakes, things of that nature. The orcs want the better lands ofLothnehil for themselves, and they hate elves and want to make them suffer. So, invasion.”
She let her dress fall and began to work on the laces of her corset, which laced up the front. She would put this back on, but she wanted the layer beneath it, her shift, the fabric directly against her skin, which had absorbed her terrified sweat, off her. Sheneededit off. Now.
“Also,” said Dathor, “I suppose it’s about trade.”
“Right,” she whispered. “He cut off the trade.” This had ruined her father, after all. The High King—his name was Findas nae Ortholin—believed in elvish superiority and he thought elves could do everything themselves, and he had made trade increasingly difficult. Her father had made his money on imports.
Since the High King had taken the throne, many businessmen in the Vale had been ruined. High King Findas was not entirely popular, well, not popular in the south, anyway.
Here, in the north, they tended to love him. He would speak of simpler times, the old ways, which were the ways of the north, the ways of the silvan elves, the ways of magic and communion with the gods.
Sometimes, hearing a train whistle far off on the breeze, the noise cutting through the cold air the way it did, Aerhril felt frightened, too. She missed the comfort of the way things used to be. Things had changed so much in her lifetime, an explosion of new things—gas lamps, revolvers, trains, all manner of things powered by steam engines. She found it exciting, but it was sometimes frightening, too.
The High King hated orcs. And he had made it his mission to exile them all. Since he had taken the throne, he had begun having orcs rounded up and sent back over the mountains to the northwest, over the Rathog Pass and back to the neighboring country of Arzakh, where the orcs had come from.
All we want is for them to go back where they came from,was the rallying cry of the High King and his followers.All we want is for them to stop encroaching on our culture.
It was funny, because that was something she’d heard here for the first time, the anger that the Cirdan elves had against the Valaedor for encroaching ontheirculture, for the way the fair ones sneered at the old ways, calling them backward, calling them superstition.
In a way, though, perhaps she understood. She had gone to the bonfires, heard the chants to the old gods, seen the dances and listened to the drums and the music. She did not know if she believed that it made the harvest good or kept the winter winds away. But it was beauty, and it was togetherness and it was nice. There was nothing like that in the city, amongst her own people, who would not deign to participate in such things.
It was true what they said, that an invading force could come in and strip away all of the things that made another group of people special and unique. She had seen that it happened.
But the orcs were certainly not doing that.
They were entirely separate from the elves, treated as lesser, and there had always been strife between elves and orcs.
She wriggled out of her corset. It could likely have been looser before she had done it. It was not easy to get it off. “Do we trade with orcs in Arzakh?”
“Yes, Aerhril,” he said as if she were particularly stupid.
“Or, well,” she said, “weusedto trade with them.”
“Precisely,” he said.
She pulled her shift over her head, balling it up and throwing it into a corner. She shook out another one, a clean one, and it felt very good to have clean fabric against her skin. She let out a whimper. “So, the orcs think, ‘If the elves will not buy things from us, we will just go and take their riches from them.’”
“Yes,” said Dathor.
“And I suppose they’ve seen those awful tracts that the High King publishes.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” she murmured. “Well, they must be very angry.”She picked up the corset and tried to pull it down over her body but it got stuck. She tried to take it off, and she couldn’t do that either.
She struggled with it for some time.
