21
ONLY DAYS AFTERthe dance that Aerhril had attended, Dathor was summoned to the sitting room. There were guests at the Peak.
Dathor had seen the carriage arrive, but he’d been too busy to see anyone alight out of it, and then he’d been busy with making sure the horses were all right, the carriage tucked away.
So, he had not seen the three orcs come out of the carriage, but there they were in the sitting room, all dressed up in jackets and ties—the men, anyway—and the one woman was in a tidy blouse and a skirt, a brooch at her neck.
He had never seen an orc woman up close, and he looked at her with interest. She was young, he thought. She could not be too much older than him. Indeed, he would find out that Nathre was only nineteen, but a year older than him. She was slighter than the men but so much larger than an elf woman. She was… he could not help but note the swell of her bosom, the generous curve of her hips. Were all orc women buxom?
He liked the look of her.
“Dathor, you have guests,” said the steward from where he sat, holding his tea cup in one hand and his saucer in the other. He sneered a little, as if he did not approve of such things. “Perhaps you can take them to the servants’ diningroom to receive them. Be sure to wash your hands before you… touch anything.”
Dathor glanced at his hands, which may have been dirty. He tucked them behind his back, feeling embarrassed.
And then he caught sight of Aerhril’s expression. She was gazing at him with one of her mixtures of rapture and pity, and he felt a wave come over him. Hedespisedher.
Why must she lord it over him, truly? Why must she take such delight in anything that he had been hitherto denied? Why must she act as if she was the one giving him such things?
She had not caused the orcs to come.
He refused to look at her again.
It was unsettling, hating her like that. She was everything to him, and he could not hate her. He would have to think it through and talk himself out of it, he supposed.
Later, though.
He led the orcs to the kitchen of Foxglove Peak, and the servants down there were not at all pleased to see them all sitting there at their dining room table.
“We could walk,” Dathor said to them. “The flowers are pretty this time of year.”
So, they left the kitchen and walked together along a path outside of the Peak.
Igbar had been with Elrion the longest, since he was but six years old. The others had only been with him since they were young adolescents. Dathor told them that he had never known his father and that he was half elf.
But they all talked at each other sort of constantly, a kind of giddiness to the interaction, all of them seemingly excited by it. He could not quite say what it was they talked about, however. They seemed to skip from subject to subject, some things serious—they knew some of the orc language, for instance, and promised to teach it to him, even taught him a few words—and some of it ridiculous—like Taktre’s fondness for hot chocolate.
The two male orcs were Igbar and Taktre. The woman was Nathre.
When they finally left, he had talked away the afternoon with them and he was behind on all his duties. He felt strange, the way he’d never felt in the company of others, like he had been instantly accepted by them. He had never experienced such a thing, he realized. He was accepted, now, amongst the servants, because they were used to him, but whenever he met anyone, there was always the way that they interacted with him because he was an orc, the otherness that they projected onto him. He must be warmed up to, always, and his disposition, he supposed, did not help matters, for he was often gruff.
But how could he not be gruff, truly, when everyone treated him as if he were part monster, a creature, a beast?
He wondered if this was the way everyone else felt when they met other people, an immediate sense of trust and openness, an easiness and a comaraderie?
It hurt him to think that might be true.
He told himself it wasn’t.
No, he and the other orcs were so quick to bond with each other precisely because of the way they were treated by others. They were all treated with distrust and seeing others like them felt like a respite from it all. In a way, perhaps, it was some compensation against the world, the knowledge of their shared oppression, he thought.
He was up late finishing everything and then she was tapping at his window when he was exhausted and ready to fall into bed.
He opened the window to her and she tumbled into his room above the stable as pretty as ever, and he did not despise her anymore, he supposed, but he thought heshoulddespise her.
“What was it like?” she said. “What weretheylike? I wanted to come, but the steward would not hear of it. But Elrion says we must call upon him, you and me. I am to bring you specifically, and the steward heard and he cannot say no.”
He wanted to hide it from her, but he wondered at himself. If he really wished to be with her, could he hidethings like this from her? He was only frightened, he supposed, because she wouldn’t understand.
